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Perhaps the most prominent early proponent of this view was Donald Horton. In a survey of drinking practices across fifty-six small-scale societies published in 1943, Horton declared that “the primary function of alcoholic beverages in all societies is the reduction of anxiety.”30
One study found that subjects judged the trustworthiness of faces within 100 milliseconds, and that these judgments did not change even when people were given more information or time.41 This tendency to instantly peg people as likely cooperators or not appears quite early in development, with children above the age of three quickly and readily classing faces as “mean” or “nice.”42 These gut-level assessments are consistent across cultures, and play a surprisingly outsized role even in formal contexts, like court cases or political elections, where you would expect people to be guided by more
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In one disturbing but elegant study,51 the psychologist Leanne ten Brinke and colleagues coded video clips, taken from real life, of individuals emotionally pleading to the public for information that would help with the return of a missing relative. In half of these cases, the pleaders were lying, and had been later convicted, based on overwhelming physical evidence, of having murdered the relative in question. Unaware of which people were later found to have been faking their distress, participants were nonetheless able to pick them out by focusing on facial muscle groups that are difficult
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Latin in vino veritas, “in wine there is truth.”
A line in Plato’s Symposium declares that “truth is revealed by wine and children”—a very telling equation of the sort of PFC impairment shared by children and drunks.
In ancient Greece, oaths declared under the influence of wine were viewed as particularly sacred, reliable, and powerful.
Although they did not enjoy the benefits of modern neuroscience or social psychology, cultures throughout time and across the world implicitly understood that the sober, rational, calculating individual mind is a barrier to social trust. This is why it is common for drunkenness—often serious drunkenness—to be obligatory for important social occasions, business negotiations, and religious rituals.
Just as we shake hands to show that we are not carrying a physical weapon, communal intoxication allows us to cognitively disarm in the presence of others. By the tenth toast of sorghum liquor at a Chinese banquet, or the final round of wine at a Greek symposium, or the end of Purim, the attendees have all effectively laid their PFCs on the table, exposing themselves as cognitively defenseless. This is the social function that Henry Kissinger had in mind when he supposedly told the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, “I think if we drink enough mao-tai we can solve anything.”68
favorite lines about Confucius, found near the end of a long account of how fastidious he was about everything he ate and drank, is “only with regard to wine did he set no limits.”86 The fact that Confucius could drink to his heart’s content but never become unruly is a sign of his sagehood. Socrates was similarly praised for his ability to keep his wits about him despite partaking, as any proper Athenian man did, in marathon drinking events. “He will drink any quantity that he is bid,” wrote Plato, “and never be drunk all the same.”87
The sinologist Sarah Mattice observes that both ancient China and ancient Greece combined a demand that adults (at least adult males) get drunk together with an expectation that this would be an opportunity for them to display self-restraint and virtue under challenging conditions.
As for the Greek symposium: With a sober symposiarch in the lead—monitoring the character of those involved—citizens are given the opportunity to test themselves against the desire to succumb to pleasures, at the very point when their self-control is at its lowest. By drinking wine and being present in a situation where shamelessness has a tendency to reign, the citizens can develop a resistance to immoderate behavior, and so develop their character. In addition, because…symposia would be civic events, they also provide the opportunity for the citizens’ virtue to be observed and tested.89
This link between drink and fellowship remains a powerful one today in cultures across the world. The anthropologist Gerald Mars, in a study of the social dynamics of a group of longshoremen in Newfoundland, notes, “When early in fieldwork I asked a group of longshoremen why someone who was married, young, fit and hardworking—all well regarded qualities in a workmate—was nonetheless an outside man, the answer given was that he was a ‘loner.’ When I queried what form this took I was told, ‘He doesn’t drink—that’s what I mean by a loner.’”90
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the YES function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. —William James94
In a sample of 488 small-scale societies for which relevant anthropological accounts exist, Erika Bourguignon found that 89 percent instituted ritual practices designed to produce states of dissociation or ecstatic trance, typically through group dance, song, and chemical intoxication.96
Durkheim, viewed music, ritual, and dance as the key cultural technologies employed to create the “collective effervescence” that bound together traditional cultures. The influential theorist Roy Rappaport similarly argued that “the ritual generation of communitas often rests in considerable degree on ritually-imposed tempos, on their repetitiveness and, more fundamentally, on their rhythmicity.”99 More recent work in the cognitive science of ritual has followed this lead, with researchers focusing on ritual components such as physical synchrony. One study, for instance, found that getting
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The ritual life of early Incan and Mayan cultures, for instance, centered on public rituals that employed dance and music to bring together the community and honor the gods. It also involved a degree of wild alcoholic inebriation that shocked early missionaries.102
If we think of alcohol, for instance, as disabling negative barriers to cooperation (lying, suspicion, cheating), we have to also see its positive role in building affiliative, pair bond–like emotional ties between members of the group through the stimulation of endorphins and serotonin. Chemical ecstatic states are both a scalpel that disarms the self and the glue that binds suspicious, selfish apes into the cultural hive mind.
It is revealing that there are no grain silos or other food storage facilities at Göbekli Tepe. “Production was not for storage,” notes the archaeologist Oliver Dietrich and his colleagues, “but for immediate use.”119 In other words, people gathered in large numbers at this site for temporary, epic, blowout feasts, accompanied by dramatic rituals,120 all of it likely fueled by generous quantities of booze.121
We see a similar connection between large-scale, centralized production of alcohol and the beginnings of political and ideological unity in other regions of the world where great civilizations independently arose. We have seen that the rulers of the Erlitou and Shang cultures in the Yellow River Valley of China appear to have derived their power from rituals powered by various beers and fruit wines, while the standardization and large-scale production of chicha was a crucial tool used by the Incas in the South American Andes to consolidate their empire.
In industrialized societies, where we have unions and 9-to-5 workdays with set wages and health care, drinking on the job is discouraged. In pre-industrial societies, facilitating drinking on the job is the only way to get the job done.
Alcoholic feasting thus also serves as a way to announce, symbolize, and reinforce social status. This is especially the case because alcohol, unlike more mundane staples like bread or rice, is essentially a luxury good.
The happy notion of doctors prescribing two glasses of wine with dinner was shattered in 2018 with the publication of the study in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet mentioned in the Introduction. While acknowledging that moderate alcohol consumption might provide some modest health benefits, it noted that these were far outweighed by the massive costs in terms of accidents, liver damage, and other causes of early mortality. It concluded that the safest level of alcohol consumption was zero. In July of 2020, it was reported that the next update to the U.S. federal government’s Dietary
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For our purposes, the most important thing to note is that this whole kerfuffle serves as a perfect example of how a failure to consider the functional, social benefits of alcohol can seriously skew public debate on the topic.
As expected, once the drinking group got drunk, they underperformed the controls on the second executive function task—the alcohol did its job of taking the PFC temporarily offline. The drunks, however, smoked the sober controls on the RAT task, solving more RATs and more quickly. They were also more likely to report having solved the tests in moments of inspiration, with the answers just popping into their heads.
We can add to it one other alcohol study, “Lost in the Sauce”6 (if nothing else, alcohol increases the creativity of study titles),
From ancient China and ancient Greece to modern-day Silicon Valley, communal thinking and group drinking have always gone hand in hand. Gately has also argued that more recently the “water trade,” the infamously alcohol-soaked, after-hours but mandatory drinking sessions endured by Japanese salarymen (and they were almost all men), was a key driver of Japanese industrial innovation in the 1970s and ’80s. One of its functions was to suspend social hierarchy norms in order to allow innovative ideas to flow from junior to senior employees. “Alcohol was the lubricant that enabled the Japanese
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One of the most significant political ideologies of modern times, communism, was forged by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx over “ten beer-soaked days”10 in Paris in 1844;
It is hard to find systematic data on alcohol and cultural innovation, but a recent working paper by the economist Michael Andrews, “Bar Talk: Informal Social Interactions, Alcohol Prohibition, and Invention,” represents one fascinating attempt to do so. Andrews begins by reviewing the literature in economics on “collective invention,”12 which documents the manner in which informal, chance social interactions drive innovation and growth. This is one fairly obvious reason that dense urban areas, particularly if they include a mix of industries and academic institutions, tend to be sources of
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Andrews notes that there is a growing literature on the importance of bars as gathering places for creative individuals, and a wealth of examples of inventions or new technologies being hatched in saloons, (alcohol-serving) cafés, or bars.16
prohibition reduced the number of new patents by 15 percent annually in previously wet counties relative to previously dry counties.
I will confess to having dabbled in psychedelics as a young adult, usually in certain places of unusual natural beauty near my home in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly the west face of Mount Tamalpais and Limantour Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. I would often take a notebook with me to record my thoughts and “insights.” During one particularly epic experience, I was seized by the conviction that the answer to all of life’s questions, the key to understanding all reality, was the realization that truth was the color blue. Over twenty notebook pages I carefully and definitively
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One recent study of online respondents28 contrasted the performance of self-reported microdosers and individuals who had never microdosed on the Unusual Uses Task (UUT). It found that microdosers generated responses that were rated as significantly more uncommon, unexpected, and clever than those of their non-microdosing peers.
As the creative and cultural species, we need all of the innovation we can get. The neural reshuffling that psychedelics induce in individual brains could have important effects on group creativity.
Leary’s infamous motto, “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” can thus be seen as an encouragement to be less like chimps and tap, instead, into our capacity to be creative, cultural, and communal primates. Sexism and woo-woo New Age language about “ancient energies and wisdoms” aside, we couldn’t have a better expression of the role that powerful brain depatterners have historically played in accelerating the pace of cultural evolution. Especially given the enhancement in efficacy and ease of use that has been made possible by modern science, they should continue to play a similar role in today’s
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Why fly from New York to Shanghai to meet a potential business partner when you could just call or Zoom? The puzzle of business travel is fundamentally related, I would argue, to the puzzle of why we like to get drunk.
a PFC-impaired person is a more trustworthy one. We’ve discussed how depressing PFC function makes it harder for a person to lie. Perhaps surprisingly, it has the opposite effect on lie detection.35 It’s actually more difficult for us to accurately evaluate the truthfulness of a statement when we are focused exclusively on doing so. We do a better job detecting lies when we are distracted by other stimuli—for instance, trying to get the bartender’s attention or savoring an appetizer—and then asked later if the person we were speaking with was being honest. Our unconscious selves are better lie
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In the absence of strong situational cues, for instance, people become more aggressive when drunk only if they are predisposed to aggression in general.36 You may seem like a nice person on the phone, but before I really trust that judgment I would be well advised to reevaluate you, in person, after a second glass of Chablis.
Armed with our evolutionary analysis of intoxication, a more accurate way to proceed would be to weigh the undeniable and clear costs of alcohol consumption against its harder-to-perceive benefits. There is a reason that highly successful companies, such as Google, continue to allow alcohol to play a structural role in their institutional life. As we have seen, alcohol enhances creativity, both individual and group. It can help overcome trust issues and allow for a freer exchange of ideas. It is also the case that office parties do, or at least can, build corporate spirit and group bonding.
The results were clear. “Alcohol consumption,” the authors concluded, “enhanced individual and group-level behaviors associated with positive affect, reduced individual-level behaviors associated with negative affect, and elevated self-reported bonding.” A later analysis of the social dynamics reflected in the videos found that intoxication enhanced the “contagion” of smiling and positive affect: genuine smiles that popped up in drinking groups were more likely to spread to everyone, rather than simply being ignored. This contagion effect was particularly dramatic in male-dominated groups,
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the wine-centered symposium was the model of ancient Greek sociality. The mead hall served as the center of communities in medieval Anglo-Saxon cultures, and continues to do so to this day in the form of the alehouse or the pub.52 In colonial America, every town had its tavern, which was typically one of the first buildings constructed, right next to the church and/or meetinghouse.53 From the salon of France to the kabak of early modern Russia54 to the saloon of the American frontier, the mild dissociation from reality caused by alcohol and casual, relaxed socializing have been inseparable.55
A research initiative into the role of the pub in modern British culture is being directed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, one of the most active contemporary scholars exploring alcohol’s contribution to human sociality. One of the team’s findings, from survey data about pub use in Britain, found that people who had a neighborhood pub that they frequented regularly had more close friends, felt happier, were more satisfied with their lives, more embedded into their local communities, and more trusting of those around them. Those who never drank did consistently worse on all these criteria,
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Dunbar attributes this bonding effect to endorphins, which are independently boosted by alcohol and laughing. We can see a kind of virtuous circle here, where alcohol not only itself triggers endorphin release, but by lowering the barrier to laughter and singing and dancing and perhaps more risqué behavior, encourages actions that serve to further ramp up endorphin levels.
2018, the impending closure of the Gay Hussar, a venerable and notorious restaurant and drinking hole in London’s Soho where politicians, journalists, and union leaders would mix, prompted an article by the journalist Adrian Wooldridge bemoaning the broader demise of the liquid lunch in British politics.60 It does an excellent job of highlighting what is lost as the influence of alcohol is gradually drained out of public life: The saddest reason is the rise of a professional political class. Drink provided a link between politics and society. The Labour Party recruited MPs and activists from
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Subjects given alcohol rather than a placebo rate photos with sexual content as more appealing and choose to gaze at them longer.72 Interestingly, the effect is more pronounced in women, which may reflect greater inhibitions created by cultural norms that alcohol then helps to downregulate.73
moderate alcohol consumption, as opposed to both complete abstinence and heavy drinking, is associated with closer friendships and better family support.88
author Barbara Ehrenreich’s biting observation that missionaries sent to South Africa deliberately focused on repressing traditional dances as a means for “weakening the communistic relations of members of a tribe among one another,” with the goal of, as she sarcastically puts it, “letting in the fresh, stimulating breath of healthy individualistic competition.”93
During one of his benders he reportedly got stark naked in a public-facing room of his house, drawing rebukes from passersby. He is said to have shouted at them, “For me, Heaven and Earth are the rafters and roof of my house; this room is just the trousers of my garment. What are you gentlemen doing inside my trousers?”104
the ubiquity of chemical intoxicant use throughout the animal world has led the psychologist Ronald Siegel to declare that “intoxication is the fourth drive,” after food, sex, and sleep.108
Humans, however, are even more in need of ecstasy than most. We are afflicted by a malady that, as far as we know, is not shared with any other species: conscious self-awareness.
there is good empirical data on psychedelic experiences and long-term positive mental health outcomes. Beginning with the famous Good Friday Experiment, in which a bunch of straight-laced divinity school students had their minds blown by 30 mg of purified psilocybin and then followed over the course of twenty-five years, a growing body of evidence suggests that even a single intense experience of chemical ecstasy can provide long-lasting benefits, alleviating depression and enhancing openness to experience, mood, aesthetic appreciation of the world, compassion, and altruistic behavior.113
