Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

One of the reasons that dogs strike us as so cute is that, relative to their wolf ancestors, they display “neoteny,” the extension of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. In other words, even as adults they look and act like wolf pups, with rounded, puppy-like features, an intense desire to play, and a readiness to trust. As the play researcher Stuart Brown notes, adult human beings, in both our appearance and playfulness, are essentially the “Labradors of the primate world.”26 We look, and behave, more like chimp babies than chimp adults. Species that display neoteny (like dogs) tend to be more flexible but less efficient and self-sufficient; those showing mature characteristics (like wolves) are brutally efficient but rigid. In the same way that an extended period of childhood tends to predict cognitive flexibility, across a broad range of species there appears to be a positive correlation between brain size and playfulness.27 Human children, like dog pups, are thus doubly immature: youthful versions of a species that itself retains youthful characteristics.

All of this suggests that it is quite likely that the desire to get drunk or high gave rise to agriculture, rather than the other way around. Agriculture, of course, is the foundation of civilization. This means that our taste for liquid or smokable neurotoxins, the most convenient means for taking the PFC offline, may have been the catalyst for settled agricultural life. Moreover, intoxicants not only lured us into civilization but, as we will explore in this chapter, also helped make it possible for us to become civilized. By causing humans to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal—to live like social insects, despite our ape nature—intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups, domesticate increasing numbers of plants and animals, accumulate new technologies, and thereby create the sprawling civilizations that have made us the dominant mega-fauna on the planet.

Even the best videoconference is a poor substitute for the visceral buzz of interpersonal chemistry, catalyzed by chemical intoxicants, that comes from in-person socializing in pubs and cafés. The shared experience of music, happy chatter, effortlessly synchronized conversation, rising endorphin levels, and reduced inhibitions is impossible to replace with any technology that we currently possess.

Video meetings are probably more efficient; but efficiency, the central value of Apollo, is the enemy of disruptive innovation. The pub doesn’t just make us feel better; used properly, it makes us, in the long run, work better.

This all suggests that replacing alcoholic cocktails with virgin cocktails at the annual office party will defeat much of the purpose of holding such events in the first place. While three college students smiling at one another across a Formica lab table is not as dramatic or entertaining a data point as the actor T. J. Miller launching himself down a slide full of cocaine in a Santa outfit, this study does provide us with actual empirical evidence that alcoholic office parties have positive social functions, in addition to their more obvious costs. Crucially, as this study reveals, it’s important to note that the ethanol itself, not just the setting or cultural expectations, is doing the work.

In other words, go to the pub and have a pint or two. All things considered—liver damage, calories, and all—a spot of social drinking is good for you, and this has nothing to do with any French paradox or narrow health benefit. Moderate, social drinking brings people together, keeps them connected to their communities, and lubricates the exchange of information and building of networks. We social apes would find it very challenging to do without it, both individually and communally.

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder: Sex, Friendship, and Intimacy

Some research suggests that the instrumental use of alcohol might be especially important for introverts or those with social phobias, who strategically use alcohol to effect “a self-induced, time-restricted personality change,”85 temporarily transforming themselves into extroverts for long enough to make it through a cocktail reception or dinner party.86 (Introverted readers may well recognize this particular mind hack.)

We cannot, he concludes. “It is in many ways easier to be frank today about one’s sexual habits than it is to talk about what intoxicants one uses…rendering us all shame-faced inarticulates on the subject.”123 It is time for us to become articulate again. While it is socially acceptable to talk in purely aesthetic terms about our interest in fine wine, microbrewed beer, or designer cannabis, we remain uncomfortable talking about our need for embodied pleasure for its own sake, rather than as a side effect of more respectable, abstract connoisseurship. This is a hang-up that we need to get over.

Alcohol, on the other hand, stands defenseless against bureaucrats, physicians, and government policy makers in large part because we have failed to do the work of uncovering the evolutionary rationales for its role as the king of intoxicants and unpacking its continued benefits to individuals and societies. Pleasure alone is, alas, rarely broad enough cover for intoxication.

The psychologists Christian Müller and Gunter Schumann make two important points in their review article on “drug instrumentalization,” or the rational, strategic use of chemical intoxicants to achieve specific, desirable outcomes.130 The first is that, despite justified concerns about alcoholism and drug addiction, the vast majority of psychoactive drug users, across the world and through all age groups, are not addicts, and are at very low risk of becoming addicts.131 Most people use intoxicants simply as tools for creating desired short-term psychological shifts, in the same way they use coffee to wake up and focus, or a silly TV show in the evening to decompress from a hard day at work. The authors further argue that modern, industrialized societies involve a much higher density and variety of social “microenvironments,” to which people are constantly required to adapt, than traditional agricultural, or pre-agricultural, societies. We work from home, collaborate online, network over meals and at receptions, wedge exercise or a stolen moment with our children in between a conference call and a team brainstorming session. Psychoactives—not only pure stimulants like coffee and nicotine, but intoxicants like alcohol and cannabis—might therefore be even more important for us today than they have been historically.

This is historically myopic and scientifically unsound. At the end of the day, despite the potential chaos he brings in his wake, we should welcome Dionysus into our lives. We should do so partly in recognition of the challenges we face as a species and the functional benefits he can continue to provide us only partially civilized apes living in artificial modern hives. We should also accept the fact that pleasure is good, for pleasure’s sake, and requires no further justification. We need to debunk the view that alcohol and similar intoxicants are sinister inventions of capitalist modernity, sold to us by nefarious advertisers, leading to nothing but hangovers, lost income, and bulging waistlines. Drinking can make us fat, harm our livers, give us cancer, cost us money, and turn us into useless idiots in the mornings. It can even be lethal, to both us and those around us. It has, nonetheless, always been deeply intertwined with human sociality, and for very good evolutionary reasons. Moreover, its important functions are very difficult, if not impossible, to replace with other substances or practices. Let us therefore embrace Dionysus with appropriate caution, but also with the reverence that he is due.

This story is wonderful and revealing. “Few recognize Dionysus as a god, this hymn seems to tell us,” the classicist Robin Osborne observes, “and only those who do retain their humanity.”