By Richard Coad, Chief Creative Officer, MDB Communications

A fascinating new book by Edward Slingerland, How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, is a thoughtful and spirited defense of intoxication.

Slingerland, who is a professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, posits a central thesis that is clear minded and straightforward. “For excessive alcohol consumption to have become so widespread for so long, it must have some evolutionary, adaptive purpose.”

Drunk cuts through the jumble of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication. It provides the first rigorous, scientifically grounded exploration for our love of alcohol in all its many, delicious forms. Drawing from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature and genetics,  Slingerland shows that our taste for intoxicating beverages is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are often told.

Slingerland argues that, despite its numerous downsides, getting drunk has been, on the hole, beneficial, “enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.”

He delves into biology and neuroscience to explain how alcohol’s inhibition of the prefrontal cortex helps foster a “childlike creativity and receptiveness in otherwise fully-functional adults,” and cites psychological studies showing that moderate intoxication breaks down the social barriers that can prevent people from bonding.

Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, have played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. Slingerland notes that traces of alcohol have been found on Chinese pot shards from 7,000 BCE and on peyote buttons found in human cave dwelling dating from 3,700 BCE.

Drunk is packed with fascinating case studies and engaging science, along with practical takeaways for individuals and communities. Slingerland even sites archaeological evidence that brewing preceded baking, wherein he suggests that agriculture was motivated more by a desire for beer than for bread.

Slingerland is disturbed by “our current age of neo-prohibition and general queasiness about risk.” He strongly believes in “the simple joy of feeling good.”

He is critical of those who dismiss chemical shortcuts to happiness noting that, however we achieve pleasure, we’re inducing biochemical states. He wonders why we think it’s great that exercise or meditation can reduce stress or improve our mood but don’t show the same respect for a glass or two of fine wine.

Much of Slingerland’s evidence endorses the benefits of mild intoxication. He’s also a fan of an occasional “bender,” citing many examples of cultures in which communal “blow-outs” were ritualized ways of building group cohesion.

Toward the end of his book, Slingerland acknowledges that just because alcohol has served us well historically doesn’t mean that it exclusively continues to do so. Two things have changed how we relate to alcohol: distillation and isolation.

Through most of human history, alcoholic drinks were relatively weak. Distillation made it possible to get drunk fairly quickly. Today, even beer and wine have gotten stronger. Add to this the cost of drinking at home alone and the cost-benefit balance of intoxication becomes not quite so favorable.

Nonetheless, Slingerland makes a compelling case that human societies have been positively shaped by alcohol and concludes that “we could not have civilization without intoxication.”

Cheers!

MDB Communications is a Capitol Communicator sponsor.