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

Because of the distinctive adaptive challenges we face as a species, we require a way to inject controlled doses of chaos into our lives.

Intoxication is an antidote to cognitive control, a way to temporarily hamstring that opponent to creativity, cultural openness, and communal bonding.

Given that the pre-frontal cortex is a key to our success as a species, consuming any amount of alcohol or other intoxicant seems really stupid.

The great power of adopting a scientific approach to human behavior is the ability to unmask deep puzzles about human existence that otherwise hide in plain sight. Once we begin to think deeply and systematically about the antiquity, ubiquity, and power of our taste for intoxicants, the standard stories suggesting it’s some sort of evolutionary accident become difficult to take seriously. Considering the enormous costs of intoxication, which humans have been paying for many thousands of years, we would expect genetic evolution to work toward eliminating any accidental taste for alcohol from our motivational system as quickly as possible. If ethanol happens to pick our neurological pleasure lock, evolution should call in a locksmith.

Even in the most low-tech societies, however, humans are completely helpless without tools and the creative insights that generate them. We need creativity simply to function.

Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them.

awakening’ drinkers to their optimum creative moments…to be intoxicated is to be inspired.”10 It is not uncommon for ancient Chinese poets to have entire series of poems under the rubric, “Written While Drunk,” including this one from the Zhang Yue (667 to 730): Once drunk, my delight knows no limits— Even better than before I’m drunk. My movements, my expressions, all turn into dance, And every word out of my mouth turns into a poem!11

If you tasked a cultural engineering team with designing a substance that would satisfy specs aimed at maximizing individual creativity and group cooperation, they would come up with something very much like alcohol.

...we are simply not well adapted, evolutionarily, to be able to consume alcohol safety outside of the traditional context of ritual and social controls.

As countless myths and children’s stories recount, however, childlike playfulness, something we uniquely crave among primates, is eventually lost. We relish some banter with the hot dog vendor, but keep it short because we’re late for work. As adults, the childish drive to meander, examine boogers, and play becomes subordinated to productive routine. Get up, dress, commute, work, eat, sleep, repeat. This is the realm of the PFC, that center of executive control, and it is no accident that its maturation corresponds to an increased ability to stay on task, delay gratification, and subordinate emotions and desires to abstract reason and the achievement of practical goals.

If with water you fill up your glasses You’ll never write anything wise But wine is the horse of Parnassus That carries a bard to the skies.

The Gospel of Matthew declares, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” An early Chinese Daoist text, the Daodejing or Laozi, compares the perfected sage to an infant or small child, perfectly open and receptive to the world.

After a glass or two, your attention is narrowed to only the immediate surroundings. You meander unpredictably, more free to follow wherever the conversation might take you. You feel happy and unconcerned about future consequences. Your motor skills are rubbish. On the other hand, if you speak a second language, you might find yourself suddenly a bit more confident and fluent. In other words, you are a child again, with all of the benefits and costs that come with stunting the PFC.

As with other childlike traits, human adults remain playful and trusting in a way that looks a lot more like Labradors than adult wolves or chimpanzees. When a grown wolf or a chimp bares its teeth, you’d better run. Humans, even adult humans, are by and large more into chasing balls than establishing dominance. The readiness with which we play with our friends and acquaintances and even strangers is remarkable, even though verbal banter or wordplay tends to gradually displace physical wrestling. When I joke with the hot dog vendor about his pathetic loyalty to the Mets, as evinced by the baseball cap he is wearing, we become very much like two dogs wrestling in a park: My verbal jabs are play-serious, not meant to genuinely wound, and the successful banter establishes an ephemeral but important trust connection in the midst of a busy metropolis. Insult a chimpanzee’s favorite baseball team, on the other hand, and you’re likely to lose an arm. The fact that humans retain into adulthood the complex and sophisticated cognitive machinery required to play, and in fact continue to enjoy playing with others, is a reflection of the profound importance of trust in human affairs.

It must grace the festivity of the wedding; it must enliven the gloom of the funeral. It must cheer the intercourse of friends and enlighten the fatigue of labor. Success deserves a treat and disappointment needs it. The busy drink because they are busy; the idle because they have nothing else to do. The farmer must drink because his work is hard; the mechanic because his employment is sedentary and dull. It is warm, men drink to be cool; it is cool, they drink to be warm.27

My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively

We also have to reevaluate the historic benefits of intoxication, at both the individual and group level, in light of the unprecedented threats that intoxicants pose in the modern world. The relatively recent innovations of distillation and social isolation entirely change intoxicants’ balance on the razor’s edge between order and chaos, creating novel dangers that we only dimly appreciate.

It should puzzle us more than it does that one of the greatest foci of human ingenuity and concentrated effort over the past millennia has been the problem of how to get drunk.

This crucial functional role for alcohol and other intoxicants is slowly gaining wider acceptance in the anthropological community. 131 Proponents of the beer before bread hypotheses rightly emphasize how the increased cohesiveness and scale of intoxicant-using cultures would give them a distinct advantage in competition with other groups, allowing them to cooperate more effectively in work, food production, and warfare. 132 The inexorable pressure of cultural group selection would, in this way, encourage and disseminate the cultural use of intoxicants in the manner that we actually observe in the historical record, and that is completely inconsistent with any hijack or hangover theory of intoxication.

Our dependence on culture means that our minds need to be open to others, so that we can learn from them.

Humans have adopted such an extreme form of the peak-late strategy because, as a species, we have come to inhabit an equally extreme ecological niche. The main demands imposed upon us by the odd, crowded cave to which we have adapted can be summed up with what I’ll call the Three Cs: we are required to be creative, cultural, and communal. The demands of the Three Cs make us, like the helpless, blind, altricial crow chicks, more vulnerable than robust and less complicated animals. For instance: sharks. You’d never want to put a four-year-old human up against a four-year-old shark. Yet it remains the fact that our weak, mewling infants grow into relative masters of the universe, putting sharks in aquariums, eating their fins in soups, and now, unfortunately, driving them to extinction in many regions of the world.

One of the many gifts attributed to Dionysus by the Greeks was the power of transformation. He could turn himself into an animal, and he was the god who granted the unfortunate King Midas the power to turn anything he touched into gold. As the god of intoxication, he could turn sane people mad. Or, even more impressively, he could transform task-focused, suspicious, aggressive, and fiercely independent primates into relaxed, creative, and trusting social beings. Let’s now look at how, across the world and throughout history, humans have turned to Dionysus for help when confronting the challenge inherent to being a creative, cultural, and communal ape. A

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.

In fact, one of Gopnik’s most important arguments is that this cognitive flexibility and creativity is a design feature of youth. She and her colleagues review evidence that suggests that when it comes to novel learning tasks, the young of many species often outperform their elders.20 This is certainly true of humans.

Three cups only do I propose for sensible men, one for health, the second for love and pleasure and the third for sleep; when this has been drunk up, wise guests make for home. The fourth cup is mine no longer, but belongs to hubris; the fifth to shouting; the sixth to revel; the seventh to black eyes; the eighth to summonses; the ninth to bile; and the tenth to madness and people tossing the furniture about.

In other words, being human requires a careful balancing act between Apollo and Dionysus. We need to be able to tie our shoes, but also be occasionally distracted by the beautiful or interesting or new. Because of the distinctive adaptive challenges we face as a species, we require a way to inject controlled doses of chaos into our lives.74 Apollo, the sober grown-up, can’t be in charge all of the time. Dionysus, like a hapless toddler, may have trouble getting his shoes on, but he sometimes manages to stumble on novel solutions that Apollo would never see.

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. There is no need to quibble around the margins about HDL levels. The most important thing that neo-Prohibitionists and health authorities alike fail to consider in coming down on the side of total abstinence is that the obvious physiological and psychological costs of alcohol must be weighed against their venerable role as an aid to creativity, contentment, and social solidarity. Once we recognize the functional benefits of intoxication—its role in helping humans to adapt to our extreme ecological niche—the argument that we should strive for a completely dry world is difficult to sustain. We saw in Chapter Three how alcohol and

As the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have observed, general intelligence, behavioral flexibility, ability to solve novel problems, and a reliance on learning from others tends to roughly correlate with an extended period of helpless immaturity.13 This relationship is found across a broad range of animals, including birds and mammals, suggesting that it tracks a fundamental evolutionary trade-off between narrow competence and creative flexibility.

As the scholar of English literature Marty Roth notes, while modern writers from Eugene O’Neill to Hemingway have explicitly denied the role of alcohol in their art, “this disclaimer, when it comes from a heavy drinker, is more likely to be part of an alcoholic alibi system than a statement of fact.”14 In any case, it is impossible to ignore the fact that an inordinate proportion of writers, poets, artists, and musicians are also heavy users of liquid inspiration, willing to put up with the physical and sometimes financial and personal costs in return for an unleashed mind.

Human rulers get poisoned or decapitated or simply voted out of office all the time, as our set of personal desires, our chimpanzee DNA, rears its individualistic head.