Civilization and Intoxication: A Selection from Edward Slingerland’s Drunk (2021)
“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. Even small-scale societies on the brink of starvation will set aside a good portion of their precious grain or fruit for alcohol production. In pre-colonial Mexico, tribes that otherwise had no organized agriculture traveled great distances to make liquor from cacti fruit during the brief periods when they were in season. Migrants whose alcohol supplies have run dry have desperately fermented shoe leather, grasses, local insects, whatever they could get their hands on. Nomads of Central Asia, with little access to starch or sugars, go so far as to make booze out of fermented mare’s milk. In contemporary societies, people spend an alarming proportion of their household budgets on alcohol and other intoxicants. . . .
Archaeologists have begun to suggest that various forms of alcohol were not merely a by-product of the invention of agriculture, but actually a motivation for it—that the first farmers were driven by a desire for beer, not bread. It is no accident that the earliest human archaeological finds from around the world always include huge numbers of specialized, elaborate vessels used solely for the production and consumption of beer and wine. . . .
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. . . .
My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively altered must have, over evolutionary time, helped individuals to survive and flourish, and cultures to endure and expand. When it comes to intoxication, the mistake story cannot be correct. There are very good evolutionary reasons why we get drunk. . . .
People like to masturbate. They also like to get drunk and eat Twinkies. Not typically all at the same time, but that’s a matter of personal preference.
From a scientific perspective, we have long been told that these otherwise variegated pleasures have one thing in common: They are evolutionary mistakes, sneaky ways humans have figured out how to get something for nothing. Evolution gives us little shots of pleasure for doing things that advance its plan, like nourishing our bodies or passing on our genes. Clever primates, though, have been gaming this system for eons—inventing porn, birth control, and junk food, and seeking out or creating substances that will flood their brains with dopamine with callous disregard for evolution’s original design goals. We are inveterate pleasure seekers, promiscuously grabbing little jolts of ecstasy whenever and wherever we can. When someone gets an endorphin hit from devouring a Twinkie, downing a shot of Jägermeister, and then pleasuring themselves to Swingers Getaway IV, they are getting an undeserved reward. Evolution must be furious.
One type of evolutionary mistake can be thought of as an evolutionary ‘hangover,’ where we are plagued by behaviors and drives that were once adaptive, but are no longer. Our desire for Twinkies is a classic example of an evolutionary hangover. Junk food is appealing because evolution built us to like sugar and fat. This was a sensible strategy for our ancestors, hunter-gatherers haunted by the constant specter of hunger and starvation. It goes seriously off the rails, however, in modern environments, where most people have easy access to cheap sweets, carbs, and processed meats, sometimes helpfully delivered in a single, heart attack–inducing package. Evolution can also be subverted by ‘hijacks.’ These are cases where we’ve figured out an illicit way to tap into a pleasure system originally designed to reward other, more adaptive behavior. Masturbation is an exemplary hijack. Orgasms are meant to reward us for having reproductive sex, thereby helping our genes get into the next generation. We can, however, trick our bodies into giving us that same reward in any number of entirely, wildly non-reproductive ways.
In scientific circles, there is debate about whether our mistaken taste for alcohol is of the hijack or hangover variety. Proponents of hijack theories claim that alcoholic beverages make us feel good because their active ingredient, ethanol, happens to trigger the release of reward chemicals in our brain. This is a design glitch: These chemicals are actually intended by evolution to reward genuinely adaptive behavior, like eating nutritious things or pushing a hated enemy into a tar pit. But the brain can be tricked, and ethanol is one of the easiest ways to do so. . . .
Far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication. . . .
Remains in Britain and Europe suggest that people were consuming opium poppies as long as 30,000 years ago, and archaeological evidence shows that poppy goddesses were worshipped in the Mediterranean as far back as the second millennium BCE. So, people have been getting intoxicated—drunk, stoned, or lit up with psychedelics—for a really long time, all over the world. There is no shortage of entertaining books documenting our species’ taste for intoxicants, as well as the wildly diverse ways in which we have pursued our desire for altered states. As the alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil observes, ‘The ubiquity of drug use is so striking that it must represent a basic human appetite.’ In his overview of the impressive variety of intoxication technologies used around the world, the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt similarly argues that ‘the deliberate seeking of psychoactive experience is likely to be at least as old as anatomically (and behaviorally) modern humans: one of the characteristics of Homo sapiens sapiens.’ . . .
When drunk, you physically appear more attractive to others: Photos of moderately intoxicated people are rated as more attractive than photos taken of the same person when they are sober. . . . These photos illustrate one aspect of alcohol’s attractiveness-enhancing effects: The tense work self is gradually replaced with someone infinitely more relaxed, confident, unselfconscious, and happy. . . .
There is a very good reason we have historically gotten drunk. It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers, and trippers who emerged triumphant. In all of the ways outlined above, intoxicants—above all alcohol—appear to have been the chemical tool that allowed humans to escape the limits imposed by our ape nature and create social insect–like levels of cooperation. We have seen that traditional views about the functional benefits of alcohol consumption find confirmation in modern science. By enhancing creativity, dampening stress, facilitating social contact, enhancing trust and bonding, forging group identity, and reinforcing social roles and hierarchy, intoxicants have played a crucial role in allowing hunting and gathering humans to enter into the hive life of agricultural villages, towns, and cities. This process has gradually scaled up the scope of human cooperation, eventually creating modern civilization as we know it. . . .
I would argue . . . that we have not entirely outgrown our need for chemical ecstasy. Alcohol and other intoxicants can and should continue to play a role in our modern world. Indeed, in some ways we need them more than ever. There’s a strong case to be made that chemical intoxication has not outlived its functional role, and there are plenty of reasons we should continue to get drunk.”—Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way Into Civilization (2021)
