Almost everything academic ever written about drinking and alcohol is centered on why it is bad for us. In this episode of Follow Your Different, we have the audacity to ask, “How does drinking and getting drunk make a difference to humanity?” And to answer that question, we have Edward Slingerland with us.
A bit of a disclaimer before we proceed: it is clear that for some people, drinking is a horrible thing. If you're somebody for whom drinking represents a problem, then please know you have our thoughts and empathy. However, this episode is one that is going to celebrate the difference that drinking has made to society. Our guest today delves into that and more on his new book that studied how drinking is great for us as a society.
Professor Edward Slingerland is a distinguished university scholar and professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His new book is called Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way into civilization. We dive deep into that and more on this episode, so stay tuned.
Edward Slingerland on Getting Drunk
Prof. Edward shared that he had fun writing his book, Drunk. On one hand, it’s a topic people are interested in a lot, because it’s about drinking. For Edward, it’s also a mystery worth exploring, despite most people not even realizing it.
Finding books about different drinks and how to get drunk around the world is easy. Finding one about why people like getting drunk, is not.
“I don't think anyone's ever explored just the underlying question of why we like to get drunk in the first place. And so, it's fun to actually problematize something that people take for granted.” – Edward Slingerland
Evolutionary Hijacks
So, why do we get drunk? The easiest answer is that it makes us feel good. But that’s not really an answer, according to Prof. Edward. That answer just opens up another one, which is “why does evolution allow us to get drunk?” In simpler terms, “Why?” This is the central mystery that Prof. Edward wants to explore.
The standard story we’ve been told in psych textbooks is that it was an evolutionary mistake. We somehow discovered something that just happened to randomly hijack reward circuits in our brain. So as clever primates, we figured that we could just take a shortcut and feel good without doing anything.
Prof Edward likens it to masturbation, which is another evolutionary hijack. Orgasms given us pleasure, and pleasure is the best carrot that evolution has to encourage us to pass on our genes to the next generation. Yet we have managed to hijack that with all sorts of non-reproductive sexual hijacks.
“But evolution lets us get away with that because it's not interested in a perfect system. It's happy with good enough. And this system is good enough.” – Edward Slingerland
Although unlike masturbation that old people say will make you blind, excessive alcohol consumption will literally blind you.
Reasons to Get Drunk
Despite all that, people have been gathering around the fire and drinking to their hearts content since the start of civilization. This just makes everything all the more mysterious, according to Prof. Edward.
Another thing that Prof. Edward noticed is that the evolutionary mistake story might not have been accurate. For one thing, most of our ancestors that domesticize plants didn’t do it for food. They were hunter-gatherers; they could just simply pick food up in the wilderness. Yet they still tried to grow such plants near their living spaces for easy access.
It was the same for the civilizations that discovered the ancestor of maize. It was a terrible grain to use as a food source, yet people chose to settle and raise this crop. All for the sake of getting drunk. So it was by no means an accident.
“There's one estimate from ancient Sumer, is that half of the grain production went to making beer. So you're taking in a place where people are on the edge of starvation, even in large scale civilizations,
