Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
An "entertaining and enlightening" deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization—and the evolutionary roots of humanity's appetite for intoxication (Daniel E. Lieberman, author of Exercised).
While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place.
Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Drunk shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, 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. Our 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 would not have civilization without intoxication.
From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with fascinating case studies and engaging science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.
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Edward Slingerland. (2021). Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Little, Brown and Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Edward Slingerland. 2021. Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Little, Brown and Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Little, Brown and Company, 2021.
MLA Citation (style guide)Edward Slingerland. Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Little, Brown and Company, 2021.
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- bioText: Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, with adjunct appointments in Psychology and Philosophy, as well as Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture and Director of the Database of Religious History. Slingerland is the author of Trying Not to Try, which was named one of the best books of 2014 by The Guardian and Brain Pickings and was the subject of a piece by John Tierney in the New York Times. He has given talks on the science and power of spontaneity at a variety of venues across the world, including TEDx Maastricht and two Google campuses, and has done numerous interviews on TV, radio, blogs, and podcasts, including NPR, the BBC World Service and the CBC.
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An "entertaining and enlightening" deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization—and the evolutionary roots of humanity's appetite for intoxication (Daniel E. Lieberman, author of Exercised).
While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place.
Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Drunk shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, 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. Our 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 would not have civilization without intoxication.
From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with fascinating case studies and engaging science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.
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April 15, 2021
A spirited look at drinking. A professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, Slingerland draws on archaeology, anthropology, history, neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, poetry, and genetics to argue--insistently and repetitively-- for the social, cultural, and psychological benefits of getting drunk. "Far from being an evolutionary mistake," he writes, "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." He expounds at length on humans' need for creativity, culture, and cooperation, which, he claims, alcohol enhances. "In many ways," he writes, alcohol "is the perfect drug. It is easy to dose, and its cognitive effects stable across individuals. Best of all, these effects wax and wane predictably and are relatively short-lived." Alcohol consumption, he asserts, preceded agriculture and, in fact, "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." While Slingerland concedes that alcohol may have detrimental physical effects, such as liver damage, he asserts that such costs must be weighed against its "venerable role as an aid to creativity, contentment, and social solidarity." The author acknowledges, however, that this solidarity excludes those who do not drink for health or religious reasons and often excludes women, as well. As far as the role of alcohol in sexual assault and rape, Slingerland writes that these unsavory behaviors are "driven by patriarchal or misogynist social norms rather than the ethanol molecule itself." In the final chapter, the author cautions against imbibing distilled spirits and drinking "outside of the traditional context of ritual and social controls," contradicting his earlier assertion that many artists and writers "unleashed" their creativity by drinking hard liquor, alone. A hyperbolic but entertaining defense of intoxication via alcohol.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from May 1, 2021
Why do people all over the world use intoxicants that impair thinking and cause long-term health problems? Slingerland (Asian studies, Univ. of British Columbia; Trying Not To Try) attempts to answer this question. His book is international in scope and covers a wide range of topics around this peculiar human behavior and its potential evolutionary or social explanations. He analyzes some widespread theories of drug and alcohol use: "hijack theory" asserts that humans are smart enough to exploit evolution's pleasure systems, while "hangover theory" suggests that we tend to overindulge in substances that, in smaller amounts, would have evolutionary advantages. He also discusses simple functional uses of alcohol, including its ability to kill bacteria in water; for Slingerland, that functional explanation doesn't explain why humans haven't replaced alcohol with, for instance, boiled tea. He proposes that intoxication cools the grip of the prefrontal cortex, allowing a curious and creative childlike mind to wander. There is serious anthropology here, including the tantalizing theory that beer, not bread, was the stimulus for the agricultural revolution. Slingerland's informal, conversational style weaves modern scientific studies with ancient mythology. VERDICT An illuminating yet conversational study that takes an anthropological approach to a widespread and often puzzling human behavior.--Jeffrey Meyer, Iowa Wesleyan Univ.
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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May 1, 2021
Authors praising booze come up with the damndest things. Did you know that the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock was a beer run? (Well, sort of.) Slingerland, though, has no truck with drunky cuteness. He's a scholar, with solid academic credentials and a professorial display of charts and statistics, which readers can comfortably skip but that do provide scientific and historical justification for a wealth of jarring and entertaining statements: ""We wouldn't have civilization as we know it without intoxication in some form."" That the form was alcoholic largely accounts for the agrarian expansion that created the modern world: got to have something to ferment. Chunks of the study sing the benevolence and importance of the sauce in business, religion, friendship, the arts, and romance--and in escaping what Aldous Huxley called ""selfhood and the environment."" Yes, alcohol is linked to ""liver damage, cancer, self-harm, industrial accidents, poisonings, drownings, and falls,"" yet evolution, which apparently has beer for breakfast, has been slow to sense real danger. Slingerland, too, prefers not to dwell on it. ""The way to God,"" he quotes the shamans, ""is with beer in hand.COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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An "entertaining and enlightening" deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization—and the evolutionary roots of humanity's appetite for intoxication (Daniel E. Lieberman, author of Exercised).
While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place.
Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Drunk shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a...
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