The Case for DrinkingAlcohol facilitates human cooperation and creativity on a grand scale, says Edward Slingerland, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia.
MEREDITH BRAGG
6.30.2022
"We've been looking at alcohol consumption through this very distorted lens," says Edward Slingerland, author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. "We've only been looking at it as a kind of addictive pleasure substance. We haven't been seeing any of the positive social benefits."
While not minimizing the dangers of overuse, Slingerland lays out a case that alcohol is a cultural technology that motivated humans to create and maintain civilization.
"[Alcohol] helps us to be more creative. It helps us to be more communal. It helps us to cooperate on a large scale. It helps to make it easier for us to kind of rub shoulders with each other in large-scale societies that we live in. So it solved a bunch of adaptive problems that we uniquely face as a species because of this weird lifestyle we have."
Alcohol's effect on the brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC), Slingerland argues, allows us to be more receptive and creative.
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"In every culture I know, whenever you get potentially hostile strangers or people with potentially competing interests who have to come to an agreement and figure something out, alcohol's involved. And in places that don't have alcohol, they use some other substance that has exactly the same function. The same way we shake hands when we need to show we're not carrying a weapon, if I sit down and drink a few beers with you, I'm basically taking my PFC out and putting it on the table and saying, 'you know, I'm cognitively disarmed.'"
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Source:
https://reason.com/video/2022/06/30/the-case-for-drinking/
