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Why we get boozed, with Edward Slingerland
2.6k Plays1 month ago
After a merry festive season, this is the time of the year when some of us decide to cut back on the booze. Dry January is a peculiar concept. Anyone who does it will tell you they feel great at the end of the month, but most of them can’t wait to get back to the pub.
In many ways, drinking doesn’t make sense. It often takes more than it gives. And yet we keep drinking, just like we have for tens of thousands of years. The question is, why?
To help Will with an answer, he is joined by Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and author of ‘Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization’, Edward Slingerland.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fire at Will Podcast
The Paradox of Dry January
00:00:21
Speaker
yeah And welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. After a merry festive season, this is the time of year when some of us decide to cut back on the booze. I've always found Dry January to be a ah peculiar concept. Anyone who does it will tell you they feel a million bucks at the end of the month, but most of them can't wait to get back to the pub regardless.
00:00:51
Speaker
If you take a step back, drinking doesn't make much sense. Hangovers, extra kilos, incoherent arguments with politically misguided relatives, not to mention the really serious consequences. Alcohol appears to take more than it gives. And yet we keep drinking, just like we have for tens of thousands of years. The question, which surprisingly few people ask, is why?
Meet Ted Slingalant, Philosophy Professor
00:01:19
Speaker
To help me with an answer, I am delighted to be joined by Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and author of my favourite holiday read, Drunk, How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, Ted Slingalant. Ted, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:01:37
Speaker
and so It's a pleasure. I hope you don't mind. I thought it was appropriate and in keeping with this podcast that I should have a beer as we're chatting. I know it's a bit... That is tight and zone appropriate for you. You'll stick in the can, I'll drink coffee. Okay, great. Well, cheers. Ted, I'm implementing a new rule on this podcast in 2025 and you'll be the first adherent to it. And that is when
Alcohol's Role in Civilization
00:02:02
Speaker
I have someone who has written a book on the podcast, the first question will be, what's the book about?
00:02:07
Speaker
It's about the question you raised in your intro. We drink, and we don't think about why we drink. It just is something humans do. ah When we look around the world, everywhere we go, people, when they gather together socially and buy some sort of intoxicant, we've been doing this forever. it It's an ancient behavior. So as long as humans have been doing anything in an organized fashion, even even before we had agriculture,
00:02:35
Speaker
we were getting together and producing and consuming alcohol and other chemical intoxicants. And I just kind of professionally academically, I'm interested in what I think of as mysteries hiding in plain sight. So behaviors that humans engage in that we never really question, but we should question because once you start thinking about it, they're puzzling.
00:02:58
Speaker
And in my previous career, the last decade or so, one of the things I've worked on is religion in this regard. So again, everywhere you go around the world, throughout history, people are cutting off the foreskin of their penis or scarifying themselves or sacrificing valuable objects to invisible beings.
00:03:18
Speaker
they're
Challenging Alcohol's Negative Image
00:03:19
Speaker
building these enormous, useless monuments. right this they they're They're engaging in costs on an individual and social level that are baffling if you don't share the belief system, if you don't actually think they're these beings who they who are going to give them rewards for doing these things.
00:03:40
Speaker
And yet humans have always done it, humans do it everywhere. And so one of the things I've worked on in the past is what's going on in terms of possible benefits with this otherwise costly, apparently pointless behavior. And I started to think that maybe another one of these behaviors is the human use of chemical intoxicants. So alcohol is costly, it's economically costly.
00:04:05
Speaker
I think one thing that shifted especially in the last few years, but ah it's been happening over the last decade, it it seems to be a physiological net negative. So all that kind of happy talk about the French paradox and yeah lower cholesterol seems to be outweighed by so the cancer risk and other harm. So so it's bad for you physiologically,
00:04:27
Speaker
We know about all the social costs that can lead to bad behavior. If you
Evolutionary Perspectives on Alcohol
00:04:33
Speaker
have a genetic propensity to alcohol use disorder, it can be very dangerous for you. There's really, in terms of physiology, nothing and think good to say about alcohol consumption. And yet, as you know, we we like to do it. We continue to do it. I got interested in trying to explain why this is from an evolutionary perspective.
00:04:53
Speaker
And I was particularly interested in it when I started to dig a little bit and found that... So the standard story, if you want to look at why we like... So why do we like to drink is the basic question the book wants to answer. The flippant answer as well it makes us feel good. But then the deeper question is, why does it make us feel good? Or or really in the way ah I'd want to formulate it is, why does evolution allow it to make us feel good?
00:05:22
Speaker
And one of the things one the first things I discovered when digging into this scientifically is that evolution could have chosen otherwise. I mean, I'm talking and in intentional terms, but but this works in terms of the mechanisms of evolution. There is a genetic solution to our taste for alcohol.
00:05:40
Speaker
which is the set of mutations that's happened at least three times in human history. and people It's most widespread in East Asia, and it's sometimes called the Asian Flushing Syndrome. But especially if you have copies of this mutation, drinking doesn't make you feel good. it gives It makes you flush, it gives you heart palpitations, it makes you nauseous. so this if The standard scientific story is an evolutionary mistake one.
00:06:08
Speaker
Our taste for alcohol is like our taste for other vices. It it happens to go in and hijack reward networks in our brain. And there's no good reason for it. It's just a mistake. But ah if this were true, then this is the solution. This Asian Flushing syndrome is the solution to that mistake. This mutation happened, we think, about 7,000 years ago, maybe 10,000 years ago in East Asia. And yet it's pretty much stayed in East Asia. It hasn't moved. So if it were the case that this was an evolutionary mistake or taste for alcohol,
00:06:47
Speaker
this gene should have spread immediately all throughout the world. We would all flush when we drink alcohol, and yet we don't. And so that suggests to me that there's there's got to be some benefits on the other side. The the evolutionary mistake theory can't be right. And then alcohol must be doing something for us that's paying for the costs.
00:07:08
Speaker
Will you outline two particular forms of evolutionary mistake that have been pointed to as potential reasons for why we keep drinking? You mentioned one, which is the hijack theory, and the other is the hangover theory. Explain both of those for me, because I think they're important as as context for the conversation.
00:07:27
Speaker
Right. So the the if you open a psych textbook, you're going to probably see the hijack theory. So that is this idea that just for no good reason at all, ethanol, the active ingredient in alcohol, hijacks, makes us feel that hijacks are a reward network. It's like a a mouse pushing a button and getting a little jolt of cocaine, right? We've learned that pushing the button makes us feel good, and so we keep pushing the button. But there's no functional reason why this should be so. It's just a kind of mistake.
00:07:56
Speaker
What are some
Alcohol vs. Evolutionary Intentions
00:07:57
Speaker
analogous examples of the hijack theory that people would be able to point to in in their daily lives? Well, I opened the book with masturbation. It was a lading question. yeah It is a perfect example of hijack, right? We get this evolution has built us in such a way that we get the best reward possible for doing what evolution, genetic evolution, most wants us to do, which is pass on copies of our genes for the next generation. So that's the orgasm. It's the it's the biggest carrot that evolution has.
00:08:32
Speaker
But humans and man and other species have figured out there's other ways to get that reward than reproductive sex. And so we you know we have all these workarounds to get it. That's a classic hijack, right? the the if In evolutionary terms, the adaptive target of the orgasm is reproductive sex.
00:08:52
Speaker
And that's why this reward evolved. We figured out how to flip that switch in lots of other ways and and kind of cheat evolution in that regard. Evolution doesn't know that we're not procreating, that we are on our own in front of a laptop, basically.
00:09:09
Speaker
Exactly. I didn't know about laptops. It didn't know about pornography. It didn't know about birth control, right? So we're doing it also when we engage in what would be reproductive sex, but we're using birth control. But in the case of masturbation,
00:09:25
Speaker
It's an ancient behavior, so it has one of the hallmarks of these kinds of things I'm interested in, but it doesn't have the other hallmark. It's not costly, it's despite what you might have learned if you went to Catholic school. It doesn't make you go blind. and It's actually pretty low-cost behavior. and The basic setup works pretty well. Lots of reproductive sex still keeps happening despite all these workarounds.
00:09:49
Speaker
And, you know, evolution, again, to use intentional language, evolution is not a perfectionist. Evolution just wants to get the job done. And this basic setup orgasm for reproductive sex has gotten the job done, or we wouldn't be around to talk about it. So alcohol, man, there so the standard story is alcohol is like that.
Creativity and Alcohol
00:10:09
Speaker
We have a reward network that evolves for whatever adaptive target, we don't know, maybe having a good social interaction, performing a task successfully, and we get a little serotonin boost from that.
00:10:21
Speaker
we figured out that sticking is some ethanol in our brain will give us that same jolt. That's the hijack story in essence. The problem with it is unlike masturbation, alcohol is really dangerous. It it will make you go blind. Masturbation will not, but but enough alcohol alcohol can make you go blind. and so That's where the hijack theory can't be the whole story because it's a costly behavior that evolution should be very motivated in getting rid of.
00:10:49
Speaker
So the second one is the hangover theory. The hangover theory, the classic example of a hangover is our taste for junk food. So evolution has designed us to experience pleasure when we eat fats and sugars. And for most of our evolutionary history, that was a great system because getting fat and sugar was challenging. And so you know you came across meat, you came across berries, you should eat as many of them as possible because they're rare and important.
00:11:19
Speaker
It only starts to go awry in modern industrial societies where we have basically endless access to you Twinkies and junk food and all kinds of terrible things that harm us physiologically. So this is interesting because it has one of the hallmarks of things I'm interested in. It's costly.
00:11:40
Speaker
Unlike masturbation, our taste from young food is costly, but the it lacks the other hallmark. It's not ancient, and and it's not it's also not ubiquitous. So there's still plenty of places in the world where getting enough calories, getting enough sugar and fat is still a problem.
00:11:55
Speaker
And this is a relatively recent development. so So one way to think of it is evolution just hasn't had time to deal with this hangover. So that's that's the idea, is in a hangover mistake, a behavior was adaptive in our evolutionary past, but it's not now. But that's a relatively recent development. And so some people think this about alcohol. It's not as common as the hijack theory, but some of these scientific theories out there, and I surveyed them all in the book,
00:12:25
Speaker
think that alcohol might have had this kind of function in the past. So one of them the the one that I hear the most is the dirty water hypothesis. So the idea that in a revolutionary past, surface water was often contaminated because we didn't know about you know keeping our feces away from the water that we're drinking.
00:12:43
Speaker
If you take contaminated water and you ferment it into a beer, it purifies it. It makes it safe to drink. And so one theory is this may allow us to hydrate ourselves in environments where water wasn't safe to drink. The problem with things like the dirty water hypothesis is, you know, the other way to make water drinkable when it's contaminated is just boil it. So just
Historical Context of Alcohol Consumption
00:13:07
Speaker
drink tea, drink a healthy herbal tea would do and do the trick.
00:13:11
Speaker
the Chinese kind of blew blew up this theory, didn't they? Yeah, so they've been boiling. They they have kind of have a different theory about why you shouldn't drink raw or kind of unheated water. It has to do with chi in your stomach, Chinese medical ideas, but it has the same effect. Don't drink water that hasn't been boiled.
00:13:31
Speaker
And yet, so they've been doing that forever and yet they still have, they've always had plenty of alcohol. So it can't be in dirty water. Another idea is the drunken monen monkey hypothesis. So the smell of ethanol, ethanol is a very small, light molecule. You can smell it from far away. So the idea is that in the jungle where it's kind of hard to spot food,
00:13:54
Speaker
you could our primate ancestors could smell ethanol and that would lead them to fermenting rotting fruit, which has a lot of sugar, a lot of calories. And so we have this reward network for ethanol because it was a calorie, the sign of a high calorie payoff. So that's another hypothesis. And again, it's ah it's a hangover one, so this was adaptive, but it's not anymore. But none of these none of these stories can actually really account for the functional benefits of alcohol, both at an individual level and a species level. so it really I walk through the various hangover hypotheses and try to explain what none of them can be. They might all play a role, but they can't be the full account.
00:14:42
Speaker
So we've discounted the different strands of evolutionary theory that are not sufficient for why we still continue to drink. I'm going to leave the listeners in a suspense for a moment as to what the actual answer is in your opinion. And I'm going to actually detour ah back.
00:15:03
Speaker
to, I think, a really interesting part of your biography, which is that you said that your background, at least to a large extent, is around theology. The question is is, what was it around drinking that and the way that we think about drinking on a societal level that you saw that was in some respects parallel to the way that we think about religion. So my dissertation and my first academic book were on this this religious concept in early China. So that's my specialty is early early Chinese thought called wu wei, which literally means no doing. I translated as effortless action. So it was this spiritual ideal
00:15:45
Speaker
where you're spontaneous, you you lose a sense of yourself as an agent, you're relaxed, you're unselfconscious. the china you're charismatic, people like you, and you're socially successful. So these these are early Chinese thinkers that I looked at, the Confucians and the Taoists, all have this as an ideal, but they all face this problem I call it the paradox of wu wei, or in my first book for a popular audience, the title of it is trying not to try. It's it's the paradox of how can you try if you know that
00:16:19
Speaker
you're in a situation where being spontaneous would be advantageous. How do you try to be spontaneous? So I know that you know on this I'm on a date and I know i'm goingnna it's going to be more successful if I'm funny and relaxed and charming, but how do you make yourself be funny, relaxed and charming? If you try, you're you you are not. You're going to be forced.
00:16:42
Speaker
I know that very well. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the problem with like dating handbooks and things like that. you know None of them work because the only thing that works is not trying. The only way you get charisma is to not try to get charisma. So the early Chinese thinkers came up with various behavioral strategies to get around this, using your body in a certain way, doing rituals repetitively so that eventually you kind of forget about what it is you're doing and and you get it to away. Or um but basically meditative practices. So sitting in a certain way, breathing in a certain way. They're all they're all variations, I think, on a version of the paradox that we face when we have insomnia.
00:17:29
Speaker
So if you're you know you're you're very tired, you your body wants to sleep, but you have a big event the next day and your mind is racing and you're thinking about it, yeah you need to try to try to turn your mind off, but you you can't. And I talk and try not to try about the cognitive scientific reasons why This is a real paradox. When you're trying to relax, if you're trying to fall asleep, or you're trying to be charismatic, or you're trying to not think about the score in a tennis match so that you can relax and actually hit the ball the right way.
00:18:05
Speaker
The part of your brain that you're activating, ah pre roughly the prefrontal cortex, is the part you're actually trying to shut down. so you're you're It's like if I say to you, don't think of a white bear, you think of a white bear because I've just activated that concept in your brain. That's the core of the paradox.
00:18:25
Speaker
Essentially, one strategy is the Chinese one, which is analogous to counting sheep in a way. So I give you something that's unrelated to do to distract you from the problem. And if that works, you can eventually just relax accidentally because you're focused on counting the sheep and not on falling asleep.
Alcohol's Cultural Significance
00:18:45
Speaker
In one of these texts, though, the Zhuangzi, the Saroy Daoist text, the author uses drunkenness. So being drunk on alcohol as an analogy for the state they wanted to be in. So the story describes this guy who's riding in a cart for a drunk, I guess, getting taken home from a party, and he falls out of the cart and he's not hurt.
00:19:08
Speaker
and And we have this experience, right? If you're drunk and you kind of fall, you you relax. you don't So the story says you know he didn't know he was riding, he doesn't know that he's fallen out. Fear and terror have not been able to enter his breast. So he's because he's relaxed and not thinking about things, he kind of rolls with it. He falls out of the cart, he rolls, he gets up, he's fine. But the story concludes if you can make your spirit whole in this way by means of alcohol.
00:19:36
Speaker
how much more so if you're drunk on heaven. So it wants you to be religiously, spiritually drunk, and and alcohol is just an analogy. But I started to think about that story and think, you know, but alcohol is not bad. It's faster than meditation. It's more reliable than counting xi. And so it's this it's actually this one story in Mijuangzi that made me start to think about alcohol as a solution to what I originally ah thought of as a religious problem. How do you become spontaneous in harmony with the way through effort? It seems paradoxical. Alcohol, I started to think of as a cultural technology that humans have come up with to short-circuit the paradox.
00:20:26
Speaker
If I tell you to try to relax, it won't work because I'm activating the PFC and that's what you're trying to shut down. If I don't say anything about relaxing, I just sit down with you and I give you a beer and we both start drinking beer, the paradox disappears because that substance is now going in and down regulating your prefrontal cortex for you.
00:20:48
Speaker
Is it a gross oversimplification to say that both religion and alcohol are distractions from the difficulties of daily life? Is that the connection there, or am i is that a misinterpretation? No. I would say that these the religious techniques like ritual and meditation and breathing practices, like alcohol,
00:21:12
Speaker
are ways to get around the cognitive paradox involved in trying not to try. Spontaneity is is a goal that can't be pursued directly because if you're trying to do it, you're by definition not doing it. So there are various routes for kind of indirectly getting you into that state. And some of them involve practices you can do, but in this case, actually consuming a substance will help you to help do the job for you.
00:21:42
Speaker
It's a chemical shortcut to spontaneity, if you want to think of it that way. You were saying you are a philosopher. The other reason that goes yeah to the relationship between the two. Yeah. so you know My specialty is really Chinese philosophy and comparative religion, and I've worked on the cognitive science of religion and evolution of religion.
00:22:02
Speaker
And then I've read a book on alcohol and my colleagues are all baffled. And and and I get this question a lot in interviews, like where did why did you start writing about this? But it really grows naturally out of these previous interests. So one of them is my interest in mysteries hiding in plain sight. So why do humans engage in behaviors that are ubiquitous, ancient, and costly?
00:22:29
Speaker
Why do those behaviors continue? And there's an analogy there between religious practices of various kinds and consuming alcohol and other chemical and intoxicants. The second connection is this, the paradox of trying not to try. How do you get around this paradox of the impossibility of directly pursuing spontaneity and that the light bulb that went on for me was saying, oh,
00:22:55
Speaker
This is alcohol as a chemical technology that we use in situations where we want to be spontaneous, but but we're we're aware at some level that we can't consciously force ourselves to be spontaneous.
00:23:09
Speaker
So in the book, you then separate both why this cultural technology was valuable in the origins of civilization and then why it continues to be valuable today. Now I want people to go out and buy the book, so I'm not going to get you too hard to give away all of your secrets before we go on to, I think, some more modern questions around alcohol and society today going beyond the book. But just before we do, give me a couple of little highlights for how alcohol builds civilization or the how it contributed to the origins of civilization. So there's one direct way in which alcohol and our desire to get intoxicated literally led to civilization, and that's the call it in the book, The the Beer Before Bread Hypothesis.
00:23:54
Speaker
So the standard story about how humans move, the the the most important thing that's ever happened in our history is when we made the transition from small hunter-gatherer bands to living in large, settled agricultural communities. That completely changed both human life and the planet. I mean, we now altered the planet because of this. The standard story is agriculture happened first. So we discovered that you know we could cultivate these crops and feed ourselves more effectively. And so these hungry gatherers started to sell down and and grow grain for bread and other nutrition purposes.
00:24:35
Speaker
When we look at the the archeological record, though, what we see, so for instance, as sites like Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. if If you're a yeah ah fan of that ancient apocalypse Netflix series, I think what's his name goes about that particular site? Hancock. I got and but ambushed on the Joe Rogan show, but because I mentioned Göbekli Tepe, and he's a big Hancock fan. He was like, oh no, that was created by aliens or whatever.
00:25:05
Speaker
hu yeah that's Most archaeologists think that's nuts. I wish I had known about that before I brought it up. and in The standard, the mainstream archaeological view is that were these were hunter-gatherers. There was no agriculture in them in this part of the world at the time, but they were coming together and building these monumental sites. I mean if you i don't know if you've seen pictures of it, but there's this huge stone stele carved with animals. They were performing some kind of religious rituals. They were feasting, so we have the the remains of gazelle bones and some kind of feast.
00:25:41
Speaker
and they were drinking something. and they so There are these huge vats of liquid at this site. and we From Gobekli Tepe itself, we don't have direct chemical residue evidence, but we do have from other places in the region that they were making beer. and so roughly Roughly how long ago are we talking?
00:26:03
Speaker
10,000, 12,000 years ago. and we got it to right We have chemical evidence of beer making in present day Israel from 13,000 years ago, so we know people in the region were making it, and possibly also laced with hallucinogens, so possibly beer with an extra kick to it.
00:26:20
Speaker
And so it looks like what was motivating these people to come and gather at that site was intoxication. It was beer. It was a huge beer party. And so yeah this has led archaeologists to start to think, well, maybe the reason people started settling down and doing agriculture wasn't for bread.
00:26:42
Speaker
it was to make more and better beer. And then if you start to look around the world, this pattern is repeated. So the
Discovery and Cultural Integration of Alcohol
00:26:51
Speaker
ah first domesticated crops when you look around the world tend to seem to have been chosen for their psychoactive properties and not for their nutrition properties. So Teosinte is the the an the wild ancestor of corn, of maize.
00:27:10
Speaker
It doesn't look anything like maize. It's ma it's terrible for making bread or tortillas. It doesn't have very big kernels. What it is good for is making beer because it has a starchy stalk that you can ferment.
00:27:25
Speaker
And so it's starting to look like it's the desire to get intoxicated that actually was the impetus for hunter-gatherers to start settling down and getting serious about agriculture. And so in this sense, you know intoxication led to civilization in this very direct, motivational way. So that's one sense. We don't have, obviously, an answer for this, but Obviously, people 10,000, 12,000 years ago do not have a scientific understanding of what is going on. They don't know how the yeast and the hops and the barley and whatever come together. Yeah. Do you think it's just trial and experiment and they drink something and then they feel a particular way? How do you ah do you think this this process actually worked back in the long, long, long ago? Yeah, it worked through trial and error, and this is how cultural evolution works.
00:28:19
Speaker
People randomly try out various things or where accidents happen. They leave whatever, some grain sitting around, some water, and they it bubbles and they're curious and they try it. this is how This is how cultural revolution works. It's in this regard analogous to genetic evolution. So if you think about genetic evolution, there's random mutations.
00:28:43
Speaker
and most of them are bad and get eliminated. But every once in a while, there's one that has an adaptive advantage and that gets preserved. so you can the An analogous thing happens with cultural evolution. People are constantly trying all sorts of stupid stuff and most of it is stupid and doesn't survive or get tried again. But every once in a while, something that seems stupid works pretty well and that gets preserved.
00:29:10
Speaker
the people who eat the poisonous berries die, the people who stay alive see the people eating the poisonous berries and they don't eat them again and then they find the berries that are edible. Yeah, yeah. So people without any kind of scientific knowledge have come up with amazing technologies that we can now understand scientifically how they work. But they were done completely through random trial and error, sometimes multi-stage processes so where they don't understand the causality involved. They just know that it works. So so alcohol fermentation was discovered at the same time.
00:29:46
Speaker
Beer is a little more complicated because it's got several steps.
Alcohol and the Brain: Creativity Catalyst
00:29:50
Speaker
But fruit, one of the things about alcohol, and I think one of the reasons it's, the I call it the king of intoxicants, is it it's relatively easy easy to discover.
00:30:01
Speaker
You know, cannabis, whoever, who's the first one who thought of smoking it, right? Burn this thing and nail smoke, right? But fruit wine, you don't even have to invent. It just exists in the world. You can come across fermenting fruit. It just, fruit starts to spontaneously ferment and you can eat it or drink the pulp and you've got something like wine. So so alcohol as a cultural technology, especially in the form of fruit wine, this is really easy to discover.
00:30:31
Speaker
I interrupted you be there, but you're moving towards a second reason for why that this is so important at the origin point of civilization. So the desire, it seems like the desire to get intoxicated provided the motive to settle down and move from small hunter-gatherer bands to large-scale agricultural societies. It also simultaneously had these functions that helped us to successfully make that transition as a cultural technology. So one of the problems we have as a species is innovation. And this is unique to humans. We're completely dependent on tools and technology to the point that our bodies are dependent on technologies.
00:31:20
Speaker
we we We can't survive on raw food anymore. we actually are Our digestive systems, our intestinal tract can't handle raw meat, for instance, as insulting that we eat. Our jaws have gotten very weak and our teeth aren't very sharp because we've actually physically adapted to eating cooked food.
00:31:41
Speaker
which cooking the food predigested for us. Fire is a technology. So we've actually become biologically dependent on an artificial technology. And this is true just in general. We need tools to hunt. We need tools to prepare our food. We need tools to protect ourselves against other species. And so humans are unique in the animal world and being dependent on creativity because you can't have tools without creativity.
00:32:11
Speaker
And the environment's constantly changing, so you need new tools to deal with new situations. I think probably more relevantly, human groups are always competing with other groups. And if they have a better tool set than you do, you're in trouble. They're going to be able to exploit the environment better or exploit you in a way that is undesirable. And so there's pressure on humans to be creative. The problem with creativity is that it's it involves spontaneity.
00:32:41
Speaker
creative solutions can't be forced. And so in in the psychological literature, they talk about divergent creativity. So this is where you solve a problem that requires insight. So you can't power through A to B to C like a mathematical proof. You have to relax and see the solution. It has to come to you in this spontaneous way.
00:33:08
Speaker
That's how creative, really advancing creative insights happen. how do you force that? So we've got an adaptive problem. you know The fish have disappeared. We now have to figure out how to start where to get food in the environment. We need a new solution. Sitting down and drinking coffee, yeah drinking a stimulant is not going to help us with that because cognitive scientifically, what's happening in an insight solution and is we're relaxing the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex is a part of our brain that's in charge of effortful, conscious action. It's cognitive control. I want that cookie, but and I'm on a diet, so I stop myself. That's PFC.
00:33:59
Speaker
I'm bored working on my taxes, but I have to get them done. So I force myself to continue going through the spreadsheet. That's the PFC. Anything effortful and kind of controlled is is is the PFC. And it's crucial. you know Any kind of successful adult behavior requires us to you know override our impulses and force ourselves to do things.
00:34:23
Speaker
The PFC gets in the way though of creative solutions. And actually when it's active, it's preventing our brain from relaxing and making connections.
00:34:34
Speaker
And so
Alcohol vs. Psychedelics in Creativity
00:34:35
Speaker
one of my arguments is that this is where alcohol comes in because one of the main physiological effects of alcohol is to down-regulate, to turn down the PFC. And by doing so, it's allowing other parts of our brain to communicate with each other that don't normally get a chance to.
00:34:54
Speaker
So there's this, you know again, throughout history all over the world, you see it cultures associating alcohol and other chemical and intoxicants with artists or poets or shamans, creative types.
00:35:10
Speaker
And what I lay out in the book is the very good scientific reasons for that. Alcohol goes in, turns down your PFC, and allows you to start making creative connections in a way that has been crucial for human beings. So and so it helped me guess the creative species.
00:35:29
Speaker
You think about the Beatles creating some of the greatest music known to man on say LSD, which I must admit, I've never had LSD, but I understand. I don't think it gives you a ah hangover the day after. And I imagine you need to take less of it than drinking seven or eight glasses of wine or whatever. Maybe the case seems like a more efficient way to be creative. Why would you go to alcohol as opposed to say LSD if you are the Beatles or Beatles want to be?
00:35:57
Speaker
Yeah. So that's a really good question. Michael, yeah I don't know if you know Michael Pollan's book, had a change of mind. I think it is his most recent book. He's looking primarily at psychedelics like LSD or so. as What people ah historically would have had access to are typically mushroom based hallucinogens that have very very similar effect. So hallucinogens are doing something similar to alcohol. They're down regulating your PSC, allowing crosstalk in your brain.
00:36:26
Speaker
but it's on steroids. They're completely removing you from reality. And Paulin has a really great analogy where he he analogizes The kind of random creativity that psychedelics allow with genetic mutagens. So if you want, you know, genetic evolution to kind of kick into high gear, a bunch of ultraviolet lights create, you know, increase the mutation rate and you'll get more variation.
00:36:57
Speaker
Most of that variation, again, will be harmful or deleterious to the the organism carrying it, but every once in a while you might get something good. He suggests that psychedelics are like that. Basically scramble the brain, come up with a bunch of crazy stuff you wouldn't otherwise. Most of it's going to be garbage, but every once in a while there might be a really great new insight. And that's true, but because psychedelics remove you from reality so much,
00:37:24
Speaker
One way to think of it is it's a very powerful mutagen. And 99, that means that 99% of what you're coming up with is garbage. And so the book I talk about, I have experimented with LSD. And and in the book I talk about this experience I had where I, on a trip, I would take notes in this notebook. And I discovered during a trip that truth is the color blue.
00:37:53
Speaker
And I wrote 20 pages in my notebook with diagrams and equations, proving that truth is colored blue. And I was convinced that I was a grad student at the time, and I was convinced that once I showed this to my advisor,
00:38:09
Speaker
They would just make me a full professor. I wouldn't even have to do the whole PhD thing. They'd just yeah have a job for life. This would make me famous. And then of course the next morning I looked at the notebook and I was like, yeah, I don't think I'll be publishing that. in So there's a lot that the garbage rate is much higher with psychedelics. so they But they have a role. And that's why, again, I talk in the book about the role that psychedelics also have played for human beings.
00:38:35
Speaker
But they tend to be, because they're so powerful, they tend to only be used on special occasions or or by a special class of people.
Changing Attitudes Towards Alcohol
00:38:46
Speaker
So in some societies, there is a class of people, shamans, who part of their job is to take psychedelics and and scramble the reins in this way. But that's because that's their full-time job.
00:38:56
Speaker
If you and I are working, where we're trying to grow crops and we're trying to figure out how to do that better. It's going to be much more effective for us to sit down after work with a couple beers because what the alcohol is going to do is give us some of that relaxation and some of that creativity.
00:39:15
Speaker
but also keep us grounded in reality. So the percentage of stuff that we come up with when we're drinking beer that actually is useful is going to be much higher than what we come up with with psychedelics. So they're just two different technologies that have ah varying degrees of strength. And the really powerful version of this technology is is not useful as a daily practice. It's just it's just helpful.
00:39:44
Speaker
We've scratched the surface of the benefits of alcohol as a cultural technology. I will highly recommend that people buy your book to understand that further. But I don't, as I said, I don't want to give all of that away. So let's drag you beyond some of the things I think you talked about in the book to some of the questions around alcohol today that you may have been thinking about. And the first, which I think I mentioned earlier briefly was around the relationship between alcohol and young people.
00:40:06
Speaker
It's long been a form of rebellion for people under the age of 18 or in the US under the age of 21 to drink, seen as something which is fun and and unusually, and this is a very recent social phenomenon to Gen Z genze thing.
00:40:23
Speaker
peers that less and less young people are drinking and particularly less and less young people are binge drinking compared to say your generation and even compared to my my my generation in the last 15 years. Why do you think that is the case? And do you think that is a good or a bad thing? oh It's partly the case because we have a much better sense of the dangers of alcohol physiologically. So as I mentioned earlier,
00:40:50
Speaker
Even 10 years ago, you could plausibly think that a drink or two a day was good for your digestion, lowered cholesterol, wasn't really a problem. yeah And it's really very recently that we've discovered that it probably is the case that the the only completely safe, physiologically safe level of consumption is zero when it comes to alcohol.
00:41:13
Speaker
So young young generations have heard that, and they haven't developed the drinking practices that my generation had. So they can say, okay, well, let's just not start doing that behavior. I think part of it's just fashion. So alcohol is not cool. It's what your kind of boring uncle does. Cannabis is cool. So I think part of it is the legalization and increased availability of cannabis, which is viewed as kind of a hipper type of intoxicant.
00:41:43
Speaker
And I think part of it is this, what I call this kind of neo-puritan self-maximalization trend that is becoming more prominent, and I see among Gen Z kids.
00:41:59
Speaker
where you're you're kind of virtue signaling by being healthy. you know I don't engage, I don't put these poisons in my body and I'm gonna post something on TikTok about me turning down alcohol or me doing Hatha Yoga 6 a.m. There's a weird, and it's particularly evident in Anglo cultures because it actually has its roots in Puritanism.
00:42:28
Speaker
So you know for the Puritans, some people were saved. Some people were beloved of God, but you didn't necessarily know who they were. But there was evidence of God's favor if you were successful and hardworking and you made a lot of money. I think a version of secular version of that is going on where people signal that they are special because they don't drink, because they exercise all the time, because they eat probiotic things and they don't eat GMO products. and So it's part of this weird kind of almost asceticism that is is trendy and and has deep roots. It's not um unknown in previous generations, but it's become much stronger now. like I think part of it is is just this this trend.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah. A conversation around how you demonstrate status has come up on this show several times with several different guests. And I find it fascinating that if you're a corporate executive in the eighties, the way you demonstrated status was.
00:43:35
Speaker
the Ferrari and the trophy wife and the big house. And now you use the term virtue signaling the way that you may demonstrate status today is through a series of high status beliefs. And perhaps the Gen Z or Gen Z equivalent here is a high status belief now potentially is abstaining or limiting your consumption of alcohol. Yeah, I think that's absolutely part of what's going on.
00:44:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's very interesting. Another question that i i was on my mind as I was reading the book was, as because one of the brilliant things is how you look at so many different cultures. and One of the things you say is that alcohol consumption is not ubiquitous, but near ubiquitous across human history and across almost all cultures.
00:44:19
Speaker
And there's a funny thing, you know, the Irish will say proudly that they're the biggest drinkers. Aussies will say that, you know, that they love a beer more than anyone else. So I imagine most countries potentially would do that. The question would be, how do you think that the way that different cultures reflect on their use of alcohol, what does that say about them?
00:44:40
Speaker
One of the things I talk about in the book is the distinction between what what anthropologists refer to as northern and southern drinking cultures, and they're talking about Europe here. Northern cultures are Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the States, the UK. You drink to get drunk. You drink a lot of spirits.
00:45:02
Speaker
You drink often typically in unisex groups. So a bunch of guys go out by themselves, just guys. They're drinking to get drunk. The goal is to get drunk. You brag about how drunk you are. Typically, you're not doing it with food. This is one way to consume alcohol. And cultures who do that tend to be the ones that brag about drinking, that they can drink more than the Aussies can drink more than the Kiwis or whatever.
00:45:32
Speaker
Southern drinking cultures integrate their consumption of alcohol and everyday life in a way where there's not so much a division between drinking and not drinking. So and my my experience is with Italy, my ex-wife is half Italian. I spent a lot of time in Italy. In Italy, you have wine. So they're drinking primarily wine and beer. They don't drink a lot of distilled spirits.
00:45:55
Speaker
It's only at the meal table, so you only drink with food. It's a mixed group, so it's men and women, it's the grandparents, it's the kids. The kids get a little bit of wine watered down with their food to show that this is you just something you do. Drinking to the point of getting drunk is actually shameful. it's You'd be ashamed to be visibly drunk in Italy.
00:46:21
Speaker
And so you don't brag about your drink. So you don't see, you don't tend to see Italians going around bragging about how they can out drink. They could drink an Aussie under the table. They just don't use that language because they don't have that kind of drinking culture.
00:46:35
Speaker
And there's pretty good evidence that the Northern drinking culture is much more dangerous than the Southern ah culture. It leads to binge drinking. It leads to kind of just very toxic attitudes about alcohol. So one of the pragmatic solutions I offer in the book is to try to move you know you yourself as a person and maybe try to nudge your culture into more of a Southern attitude toward drinking.
00:47:03
Speaker
Yeah, I
Regulation and Cultural Differences
00:47:04
Speaker
certainly agree with that. One other potential solution that a lot of people would bring up would be regulation. I think it is fair to say that across a whole range of areas, Western countries are regulating more than they would have.
00:47:18
Speaker
100 years ago, 50 years ago, even 20 years ago, we are prioritising safety to a greater degree than maybe we once did over say individual freedoms. Do you think, and this is a broad question when we're talking across countries and regions, of course, but do you think more regulation when it comes to alcohol is necessarily the answer to solve some of the problems associated with it?
00:47:42
Speaker
in some respects, maybe. So one one thing I point out in the book is that alcohol has recently, very recently, become exponentially more dangerous than it ever has been. And that's the invention of distillation. so And this was a surprise to me when I was started researching the book. I kind of assumed we always had jinns and vodkas and distilled spirits, but that's not the case at all. So for almost all of our evolutionary history,
00:48:09
Speaker
We've been drinking pretty low ABV beers, primarily, and maybe slightly stronger fruit wines. And those come with a safety... to Naturally distilled beverages have a safety feature, which is that they can only get to a certain ABV before the yeast shut themselves down. If you're drinking a 2% lager, essentially, you can drink that all day long and never get dangerously drunk.
00:48:36
Speaker
you'll You'll hover it around the sweet spot. I talk about the blood alcohol content about 0.08. There's about two beers in maybe where you're maximally creative, you're maximally social, you're kind of open to things, but you're not dangerously drunk. It's very easy to be at that sweet spot when you're drinking beers and wines.
00:48:55
Speaker
if you start drinking 90-something ABV vakas, doing shots of that, it's crazily dangerous. like You're completely overwhelming your body with ethanol. And this is a really new danger. And so I do think regulation has a role. And and this is the case in Europe. The drinking age is higher for distilled spirits than distilled spirits aren't available everywhere in the way beer and wine is. So, I do think favoring beer and wine in a regulatory way is important. It helps deal with this new danger that alcohol presents. But I think in general, part of my purpose in writing this book was I think our public discourse around alcohol isn't impoverished.
00:49:40
Speaker
And it's impoverished because it's it takes place completely in a medicalized risk reduction framework. So you should not drink alcohol because it is physiologically bad for you. That's it. That's the end of the story from a public health perspective. The distorted thing is that we don't usually think about other types of behaviors that way. So driving a car from a medical perspective is a bad thing. Physiologically dangerous to get into a motorized moving vehicle as opposed to staying home, let's say. But no doctor says you should never drive and you should just stay in your house because it's safer because we want to do things in the world but and cars are useful. So in most areas of our lives, we use a cost benefit analysis. So if the behavior is dangerous, we say, okay, well, let's think about the benefits and decide how much or if we want to do it.
00:50:36
Speaker
With alcohol, we only talk about the costs, and we only talk about kind of maximizing our lifespan. And
Conclusion and Responsible Drinking
00:50:44
Speaker
it's just it's distorted, first of all, in the sense that you know we're missing the benefits. So you know we're not talking about what we're losing in terms of increased creativity, stress reduction, and just, frankly, pleasure. So at the end of the book, I say, you know what? Pleasure should matter too.
00:51:03
Speaker
you know I make these evolutionary arguments for the functions of alcohol, but also at the end of the day, it's just it tastes really good like good. The idea of life without you know French Chardonnay would be really... ah and and And then also you know alcohol is bad for you, but so is loneliness.
00:51:25
Speaker
Yeah, you mentioned COVID and that was another very good example of where I would argue we didn't do a holistic cost-benefit analysis of a lot of the policy measures. It's not something that politicians are good at, both with it when it comes to alcohol and more generally, but that is a much bigger conversation. Ted, my final question. What's your favourite drink?
00:51:42
Speaker
Yeah, I said a lot. And I i have a disappointing answer. i just It depends on what I'm doing. yeah So with food, I like... And then what what wine do you like? Well, it depends on what I'm eating. My my cocktail isn't a granny. So that maybe that's a simple answer. i When I do want a cocktail, I like a bitter, strong cocktail. And I'm kind of a single walk guy comes to distill liquors.
00:52:07
Speaker
Very good taste. Ted, this was a wonderful book and a really important book. Thank you very much for writing it and thank you for coming on the show today. and Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of Far at Will. If you enjoyed the show, why not consider a subscription to The Spectator Australia? The magazine is home to wonderful writing, and insightful analysis, and unrivaled books and arts reviews.
00:52:32
Speaker
A subscription gets you all of the content from the British edition of the magazine, as well as the best Australian political commentary. Subscribe today for just $2 a week for a year. No, I'm not joking. $2 a week for an entire year. A link is in the show notes.