Olivia: Alright, Jackson, I'm going to say something that sounds completely wrong. What if the single biggest catalyst for human civilization wasn't the wheel, or writing, or even agriculture... but our desire to get drunk? That beer might actually have come before bread. Jackson: That sounds like the best excuse I've ever heard for a happy hour. Come on, Olivia. You're telling me that stumbling around, slurring our words, and making bad decisions is what led to us building pyramids and writing poetry? I'm going to need some serious convincing on that one. Olivia: I know, it feels totally backwards. But that's the provocative argument at the heart of the book we're diving into today: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. Jackson: Okay, Drunk. The title is definitely direct. Who is this author who's brave enough to make such a claim? Olivia: That's what makes it so fascinating. Slingerland isn't just a historian. He's a Professor of Philosophy and a cognitive scientist. He’s looking at this question from this really unique, interdisciplinary angle. He’s not just asking what happened, but why our brains are wired to seek this state, and what evolutionary advantage it could possibly have offered. Jackson: A philosopher defending drinking. I love it. Okay, so where does he even start to build such a wild case? Because my first thought is that getting drunk is clearly an evolutionary disadvantage. Olivia: That’s the perfect place to start. He calls it the evolutionary puzzle. And to understand it, we have to go back to one of the oldest stories ever written.

Jackson: An old story? I'm intrigued. Where are we headed? Olivia: We're going to ancient Sumeria, around 2000 BCE, to the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the story, there’s a character named Enkidu. He's a "wild man," living in nature with the animals. He's completely uncivilized. The king, Gilgamesh, wants to tame him. Jackson: And let me guess, he doesn't send a teacher or a diplomat. Olivia: Not even close. He sends a temple prostitute. She finds Enkidu at a watering hole and offers him two things that are completely foreign to him: bread and beer. He's hesitant, but she encourages him. The text says he drinks seven jugs of beer, his heart expands, and he starts singing with joy. Jackson: Seven jugs! Enkidu was not messing around. Olivia: Not at all. And after a week of this—plus some quality time with the prostitute—Enkidu is transformed. He's no longer a wild beast. The story says he has become "human" and is now ready to enter the city and join civilization. Jackson: Whoa. So one of our oldest literary works literally suggests that the path to becoming a civilized human involves getting hammered? That's a pretty bold opening argument. Olivia: It is. And Slingerland uses it to frame the central puzzle. From a modern scientific perspective, our desire for things like junk food or even masturbation makes a certain kind of sense. He calls them "hangovers" or "hijacks." A craving for sugar was great when calories were scarce, it's just a "hangover" in a world of 7-Elevens. It's a system being gamed. Jackson: Right, our brain's reward system is being tricked into giving us a dopamine hit for something that isn't actually helping us survive or reproduce in the modern world. Olivia: Exactly. But alcohol is different. It's not just a harmless hijack. It's a poison. It actively impairs the most advanced part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. The PFC is our brain's CEO—it handles logic, long-term planning, and self-control. It’s the very thing that makes us successful as a species. So why on earth would we have a deep-seated, cross-cultural, ancient desire for a substance that deliberately shuts down our own superpower? Jackson: That is a much better question. It's not just getting a reward for nothing; it's like we're paying to have our best asset temporarily taken offline. The standard "brain hijack" theory feels a little thin if that's the case. Olivia: It feels very thin. And that's the mystery Slingerland sets out to solve. If intoxication was just a simple evolutionary mistake, you'd expect cultures that prohibit it to have outcompeted and crushed the drunken ones over millennia. But that's not what happened. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Jackson: So the puzzle isn't just why do we drink, but why have drinking societies thrived throughout history? Olivia: Precisely. The evidence suggests that getting drunk must have been doing something profoundly useful for us. It wasn't a bug; it was a feature. And that's where Slingerland flips the entire script. He argues we're not hijacking our brains for nothing; we're doing it to solve a very specific set of human problems.

Jackson: Okay, I'm ready for the big reveal. If it's not a bug, but a feature, what is this supposed 'feature' doing for us? What problems does getting drunk solve? Olivia: It solves the problem of being a stressed-out, self-conscious, and overly logical adult. Slingerland frames this as a battle between two Greek gods: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represents order, logic, and control—that's our prefrontal cortex, our inner CEO, always on task. Jackson: The part of my brain that makes spreadsheets and feels guilty about not going to the gym. Got it. Olivia: Exactly. But Dionysus represents chaos, emotion, ecstasy, and creative abandon. Slingerland's argument is that to be truly successful, humans need to be able to switch off Apollo and let Dionysus take the wheel sometimes. We need to get out of our own heads. And alcohol is the most effective cultural technology we ever invented for doing that. Jackson: So it's like alcohol is a temporary 'off switch' for our inner critic? For the overthinking part of our brain? Olivia: That's a perfect way to put it. Think about creativity. It doesn't come from linear, logical thought. It comes from making weird, unexpected connections. There's a famous experiment with something called a "blicket detector." It's a box that lights up when you put certain objects on it. Jackson: A blicket detector. Sounds scientific. Olivia: Researchers asked adults and four-year-olds to figure out the rule. In the simple cases, adults were fine. But in a complex case, where it only lit up with a combination of objects, the adults were stumped. They kept trying one thing at a time, logically. But the four-year-olds? They just started messing around, throwing random combinations on the box. And about 90 percent of them figured it out, compared to only 30 percent of the adults. Jackson: Wow. Because their brains aren't as rigid. Their 'Apollo' isn't fully in charge yet. Olivia: Exactly! Their PFC is less developed, so they think more flexibly, more creatively, more... drunkenly. Slingerland argues that when we drink, we are chemically inducing a state of mind that mimics the creative, open, and less-inhibited thinking of a child. We're temporarily silencing our inner CEO to let the creative chaos of the mailroom take over. Jackson: Okay, I see it now! We get drunk to temporarily get our 'kid brain' back—the one that's better at creative leaps. But what about the social part? How does this build civilizations? Olivia: This is where we get to the "beer before bread" idea. For that, we have to go to a real place: Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey. It's an archaeological site that's about 12,000 years old, and it completely upended our understanding of history. Jackson: What did they find there? Olivia: They found massive, intricately carved stone pillars, weighing up to 20 metric tons each. It was a huge, complex temple. The shocking part is that it was built by hunter-gatherers. These were people who hadn't invented agriculture, pottery, or even permanent settlements yet. Jackson: Hold on. How did nomadic people organize the labor to build something that massive? That would take hundreds of people working together for a long time. What was motivating them? Olivia: That was the million-dollar question. And the archaeologists found the answer. Alongside the animal bones from massive feasts, they found large stone vats with the chemical residue of calcium oxalate, a byproduct of brewing grain. Jackson: No way. Beer. Olivia: Beer. Lots and lots of beer. The theory is that the promise of these huge, alcohol-fueled ritual feasts was the incentive that brought these scattered tribes together. Alcohol was the social lubricant that allowed these fiercely independent people to cooperate, to trust each other, and to engage in a massive, creative, collective project. They weren't farming to make bread; they were gathering wild grains to make beer. The desire for intoxication, for that Dionysian release, may have been the very thing that kickstarted large-scale society. Jackson: That is mind-blowing. So the hook was real. Beer literally came before bread. It wasn't a byproduct of agriculture; it might have been the cause of it. This wasn't just for fun, it was for work... for building society. Olivia: It was the chemical tool that helped us scale up from small family bands to the beginnings of civilization. It helped us be more creative, more trusting, and more collaborative.

Jackson: This all sounds incredible, Olivia. It's a powerful and optimistic case. But we can't ignore the elephant in the room. I know from the reviews that some critics felt the book was a bit too rosy in its portrayal. What about the dark side? What about addiction, violence, drunk driving, all the terrible things that come with alcohol? Olivia: You're right, and Slingerland addresses this head-on. He calls it "The Dark Side of Dionysus." He's not a prohibitionist, but he's also not naive. He argues that the catastrophic problems we associate with alcohol today are not inherent to the substance itself, but are massively amplified by two modern inventions: distillation and isolation. Jackson: Distillation and isolation. Break that down. Olivia: For thousands of years, humans drank naturally fermented beverages—beer, wine, mead. These are relatively low in alcohol content, and you have to drink a lot of liquid to get drunk. But then, around the 12th century, distillation technology arrives in Europe. Suddenly, you have spirits—gin, vodka, whiskey. These are incredibly potent and can be consumed quickly. Jackson: It's the difference between sipping a beer over an hour and doing three shots of tequila in a minute. Olivia: Exactly. The potency skyrockets. And he gives a terrifying historical example: the "Gin Craze" in 18th-century London. When cheap, distilled gin flooded the city, it was a public health disaster. The city was awash in alcoholism, crime, and death because society had no cultural norms, no rituals, to handle this new, super-potent form of the drug. Jackson: And what about isolation? Olivia: That's the second, and maybe more important, factor. For most of human history, drinking was a communal, public, and ritualized act. You drank at feasts, in ceremonies, with your community. There were social guardrails. If you got too out of line, people would stop you. But today? We can buy a bottle of vodka and drink it alone in our apartment. That removes all the social controls that made drinking a relatively safe, pro-social activity for our ancestors. Jackson: So it's the combination of a much more powerful drug with the removal of the social safety net. That makes a lot of sense. It explains why the Camba people in the book, who drank potent stove fuel until they passed out, had such a destructive relationship with it. They were isolated. Olivia: Precisely. Their drinking wasn't fostering connection; it was a symptom of its absence. The problem isn't Dionysus himself, but what happens when he's let loose in a world he wasn't designed for. Jackson: So what's the solution? We can't un-invent gin or force everyone to drink in groups. How do we get the benefits Slingerland talks about without the modern catastrophe? Olivia: That's the final, and I think most useful, part of the book. It’s about being smarter and more intentional about our relationship with alcohol.

Jackson: So, if the goal is to get the creative, social benefits while avoiding the 'dark side of Dionysus,' what's the big takeaway? What should we actually do? Olivia: The book's final message isn't 'go get drunk.' It's that we need to be more conscious about how and why we drink. We need to reclaim the social and ritualistic aspects that our ancestors understood intuitively. It’s all about context. Slingerland argues we should try to steer our drinking back towards its original, evolutionarily-approved purpose. Jackson: Which is connection and creativity, not just numbing out. Olivia: Exactly. It’s about choosing the social pint with friends over the solitary bottle of vodka. It’s about savoring a glass of wine with a meal, which is a classic social ritual, rather than binge-drinking to escape. He's not making a moral judgment; he’s making a practical, evolutionary one. We need to use this powerful tool in the way it was meant to be used. Jackson: It's funny, during the pandemic, when lockdowns happened, what was one of the few things almost universally deemed an 'essential service'? Liquor stores. It shows how deeply ingrained this is, but also highlights the danger of that isolated consumption Slingerland warns about. Olivia: That's a perfect modern example. We recognize our need for it, but the context has become dangerous. The book is a call to restore that healthy context. It's about embracing Dionysus, but with the wisdom and reverence he deserves, not with the recklessness of the modern world. Jackson: It really makes you think, doesn't it? When we reach for a drink, are we seeking connection or just escape? The answer might say a lot about our relationship with Dionysus. Olivia: A question worth asking. Jackson: A fantastic and thought-provoking read. Thanks, Olivia. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.