Response to Wesley J. Wildman's Commentary on Edward Slingerland's Drunk by the Author

I want to begin by thanking Prof. Wildman for his incredibly generous and thoughtful review of Drunk. Although pitched as a popular-market trade book, I intended Drunk to also advance academic discussions concerning the role of intoxicants in human sociality, the origins of large-scale cooperation, and the link between intoxicants and ritual and religion. I am delighted to have such an important figure in our field engage with my arguments so carefully and in such detail. Wildman's first suggestion that I should characterize my theory as subsuming, rather than replacing or refuting, previous evolutionary mistake theories is one that I enthusiastically embrace. I should have consulted him earlier in the writing process! Many common human behaviors are overdetermined, and there is no reason to think any explanation for the preservation of our taste for alcohol (to focus, as my book does, on the king of intoxicants) should be exclusive. The idea that ethanol hijacks pleasure centers in the brain that were originally selected for other adaptive reasons is hard to deny: this pleasure has to be what got our engagement with alcohol off the ground in the first place and is probably a sufficient explanation for the appeal of alcohol to nonhuman animals. It is, however, simply not sufficient to explain the preservation of the drive to drink in our own genetic and cultural repertoires, given the costs. Similarly, it is undeniable that the brewing of beer, for instance, can have the function of purifying otherwise contaminated water (the “dirty water” hypothesis) or adding crucial micronutrients to what might be an otherwise dangerously monotonous diet (the “biological ennoblement” hypothesis). The fact that these functions can be performed in other, less costly ways—foe example, boiling water or fermenting grains into porridge—suggests that neither can be a sufficient explanation for our continued drive to produce and consume alcohol. Both, however, can play some role. I love Wildman's metaphor of adjusting explanatory weights and gratefully adopt it here. I would still maintain that the social functional roles I assign to alcohol bear the majority of the explanatory burden, given alcohol's high costs, antiquity, and ubiquity. I would, though, also grant a heavy weight to reward circuit hijacking, responsible for getting the whole process off the ground and serving as a proximate causal motivator, as well as minor weights to the functions hypothesized by the dirty water and biological ennoblement hypotheses. The drunken monkey hypothesis—the idea that the scent of ethanol led our ancestors to calorie-rich overripe fruit—I will leave to primate experts for final adjudication. The connection between chemical intoxication and religion, raised in Wildman's second point, is one that I wish I'd explored in more detail in the book. I am completely willing to grant him the point that there are multiple cultural technologies that human groups have employed to get large-scale cooperation off the ground. As Wildman notes—and my previous research with colleagues such as Ara Norenzayan, Joseph Henrich, and Dimitris Xygalatas has explored in some detail—these include such religious techniques as costly or painful ritual displays, belief in watchful and punishing deities and synchronous group activities. It is likely that some combination of these might be enough to ensure large-scale cooperation even in the absence of chemical intoxicants, so I accept Wildman's critique of my claim that intoxicants are necessary for civilization. Intoxicants are certainly really convenient and useful, though. In this context, I'd like to expand on one minor theme in Drunk, which is that the human use of chemical intoxicants has been a glaring blind spot in the academic study of religion. Theoretical pioneers such as Émile Durkheim or Roy Rappaport expend hundreds of pages extolling the social functional virtues of synchrony, pain, music, dance, trance, crying out loud, symbolic indexing, sensory loading, or strangeness while making only occasional, marginal reference to the drugs that historically fueled much of this behavior (e.g., Durkheim 1915/1965, 428; Rappaport 1999, 202). Major figures such as Mircea Eliade have gone as far as to dismiss drug-assisted mystical experiences as a later “vulgar substitute” or “imitation” of true shamanistic ecstasy (Eliade 1964, 401). From a historical, anthropological, or scientific perspective, this is a completely unsubstantiated claim and can only be understood as the expression of a Puritanical prejudice so deeply embraced as to be invisible to the bearer. Nonetheless, the modern cognitive science of religion and religious ritual has uncritically inherited this prejudice: of the now dozens of empirical studies of the role of ritual in bonding individuals and enhancing cooperation, for instance, not a single one considers the role of chemical intoxicants. We cannot progress in either traditional religious studies or the cognitive science of religion unless we move past our neo-Puritan queasiness about the ancient, ubiquitous, and enthusiastic incorporation of chemical intoxicants into human religious life. As Wildman rightly observes, I am guilty in Drunk of overstating its role, but this might perhaps be excused as an exaggeration in the service of correcting for a previous bias. The topic of Puritans leads us to Wildman's third and fourth points: the role of Axial religions in suppressing ecstatic religion and herding individuals into tamer, doctrinal forms of religiosity. One way to understand the neglect of chemical intoxication in our field is precisely as a hangover of this triumph of Apollonian reason over Dionysian ecstasy, which is why scholars such as Barbara Ehrenreich have had to struggle to find and celebrate the remaining strains of ecstatic practice in modern Western societies (Ehrenreich 2007). I completely agree with Wildman's suggestion that Axial forms of social control are very much reliant on the human prefrontal cortex (PFC), executive function, and delayed gratification. When it comes to the chemicals that we are allowed to put into our bodies, Axial authorities, therefore, tend to favor drugs that strengthen the PFC and cognitive control, like caffeine, while disparaging and attempting to marginalize PFC-suppressing, prosocial emotion-enhancing intoxicants such as alcohol. Wildman suggests that, as the supernatural supports that undergird Axial religions are weakened or completely kicked away, one result may be the resurgence of ecstatic “wild religions” in the form of modern, syncretic forms of shamanism, paganism, or modified forms of traditional Eastern or Western mysticism. These are all much friendlier to chemical intoxicants than mainline Axial religions. Does this imply a public, shared reaffirmation of the value of getting drunk, high, or seriously cognitively altered? The fact that otherwise relatively staid suburban dwellers are now showing an openness to guided psychedelic journeys, MDMA couples counseling, and of course, various forms of now-legal cannabis experiences seems to signal a qualitative shift. Alcohol is actually losing in popularity among some younger generations, perhaps simply not only from being associated with uncool parents, but also likely because of increased knowledge of the serious health dangers of alcohol consumption. Prediction is a tricky business, but I will nonetheless venture a few. First, alcohol is not going anywhere. I was recently on a flight with my 16-year-old daughter on a model of airplane so old it still featured ashtrays in the armrests. Playing with one of them, my daughter speculated as to its possible function: a repository for used gum, perhaps? When I explained that it was an ashtray and that, in her father's day, people were able to smoke on airplanes, she was as horried and amazed as if I'd just casually mentioned that commercial airline flights in the 1970s typically began with passengers handling poisonous snakes or doing hits of nitrous oxide from the drop-down air masks. This is how thoroughly views of tobacco use have changed in the course of a single generation. Despite attempts by the WHO and the medical community to portray alcohol as the evil twin to tobacco and vulnerable to the same strategy of gradual elimination through legislation, taxation, and social shaming, I predict that we will still be drinking on airplanes in the year 2040, long after ashtrays have disappeared completely from our armrests. Unlike tobacco (at least in its modern form, unmixed with psychedelics), alcohol has crucial individual and social functions that will render it immune to Axial attempts to outlaw it and social pressures to eschew it as taboo. Second, alcohol will not be supplanted as the king of intoxicants, the social drug of choice. This is despite the legalization of cannabis or, perhaps in the near future, certain psychedelics. To be sure, alcohol (ethanol) is an imperfect drug: unlike cannabis or psilocybin, for instance, it is highly physically addictive and physiologically harmful. It does, however, have some unique advantages. It is easy to dose and has predictable effects across individuals—unlike cannabis, whatever the strain. It produces mild euphoria and only a minor disassociation from reality—unlike psychedelics, at least in their traditional form. Alcohol is easy to make and has short-term cognitive effects because our primate lineage has dedicated enzymes designed to break it down and eliminate it from our bodies as quickly as possible. Finally, as I note below, it is delicious and pairs well with food. In Drunk, I do consider the possibility that novel drugs, such as synthetic, microdosable forms of psychedelics, could conceivably come to fill some of the roles that alcohol traditionally has, with none of the physiological drawbacks. My money is still on alcohol, though, for a couple reasons. We have been joking, flirting, courting, worshipping, brainstorming, bonding, feasting, and partying with alcohol for tens of thousands of years. We know how it works, what it is good for, how much to take, and what we are going to feel like the next day with considerable accuracy. Microdosable psychedelics are completely new, and it is going to take a long period of cultural R&D before they can even begin to supplant alcohol as a drug of choice. Similarly, alcohol is not just about the ethanol. We should not lose sight of the fact that beer, wine, and spirits taste good, the process of consuming them is itself pleasurable, and they ideally enhance our enjoyment of that other great cultural technology for group bonding: communal meals. Various hyperlocal forms of wine and beer have coevolved with regional cuisines for thousands of years. I confidently predict that, even in my grandchildren's generation, fine meals in Italy, France, or California will be paired with traditional wines and beers, even if climate change means that their sole almondine will be paired with a Chardonnay made in Devon, England rather than Burgundy. I would be shocked if, instead, my grandchildren popped a psilocybin tablet as an aperitif or accompanied the cheese course with a cannabis smoothie. In fact, I would consider explicitly forbidding this in my will if I did not dismiss it as an impossibility. The deep, ancient friendship that Homo sapiens has cultivated with ethanol for the last many millennia should endure for at least a good portion of the next one. This makes the task of understanding its costs and benefits—of answering the question of when and where it is useful, in what form, and in what quantity—absolutely crucial. My argument in Drunk is that, in this regard, we have too long been flying blind, from a historical, anthropological, and scientific perspective. I hope that this is now beginning to change, and I thank Prof. Wildman for helping me to formulate my thoughts on the topic with much greater clarity and accuracy.

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