RECORDED ON APRIL 7th 2021.
Dr. Edward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He’s the Director of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), the Director of the Database of Religious History (DRH), and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC). His most recent book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.
In this episode, we focus on Drunk. We first talk about alcohol consumption during our evolutionary history. We discuss the particular case of East Asians, and their difficulty in metabolically processing alcohol. We compare alcohol to other intoxicants, and talk about its social benefits, considering that humans are communal, creative and cultural. We mention the role it might have played in the development of the arts, and also how it is used in religious rituals.
We discuss the negative effects of alcohol, and how people moderate its use. We talk about how experience pleasure for pleasure’s sake is also a good thing, and how Nietzsche praised Dionysian experiences. We also talk about prejudices against alcohol, and go through some of the evolutionary mismatches we face in our modern industrialized societies, with focus on the presence of distilled liquors and drinking in isolation. Finally, we discuss possible alternatives to alcohol, and how we should expose young people to alcohol.
