Podcast: Alcohol, diplomacy & society, from Edward Slingerland's perspective

TRANSCRIPT: Alcohol, diplomacy & society, from Edward Slingerland's perspective

Edward Slingerland:

All the positive aspects of alcohol-based sociality have a dark side. And so when people are bonding over alcohol, they can do things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. They can reach agreements, they can trust each other in a way they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. But then people who aren't joining in that practice can get frozen out.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you can find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today I'm cracking open a cold one which is funny, because I hate beer. And looking at the role alcohol. Yes, alcohol, has played in shaping today's global order. How has booze helped bridge social divides and foster diplomatic breakthrough? And as global alcohol consumption continues to increase year after year, particularly during the pandemic, is it doing us more harm than good?

I'll be breaking it all down with philosopher Edward Slingerland, who's out with his new book, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Yeah, you bet he's tenured. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Ted Slingerland, he's a philosophy professor at University of British Columbia, and also the author of the most recent book, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. Ted, thanks so much for joining me today.

Edward Slingerland:

Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

So you have established in this book that human beings have been drinking for a very long time and for very deep social purposes. How did it start?

Edward Slingerland:

So I was told and I think most of us are told. To the extent we think about the beginning of alcohol, we think of it as a byproduct or accidental discovery after we had agriculture. So the way I thought of it was we got agriculture, we started growing grains, we started making bread. And then one day, someone leaves their sourdough starter out for too long and it starts to ferment and they drink it and think, oh, that's interesting. And we had beer.

So in that story, alcohol was an afterthought to civilization. What really surprised me was the archeological evidence suggests it's the other way around. So hunter-gatherers were gathering together in big groups to have festivals, to do rituals at these really impressive ritual sites with these massive stone pillars, kind of like mini Stonehenges, and drinking. They were drinking some substance. There were huge vats along with the remains of the feasts that they were eating. Maybe those vats contained water, I really doubt it. We know people were making beer at this point in the Fertile Crescent and probably hallucinogen-laced beer.

So they were gathering and getting intoxicated. A couple thousand years before we had agriculture. And so the story now, this is the so-called beer before bread hypothesis. Is that it's actually the drive to get intoxicated that motivated people to settle down and start trying to make alcohol in a serious way, start to cultivate plants in a serious way. And then we got bread. So we actually settled down to make beer and then we discovered, well, you could also make this thing to eat the next morning, soak up the alcohol.

So that surprised me. And in this sense, in a very direct way, our drive to get intoxicated is what caused us to create civilization. Because agriculture is the basis of civilization. And then once we got into civilization, it gave us a tool for helping us to cope with all the challenges of living in civilized societies.

Ian Bremmer:

So you talk a lot about alcohol and trust between human beings. Give us a sense of how that works.

Edward Slingerland:

Well, in the same way that when we meet, we shake hands, right? We shake right hands. I'm showing you that I'm not carrying a weapon. And now we can sit down and I can't harm you, I'm disarmed. If you sit down with someone and you do a couple shots of Baijiu, this liquor that is used at Chinese banquets-

Ian Bremmer:

In China, yeah.

Edward Slingerland:

... you're doing the same thing cognitively. You're taking out your prefrontal cortex and putting it on the table and saying, I am cognitively disarmed. I am less able to lie. I'm less able to cheat. And I'm more likely to like you. I've become more open cognitively to you. And that's an appealing thing.

Ian Bremmer:

So we have some societies, of course, around the world that have done everything they can to ban alcohol. What do you think the impact of that is in terms of social interactions, business structure, politics? What does it mean for a society when they do that?

Edward Slingerland:

They've eliminated a crucial tool for getting people to cooperate. Some cultures that don't have alcohol substitute something else that does the same thing. So they substitute another chemical intoxicant. Some of the Pacific cultures that don't have alcohol use Kava, which is this tuber-based intoxicant that has similar effects. Cultures that ban chemical intoxicants entirely have to be either replacing it with something else or just suffering the consequences of having trouble getting people past cooperation dilemmas. I really don't know what the equivalent would be.

I mean, when Skype got invented, I remember ... I'm old enough to remember this. Everyone said, okay, business travel is going to stop. Because why would you fly to Shanghai to sign a contract when you could do everything over Skype? Business travel remained unchanged until the pandemic. And that's because people, if you're doing anything important, you want to sit down with people, have a meal, and drink a lot. Because when you're drinking alcohol, you're basically ... same way you shake hands and you say, I don't have a weapon. When you do a couple shots of Baijiu at a Chinese banquet, you're taking your prefrontal cortex out and you're putting it on the table and you're saying, I'm cognitively disarmed.

At the same time that you're disarming yourself, your mood is enhanced. You're feeling better. Serotonins and endorphins are rushing through your brain. If we're doing drinks together, suddenly you look a lot more handsome and charming. I feel more handsome and charming. It helps people get cooperation off the ground, especially in situations where cooperation is challenging. And so how cultures do that when they ban alcohol and other chemical and intoxicants is something I don't know. Maybe there's substitute practices you could throw in, but there's a good reason that it's rare for cultures to do that.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, I mean, we certainly have seen in ... I mean, international summitry, they get together, dinners, they've got drinks. Not everybody does, of course. I mean, Donald Trump, for example, I mean just doesn't drink, period.

Edward Slingerland:

Yeah. I would predict people are going to trust him less. What alcohol is doing is paralyzing the part of your brain that's in charge of rational self-interest. So the prefrontal cortex is how you calculate cost benefits. It's how you suppress instincts. It's how you delay gratification for long term payoffs. When you turn that down a bit, you start to let your emotions take over. You start to see commonalities rather than just pursuing your own interest. So I'd have to predict that leaders who don't drink are going to have trouble doing that.

And maybe one of the reasons they do it is because they get an advantage. I mean, if other people are cognitively disarming and you're not, you may be able to pursue your self-interest in a way that could be harmful to other people. I mean, I document the fact that across cultures and throughout history, people have been suspicious of people who don't drink. People have been suspicious of the one who remains sober when everyone else is getting drunk. Now, I think is the case with Trump, and I think Joe Biden as well, alcoholism in his family.

Ian Bremmer:

In the family, yeah.

Edward Slingerland:

And so he avoids drinking because he's seen the incredible costs of alcoholism. Maybe the person who's not drinking is pregnant, or they have to get up early and take the kids to daycare. So this is a problem. All the positive aspects of alcohol-based sociality have a dark side. And so when people are bonding over alcohol, they can do things that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise. They can reach agreements, they can trust each other in a way they wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

But then people who aren't joining in that practice can get frozen out, and that creates some inequity. And that's what I think organizations have to figure out, is how you deal with that. How do you get the benefits of alcohol-based sociality while mitigating the inequities that it creates?

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. We talk about in corporate organizations, of course, a lot of this is around bro-culture to the extent that there's drinking going on after hours in organizations. It's caused all sorts of mistreatment, usually gender-based. And so I mean, our society is moving as far away from that as possible.

I mean, how much of gender inequity has actually been fostered by the fact that alcohol is a significant piece of letting down your cognitive guard?

Edward Slingerland:

Yeah, I think quite a bit. And it's a problem. And I think people are rightly concerned about it. So for instance, I'm an academic. When we go to conferences, academic conferences, in-person conferences, we go in-person and we go in-person because a lot of the real work is done outside of the formal sessions. A lot of this happens at the conference bar after hours. And it's great, in some ways. It's allowing a type of sociality to happen that wouldn't happen otherwise. The problem is, it's all dudes. And women are quite understandably reluctant to enter these bro-culture, especially late night gatherings. And as a result, they're getting frozen out of this. So this is a big problem.

I think the response to this by most organizations has been overkill. So the response has been, well, let's just make everything dry. You're not allowed to have these events anymore. Or if you have them, you can't have alcohol at them. And I think that's because we don't see the functional benefits of alcohol. We look at alcohol just as a public health problem. And at most on the positive side, as fun. So if I'm head of HR and I see on one side potential lawsuits, sexual harassment and sexual assault, drunk driving, all these bad things plus damage to people's livers. All this because of alcoholism. That's all on one side.

On the other side, what is there, fun? When you put it that way, fun is always going to lose. So what I'm trying to do in Drunk is point out that on the other side it's not just fun, it's functional benefits, enhanced creativity. So we haven't talked about that, but one of the things alcohol does is free your mind up. You can start to think in a lateral way more easily, and share your ideas with others in a freer way. So it's a crucial element, I think, in group creativity. You lose that as well.

Now you may see all those benefits and still say, yeah, we're still not, we still don't want you guys drinking around the hotel bar late at night. We still don't want to have alcohol at our annual holiday party. And that's a perfectly justified decision, but it has to be made with all of the data. And I think right now, when it comes to making decisions about alcohol, whether to include it in our personal lives, whether to include it in our professional lives, we've been flying blind, from an anthropological and from a scientific perspective.

So I'm just trying to correct that and at least get all the data out there for decision makers. And then they can decide for their own organization, or you can decide as an individual yourself, the extent to which you want to use alcohol in your life.

Ian Bremmer:

I just wonder to what extent we can really say that the impact of alcohol is so similar, so homogeneous on people when they take it. I mean, just from a pop culture perspective, you've got the angry drunk.

Edward Slingerland:

Yeah. Angry drunks are just angry people who are finally getting to show their anger. What alcohol is doing is disinhibiting you. It's not creating new personality traits. It's not making you a different type of person. What it's doing is impairing your ability to conceal or repress what type of person you are. The ugliness that can come out at a certain point of inebriation is you seeing what people really think or what they really feel. So I do think there's a lot of work that can be done. The last part of the book is about all the dangers of alcohol, and there are a lot of dangers. Historically, we've been drinking relatively weak beers and wines. Most cultures are drinking 2 to 3% beer-like substances. Relatively recently, so last few hundred years, we've had access to distilled liquors, which are just wildly more powerful than the stuff we've had access to in the past.

The other problem is we're drinking more alone. So again, historically it's always been the case that drinking was a social act. It's something you did usually in a actually very tightly-controlled ritual environment, and you didn't have private access to alcohol. The only time you had access to alcohol was in a public event where someone was timing the drinking. They were making toasts, they were passing around something, everything was regulated. Other people were watching you. The tendency humans have to over-indulge in something that makes us feel good, that hits our pleasure centers in our brain was controlled and moderated by this ritual support.

When you can go to a drive-through liquor store and load your SUV up with a couple cases of vodka and some firearms and Twinkies and drive home to your house in the suburbs and just have all that sitting around, that's historically unprecedented. So I think that I call this the problems of distillation and isolation. These two relatively new features of modernity have made alcohol a lot more dangerous. I think the pandemic has shown that when you make this really extreme, when people can't even go out and drink in a pub or a cafe, drinking gets really unhealthy and dangerous.

Different cultures have healthier and less healthy attitudes and practices around alcohol. So-called Northern European cultures drink a lot of distilled spirits. They drink to get drunk, they celebrate drunkenness. It's manly to be really drunk. They tend to have really high levels of alcoholism and tend to not use alcohol in healthy ways. What anthropologists call Southern European culture, so Italy is the one I'm most familiar with, they drink mostly wine and beers. It's always part of a meal. You're always doing it at the meal table, so for lunch or dinner. Kids get acculturated into it very early. So you give kids a little bit of wine that's watered down with their meal, so they understand that it's just part of life. It's something people do. And public drunkenness is frowned upon. So if you're in Rome and you see some drunk people wandering around, they're American or German tourists, they're not locals.

The human propensity to alcoholism cross culturally is probably about 15% all over the world. Probably about 15% of people have a genetic propensity to alcoholism. Alcoholism rates vary wildly. And Italians drink a lot of wine, they have very low alcoholism rates. And it's probably because they have a healthy attitude towards drinking. It's only done at the table with food, and it's done at normal hours. You do it at mealtimes, lunch and dinner. So I think if you figure out ways to emulate healthy drinking cultures, you're more likely to be able to get the benefits of alcohol and avoid all of the ... at least most of the negative consequences.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, like so many things in life, the healthiest ways to approach a challenge are not the quick fixes.

Edward Slingerland:

That's the case with alcohol too.

Ian Bremmer:

Ted, thanks so much for joining me today.

Edward Slingerland:

Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor. First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

GZERO World also has a message for you from our friends at Foreign Policy. Could empowering women in the workplace be the simplest way to boost the global economy? Basically, yes. But how? The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women is a new limited series podcast from Foreign Policy featured on Apple Podcasts' New and Noteworthy. Listen to the Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women wherever you get your podcasts.

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