Bottoms up! We haven't changed much in 18 million years.
On the mournful days of daylight saving, of short afternoons and pitch dark mornings, it can be a struggle finding the means to go on. I have an answer. It's sciencey, surprisingy and alcohol
Baudelaire said, “Who only drinks water has a secret to hide.” Do you think the grandfather of decadence might have been on to something there, given the list of famous teetotallers includes Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler and Prince Andrew?
Of course there are many more teetotallers now. One in five people opting for the sober life in the UK, nearly half of all Americans. Baudelaire couldn’t say that now, he’d be called an enabler, or just cancelled, just another drunken know it all white man. It used to be there was alcoholism (bad) problem drinking (less bad) and then sort of normal drinking (neutral), modest drinking (admirable) and not drinking (very peculiar). Because even if you were the Pope or Jesus, drinking was part of life. But now normal drinking is (bad) too. Gwyneth Paltrow recommends one glass a week. The science, one a year.
I’ve been curious over the years about this sober cult, with its promises of euphoria and clarity, I’ve given it a go. Most of us who have tried to do the not drinking thing will know what hard labour it is trying to live without a little wine sometimes but it can be done.
The problem is, I don’t want to give up the fermented plant matter. No matter how hard those fingers both beckon and wag, I just won’t. The riposte to this is, “Oh, well if you won’t give up drinking then you’ve definitely got a problem.” And while I wasn’t drinking Special Brew with my breakie, or even drinking every day (much), I took this as gospel. Oh, I’ve got a problem. So I tried giving up even harder, and found it even harder to stop.
Whenever I stopped drinking I never went out. I occasionally rode on an incredible wave of good humour (possibly mania) but mostly I just became rather quiet, po-faced evenWhen you try to give up you realise how firmly drinking is wedded to our identity, our lives, our enjoyment of it. It’s almost as if to drink is in our DNA.
Are we sick in the head…
…or are we designed to drink.
We are hard wired and many many millions of years habituated to the psychoactive compound in booze, ethanol, and the theories are that it has a number of important functions in human evolution. This was worked out by paleogeneticists trying to work out why alcoholism happens and turns out that many many millions of years before homosapiens a single crucial mutation in chimps, gorillas - the Great Apes - happened that meant they alone could metabolise ethanol and turn it back into sugar.
Big apes ingesting booze has been going on millions of years more than Lewis Hamilton’s has a no alcohol tequila or Kylie’s 0% prosecco. This is the Drunken Monkey hypothesis.When we came down from the trees and started hanging out on the ground we developed an appetite for those extra sweet slightly rotting fruits on the forest floor in what a winemaker might call early fermentation. Long before humans made Beaujolais, gorillas were seeking out the smell of fermenting fruits.
This is so incredibly hardwired into our DNA, that it’s no wonder it’s hard to knock it on the head. I suppose where the problems have come in its with your distilled spirits, and your 20% Thunderbirds. Fermenting fruit is closer in ABV to a nice Kabinett Riesling. So while the science was developed to help people abstain, I hope you like the way I am handily interpreting complex academic papers to justify making my life a slow symphony of delicious pops.
All life loves sugar, from the tiniest yeast to the massivest pachyderm. But not all life loves ethanol. Only us great apes can handle our booze. Feel free to put down your glass and beat your chest area like a silverback gorilla.
This taste for fermented stuff would evolve with us and we started fermenting on purpose. Perhaps it was to enable food storage. Or perhaps we just enjoyed the vibe. Because there’s another theory that booze helped us to stop clubbing each other and instead build these little tribes and communities that would eventually turn into the 21st Century version of clubbing.
Yes, alcohol had an evolutionary role in bringing us together so we were stronger. And it still does. There’s a lot that’s bad for us beside drinking a bit of alcohol (within sensible limits, etc). Not least loneliness. Loneliness is a nasty affliction. The US Surgeon General recently announced it is as bad as six drinks a day. I’m not sure that I’ve quite got it right if I say that means five drinks a day as long as they’re sociable are better for you than being lonely. But I’ve mangled all the other science to suit my purpose so why not the US Surgeon General’s too.
Wine, as Baudelaire pointed out in his essay comparing Du vin et du haschisch, “makes good and sociable.” Its helps us to bond with fellow members of our species, to make other people not hell. And this bonding aspect is not just important for a good wine lunch but also for the lesser endeavour of human survival.
Without drink we might never have settled down in communities and just stayed roaming around, running at anyone who comes near us with flint-head axe. Which, to be fair, does sound like something that too many Blue WKDs could do but never a few glasses of Gevrey Chambertin.
Fine, yes, booze is not good for your health. But it is not the new smoking. It is not wall to wall bad. Is humankind evolving into some new stage in its being, one of new puritanism with it’s fretful unmeetable goals of health, longevity, spiritual growth, anti-anxiety, wellness, purity, healing (and, of course, of staying thin but no one talks about that any more) and all that other shit. Are we evolving to behave like Tolkein’s elves?
I had a couple of wines with a 25 year old PhD student recently and she told me the thing now is to meet for “walks”. I know this one, I’ve tried it myself when attempting sobriety, this let’s meet for a dog walk or a yoga class, let’s go for coffee. It’s nice enough but but it’s not sinking into a good lunch with wine is it? Then she added, everyone’s really anxious and I said, “Do you think, maybe, it might help if they had a drink?”
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