Our need to get drunk in company may be innate

It was once a favourite theory of optimistic drunkards that a suitably ‘moderate’ level of alcohol consumption provided covert health benefits. The mechanism was always a little obscure. But it was a fairly sure thing that reds — or was it all booze? — by virtue of some enzyme or vitamin or whatever, and judiciously drunk in something between homeopathic and industrial quantities, protected against heart attack — or was it ischaemic stroke… or memory loss? This, at any rate, was the glass-half-full defence of moderate drinking.

Then a paper published in the Lancet in 2018 pulled the rug out from underneath the moderate drinker (not something, needless to say, that he finds terribly helpful). The much publicised study concluded that there was actually ‘no safe level of alcohol consumption’; previous, more optimistic, studies were ‘inaccurate’; tax, regulation and ‘restrictions on the physical availability of alcohol’ should be employed to discourage drinking. It was sobering news: enough, upon reflection, to make you want to seriously cut back on reading the Lancet.

Edward Slingerland’s Drunk is self-consciously ‘haunted’ by that Lancet study — ‘the terrible document that concluded definitively that the only safe level of alcohol consumption was zero’. Slingerland aims to tell a vindicatory story about intoxication, its adaptive value for societies and individuals, and its continued indispensability to contemporary life.

Instead of alcohol you could always try sleep deprivation, self-flagellation or extended meditation in painful poses

There is a ‘genuine evolutionary puzzle’ about alcohol. If alcohol intoxication really were the cause of individual ill health and wider social dysfunction, unchecked by any broader benefit, we should expect it to have been eliminated by natural and cultural selection: ‘Evolution is not stupid, and works much faster than most people realise.’ Moreover, genetic ‘solutions’ to the alleged problem of alcohol consumption already exist in the form of heritable intolerance, so-called Asian Flushing Syndrome; cultural ‘solutions’ exist in the form of prohibition.