Daoism, Evolution and the Power of Alcohol
Edward Slingerland on Medium
It’s hard to explain to people what I do for a living.
I’m a professor, at the University of British Columbia. I’ve recently moved from the Department of Asian Studies to Philosophy, and have an affiliation with Psychology, but my Ph.D. is in Religious Studies, and my other degrees are in Classical Chinese. These days I mainly publish co-authored papers in scientific journals, which is unusual for a humanities scholar. I also run a huge database of religion project, which is perhaps even weirder.
And, finally, I write books for popular audiences. This is no longer unusual for the psychologists I tend to hang out with these days—since the wild success of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, it seems like every psychologist is trying their hand at trade writing. But it’s still the case that most humanities scholars, especially in fields like Philosophy and Religious Studies, view popular book writing as a kind of pandering to the masses, a debasement of scholarship. So I play down this aspect of my life when talking to most fellow academics.
The weird spot I’ve ended up at—wildly interdisciplinary, engaged in digital humanities, active in online teaching and trade publication—is all the result of a long journey that started with an interest in science in high school, a turn toward languages and the humanities in grad school, and then another pivot toward the sciences after my Ph.D.
After two years of molecular biology and marine ecology at Princeton, I moved to the West Coast and tacked hard toward the humanities, ending up with a B.A. from Stanford in Chinese and an M.A. in Classical Chinese from UC Berkeley. I then returned to Stanford for my Ph.D. work, which focused on Warring States (5th-3rd c BCE) Chinese thought, but also included German philosophy, virtue ethics and hermeneutics (the study of interpretation). I finished in 1998 with a dissertation on the concept of “effortless action” (wu-wei) in early China, as well the as the tensions caused by the “paradox of wu-wei”: how can one consciously strive to be spontaneous?
Since graduate school, however, I found myself drawn back to my roots in science, coming to feel that tools from the cognitive sciences and evolutionary theory are necessary to transform the way that humanities scholars study cultures, both past and present. In addition to what has become the standard English-language translation of the Analects of Confucius, my academic monographs have covered topics such as effortless action and metaphor theory, why humanities scholars should engage more with the sciences and move past postmodernist theory, and concepts of mind and body in early China and the dangers of neo-Orientalism. I’ve published over fifty peer-reviewed articles in top journals in a wide variety of fields, from Nature and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Ethics, as well as a popular book on ancient Chinese concepts of spontaneity.
As the leader of large-scale research grants on the cognitive science and evolution of religion, I’ve been awarded over $11 million dollars in grants to support research into the origins of prosocial religions and to build, maintain and expand the Database of Religious History (DRH), the world’s first online, open-access, qualitative and quantitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history
My latest work is a trade book entitled Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Little, Brown Spark, 2021). While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place. Drunk attempts to cut through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, I show that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. I argue that our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication
While this topic might seem like a strange departure from my earlier work, it actually flows quite naturally from it. Like religion, the human consumption of intoxicants is a mystery hiding in plain sight, found wherever humans exist, and yet puzzling because of its lack of obvious utility and extremely high costs. Alcohol has also come to strike me as a cultural technology developed to circumvent precisely the paradox my previous work focused upon: how can we try not to try? While actively striving to be spontaneous is self-defeating, chemical intoxicants like alcohol cut through the cognitive paradox by directly shutting down the parts of our brain involved in self-control and conscious awareness.
My personal website contains more information than you could possibly desire on my previous work, podcast, radio and TV interviews, online courses and lectures, current projects and classes, and upcoming events. You can also follow me on twitter.
I’ll be taking advantage of the flexibility and informality of Medium to post on Drunk, news and observations relevant to alcohol and human sociality, and connections between religion, Chinese philosophy and intoxication.
Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.
