By Brad Hornick
Special to the Record
The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction鈥檚 (CCSA) recently issued guidelines on alcohol and health that suggest that no amount of alcohol is good.
The guidelines are based on a significant body of research that highlights the dangers of excessive drinking, including increased risk of liver disease, cancer, and mental health problems. Outcomes from CCSA guidelines may lead to the potential use of graphic warnings on wine bottles, similar to what appears on cigarette packages.
The CCSA report鈥檚 well-established facts on the risks to human health and its recommendations are based on a medical lens of risk evaluation to human health. But what is outside the scope of the CCSA approach is the broader story of how alcohol has played and continues to play a pivotal constructive role in human civilization.
Edward Slingerland, author of Drunk, How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization addresses this wide gap in knowledge by providing arguments about how and why vastly diverse civilizations came to recognize the advantages of alcohol. Slingerland is a UBC professor of Asian studies and a scholar of comparative religion, philosophy, and cognitive science. With considerable credentials to bring to the discussion, Slingerland asks, if the case against alcohol seems so bullet-proof, why has alcohol use persisted so pervasively despite its many obvious disadvantages?
Through witty anecdotes and sober anthropological analysis, Slingerland paints a picture of the history and rationale of alcohol as central to the evolutionary success of homo sapiens through millennia. Alcohol use is deeply ingrained in ancient and modern societies. He argues that alcohol use shapes local and regional culture, builds community, inspires business and cultural ingenuity, provides social and mental well-being, and supports personal and group social bonding through ritual and ceremony.
There are reasons why intoxication has been integral to the development of human society. Slingerland explores the cognitive science of brain chemistry, how alcohol temporarily relaxes the control exerted by the pre-frontal cortex. As it triggers the release of endorphins, it also dilutes the dominating tendencies of rational and goal-oriented thinking, and hence, creates space between people to inspire trust and cooperation while it performs as a truth serum and trust enhancer.
Yet what promises the temporary Dionysian opening towards creativity, imagination, passion, friendliness, and hearted-orientation at the same time threatens to reveal its potentially just-as-creative shadow side. (Some of history鈥檚 best revolutionaries concocted their plans in local pubs and watering holes.) This includes the negative side-effects of overindulgence: chaos, unbridled recklessness, irrationality, depression, and all of the associated social consequences.
What emerges from Slingerland鈥檚 analysis in the context of the CCSA鈥檚 recommendations, is that alcohol is deeply intertwined with human culture. A move to eliminate the 鈥減roblem鈥� of alcohol or tendencies towards moralistic calls for prohibition may be too simplistic a confrontation with personal and social ills because it ignores the complex role that alcohol plays in individuals and human society.
Whether you鈥檝e had personal battles with the Dionysian shadow haunting intoxication, or you鈥檝e craved a touch of relief from strictures of the pre-frontal cortex rationality, Slingerland will provide an enlightening discussion to think through alcohol鈥檚 dilemmas.
Slingerland will serve up an engaging elixir to inspire both levity and gravity on this important topic (and whet-your-whistle for the main Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival event this coming July 20-23). For tickets for this exciting evening on Saturday, May 20, visit d
