Peter: The Grapes of Joy

The Bacchanal
of the Andrians
Titian, 1523 - 1526

Until a couple of weeks ago, when I was shopping for a book by one of my favourite modern philosophers, I had never heard of Edward Slingerland. Google, however, thought I might like him, so after I had paid for Derek Parfit’s exploration of the foundations of moral philosophy, its AI thoughtfully suggested Slingerland’s book published in May this year. The title, Drunk, tempted me to ignore it, but the subtitle caught my interest: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. The reviews from other writers and publications that I know and trust were impressive, so I decided to give Slingerland a chance to impress me as well. I’m glad I did. Reading Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization over about 24 hours, I enjoyed the author’s solid academic approach as he argued for a reassessment of the benefits and harms of our species' love affair with alcohol and other intoxicating drugs, from the historical and cultural background he provided to the connections he made with social and scientific concepts, which in many cases coincided with my own interests and my personal  family history.

Although adopting a relaxed, sometimes informal, style of writing, Edward Slingerland is a serious academic of considerable erudition. From the very first pages, he regularly cites a wide range of sources to support his controversial thesis that drugs generally, but alcohol in particular, played a crucial role in our species' ascent to civilizations that today dominate the planet. He cites ancient Greek and Egyptian sources, modern research on the effects of alcohol on the brain, mediaeval Nordic custom, recent research in archeology, classical Chinese texts, sociology, and much else. I was not surprised to discover that at exactly 75% of the way through the book’s 313 pages, it came to an end at page 240: the remaining 73 pages, 25% of the book, are filled with the references for the sources he had cited and notes. That’s a little unusual in a popular book for a general audience, but it’s not at all unusual for an academic work. Edward Slingerland’s academic rigour powerfully supports his arguments at each step towards establishing his novel thesis. 

I particularly enjoyed his references to ancient cultures, which are not only subjects that interest me today, but that took me back to my days at university. I do not know whether Slingerland also studied the classical languages of Greece and Rome, but he certainly knows his Greek and Latin literature. As he was citing Homer, Plato, Aristotle and other Greeks  to help his thesis, it was a pleasant surprise to see how often he used details that I remembered from my own reading of those texts. His details about the drinking of wine in Plato’s Symposium, for example, reminded me of when I first read that work some decades ago at Sydney University, where it was welcome news to discover that Socrates was famous not only for his ability to seriously annoy powerful politicians and rich people but also for his ability to drink more than everyone else and remain sober. When I was in my late teens and enjoying student life, the ability to consume wine was an important aspect of social life at the college in which I lived, which was modelled on the more ancient colleges of Oxford, and which also copied the Oxford habit of wine with meals, and often after meals. Looking back, my own experience at university supports Slingerland’s assertion that alcohol played an essential role in culture. That was certainly the case at Sydney University in the late 1970s and early 80s. I was never much into the popular pub culture, but a glass of wine was usually welcome. 

I was prepared for Slingerland to quote the classics of the West, but I was thrilled by his doing the same for the classics of Chinese literature. One of the languages I studied at university was Chinese, mainly classical Chinese, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover that Slingerland had done the same in his student days. Just as he used Homer and Virgil, so too did he highlight with specific quotes from Confucian classics and the more ancient classics that Confucius admired how wine had played a central role in the development of Chinese community, culture and civilisation over the course of thousands of years. He seems to have preferred the poet Tao Yuan Ming more than my own favourites from the later T’ang Dynasty, but again, the references made a novel use of sources I was already familiar with, and again reminded me of my days at Sydney University with the antique Professor Davis, the lonely aisles of Sydney University’s Oriental Library (Chinese had not then become so popular as it soon would), the fun of reading Li Bai and Tu Fu, and of learning calligraphy with Professor Liu.  

Celebrating the grape harvest at
New Italy, Australia in the 1890s

But perhaps what I most related to were Slingerland’s depictions of Southern European culture, especially that of Italy. He often uses the example of the role that wine plays in modern Italian culture. My own family is of Italian descent, hence my last name, Filicietti, and although it was my great-grandparents who came over from Italy in 1880, the succeeding generations have maintained some Italian customs. Slingerland points out that there is increasing evidence that the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago began not with a desire to grow wheat for food, but to make beer, or to grow grapes not to eat but to make wine. His grape story is straight out of my family history. One of their most prized possessions on the very long boat trip from Italy to Australia was the cuttings from their grape vines back home that my great-grandparents brought with them. And on arriving in the Australian bush, almost the first thing they did after clearing some land was to plant their grapes to make wine. And as Slingerland notes, it is traditional in Italian culture for parents to introduce their children to wine from an early age. My memory is a little fuzzy (not because I was drunk, but because it was half a century ago), but I think my parents started letting myself and my brothers and sisters have sips of wine at dinner from the age of around ten. As Slingerland describes it for Southern European cultures, wine was a normal part of our family dinners, and often lunch if it was a special occasion. But as he also notes, it was very rare for anyone to actually get drunk. I can remember my father being drunk only four or five times, but only ever on the sort of special occasions that Slingerland describes, where it was accepted social practice that would not extend to normal days. 

Reading Slingerland’s book opened my eyes to a new perspective on the role of alcohol as being not only fun but, despite its very real dangers, contributing greatly to the success of humans over the last 12,000 years or more. He also helped me remember happy days from university, where I had fun both socializing with friends over a bottle of wine and studying the subjects that entranced me, including my major, philosophy, which I learned only in the publisher’s note about the author at the very end of the book is also Slingerland’s main academic area. I was not surprised to discover that he is a philosopher. His restoration of the reputation of the deadly but fun drug alcohol will doubtless upset some as much as Socrates ever upset the conservatives 2,400 years ago until the law courts of democratic Athens put him to death. I’m now looking forward to reading Slingerland’s earlier book; it appears that Google’s AI knows what I will enjoy at least as well as I do.

At 1,306 words, this exceeds the suggested word limit. Had I written this before I prepared the question, I would have given a more generous word limit. You can also check the Google Doc where I wrote before copying and pasting in here and my planning notes in pdf format.