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Cover of the book "Drunk" by Edward Slingerland

Is drinking good for us?
Edward Slingerland's book "Drunk" makes the case

Posted by: Alastair Cassie | Alcohol Reduction Coach™

 

I first came across Edward Slingerland’s Drunk through the Wine Blast podcast with Susie and Peter. If you know it, you know why a recommendation from them lands differently. Their episode on the book stopped me mid-walk. I went home, ordered it, and in the weeks that followed it reframed something I had been doing informally for years. Giving friends and colleagues direct advice about their drinking was one thing. This made me think about alcohol moderation in a more structured way, and more importantly, it reminded me why people drank in the first place. That felt like territory worth working in, and it became the foundation of what Alcohol Reduction Coach™ is today.

So this is not a neutral review. But it is, I hope, an honest one.

 

What the book actually argues

Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, and Drunk was published in June 2021. His central argument is that alcohol is not an evolutionary accident or a design flaw that civilisation has somehow failed to correct. It is something closer to a cultural technology: one that helped our ancestors solve problems that were genuinely hard to solve any other way.

The core of it is the prefrontal cortex. That is the part of the brain responsible for planning, self-monitoring, impulse control and social filtering. Useful, obviously. But also, sometimes, actively in the way. When you need to bond quickly with a stranger, negotiate trust, take a creative leap, or simply lower your guard enough to be genuinely present with another person, the prefrontal cortex can be less ally than obstacle. Alcohol dials it down. And for most of human history, Slingerland argues, that temporary dialling down served a real purpose.

He draws on ritual feasting sites like Göbekli Tepe, 11,000 years ago, where large stone vats suggest communal drinking. Beer vessels at ancient Sumerian gatherings. The Greek symposium. The Viking mead hall. The Japanese nomikai. In every case, the pattern is similar: drinking embedded in structure, in occasion, in social ritual, with a purpose beyond the alcohol itself. None of it is mindless consumption. What he calls cognitive disarmament is at work. Mutual vulnerability as a trust signal. By lowering your guard together, you demonstrate something that is genuinely hard to fake. Even the Greeks, whom Slingerland holds up as a model of this, understood the razor’s edge well enough to engineer against it: the Symposiarch, a designated role whose entire job was to water the wine and keep the gathering functional. The ritual worked precisely because someone was managing the dose.

It is a compelling idea. And for anyone who has spent thirty-odd years, as I have, working in and around the wine trade, it resonates in the bones. Wine has always been more than a drink. It is occasion. It is conversation. It is the thing that changes the temperature of a room.

 

Where Slingerland is right

The cultural and historical case is where the book earns its keep. The evidence that humans have consistently built ritual and meaning around alcohol is robust and spans every continent and most eras. The argument that this was never merely about getting drunk, that the structure and context mattered as much as the ethanol, is both historically grounded and personally recognisable to anyone who has felt the difference between a glass of something genuinely good in the right company and the same units consumed alone in front of a screen.

His diagnosis of where things went wrong is also precise. He identifies two historical shifts that broke the model. The first was distillation, which arrived in Europe in the 1500s and produced spirits at concentrations the body and its social guardrails were never designed to handle. The second was the collapse of the communal, ritualised drinking context. Historically, you drank with others, with food, in a defined space, at a socially regulated pace. Both shifts fundamentally altered alcohol’s position on what he calls the razor’s edge between usefulness and harm.

That is an almost perfect description of the problem most of my clients are navigating.

 

Where he runs out of road

Slingerland’s historical argument is persuasive. His evolutionary argument is another matter. The claim that alcohol is an adaptation humans were shaped by evolution to seek, rather than a compound we have opportunistically exploited, is a step beyond what the evidence supports. Many reviewers, including sympathetic ones, noted it. The cultural case is strong. The biological one is not.

The other issue is his solutions. After several hundred pages of brilliant diagnosis, the practical advice in the final chapter, drink mindfully, drink with food, avoid spirits, never drink alone, is underwhelming. These are individual responses to what is partly a structural problem. And they assume the structures that once made drinking self-regulating, closing time, shared norms, finite supply, social accountability, are still available. For a lot of people, they are not.

 

The gap between ancient ritual and modern Tuesday

This is where the book matters most, and where I would push Slingerland’s argument further than he takes it himself.

The drinking contexts he celebrates, the symposium, the mead hall, the village ritual, all had something modern drinking has largely lost: limits built into the situation itself. The bottle of supermarket wine in the fridge at half past eight on a Tuesday has none of those things. The ritual structure that made historical drinking relatively self-regulating has been stripped out, and nothing replaced it.

Slingerland published Drunk in June 2021, as the world was still climbing out of lockdown. He had identified the problem in theory. What none of us quite knew yet was that the pandemic had just run the experiment at scale.

Overnight, millions of people were stripped of every communal, ritualised drinking context simultaneously. Pubs closed. Restaurants closed. The occasions that had given drinking its structure and social guardrails simply disappeared. What remained was supermarket alcohol, a sofa, and nowhere to go. The conditions Slingerland had described as historically dangerous, distillation plus isolation, became the default setting for an entire population.

The data that followed said everything. By 2023, 73% of all alcohol sold in the UK was bought in the off-trade, up from 53% in 2000, according to Drinkaware’s 2025 Monitor*. Since 2020, more than 2,000 pubs have closed, with roughly one shutting every day through 2025. Those are not just economic statistics. They represent the accelerating loss of exactly the structured, communal drinking contexts that Slingerland argues made alcohol functional rather than harmful in the first place.

The people most affected are not, as public health messaging often implies, young people drinking recklessly on nights out. Research on British drinking occasions consistently shows habitual, home-based drinking concentrated among those least likely to have the social structures that historically kept consumption in check**.

This is not the Greek symposium. This is autopilot.

 

What this means for anyone rethinking their drinking

Slingerland will not give you permission to keep drinking exactly as you are, whatever some reviews suggest. What he will give you is context, and context is something the public health conversation around alcohol almost entirely lacks.

The dominant framing in the UK is risk-based, unit-focused and largely humourless. It tells you what alcohol costs you. It rarely acknowledges what people are actually reaching for when they pour a drink: the transition from work to evening, the social ease, the lowering of the day’s accumulated tension. Slingerland does acknowledge those things. He should. Ignoring why people drink while lecturing them about why they should not is one of the main reasons public health messaging on alcohol lands so poorly.

But acknowledging the function does not mean accepting the autopilot. That is the distinction ARC is built on. I am not anti-alcohol. I spent thirty-odd years with it as my professional life, and I understand better than most what it can be at its best. What I work against is the version that has slipped out of ritual and into repetition, out of choice and into reflex.

Slingerland shows you why alcohol has mattered so much, for so long. The question worth asking next is what you actually want from it now, and whether the way you are drinking is delivering that, or just the habit of expecting it to.

Drunk is worth your time. Read it with that question in mind.

 

If this question feels closer to home than you expected

If your own drinking has drifted further from ritual than you would like, find out how the BAC System™ works.

 

 

References

*Drinkaware. (2025). Drinking at Home: Changing patterns and opportunities for prevention. Drinkaware Monitor 2025. https://drinksretailingnews.co.uk/home-drinking-dominates-as-73-of-alcohol-bought-in-the-off-trade/

**Holmes, J. et al. (2023). Change and stability in British drinking practices and culture between 2009 and 2019. SSM Population Health. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10682034/

 

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