Edward Slingerland Explores Human Impulse to Get ‘Drunk’ — and Why It’s Not Always A Bad Idea

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KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2021

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“It should puzzle us more than it does that one of the greatest foci of human ingenuity and concentrated effort over the past millennia has been the problem of how to get drunk,” writes Edward Slingerland in his new book “Drunk.” Alcohol might not only enable personal creativity and social ease — it may have aided the cohesion and innovation necessary to create civilizations themselves. Slingerland does not dismiss the gravity of addiction and its endangering behaviors, but in appealing to history, neuroscience and art, he makes the case that drinking, socially and in moderation, can advance social goods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:32.1	From KQED.
0:33.1	Thank you. From KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, I'm Nina Kim. Coming up on forum, alcohol sales around the world skyrocketed during the pandemic, and it seems women in particular
0:55.3	have been drinking more.
0:57.1	It's amid this rise and renewed concern over alcohol's harms that Edward Slingerland's
1:02.5	new book, Drunk, arrives.
1:05.1	It actually looks at the role alcohol has played in the advancement of civilization and
1:09.8	points to what's possible if more Americans
1:12.8	could better manage how and when we drink. What's your relationship with alcohol? Tell us,
1:19.3	after this news. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Not everyone drinks alcohol, but Americans who do were already drinking a lot even before the pandemic.
1:44.9	The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that from the turn of the century
1:49.4	to 2017, per capita consumption went up 8 percent, and alcohol-related deaths doubled.
1:56.3	Now, as study results from this past year start to come in, they suggest that Americans overall
2:02.7	have been drinking even more as a result of the pandemic.
2:06.6	Edward Slingerland, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, has been
2:10.6	looking into why we drink. His new book is Drunk, How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.
2:20.4	Welcome to Forum, Edward Slingerland.
	...

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