Binge drinking and the rise of civilisation

Recently, notorious bon-vivant, giant-handed Russian Citizen, and actor, Gerard Depardieu admitted he drinks 14 bottles of wine a day, as well as some (breakfast, obviously) Champagne, a little Pastis to break up the grape-based monotony, and some well earned Whisky to round off the day.

“How awful”, the abstinent world decried, except the French, who adore this kind of thing and figuratively slapped him on the back while congratulating each other for producing such a fabulous specimen. This despite the fact Depardieu renounced his French citizenship years ago and once urinated in the aisle of a plane.

Yes, the scientists and other alcohol haters may sneer behind supercilious eyes, denouncing the fiery nectar as a pernicious vice, but what do they know? The Nobel Prize winning ‘scientist’ who pioneered the frontal lobotomy was shot — by one of his patients — who was presumably as unimpressed with science as Gerard Depardieu.

These fun-hating slimline-tonic-drinking, raw-food-championing, alcohol-free insufferable weasels fail to see the obvious: that alcohol is the Promethean fire, the liquid fuel that ignited human imagination, the cradle which nurtured the civilisation that permits their existence!

The question of why civilisation emerged out of Eurasia, not Aboriginal Australia or Native America or sub-Saharan Africa, was answered by Jared Diamond — he of the weird, moustacheless, Amish beard — in his book Guns, Germs and Steel. Dismissing any idea of genetic superiority, Diamond identifies Eurasia as simply being the lucky part of the Earth graced with the right geographical conditions to nurture a fecund garden of the most easily domesticable plants and animals, and a long East-West axis enabling transmission of them.

While this might answer the question of what preconditions were necessary for civilisation, it doesn’t really shed light on why civilisation emerged in the first place, nor how it maintained it’s momentum. What kick started the Neolithic Revolution? What caused the inception of the idea to leave behind the halcyon, hunter gathering epoch (studies have shown that hunter gathering societies have far more leisure time than we do), and grind out a laborious existence as farmers?

The answer? Booze.

I’m not joking. Patrick McGovern, the ‘Indiana Jones of Ancient Ales, Wines, and Extreme Beverages’, a Biomolecular Archaeologist, posits that, “the main motivation for settling down and domesticating crops was to make an alcoholic beverage of some kind”.

Think about it; can you really imagine early humans clamouring for a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle simply just because some bright spark cobbled together an insipid loaf of bread? Or is it more plausible that an accidental pioneer, stumbling upon some fermenting vegetable decided to imbibe it and had the time of his life, thereafter telling his mates, who, presumably — after some short lived initial suspicion — were soon drunkenly dancing around the fire, yelling to each other how much they loved one another, and concocting elaborate plans to form an egalitarian collective devoted to producing as much of the glorious happy juice as possible, so they could get hammered together forever? “Fuck Jeffrey,” the first person to drink alcohol probably never said, “I’m not hunting shit. Let’s just keep drinking this.”

“Alcohol provided the initial motivation,” says McGovern, after extensively studying the chemical composition of ancient pottery shards, finding evidence of alcohol use across the world from fragments dating back as far as 9000 years in China, “then it got going the engine of society”. The novelty of alcohol motivated humans to work together for the first time, to create something that wasn’t available via hunting and gathering.

Not content with getting us started, booze went on to shape our entire culture. It’s no coincidence that Eurasian countries with a certain type of climate (think Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, China, etc) have a long cultural history of binge drinking. While the rest of the world enjoys sunshine rays and glorious days, everyone in the aforementioned countries regularly huddles together in small rooms hiding from the cold and rain. So what do you do? Get pissed, that’s what. If you’re forced into sitting indoors for months on end, what else is there to do except get steaming drunk? And when the sun comes out again? Get pissed anyway!

Following the discovery of booze, agriculture facilitated the population explosion that gave rise to society, consequently producing those rare artistic geniuses who so advance the human condition, and here again booze plays it’s part; as the popular muse for the writers, the poets, the artists. As Hemingway said, “When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?”

So while Geography may have played it’s part, it is booze that made us great.

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