Alcohol has long been recognized as a useful social lubricant for parties and gatherings. Yet few of us understand the historical importance of intoxication, and the fundamental role it has played in forming societies. In this article, Edward Slingerland argues that alcohol helps us to access truth, and posits that intoxication should be taken seriously as a tool for building consensus and harmony in an increasingly divided world.

A recently-discovered ancient Chinese text, dating to the 4^th or 3^rd century BCE and written on bamboo strips, contains the evocative declaration “harmony between states is brought about through the drinking of wine.” [1] In ancient China political agreement was reached without the participants first voluntarily impairing their brains with carefully-timed and calibrated shots of liquid neurotoxin. The Roman historian Tacitus noted that, among the barbarian tribes of Germany, every political or military decision had to be run through the gauntlet of drunken communal opinion:

It is at their feasts that they generally consult on the reconciliation of enemies, on the forming of matrimonial alliances, on the choice of chiefs, finally even on peace and war, for they think that at no time is the mind more open to simplicity of purpose or more warmed to noble aspirations. A race without either natural or acquired cunning, they disclose their hidden thoughts in the freedom of the festivity. Thus the sentiments of all having been discovered and laid bare, the discussion is renewed on the following day…They deliberate when they have no power to dissemble; they resolve when error is impossible. [2]

SUGGESTED READING Ritual, transcendence & psychedelics By Valerie van Mulukom

Although Tacitus patronizingly portrays this use of truth-serum use of alcohol as a primitive, barbarian practice, the ancient Romans and Greeks themselves relied heavily on precisely the functions. Indeed, the idea that drunkenness reveals the “true” self, though ancient and universal, is perhaps most famously expressed by the Latin in vino veritas, “in wine there is truth.” This perceived link between honesty and drunkenness goes back to the Greeks, for whom the combination of “wine and truth” was a truism. “Inappropriate sobriety was thought highly suspect,” the writer Iain Gately notes. “Some skills, such as oratory, could only be exercised when drunk. Sober people were coldhearted—they meditated before they spoke and were careful about what they said, and therefore…did not really care about their subject.” [3]

Since drunken words are spoken straight from the heart, they have historically been accorded greater weight than communications from the sneaky, controlled, and calculating self. In ancient Greece, oaths declared under the influence of wine were viewed as particularly sacred, reliable, and powerful. The Vikings similarly accorded an almost magical reverence to vows made after drinking (heavily) from a sacred “promise cup”; in Elizabethan and Stuart England, public declarations were viewed with suspicion unless they were accompanied by toasting with alcohol. [4]

___

Alcohol is the most commonly-used truth-telling technology, but it is revealing that in regions without alcohol other intoxicants play an identical role.

___