Why do people drink alcohol?

Taming the mind, escaping the self, breaking taboos, and glimpsing unity

I live in London, a city that runs on coffee and alcohol.

Almost every day I say to myself: If coffee is the answer, what is the question? We don’t find the desirably bitter taste of coffee elsewhere easily, and it offers bursts of energy and alertness to help us think and work. Yes, there is clearly something ritualistic about hot beverages, perhaps some distant intimation of our perennial quest to find water and make fire. The act of making ourselves coffee also serves as a kind of gateway to concentration and a starter pistol for work, while the invitation to “meet for coffee” is rarely about the coffee as such, but more like a way of saying: “Let’s do that thing that people who like each other do” and acts as a signal of warmth to elicit solidarity. This point is highlighted in an act of ‘social breaching’ by the character Will, played by Matt Damon, in Good Will Hunting when he responds to a request to meet for coffee by saying: “Or maybe we could just get together and each a bunch of caramels…it’s as arbitrary as drinking coffee.”

I may come back to coffee in a future post (because it’s a big part of my life!) but for now, I want to share a little thinking about the harder stuff, because I believe our reasons for drinking alcohol are more complex. It’s not that alcohol as such tastes particularly good, though it comes in various tasty forms; and while we might explain it away as unwinding after work, taking the edge off, making social life more fun, or having a good time, the real reasons are deeper, and multiple. Here, based on a blog post I wrote in response to a documentary over a decade ago, I offer four.

Image of Bacanal de los andrios via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bacanal_de_los_andrios.jpg

First, neuroscience indicates that we drink to reduce associations in our minds. Ethanol, the psychoactive ingredient of alcohol, inhibits communication between neurons by weakening the molecules in the walls that separate them, such that electrical signals are not sent as normal and associations between ideas do not emerge as readily. That might sound like a bad thing, but such associations are the basis for our continuous and strenuous efforts to make sense of the world, a blessing at the best of times, but sometimes a burden we could do without. Alcohol can compound negative feelings, but it typically elevates mood because with fewer associations to bother us, we start living less in our heads, and more in the here and now.

Secondly, and relatedly, psychology suggests we drink to escape the self. When we succeed in this venture we feel great, with less narcissistic chattering and relatively unmediated connection to the people and world around us. But of course, alcohol can also make us think only of ourselves, leaving us heavy, lost in thought, and disconnected from the world. The reason one of these two things happens, rather than both, is that alcohol causes cognitive narrowing, making us less nimble with our attention. With less flexibility, we tend to focus our reduced cognitive resources on whatever is most salient to us at the time and ignore almost everything else.

Third, anthropology suggests we drink to allow ourselves to break taboos. However, we should be clear about what is caused by ethanol and what is caused by culture. Anthropologist Kate Fox, supported by a huge body of cross-cultural evidence, argues that while the physiological effects mentioned above are undeniable, the assumptions we make about the impact of such effects should be contested.

Drinking does not make you outspoken, promiscuous, aggressive or rude, and nor does it directly make you lose control of your behaviour more generally. Such things happen in the UK, but they are mostly self-fulfilling, and happen because of what we collectively expect alcohol to do to us. As Fox puts it: “When people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.” The problems of drinking-related anti-social behaviour in Britain are therefore about cultural conceptions of what drunkenness means, not what alcohol does.

What this means is a bit shocking. Not only do we drink to get drunk, but we get drunk to justify behaviour that is not actually caused by drinking at all! We do this because we have an ‘ambivalent drinking culture’ where we view alcohol as morally significant, rather than an ‘integrated drinking culture’, where alcohol is morally neutral, as it appears to be in places like France. I am caricaturing of course, but we like to imagine the French enjoying a suitably sized glass of affordable Châteauneuf-du-Pape with their leisurely and convivial meals at a large table outside together in the sunlight; rather than a neurotic individual with social anxiety buying a cheap bottle of Blue Nun from the corner shop, hiding behind the first available tree, and chugging it down to reach the apparently desired state as quickly as possible, in order to enter the fray at the party.

Fourthly, spirituality tells us that we drink to glimpse unity and transcendence. Whatever you think of the Alcoholics Anonymous process it places spirituality at its heart because it recognises that the compulsion to drink is a perverted spiritual need. By weakening self-consciousness and relaxing the central nervous system, drinking gives a glimpse of transcendence and serves as a kind of secular spiritual experience. The centrality of this link was indicated by William James over a century ago in his classic text On the Varieties of Religious Experience:

“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the YES function in man…”

For anybody who enjoys a drink, I imagine that much is plausible, but as always James saw deeper:

“It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognise as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of the larger whole.”

In modern language I think he means something like this: It’s such a pity that we draw the wrong conclusions from the pleasures of being slightly drunk.

The tragedy James alludes to is that when we get this periodic glimpse of being present, at ease with the world, and available to other people, we wrongly think that drinking more will heighten the sensation. Instead, we should consider how we might live our lives in order to experience such bliss much more of the time.