Even alcohol’s defenders are still thinking like temperance robots

Alcohol Is Not Just a Chemical

Slingerland sets the stage in his book. Alcohol is not just a chemical that happens to have social side effects. It is among the oldest, most accessible tools humans have used to shape social life. It has been woven into rituals, celebrations, negotiations, mourning practices, courtship, storytelling, and the simple act of sitting across from another person and deciding to trust him.

The question is not whether alcohol is “healthy” in a narrow biomedical sense. The question is what kinds of cultural drinking styles cause humans to flourish—and what kinds produce harm.

Slingerland gestures toward this throughout the conversation. His discussion of alcohol as a “shortcut” to relaxed, spontaneous social interaction is compelling. Drawing on early Chinese philosophy, he connects drinking to the idea of wu-wei, a state of effortless action where self-consciousness drops away and people operate fluidly and effectively. It is a highly effective social lubricant.

Alcohol, in other words, helps people relax—or as Slingerland and Coleman put it, to bypass the paradox of trying to relax. That’s good for society. It enables pow-wows, cooperation, and good clean fun.

It is also highly psychologically significant—particularly for introverts, which is how both Slingerland and Hughes describe themselves. The need to relax isn’t trivial for any individual. We often function best when we are less tightly controlled, less guarded, less performative. Alcohol, in the right context, can help people achieve this state. And some people, in some settings, consider and experience that feeling as essential to their functioning and well-being.

If only we could perfect that tool—i.e., use it without causing social disruption or addiction.

When Is Alcohol a Problem?

Slingerland and Hughes defer to the dominant public health framing that alcohol is a physiological negative, a toxin, albeit one with redeeming social features. Maybe. But that framing is incomplete and reductive.

Public health specialists like to investigate what alcohol does to the body, its so-called medical or biological effects. But that is only part of the story.

People typically don’t consume alcohol by themselves. Hughes, for example, says he never drinks alone. People customarily drink wine at dinner, beer with friends, champagne at weddings, whiskey after funerals. They drink in patterned, meaningful, socially embedded ways. The unit of analysis isn’t the molecule but the practice.

That’s not the only sense in which alcohol’s effects are socially determined. Even when people drink alone, the effects are influenced by complex culturally and personally imbued meanings.

If alcohol lowers the risk of one set of diseases while raising the risk of another, the calculation of its net medical impact is complicated and uncertain. But if it reduces loneliness, deepens relationships, increases social trust, and helps people build bonds that persist over time, that’s not a rounding error. Loneliness, isolation, and social fragmentation carry their own profound health risks. Eliminating drinking doesn’t just subtract risks—it can also subtract benefits.

Slingerland’s book attempts a calculation of alcohol’s social costs and benefits. His bottom line: On balance, alcohol has been beneficial to civilization. Hughes adds value to this discussion by explaining the motivation, experience, and effects of his own drinking. But Slingerland and Hughes barely explore the relevant tradeoffs. They do not delve into the causes of addiction. They’re not clinicians, psychologists, or recovering alcoholics.

Another place where the conversation falters is the question of who “can” drink. Slingerland and Hughes reiterate the familiar idea that a certain percentage of the population is genetically unable to drink safely.

There is some truth here. People differ in vulnerability. But the way this vulnerability is typically presented—as fixed, categorical, almost a matter of fate—doesn’t match how humans actually behave. Drinking patterns change over time—when people graduate from college, for example, or become parents. People mature out of heavy use. Their environments, relationships, identities, and incentives change. Culture matters. Expectations matter. Life structure matters.

The notion of a permanently doomed class of drinkers fits within a disease framework. It fits less neatly with everything Slingerland says about context, ritual, and meaning.

Alcohol as a Social Tool

Which brings us to the most interesting part of the conversation—and the least fully developed. Hughes offers a simple personal observation: Alcohol, for him, has been primarily a social tool. It lowered his barriers, helped him open up, deepened conversations, and contributed to friendships that later became self-sustaining. The drinking didn’t have to continue at the same level for the relationships to endure. But it often played a role in their formation.

Alcohol, in that account, is not merely an indulgence. It’s an experiential platform. It helps people build social capacities, such as openness and trust, that they can later deploy without drinking. That happens when they mature, calm down, become responsible citizens, have families—all of which change the value and function of alcohol for them, along with their risk calculations and role performances.

For some people in some contexts, alcohol seems irresistible, loss of control in its use inevitable. But in other contexts, those same people have little difficulty controlling their drinking. You will often hear people say they don’t get the same thrill or pleasure from drinking that they once did, or that they are more careful about their drinking now that they have families.

Hasn’t everyone encountered such changes, either personally or by observing others? Did you used to smoke? Did you quit? Have cigarettes changed? Has your personality? Did you make different choices? Addiction is a developmental process.

There is no gene, region of the brain, or neurochemical that eliminates change and choice. But that commonsensical observation is almost invisible in modern discussions of addiction. We are accustomed to thinking that substances determine outcomes. But that’s no truer with drugs and alcohol than it is with relationships, eating, gambling, and many other habits and practices.

In other words, as with all destructive habits, some people get stuck, but most do not. The difference depends on life trajectories, not on the pharmacology of the addictive substance.

What About Strong Drink?

Slingerland makes a similar mistake when he emphasizes the historical role of low-alcohol beer and wine, contrasting them with distilled spirits. But ethanol content is not the decisive variable.

People don’t drink moderately because the alcohol is weak. They drink moderately because the culture around drinking is structured, social, and bounded. In some cultures, such as Italy, Greece, France, and Spain, drinking is tied to meals, mixed-age groups, and expectations of restraint. In others, such as Nordic and English-speaking countries—including the United States—it’s tied to intoxication, identity, and excess.

Sociologist Harry Levine calls the latter group “temperance societies” because all of them have organized anti-alcohol movements. France, Italy, Spain and Greece do not.

Slingerland and Hughes are a part of a temperance culture: ours. Slingerland notes that consumption of distilled spirits is especially common in Northern European countries, while wine is the usual beverage in Southern Europe. But you can drink wine badly, and you can drink whiskey well. Focusing on preferred national beverages—which vary within countries and have changed over time—misses the more powerful forces in addiction: norms, values, customs, and social practices.

The Real Question

That points to a broader issue. The modern anti-alcohol stance is often framed as cautious, evidence-based, and responsible. In some ways, it is. But it also reflects a discomfort with adult life.

A functioning culture teaches people how to engage with powerful pleasures—food, sex, alcohol, money—in ways that are integrated, bounded, and meaningful. It doesn’t assume abstinence is the only safe option.

The latter attitude itself shapes expectations, risks, rules, and feedback mechanisms that influence behavior over time. And not in the best way. The belief that loss of control is inevitable, for example, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A fearful culture defaults to warning labels, risk messaging, and binary categories and identities: safe or unsafe, healthy or unhealthy, use or disorder, alcoholic or normal drinker. Even thoughtful defenders of alcohol like Slingerland and Hughes accept this framework and then try to carve out exceptions within it.

The conversation between Slingerland and Hughes is a step in the right direction. It reintroduces history, culture, and social function into a debate that has become overly medicalized and mechanical. But it falls short in teasing out the implications of those factors.

If alcohol’s effects are so deeply shaped by context, meaning, and practice, the conversation should not focus on whether alcohol is good or bad or whether people are moderate drinkers or alcoholics. It should focus on the kind of culture and practices we want to build around alcohol and other substances—and whether we trust ourselves to do so.