Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure. Paul Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ Drunkenness came to be viewed not as a god-given state, but as a shameful surrender to animal instincts. We shall return in chapter 13 to the uneasy relationship between the world’s main monotheistic religions and the pursuit of pleasure.

      Despite the hardening of religious disapproval, drunken rituals continued to play a significant part in communal life in many parts of the world. In medieval England, villages held festivals in which revellers were expected to drink themselves into oblivion for days at a time. Judging by any English town centre on a Friday or Saturday night, not much has changed. Alcohol-induced oblivion has clearly retained its mass appeal. For many present-day drinkers, the prime objective of a good night out is still to get completely smashed (or annihilated, arseholed, bladdered, blitzed, blootered, bombed, bowsered, canned, guttered, hammered, lashed, legless, mullahed, obliterated, paralytic, pie-eyed, pissed, plastered, rat-arsed, scuttered, shit-faced, slaughtered, sloshed, sozzled, stewed, stinking, thrashed, trolleyed or wrecked, to use just some of the synonyms). The fact that the English language has well over a hundred different words to convey the concept of ‘drunk’ says something about our deep attachment to this state.⁹

      Not all cultures regard alcohol as primarily a tool for getting steaming drunk. In many parts of Europe the predominant drinking culture is one of extracting maximum pleasure from that warm, buzzy state that lies roughly midway between stone-cold sober and out of your skull. For instance, several million people congregate each year at the Munich Oktoberfest, the world’s most popular annual festival, where they consume many millions of litres of foaming beer and countless kilometres of sausage. Drunkenness certainly does occur, but getting drunk is not the main reason why most people go there. The aim of most Oktoberfest revellers is to achieve a state of Gemütlichkeit, for which the nearest English translation is something like ‘a state of feeling snug, cosy and pleasant’. The legendary Soho drinker Jeffrey Bernard wrote that he had never really enjoyed being drunk; it was the process of getting there that appealed to him – particularly the halfway stage, which in his case was invariably short-lived. Other languages have words to signify this pleasant intermediate state. In Danish it is hygge; in Spanish it is la chispa. But English-speakers have little in their vocabulary to cover the extensive territory between the two extremes of sober and legless.

      We like alcohol and other recreational drugs because they make us feel nice. But we are also drawn to them because they make us feel different. The kick of intoxication is not only about feeling good: it can also be about taking a holiday from normality and temporarily seeing life from an altered perspective. As Louis Lewin put it, ‘A man must sometimes take a rest from his memory.’

      Recreational drugs have long been used for stimulating creativity. The nineteenth century witnessed a vogue for experimenting with psychoactive drugs as tools for exploring the inner workings of the mind and unleashing its creative potential. Among the many intellectuals to pursue this approach was Charles Baudelaire, who was inspired by the drug-fuelled works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey to write Les Paradis Artificiels (Artificial Paradises). In it, Baudelaire relates how he and his friends used opium and hashish to help them break into unexplored realms of the human imagination and view the world in novel ways. Their goal was nothing less than to ‘conquer Paradise at a stroke’. Baudelaire died in 1867, ruined by his drug use and addicted to opium. The artistic tradition of using drugs to aid creativity continued in the next century. Among the best-known products are Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception and its sequel Heaven and Hell. They were woven from Huxley’s own experiences in the 1950s with mescaline, a hallucinogen derived from the peyote cactus.¹⁰

      Alcohol is also capable of stimulating creativity, up to a point. The ranks of creative writers and poets have famously been stuffed with boozers too numerous to mention. However, one piece of research suggests that alcohol may in fact be more effective at enhancing the creativity of individuals who are normally uncreative. Researchers found that a moderately large dose of alcohol improved the verbal creativity of men and women who were not very creative when sober, but tended to impair the performance of those who did well when sober. One way in which alcohol clearly does assist creativity is by reducing social inhibitions and releasing the shackles of conventionality. As William James observed, ‘Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the greatest votary of the Yes function in man.’

      Humanity’s longstanding attraction to drunkenness and other altered states of consciousness has led some scientists to conclude that it is deeply ingrained in our biological makeup. Indeed, the American psycho-pharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel has argued that the desire for intoxication is one of four basic drives governing human behaviour – the others being hunger, thirst and sex.¹¹ Siegel’s research on how drugs affect humans and other animals convinced him that an ‘intoxication drive’ is a primary motivational force. The function of this drive, he believes, is to help maintain mental health through self-medication. According to Siegel, intoxicating drugs are a form of medicine: when we are stressed, anxious or in pain, we seek out drugs that give us some relief; and when we are tired or depressed, we seek out stimulants to lift our mood.

      Other animals do the same, if given the opportunity. Historical descriptions of opium dens refer to mice, rats and birds sniffing the intoxicating smoke and nibbling leftover scraps of opium. Louis Lewin observed that ‘cats, dogs and monkeys inhale the smoke which their master expels from his opium-pipe, and it is said that monkeys consume the opium which oozes from the bamboo pipe’. The French writer and opium addict Jean Cocteau similarly described how flies, lizards, mice, cockroaches and spiders would gather round the opium-smoker, forming a ‘circle in ecstasy’.

      Properly conducted scientific experiments have confirmed that many species of mammals, fish and reptiles will learn to seek out and consume psychoactive drugs. When monkeys, apes, rats, cats or dogs are given free rein to self-administer drugs under laboratory conditions, they generally prefer the same drugs as humans, including alcohol, nicotine, opium, cannabis, cocaine, ether and nitrous oxide. Like humans, they will voluntarily dose themselves with recreational intoxicants, while showing little interest in psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants. And, just like us, they will work very hard to obtain the most pleasurable and addictive recreational drugs, especially cocaine. In laboratory experiments, some monkeys have willingly pressed a lever more than 12,000 times to obtain a single injection of cocaine.

      Children also display a natural propensity to experiment with altered states of consciousness. They normally achieve this without the aid of recreational drugs, using age-old techniques such as hyperventilation or spinning around to induce dizziness. Children as young as three or four will spontaneously discover the pleasures of twirling themselves into a giddy daze or hyperventilating until they almost faint. However, children soon turn into adolescents, who tend to prefer their intoxication in a chemical form such as alcohol. More than half of all 11–15-year-olds in England have drunk alcohol and more than one in five have used it within the past week.¹²

      Children’s experimentation with making themselves feel different, whether by hyperventilating or spinning around, may be a reflection of their deeper propensity to play. We are all born with an instinct to play, so that we can learn about the world around us and how to deal with it. Play behaviour is a fundamental characteristic of young humans and young animals of other species. Play is a form of safe simulation, in which the young individual can explore the world and develop their physical and mental capabilities, whilst remaining insulated from the risks that would arise from ‘serious’ versions of the same behaviour. For example, young animals play at fighting each other, or catching prey, during a stage in their development when real fighting or real hunting would be dangerous. By playing in this way, they acquire crucial physical and social skills they will need in later life. We humans play mentally as well as physically. Our attraction to temporarily СКАЧАТЬ