Edward Slingerland > Quotes

“Thinking that you are good can make you bad. Talking about positive behavior can encourage negative behavior. Laozi is clearly on to something when he warns us that consciously trying to be righteous will, in fact, turn us into insufferable hypocrites and that anyone striving to attain virtue is destined to fail.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“Let alone, without the help of or hot cognition, cold cognition is simply paralyzed by choice.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“The conscious mind, ungrounded by the wisdom of the body, is remarkably incapable of taking care of business.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“This work is part of what is now a huge literature on the often harmful effects of rumination and explicit analysis on people’s ability to experience and identify pleasure.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like "effortless action" or spontaneous action.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“When people are asleep, their spirits wander off; when they are awake, their bodies are like an open door, so that everything they touch becomes an entanglement. Day after day they use their minds to stir up trouble; they become boastful, sneaky, secretive. They are consumed with anxiety over trivial matters but remain arrogantly oblivious to the things truly worth fearing. Their words fly from their mouths like crossbow bolts, so sure are they that they know right from wrong. They cling to their positions as though they had sworn an oath, so sure are they of victory. Their gradual decline is like autumn fading into winter—this is how they dwindle day by day. They drown in what they do—you cannot make them turn back. They begin to suffocate, as though sealed up in a box—this is how they decline into senility. And as their minds approach death, nothing can cause them to turn back toward the light.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“Because of the distinctive adaptive challenges we face as a species, we require a way to inject controlled doses of chaos into our lives.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“Intoxication is an antidote to cognitive control, a way to temporarily hamstring that opponent to creativity, cultural openness, and communal bonding.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“In another sense, however, contemporary secularism has new and distinct features, the source of both its strengths and its weaknesses. Its commitment to rationality and evidence, for instance, means that it’s unusually open to modification around the edges, although—as with any value system worth its salt—the core values like human rights or freedom are in principle non-negotiable. The flip side to this openness is a somewhat disorienting minimalism: liberalism is about as stripped down as a value system can be and still function. Most of its injunctions are negative. Do not violate human rights, do not restrict people’s freedom of expression, do not allow the strong to oppress the weak. As long as you are careful to steer clear of committing genocide or being oppressively prejudiced, however, secular liberalism then doesn’t have a lot to say about what you should be doing. Besides vaguely sacred communal rituals such as listening to NPR, reading the New York Times, or buying locally sourced organic vegetables, secular liberals are not given much guidance on how to actually live their lives. And this vacuum has to be filled by something—avoiding human rights abuses still leaves a lot of hours in the day.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive. This is because the problem of choking or freezing up extends”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity

“... work in social psychology has made it clear that cognitive control is a limited resource. When a teacher taps on a dozing student's desk and says: "Pay attention!" it turns out that this is not a metaphor: attention is costly, and if it is "spent" on one task there is less available to spend on another. This phenomenon is known as "ego depletion". ... The moral? Effort is effort, mental or physical.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“People who are in wu-wei has de, typically translated as "virtue," "power," or "charismatic power." De is radiance that others can detect, and it serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity

“are spontaneously generous if forced to make instant decisions but begin to gravitate toward more selfish strategies if given time to think. All of this suggests that honest behavior is governed by automatic mental processes, whereas controlled processes are involved in lying or faking. In other words, effortless, unselfconscious behavior—behavior that is wu-wei—acts like a window into our true character.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“Given that the pre-frontal cortex is a key to our success as a species, consuming any amount of alcohol or other intoxicant seems really stupid.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behavior that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive. This is because the problem of choking or freezing up extends far beyond sports or artistic performance.”
― Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

“Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“For our purposes, the most important thing to note is that this whole kerfuffle serves as a perfect example of how a failure to consider the functional, social benefits of alcohol can seriously skew public debate on the topic. There is no need to quibble around the margins about HDL levels. The most important thing that neo-Prohibitionists and health authorities alike fail to consider in coming down on the side of total abstinence is that the obvious physiological and psychological costs of alcohol must be weighed against their venerable role as an aid to creativity, contentment, and social solidarity. Once we recognize the functional benefits of intoxication—its role in helping humans to adapt to our extreme ecological niche—the argument that we should strive for a completely dry world is difficult to sustain. We saw in Chapter Three how alcohol and”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“This is even more puzzling than the Asian flushing gene’s failure to sweep through the world. As Tomáš Masaryk saw clearly, a culture that spends entire evenings consuming liquid neurotoxins—created at great expense and to the detriment of nutritious food production—should be at an enormous disadvantage compared to cultural groups that eschew intoxicants altogether. Such groups exist, and have for quite some time. Perhaps the most salient example is the Islamic world, which produced Ibn Fadlan. Prohibition was not a feature of the earliest period of Islam, but according to one hadith, or tradition, it was the consequence of a particular dinner at which companions of Mohammed became too inebriated to properly say their prayers. In any case, by the end of the Prophetic era in 632 CE, a complete ban on alcohol was settled Islamic law. It cannot be denied that, in the cultural evolution game, Islam has been extremely successful.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“We also have to reevaluate the historic benefits of intoxication, at both the individual and group level, in light of the unprecedented threats that intoxicants pose in the modern world. The relatively recent innovations of distillation and social isolation entirely change intoxicants’ balance on the razor’s edge between order and chaos, creating novel dangers that we only dimly appreciate.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“One of the many gifts attributed to Dionysus by the Greeks was the power of transformation. He could turn himself into an animal, and he was the god who granted the unfortunate King Midas the power to turn anything he touched into gold. As the god of intoxication, he could turn sane people mad. Or, even more impressively, he could transform task-focused, suspicious, aggressive, and fiercely independent primates into relaxed, creative, and trusting social beings. Let’s now look at how, across the world and throughout history, humans have turned to Dionysus for help when confronting the challenge inherent to being a creative, cultural, and communal ape. A”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“We cannot properly grasp the dynamics of human social life unless we understand the role that intoxicants have played in making civilization possible.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“If we think of alcohol, for instance, as disabling negative barriers to cooperation (lying, suspicion, cheating), we have to also see its positive role in building affiliative, pair bond–like emotional ties between members of the group through the stimulation of endorphins and serotonin.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“Humans have adopted such an extreme form of the peak-late strategy because, as a species, we have come to inhabit an equally extreme ecological niche. The main demands imposed upon us by the odd, crowded cave to which we have adapted can be summed up with what I’ll call the Three Cs: we are required to be creative, cultural, and communal. The demands of the Three Cs make us, like the helpless, blind, altricial crow chicks, more vulnerable than robust and less complicated animals. For instance: sharks. You’d never want to put a four-year-old human up against a four-year-old shark. Yet it remains the fact that our weak, mewling infants grow into relative masters of the universe, putting sharks in aquariums, eating their fins in soups, and now, unfortunately, driving them to extinction in many regions of the world.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“As countless myths and children’s stories recount, however, childlike playfulness, something we uniquely crave among primates, is eventually lost. We relish some banter with the hot dog vendor, but keep it short because we’re late for work. As adults, the childish drive to meander, examine boogers, and play becomes subordinated to productive routine. Get up, dress, commute, work, eat, sleep, repeat. This is the realm of the PFC, that center of executive control, and it is no accident that its maturation corresponds to an increased ability to stay on task, delay gratification, and subordinate emotions and desires to abstract reason and the achievement of practical goals.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“One such trait is precisely this human ability to ferret out dishonesty. Although we take it for granted that we can immediately tell that that hot dog vendor seems a bit shifty, or that our child is lying about having walked the dog, a chimpanzee would be astounded by our mind-reading capacities—this would all seem like magic to them. Chimps seem capable of rudimentary mind-state signaling,56 but our ability to transmit an enormous bandwidth of thoughts, emotions, and character traits to one another through a slight raise of an eyebrow, tone of voice, or twitch of the mouth is absolutely unmatched in the animal world. It bears all of the hallmarks of being an extreme trait driven by an evolutionary arms race.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“After a glass or two, your attention is narrowed to only the immediate surroundings. You meander unpredictably, more free to follow wherever the conversation might take you. You feel happy and unconcerned about future consequences. Your motor skills are rubbish. On the other hand, if you speak a second language, you might find yourself suddenly a bit more confident and fluent. In other words, you are a child again, with all of the benefits and costs that come with stunting the PFC.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“55 The expansion of cultures can also be tracked by following the waft of alcohol. Commenting on the settling of the American frontier, Mark Twain famously characterized whiskey as the “earliest pioneer of civilization,” ahead of the railway, newspaper, and missionary.56 By far the most technologically advanced and valuable artifacts found in early European settlements in the New World were copper stills, imported at great cost and worth more than their weight in gold.57 As the writer Michael Pollan has argued, Johnny Appleseed, whom American mythology now portrays as intent on spreading the gift of wholesome, vitamin-filled apples to hungry settlers, was in fact “the American Dionysus,” bringing badly needed alcohol to the frontier. Johnny’s apples, so desperately sought out by American homesteaders, were not meant to be eaten at the table, but rather used to make cider and “applejack” liquor.58”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“This book argues that, far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

“At best, we base our thinking on disconnected facts or snippets of scientific knowledge uninformed by a broader evolutionary perspective.”
― Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization