Page 94 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

name was Leon Greenberg. He said to me, ‘Hey, you spin a good yarn. But you couldn’t really have
drunk that stuff.’ And he needled me just enough that he knew he would get a response. So I said,
‘You want me to drink it? I have a bottle.’ So one Saturday I drank some under controlled
conditions. He was taking blood samples every twenty minutes, and, sure enough, I did drink it, the
way I said I’d drunk it.”
Greenberg had an ambulance ready to take Heath home. But Heath decided to walk. Anna was
waiting up for him in the third-floor walkup they rented in an old fraternity house. “I was hanging
out the window waiting for him, and there’s the ambulance driving along the street, very slowly, and
next to it is Dwight. He waves, and he looks fine. Then he walks up the three flights of stairs and
says, ‘Ahh, I’m drunk,’ and falls flat on his face. He was out for three hours.”
Here we have a community of people, in a poor and undeveloped part of the world, who hold
drinking parties with 180-proof alcohol every weekend, from Saturday night until Monday morning.
The Camba must have paid dearly for their excesses, right? Wrong.
“There was no social pathology—none,” Dwight Heath said. “No arguments, no disputes, no
sexual aggression, no verbal aggression. There was pleasant conversation or silence.” He went on:
“The drinking didn’t interfere with work.…It didn’t bring in the police. And there was no
alcoholism either.”
Heath wrote up his findings in a now-famous article for the Quarterly Journal of Studies on
Alcohol. In the years that followed, countless other anthropologists chimed in to report the same
thing. Alcohol sometimes led people to raise their voices and fight and say things they would
otherwise regret. But a lot of other times, it didn’t. The Aztec called pulque—the traditional
alcoholic beverage of central Mexico—“four hundred rabbits” because of the seemingly infinite
variety of behaviors it could create. Anthropologist Mac Marshall traveled to the South Pacific
island of Truk and found that, for young men there, drunkenness created aggression and mayhem.
But when the islanders reached their mid-thirties, it had the opposite effect.
In Oaxaca, Mexico, the Mixe Indians were known to engage in wild fistfights when drunk. But
when anthropologist Ralph Beals started watching the fights, they didn’t seem out of control at all.
They seemed as though they all followed the same script:
Although I probably saw several hundred fights, I saw no weapon used, although nearly all men
carried machetes and many carried rifles. Most fights start with a drunken quarrel. When the
pitch of voices reaches a certain point, everyone expects a fight. The men hold out their weapons
to the onlookers, and then begin to fight with their fists, swinging wildly until one falls down, [at
which point] the victor helps his opponent to his feet and usually they embrace each other.
None of this makes sense. Alcohol is a powerful drug. It disinhibits. It breaks down the set of
constraints that hold our behavior in check. That’s why it doesn’t seem surprising that drunkenness
is so overwhelmingly linked with violence, car accidents, and sexual assault.
But if the Camba’s drinking bouts had so few social side effects, and if the Mixe Indians of
Mexico seem to be following a script even during their drunken brawls, then our perception of
alcohol as a disinhibiting agent can’t be right. It must be something else. Dwight and Anna Heath’s
experience in Bolivia set in motion a complete rethinking of our understanding of intoxication.
Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. They think of it as
an agent of myopia.

5.

The myopia theory was first suggested by psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs, and
what they meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental
fields of vision. It creates, in their words, “a state of shortsightedness in which superficially
understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and
emotion.” Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the
background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and more cognitively
demanding, longer-term considerations fade away.