A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

  But the clearest impact drinking had on Alexander’s life achievements came during the occupation of Persepolis, the former capitol of the Persian Empire and one of the greatest cities on earth at the time. Alexander initially wanted to leave the royal palace intact. But during the victory feast, he and his men got rip-roaring drunk. Drunk enough that when one of the partygoers suggested lighting the whole damn thing on fire, Alexander’s first instinct was to start handing out torches.

  By his early thirties, Alexander ruled over the largest empire on earth. He died before his forces could conquer all of India, an invasion with the potential to change the entire history of curry, and also the world. The Macedonian king fell sick at a feast; after chugging a glass of wine he clutched his side in agony, and claimed his liver felt like it had taken an arrow.

  Most historians suspect that typhoid is what finally did Alexander in, days later. But his years of drinking and his shitty alcoholic’s immune system certainly helped typhoid do the job.

  History is full of drunken conquerors: Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were both Don Draper–level alcoholics. But the exact influence of alcohol on the decision-making process of any given drunken world leader isn’t always easy to parse out, especially if he was drunk throughout his reign.

  One of the few clear examples of alcohol changing the course of world history comes from Russia. According to the Primary Chronicle (literally the only written history of the Kievan Rus, a.k.a. proto-Russians, in this period), Prince Vladimir of Kiev, a pagan, started shopping for a new religion around 988 CE. Bulgarian Muslims made a strong case, promising him “women and indulgence,” but also admitting that the Russians would have to quit drinking alcohol if they were going to convert to Islam.

  Prince Vladimir didn’t even consider the possibility.

  “Drinking,” said he, “is the joy of the Russes. We cannot exist without that pleasure.”

  Prince Vladimir opted to join the Christian rather than the Muslim world. There’s no way to know just how different human history would’ve been with an Islamic Russia. But we can pretty safely assume the global popularity of vodka would’ve taken a hit.

  That’s not the last time alcoholism and Russia collided to change history. Joseph Stalin was a famous alcoholic, particularly during World War II. The only thing he and British prime minister Winston Churchill had in common was a desperately unhealthy habit. Both men drank basically all day, every day, while piloting their ships of state through the bloodiest, most violent conflict in human history.

  They didn’t get along at all, due in part to Stalin’s status as a power-hungry mass murderer, and to the fact that fucking nobody got along with Winston Churchill. In 1942, the pair met in Moscow to try and iron out some of their disagreements and thus facilitate the important work of killing Nazis.

  It didn’t go well.

  Not at first, that is. Both men met for two days of negotiations, with Stalin backpedaling and arguing every step of the way. By the last night of the mission, things seemed hopeless. An awful dinner party passed, and it looked as if the two would part at worse odds than ever before.

  Then Churchill and Stalin started drinking. They kept it up for hours, and around one A.M. the prime minister sent for his secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, who arrived at the party in medias res and later wrote about what he saw:

  There I found Winston and Stalin, and Molotov who had joined them, sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a sucking pig, and innumerable bottles.

  The two world leaders managed to drink their way to some sort of common ground. The party didn’t end until three in the morning, by which time the mood was “merry as a marriage-bell.” It’s hard to tie the meeting to a specific policy or plan, but Stalin and Churchill seem to have valued it as an allied “team-building” exercise—like a ropes course, but with all of human civilization riding on whether or not they did the trust fall.

  Alcohol brought Churchill and Stalin together, and in doing so it may have played a small role in saving Western civilization from Nazism. But alcohol has also played its role in the end of civilizations, including the great Wari Empire of South America.

  Wari: The Empire That Ended with a Drinking Binge

  The Wari Empire controlled a large chunk of South America’s western coast, located mainly in what’s now Peru, from about 600 to 1100 CE. In a lot of ways it was your traditional empire, conquering any nation that wouldn’t bend a knee to it, brutally suppressing local traditions—basically, all the different reasons no “empire” in any movie is ever the good guys.

  But the Wari were different from most empires in one critical way: They threw the absolute best parties.

  I’m talking about a level of drinking that would make Saint Patrick crap his festive shamrock-embroidered drawers. The Wari gathered en masse to dance and to drink boggling quantities of their traditional beer, chicha. They’d often consume more than three gallons of beer in a single sitting. Even if we’re talking about the ancient equivalent of Miller High Life, that’s a heroic amount of alcohol. The Wari drank like frat boys, right down to their boozing accoutrements: bizarre, half-gallon cups called keros, some of which were shaped like human feet.

  Tavia Morra

  Yes, those Las Vegas kiosks selling giant plastic boots full of liquor are actually part of an ancient tradition.

  The Wari built large, orderly cities, giant defensive citadels, and mountains of exquisite art in honor of their gods. But every great empire did that. What made the Wari special, at least in the red-rimmed eyes of this author, were their breweries. These enormous wooden structures contained twenty or more ceramic brew vats, each twenty-five to thirty-five gallons in size. In a day, one of these titanic beer shrines could serve up to five hundred gallons of chicha.

  We don’t know much about gender relations in the ancient Wari Empire. Most of their records were kept on khipu, an early Mesoamerican form of recording information with elaborate rope knots. Sadly, most khipu rotted away long before the first archaeologist was born. But what evidence we have from their ruins suggests that the vast Wari beer industry was operated entirely by women.

  The Wari drank for a lot of the regular reasons: religious celebration, the changing of the seasons, a crippling street-vomit shortage. But they also used beer as a diplomatic tool, inviting their rivals, including the neighboring Tiwanaku, over for epic drinking binges. These international celebrations must’ve forged a few friendships, but they also gave the Wari an opportunity to show off their wealth and organization. The intended message was, “We’re happy brewing beer right now, but if you piss us off we’ll start focusing on wrecking your day.”

  The Wari started dying out somewhere around the year 1100. We know the Tiwanaku collapsed around 1000, possibly setting off a chain reaction that doomed the Wari. It’s also possible they fell victim first to whatever eventually broke the Wari. We don’t know why the Wari Empire fell. But thanks to scientists from the University of Florida and the Field Museum in Chicago, we do know how it fell: in a giant drunken party.

  Excavations in the Wari city of Baúl have shown that the great city brewery, and much of the city itself, was destroyed in a gigantic ritual fire at the end of the very last Wari drinking party. As the brewery and the surrounding feasting house crumbled, the Wari nobles dropped their boot-shaped half-gallon beer steins in the fire, symbolically ending their empire with the closest thing any historical record has to a mic drop.

  Bidding farewell to your entire civilization with an epic drinking binge is one of those things that sounds impossibly badass on the surface. But it also doesn’t make much sense. Why would a people on their last legs, forced to abandon their home, waste critical resources on one last awesome party? History will never have the full answer to that question. But this Song of Booze and Fire makes a lot more sense when you understand . . .

  Chicha: The Beer T
hat Held Mesoamerica Together

  Various types of chicha were, and still are, popular across South and Central America. The Wari made theirs with pink peppercorn, the berry of the Schinus molle plant. Their rivals the Tiwanaku used corn. Most ancient Mesoamericans used corn, or some other starchy plant like yucca. The Wari probably used molle for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it made a stronger beer. But choosing a unique beer also made a major political statement.

  See, chicha isn’t like regular beer. In ancient Mesoamerica it was made both in government breweries and in households by citizens—mostly women—chewing up and spitting out the key ingredient. Amylase, an enzyme in human spit, converts unfermentable plant starches into fermentable sugars. Introduce yeast and water to wads of spit-up plant matter, and within a couple of days you’ll have beer. There are many, many different chicha recipes in the world, but the basics are the same for all of them. (You can read more about chicha in Justin Jennings’s 2004 paper, “La Chichera y El Patron.”)

  Chicha was a beer by the people, and quite literally of the people. And no great empire rose to power in Mesoamerica without a great beer behind it. Empires like the Wari and the Inca spread their culture and word of their power by hosting feasts and drinking parties for rivals and subject peoples alike.

  In Andean society, drunken feasts took on an even more critical role: They were the foundation of the entire economy. In an era before money was really relevant to most of the subsistence-farming populace, workers were often paid for their hard labor with elaborate feasts. Chicha was a critical part of this system of reciprocity, and so an empire like the Inca could build great cities and monuments only if it kept the beer flowing.

  You can’t really age chicha; once it’s made, you’ve got a few days before it starts to go bad. This meant brewing was a full-time, year-round occupation. And in most of Mesoamerica, the beer industry was dominated by women. Ladyspit was renowned for making the very best chicha. The Incans even had a special class of brewers, called aqllas, or “chosen women.” The chosen women were basically beer-brewing royal nuns. Most of them were related to the Incan ruler, and they all swore vows of chastity.

  It takes a very specific type of person to give up sex for the privilege of having hundreds of people drink her spit. But the central role chicha played in public life meant these women would’ve been very highly regarded. Their chicha represented the Incan state at public holidays and state functions. Visiting emperors and kings got drunk off the aqllas’ spit.

  You’ve got to admit, that’s pretty cool.

  Experiment: Does Ladyspit Make Better Beer?

  I’m sure you’re all taken with the same burning question that hit me as soon as I started reading about chicha: Why make it a girls-only affair?

  I asked that question of Dr. Brian Hayden, beer archaeologist and professor at Simon Fraser University. He offered one fairly tame explanation for the girls-only brewclub:

  In a lot of feasts it’s men who do the butchering, and often the cooking of meat. It could be that preparation for brewing was just so labor intensive they wanted to offload it on women.

  But he also offered a much more exciting hypothesis, that there might be “some sort of difference in the enzymes in women’s saliva, as opposed to men’s.” So probably sexism, but maybe because women’s spit makes the best beer? That maybe was all I needed to justify another experiment. You can re-create my work if you grab male and female friends and . . .

  Ingredients

  2 one-gallon glass jugs, either from a brew store or because you drink that much Carlo Rossi wine

  2 airlocks

  About ½ pound corn flour, ground corn, cornmeal, etc.

  2 packets yeast

  2 spit bowls

  Directions

  Split into groups of girls and boys. Each gender gets a spit bowl and a quarter pound of corn flour, ideally.

  This will not be easy. Pop a generous spoonful of corn flour in your mouth and start chewing. Try to keep each corn wad at the front of your mouth, to avoid swallowing any and to assure maximum saturation. It should come out as a thick gooey puck, but a sludgy paste will probably be more common for novice masticators.

  WARNING: Chewing this much corn flower suuucks, and two out of four experimenters actually wound up bleeding. Since the girl and boy spit jugs wound up with roughly equal amounts of blood, I decided the experiment was still valid.

  Once each side has chewed up a quarter pound (or more, if you’re crazy), pour or funnel the cornspit into its respective gallon jugs. Make sure to label which one contains the boy spit, and which contains the girl spit! Fill each jug about halfway up with water.

  Last, drop in the yeast, seal the airlock, shake it up and let your budding chicha sit for at least forty-eight hours.

  We went about our lives for the next forty-eight hours, every now and again glancing at the slightly fizzy jugs of yellow bloodcornspit sitting in our kitchen.

  Two days later I warily decanted the first two glasses of our chicha. A sour, yeasty smell was immediately obvious. The beer itself was better: sour, a little fizzy. There did seem to be a gender difference: The male chicha was noticeably more sour and yeasty tasting. The girlspit version was considerably milder. If I had to drink gallons of one or the other, I’d choose the smoother flavor of ladyspit beer. Perhaps it was as simple as that for the ancient Mesoamericans.

  Those results were intriguing, but I decided it was important to follow up and see if I could taste differences in girlspit beer made with Schinus molle, not corn, as the active ingredient. I ordered a pound of dried red peppercorns off sweet lady Internet and gathered a larger group of volunteers: six men, and three women. The gender disparity meant the females wound up chewing many more peppercorns per person than the men. (Major props to K for chewing the very most.)

  Once the chicha was ready, three days later, a smaller group convened to actually drink the resulting beverage. Six people, four men and two women, were subjected to a blind taste test and quizzed on which beer they preferred. Four out of six participants (three male, one female) preferred the girlspit, noting it was “more effervescent” and had an altogether milder taste than the boys’ variety.

  These tests should be far from the last word on the subject; if some beer archaeologists want to put together a larger study using more traditional methods, I wish them the best of luck in finding funding. I think we can all agree this is exactly the sort of question federal science grants exist to help us answer.

  Until that happens, I’m a firm backer of the “girlspit just tastes better” theory.

  Let’s talk about dicks for a moment. Not the crude colloquialism for a man’s reproductive organ, but the crude colloquialism for people who behave poorly, and who generally lack fucks-given for the feelings of others. These are the people who pick drunken fights for the sheer joy of being an aggressive asshole in public, or who take pictures of their abs in the mirror and post them on Facebook because, obviously, everyone wants to see that. They are the Internet trolls who spend every free moment of their time insulting people they’ll never meet. They are people for whom sarcasm is a reflex, and the rest of the world is just a target.

  These dicks, and legions of their kin, are a plague on the modern age. When the promise of the Internet as a global communication tool first became clear, many of us thought it might herald the dawning of a new era of human discourse. People would be able to spread their ideas, to connect and understand one another on a level never before possible. That’s all been true, but we utterly failed to anticipate the vast rainbow of ugliness the Internet would bring into being. The Internet’s early proponents dreamed of things like YouTube, but not in their darkest, Adderall-crash nightmares did they imagine the racism and misogyny of a YouTube comments section.

  Usenet is the great-grandfather of modern social media. It was established in 1980 as a series of “
newsgroups” in which people across the world could discuss whatever they wanted with whoever happened to have Internet access. For the nerds of the eighties and early nineties, Usenet was a mixture of Reddit, Facebook, and Gmail. It was the very first open way for people to talk about whatever they wanted with strangers from around the world.

  “Open” might be too strong a term. Internet access didn’t start to become common until the mid-nineties. For more than a decade, the vast majority of people on Usenet had Internet access either through their jobs or through the computer labs at their universities. Personal home connections were uncommon, and limited to only the wealthy geeks of Silicon Valley or the most bearded and dedicated of programmers. New users came to Usenet in a trickle, not the gushing spigot that floods our Internet today. In 1985 there were 1,300 newsgroups on Usenet. In 2014, that many webpages were created every two and a half minutes.

  In Usenet’s heyday the infusion of newbies was much more manageable, and it came in predictable waves. The largest came every year in September when new classes’ worth of freshmen came to college and logged on for the first time. Each September was a grueling period of rude newbies treating Usenet’s discussion threads as their own personal bathroom walls, before being reprimanded and gradually beaten into compliance by the hammer of public shame. It was a predictable cycle that led to a relatively well-behaved digital culture.

  And then came AOL.

  In 1993, the floodgates opened to a whole new generation of Internet users. Now anyone with a few bucks to spare and no pressing need to make phone calls could get online and start posting to Usenet. A vast swarm of uncultured techno-barbarians spilled over the walls of Usenet, too numerous for the core of veteran users to tame and educate. Trolls, now camouflaged by the anonymity of the horde, became impossible to exile or shun into submission.