Joe Rogan guest Michael Pollan notes that caffeine was unknown in Europe until the 1650s, when coffee, tea and chocolate all arrived:
“Before caffeine, it was a very different world, and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all the time. People drank morning, noon and night because it was safer than water.” They gave kids hard cider for breakfast!
So a drug comes on the market that encourages sober, linear thought, and shortly after that the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution ensue.
Food (or drink) for thought…
Tags: caffeine, Industrial Revolution, Joe Rogan, Michael Pollan, The Enlightenment, video
Then why wasn’t the Enlightenment a Native American phenomenon?
Tea and coffee both required boiling water as part of their preparation. Boiling water kills bacteria and any other micro-organisms in the water, thus making it safe to drink. The neurological effects of caffeine might well have been incidental to the benefit of having a safe drink that didn’t actively kill brain cells.
Coffee only existed in Central and South America, which were largely preliterate civilizations. Plus they lacked the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman intellectual underpinnings of western civilization.
The video mentions the water-boiling point.
Err… coffee is native to Ethiopia, which, despite its problems in recent centuries, has been literate and Christian for a very, very long time.
This is in reference to the “Native American” comment.
Coffee originated in the area around Ethiopia and Yemen. Chocolate originates in the Yucatan though. Tea originates in Asia.
Lawrence, I think it’s a bit rich to talk about “Judeo-Christian” underpinnings in this context, since the Enlightenment had to massively repudiate those in order to be the Enlightenment.
You live after the Enlightenment, so it’s not surprising that you don’t grasp what an evil and terrible thing Christianity was before Christians developed a retrospective sense of shame about what they’d been up to for the previous thousand years and carefully sanitized their history.
Voltaire called it “l’infame” for good reason.
Lawrence Person: Coffee came from east Africa – Ethopia. Was spread to the rest of the world by the Arabs and then Europeans.
Lawrence, I think it’s a bit rich to talk about “Judeo-Christian” underpinnings in this context, since the Enlightenment had to massively repudiate those in order to be the Enlightenment.
You live after the Enlightenment, so it’s not surprising that you don’t grasp what an evil and terrible thing Christianity was before Christians developed a retrospective sense of shame about what they’d been up to for the previous thousand years and carefully sanitized their history.
Voltaire called it “l’infame” for very good reason.
So, if that is true, then why was their no enlightenment in Central and South America?
@Eric, good grief. Your libertarian slip, i,e., fundamental antipathy to Christianity, is showing. Voltaire is not someone to put forward as an authority on anything except cynicism. He was an evil, depraved person. Don’t blame Christianity itself for the unbiblical and immoral accretions of the men running the Roman Catholic Church to the simple and clean faith of the apostolic and early church era, which always quietly endured in such men as Erasmus. I’ve enjoyed your own blog a lot over time for its common sense and good thinking on various subjects, but have had to on occasion filter out this antipathy, which seems to be endemic to libertarian thinking.
@Lawrence, I’ll say “yea” to coffee, tea and chocolate being marvels. But as you note, the Enlightenment came out of a convergence of things only present in Europe. I would add that the Protestant Reformation helped to set the stage for an era of changes in many things, particularly in Northern Europe.
On the other hand, in the U.S., many people did not drink tea or coffee as late as in 10 century (for religious reasons). Of course most cities and towns had access to a very good water. While the people living in the boonies had no access to good water or coffee.
10 century is a misprint: I have meant 19 century, of course.
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Uh, back then people didn’t drink wine and beer all the time because the water was unsafe. They didn’t consider water unsafe unless it looked and/or smelled bad.
They drank beer and wine for breakfast and onwards because they liked the taste and buzz.
Also, in pre-industrial, pre-mechanized societies it didn’t really matter much how buzzed you were.
There may be a correlation, but it strikes me as an oversimplification. Aquinas, Leonardo, and (Heaven help us) even Machiavelli – to cite just a few examples – seem to have done fine without it.