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'Making the Genius Quicker': A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf (Part Two)
by Peter Cresswell

 
Strong is a king who destroys all, stronger still is a woman who obtains all, but strongest is wine, which drowns reason. Stronger still, however, is Truth and I who speak it.
                                                     Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
 
So, to summarise (from Part One): in the beginning all that existed was savagery and raw steak.  With beer and bread was ushered in civilisation. (Bread and circuses were to come later.)

Then, with the brief exceptions of Classical Greece and Julius Caesar (there go the bread and circuses), for the next several thousands of years human beings would celebrate the arrival of beer  by being variously bladdered, blotto, blathered and blagged (to use just four of the over one-thousand English words for being bevvied). Talk about overdoing a good thing. For centuries, beer was the main source of nutritional value; as a ‘beer soup it was drunk by men and women and children at every meal including breakfast – indeed, in most cases it was the meal’ -- and the world looked like you’d expect it to look after several thousand years of a serious session.

[New scene]: The siege of Vienna[1]. Plague stalks the land. Small shit-laden hovel with filthy leprous woman in foreground. A dead horse crawling with maggots and flung by a Turkish catapult crashes through the roof.
Women (turns to camera): I can’t wait for the Renaissance!

Two things happened to effect the Renaissance: after a millennia-and-a-half of drinking, a few scholars sobered up long enough to begin reading what those Classical Greeks had been banging on about. “Hey, this is good stuff!” they instantly hallelujahed. Artists and popes agreed, and celebrated by producing and commissioning (and -- in the case of the popes -- enacting) some of the finest erotica the world has ever seen. But the world didn’t see it: it still took several centuries and the invention of Gutenberg for the art and thought of the Renaissance to make a general impact.

It took one more thing – it needed the rest of the population to sober up for a moment to read and savour what the printing presses produced. What it took, in a word, was coffee.

From out of Islam came the great redeemer. When the Turks in 1529 left behind a few bags of their coffee at their failed siege of Vienna, we suddenly knew what to do when in the grip of a hangover, and our fuzzy brains began working again. Naturally, men began writing eulogies to the arrival of this exotic new intoxicant: 
When the sweet poison of the Treacherous Grape[2]
Had acted on the world a general rape; …
Coffee arrives, that grave and wholesome Liquor
That heals the stomach and makes the genius quicker.
 Coffee was the Great Redeemer:
It is a panacea…It dries the cold humours, dispels wind, strengthens the liver, it is the sovereign cure for hydropsy and scabies, it restores the heart, relives bellyache. Its steam in fact is recommended for fluxions of the eyes, buzzing in the ears, catarrh, rheum or heaviness of the nose, as you will.[3]

Coffee was great; coffee was suddenly it; coffee produced a new kind of man, Homo coffea, and with it a new society opposed to the excesses of the past, one in which reason was no longer drowned:
The massive, heavy body types of seventeenth-century paintings had their physiological explanation in high beer and beer-soup consumption… The insertion of coffee achieved chemically what the Protestants sought to fulfil spiritually [by] ‘drying’ up the beer-soaked bums and replacing them with ‘rationalistic, forward-looking bodies’ typical of the lean cynics of the nineteenth-century.[4]

People became sober and serious; thought and wit and rationality became valued; and business picked up as people stopped shooting each other. The popular pastime of besieging each other’s cities stopped -- the Thirty Years War came to an end -- and the population began instead desperately seeking overseas supplies of this wonder drug. With coffee addiction came the immediate necessity of large scale foreign trade to keep the addiction fed: such was the beginning of the noble tradition of globalisation that Starbucks celebrates to this day. Coffee at once energised the brains of entrepreneur’s and gave them a goal: more coffee!

As Ayn Rand observed, animals survive by adapting themselves to their environment while humans flourish by adapting their environment to themselves. For too long people had concluded that all foods aside from beer quickly ‘go off’ so best just sup up and stay stoated. Although coffee itself didn’t replace the nutritional value that beer then provided, what it did do was sober people up enough to begin inventing ways of preserving foods, producing packaging and so making of food (and life) the man-made delight it had never been before. We today are the hearty beneficiaries of those sober and serious producers.
 
Western civilisation rightly fell in love with coffee and the enlightenment it ushered in. Historians were so excited they capitalised the era: coffee ushered in The Age of Enlightenment. Western civilisation was again transformed, and in the coffee-houses of Europe two revolutions were being planned, and executed.

To be continued ...  
 

[1] Yes, I know, the dates don’t quite match. Don’t interrupt. But if you can remember from where this scene originates I’d love to be reminded.
[2] Our anonymous author clearly couldn’t find a word to rhyme with ‘hops’ so chose wine as his target. The point remains the same. And stop interrupting.
[3] The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco
[4] Tastes of Paradise : A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, Wolfgang Schivelbusch [I swear I did not make that name up!]
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