In his On Deep History and the Brain, historian Daniel L. Smail suggested that technologies and dedicated socio-economic systems develop around specific psychotropic practices, that is, practices which piggyback our neuroendocrine system to deliver a rewarding, addictive experience (Smail 2008). According to Smail, the period that ranges from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the imperial coda of the French Revolution (1815) stands out as a pivotal moment in the “invention” of a distinctly modern mass economy of psychotropic products and practices.
Recalling an excerpt from German historian August L. Schlözer (1735-1809), Smail reports that “‘the discovery of spirits, the arrival of tobacco, sugar, coffee and tea in Europe have brought about revolutions just as great as, if not greater than, the defeat of the Invincible Armada, the wars of the Spanish Succession, the Paris Peace, etc.’ To these”, Smail notes,
“one can add other characteristic products of the long eighteenth century that have psychotropic consequences, including novels and pornographic literature, as well as a new range of practices, such as consumption patterns, spectacularly gruesome executions, and even the gossip-enabling environment of salons and cafés, that can be seen as mood altering” (Smail 2008: 179-180).
To be clear: all of these ‘mood-altering’ activities already existed earlier, albeit in different forms. Martial’s Epigrams (86-103 CE) and Pietro Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi (1526) are examples of previous licentious literature; unfortunately, gruesome executions were commonplace, from Aztec heart removal in public religious rituals to the horrible public tortures of modern Europe; and gossip in its various forms is so cross-culturally and globally ingrained in both our everyday lives and deep history as a species that it might well have provided our ancestors with the evolutionarily adaptive edge to boost our in-group pro-sociality beyond the social constraints of primate grooming (Dunbar 2004).
Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to say that, while mood-altering activities are to be found in every human society, each historical period has modulated these pan-human tendencies into specific neurohistorical coordinates. A matter of degrees and not of kinds, if you will.
Modernity, however, brought about stronger psychotropic experiences for almost everyone. For instance, while wine and beer had been known since prehistory, spirits are a distinctly modern invention, as is coffee. Equally modern is the diastratic and capillary diffusion of their consumption. Indeed, the modern era, according to Smail, was characterized by the globalized volume of both supply and demand and the diffusion of psychotropic activities to societies as a whole – and not just to certain classes. If horror as a narrative thrill had always found its way into human storytelling, haunting the supernatural afterlife of worldwide believers to remind them constantly of the ultimate cost of defective, non-cooperative, or anti-social behaviours (Clasen 2017), a set of specifically modern features concurred to give horror its social and cultural relevance:
the invention of the press and dedicated literary genres;
the existence of a specific market for such products;
the social extension of opportunities for leisure;
most of all, the invention of the modern cinematic experience.
We are primates, and as such we are “quintessentially visual animals” (Gould 2001). Once some sort of sufficiently convincing visual projection was invented, horror hit the ground running. From 19th-century magic lantern ghost shows to contemporary 3D and IMAX technology, the moving pictures have provided horror with its natural habitat - our retinas (Barber 1989; Vermeir 2005).
Notes
Please note that this post was originally written in (pre-pandemic) March 2019.
Refs.
Barber, X. Theodore (1989). “Phantasmagorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Ghost Show in Nineteenth-Century America.” Film History 3(2): 73-86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814933
Clasen, Mathias (2017). Why Horror Seduces. Oxford: oxford University Press.
Dunbar, Robin I.M. (2004). “Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective.” Review of General Psychology 8(2): 100-110. https://doi.org/10.1037%2F1089-2680.8.2.100
Gould, S. J. (2001). “Reconstructing (and Deconstructing) the Past.” In S.J. Gould (ed.), The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, 6-21. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Smail, Daniel. L. (2008). On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Vermeir, Koen (2005). “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660-1700): On Analogical Demonstration and the Visualization of the Invisible.” The British Journal for the History of Science 38(2): 127-159. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4028694