Linking four basic human desires (sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control) with plants that satisfy them (apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes), the author explores how plant species have thrived over the millenniums by seducing other creatures, including humans.
We all crash, and when it starts to become intrinsically linked to feelings around intimacy and sex, it becomes hard to control, as they are basic human desires we all want, and on these drugs that desire is intense.
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Humans are hard-wired to get high – it's natural; in his 1989 book Intoxication, the American pharmacologist Ronald K Siegel concluded that after the basic human desires of hunger, thirst and sex comes a "fourth drive", an instinctive urge to change our ordinary state of awareness.
Combine these unstoppable forces with a few basic human desires, such as freedom, choice, hope, heroism and transcendence, and you get what Wriston calls "the whole ballgame".
Some basic human desires for advancement through our careers and for security have also been sacrificed on the altar of economic efficiency.
Second, to show that secularism is capable of grounding these values, he offers a sophisticated account of how ethics could have evolved as a "social technology" — a set of optimally designed practices and norms — to satisfy basic human desires.
He explains the world amusingly; it's a place where progress is triggered by basic human desires (better food, higher social status, the yearning to visit an Exxon restroom without touching a single hard surface) and carried out by clever people in entertaining historical anecdotes.
