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Civilized to Death: What Was Lost on the Way to Modernity
Progress, the basic illusion of our age, is exhausted. Kids typically no longer expect their lives to be better than their parents’ were. Dystopian scenarios loom ever larger in public consciousness as fisheries collapse, CO2 levels rise, and clouds of radioactive steam billow from “fail-safe” nuclear plants that failed. Despite the technological marvels of our age—or perhaps because of them—these are dark days.
As comedian Louis C.K. put it, “Everything’s amazing, but nobody’s happy.”
Even for the most fortunate among us, material abundance comes at a very high price. Facebook is a hollow replacement for face time. We produce more food than ever, but hunger and malnutrition are standard in most of the world while the rest of us stuff ourselves quite literally to death. Despair darkens ever more lives as rates of clinical depression and suicide continue their grim climb in the developed world. A third of all American children are obese or seriously overweight, and fifty four million of us are pre-diabetic. Pre-schoolers represent the fastest-growing market for anti-depressants, while the rate of increase of depression among children is over twenty percent, according to a recent Harvard study. Twenty four million American adults are thought to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—mostly attributable to the never-ending wars that have become part of modern life for the swelling underclass with few other employment opportunities.
It’s common to wonder how an anthropologist from Mars would view our world or what sage advice an emissary from the future would bring back. But how would a time-traveler from our prehistoric past assess the lives we lead and the future prospects for the path we’re on? Such a visitor from 200 centuries ago would no doubt be impressed by much of what she found here. But once her amazement at iPhones, air travel, and liver transplants subsided, what would she make of our daily lives? Would she ultimately be more impressed by our advances or dismayed by what we’ve lost in our always accelerating rush toward the future?
With faith in the future melting like an overheated glacier even as contentment with the present evaporates, it’s high time for a sober reassessment of the past. Ten thousand years since turning from the ancient path our ancestors trod forever, it’s time for a scientifically-informed, multidisciplinary look at the effects of this fateful divergence. It’s time to ask what may be the most subversive question of all: Are modern humans, even the most fortunate among us, living significantly better lives than our pre-civilized ancestors? Taken as a whole, is civilization a net gain for individual human beings?
As comedian Louis C.K. put it, “Everything’s amazing, but nobody’s happy.”
Even for the most fortunate among us, material abundance comes at a very high price. Facebook is a hollow replacement for face time. We produce more food than ever, but hunger and malnutrition are standard in most of the world while the rest of us stuff ourselves quite literally to death. Despair darkens ever more lives as rates of clinical depression and suicide continue their grim climb in the developed world. A third of all American children are obese or seriously overweight, and fifty four million of us are pre-diabetic. Pre-schoolers represent the fastest-growing market for anti-depressants, while the rate of increase of depression among children is over twenty percent, according to a recent Harvard study. Twenty four million American adults are thought to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—mostly attributable to the never-ending wars that have become part of modern life for the swelling underclass with few other employment opportunities.
It’s common to wonder how an anthropologist from Mars would view our world or what sage advice an emissary from the future would bring back. But how would a time-traveler from our prehistoric past assess the lives we lead and the future prospects for the path we’re on? Such a visitor from 200 centuries ago would no doubt be impressed by much of what she found here. But once her amazement at iPhones, air travel, and liver transplants subsided, what would she make of our daily lives? Would she ultimately be more impressed by our advances or dismayed by what we’ve lost in our always accelerating rush toward the future?
With faith in the future melting like an overheated glacier even as contentment with the present evaporates, it’s high time for a sober reassessment of the past. Ten thousand years since turning from the ancient path our ancestors trod forever, it’s time for a scientifically-informed, multidisciplinary look at the effects of this fateful divergence. It’s time to ask what may be the most subversive question of all: Are modern humans, even the most fortunate among us, living significantly better lives than our pre-civilized ancestors? Taken as a whole, is civilization a net gain for individual human beings?
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2018
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December 12, 2019
There are a couple of things that separate me from your average loony, left-wing atheist. One is my distaste for both Pinker and Dawkins who are more generally held to be the heroes and even linchpins of modern-day rationalism. The reason why they both bother me so much is that I can’t help feeling that their genetic determinism smells a little too much like eugenics. This book criticises them on much the same terms I do. That said, if I was to offer one piece of advice about how to read books, it would be to pause when what you read confirms your prejudices. It won’t actually help, of course – despite the modern belief that the scientific method clears the path of dogma, the truth is much more complicated. Your prejudices will almost certainly win out in the end, even if you pause and acknowledge them. But even so, there is no harm in pausing all the same.
Dr Pangloss, Voltaire’s inspired character from Candide, knows that we live in the best of all possible worlds – which is not unlike the opinions of Professor Pinker who has recently written a couple of book seeking to prove much the same thing. Pangloss even goes on to provide optimistic explanations for what might not otherwise appear material from the best of all possible worlds opinion – you know, like his being hanged for heresy by the inquisition.
This book shows that most of us are a bit like Dr Pangloss on steroids. This is because we not only believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but even that the world is getting increasingly better. That is, it is better to live now than it was to live yesterday, and it will be better to live tomorrow than it is today. Progress, young man, progress.
There are two views of the prehistory of humans that have defined much of post-enlightenment thinking on the subject. The first is that of Rousseau, although, interestingly enough, it seems he never actually ever used the phrase he has become most associated with – that is, the noble savage. The noble savage is only noble, however, when he is alone and fully engaged in selfish, boy behaviours. As soon as he stops being alone and has to negotiate with other people, things go from bad to worse. Once I watched the very start of a film called Being Human. It had Robin Williams and some woman as sort of Adam and Eve – which was all good, until sort of Vikings arrived and took away Eve. The implication being that early humans were essentially sort of orangutans, living alone and only coming together to mate.
The other vision of early humanity that has dominated western thought is that of Thomas Hobbes. Interestingly enough, he also thought early humans lived isolated lives – but he is mainly remembered for the quote that early humans lead lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And since one person could never trust another person to not do them wrong, they had to do onto others before the others did onto them. It was only with the birth of a state – where people gave up much of their freedom and agreed to be ruled over – that life became even part-way tolerable.
This book is a spirited defence of pre-civilised humanity. By pre-civilised, I mean that literally, that is, human life prior to the agricultural revolution of the fertile crescent and elsewhere that lead to us living in cities. In this the author attacks the foundations of many of our current beliefs about the notion of progress. Much of this attack is full-frontal. So that, we might argue that civilisation has given us wonderful cancer treatments, or medicines to treat diabetes, or heart disease, or provided us with great dental care – while the author points out that most of these illnesses are products of and caused by our living in civilisation. So, saying you have a partial cure for something that you, in fact, caused, doesn’t quite sound as impressive as we might have first assumed.
Just about every book I’ve ever read on this theme quotes Benjamin Franklin that if you bring a native American child up in a city and show them all of the benefits of life that modern society can bestow, and then they spend a week back with among native Americans, they won’t want to return to ‘civilisation’. But the reverse doesn’t hold. Non-native American children brought up by native Americans need to be physically restrained from escaping back to their tribe when they are finally ‘saved’ by their ‘civilised’ own kind.
Rather than such lives being brutish and nasty - they are caring, healthy, and, given our species evolved into such lives, it is a bit hard to argue that they are opposed to how we are meant to live.
He provides quotes from people from PNG who could not get over how much more we work than seemed reasonable to them, or why we spent so much time away from those we loved for so little return. Given hunter-gatherers generally only work about 20 hours a week, they can hardly be blamed for looking at us askance. They also struggled to understand why the majority of the people allowed a tiny minority to dominate so much of the wealth of society – given that sharing is so fundamental to hunter-gatherer society. They couldn't quite understand why those who selfishly hoarded wealth weren't killed by those without.
He also dispels a number of myths along the way here – not least the ‘short’ part of Hobbes’s quote above. In fact, if you lived beyond childhood in a hunter-gatherer society (something he admits wasn’t exactly guaranteed) then you were likely to live until you were 70, and this has remained fairly constant for much of human history. As he points out at one point, we now live slightly longer than this on average, but mostly this ‘gain’ has been bought by turning a relatively quick death into a protracted and slow (and often agonising) death. In fact, I felt this part of the book to be the most interesting of the whole thing. His discussion of how we have become obsessed with postponing death at any cost does make me wonder at the sanity of our society. People I have spoken to who have lost family members to cancer, say, have wondered if their family member might have been better off not ‘fighting’ cancer, and therefore suffering the agony of surgery and of chemo and of other medications and so on, or if it might have been better to have just let the disease run its course and rather spent their time trying to achieve some form of acceptance. The major truth of our existence is that it has an end – the notion that a delayed end is always better is pretty hard to justify.
Look, I don’t know what to make of this book in some ways. There is no going back, and there are far too many of us now on the planet to do much else than what we are currently doing, I suspect. But we do seem to be destroying the basis upon which our lives on this planet can be sustained, and if that is as good as civilisation gets, you do get to see why ‘primitive’ peoples might look at us 'civilised' people as if we were insane when we tell them how much more ‘advanced’ we are compared to them. You know, civilisation has had a bit over 200 years in Australia, while Aboriginal society was here for something like 60,000 years – and man, have the civilised stuffed this place up! We have the fastest extinction rates in this country of anywhere else on the planet. We currently have bushfires burning along the length of the New South Wales coast and summer has only just started. Last year a million fish died in our inland river systems due to an extended drought, but all of the seats along the river (where this Biblical scale pestilence visited) voted for climate change deniers. As uncomfortable as I feel when I get told that progress is either an illusion or a marketing ploy – looking at climate change does make me think we really are stupider than we look.
This is a quick read but a very interesting read too.
Dr Pangloss, Voltaire’s inspired character from Candide, knows that we live in the best of all possible worlds – which is not unlike the opinions of Professor Pinker who has recently written a couple of book seeking to prove much the same thing. Pangloss even goes on to provide optimistic explanations for what might not otherwise appear material from the best of all possible worlds opinion – you know, like his being hanged for heresy by the inquisition.
This book shows that most of us are a bit like Dr Pangloss on steroids. This is because we not only believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but even that the world is getting increasingly better. That is, it is better to live now than it was to live yesterday, and it will be better to live tomorrow than it is today. Progress, young man, progress.
There are two views of the prehistory of humans that have defined much of post-enlightenment thinking on the subject. The first is that of Rousseau, although, interestingly enough, it seems he never actually ever used the phrase he has become most associated with – that is, the noble savage. The noble savage is only noble, however, when he is alone and fully engaged in selfish, boy behaviours. As soon as he stops being alone and has to negotiate with other people, things go from bad to worse. Once I watched the very start of a film called Being Human. It had Robin Williams and some woman as sort of Adam and Eve – which was all good, until sort of Vikings arrived and took away Eve. The implication being that early humans were essentially sort of orangutans, living alone and only coming together to mate.
The other vision of early humanity that has dominated western thought is that of Thomas Hobbes. Interestingly enough, he also thought early humans lived isolated lives – but he is mainly remembered for the quote that early humans lead lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And since one person could never trust another person to not do them wrong, they had to do onto others before the others did onto them. It was only with the birth of a state – where people gave up much of their freedom and agreed to be ruled over – that life became even part-way tolerable.
This book is a spirited defence of pre-civilised humanity. By pre-civilised, I mean that literally, that is, human life prior to the agricultural revolution of the fertile crescent and elsewhere that lead to us living in cities. In this the author attacks the foundations of many of our current beliefs about the notion of progress. Much of this attack is full-frontal. So that, we might argue that civilisation has given us wonderful cancer treatments, or medicines to treat diabetes, or heart disease, or provided us with great dental care – while the author points out that most of these illnesses are products of and caused by our living in civilisation. So, saying you have a partial cure for something that you, in fact, caused, doesn’t quite sound as impressive as we might have first assumed.
Just about every book I’ve ever read on this theme quotes Benjamin Franklin that if you bring a native American child up in a city and show them all of the benefits of life that modern society can bestow, and then they spend a week back with among native Americans, they won’t want to return to ‘civilisation’. But the reverse doesn’t hold. Non-native American children brought up by native Americans need to be physically restrained from escaping back to their tribe when they are finally ‘saved’ by their ‘civilised’ own kind.
Rather than such lives being brutish and nasty - they are caring, healthy, and, given our species evolved into such lives, it is a bit hard to argue that they are opposed to how we are meant to live.
He provides quotes from people from PNG who could not get over how much more we work than seemed reasonable to them, or why we spent so much time away from those we loved for so little return. Given hunter-gatherers generally only work about 20 hours a week, they can hardly be blamed for looking at us askance. They also struggled to understand why the majority of the people allowed a tiny minority to dominate so much of the wealth of society – given that sharing is so fundamental to hunter-gatherer society. They couldn't quite understand why those who selfishly hoarded wealth weren't killed by those without.
He also dispels a number of myths along the way here – not least the ‘short’ part of Hobbes’s quote above. In fact, if you lived beyond childhood in a hunter-gatherer society (something he admits wasn’t exactly guaranteed) then you were likely to live until you were 70, and this has remained fairly constant for much of human history. As he points out at one point, we now live slightly longer than this on average, but mostly this ‘gain’ has been bought by turning a relatively quick death into a protracted and slow (and often agonising) death. In fact, I felt this part of the book to be the most interesting of the whole thing. His discussion of how we have become obsessed with postponing death at any cost does make me wonder at the sanity of our society. People I have spoken to who have lost family members to cancer, say, have wondered if their family member might have been better off not ‘fighting’ cancer, and therefore suffering the agony of surgery and of chemo and of other medications and so on, or if it might have been better to have just let the disease run its course and rather spent their time trying to achieve some form of acceptance. The major truth of our existence is that it has an end – the notion that a delayed end is always better is pretty hard to justify.
Look, I don’t know what to make of this book in some ways. There is no going back, and there are far too many of us now on the planet to do much else than what we are currently doing, I suspect. But we do seem to be destroying the basis upon which our lives on this planet can be sustained, and if that is as good as civilisation gets, you do get to see why ‘primitive’ peoples might look at us 'civilised' people as if we were insane when we tell them how much more ‘advanced’ we are compared to them. You know, civilisation has had a bit over 200 years in Australia, while Aboriginal society was here for something like 60,000 years – and man, have the civilised stuffed this place up! We have the fastest extinction rates in this country of anywhere else on the planet. We currently have bushfires burning along the length of the New South Wales coast and summer has only just started. Last year a million fish died in our inland river systems due to an extended drought, but all of the seats along the river (where this Biblical scale pestilence visited) voted for climate change deniers. As uncomfortable as I feel when I get told that progress is either an illusion or a marketing ploy – looking at climate change does make me think we really are stupider than we look.
This is a quick read but a very interesting read too.
October 6, 2019
I’m conflicted about this one. It was a fun read and the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress” definitely deserves the type of debunking the author is attempting. The lives of our hunter/gatherer forbears were not as nasty, brutish, or short as the proponents of the myth of progress would have us all believe. However, their lifestyles were not as idyllic, peaceful, and sustainable as the author would have us believe either. He rightly takes scientists like Steven Pinker to task for cherrypicking data in “The Better Angels of Our Natures”, but he does the same thing himself to paint the rosiest possible picture of pre-agricultural societies. He also lost me when he started going on about magic mushrooms. Nevertheless, it was an entertaining book and the author makes a lot of very valid points. For further reading on this topic, I highly recommend Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and Craig Dilworth’s “Too Smart for Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind”
April 9, 2020
Most of my reviews are short and sweet, but this book made me want to take notes as I went. The author is clearly passionate about the subject which I respect, but the arguments made throughout the book felt so poorly made that they rubbed me completely the wrong way. The funny thing is, there is plenty that the author said that I agree with, but often even these things were annoying. Some of these complaints will flow poorly as they were taken from various chapters and moments in the book, while others were more general issues with the book as a whole. Here we go...
The author discussed why he feels progress has led to more problems than solutions, but really that he feels we haven't made progress. Of course, the meaning of "progress" itself is vague and seemingly changes throughout the book.
I highly recommend against the audio book, unless you want to hear the author use an obnoxiously childish tone when discussing things he doesn't like or disagrees with, completely undermining any legitimacy his claims might have.
The author admits that he will have to cherry pick examples to make his points, but it was done to such an extreme I thought a cherry tree would've made for a more apt cover photo.
Ryan makes an absurd amount of certain claims that just seem ludicrous, at one point insisting that modern humans have all been trained to find things like rape and enslavement normal. I don't know where he's getting that from.
The book is riddled with conspiracy theories throughout, such as the idea that no one is trying to cure cancer because the treatments cost more than a cure would.
At times Ryan rails against what he considers poorly conducted studies, or mocks studies for not having enough data, but defends those that make his point by saying things such as despite a small sample size...
The hypocrisy got so bad that at one point in the book the author is mocking a medication for having a very rare side effect of causing death in people with unknown heart conditions. Many chapters later, he defends a drug he supports the use of by saying that all the deaths it caused were in people who had unknown heart conditions.
He complains that people work instead of enjoying life, and then later in a mocking tone makes fun of some of the things people enjoy (such as sports).
It's hard to tell if the author knows the way his words comes out and means them that way or not, but at one point seemingly suggests, multiple times, that cancer patients would generally be better off going into palliative care than being given treatment. This is certainly an end result for some, but to suggest this without great specification is wrong and irresponsible.
In one of the oddest moments (maybe because I've never lived in the country?), Ryan states unequivocally that most people would congratulate a man for shooting a suffering pet in the head to put it out of it's misery. Adding to the confusion is that he seems disturbed that we wouldn't want to do this to a person. I wouldn't want to do it to either, personally. In this same conversation, he discussed other cultures that leave their sick/elderly behind so they can die, or actively kill them with or without their knowledge, but suggested this shouldn't be taken into account when discussing if they are more or less peaceful than modern civilized people.
After constantly critiquing cherry picked studies and conclusions of others, Ryan discussed that he feels we go too far in the way we provide health care for the very sick and elderly. This particularly annoyed me, because it's one of the places where I, at least in large part if not in all the details, agree with the author's point, but even this point was poorly made. His big revelation is that when doctors were asked in a study what procedures they'd want when they are dying to help keep them alive a bit longer, most were against a lot of the treatments people tend to get. This is the wrong question. Yes, the treatments are often miserable and expensive and decrease quality of life. But most people who are young and healthy would likely say they don't want them. Show me a study of what retired doctors who are old and close to death choose to do, not what they say they will or won't want to do while they are young.
Also, adding to the silliness factor, at one point the author used as part of his "evidence" an experience in which he looked at animals and is sure he knew what they were thinking because of the looks on their faces.
After getting through all the authors complaints, I was left wishing there was any call to action. There were absolutely no specific or even vague solutions set forth by the author to fix the problems he believes exist. That's what the entire book should've been, and we couldn't even get a full paragraph of it at the end .
I'm truly glad other people seem to have liked this. I'm just not sure what they got out of it.
The author discussed why he feels progress has led to more problems than solutions, but really that he feels we haven't made progress. Of course, the meaning of "progress" itself is vague and seemingly changes throughout the book.
I highly recommend against the audio book, unless you want to hear the author use an obnoxiously childish tone when discussing things he doesn't like or disagrees with, completely undermining any legitimacy his claims might have.
The author admits that he will have to cherry pick examples to make his points, but it was done to such an extreme I thought a cherry tree would've made for a more apt cover photo.
Ryan makes an absurd amount of certain claims that just seem ludicrous, at one point insisting that modern humans have all been trained to find things like rape and enslavement normal. I don't know where he's getting that from.
The book is riddled with conspiracy theories throughout, such as the idea that no one is trying to cure cancer because the treatments cost more than a cure would.
At times Ryan rails against what he considers poorly conducted studies, or mocks studies for not having enough data, but defends those that make his point by saying things such as despite a small sample size...
The hypocrisy got so bad that at one point in the book the author is mocking a medication for having a very rare side effect of causing death in people with unknown heart conditions. Many chapters later, he defends a drug he supports the use of by saying that all the deaths it caused were in people who had unknown heart conditions.
He complains that people work instead of enjoying life, and then later in a mocking tone makes fun of some of the things people enjoy (such as sports).
It's hard to tell if the author knows the way his words comes out and means them that way or not, but at one point seemingly suggests, multiple times, that cancer patients would generally be better off going into palliative care than being given treatment. This is certainly an end result for some, but to suggest this without great specification is wrong and irresponsible.
In one of the oddest moments (maybe because I've never lived in the country?), Ryan states unequivocally that most people would congratulate a man for shooting a suffering pet in the head to put it out of it's misery. Adding to the confusion is that he seems disturbed that we wouldn't want to do this to a person. I wouldn't want to do it to either, personally. In this same conversation, he discussed other cultures that leave their sick/elderly behind so they can die, or actively kill them with or without their knowledge, but suggested this shouldn't be taken into account when discussing if they are more or less peaceful than modern civilized people.
After constantly critiquing cherry picked studies and conclusions of others, Ryan discussed that he feels we go too far in the way we provide health care for the very sick and elderly. This particularly annoyed me, because it's one of the places where I, at least in large part if not in all the details, agree with the author's point, but even this point was poorly made. His big revelation is that when doctors were asked in a study what procedures they'd want when they are dying to help keep them alive a bit longer, most were against a lot of the treatments people tend to get. This is the wrong question. Yes, the treatments are often miserable and expensive and decrease quality of life. But most people who are young and healthy would likely say they don't want them. Show me a study of what retired doctors who are old and close to death choose to do, not what they say they will or won't want to do while they are young.
Also, adding to the silliness factor, at one point the author used as part of his "evidence" an experience in which he looked at animals and is sure he knew what they were thinking because of the looks on their faces.
After getting through all the authors complaints, I was left wishing there was any call to action. There were absolutely no specific or even vague solutions set forth by the author to fix the problems he believes exist. That's what the entire book should've been, and we couldn't even get a full paragraph of it at the end .
I'm truly glad other people seem to have liked this. I'm just not sure what they got out of it.
October 26, 2019
An intellectually dubious argument for taking life like a buffet: Ryan would take some of the 21st century, and some from the 20th century plate and mostly from a fairy tale that exists only in his mind.
July 4, 2021
"Know thyself" was once said to be inscribed on the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi, and human beings have been trying to live down this maxim ever since. We don't know ourselves, and the results have, and will continue to be, devastating, according to Christopher Ryan's brilliant book, "Civilized to Death".
I not only accept this author's premise, but fully embrace it. This book articulated something I have been feeling for a long time, and has been touched on in other books I've read, actually - that modern society and civilization in general, as a result of it's ignorance to our human origins, has done and will continue to do, a great deal of harm to our species, physically and mentally.
Physically, in ways you've already experienced over the last year -- new and novel diseases and viruses from our proximity to domesticated animals - and each other - not to mention heart disease, diabetes, and mental disorders. I completely buy the idea that these things were rare or non-existent prior to the rise of civilization, because of the close contact, sense of community, and purpose our foraging ancestors experienced.
And mentally in ways that do not need to be described to me, given my history of useless, soul-crushing work for greedy corporations, and the hundreds of dollars I've spent enriching a pharmaceutical industry to treat anxiety I may not have, if I lived in a society that understood itself a little better. Ryan explains all this in easy, fun prose, and backs up his arguments with what seems to be solid facts and science.
Towards the end of the book, Ryan does the obligatory "If we get our act together, we can maybe salvage things", but admits that it probably won't happen. I agree. Human beings are probably not the first civilization to have existed in this universe, and therefore there's nothing inherently special about us. We already know that nature does not spare anyone for sentimental reasons, and we are no exception. We may THINK we're special, but we're probably just another species in this cosmos who couldn't get it's act together long enough to see the warning signs of it's own impending doom. We truly will be civilized to death.
I not only accept this author's premise, but fully embrace it. This book articulated something I have been feeling for a long time, and has been touched on in other books I've read, actually - that modern society and civilization in general, as a result of it's ignorance to our human origins, has done and will continue to do, a great deal of harm to our species, physically and mentally.
Physically, in ways you've already experienced over the last year -- new and novel diseases and viruses from our proximity to domesticated animals - and each other - not to mention heart disease, diabetes, and mental disorders. I completely buy the idea that these things were rare or non-existent prior to the rise of civilization, because of the close contact, sense of community, and purpose our foraging ancestors experienced.
And mentally in ways that do not need to be described to me, given my history of useless, soul-crushing work for greedy corporations, and the hundreds of dollars I've spent enriching a pharmaceutical industry to treat anxiety I may not have, if I lived in a society that understood itself a little better. Ryan explains all this in easy, fun prose, and backs up his arguments with what seems to be solid facts and science.
Towards the end of the book, Ryan does the obligatory "If we get our act together, we can maybe salvage things", but admits that it probably won't happen. I agree. Human beings are probably not the first civilization to have existed in this universe, and therefore there's nothing inherently special about us. We already know that nature does not spare anyone for sentimental reasons, and we are no exception. We may THINK we're special, but we're probably just another species in this cosmos who couldn't get it's act together long enough to see the warning signs of it's own impending doom. We truly will be civilized to death.
May 16, 2020
There were some parts of this book that were ok.
Unfortunately, this was constantly undercut by the many parts of this book that are ableist, sexist garbage, verging on eco-fascism.
To wit:
High infant and child mortality in prehistoric cultures isn't as bad as it sounds because they were just killing disabled children, and those kids don't count: (p. 118) "While a significantly greater percentage of infants died in prehistory than today, even that point isn't as unambiguous as it seems. First, many of those deaths were cases of what might be called 'postnatal abortion' of children born in times of resource depletion or with congenital deformities or other disabilities that would now be detected during prenatal testing, often resulting in abortion. Such infants would not have survived long in a world where it was crucial to be mobile, vigorous, and sharp-eyed."
1) as a mother to a disabled kid, fuck you sideways forever, Ryan.
2) That is a load of ableist horseshit. Your assumptions about the worth of disabled humans and their contribution to society are damaging, bigoted, and actually contradicted by archaeological evidence, which has found evidence of foragers caring for disabled humans in their tribes. So again. Fuck you sideways forever, Ryan.
He constantly confuses "civilization" with "American society" and "American empire." These are not the same fucking things, you absolute dimwitted raccoon. In fact, it's safe to say that most countries in the world measure their own civilized-ness by how NOT like the Americans they are. So in this book that claims to be about how CIVILIZATION is bad for people, what he mostly does is complain about how awful AMERICAN SOCIETY is compared to other countries. Other countries are fucking civilized! eg.//
1) p. 139, American parents are less happy than parents in other countries, and thus ... civilization is bad.
2) Americans spend more on health care than other industrialized countries do, and thus ... civilization is bad.
Claims that inequality is equally bad for everyone. Seriously. (p. 173) "The wealthy breathe the same fouled air, bathe in the same toxic water, and eat food steeped in the same poisons and cruelty. A stressed-out millionaire may get the best chemotherapy money can buy but he's still going to get the cancer." Shut the fuck up. Do you not even understand your own case? No, the rich do not get the same cancers, or breathe the same air/drink the same water. Flint, asshole. Cancer alleys all over, predominantly lived in by the poor and people of colour. In my city, the poorest neighbourhoods have life expectancies 20 YEARS shorter than the provincial average. But oh yes, let's solve inequality for the poor rich assholes who can afford chemo.
And then let's throw in cherry-picked nuggets about poor guys with testosterone and they can't help being lecherous creeps, ladies just don't understand!
OK, so look:
If you're going to try to write a treatise against civilization--
--it needs to be against CIVILIZATION.
You can't find parts of American society that look back (compared to ... ? other CIVILIZED countries), parts of American empire you find objectionable (compared to ... ? other CIVILIZED nation-states), and generalize this to civilization.
And if you're going to use this logically incoherent argument to say that going back to forager societies would be fantastic because the only thing we'd lose would be disabled people?
Holy shit fuck you.
Forager societies took care of their ill and disabled members. It is not NATURAL or is it SUPERIOR to be a fucking eugenicist, and if you are defending that shit in 2019, you are not a good person. You are a fascist.
Unfortunately, this was constantly undercut by the many parts of this book that are ableist, sexist garbage, verging on eco-fascism.
To wit:
High infant and child mortality in prehistoric cultures isn't as bad as it sounds because they were just killing disabled children, and those kids don't count: (p. 118) "While a significantly greater percentage of infants died in prehistory than today, even that point isn't as unambiguous as it seems. First, many of those deaths were cases of what might be called 'postnatal abortion' of children born in times of resource depletion or with congenital deformities or other disabilities that would now be detected during prenatal testing, often resulting in abortion. Such infants would not have survived long in a world where it was crucial to be mobile, vigorous, and sharp-eyed."
1) as a mother to a disabled kid, fuck you sideways forever, Ryan.
2) That is a load of ableist horseshit. Your assumptions about the worth of disabled humans and their contribution to society are damaging, bigoted, and actually contradicted by archaeological evidence, which has found evidence of foragers caring for disabled humans in their tribes. So again. Fuck you sideways forever, Ryan.
He constantly confuses "civilization" with "American society" and "American empire." These are not the same fucking things, you absolute dimwitted raccoon. In fact, it's safe to say that most countries in the world measure their own civilized-ness by how NOT like the Americans they are. So in this book that claims to be about how CIVILIZATION is bad for people, what he mostly does is complain about how awful AMERICAN SOCIETY is compared to other countries. Other countries are fucking civilized! eg.//
1) p. 139, American parents are less happy than parents in other countries, and thus ... civilization is bad.
2) Americans spend more on health care than other industrialized countries do, and thus ... civilization is bad.
Claims that inequality is equally bad for everyone. Seriously. (p. 173) "The wealthy breathe the same fouled air, bathe in the same toxic water, and eat food steeped in the same poisons and cruelty. A stressed-out millionaire may get the best chemotherapy money can buy but he's still going to get the cancer." Shut the fuck up. Do you not even understand your own case? No, the rich do not get the same cancers, or breathe the same air/drink the same water. Flint, asshole. Cancer alleys all over, predominantly lived in by the poor and people of colour. In my city, the poorest neighbourhoods have life expectancies 20 YEARS shorter than the provincial average. But oh yes, let's solve inequality for the poor rich assholes who can afford chemo.
And then let's throw in cherry-picked nuggets about poor guys with testosterone and they can't help being lecherous creeps, ladies just don't understand!
OK, so look:
If you're going to try to write a treatise against civilization--
--it needs to be against CIVILIZATION.
You can't find parts of American society that look back (compared to ... ? other CIVILIZED countries), parts of American empire you find objectionable (compared to ... ? other CIVILIZED nation-states), and generalize this to civilization.
And if you're going to use this logically incoherent argument to say that going back to forager societies would be fantastic because the only thing we'd lose would be disabled people?
Holy shit fuck you.
Forager societies took care of their ill and disabled members. It is not NATURAL or is it SUPERIOR to be a fucking eugenicist, and if you are defending that shit in 2019, you are not a good person. You are a fascist.
January 24, 2020
Are you interested in hearing arguments based on how an author “feels” about the world, with nothing but personal biases and anecdotes supporting them? If so, this might be the book for you. But, if you’re like me, and prefer books that support a thesis with statistics and research, you probably won’t enjoy it. The closest thing to factual support Christopher Ryan offers for any of his arguments is one or two counter-examples for a generalized belief. For instance, when arguing against the opinion that nature is often cruel and ruthless, he says as his counter-argument, that one man who was attacked by a lion reported it wasn’t excruciatingly painful due to his endorphins. Yes, my friends, that’s about as scientific as this book gets.
October 6, 2019
“An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.”
— Arthur Miller
Modern civilization is seen as necessary for “progress.” With every breakthrough in technology, science, medicine, and so on, with every new comfort and convenience, advancement and novelty, what is the cost?
People often assume that progress is steadily increasing, and at a linear pace, believing that the livelihoods of the hunter-gatherers were primitive, dangerous, and simple, despite their survival for most of human history.
Since the domestication of animals and move into agriculture from small bands of roaming hunter-gatherers, civilizations have both developed and fallen from a depletion of natural resources, conflict, famine, and disease. Populations have become denser and temperatures have risen to new global extremes every year.
Humanity, overcome with dissatisfaction and anxiety, has rushed into a shadow future. They have chased after novelty without knowledge, or concern, for the consequences of their desires.
Americans, for example, generally work longer hours than in past decades while the global competition rises and wages stagnate. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Rates of people who struggle with starvation, who earn ten dollars a day, who can’t afford to deal with a medical emergency, increases steadily.
Civilization doesn’t necessarily imply progress. Hunter-gatherers are not inherently miserable. One must ask always when speaking of progress, “progress for whom?”
What seems like progress for one person, group, community, or civilization, may be contextually a benefit, but not absolutely. Furthermore, what is normalized for one group may not necessarily be “good” for that group or another group, but rather, an adaptation overtime of that group to an advantageous environment. Those who do not gain any benefits from that environment would suffer, die, or merely not flourish enough to gain much from it.
In our modern age of progress, millions of people have been displaced from their homelands due to war, conflict, famine, persecution, and climate change. More species are increasingly going extinct while the ocean currents have slowed down.
While every unstoppable civilization such as Rome, Sumer, and Ancient Egypt, have all crumbled in the past, they have done so regionally. If our civilization falls, it will happen at a global scale.
Hunter-gatherers may not have been idealistically perfect but those who survived and succeeded through reproduction did so from trust, cooperation, and generosity. They would’ve perished under brutal environments if not for their interdependence and mutual interests.
The days of the hunter-gatherer are over, however. It is too late to turn back to the prehistoric world. Population densities have swelled beyond small bands of undomesticated hominids.
“We’ve lost too much of the knowledge and physical conditioning necessary to live comfortably under the stars. If our ancestors were wolves or coyotes, most of us are closer to pugs or poodles.”
Even though no one can return back to prehistory, it’s possible to learn from the past to create better conditions for the future. If stories of the past are misused, misunderstood, or abused, however, then the accepted narrative of civilization can imprison just as much as free.
There’s an assumption of prehistory as being a Hobbesian nightmare where people brutalized each other in harsh environments to survive and reproduce, where primitive peoples lived lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.”
While precivilization is condemned, civilization is often seen as perpetually improving, all despite human nature’s competitive, aggressive, and bloody history. This view of humankind is routinely used in the justification of slavery and war and colonialism. Rather than connecting more intimately with one another, civilized people are conditioned to not trust each other, to compete, to feel shameful over their bodies and instincts.
There may be a more accurate story than the Hobbesian one. When studying modern foragers, who have similar relationships with their environments as peoples did thousand of years ago, from how they settled conflict and had children to how they hunted and built their homes, structural insights into their groups can help researchers see the past.
Looking deeply at the anatomical/physiological functions of the human body, especially since human beings have evolved for thousands of years as hunter-gatherers (longer than as agriculturalists), provides a glimpse into the past as well.
“Well over 95 percent of the time that our species has existed we’ve lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers moving about in small bands of 150 people or fewer.”
These bands, despite how long ago they lived or where they had come from, were egalitarian, mobile, social, and generous. Power was fluid rather than hierarchical, based more on social value than status and property. Women were given similar opportunities to men, gaining respect for their intelligence, skill, and integrity, while being able to make decisions that would profoundly impact the rest of the group.
With these universal traits displayed among the hunter-gatherers, however, there are still no absolutes. Exceptions of child abuse, unequal treatment between the sexes, disproportionate power, and so on, can exist and have before, but never on the scale of hierarchical, agriculture-based societies.
While hunter-gatherers, traveling with minimal shared supplies, relied on each other for reciprocal generosity, treating each other as extended families, giving and receiving in order to survive and to grow, when the State first arose, people became inferiors, subservient to kings, priests and dictators, being taxed and controlled by those with unequal power.
For hunter-gatherer tribes, an individual is prized for their intelligence, hunting skills, and so on. When they exceed their skills through arrogance, selfishness, pride, or an unequal amount of power, they are laughed at, socially exiled or eventually killed. As long as they provide social benefit to the group, they are mutually benefited themselves. In agricultural societies, however, there is a conflict regarding the messages of promoting generosity and support and sharing, competition and survival and private ownership. Large populations with complex civilizations are prone to conflicting value systems.
Nevertheless, humans have complex moralities based on social values that were deeply woven into their biological makeup for thousands of years to ensure their survival.
While civilization has definite benefits, what is the long term cost of perpetual expansion? Civilization has solved many problems while simultaneously being the reason for those problems to exist in the first place. Everything from gum disease to obesity, depression to anxiety, overly medicated children to heart attacks, rose since the advent of civilization rather than before it.
Agricultural societies may have developed independently from each other, thousands of years ago, due to extremes in climate. As the hoarding of resources began, complex social hierarchies did as well. These hierarchies may have led to more conflict among groups, artistic creation, nuanced relationships with the dead, ritualistic practices, warfare, and enslavement.
While hunter-gatherers revered the flow of nature and relied on it with their lives, the agriculture-based civilizations dominated and controlled it. Rather than mobility and sharing, humans became sedentary and owned more possessions. They became conditioned by the institutions that had arisen with their settlement. As humans domesticated plants and animals, they too became domesticated.
When civilizations encountered foraging societies, they often brutalized them through the theft of land, enslavement, human sacrifice, rape, wanton murder, exploitation, torture, spread of disease.
The stronger the civilization, the greater the need for using up natural resources while expanding to conquer other places and peoples. Those apart from civilization were seen as less human and treated as such. And within powerful civilizations, the disparity between wealth and freedom grew between the powerful and the powerless.
Rather than living as an egalitarian web of relationships in a band of intimates, rather than as an extended family caring for one another’s benefit, people were treated like property in civilization. These forced participants, who were enslaved and worked until death, who procreated out of necessity for survival, for the labor of the system, who were manipulated by their rulers to keep civilization from collapsing, were not treated as humans anymore. Those who tried to break away from the confines of civilization were severely punished or manipulated into returning out of desperation and systematic coercion.
This practice continues today: “Multinational corporations routinely expropriate land in poor countries (or ‘buy’ it from corrupt politicians), force the local populations off the land (so they cannot grow or hunt their own food), and offer the ‘luckiest’ among them jobs cutting down the forest, mining minerals, or harvesting fruit in exchange for slave wages often paid in company currency that can only be used to buy unhealthful, industrially produced food at inflated prices at a company-owned store. These victims of market incursion are then often celebrated as having been saved from ‘abject poverty.’ With their gardens, animals, fishing, and hunting, they had been living on less than a dollar a day. Now, as slave laborers, they’re participating in the economy. This, we’re told, is progress.”
While civilized people are systematically forced to remain in civilization, they are conditioned to fear any alternative. They are routinely propagandized with fear of death, fear of old age, fear of outsiders, fear of a dangerous environment, fear of disobeying the structure of society, fear of being different, and fear of questioning.
While fear is being mass communicated to those who serve the system, messages of self-interest are justified as natural for a species that is interpreted as inherently competitive and selfish.
While the social hierarchical system, built upon control and expansion, rationalizes itself under these premises, messages of altruism, generosity, and sharing, which are prominent in foraging groups, are conflicted with and misrepresented.
Foragers nevertheless have some form of social hierarchy, except their structure is in support of social autonomy. People can gain more power in these groups, except at the expense of the group. Those who violate the rules of the group, benefiting themselves at the expense of others, are shamed, excluded, or eventually killed, depending on the person’s effect upon others. Foragers are often quite aware of the social hierarchy in their groups and have ways of keeping a check on power, maintaining egalitarian principles with tradition, stories, humor, and so on.
Another way that foragers have often maintained social harmony is through group fluidity. Members of small bands can leave the group, join other groups, based on climatic conditions, the hunt, and so on. In many tribes, once women are old enough, they leave their families for another tribe. Rather than based on biological necessity, many foragers come together out of a mutual practicality and show attitudes of abundance rather than scarcity.
These behaviors may be influenced from their evolutionary past. Humans share a common genetic ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees. Those who argue the progress myth often cite chimpanzee behavior as the source for human aggression, conflict, and war, but conveniently ignore the deep human relationship to bonobos. Bonobos are mostly peaceful, resolving conflict with sex and bonding, rather than with war. While chimps do show some organized group violence, bonobos are different.
Whereas hunter-gatherers are highly mobile in small groups, adapting to changing environmental conditions, experiencing occasional food shortages while still being mostly well nourished, millions of people in modern societies, dependent on certain crops or water sources, are often undernourished.
Caloric restriction, which occurs at periods with hunter-gatherers, may actually be healthful, preventing some neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, diabetes, while supporting a longer lifespan.
Foragers don’t necessarily die at an earlier age than those born in agricultural societies. There may be a higher mortality rate among infants and children, which statistically, brings the average of life expectancy down, but those who live usually do so into a healthy old age, similar to those in agricultural societies. Except the children who grow up in the foraging communities had better quality of life in regards to childcare, clean air and water, communal support, etc.
Living in agricultural settlements with swelling populations drastically altered human beings. Status, family dynamics, power, treatment of women and children, food quality, exposure to new diseases, relationship to death, worsened. Even the worship of friendly and nourishing gods transitioned into religions where a God dominated nature and had absolute power with His control. While foraging societies protected their young ones, having an extended family to raise a child, within agricultural societies, children were seen as property, labor, as potential heirs to wealth, as rivals.
Even in modernity, infants and children develop quite differently than those in hunter-gatherer societies. C-sections, which don’t provide the immunological advantages of natural births, less time physically touching an infant, less time breastfeeding, more separation from offspring, contribute significantly to the emotional development in people in agricultural societies. In foraging groups, infants are closely attuned to, nurtured, and emotionally responded to, by dozens of loving caregivers beyond the mother or father(s). They are breastfed longer and supported in a cooperative social world.
“When you receive no significant social support from your society and have to work two jobs just to pay for the daycare that allows you to go to work, nobody can blame you for putting your kids in front of the TV, feeding them what you can afford, and not wanting to spend the night comforting them when they’re restless. Many progressive European societies have policies that replicate hunter-gatherer parenting values by assuring community support for parents via generous maternity and paternity leave, subsidized medical and child care, and free education.”
Read the rest of the review here: https://medium.com/@bremeracosta/civi...
— Arthur Miller
Modern civilization is seen as necessary for “progress.” With every breakthrough in technology, science, medicine, and so on, with every new comfort and convenience, advancement and novelty, what is the cost?
People often assume that progress is steadily increasing, and at a linear pace, believing that the livelihoods of the hunter-gatherers were primitive, dangerous, and simple, despite their survival for most of human history.
Since the domestication of animals and move into agriculture from small bands of roaming hunter-gatherers, civilizations have both developed and fallen from a depletion of natural resources, conflict, famine, and disease. Populations have become denser and temperatures have risen to new global extremes every year.
Humanity, overcome with dissatisfaction and anxiety, has rushed into a shadow future. They have chased after novelty without knowledge, or concern, for the consequences of their desires.
Americans, for example, generally work longer hours than in past decades while the global competition rises and wages stagnate. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Rates of people who struggle with starvation, who earn ten dollars a day, who can’t afford to deal with a medical emergency, increases steadily.
Civilization doesn’t necessarily imply progress. Hunter-gatherers are not inherently miserable. One must ask always when speaking of progress, “progress for whom?”
What seems like progress for one person, group, community, or civilization, may be contextually a benefit, but not absolutely. Furthermore, what is normalized for one group may not necessarily be “good” for that group or another group, but rather, an adaptation overtime of that group to an advantageous environment. Those who do not gain any benefits from that environment would suffer, die, or merely not flourish enough to gain much from it.
In our modern age of progress, millions of people have been displaced from their homelands due to war, conflict, famine, persecution, and climate change. More species are increasingly going extinct while the ocean currents have slowed down.
While every unstoppable civilization such as Rome, Sumer, and Ancient Egypt, have all crumbled in the past, they have done so regionally. If our civilization falls, it will happen at a global scale.
Hunter-gatherers may not have been idealistically perfect but those who survived and succeeded through reproduction did so from trust, cooperation, and generosity. They would’ve perished under brutal environments if not for their interdependence and mutual interests.
The days of the hunter-gatherer are over, however. It is too late to turn back to the prehistoric world. Population densities have swelled beyond small bands of undomesticated hominids.
“We’ve lost too much of the knowledge and physical conditioning necessary to live comfortably under the stars. If our ancestors were wolves or coyotes, most of us are closer to pugs or poodles.”
Even though no one can return back to prehistory, it’s possible to learn from the past to create better conditions for the future. If stories of the past are misused, misunderstood, or abused, however, then the accepted narrative of civilization can imprison just as much as free.
There’s an assumption of prehistory as being a Hobbesian nightmare where people brutalized each other in harsh environments to survive and reproduce, where primitive peoples lived lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.”
While precivilization is condemned, civilization is often seen as perpetually improving, all despite human nature’s competitive, aggressive, and bloody history. This view of humankind is routinely used in the justification of slavery and war and colonialism. Rather than connecting more intimately with one another, civilized people are conditioned to not trust each other, to compete, to feel shameful over their bodies and instincts.
There may be a more accurate story than the Hobbesian one. When studying modern foragers, who have similar relationships with their environments as peoples did thousand of years ago, from how they settled conflict and had children to how they hunted and built their homes, structural insights into their groups can help researchers see the past.
Looking deeply at the anatomical/physiological functions of the human body, especially since human beings have evolved for thousands of years as hunter-gatherers (longer than as agriculturalists), provides a glimpse into the past as well.
“Well over 95 percent of the time that our species has existed we’ve lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers moving about in small bands of 150 people or fewer.”
These bands, despite how long ago they lived or where they had come from, were egalitarian, mobile, social, and generous. Power was fluid rather than hierarchical, based more on social value than status and property. Women were given similar opportunities to men, gaining respect for their intelligence, skill, and integrity, while being able to make decisions that would profoundly impact the rest of the group.
With these universal traits displayed among the hunter-gatherers, however, there are still no absolutes. Exceptions of child abuse, unequal treatment between the sexes, disproportionate power, and so on, can exist and have before, but never on the scale of hierarchical, agriculture-based societies.
While hunter-gatherers, traveling with minimal shared supplies, relied on each other for reciprocal generosity, treating each other as extended families, giving and receiving in order to survive and to grow, when the State first arose, people became inferiors, subservient to kings, priests and dictators, being taxed and controlled by those with unequal power.
For hunter-gatherer tribes, an individual is prized for their intelligence, hunting skills, and so on. When they exceed their skills through arrogance, selfishness, pride, or an unequal amount of power, they are laughed at, socially exiled or eventually killed. As long as they provide social benefit to the group, they are mutually benefited themselves. In agricultural societies, however, there is a conflict regarding the messages of promoting generosity and support and sharing, competition and survival and private ownership. Large populations with complex civilizations are prone to conflicting value systems.
Nevertheless, humans have complex moralities based on social values that were deeply woven into their biological makeup for thousands of years to ensure their survival.
While civilization has definite benefits, what is the long term cost of perpetual expansion? Civilization has solved many problems while simultaneously being the reason for those problems to exist in the first place. Everything from gum disease to obesity, depression to anxiety, overly medicated children to heart attacks, rose since the advent of civilization rather than before it.
Agricultural societies may have developed independently from each other, thousands of years ago, due to extremes in climate. As the hoarding of resources began, complex social hierarchies did as well. These hierarchies may have led to more conflict among groups, artistic creation, nuanced relationships with the dead, ritualistic practices, warfare, and enslavement.
While hunter-gatherers revered the flow of nature and relied on it with their lives, the agriculture-based civilizations dominated and controlled it. Rather than mobility and sharing, humans became sedentary and owned more possessions. They became conditioned by the institutions that had arisen with their settlement. As humans domesticated plants and animals, they too became domesticated.
When civilizations encountered foraging societies, they often brutalized them through the theft of land, enslavement, human sacrifice, rape, wanton murder, exploitation, torture, spread of disease.
The stronger the civilization, the greater the need for using up natural resources while expanding to conquer other places and peoples. Those apart from civilization were seen as less human and treated as such. And within powerful civilizations, the disparity between wealth and freedom grew between the powerful and the powerless.
Rather than living as an egalitarian web of relationships in a band of intimates, rather than as an extended family caring for one another’s benefit, people were treated like property in civilization. These forced participants, who were enslaved and worked until death, who procreated out of necessity for survival, for the labor of the system, who were manipulated by their rulers to keep civilization from collapsing, were not treated as humans anymore. Those who tried to break away from the confines of civilization were severely punished or manipulated into returning out of desperation and systematic coercion.
This practice continues today: “Multinational corporations routinely expropriate land in poor countries (or ‘buy’ it from corrupt politicians), force the local populations off the land (so they cannot grow or hunt their own food), and offer the ‘luckiest’ among them jobs cutting down the forest, mining minerals, or harvesting fruit in exchange for slave wages often paid in company currency that can only be used to buy unhealthful, industrially produced food at inflated prices at a company-owned store. These victims of market incursion are then often celebrated as having been saved from ‘abject poverty.’ With their gardens, animals, fishing, and hunting, they had been living on less than a dollar a day. Now, as slave laborers, they’re participating in the economy. This, we’re told, is progress.”
While civilized people are systematically forced to remain in civilization, they are conditioned to fear any alternative. They are routinely propagandized with fear of death, fear of old age, fear of outsiders, fear of a dangerous environment, fear of disobeying the structure of society, fear of being different, and fear of questioning.
While fear is being mass communicated to those who serve the system, messages of self-interest are justified as natural for a species that is interpreted as inherently competitive and selfish.
While the social hierarchical system, built upon control and expansion, rationalizes itself under these premises, messages of altruism, generosity, and sharing, which are prominent in foraging groups, are conflicted with and misrepresented.
Foragers nevertheless have some form of social hierarchy, except their structure is in support of social autonomy. People can gain more power in these groups, except at the expense of the group. Those who violate the rules of the group, benefiting themselves at the expense of others, are shamed, excluded, or eventually killed, depending on the person’s effect upon others. Foragers are often quite aware of the social hierarchy in their groups and have ways of keeping a check on power, maintaining egalitarian principles with tradition, stories, humor, and so on.
Another way that foragers have often maintained social harmony is through group fluidity. Members of small bands can leave the group, join other groups, based on climatic conditions, the hunt, and so on. In many tribes, once women are old enough, they leave their families for another tribe. Rather than based on biological necessity, many foragers come together out of a mutual practicality and show attitudes of abundance rather than scarcity.
These behaviors may be influenced from their evolutionary past. Humans share a common genetic ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees. Those who argue the progress myth often cite chimpanzee behavior as the source for human aggression, conflict, and war, but conveniently ignore the deep human relationship to bonobos. Bonobos are mostly peaceful, resolving conflict with sex and bonding, rather than with war. While chimps do show some organized group violence, bonobos are different.
Whereas hunter-gatherers are highly mobile in small groups, adapting to changing environmental conditions, experiencing occasional food shortages while still being mostly well nourished, millions of people in modern societies, dependent on certain crops or water sources, are often undernourished.
Caloric restriction, which occurs at periods with hunter-gatherers, may actually be healthful, preventing some neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, diabetes, while supporting a longer lifespan.
Foragers don’t necessarily die at an earlier age than those born in agricultural societies. There may be a higher mortality rate among infants and children, which statistically, brings the average of life expectancy down, but those who live usually do so into a healthy old age, similar to those in agricultural societies. Except the children who grow up in the foraging communities had better quality of life in regards to childcare, clean air and water, communal support, etc.
Living in agricultural settlements with swelling populations drastically altered human beings. Status, family dynamics, power, treatment of women and children, food quality, exposure to new diseases, relationship to death, worsened. Even the worship of friendly and nourishing gods transitioned into religions where a God dominated nature and had absolute power with His control. While foraging societies protected their young ones, having an extended family to raise a child, within agricultural societies, children were seen as property, labor, as potential heirs to wealth, as rivals.
Even in modernity, infants and children develop quite differently than those in hunter-gatherer societies. C-sections, which don’t provide the immunological advantages of natural births, less time physically touching an infant, less time breastfeeding, more separation from offspring, contribute significantly to the emotional development in people in agricultural societies. In foraging groups, infants are closely attuned to, nurtured, and emotionally responded to, by dozens of loving caregivers beyond the mother or father(s). They are breastfed longer and supported in a cooperative social world.
“When you receive no significant social support from your society and have to work two jobs just to pay for the daycare that allows you to go to work, nobody can blame you for putting your kids in front of the TV, feeding them what you can afford, and not wanting to spend the night comforting them when they’re restless. Many progressive European societies have policies that replicate hunter-gatherer parenting values by assuring community support for parents via generous maternity and paternity leave, subsidized medical and child care, and free education.”
Read the rest of the review here: https://medium.com/@bremeracosta/civi...
December 17, 2020
For well over 95% of our history, we humans existed in “small bands of 150 or fewer people” in a system of egalitarianism, mobility, and gratitude. Sebastian Junger explained why hoarding and selfishness were not tolerated: “Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny.” Jared Diamond called the transition to agriculture (civilization) the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Historian Yuval Noah Harari called the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud”. Using monotheistic religion to lock in a less nutritious diet that demands a lifestyle with less leisure? That doesn’t seem smart, or fun.
Before the advent of agriculture, the human population doubled roughly every 250,000 years. After the birth of agriculture, babies could be weaned earlier with animal milk. Women became lesser in status. Generosity and equality were abandoned. To Christopher, “our species went from living in the world, into living in a zoo of our own making.” He insightfully added that we became as domesticated as our chosen plants and animals. “Civilization convinced Columbus and his men that gold was more valuable that the lives of the people they destroyed to get it.” Any child over fourteen caught begging for the third time in England, after the Poor Laws were enacted, was executed. Early explorers discovered people who “ate more nutritious food, worked less, slept more, and suffered less disease.” Those who love to point out how chimps can be so aggressive won’t also mention that bonobos who have an “utter absence of lethal aggression among them. No war.” Doug Fry writes in “War, Peace, and Human Nature” that the “worldwide archaeological record is ‘clear and unambiguous’ in showing that ‘war developed, despots arose, violence proliferated, slavery flourished, and the social position of women deteriorated’ after our species” began after agriculture. As Christopher bluntly states, “Civilization is the source of most human violence.” “The infectious diseases most deadly to human beings didn’t exist in prehistory. They are by-products of civilization itself.” A dentist travelling the world realized, “if people were still eating their traditional diet, their teeth were perfect.” Today, one in nine people worldwide are undernourished. Those saying that we are better fed than foragers today, must ignore close to a billion people from their calculations. Strange, but caloric restriction is considered “the only proven technique for extending life.”
Foundling hospitals began when so many people were dumping babies by the side of the road. “In the early 1800’s, roughly a third of the babies born in Paris were left at the foundling hospital.” So much for Parisienne romance.
Civilization is the destruction of what is free, so that humans can be sold an inferior overpriced copy of what was free. Civilization is “Ignore friends and family to get rich so someone will love you”. I like Chris’s bit on civilization selling us, “prepackaged dollops of transitory satisfaction that evaporate on the tongue.” Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park study showed that happy rats did not get addicted to drugged water. Addiction is having more to do with the addict’s earlier trauma than with the drug itself. Nike made lots of money by making running shoes for a style of running humans shouldn’t be doing, namely landing on their heels. They created a product, then the market out of vapor, and the resultant running injury epidemic was free of charge. Before 1972, people ran in thin soles shoes and had far fewer knee injuries. Tribal infants are picked up when crying and feel loved and welcome. Civilized infants are left to cry and feel “confused and alone” thinking there must be something wrong with me.
Between 1997 and 2003, the number of children who liked to hike, garden, engage with nature fell by 50%. One explanation is that between 2000 and 2003, children’s prescriptions for psychotropic drugs increased 49%. U.S. toddlers were recently found to be active 20 minutes a day. Let’s look at the number of children killed by family members per year: that figure (20,000) is 4x the number of U.S. soldiers dying both in Iraq and Afghanistan. UNICIEF found children’s health to be the lowest in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and the United States. In 1998, 30% of teachers thought that kindergarteners should read. By 2010, the figure became 80%. Kids must first hang and play to learn social cues. Let’s face it: play teaches kids to learn to live together. Hunter-gathers shunned “power assertive methods to control behavior”, they knew that each person should learn to understand/control their own needs. They did/do have a sense of toil. When the hunter-gatherer child became adult, play became work, “but it does not cease being play. That productive quality helps the whole band and is valued by all.” For hunter-gatherers much of life is play while for the civilized much of play strangely becomes work. “Excuse me, I’m still working on my salad.” Grandpa exercised, while we work out. I’m working on myself in therapy. I’m working on being more playful. I’m working on not working. Why is the U.S. called a prosperous nation when forty-million people are clearly below the poverty line?
The closer you look at it, the more civilization looks like a pyramid scheme. Villages and towns meant hierarchy, and hierarchy of wealth. Happiness once came from being in the community. In the 1920’s 5% of the U.S. lived alone. Now that number is 25%. Keep them alone and fragmented, and those people are easy to control. Calling all rich winners is as smart as calling every soldier a hero. Reinforcing false narratives is easy when few factcheck or dare to read. “Power diminishes all varieties of empathy.” Diminished empathy is self-destructive and leads to isolation. Selfishness leads to death, first social, then physical.
“We pay doctors very well for deploying technology and very poorly for spending time with patients.” Attempts to make humans live longer appear to have just made suffering slow-motion. Victor Frankl saw it was meaning in life that was far more important than happiness. Happiness is best seen as “an incidental gift”. The Journal of Affective Disorders in 2012 wrote, “The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment …that maximize [s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being.” They concluded after “a long-hominid history” we’ve arrived at a “socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.” U.S. antidepressant use is up 400% since 1990. Don’t dream of blaming the culture, just blame yourself. In 1985, when sociologists asked Americans if they had someone to confide in, 10% had no one. Now the figure is 25%. The CDC said in 2013, that for the first time more Americans were committing suicide than were dying in car accidents. It’s the culture, it’s not the person. Think of those thousands in prison for life (like Timothy Tyler or Bob Riley) for selling LSD or mushrooms at a Dead concert or to a “friend”. MDMA was first synthesized in the 1920’s at Merck and later used by therapists as an empathogen. The DEA forced it to be classified as no medical use (Schedule I) which killed its medical use. No one to date has ever died of an LSD overdose. As John Ehrlichman (Nixon’s domestic policy advisor) explained in 1994 to a journalist, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” A pathologist testifying before the Senate in 1971 said, “The history of medicine is replete with examples of cures obtained years, decades, and even centuries before the mechanism, of action was understood for these cures.” Civilization does not appreciate the healing values of ayahuasca and iboga. But I am confident that if both drugs could be synthesized using fossil fuels and patented by a US company, that civilization might make a corporate exception. With psilocybin, patients learn to fear death less and embrace life more, they learn that they are not dying, but are alive until the moment of death. Remember in disaster movies how half of people meet the last seconds before the final tidal wave with appreciation and love of what they’ve had, while the other half choose to run while screaming, unable in their final moments to activate their DABDA Kubler Ross scenario. Use of psychoactive mushrooms for life lessons and healing suffering dates back 5,700 hundred years and predates all the major religions.
Thanks to opioids that only treat “superficial symptoms rather than underlying structural problems in how we live our lives”, now more Americans die every year (just due to overdose deaths) than soldiers died during the entire Vietnam War.
“Foragers see the world as spiritually alive, welcoming, and generous. Farmers see it as inanimate, forbidding, and reluctant. The gods of foragers are multiple, benevolent, and directly accessible by anyone; the God of farmers is solitary, angry and jealous.” “Agriculturalists are taught to hoard property and defend it to the death while foragers tend to see one another as companions in mutually beneficial relationships.” Christopher mentions Daniel Quinn’s anti-civ writings and remarks that when he first read about DQ’s Leavers versus Takers concept, Christopher thought of another valid polarity, hope versus fear. “OK people, we have to invade them, or they will invade us”. Every war is sold to us through fear. Advertising sells through fear; “you don’t want to be caught without this!”
Here’s a cool anti-civ quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald from the Great Gatsby, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” A reminder that capitalism with its endless growth is “the ideology of a cancer cell”. Ask why was Gobekli Tepe buried in trash? [see ancient-origins.net] Americans sort of get tribalism – street gangs with their colors and armchair warriors with allegiances to arbitrary sports teams – there’s a strong longing for human connection and group identity. We were all indoctrinated against tribalism with the book/film The Lord of the Flies. Civilization won’t tell you that in 1977, when a real-life Lord of the Flies scenario happened, the boys stayed alive by staying in pairs and one of them had to always stay awake for passing ships. Two boys on watch spotted a passing boat after 15 months. And no one was ever named Piggy.
Previous collapses have been regional. Our upcoming collapse will be planetary, and with no place to hide. People wonder why man was stuck for so long without progress before civilization, but he wasn’t stuck. He was home. True things didn’t change but that’s not a bad thing. From what I’ve seen, merely interacting one’s pets, or chatting with someone with a brain has been more fulfilling than watching TV. And evidence suggests humans were happier back then, when they weren’t breeding themselves into overdrive. Christopher sees the only answer today as this: put hunter-gatherer thinking in charge. Top-down structures must become “peer progressive networks” while divestment $$$ from war and weaponry must go to provide basic income for all and provide big incentives for not having children. Note that today’s progressive agenda often shares forementioned forager communal values, while today’s conservative agenda often aligns with the worst long-term aspects of civilization: patriarchy, monotheism, monoculture, raping a land base to secure $$$ and power, and a wildly un-Christ-like lust for money and organized violence (war). Great book that really covers good anti-civ stuff from a different angle than the older known anti-civ writers.
Before the advent of agriculture, the human population doubled roughly every 250,000 years. After the birth of agriculture, babies could be weaned earlier with animal milk. Women became lesser in status. Generosity and equality were abandoned. To Christopher, “our species went from living in the world, into living in a zoo of our own making.” He insightfully added that we became as domesticated as our chosen plants and animals. “Civilization convinced Columbus and his men that gold was more valuable that the lives of the people they destroyed to get it.” Any child over fourteen caught begging for the third time in England, after the Poor Laws were enacted, was executed. Early explorers discovered people who “ate more nutritious food, worked less, slept more, and suffered less disease.” Those who love to point out how chimps can be so aggressive won’t also mention that bonobos who have an “utter absence of lethal aggression among them. No war.” Doug Fry writes in “War, Peace, and Human Nature” that the “worldwide archaeological record is ‘clear and unambiguous’ in showing that ‘war developed, despots arose, violence proliferated, slavery flourished, and the social position of women deteriorated’ after our species” began after agriculture. As Christopher bluntly states, “Civilization is the source of most human violence.” “The infectious diseases most deadly to human beings didn’t exist in prehistory. They are by-products of civilization itself.” A dentist travelling the world realized, “if people were still eating their traditional diet, their teeth were perfect.” Today, one in nine people worldwide are undernourished. Those saying that we are better fed than foragers today, must ignore close to a billion people from their calculations. Strange, but caloric restriction is considered “the only proven technique for extending life.”
Foundling hospitals began when so many people were dumping babies by the side of the road. “In the early 1800’s, roughly a third of the babies born in Paris were left at the foundling hospital.” So much for Parisienne romance.
Civilization is the destruction of what is free, so that humans can be sold an inferior overpriced copy of what was free. Civilization is “Ignore friends and family to get rich so someone will love you”. I like Chris’s bit on civilization selling us, “prepackaged dollops of transitory satisfaction that evaporate on the tongue.” Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park study showed that happy rats did not get addicted to drugged water. Addiction is having more to do with the addict’s earlier trauma than with the drug itself. Nike made lots of money by making running shoes for a style of running humans shouldn’t be doing, namely landing on their heels. They created a product, then the market out of vapor, and the resultant running injury epidemic was free of charge. Before 1972, people ran in thin soles shoes and had far fewer knee injuries. Tribal infants are picked up when crying and feel loved and welcome. Civilized infants are left to cry and feel “confused and alone” thinking there must be something wrong with me.
Between 1997 and 2003, the number of children who liked to hike, garden, engage with nature fell by 50%. One explanation is that between 2000 and 2003, children’s prescriptions for psychotropic drugs increased 49%. U.S. toddlers were recently found to be active 20 minutes a day. Let’s look at the number of children killed by family members per year: that figure (20,000) is 4x the number of U.S. soldiers dying both in Iraq and Afghanistan. UNICIEF found children’s health to be the lowest in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and the United States. In 1998, 30% of teachers thought that kindergarteners should read. By 2010, the figure became 80%. Kids must first hang and play to learn social cues. Let’s face it: play teaches kids to learn to live together. Hunter-gathers shunned “power assertive methods to control behavior”, they knew that each person should learn to understand/control their own needs. They did/do have a sense of toil. When the hunter-gatherer child became adult, play became work, “but it does not cease being play. That productive quality helps the whole band and is valued by all.” For hunter-gatherers much of life is play while for the civilized much of play strangely becomes work. “Excuse me, I’m still working on my salad.” Grandpa exercised, while we work out. I’m working on myself in therapy. I’m working on being more playful. I’m working on not working. Why is the U.S. called a prosperous nation when forty-million people are clearly below the poverty line?
The closer you look at it, the more civilization looks like a pyramid scheme. Villages and towns meant hierarchy, and hierarchy of wealth. Happiness once came from being in the community. In the 1920’s 5% of the U.S. lived alone. Now that number is 25%. Keep them alone and fragmented, and those people are easy to control. Calling all rich winners is as smart as calling every soldier a hero. Reinforcing false narratives is easy when few factcheck or dare to read. “Power diminishes all varieties of empathy.” Diminished empathy is self-destructive and leads to isolation. Selfishness leads to death, first social, then physical.
“We pay doctors very well for deploying technology and very poorly for spending time with patients.” Attempts to make humans live longer appear to have just made suffering slow-motion. Victor Frankl saw it was meaning in life that was far more important than happiness. Happiness is best seen as “an incidental gift”. The Journal of Affective Disorders in 2012 wrote, “The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment …that maximize [s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being.” They concluded after “a long-hominid history” we’ve arrived at a “socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.” U.S. antidepressant use is up 400% since 1990. Don’t dream of blaming the culture, just blame yourself. In 1985, when sociologists asked Americans if they had someone to confide in, 10% had no one. Now the figure is 25%. The CDC said in 2013, that for the first time more Americans were committing suicide than were dying in car accidents. It’s the culture, it’s not the person. Think of those thousands in prison for life (like Timothy Tyler or Bob Riley) for selling LSD or mushrooms at a Dead concert or to a “friend”. MDMA was first synthesized in the 1920’s at Merck and later used by therapists as an empathogen. The DEA forced it to be classified as no medical use (Schedule I) which killed its medical use. No one to date has ever died of an LSD overdose. As John Ehrlichman (Nixon’s domestic policy advisor) explained in 1994 to a journalist, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” A pathologist testifying before the Senate in 1971 said, “The history of medicine is replete with examples of cures obtained years, decades, and even centuries before the mechanism, of action was understood for these cures.” Civilization does not appreciate the healing values of ayahuasca and iboga. But I am confident that if both drugs could be synthesized using fossil fuels and patented by a US company, that civilization might make a corporate exception. With psilocybin, patients learn to fear death less and embrace life more, they learn that they are not dying, but are alive until the moment of death. Remember in disaster movies how half of people meet the last seconds before the final tidal wave with appreciation and love of what they’ve had, while the other half choose to run while screaming, unable in their final moments to activate their DABDA Kubler Ross scenario. Use of psychoactive mushrooms for life lessons and healing suffering dates back 5,700 hundred years and predates all the major religions.
Thanks to opioids that only treat “superficial symptoms rather than underlying structural problems in how we live our lives”, now more Americans die every year (just due to overdose deaths) than soldiers died during the entire Vietnam War.
“Foragers see the world as spiritually alive, welcoming, and generous. Farmers see it as inanimate, forbidding, and reluctant. The gods of foragers are multiple, benevolent, and directly accessible by anyone; the God of farmers is solitary, angry and jealous.” “Agriculturalists are taught to hoard property and defend it to the death while foragers tend to see one another as companions in mutually beneficial relationships.” Christopher mentions Daniel Quinn’s anti-civ writings and remarks that when he first read about DQ’s Leavers versus Takers concept, Christopher thought of another valid polarity, hope versus fear. “OK people, we have to invade them, or they will invade us”. Every war is sold to us through fear. Advertising sells through fear; “you don’t want to be caught without this!”
Here’s a cool anti-civ quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald from the Great Gatsby, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” A reminder that capitalism with its endless growth is “the ideology of a cancer cell”. Ask why was Gobekli Tepe buried in trash? [see ancient-origins.net] Americans sort of get tribalism – street gangs with their colors and armchair warriors with allegiances to arbitrary sports teams – there’s a strong longing for human connection and group identity. We were all indoctrinated against tribalism with the book/film The Lord of the Flies. Civilization won’t tell you that in 1977, when a real-life Lord of the Flies scenario happened, the boys stayed alive by staying in pairs and one of them had to always stay awake for passing ships. Two boys on watch spotted a passing boat after 15 months. And no one was ever named Piggy.
Previous collapses have been regional. Our upcoming collapse will be planetary, and with no place to hide. People wonder why man was stuck for so long without progress before civilization, but he wasn’t stuck. He was home. True things didn’t change but that’s not a bad thing. From what I’ve seen, merely interacting one’s pets, or chatting with someone with a brain has been more fulfilling than watching TV. And evidence suggests humans were happier back then, when they weren’t breeding themselves into overdrive. Christopher sees the only answer today as this: put hunter-gatherer thinking in charge. Top-down structures must become “peer progressive networks” while divestment $$$ from war and weaponry must go to provide basic income for all and provide big incentives for not having children. Note that today’s progressive agenda often shares forementioned forager communal values, while today’s conservative agenda often aligns with the worst long-term aspects of civilization: patriarchy, monotheism, monoculture, raping a land base to secure $$$ and power, and a wildly un-Christ-like lust for money and organized violence (war). Great book that really covers good anti-civ stuff from a different angle than the older known anti-civ writers.
February 15, 2024
The effect reading this had on my mindset, i.e. I now think everything about modern life is ridiculous and don't much care for it and have decided to zone it all out, is amazing!
Would recommend!
My only criticism is that in the chapter on teen sex Christopher Ryan goes into a tonne of detail about how lots of young men go bananas via testosterone because they want desperately to have sex and no one will fuck them and testosterone is a dangerous thing to keep pent up blah blah blah. Putting aside that I was a teen lady virgin that no one would fuck, I always think it's worth following up that kind of argument with "young women aren't allowed to fuck young men because by and large they'll be called sluts and considered worthless by the same young men so it's DUDES that have stopped OTHER DUDES from getting laid, not women who are forced to be the gatekeepers of sex via social stigma" But you know, I DID GENDER STUDIES AT UNIVERSITY. And I didn't get the sense CR was trying to blame women for incels, so I'll let it go. Still a worthwhile book, fellow thwarted humans. Sidenote: Does anything highlight the pitfalls of our doomed society quite like critiquing this book on Goodreads?
Holy shit.
Would recommend!
My only criticism is that in the chapter on teen sex Christopher Ryan goes into a tonne of detail about how lots of young men go bananas via testosterone because they want desperately to have sex and no one will fuck them and testosterone is a dangerous thing to keep pent up blah blah blah. Putting aside that I was a teen lady virgin that no one would fuck, I always think it's worth following up that kind of argument with "young women aren't allowed to fuck young men because by and large they'll be called sluts and considered worthless by the same young men so it's DUDES that have stopped OTHER DUDES from getting laid, not women who are forced to be the gatekeepers of sex via social stigma" But you know, I DID GENDER STUDIES AT UNIVERSITY. And I didn't get the sense CR was trying to blame women for incels, so I'll let it go. Still a worthwhile book, fellow thwarted humans. Sidenote: Does anything highlight the pitfalls of our doomed society quite like critiquing this book on Goodreads?
Holy shit.
October 2, 2019
I read about 10% of the book. I agree with Ryan that if we started as a “wolf pack” then we are mostly poodles and pigs, and we need to look at and provide for our psychological needs in light of our origins as foragers. But I won’t get my desire for confirmation fulfilled by this book. He seems to not understand natural selection, and he lacks precision and science when considering human evolution and the human condition. There are many better popular science books out there. Start with De Waal if this interests you. Personally I can’t be bothered with the rest of this book.
July 23, 2021
I am merely going to summarize, in a nutshell, the author’s claims, ideas, conclusion etc.
Our civilization is a lie. The good life it supposedly gives us is a lie. Our civilization tells us nature is our enemy and we need to be part of civilization to gain its protection. Civilization made this massive reproduction rate possible. We can now eat ourselves to death . It makes no one happy. Everybody lives in anxiety . The media tries to sell us that we have such a good life. We are happy. What you are not happy? Read this . Watch this. Buy this. What? It is still not working ? Just pop a pill 💊 You will be happy then. Our civilization teaches us to venerate egotists. It is all mine , mine , mine. Where is true cooperation? My child , my wife, my property. We even erect monument to these egotists.
He quotes the book Walden of Henry David Thoreau: quote - “As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. “
What worries me the most is that as the years go by our lives are getting more and more under control by that selfish band of egotists. Soon nobody will be able to break free anymore from them because the time is nigh their control will be absolute.
Food might be plentiful but all of it by varying degrees is tainted either with pesticides, cross genetically manipulated or not properly grown.
We can stuff our faces with sugary, gluten laden, desaturated foods until the cows come home, but we still are malnourished.
Statistics can tell me to end of of days that we have a much higher GDP and income than ever before when in reality the average jack Robinson has no cash in his pockets, massive mortgage, and worries about his future.
I am not interested in average distribution of wealth when it includes the richest 85 people in the world who accumulate more than 3.5 billion of the poorer population in the world.
Our modern age produces unhappy kids that grow up to become psychopaths . But in reality this has already happened from the dawn of civilization on.
Even my most beloved Richard Dawkins may not be always be right. It seems to me now that humans have begun as a cooperative, social even unselfish species. So why are we such egotists today . Well the answer should be clear. Because of agriculture which led to civilization.
Our Civilization borrows from the future and feeds from the past - the ultimate entropic death spiral 🌀
Biggest problem is that nuclear family parenting has replaced diverse multi input community parenting . Now it’s I got no time for you. I am responsible - I must work . I am stressed. So that is civilization - that is progress / modernity?
He quotes the last paragraph of an essay of Bertrand Russell
Here he envisions a future for humankind that sounds nearly identical to our hunter gatherer past.
“Above all there will be happiness and joy of life instead of frayed nerves weariness and dyspepsia.
The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful but not enough to produce exhaustion.
Ordinary men and women having the opportunity of a happy life will become more kindly unless persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion.
The case for war will die out partly for this reason and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all.
Good nature is of all moral qualities the one in the world needs most and good nature is the result of ease and security not have a life of arduous struggle.
Hither two we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines in this we have been foolish but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.
If work is unnecessary why do we continue to behave as if the key to a good life is to spend most of it doing something we'd rather not.”
I believe this to be an important summary of all that’s problematic with modern civilization. Read it and judge for yourself.
Our civilization is a lie. The good life it supposedly gives us is a lie. Our civilization tells us nature is our enemy and we need to be part of civilization to gain its protection. Civilization made this massive reproduction rate possible. We can now eat ourselves to death . It makes no one happy. Everybody lives in anxiety . The media tries to sell us that we have such a good life. We are happy. What you are not happy? Read this . Watch this. Buy this. What? It is still not working ? Just pop a pill 💊 You will be happy then. Our civilization teaches us to venerate egotists. It is all mine , mine , mine. Where is true cooperation? My child , my wife, my property. We even erect monument to these egotists.
He quotes the book Walden of Henry David Thoreau: quote - “As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. “
What worries me the most is that as the years go by our lives are getting more and more under control by that selfish band of egotists. Soon nobody will be able to break free anymore from them because the time is nigh their control will be absolute.
Food might be plentiful but all of it by varying degrees is tainted either with pesticides, cross genetically manipulated or not properly grown.
We can stuff our faces with sugary, gluten laden, desaturated foods until the cows come home, but we still are malnourished.
Statistics can tell me to end of of days that we have a much higher GDP and income than ever before when in reality the average jack Robinson has no cash in his pockets, massive mortgage, and worries about his future.
I am not interested in average distribution of wealth when it includes the richest 85 people in the world who accumulate more than 3.5 billion of the poorer population in the world.
Our modern age produces unhappy kids that grow up to become psychopaths . But in reality this has already happened from the dawn of civilization on.
Even my most beloved Richard Dawkins may not be always be right. It seems to me now that humans have begun as a cooperative, social even unselfish species. So why are we such egotists today . Well the answer should be clear. Because of agriculture which led to civilization.
Our Civilization borrows from the future and feeds from the past - the ultimate entropic death spiral 🌀
Biggest problem is that nuclear family parenting has replaced diverse multi input community parenting . Now it’s I got no time for you. I am responsible - I must work . I am stressed. So that is civilization - that is progress / modernity?
He quotes the last paragraph of an essay of Bertrand Russell
Here he envisions a future for humankind that sounds nearly identical to our hunter gatherer past.
“Above all there will be happiness and joy of life instead of frayed nerves weariness and dyspepsia.
The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful but not enough to produce exhaustion.
Ordinary men and women having the opportunity of a happy life will become more kindly unless persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion.
The case for war will die out partly for this reason and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all.
Good nature is of all moral qualities the one in the world needs most and good nature is the result of ease and security not have a life of arduous struggle.
Hither two we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines in this we have been foolish but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.
If work is unnecessary why do we continue to behave as if the key to a good life is to spend most of it doing something we'd rather not.”
I believe this to be an important summary of all that’s problematic with modern civilization. Read it and judge for yourself.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 2, 2019
Author Christopher Ryan has provided a clear and compelling argument against what he calls the Narrative of Perpetual Progress, or NPP.
In 2016, I dropped away from traditional life, leaving Seattle, WA to wander Mexico and Central America. It was due to many of the ailments listed in this book that I found life in Seattle so intolerable; but I wasn't ready to face the idea that Modern Life wasn't great. It took awhile for that realization to set in.
I was raised in a fundamentalist religion. I remember suppressing overwhelming fear that would bubble up in small doses. Having devoted my life to ideas and organizations that were harmful to me, it was too painful to admit that I was committed to walking down the wrong path. Upon leaving, it still took me several years to acknowledge just how wrong that path was for me. In hindsight, the problems with the belief system are so obvious that I marvel at the need to outline them, painstakingly, point by point, for those who are still enmeshed in such beliefs. But when you're in that belief, you need someone to do just that. Many people need the structure to be dismantled in small, bite-sized chunks.
I've reached a similar point in my departure from the NPP. It took me a long time, and now that I've extracted myself, I look back and wonder how so many can be so blind to what clearly ails them. Modern civilization is so obviously dysfunctional that I forget what it was like to be blind to that dysfunction. There were points in Ryan's book where I was asking "isn't this obvious to everyone?" but Ryan has taken the time and displayed the patience to help those still deep in NPP to dismantle their ideas in small bite-sized chunks.
Well done Chris. It was worth the wait.
In 2016, I dropped away from traditional life, leaving Seattle, WA to wander Mexico and Central America. It was due to many of the ailments listed in this book that I found life in Seattle so intolerable; but I wasn't ready to face the idea that Modern Life wasn't great. It took awhile for that realization to set in.
I was raised in a fundamentalist religion. I remember suppressing overwhelming fear that would bubble up in small doses. Having devoted my life to ideas and organizations that were harmful to me, it was too painful to admit that I was committed to walking down the wrong path. Upon leaving, it still took me several years to acknowledge just how wrong that path was for me. In hindsight, the problems with the belief system are so obvious that I marvel at the need to outline them, painstakingly, point by point, for those who are still enmeshed in such beliefs. But when you're in that belief, you need someone to do just that. Many people need the structure to be dismantled in small, bite-sized chunks.
I've reached a similar point in my departure from the NPP. It took me a long time, and now that I've extracted myself, I look back and wonder how so many can be so blind to what clearly ails them. Modern civilization is so obviously dysfunctional that I forget what it was like to be blind to that dysfunction. There were points in Ryan's book where I was asking "isn't this obvious to everyone?" but Ryan has taken the time and displayed the patience to help those still deep in NPP to dismantle their ideas in small bite-sized chunks.
Well done Chris. It was worth the wait.
October 18, 2019
I’m a long time listener of Dr Ryan’s podcast Tangentially Speaking so the arguments presented to me in this short and sweet treatise on why progression isn’t inherently positive, aren’t new. I’d however recommend this book to anyone that has contemplated the necessity to participate in the “rat race”, why we aren’t necessarily better off now than our ancestors and how to re-imagine a better life for yourself. I listened to this on Audible and it was read by the author which I’d highly recommend !
December 12, 2020
To a whole degree, the book challenged a lot of my thoughts and beliefs. I was wondering on which basis he was basing his argument, which goes as follows: The greater woes of man,—cancer, depression, diabetes, STD's, anxiety, wars, greed, loneliness, chronic disease, (even tooth decay)—are products of civilization, of agriculture and modern societies. He compares the status quo with the pre-historic simplistic groups of people living off the land in hunter-gatherer societies.
I said, well-and-good. It's not my area of expertise, and I have to listen to him. But then, he goes on about the modern woes of humanity by which inspired him to look for better times, and we find him ranting on inequality and such, even citing Picketty and Krugman. It becomes obvious that if someone is willing to base parts of his arguments on lies and bogus science, the rest is also suspect. If someone allows himself to cheat on half of his solution, I am still waiting in want of the solution. He discredited himself.
It seemed at first that this was a genuine inquiry into better times of the past. But little by little, I realized that he just doesn't like capitalism, he doesn't like Western society and Western thought, and he'd want anything but what the West offers. Upon these realizations, I would definitely say: If anxiety was the price for truth and knowledge, then I want anxiety over a life that's spent in play. I would prefer a life of meaning over a simple life of subsistence. Civilized to Death is shallow in many respects. He tells us that people live into old age, but they're depressed and are in chronic pain, and that was something that didn't happen in the past. Again, he misuses statistics and makes false conclusions that further undermine his argument.
I was happy at first that my beliefs were challenged. I would have to respond with intellectual fervor to the claims and ideas presented in this book. But I found out that I won't find these things here, and that I would have to look for scrutiny and closure elsewhere. Civilized to Death is not the book for me.
P.S. A lot of the book is a critique of what is called Hobbesianism; the belief that humans are extremely violent if left unrestrained. The author claims that humans are social and cooperative creatures, which I agree with. But then he takes the Rousseaueian claim that it is private property that leads to violence between people. Well, why not ignorance? Why not scarcity? Will the author say anything to promote egalitarianism? Why should private property only lead to greed? Many people give away a lot of what they own, if they believed in altruism, and often even when they don't. That's not an idea that I liked at all.
I said, well-and-good. It's not my area of expertise, and I have to listen to him. But then, he goes on about the modern woes of humanity by which inspired him to look for better times, and we find him ranting on inequality and such, even citing Picketty and Krugman. It becomes obvious that if someone is willing to base parts of his arguments on lies and bogus science, the rest is also suspect. If someone allows himself to cheat on half of his solution, I am still waiting in want of the solution. He discredited himself.
It seemed at first that this was a genuine inquiry into better times of the past. But little by little, I realized that he just doesn't like capitalism, he doesn't like Western society and Western thought, and he'd want anything but what the West offers. Upon these realizations, I would definitely say: If anxiety was the price for truth and knowledge, then I want anxiety over a life that's spent in play. I would prefer a life of meaning over a simple life of subsistence. Civilized to Death is shallow in many respects. He tells us that people live into old age, but they're depressed and are in chronic pain, and that was something that didn't happen in the past. Again, he misuses statistics and makes false conclusions that further undermine his argument.
I was happy at first that my beliefs were challenged. I would have to respond with intellectual fervor to the claims and ideas presented in this book. But I found out that I won't find these things here, and that I would have to look for scrutiny and closure elsewhere. Civilized to Death is not the book for me.
P.S. A lot of the book is a critique of what is called Hobbesianism; the belief that humans are extremely violent if left unrestrained. The author claims that humans are social and cooperative creatures, which I agree with. But then he takes the Rousseaueian claim that it is private property that leads to violence between people. Well, why not ignorance? Why not scarcity? Will the author say anything to promote egalitarianism? Why should private property only lead to greed? Many people give away a lot of what they own, if they believed in altruism, and often even when they don't. That's not an idea that I liked at all.
November 29, 2019
This is one of those books easily read annually to remind one of what is important in life.
I jotted down at least 10 of Christopher Ryan’s most salient points. Here are three:
“Our desperate peregrinations are in search of a place much like the home we left when we left The Garden and started to farm”.
“We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter and leisure”.
“We are trapped in an economy that is killing us. Humans are starving for what our ancestors had, a sense of community”.
Strangely coincidentally, I had been reading Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael”, a book that had been sitting un-read on a bookshelf for many years, when the subject audiobook became available. When I had plucked “Ismael” off the shelf I expected it to be about Herman Melville and/or Moby Dick and not a novel with the subtitle “An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit”. I quickly became aware of the similarities between the two books. Indeed, late in “Civilized” Christopher Ryan describes “Ishmael” as a “cult classic” (who knew?) that “distinguished the leavers from the takers”, i.e. those who make the world a better place and those who cannot see beyond their own greed.
From “Ishmael”, page 80: “....Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he’s done—almost. He hasn’t quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world—or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought. We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit—and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out—and we go on gobbling them up. It is hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.” Sobering.
I jotted down at least 10 of Christopher Ryan’s most salient points. Here are three:
“Our desperate peregrinations are in search of a place much like the home we left when we left The Garden and started to farm”.
“We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter and leisure”.
“We are trapped in an economy that is killing us. Humans are starving for what our ancestors had, a sense of community”.
Strangely coincidentally, I had been reading Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael”, a book that had been sitting un-read on a bookshelf for many years, when the subject audiobook became available. When I had plucked “Ismael” off the shelf I expected it to be about Herman Melville and/or Moby Dick and not a novel with the subtitle “An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit”. I quickly became aware of the similarities between the two books. Indeed, late in “Civilized” Christopher Ryan describes “Ishmael” as a “cult classic” (who knew?) that “distinguished the leavers from the takers”, i.e. those who make the world a better place and those who cannot see beyond their own greed.
From “Ishmael”, page 80: “....Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he’s done—almost. He hasn’t quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world—or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought. We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit—and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out—and we go on gobbling them up. It is hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.” Sobering.
December 18, 2019
I rather enjoyed this read, and find the ideas rather compelling.
Except one. The "sharing" economy is bad, a scam, throwing all the risk of the employer onto individuals while some tech startup rakes almost everything, and doesn't even make a profit doing it because it's dumping so much into expansion and stock buybacks to drive finance capital to just keep the damn ponzi scheme rolling. Uber, Air BNB, "Uber for dogwalkers", Task Rabbit and all the rest are vile - and Ryan bought the advertising copy in "Future Perfect".
A centralized app to dispatch and profit from the collective efforts of the working poor by removing all operating costs and leaving everything on the most precarious workers, just to bilk the excess cash of the rich is not a fucking "Peer Economy". It's a travesty.
And a proper "Peer Network" genuinely isn't possible on the network structure we have today. We'd need a whole new internet, a revolution in our networking and computing paradigms; hierarchy is literally built into the operating system.
I don't get why this part was even in the book - it's just a review of, again, ad copy for the present, as Ryan put it for "Reasonable Optimism." The manner he addressed that book and Pinker's load of shit would have well served "Future Perfect", but what it *says* is happening is so entrancing, it's real easy to believe it, if you don't know better.
"In theory, theory and reality are the same. In reality, they are not." To theory, I would add advertisements. "In theory and advertisements, theory, reality, and advertisements are the same. In reality, they are not." Advertising is violence. Always remember that.
Then there's smaller things like seeming to actually like Steve Jobs which is. . .I mean, not all of us can be pissed off Socialists -- the 'pissed off' part seems to correlate to in-work poverty.
Except one. The "sharing" economy is bad, a scam, throwing all the risk of the employer onto individuals while some tech startup rakes almost everything, and doesn't even make a profit doing it because it's dumping so much into expansion and stock buybacks to drive finance capital to just keep the damn ponzi scheme rolling. Uber, Air BNB, "Uber for dogwalkers", Task Rabbit and all the rest are vile - and Ryan bought the advertising copy in "Future Perfect".
A centralized app to dispatch and profit from the collective efforts of the working poor by removing all operating costs and leaving everything on the most precarious workers, just to bilk the excess cash of the rich is not a fucking "Peer Economy". It's a travesty.
And a proper "Peer Network" genuinely isn't possible on the network structure we have today. We'd need a whole new internet, a revolution in our networking and computing paradigms; hierarchy is literally built into the operating system.
I don't get why this part was even in the book - it's just a review of, again, ad copy for the present, as Ryan put it for "Reasonable Optimism." The manner he addressed that book and Pinker's load of shit would have well served "Future Perfect", but what it *says* is happening is so entrancing, it's real easy to believe it, if you don't know better.
"In theory, theory and reality are the same. In reality, they are not." To theory, I would add advertisements. "In theory and advertisements, theory, reality, and advertisements are the same. In reality, they are not." Advertising is violence. Always remember that.
Then there's smaller things like seeming to actually like Steve Jobs which is. . .I mean, not all of us can be pissed off Socialists -- the 'pissed off' part seems to correlate to in-work poverty.
May 17, 2020
Authors don’t make good readers (of audio books). There’s probably exceptions, but this isn’t one of them. The author takes the habit of ”acting out” the opposing views, often in a voice that exaggerates and ridicules the other party. Feels petty and childish.
As much as I’d like to give it 4 stars, I cannot due to the deficiencies. The book is full of interesting facts about ”primitive” life, and really takes a fresh view in looking at the individual and psychology, rather than at the bigger narrative (like Jared Diamond), or statistical (like Harari). I learned a lot of new things.
What, however, feels a bit stale is the narrow USA-centric viewpoint of the ”normal”. Yes, the author gives examples from Europe and the rest of the modern world. There are other books comparing regional nutrition-, drug-, sex-ed-, family life- and working habits between the US and e.g Europe, which do it with more focus and overall make this narrative more intetesting. I’d really like the ”normal” here to have been more of my perspective.
Anyway, I will recommend this book, although not wholeheartedly. Really hope the message gets through, even if the frosting is not what I’d hoped for.
As much as I’d like to give it 4 stars, I cannot due to the deficiencies. The book is full of interesting facts about ”primitive” life, and really takes a fresh view in looking at the individual and psychology, rather than at the bigger narrative (like Jared Diamond), or statistical (like Harari). I learned a lot of new things.
What, however, feels a bit stale is the narrow USA-centric viewpoint of the ”normal”. Yes, the author gives examples from Europe and the rest of the modern world. There are other books comparing regional nutrition-, drug-, sex-ed-, family life- and working habits between the US and e.g Europe, which do it with more focus and overall make this narrative more intetesting. I’d really like the ”normal” here to have been more of my perspective.
Anyway, I will recommend this book, although not wholeheartedly. Really hope the message gets through, even if the frosting is not what I’d hoped for.
October 31, 2019
I've always felt that our way of life doesn't feel natural and that it is simply because it isn't, but it has always been hard to put my finger on exactly what was at fault. This scathing critique of everything our society holds to be important yet what we know fails to meet our fundamental needs is both fascinating and entertaining.
Chris takes us on a journey through how we got to this point of mutually assured destruction we call development, prosperity and 'progress'. The more 'developed' we become the less our psychological needs of community and belonging are met and the more we try to meet them through consumption at the cost of both our only home and our future. We have built a zoo for ourselves so distant from our hunter-gatherer roots it is no wonder that it is failing to make us happy. Highly recommended if not mandatory reading for all seekers.
Chris takes us on a journey through how we got to this point of mutually assured destruction we call development, prosperity and 'progress'. The more 'developed' we become the less our psychological needs of community and belonging are met and the more we try to meet them through consumption at the cost of both our only home and our future. We have built a zoo for ourselves so distant from our hunter-gatherer roots it is no wonder that it is failing to make us happy. Highly recommended if not mandatory reading for all seekers.
November 1, 2019
Ugh! I gave up after two chapters of the audiobook. The author narrates the book and his sanctimonious drone killed whatever pleasure might be found in the book.
Save hours of your life for better purposes. Here is the gist of it:
People living ‘civilized lives’ are less happy than hunter-gatherers, generally speaking.
Change is inevitable; progress is not.
Save hours of your life for better purposes. Here is the gist of it:
People living ‘civilized lives’ are less happy than hunter-gatherers, generally speaking.
Change is inevitable; progress is not.
June 16, 2022
Ways civilization has made us and the environment more miserable since the invention of agriculture.
In general, opposes views of Hobbs and neo-Hobbesians.
I loved its dark humorous tone.
Homo-sapiens nature and psyche are not suited to urban life.
In general, opposes views of Hobbs and neo-Hobbesians.
I loved its dark humorous tone.
Homo-sapiens nature and psyche are not suited to urban life.
May 15, 2021
I was a big fan of Sex at Dawn, but that was more specialized. This one is wide-ranging and deeply disappointed with the absolute state of the place.
The take home, as is usually the take home in my beloved unga bunga bullshit books, is that the more civilized we became, the further we got from ourselves, which is why the modern world is such a seething morass of anxiety and rage. Ryan draws from the left-field guesses about our origins that constitute anthropology along with modern studies of hunter-gatherer tribes to conclude that we probably enjoyed life a lot more when it was simple and we were living in accordance with the animal drives embedded with us over the millions of years it took for us to turn into hairless apes.
We're living in overcrowded Skinner boxes. We were never meant to see this many people, let alone see them every day. We were never meant to intake this much data. We're highly adaptable, which is why we're still alive as a species, but this is a freshwater fish in a saltwater tank situation. The adults are miserable because they eat things that aren't food and spend all their time doing fake things that they don't care about. The children are doomed because they're kept confined and medicated to oblivion if they behave like children, especially during the federally mandated eight to ten daily hours of Sitting Still and Doing Math that constitutes early education. Being forced to live so counter to our instincts causes that civilization discontent Freud was popping off about, which leads to anxiety, rage, madness, an increasingly worsening world that makes the next generation suffer all the more.
Most jarring for me was the chapter on death and dying. Ryan champions a sort of stoic, honorable acceptance of death, reflected in primitive societies where the old, feeble, useless, or potential liabilities would take it upon themselves to functionally commit suicide by nature. Horrifying for us to consider, until you take a closer look at the state of the health care industry. A full 33% of the health care budget, 33% of all money that pertains to medicine in America, goes toward the 5% of people in the health care system who are going to die that year. It's a huge money funnel dedicated to prolonging the process of dying. CPR, ventilators, chemotherapy, all these last ditch "well, something has to work!" efforts don't heal the sick. It's a racket, a ritualized worship of pain that ends up bankrupting whole families for generations.
It's hard to read books like this and hope that the end isn't well and truly nigh, especially in light of the Corona outbreak. So many people are hyperventilating at the prospect of things "never getting back to normal!"
Why would you want things to go back to normal?
I'll see y'all in Thunderdome.
The take home, as is usually the take home in my beloved unga bunga bullshit books, is that the more civilized we became, the further we got from ourselves, which is why the modern world is such a seething morass of anxiety and rage. Ryan draws from the left-field guesses about our origins that constitute anthropology along with modern studies of hunter-gatherer tribes to conclude that we probably enjoyed life a lot more when it was simple and we were living in accordance with the animal drives embedded with us over the millions of years it took for us to turn into hairless apes.
We're living in overcrowded Skinner boxes. We were never meant to see this many people, let alone see them every day. We were never meant to intake this much data. We're highly adaptable, which is why we're still alive as a species, but this is a freshwater fish in a saltwater tank situation. The adults are miserable because they eat things that aren't food and spend all their time doing fake things that they don't care about. The children are doomed because they're kept confined and medicated to oblivion if they behave like children, especially during the federally mandated eight to ten daily hours of Sitting Still and Doing Math that constitutes early education. Being forced to live so counter to our instincts causes that civilization discontent Freud was popping off about, which leads to anxiety, rage, madness, an increasingly worsening world that makes the next generation suffer all the more.
Most jarring for me was the chapter on death and dying. Ryan champions a sort of stoic, honorable acceptance of death, reflected in primitive societies where the old, feeble, useless, or potential liabilities would take it upon themselves to functionally commit suicide by nature. Horrifying for us to consider, until you take a closer look at the state of the health care industry. A full 33% of the health care budget, 33% of all money that pertains to medicine in America, goes toward the 5% of people in the health care system who are going to die that year. It's a huge money funnel dedicated to prolonging the process of dying. CPR, ventilators, chemotherapy, all these last ditch "well, something has to work!" efforts don't heal the sick. It's a racket, a ritualized worship of pain that ends up bankrupting whole families for generations.
It's hard to read books like this and hope that the end isn't well and truly nigh, especially in light of the Corona outbreak. So many people are hyperventilating at the prospect of things "never getting back to normal!"
Why would you want things to go back to normal?
I'll see y'all in Thunderdome.
February 11, 2021
I tried to write an even longer review, but the people before me already did a better job, so I just want to tell people not to waste their time with this book.
While the author has some interesting facts and anecdotes about life in pre-agricultural age, in 95% of the pages he goes to such extreme lengths in cherry picking his arguments that he sounds exactly like the drunken ramblings of the next asshole hipster at your local pub. Not only this annoying as fuck, but it takes all his credibility away.
Why reading this book felt like such a fucking waste of time:
He fantasies about a way of living that would be absolutely impossible from any standpoint for today's population of over 7 billion people.
In his quest to demonize "society" (which has its big flaws, nobody is denying that), he completely disregards any positive aspect of our lives, or completely dismisses it as something we don't really need and we could do as well with out.
Who the fuck thinks we don't need houses that stand still and protect the inhabitants in the face of a storm because the people of some tribe have a good laugh when someone's hut gets blow away and they all start to rebuild, and have a good time?
Are you fucking kidding me?
You would think that he may come up with some sort of solutions for all those problems, or maybe, some ideas on how to make the world a better place for the future generations. Nope. You just get a 250+ pages rant about some abstract devil: agriculture.
Don't waste your time. Seriously, don't!
While the author has some interesting facts and anecdotes about life in pre-agricultural age, in 95% of the pages he goes to such extreme lengths in cherry picking his arguments that he sounds exactly like the drunken ramblings of the next asshole hipster at your local pub. Not only this annoying as fuck, but it takes all his credibility away.
Why reading this book felt like such a fucking waste of time:
He fantasies about a way of living that would be absolutely impossible from any standpoint for today's population of over 7 billion people.
In his quest to demonize "society" (which has its big flaws, nobody is denying that), he completely disregards any positive aspect of our lives, or completely dismisses it as something we don't really need and we could do as well with out.
Who the fuck thinks we don't need houses that stand still and protect the inhabitants in the face of a storm because the people of some tribe have a good laugh when someone's hut gets blow away and they all start to rebuild, and have a good time?
Are you fucking kidding me?
You would think that he may come up with some sort of solutions for all those problems, or maybe, some ideas on how to make the world a better place for the future generations. Nope. You just get a 250+ pages rant about some abstract devil: agriculture.
Don't waste your time. Seriously, don't!
October 1, 2019
Just finished my advance readers copy. Waited a long time for this one to finally be released. The wait was worth it. I also recommend The New Human Rights Movement by Peter Joseph and The Spell of The Sensuous by David Abram if you enjoyed this book. I love books that turn my conventional ways of thinking upside down in ways that make sense
October 18, 2019
Eye opening
Love tangentially speaking, sex at dawn and now civilized to death. Great read, very eye opening to a lot of the issues humans face today.
Love tangentially speaking, sex at dawn and now civilized to death. Great read, very eye opening to a lot of the issues humans face today.
July 5, 2019
I've been waiting for this since 2014 when I first read Sex at Dawn. Chris has been talking about this book on the podcast since then. If you're a fan of the podcast, much of the material here will be familiar. many of the same references, stories and points are repeated.
Chris isn't saying anything new here, so much as saying it in an entertaining way that is still well researched. If you have read the works of Marshall Sahlins, Jared Diamond and Frans De Waal there is nothing new to learn here, but it's worth the read anyway just because it brings the research together in a comfortable package. This book is more suited to new readers to the subjects of primatology and anthropology and I sincerely hope it reaches them.
fun side note: Chris stops to mention my personal hero Daniel Quinn, only for a sentence (one in which he misstates something Quinn actually retracted in later works and was the thing he was most vocal about regretting ever saying) despite this book repeating all of his points verbatim with updated research
Chris isn't saying anything new here, so much as saying it in an entertaining way that is still well researched. If you have read the works of Marshall Sahlins, Jared Diamond and Frans De Waal there is nothing new to learn here, but it's worth the read anyway just because it brings the research together in a comfortable package. This book is more suited to new readers to the subjects of primatology and anthropology and I sincerely hope it reaches them.
fun side note: Chris stops to mention my personal hero Daniel Quinn, only for a sentence (one in which he misstates something Quinn actually retracted in later works and was the thing he was most vocal about regretting ever saying) despite this book repeating all of his points verbatim with updated research
October 7, 2019
I like the authenticity of the author.I listen to his podcast (Tangentially speaking) more often than not and share the same concerns and similar critiques. The point of divergence is the nihilistic undertone and that of impending doom in the form of large scale climate crisis that the author tends to take for granted. The future may pan out this way and we might be completely helpless but firmly believing it to be the case wont help us in whatever efforts we may be capable of mustering collectively and individually.
All is not lost even when it seems like all is lost.
FYI, I did pre-order the book & I have to admit I am a slightly biased Tangenter.
All is not lost even when it seems like all is lost.
FYI, I did pre-order the book & I have to admit I am a slightly biased Tangenter.
October 28, 2019
Sobering and realistic
This was a great way to help us reconnect with our ancient roots, our true nature. The author used many vivid examples and sources that brought lucidity and clarity to describe the current identity crisis we are all experiencing as a species. The author and his dead helped me shaped and be able to turn a lot of this concerns and my angst into a more tangible concept. Now I have better understanding of what I been missing.
This was a great way to help us reconnect with our ancient roots, our true nature. The author used many vivid examples and sources that brought lucidity and clarity to describe the current identity crisis we are all experiencing as a species. The author and his dead helped me shaped and be able to turn a lot of this concerns and my angst into a more tangible concept. Now I have better understanding of what I been missing.
December 9, 2019
Watch a detailed review along with my favorite ideas and takeaways at:
https://youtu.be/LtCUeGzXpxs
https://youtu.be/LtCUeGzXpxs
December 30, 2019
TAI AIŠKU, kad žmonija dabar išgyvena pačius geriausius laikus. Kas norėtų grįžti į kokį ten akmens amžių - vis kraustytis, atsisakyti komforto, saugumo, turto? Nebent koks nors barzdotas, psichodelinių grybų prisivalgęs hipis.
Bet autorius į tokį nepanašus.
Skaitant jaučiasi stiprus pesimizmas, bet tuo pačiu kyla pasigėrėjimas, koks keistas ir neeilinis gamtos fenomenas yra tie žmonės. Nors knygą ir bandoma užbaigti labiau optimistine gaida, manęs ji neįkvėpė. Taip norėčiau pagyventi dar bent 1000 metų, kad pamatyčiau, kas toliau laukia žmonijos. Net jei ir nieko gero, vis tiek įdomu!
Anyway, autorius pasakoja, kodėl mūsų įsitikinimai apie homo sapiens sapiens praeitį, prigimtį ir dabartį yra fundamentaliai klaidingi, kokią funkciją visuomenėje atlieka "nuolatinio progreso" naratyvas, kuo paradoksalus yra turtų siekimas, kodėl "paauglystė" yra civilizacijos konstruktas ir dar daug.
Jei jus užkabino Y. N. Harari leptelėjimas, kad žemdirbystė buvo didžiulė žmonijos klaida, ši knyga puikiai išplėtoja šitą ERETIŠKĄ mintį.
Aišku, vardan nuoseklaus pasakojimo, vietomis nukenčia faktinis tikslumas. Pvz., lyg niekur nieko rašoma: "In fact, the only proven technique for extending life span is caloric restriction." Nope. Tai tikrai nėra toks faktas, kad jam užtektų tik vieno sakinio. Žr. puikią klausimo analizę: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/12...
Arba kažkur rašo, kad žemdirbystė padėjo mums užauginti daug maisto, bet jis ne toks maistingas. Yra ir labiau pagrįstų argumentų, kodėl žemdirbystė sufuckupino mūsų gyvenimus, bet šis yra labiau niuansuotas (ir knygoje plačiau nenagrinėjamas). Selekcijos dėka žmogus kaip tik išvedė maistingesnių augalų veisles: su mažesnėmis sėklomis, plonesnėmis žievėmis ir pan. Taip, kokie ten ryžiai nėra maistingumo viršūnė, bet tokia generalizuota frazė gali sugadinti gana tvirtą teiginį.
Tokių vietų daug neradau, bet šiaip šaltiniai pateikiami labai nepatogiai - tekste visiškai nežymimi, tik skyriaus gale išvardinti su kelių sakinių prierašais. Kadangi tekste minima daug faktų - visokių ten skaičių, tyrimų, - manau, autorius turėtų neapsunkinti jų tikrinimo.
O šiaip, tikrai apmąstymo vertas turinys. Labai rišliai ir vaizdingai parašyta, daug pavyzdžių, cituotinų vietų.
Civilization is like a hole our clever species dug and then promptly fell into.
Bet autorius į tokį nepanašus.
"Some readers will accuse me of romantic nostalgia and cherry-picking evidence. This is understandable. Reflexive dismissal of any positive view of precivilized life is typical of the civilized, unsurprisingly."
Skaitant jaučiasi stiprus pesimizmas, bet tuo pačiu kyla pasigėrėjimas, koks keistas ir neeilinis gamtos fenomenas yra tie žmonės. Nors knygą ir bandoma užbaigti labiau optimistine gaida, manęs ji neįkvėpė. Taip norėčiau pagyventi dar bent 1000 metų, kad pamatyčiau, kas toliau laukia žmonijos. Net jei ir nieko gero, vis tiek įdomu!
Anyway, autorius pasakoja, kodėl mūsų įsitikinimai apie homo sapiens sapiens praeitį, prigimtį ir dabartį yra fundamentaliai klaidingi, kokią funkciją visuomenėje atlieka "nuolatinio progreso" naratyvas, kuo paradoksalus yra turtų siekimas, kodėl "paauglystė" yra civilizacijos konstruktas ir dar daug.
"Rosy declarations of eternal progress are as intellectually baseless as they are emotionally comforting, and they undermine our capacity to correct course before it's too late. When you wake up smelling smoke. “Don't worry, go back to sleep” may be precisely what you most want to hear, but that doesn't make it good advice. Psychologist Tali Sharot calls this blind faith in progress “optimism bias.” She's found that we tend to dismiss disturbing evidence as aberrations while accentuating anything that paints a brighter picture of the future."
Jei jus užkabino Y. N. Harari leptelėjimas, kad žemdirbystė buvo didžiulė žmonijos klaida, ši knyga puikiai išplėtoja šitą ERETIŠKĄ mintį.
"Our species went from living in the world to living in a zoo of our own making. Without understanding what was happening, our ancestors were being domesticated as surely as were their plants and animals. Along with their domesticated animals, human beings now lived in overcrowded, disease-ridden enclosures full of their own excrement, herded about without explanation or redress, beaten and whipped into compliance, bought, sold, and slaughtered. Wright reminds us that “we call agriculture and civilization ‘inventions’ or ‘experiments’ because that is how they look in hindsight. But they began accidentally, a series of seductive steps down a path leading, for most people, to lives of monotony and toil.”
Aišku, vardan nuoseklaus pasakojimo, vietomis nukenčia faktinis tikslumas. Pvz., lyg niekur nieko rašoma: "In fact, the only proven technique for extending life span is caloric restriction." Nope. Tai tikrai nėra toks faktas, kad jam užtektų tik vieno sakinio. Žr. puikią klausimo analizę: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/12...
Arba kažkur rašo, kad žemdirbystė padėjo mums užauginti daug maisto, bet jis ne toks maistingas. Yra ir labiau pagrįstų argumentų, kodėl žemdirbystė sufuckupino mūsų gyvenimus, bet šis yra labiau niuansuotas (ir knygoje plačiau nenagrinėjamas). Selekcijos dėka žmogus kaip tik išvedė maistingesnių augalų veisles: su mažesnėmis sėklomis, plonesnėmis žievėmis ir pan. Taip, kokie ten ryžiai nėra maistingumo viršūnė, bet tokia generalizuota frazė gali sugadinti gana tvirtą teiginį.
Tokių vietų daug neradau, bet šiaip šaltiniai pateikiami labai nepatogiai - tekste visiškai nežymimi, tik skyriaus gale išvardinti su kelių sakinių prierašais. Kadangi tekste minima daug faktų - visokių ten skaičių, tyrimų, - manau, autorius turėtų neapsunkinti jų tikrinimo.
O šiaip, tikrai apmąstymo vertas turinys. Labai rišliai ir vaizdingai parašyta, daug pavyzdžių, cituotinų vietų.
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