As the 21st century progresses, it seems clear society has gone cattywampus in an astonishing number of ways. Our elected leaders appear to be more bumbling, sinister, and narcissistic than ever before. Our waterways are choked with cup lids and chemicals. Our relationships are strained and distant. And technology is nudging us ever closer to blowing up the planet, whether literally or metaphorically.
The way out of this global maelstrom, says author and podcaster Christopher Ryan, is to look closely at how our early human ancestors chose to live — and to tear down the structure of values, innovations, and social hierarchies that supports modern civilization. Prehistoric life wasn’t always as short, nasty, and brutal as we assume, Ryan argues in “Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress,” and what we’re conditioned to call progress must be uprooted. “Civilization,” he says, “is like a hole our clever species dug and then promptly fell into.”
Ryan launches his argument with the caveat that he’s not interested in rewinding the clock. “I harbor no illusions about ‘noble savages’ or ‘getting back to the garden,’” he writes. But the bulk of the book suggests just the opposite: that hunter-gatherer societies should be emulated, despite vanishingly rare opportunities to do so in an urbanized world.
In chapter after chapter, Ryan makes the earnest case that modern civilization is inferior to our ancestral past. Tens of thousands of years ago, he writes: “Life was good. Plenty birdies. Plenty fishies. Plenty mongongo nuts.’’ His prose — often zingy and colorful — outlines a dark vision of how short we fall compared to our forebears, without offering all that much in the way of solutions.
When humans lived in roving hunter-gatherer bands, Ryan asserts, they were generally egalitarian, with no entrenched power structures locking them into a certain lot in life. If a group member grew too big for his or her britches, the rest of the group could move on and leave the power-drunk upstart behind. But that egalitarian idyll slipped away when humans took up agriculture. Once farming anchored people in place, he says, social hierarchies solidified and the fates of many grew subject to the whims of a few, spawning modern afflictions like wealth disparities, monarchies, and even slavery.
“The change wasn’t merely a pivotal point in how our species lived in the world,” Ryan writes. “It marked a fundamental shift in what kind of world human beings inhabited.” He grounds his argument in the research of Brian Fagan, an archaeologist who has studied how humans’ social mobility decreased once they were tethered to static locations. Maybe so, but Ryan downplays the fact that agriculture also allowed many more humans to exist in the first place.
The malaise isn’t just cultural, according to Ryan: It’s biological. Civilization itself, he says, has spawned scores of diseases that have felled millions. He bolsters his argument with research showing that illnesses like smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis arose when humans took up agriculture and started living in close quarters with animals. Again, though, he focuses on one side of the story, failing to acknowledge some of the health risks that accompany the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, for example, first appeared when a simian virus made the leap to humans who hunted primates, perhaps when a chance knife slip allowed a hunter’s blood to mingle with that of a prey animal.
Shoshoni encampment, Wyoming.
Continuing this pattern of tailoring examples to fit his theory, Ryan posits that modern society also falls short on the nurturing front. In a paean to attachment parenting, he describes numerous anthropology studies showing that babies born into egalitarian bands are given near-constant attention and soothing. This, he states, while referencing the work of author Jean Liedloff, gives them “a precognitive sense of being wanted and loved.” Perhaps, but what goes unsaid is that such conditions already exist in many pockets of modern society, in the form of more liberal parental leave policies and parenting support groups, for example, and even the “babywearing” movement. Not to mention that children in foraging bands are far less likely to make it to their first birthdays.
Given the fulfillment and strong bonds hunter-gatherers enjoy today in places like the Brazilian rainforest, Ryan argues, they nearly always shun the modern world when they’re exposed to it. “Foragers almost never join civilization willingly,” he states, citing linguist Daniel Everett, who was surprised by how little interest members of the Amazonian Pirahã tribe had in entering modern society.
While that may be true, there are very few hunter-gatherer societies that are able to make such a decision in today’s increasingly urban, deforested world. And even though his claim that we should aspire to foragers’ close social ties is on target, it’s very hard to envision most people in modern society giving it all up to join a hunter-gatherer clan.
None of these critiques detract from Ryan’s many salient points about modern ills. It’s true that social change is outpacing our brains’ and bodies’ ability to adapt to it, and that we have failed to tailor our resource consumption to our planet’s available limits. It’s also true that we’re allowing our technology to control us.
What’s more, Ryan’s book is unquestionably well-timed. With outsized wildfires raking the American West and high seas swallowing coastlines the world over, the reading public is primed to accept the notion that civilization has reached critical condition.
Ryan’s cardinal sin, however, is overreach. He refers darkly to “the otherworldly price we and other creatures on this planet are paying” for our species’ crowning intellectual achievements. But this framing suggests causality where there is none. It isn’t the fault of artists or scientists that our states and ecosystems have fallen into crisis.
Rather than leaning on the sexy-but-unpersuasive case that civilization is plain poison, Ryan might have focused more on what hunter-gatherers have done right and pivoting sooner to how we might recreate the best aspects of our ancestral past — insofar as it’s possible.
He does devote several pages to suggesting we try psychedelic drugs to refresh our perspective and reduce our suffering, much as ancient shamans did. He also proposes that we swap corporate hierarchies for egalitarian “peer networks,” a term coined by pop-science author Steven Johnson — this arrangement Ryan says would better reflect “the social networks in which our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years.” And he argues for a global guaranteed basic income that would somehow discourage people from having children. (How this would work is unclear.) But compared to the depth and breadth of his argument against civilization, his proposed fixes are short on details.
Ryan is right to highlight the aspects of modern life that have gone off the rails. Our habits of mind, of innovation, and of consumption have brought us closer to a precipice. But it’s going to take still more innovation — and, yes, progress — to pull us back from the edge.
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
Photo top: Hadza member, credit: Pixabay
This might be sensible if humans had no other choice, but we do, and so his ideas are nothing more than ivory tower theology. Humans are not generally looking to work harder or work more, and subsistence living is hard work.
I’l admit to having thee same thoughts, reminiscing about bygone days, but it’s just as pointless to think about the past as it is to worry about the future; we can’t control either.
Happy New Years!
I realized that it appears unlikely that our modern society could some how reverse back to the Hunter gathers life style. But it may be possible if there is the Vision to do so. We may have to do this in baby steps by first lerning how to carry out hunter gathers life style. What animals could we used for food and what edible plants could we forage for? We must learned how to take the skins of animals and process them into clothing. Of course this would take time but within a generation we could see great progress in those who choose to adapt to the Hunter gathers life style.
“its pointless to think about the past?”
Thank you for your analysis! I’ve met more than one person who romanticizes “the” (a type of?) hunter-gatherer society. It’s also problematic to lump hunter-gatherers together…as far as I know, that’s a pretty diverse group with some pretty important differences. Thanks for the writing.
An interesting counterpoint to the “modern society is killing us” position is a recent article by Nick Kristof in the New York Times. He posits that by almost all measures, such as life expectancy, literacy, severe poverty reduction, overall disease reduction, and education of women, 2019 was the best year ever. As he states, although there are many unpleasant things about modern life, if we view it objectively, things are more positive than negative. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to make things even better, but it does mean that the common mantra of doom and gloom may be largely unwarranted.
Scott,
please do consider reading the book, as many of these exact issues are addressed in it.
ie: disease as we know it was not really an issue in hunter/gather societies. Healthy bodies, healthy teeth, etc.
-life expectancy: its true that there was a much higher infant mortality rate, but that drags down the ‘life expectancy’ figures to the point they aren’t as relevant. Humans live about 7 good decades if they get through adolescence, wherever they are in the world.
-‘poverty’ itself is created BY civilization. the idea that there is less poverty now that there was before industrial agriculture is ludicrous. There are 800,000,000 people on the planet without enough food. Poverty is historically low? not true, based on the facts that i’ve read.
-In hunter/gather societies, women are absolutely equal in every way.
Life expectancy.
Hi Tim. I read a great book by Dr. Mike Stroud (physician, anthropologist & Ranulph Fienne’s partner on Antarctic expeditions) called Survival of The Fittest and in it he talks about life expectancy. He points out that *average* life expectancy was lower in hunter gathere times due to the high mother/child mortality rate during and after pregnancy. But after the first few vulnerable years of childhood, the child would most likely become an extremely fit adult well into old age who would have had little difficulty walking or running vast distances for prolonged periods. Its easy to get the idea that if average life expectancy is say 45, it’d be rare to reach 60. Not the case apparently. As Mike Stroud commented – ‘Three scores years and ten is a biblical term after all.’
I’m sorry, but the “if it weren’t for all the people dying so young due to lack of medical care, disease and starvation, their life expectancies would be almost as long as ours” argument might even be true, but isn’t really a case for fetishizing primitive cultures.
Thanks for this, because i recently offered a counter theory to the author who suggested that Hunter gathers cultures life styles impacted the earth resources to a greater degree than industrial societies. When did rivers and streams become filled with liler? Yes you are correct with industrial societies. When did many animal species become extinct or near extinction? Yes you are correct in our greatly flawed industrial societies
Such a cool article and it really makes you think. I really love reading these types of blogs and using http://bit.ly/OutdoorWoodworking to really get in touch with nature and learn more about it!
Great topic AJ. Maybe a balanced approach is a realistic choice. I personally don’t subscribe to any particular doctrine, but I do look at my choices and how they affect my wellbeing mentally, physically and spiritually as well as others wellbeing and our ecology’s wellbeing. For me, simplicity seems the healthiest choice to support positive manintainence and growth in regards to the above. Whilst, understandably, many would not choose ‘going back’ to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, adopting an approach of ‘What do I need’ as opposed to ‘What do I want’ simplifies everything, and is compatible in the modern world.
From what I’ve read, indigenous peoples didn’t necessarily lead exhaustingly hard lives. In fact they had much spare time allowing them to create rich, artistic and vibrant cultures. A balanced way of life in harmony with ecology. The Australian aborigines and other indigenous peoples lived a balanced life for tens of thousands of years with no need for ‘progress’ Maybe we in the ‘civilised’ world can adopt the practices of tread lightly by balancing our needs as opposed to our wants, and simplicity and respect go hand in hand with that.
Simplifying our needs and minimising our extraneous possessions to maximise our life. What is life if not time and freedom? Good health of course, and modern medicine would seem very attractive to anyone I guess.
Health, time and freedom is wealth.
Great topic. Worth the discussion. For those interested, add Sebastian Junger’s “Tribe: On Homecoming & Belonging” to the reading list. The positive mental health in these classic hunter-gather societies can make up for a lot of the negatives. Community, human connections and the sense of safety.
“But it’s going to take still more innovation — and, yes, progress — to pull us back from the edge.”
I’ve been an eco-warrior for many years now, and a clear-eyed assessment of our situation can only be that people in powerful positions, that we need to make the tough decisions and big changes to keep us from going over the edge, aren’t willing to do so. Innovation and technology aren’t the saviors that many people think they will be. Eco-tech also has a carbon footprint and will for many years to come. People don’t really change that much, so what other hope can they have besides that technology will save us and allow us to keep the same standard of living? The only real hope would be to quickly return to a hybrid primitive/modern lifestyle, like for starters we all live small villages and stop mechanical transportation, but keep out smart phones.
Basically we will go over the edge, that’s what people in powerful positions are planning for, and they will let the people at the bottom of the social ladder engage in an epic battle for resources.
Hell yes we’re better off that our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Why?
Lower infant mortality rates. Modern medicine. Better quality of life (or any life) for the disabled. Not starving to death.
There’s lots of things to improve, including sustaining our planet and the existence/quality of lives of the other living things we share this planet with. However, more people are surviving, with better quality of life and comfort, than ever before in history.