Civilized to Death: What Was Lost on the Way to Modernity

by Christopher Ryan

How would a time traveler from the prehistoric past assess the state and trajectory of the modern world?

“We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring a proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse.”

Ah, the glorious, leisurely future—always just around the corner. Think I’m being too harsh? Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called the very notion of progress “a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the patterns of history.”

We tend to confuse progress with adaptation, for example. Adaptation—and, by extension, evolution—doesn’t presuppose that a species is getting “better” as it evolves, merely that it is growing more suited to its environment. The “fittest” may survive and reproduce, but “fitness” is a concept that exists only within a specific ecological context, having no absolute, noncontextual meaning or value.

Our desperate peregrinations are in search of a place much like the home we left when we walked out of the garden and started to farm.

Perhaps we’re approaching the so-called singularity, when our comfort-atrophied bodies melt into the screens we spend so much of our lives staring into.

When you’re going in the wrong direction, progress is the last thing you need. The “progress” that defines our age often seems closer to the progression of a disease than to its cure. Civilization often seems to be picking up speed in the dizzying way things do when they’re circling the drain.

Little wonder that depression is the leading cause of disability in the world, and is growing quickly.

Whether the wonders of our age are worth their exorbitant cost is a question each of us must ultimately answer for ourselves.

If everything’s so amazing, why are so many of us so profoundly unhappy?

But how many of us know our species well enough to know ourselves?

In any case, we’re no longer the undomesticated beings our prehistoric ancestors were. 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.

We are the only species that lives in zoos of our own design. Each day, we create the world we and our descendants are going to inhabit. If we want that world to be more like the San Diego Zoo than the living tombs in Bukittinggi, we’ll need a clearer understanding of what human life was like before our ancestors first woke up in cages. We’ll need to know our species.

The map showing where we came from delimits where we can go from here.

The clear implication is that any discontent or despair you may be experiencing must be due to some fault of your own—certainly not to the civilization you were born into. You aren’t working hard enough, consuming the right products, taking the right supplements, following the right exercise regimen, driving the right car, or drinking enough water.

it’s essential to take another look at the Narrative of Perpetual Progress, which overstates the benefits of civilization while ignoring many of its costs and dismissing even respectful doubt as sacrilege.

A Spanish proverb holds that “habits begin as cobwebs, but end as chains.”

It’s possible for human beings to spend their waking lives sitting in cubicles working at thankless jobs under fluorescent lighting, but we shouldn’t be surprised by the depression, anxiety, addictive behavior, and sudden explosions of violence such conditions often provoke.

Three characteristics consistently found in foraging societies roughly align with social, physical, and psychological realms: egalitarianism, mobility, and gratitude. Other aspects of hunter-gatherer life can be seen as extensions of these essential qualities, which anthropologists and ethnographers agree to be ubiquitous among practically all foragers.

it’s no surprise that psychologists have established that one of the best ways to improve your sense of well-being is by helping others.

This prosocial survival impulse manifests today in our hunger for justice, the quiet comfort we feel sharing food with others, our uncalculating, reflexive feelings of love and protectiveness for children, and the deep relaxation we feel staring into a small fire.

It’s emotionally difficult to question progress, because we’re so invested in the belief that things are getting better. This tendency serves us well as a survival mechanism, and nobody wants to believe we’ve invited our children to a party that’s already well into the overflowing-ashtrays-and-spilled-drinks phase.

“optimism bias.”

Sharot suggests there may be an evolutionary advantage to being hardwired for hope, but Wright sees things differently. At the conclusion of his survey of past civilizations—each of which rose to frighteningly familiar heights of grandeur and avarice before collapsing—Wright warns that we are stumbling past the point of no return.

Most of the dangers civilization claims to protect us from are, in fact, created or amplified by civilization itself.

If it’s making us unhealthy, unhappy, overworked, humiliated, and frightened, what’s all this progress really worth? We know more or less what it costs: nearly everything.

“If agriculture was so bad, why did they choose it?”

In 1929, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud elucidated the conundrum of the civilized: “Men are beginning to perceive that all this newly won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfillment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier.”

accumulating evidence has shown that foragers almost never join civilization willingly, and they flee it as rapidly as they can—even when it means retreating into the harshest environments on the planet.

it appears that similar sequences of climactic changes triggered the shift to farming.

It isn’t hyperbole to say that agriculture extracted humans from the world and pitted us against it.

Whatever its provenance, accumulated wealth almost always generates political hierarchies, increasingly complex rituals and artistic creation, raiding and warfare, and enslavement.

Agriculture, then, appears to have been a panic-stricken response to sudden, desperate changes. Population density was too high to adjust to the reduction in available food without massive die-offs.

But the day our kind first managed to produce food rather than find it, their feet left the ground, and it was already too late to let go.

Women—who had been respected members of egalitarian foraging societies—were now reduced to a status close to that of domesticated animals.

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.

maddness

Inherently expansionist agricultural societies consumed and exhausted the land, then spread out to conquer and occupy more. “Savages” and “barbarians” were efficiently exterminated or driven off, and the cycle began anew.

Morison estimates that a third of the three hundred thousand Taíno perished in just two years, from 1494 to 1496, and by 1508, only sixty thousand survived.

Around 56 million people died in South, Central, and North America in the hundred years following first contact with Europeans. So many were lost, in fact, that the ecological changes caused by their sudden absence may well have triggered the so-called Little Ice Age experienced in Europe in the early 1600s.

Dominican friars recounted “unspeakable atrocities.” They reported that children were being thrown to dogs to be eaten, women raped, men murdered for a laugh. You may be wondering what the hell was wrong with the Spaniards, but their behavior—demonic as it was—was far from unusual for “civilized” explorers of their day. These men hadn’t lost their way. This was their way.

Historically, those who see themselves as “civilized” see the noncivilized as less than human and therefore disposable. For the mighty, might makes right.

What fueled the Spaniards’ cruelties wasn’t human nature. It was civilization. Civilization convinced the Spaniards that their superior weapons made them superior beings. Civilization created the filthy cities in which their ancestors acquired immunity to the pathogens that wiped out millions in the Americas. Civilization convinced Columbus and his men that gold was more valuable than the lives of the people they destroyed to get it. Civilization twisted their souls into somehow concluding that their savior, supposedly the embodiment of love and mercy, would have approved of—demanded, even—the enslavement, murder, and mutilation of the best people in the world.

In fact, while there are thousands of recorded cases of people from civilized communities fleeing to “go native,” there are few documented cases of native people willingly choosing to join civilization when they had any other viable options.

I believe that the Pirahãs are so confident and secure in their ability to handle anything that their environment throws at them that they can enjoy whatever comes their way.”

antifragile

When cultural values celebrate individual autonomy, respectful sharing of resources, and mutually beneficial interdependence, the logical result is a society in which people are generally satisfied with their lives and not overly concerned with telling others how to live theirs.

indeed

Moving from the comparatively free and easy state of hunter-gatherers to the servitude of a farming life was always difficult and often compelled.

It was perhaps the most traumatic transition in the history of our species. The fall from grace.

This insatiable hunger for human labor also helps explain why most major religions so insistently and violently oppose nonreproductive sexual behavior—a major source of human suffering in civilized societies.

this otherwise bizarre prohibition of nonreproductive sex begins to make sense. Humans are in effect being bred as a source of cheap, disposable labor, like horses, oxen, or camels.

Men had to be made poor enough that they’d be forced to join the desperate throngs in the mines, armies, and factories.