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

by Christopher Ryan

“Poverty… is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It

The systematic coercion of those who tried to opt out “cut through traditional lifeways like scissors,” explains Perelman. “The first blade served to undermine the ability of people to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stern measures required to keep people from finding alternative survival strategies outside the system of wage labor.”

And make no mistake, people are still being dragged into the market economy.

It’s as if people are being forced into casinos at gunpoint, where they lose everything, generation after generation, and then they’re told they’ve got a gambling problem.

yep

Note how his depiction of precivilized life justifies the so-called White Man’s Burden of bringing salvation to the primitives—even if you kill them in the process. After all, these are nasty, brutish, short-lived people, without any artistic or cultural sophistication, barely enduring their solitary, poor lives. Civilization can only be a vast improvement to these poor brutes!

The economic and political utility of these views—in centuries riddled with slavery, colonialism, and racism—can hardly be overstated. Less clear, perhaps, is why they still hold so much power today.

Let that sink in, if you dare. The “natural state” of living things is one of “starvation and misery.” Very Old Testament!

the NPP isn’t science; it’s a marketing campaign for the status quo. The politics of perpetual fear is corrosive to our well-being and our innate capacities for cooperation, community, and kindness.

We’re trapped in and by this distorting, demonizing view of human nature and the natural world, seen as the two faces of an enemy to be feared and conquered, rather than an ally to be honored and nourished. This pernicious nonsense has us divided against ourselves, each other, and the planet itself.

ashamed to be animals, participating in the accelerating destruction of a natural world we’ve been taught is out to tear us limb from limb or gnaw away from inside.

It would be hard to overstate how much the dual demonization of the natural world and of human nature has shaped modern sensibility.

most of these monuments memorialize the dark deeds of unhinged lunatics driven by rampant ego and raving greed. “History,” wrote Alexander Herzen, “is the autobiography of a madman,” and in historical fact, most of the supposed “great men of history” were criminals on a rampage. We celebrate them because they “changed the world.”

“presentism.”

Dawkins’s human exceptionalism contrasts with Darwin’s central conviction that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”

“Nomadic foragers are universally—and all but obsessively—concerned with being free from the authority of others,” Boehm writes. “That is the basic thrust of their political ethos.… This egalitarian approach appears to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism.”

Mark Twain, who wondered “whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” A third option would be that the world is being run by smart people who have been misinformed by generations of scholars who were promulgating nonsense.

after our species shifted from foraging to living in large-scale agricultural settlements. Civilization has not reduced the ravages of human violence. On the contrary, civilization is the source of most organized human violence.

Elsewhere in the book, Ophuls describes the sad predicament civilizations face: “A mature civilization is caught in an entropy trap from which escape is well nigh impossible. Because the available energy and resources can no longer maintain the existing level of complexity, the civilization begins to consume itself by borrowing from the future and feeding off the past, thereby preparing the way for an eventual implosion.… This is the tragedy of civilization: its very ‘greatness’—its panoply of wealth and power—turns against it and brings it down.” “Nothing but improvement behind us?” Come on, now.

This belief that more people somehow translates into better, safer lives is a reflection of an outdated metric. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.

But if you value community, personal autonomy, and a meaningful existence more than dollars, soap operas, and megahertz, you may come to a different conclusion.

“The Price of Progress,” anthropologist John Bodley surveyed the health consequences typically suffered by people as their societies shift into civilization.

First, as people enter the global economic system, they become vulnerable to diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Second, development disrupts pre-existing ecological balances, often resulting in higher rates of bacterial and parasitic diseases (for example, lots of standing water from construction projects can increase malaria). Third, when development fails (as it often does), it leaves once self-sufficient societies living in impoverished, filthy slums, subject to the many assaults on health associated with such conditions.

brief hunger, it turns out that a little hunger every now and then is surprisingly healthful. In fact, the only proven technique for extending life span is caloric restriction.

evidence of how modern life makes us sick.

As we run out of babies to save, infant mortality will stop declining, and this statistical sleight-of-hand will be revealed as the party trick it is.

It’s advertising copy meant to sell the present.

What kind of creature are we anyway?

Human beings are adaptive creatures, but the fact that we can adapt to all kinds of horrible conditions doesn’t mean we should.

those who don’t understand the distant past are condemned to live lives structured in ways that conflict with our deepest human appetites and tendencies. The modern world is the ultimate human zoo, designed, created, administrated, and occupied by humans.

Civilization may be the greatest bait-and-switch that ever was.

more like the most brutal subjgation and imprisonment

The voices of civilization fill us with manufactured yearnings and then sell us prepackaged dollops of transitory satisfaction that evaporate on the tongue.

Some throw up their hands and blame it all on human nature. But that’s a mistake. It’s not human nature that makes us engage in this blind destruction of our world and ourselves.

is the nature of civilization, an emergent social structure in which our species is presently trapped. To understand the roots of our seeming penchant for ecocide, we must understand that an animal’s nature can only be expressed in relation to its environment, natural or contrived.

surplus food leads to rapid population growth, the rains stop, food supplies dwindle, areas that are still fertile become overcrowded, resulting in higher population density, which kicks in epigenetic reactions, and once-elegant, relaxed grasshoppers become crazed, rapacious locusts. Wings and legs get smaller, coloring shifts—not over generations, but in the individual animals. Goodbye, chilled-out grasshoppers, hello, swarming, cannibalistic locusts.

Recall your own rage when trapped behind distracted idiots texting in traffic or wedged between smelly, snoring strangers in economy class while someone’s demon spawn is kicking the back of your seat.

exactly....madness is civilization

These studies strongly suggest that addiction may have more to do with traumatic experiences and environment than with the magical qualities of substances.

Homo sapiens looks a lot like a species that has lost its way.

The stability and continuity of the foraging life over hundreds of thousands of years is both evidence of its utility and the original source of our humanity. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in Antifragile, “Time is the best test of fragility—it encompasses high doses of disorder—and nature is the only system that has been stamped ‘robust’ by time.”

today’s university students are 40 percent less empathic than they were just thirty years ago may be due to increasingly maladaptive parenting. Recent increases in ADHD, aggressive behavior, anxiety, and childhood depression suggest something is seriously wrong—and getting worse.

The damage done to children by this culturally sanctioned emotional abuse is difficult to treat, at best.

I want to stress that this is not a failure of parenting but a failure of civilization.

The mismatch between the human animal and the demands of society is profound and tragic. “The real disorder,” Louv wrote, “is less in the child than it is in the imposed, artificial environment.…

more potent threats such as lack of exercise, unhealthy diet, chronic stress, too little face-to-face interaction with friends, and lack of free time and access to nature—all of which are taking a horrible toll on children.

may owe something to the notion that the welfare of children is solely the responsibility of the parent, and not of the community, the extended family, or the child herself.

We seem to have decided that it’s too expensive or inconvenient to modify the environments our children learn in, so we’re modifying their brain chemistry instead.

But their suffering is real, and the intense frustration and humiliation experienced by young people who feel they’re being denied something they need at the core of their being generates a dangerous pressure.

In light of those stark facts, mass shootings in the United States appear to be analogous to terrorist operations in a homegrown jihad fueled by the sexual shame permeating American culture. Think I’m overstating it?

you. But the data suggest teens are rebelling against something in particular—namely, a culture they find oppressive and unfair—even if they rarely articulate their rage in those terms.

yes they are

Disdain for unproductive people makes sense in societies that consider the activities necessary for food and shelter to be arduous and disagreeable. After all, if work is hard, why should I do more than you?