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.

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!”

However, by presenting forager societies as the pinnacle of human fulfillment, Ryan falls into the trap that industry giants like Yuval Noah Harari warned us against. 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. Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.” Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. 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.

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. However, its pessimistic tone makes it a perfect companion to compensate the irrational optimistic ardors of people such as Steven Pinker. 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. Ryan’s basic thesis is that everything you know about culture and civilization is wrong. He rejects the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress” and if you saw what he had seen, you would, too.

Table of Contents

The book itself is not enough to form a bigger picture of what is civilization and what we gained from it (probably no book will ever be big enough to answer that question).

Ryan is not wrong when he claims that the world is more polluted than before, that people are more depressed and lonelier, and that a fire provides better entertainment than TV. We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter and leisure”. Our Civilization borrows from the future and feeds from the past - the ultimate entropic death spiral 🌀 Ryan posits that civilization has given rise to competitive institutions thriving on ever-expanding commerce, displacing the sense of meaning and happiness that humans experienced during 99% of our existence on this planet. This decline is due to the stratification of communities into hierarchical divisions — between owner and worker, man and woman, wealthy and poor — that accompanied the development of agriculture. Civilized to Death” is a fascinating read, with plenty of academic references. But Ryan provides only a few concrete ideas of how to foster and preserve elements of our lost forager culture. (He does cite progressive European societies’ generous maternity and paternity leave policies as one example.)It is also difficult to negate that civilization as we know it, has put up some important barriers in the possibility to practice this lifestyle. The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live: how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die. 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. Ryan, Christoher. "Civilized To Death, Why Everything's Amazing, But Nobody's Happy". Psychology Today. Christoher Ryan . Retrieved 2019-11-24.

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. 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.

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.