Civilized to Death

Christopher Ryan

Jared Diamond’s 1999 essay about the transition to agriculture is called, ominously, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” More recently, historian Yuval Noah Harari goes so far as to call the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud.” In his 2015 bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he writes, “The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.” Harari agrees that all that extra food merely fueled “population explosions and pampered elites” and that farmers typically worked longer and harder than foragers for an inferior diet. Forced into settled communities as a last resort, agriculturalists faced drastic increases in social inequality, much more violence in the form of organized conflict, and self-appointed elites who used monotheistic religion to lock in their power. ..

Modern dentistry? We’ll see that the cavities and gum diseases so many of us suffer from didn’t arise until the advent of grain-based diets of civilization and monoculture. Scientists analyzing remains from modern-day Sudan found that less than 1 percent of the hunter-gatherers living in the area suffered from tooth decay. Once they adopted agriculture, the rate shot up to around 20 percent.

Most of the dangers civilization claims to protect us from are, in fact, created or amplified by civilization itself. Pointing to antibiotics and bypass surgery in this context amount to extolling the virtues of seat belts and air bags without mentioning that our ancient ancestors were in no danger of auto collisions. If you’ve set my house on fire, don’t expect me to be grateful when you show up later with a bucket of water.

​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. We can tabulate the forests destroyed, topsoil eroded, fisheries depleted, aquifers fouled, the atmosphere pumped full of carbon, the cancers, the stress, the desperate refugees, and more. People used to talk about leaving a better world for their children. Now we just hope they’ll somehow survive the mess. ...

Before I started studying evolution, I was under the impression that ancient Greece was a long time ago. It’s "ancient" after all. But ancient Greece was only about three thousand years ago. Rome, two thousand. The very earliest signs of agriculture and fixed human settlements appeared roughly ten thousand years ago. These are all very recent developments. ...

"Here’s the story we’ve all been told about who we are and where we came from:

We are descended from prehistoric ancestors whose lives were a constant struggle against starvation, disease, predators, and each other. Only the strongest, cleverest, most anxious, and most ruthless survived to pass their genes into the future—and even these lucky ones lived only to the age of thirty-five or so. Then, about ten thousand years ago, some forgotten genius invented agriculture, and thus delivered our species from animal desperation into civilized abundance, leisure, sophistication, and plenitude. Despite occasional setbacks, things have been getting better ever since.

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes described human life before the advent of the state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Three and a half centuries later, it remains one of the most famous phrases in the English language, and this Hobbesian vision of our precivilized past persists as the central premise of the story of civilization. This Narrative of Perpetual Progress (NPP) claims to explain the superiority of civilization while taking it as a given. Inasmuch as faith in “progress” is just another way of saying today is ipso facto better than yesterday, the notion of progress is to be taken on faith, and cannot be questioned without inviting the wrath of the true believers. But the NPP poisons our minds, bodies, and relationships as assuredly as it does the air, water, and soil. It justified millennia of slavery and centuries of colonialism. ​It generates deep distrust of ourselves and each other, shame and disgust toward our animal bodies, and irrational fear and hostility toward the natural world we are told is out to get us. It insists that we should be grateful for all this progress we’ve made because, by definition, the here and now is the best time ever to be alive.

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. ....

The widespread belief that noncivilized human life was and is a desperate struggle for survival resonates with the haughty dismissal of uncivilized "savages" common to previous centuries. But beyond its inaccuracy and racist undertones, this view has disastrous consequences in the present. Life-and-death medical decisions are misinformed by false assumptions about the capacities of the human body, relationships fall short of unrealistic expectations, legal systems based on inaccurate notions of human nature generate the very suffering they’re meant to avert, educational institutions smother the innate curiosity of students, and so on. Indeed, nearly every aspect of our lives (and our deaths) is distorted by a misinformed sense of what kind of animal Homo sapiens really is. Dr. Jonas Salk, famous for having invented the polio vaccine, put it memorably: "It is necessary now not only to know thyself, but also to know thy species and to understand the wisdom of nature, and especially living nature, if we are to understand and help man develop his own wisdom in a way that will lead to life of such quality as to make living a desirable and fulfilling experience." ...

In Born to Run, his 2009 bestseller, Christopher McDougall explains how Nike convinced generations of joggers to ignore the evolved biomechanics of the human body to run in an unnatural, debilitating way that required the purchase of their expensive, utterly unnecessary products. ... McDougall quotes a financial columnist who thought Nike’s plan was "brilliant." "[They] created a market for a product and then created the product itself. ..” You may think it’s unfair to focus on Nike, but McDougall disagrees. “Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy,” he writes, “but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault."

Nike’s "deftest move," McDougall writes, "was advocating a new style of running that was only possible in [its] new style of shoe [which] allowed people to run in a way no humans safely could before: by landing on their bony heels." ... Before the advent of these shoes in 1972, Lieberman has noted, “People ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower incidence of knee injuries." ...

We keep [the children] indoors because we think it’s safer, but dangers lurk in the house. Inactivity leads to obesity and diabetes, but other, less obvious conditions can be traced to overly sheltered childhood as well. In the past five decades, for example, the number of young adults in the United States and Europe with myopia has doubled, from about a quarter to half. Some researchers are predicting that by 2020, one-third of the world’s population could be diagnosed with the condition. Why? Partly because kids aren’t getting enough sunlight in their retinas and are focusing almost entirely on things that are close by, both because they’re spending so much of their time indoors. ...

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.

Parents in the United States and other societies less aligned with the deeply human, communal values are struggling—not because they are bad parents, but because their culture places wildly unrealistic demands and expectations on them, abandoning them when they most need help. ...

Despite the incessant marketing of modernity, many of us know in our bones that we are far from home ... Amid all the bells and whistles, life here often feels cold, empty, isolating, meaningless, and barbaric. Our reality keeps drifting ever further from the ad copy. How many times have we heard about the next marvel that’s “just around the corner”? ...

In 1970, it took eight hours to fly from New York to London. It still does, but now the seats are smaller. Armies of confused and angry young men rise up in rage against the unfulfilled promises of modernity in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Even the things that are kind of amazing—space probes, smartphones, digital photography—quickly become expected parts of normal life and lose their luster, regaining importance only when they don’t work. ...

Civilization may be the greatest bait-and-switch that ever was. It convinces us to destroy what is free so an overpriced, inferior copy can be sold to us later—often financed with the money we’ve earned hastening the destruction of the free version. Contaminate streams, rivers, lakes, and aquifers with industrial waste, pesticide runoff, and fracking chemicals, and then sell us “pure spring water” (often just tap water) in plastic bottles that break down into microplastics that find their way to oceans, whales’ stomachs, and our own bloodstreams. Work hard now so you can afford to relax later...

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. For hundreds of ​thousands of years, human beings thrived on this planet without doing it in. No, this is not the nature of our species—it is the nature of civilization, an emergent social structure in which our species is presently trapped. ...

[Some say i]f war is an ​expression of something embedded so deeply in us that it goes back millions of years to before our ancestors diverged from the line leading to chimps (who sometimes engage in lethal group aggression), then war must be innate to our species. But there are serious problems here. First, it’s subtly, if deeply, misleading to describe chimps as "our closest primate cousin" without mentioning bonobos—our other, equally intimately related primate cousin. ...

But the biggest inconvenience occasioned by bonobos may be the utter absence of lethal aggression among them. No war. No murder. No raping or pillaging. No infanticide. No support, in other words, for the primate origins of human war. ...

Chimps and bonobos both descended from the same common ancestor that split from our line, so if one is our "cousin," both are. ...

Almost a century ago, Russell recognized that most of the hours human beings spend working are a total waste of time, noting that “only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.” He ties the problem to the facts that “the idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich” and that the industrial labor mobilized for World War I was never demobilized. Of course, a decade after his essay was published, another mobilization was under way, on a much larger scale, ultimately congealing into what President Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex." ...

Richard Dawkins is one of the most famous scientists alive ... In River Out of Eden, Dawkins describes animal life as an operatic ordeal of starvation, misery, and pitiless indifference. "The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation," he writes with trembling hand. "During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease" ...

We’ve all witnessed such scenes many times on TV, and it’s hard to argue against the cruelty of nature when you’re watching the flapping tail of a seal disappear down the throat of a sea monster, or an antelope twitching in the grip of a cold-eyed lioness. "Thank God I’m safe," we think, "sitting here on my sofa, with my Cheez Doodles and Big Gulp." ...

But I’ve had occasion to hang around some seals in my time, and they never struck me as particularly anxious animals. Every seal I’ve encountered was either snoozing on a warm rock or frolicking in the water with other seals. They looked happy, fit, and relaxed to me. Skeptical that a seal’s lot in nature could be as bad as that slow-motion terror porn implied, I ran some numbers. It turns out that harbor seals live about thirty years. The gory death on that nature special took a few seconds in real time. So the ratio ​breaks down to roughly thirty years of hanging out with friends, eating fresh fish, and soaking up the sun followed by a sudden, unanticipated, nearly painless demise. Even if that particular seal died in her prime—at fifteen or twenty years of age—the ratio of pleasure to pain in her life was better than what most of us can expect. ...