Casualties of Civilization

Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress is a 2019 book by Christopher Ryan that is very close to my forager-farmer framework. As a proponent of cultural pessimism, Ryan stands in a long tradition that is at least as old as antiquity (the myth of the Golden Age and subsequent decay). Ryan sets out to prove neo-Hobbesians like Steve Pinker and Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist ) who continue to perpetuate the Narrative of Perpetual Progress (NPP): human life used to be misery until civilization took off to come to humanity’s rescue. Ryan equates uncivilised with foraging and civilization with agriculture, which Jared Diamond called “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”.

Ryan provides countless examples of problems that civilised societies have that simply didn’t exist in forager populations, from the well-known tooth-decay due to a high starch diet to some lesser known examples, like the prevalence of breast cancer due to a drastically increased amount of menstrual cycles as compared to forager women. Of course, our problems don’t stop at physical health like obesity, hypertension, cancer and autoimmune diseases, but extend to mental health, decreased self-determination and freedom and happiness. Suicide was virtually unknown among foragers, it’s foragers like the Inuit that have the highest rates of suicide when forced to live in civilization.

Ryan quotes Benjamin Franklin’s famous passage in which he writes if you bring a native American child up in a city and show them all of the benefits of life that modern society can bestow, and then they spend a week back with native Americans, they won’t want to return to ‘civilisation’. But the reverse doesn’t hold. Non-native American children brought up by native Americans need to be physically restrained from escaping back to their tribe when they are finally ‘saved’ by their ‘civilised’ own kind.

This phenomenon is certainly something that should make people who believe in the wonders of civilization and in narratives like Steve Pinker’s make reflect their ideas. The past couple of years have certainly shown that we are not on an inevitable trajectory of progress and a better world.

One thing I find flawed about Ryan’s thinking is the equation of civilised with agriculture and uncivilised with foraging. First of all, it’s historically incorrect, civilisations only took off thousands of years after the beginning of agriculture and Ryan acknowledges implicitly that foragers are often more civilised than civilizations. Depending on your definition of civilisation, you would consider foragers, who have no slavery, no dictators, no child labour, no prisons, no poverty, no inequality, a liberal attitude towards child rearing, equality for women, pro-choice, divorce initiated by women and free health-care much more civilised than the Ancient Greeks, Romans or Egyptians, for example.

I have been arguing that a lot of what we call civilised has been historically brought about by forager types whose ancestors were incorporated into farming societies sometime around the Copper Age, after a long period of typically avoiding farming societies by taking refuge in areas less adapted for agriculture. Ever since that time forager types have been trying to adapt a farmer world to their psychological needs. Chris Ryan outs himself as a hunter-gatherer type when he writes at the end of the book:

What if we strategically bring hunter-gatherer thinking into our modern lives by, for example, replacing top-down corporate structures with peer progressive networks and horizontally organized collectives and building an infrastructure of nonpolluting locally generated energy? If Homo sapiens sapiens were to divert spending on weapons, redirecting resources into a global guaranteed basic income that incentivizes not having children, thus reducing global population intelligently and without coercion, we would be taking steps toward acceptance. Once we start down this road, every step would lead us closer to a future that recognizes, celebrates, honors, and replicates the origins and nature of our species. This is, as far as I can see, the only road home.

My hunch is, that our ancestors were happier in the past, when they were allowed to live in the environments they evolved in, be it as hunter-gatherers, farmers or pastoralists. There is no way back, only a way forward and we have to work towards a society in which everyone feels at home. Most of us forager types have been feeling like aliens on this planet since the beginning of civilisation.

For more on the forager-farmer framework check out my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZR3KPVH

Originally published at http://the-big-ger-picture.blogspot.com on September 24, 2022.