Is modern life making us miserable? ‘Civilized to Death’ author Christopher Ryan thinks so.

Book review

In “Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress,” author Christopher Ryan proposes a controversial explanation for what’s wrong with our world today: The problem began with the advent of agriculture, and the subsequent shift from a life of communal foraging to one of competition for personal gain. As Ryan explains, scholars wonder why, for thousands of years, when humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies, “nothing was happening” to signify progress. The author’s explanation is that humans were essentially happy and satisfied with their lives. When they became civilized, the concept of progress led to misery.

Digging into a treasure trove of research on prehistoric societies and the few existing hunter-forager societies, Ryan demonstrates that measures of health, longevity, security and leisure have all declined with the rise of civilization. He notes that “skeletal remains confirm that neither famine nor obesity were common until the advent of civilization.” And while prehistoric lives were short, data shows that today’s longevity is a net loss from that period in terms of functional longevity; we are simply expanding the amount of time we spend suffering as we die.

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.

Ryan uses data from modern-day American life to support this argument. He cites data showing “that 70 percent of Americans hate their jobs …” and “the use of antidepressants in the U.S. is up nearly 400 percent since 1990,” and points out that some of the few nonaddictive drugs that the ancients used to achieve happiness — psychedelics — are illegal. He also considers the ways modern society thwarts the free expression of sexuality, in contrast with the sexually liberal forager communities. Ryan argues that this repression results in enraged perversions of desire, and can even lead to violence, referencing a 2016 essay by philosopher Stephen Asma stating that “Of the past 129 mass shootings in the United States, all but three have been men. The shooter is socially alienated, and he can’t get laid.”

While these examples illustrate how civilization has corrupted our initial nonaggressive human nature, Ryan doesn’t tackle any possible exceptions. There is not a word about the fate of the foraging Neanderthals, our closest relation in the Homo genus. They disappeared when foraging Homo sapiens came into contact with them. Could our own aggressive behavior account for their demise?

Ryan also draws a hard line between forager and farmer societies, but fails to analyze the role of herders, who are as nomadic as the foragers, but tend animals. Were they inclined toward peaceful or aggressive behavior? The nomadic Mongols, for example, were not considered civilized by the great states that existed in the 13th century, but fell violently to Genghis Khan and his herder-hunter tribes.

“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.)

While he barely mentions that foraging societies likely consisted of fewer than 150 people, he does explain that close personal contact was critical to fostering cooperation. He also recognizes that the advent of agriculture accelerated population growth and stratified communities into competing groups, and supports reducing birthrates. Ryan sees another way to capture the egalitarianism and empathy of the forager societies in options like peer networking. The successful decentralized Kickstarter app, which uses cooperation to fund projects, is his prime example of this.

After blaming civilization’s problems on the idea of progress, Ryan returns to it as something positive, describing another period of Enlightenment, when progressive thought celebrated ancient Rome and Greece. This time, progress would mean introducing forager practices into our modern world, replacing top-down corporate structures with communal alternatives.

Progress may just be what saves our civilization.

____

“Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress” by Christopher Ryan, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $28

Author appearance: Christopher Ryan will read and discuss “Civilized to Death” at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 21, Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave., Seattle; elliottbaybook.com