Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress

Product Information

Unfortunately, with the arrival of agriculture and fixed abodes, the foragers’ “gods of ease and play, pleasure and laughter” succumb to civilization’s “god of toil, sacrifice, scarcity and submission. People I have spoken to who have lost family members to cancer, say, have wondered if their family member might have been better off not ‘fighting’ cancer, and therefore suffering the agony of surgery and of chemo and of other medications and so on, or if it might have been better to have just let the disease run its course and rather spent their time trying to achieve some form of acceptance. 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.

This, he states, while referencing the work of author Jean Liedloff, gives them “a precognitive sense of being wanted and loved.The implication being that early humans were essentially sort of orangutans, living alone and only coming together to mate. I have to confess that, though I read roughly a hundred books a year and try to carefully read the books that I review, I stopped reading carefully and moved more quickly through the last hundred pages of this book because it wasn’t worth the time to read it carefully. By pre-civilised, I mean that literally, that is, human life prior to the agricultural revolution of the fertile crescent and elsewhere that lead to us living in cities.

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. His big revelation is that when doctors were asked in a study what procedures they'd want when they are dying to help keep them alive a bit longer, most were against a lot of the treatments people tend to get.While civilization and progress are far from being as great as authors like Steven Pinker (or Jordan Peterson, for that matter) often advertise, it doesn’t mean it has only brought sorrow and pain. It is increasingly clear to many of us that the way we have been living is no longer sustainable, at least as long as we want the earth to outlive us. Also, adding to the silliness factor, at one point the author used as part of his "evidence" an experience in which he looked at animals and is sure he knew what they were thinking because of the looks on their faces.