Does Our Way of Life Defy Human Nature?
Christopher Ryan’s ‘Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress’ will change the way you look at the world
Redefining Progress
Before I started writing these stories, I had this vision of sharing the importance of “progress” with a society that seems to be proudly regressing into barbarism. I typed up a few very long drafts of potential stories and felt pretty good about them. I wrote about how technology would carry us smoothly into a bright future, how the medical field is better equipped than ever, and how general wealth, well-being and safety are increasing despite the constant terror we are shown on the news.
I was pretty much on board with Steven Pinker’s worldview as he laid it out in his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. But when I read Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress by Christopher Ryan, everything changed. I rewrote most of my material.
It’s not that I gave up on progress (if you’ve read my writing, you know I’m an outspoken progressive). I just realized that Pinker analyzed progress in the wrong context. Sure, our capitalist economy is always expanding, GDP is ever-rising, consumer goods are abundant, and every fast food chain has a dollar menu. Things look great on paper, depending on who you ask. But these metrics reflect growth within a faulty societal framework that conflicts with human nature.
Just because the numbers look good in our current system doesn’t mean this is the system we should be using.
Egalitarianism is our Nature
Ryan takes us back to the advent of civilization and agriculture to show us that we got off on the wrong foot from the beginning. He makes a compelling argument that we have been sold a false idea of progress. What originated as an attempt to save people from droughts that threatened a bountiful planet has turned into an unnatural system of artificial hierarchies and a destructive way of life. What we now consider “normal” defies our true evolutionary nature. And what exactly is our “true evolutionary nature”?
Egalitarianism.
That means sharing, working and caring for others communally, showing respect equally and allowing equal opportunity for all. It means equality, diversity and inclusion. The way we live today is an insult to how our forager ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years.
Ryan references the work of Christopher Benfey, who surveyed and researched many of Earth’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies. These tribes serve as an excellent model for the way humankind lived for the vast majority of its time on Earth. Benfey found that regardless of their geographic location, religion, or even the era when they were contacted, these hunter-gatherer tribes all shared the strikingly similar ideals that:
“…society should be based on cooperation rather than competition; that the nuclear family should be subsumed into the larger community; that property should be held in common; that women should not be subordinate to men; that work of even the most menial kind must be accorded a certain dignity.”
To emphasize the appeal of this common belief system, Ryan cites events in which “savage” tribesmen were taken from their native land to join “civilized” people. But when their captors returned with them to their native home so that they might indoctrinate their tribesmen, they chose to stay, wishing never to return to “civilized” western society.
Why? Our everyday practices seemed absurd to them. They could not comprehend the concept of “having a job” that requires you to spend the majority of your waking life away from your family to do work purely for the sake of saying that you’re doing work, which doesn’t directly help anyone anyway, so that you can pay for the home you hardly see. Nor could they understand the idea that one person dictates what you do at work. They thought it all sounded miserable. Can you blame them? The basic framework of our society is horribly out of touch with our communal evolution.
Family
Our culture puts much emphasis on work, competition, climbing the ladder and being the alpha-wolf who provides for the family. These are the unofficial guidelines for being the perfect parent these days. But parents are too overwhelmed by the stresses of regular life. Parents cannot give their children adequate time, care or attention because society demands so much of them. Exhausted from work, stressing over money, parents often distract their children by handing them an iPad or plopping them in front of the TV while they sneak away in an attempt to regain their sanity.
Moreover, we’ve seen drastic increases in child abuse, childhood depression, ADHD, and other physiological ailments. And I’m not at all saying that most parents are inherently bad people because that’s far from the truth. But something is clearly wrong.
These “ailments” may not even be ailments at all, but reactions to a culture that makes natural parent-child interaction nearly impossible. Ryan cites a study that found that the “happiness gap” between parents and non-parents is significantly higher in the US than in the UK, Australia, and 22 other countries surveyed. On average, adults with no children lead happier, less stressful lives.
However, Scandinavian countries with liberal social programs like free health care, child care, and paid maternity/paternity leave exhibit virtually no happiness gap. Their egalitarian systems strengthen parent-child relationships, allowing them to live in better alignment with human evolution.
It shouldn’t be a depressing burden to start a family. And it never was, at least until agriculture and civilization reshaped the way we form relationships with other human beings and ourselves.
The Medical Field and Death
Ryan makes the eye-opening, albeit uncomfortable, argument that our understanding of natural life and death is flawed. We view death as unnatural, as a failure. But we all must experience it one way or another. We have invested vast amounts of money and altered the landscape of our medical field to extend life expectancy. Again, it’s all about metrics.
Ryan argues that while we are capable of granting people longer lives, we are not giving them longer functional lives. “At a certain stage of life”, writes Washington Post internist Craig Bowron, “aggressive medical treatment can become like sanctioned torture.”
Ryan observes that “rather than prolonging life, we appear to be extending the process of dying.” And in doing so, medical institutions benefit instead of the patient.
“Corporate health care lobbies help determine what doctors get paid to do. We pay doctors very well for deploying technology and very poorly for spending time with patients. This shapes their behavior”
- Katy Butler, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
We associate spending more money with better medical care. After all, cash is king in the land of opportunity. While some medical technology and treatments are truly groundbreaking, the “relationship between expense and outcome is often perversely the inverse” of what we expect. Thirty percent of Medicare expenditures go toward the five percent of beneficiaries who die each year. But even the doctors who recommend and perform procedures like CPR, ventilation, or chemotherapy expressed, in an overwhelming 9:1 (approximate) consensus, that they would prefer not to go through the same treatment at the end of their lives. The experts would rather their deaths be as “comfortable, meaningful, dignified, and inexpensive as possible.”
Rather than spending every dollar we and our families possess to earn a couple extra painful years of nonfunctional life, Ryan proposes psychoactive end-of-life treatment. Natural psychedelic substances have been used medicinally in numerous cultures around the world for millennia. They allow for painless, euphoric and peaceful end-of-life events.
Numerous clinical trials even show that these substances are safe when used mindfully (obviously don’t go driving your car chasing neon dragons), non habit-forming, and can actually cure existing addictions and leave the patient in a lasting positive mood after the effects have subsided (sometimes for months). But they now carry a stigma born in the Nixon era, despite the public admission in 1994 by Nixon’s own domestic policy advisor that the “war on drugs” was just a cover up used to silence black people and hippies who opposed the Vietnam War.
War
“We are not hard-wired for war. We learn it.” -Brian Ferguson
It is often thought that humans are a naturally aggressive and violent species. This assumption is based on misguided evidence. Virtually all war deaths in pre-state cultures were the result of “civilized” people invading and slaughtering peaceful forager societies. The foragers weren’t killing each other. The concept that resources or territory were to be claimed and defended emerged with agriculture and its need for social hierarchy. Invasions and massacres were significantly less common before we created civilization.
“It does not require a big society with social norms to elicit a deep-rooted sense that we care about others” -Felix Warneken
War is grotesque and disturbing. There’s a reason why veterans often develop PTSD after serving in the military, even if they never sustained any injuries. This is because human beings are more psychologically disturbed by the pain of others than we are by our own pain. That’s our natural inclination for compassion coming through.
That’s why we feel good when we donate or volunteer. Helping others is who we are. Sure, we are capable of horrible things, but this is influenced by our environment. Ryan offers a number of studies to emphasize this.
A study of Capuchin monkeys in a comfortable environment revealed that they were more likely to share food with others and give away food of “higher value” than to hoard it for themselves. They all had appropriate space and access to resources. The same goes for studies conducted on cats and rats, who only became violent or competitive when cramped and overpopulated.
Conversely, the effects of an overcrowded environment were on full display in a London Zoo exhibit called “Monkey Hill”, where 94 of their 140 baboons killed one another. The confined space and unusually dense population drove them into social discord and fierce competition. Only when crammed into unnatural conditions did the otherwise peaceful monkeys become aggressive. Does this sound familiar? Monkey Hill serves as an excellent model for our society.
But what of other advanced societies with intelligent life?
Are we alone?
In his closing remarks, Ryan suggests an alternative to the Fermi Paradox, inspired by Finite and Infinite Games by philosopher James Carse. What if intelligent beings on other planets never decided to build civilization? Maybe they leave no thermal footprint for our cosmos-scanning technology to detect because they don’t need industry. Maybe they don’t operate on a system of winners and losers like we do. They simply exist, peacefully, just as we did for 99 percent of our time on Earth. They understand that “a meal is as good as a feast. More is no better than enough”. Perhaps they got sustainability right.
“‘Never satisfied’ are not words to live by, but a colossal missing of the point that the game of life is not to be won. The point of life is the living of it.”
-Christopher Ryan
Christopher Ryan offers a sobering perspective on our lifestyle. We’ve strayed so far from our natural state that we have indeed missed the point. We’re so invested in climbing this pretend ladder to reach the top of a materialist pyramid that we’ve forgotten what it means to be human. But this new understanding of our flaws can motivate us to make conscious changes as we move toward the future.
Now I’m not taking a “burn it all down, hierarchies are bad” stance. Hierarchies and competition are beneficial because they can motivate and inspire, to an extent. There are so many of us, and our world has become so complex that we now need structure. But as Ryan stresses, we need to look at the context of our society.
Maybe we need to change the goal of our competition.
And I’m not saying that I reject all modern technology. I’m happy we have Germ Theory, the internet, transportation and electricity. Not everything in our world is terrible, but what’s wrong with making refinements and improvements as we go? We have the technological tools to reclaim our true humanity. This effort to repurpose the tools and systems of civilization is at the heart of various liberal movements led by Millennials and Gen Zers.
It is driven by what author Peta Kelly calls our “Divine Intolerance.” It’s our instinctual distaste for the unnatural world we’ve built. We know deep down that “normal life” does not sit well with us. For now, we have to play the game to change the game. But at least we are waking up to the fact that there is a game that needs to be changed.
So no, this doesn’t mean drop what you’re doing and go live off of berries and tree bark. We have immensely powerful technology and miraculously brilliant minds at our disposal, so let’s use them to reclaim what we know is missing from our lives. We have the ingenuity to shift business from top-down rat-races to creativity-focused peer networks. We have the resources to purchase items and invest in programs that respect the planet and its inhabitants. We have the reach to unite people around the world and stand up for a future that is sustainable, compassionate and cooperative.
To me, the deepest expressions of humanity are our creativity and vivid imagination. Art, music, science, and the will to learn and explore are what make us unique. These are natural capabilities that come with our uniquely intricate brains. Not developing a new system that puts these uniquely human abilities at the forefront of our everyday lives would be a shame.
The kind, artistic human spirit can certainly become a facet of our lifestyle. It’s not all black and white, as we have been conditioned to think. Capitalism and egalitarianism can coexist. Just look at Scandinavia.
We can still have a vibrant market with Universal Basic Income. More vibrant than ever, in fact. We can still have freedom with compassionate social benefits. More freedom, actually.
The point is, when we work together and help each other feel better, we work more efficiently and open ourselves to new opportunities. It motivates us. We live in harmony. It’s the way we were programmed to live for hundreds of thousands of years. Who are we to think our new way of life is the only correct way to live, especially when the evidence screams otherwise?
Just take a moment and really think about how you feel. That’s what matters. Christopher Ryan has outlined precisely where we’ve gotten off track. Now with this knowledge, it’s time to stand with those who would respect the human aspect of humanity.
