Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress

by Christopher Ryan

Overview

The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live—how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die—in this “engaging, extensively documented, well-organized, and thought-provoking” (Booklist) book.

Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending—balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a world at constant war, a political system in disarray. We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they feel like truths: Civilization is humankind’s greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. Count your blessings. You’re lucky to be alive here and now. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. Civilized to Death counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the “progress” defining our age is analogous to an advancing disease.

Prehistoric life, of course, was not without serious dangers and disadvantages. Many babies died in infancy. A broken bone, infected wound, snakebite, or difficult pregnancy could be life-threatening. But ultimately, Christopher Ryan questions, were these pre-civilized dangers more murderous than modern scourges, such as car accidents, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and a technologically prolonged dying process? Civilized to Death “will make you see our so-called progress in a whole new light” (Book Riot) and adds to the timely conversation that “the way we have been living is no longer sustainable, at least as long as we want to the earth to outlive us” (Psychology Today). Ryan makes the claim that we should start looking backwards to find our way into a better future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781451659115
Publisher:	Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/11/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	232,569
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Christopher Ryan, PhD, and his work have been featured just about everywhere, including: MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Times of London, Playboy, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Outside, El Pais, La Vanguardia, Salon, Seed, and Big Think. A featured speaker from TED to The Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House to the Einstein Forum in Pottsdam, Germany, Ryan has consulted at various hospitals in Spain, provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional hearing, and appeared in well over a dozen documentary films. The author of Civilized to Death and the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Sex at Dawn, Ryan puts out a weekly podcast, called Tangentially Speaking, featuring conversations with interesting people, ranging from famous comics to bank robbers to drug smugglers to porn stars to authors to plasma physicists.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Know Thy Specks 1

Part I Origin Stories

1 What We Talk About When We Talk About Prehistory 17

Of Capacities and Tendencies 20

A People's History of Prehistory 23

Noble Savages, Savage Noblemen, and Straw Cave Men 27

2 Civilization and Its Dissonance 35

The Empirical Strikes Back 35

Through an Unremembered Gate 39

"The Best People in the World" 53

The Art of Not Being Civilized 58

Malthusian Miscalculations and Hobbesian Horror Shows 65

The Functions of Fear 70

On Primitive Power 77

Part II Apocalypse Always (The NPP in the Present)

3 The Myth of the Savage Savage (Declaring War on Peace) 91

Primate Evidence 92

Anthropological and Archaeological Evidence 95

4 The Irrational Optimist 101

Mo Better Blues 103

On the Health of Nations 105

Food for Thought 110

Longevity Lies and the Price of Paradise 112

Part III Reflections in an Ancient Mirror (Being Human)

5 The Naturalistic Fallacy Fallacy 127

6 Born to Be Wild 131

7 Raising Hell 143

8 Turbulent Teens 149

9 Anxious Adults 161

Good Work, If You Can Get It 161

The Price of Money 168

How to Lose by Winning 172

Rich Asshole Syndrome (RAS) 176

Drunk on Dollars 184

Part IV A Prehistoric Path into the Future

10 All's Well That Ends Well 193

11 In the Absence of the Sacred 205

The Many Voices of God 210

Turn On, Tune In, Get Better 217

On Holy Ghosts 232

Past Progressive 236

Conclusion: A Necessary Utopia 241

The Upside of Armageddon 242

The End of All Our Exploring 246

Acknowledgments 253

Notes and Further Reading 255

Index 273

Editorial Reviews

"Incredible . . . timely . . . clarifying." —Jack Dorsey, cofounder and CEO of Twitter

“Engaging, extensively documented, well-organized, and thought provoking.” —Booklist

“Entertaining and provocative.” —Publishers Weekly

"Often zingy and colorful . . . Civilized to Death is unquestionably well-timed . . . Ryan is right to highlight the aspects of modern life that have gone off the rails.” —Undark

“[A] prescient book about the nature of progress . . . Civilized to Death will make you see our so-called progress in a whole new light.” —Book Riot

“This book takes on 'progress' as a guiding ethos—and does so with gusto.” —The Stranger

“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. . . . Civilized to Death is an important guide in this conversation.” —Psychology Today

"A fascinating read." —Seattle Times

"Every great once in a while, a book comes along that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew. Civilized to Death is without question one of them." —Jesse Bering, PhD, author of The Belief Instinct

“Christopher Ryan is one of the most interesting and provocative thinkers of our time. Everyone should read him—you might well disagree but you’ll definitely think differently." —Johann Hari, New York Times–bestselling author of Lost Connections

From the Publisher

09/30/2019

Modernity is toxic, brutal, and insane compared to the blithe existence of ancient and contemporary hunter-gatherers, according to this fervent jeremiad. Ryan (Sex at Dawn) paints a rose-tinted portrait of nomadic “foragers” who lead healthy, happy, peaceful lives in “an egalitarian world of shared plenitude”; value “generosity, honesty and mutual respect”; work just 20 hours a week; enjoy sex with multiple partners; and respect women and LGBTQ people. 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.” The results are disastrous: patriarchy, war, high-carb diets, cancer, sexual repression, environmental destruction, tooth decay, “rich asshole syndrome,” overprotective parenting, and toilets that thwart humans’ natural squatting posture. Ryan updates the centuries-old theme of mankind’s “fall from grace” with a one-sided selection of anthropological and psychological studies, while jousting with pro-civilization ideologues such as Steven Pinker. He notes the high rates of childhood mortality among hunter-gatherers, and concedes that prehistoric foragers developed agriculture to keep from starving, but reckons death “a relatively minor event” when capping a gloriously uncivilized life. Ryan’s anti-progress polemic is entertaining and provocative, but not very convincing. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-07-28
Hunter-gatherers were happier, wiser, and healthier than we are.

Journalist Ryan (co-author: Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, 2010), host of the podcast Tangentially Speaking, is convinced that the idea of progress is insidious propaganda propelling the world to economic, ecological, and political collapse. "Every day," he asserts, in one of his many broad generalizations, "more people conclude that the approach to life promoted by the central myths of civilization are generating loneliness, confusion, anxiety, and despair for many of us." Most people, he claims, are unhappy, working in jobs they hate, eating food that has been leached of nutrition, living in overcrowded cities where they are cut off from nature and from one another, and suffering from diseases that "are by-products of civilization itself"—not only scourges such as tuberculosis, cholera, smallpox, and influenza, but also tooth decay, constipation, hemorrhoids, depression, gout, "coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, many types of cancer, autoimmune disease, and osteoporosis." To counter what the author sees as the mistaken Narrative of "Perpetual Progress," he recommends looking closely at how our distant ancestors lived. Drawing on a diverse mix of academic and popular science, Ryan concludes that all hunter-gatherers lived "in strikingly similar ways." They were "fiercely egalitarian," had free mobility to "easily walk away from uncomfortable situations," and saw themselves "as the fortunate recipients of a generous environment and benevolent spirit world." They happily shared property, had access to all they needed, did not discriminate on the basis of gender, and eased their way to death by imbibing psychedelics. Their downfall came from farming. Once they adopted agriculture, their social structure changed, becoming hierarchical, competitive, and overpopulated. "Measures of health, longevity, security, and leisure all declined for almost everyone," writes the author, including the elites. Ryan's solution to the chaos of contemporary life is simple and simplistic: to bring "hunter-gatherer thinking into our modern lives" by forming "horizontally organized collectives," using "nonpolluting locally generated energy," and offering "a global guaranteed basic income that incentivizes not having children."

A nostalgic portrayal of the prehistoric world with little relevance for our current era.

Kirkus Reviews