The world has become an awful place to live in. We have elected incompetent leaders, choked our waterways with cup lids and chemicals, and we have technology that seem to bring us ever closer to blowing up the planet. How do we find a way out of this global maelstrom? Author and podcaster Christopher Ryan says that we should look closely how our early ancestors chose to live, and tear down the structure of values that we currently have, as well as innovations, and social hierarchies that support modern civilization.
Prehistoric life wasn’t always as short, nasty, and brutal as we assume, Ryan argues in “Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress,” and what we’re conditioned to call progress must be uprooted. “Civilization,” he says, “is like a hole our clever species dug and then promptly fell into.”
Ryan launches his argument with the caveat that he’s not interested in rewinding the clock. “I harbor no illusions about ‘noble savages’ or ‘getting back to the garden,’” he writes. But the bulk of the book suggests just the opposite: that hunter-gatherer societies should be emulated, despite vanishingly rare opportunities to do so in an urbanized world.
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Perhaps we really can learn a thing or two about our ancestors, but what are your thoughts about this one?
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