Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress

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As I was reading along in the first few chapters, I started to recognize that Ryan was glossing over counter arguments and cherry-picking data.

It is also difficult to negate that civilization as we know it, has put up some important barriers in the possibility to practice this lifestyle.With outsized wildfires raking the American West and high seas swallowing coastlines the world over, the reading public is primed to accept the notion that civilization has reached critical condition. The kind of freedom that leads most directly to happiness, in other words, is the freedom not to get up to the ringing of an alarm five days a week, not to be obligated to shave and put on a tie (or bra) if you don’t feel like it, not to pretend to respect someone you don’t just because he’s your “boss” just so you’ll have enough money to keep the bill collectors at bay for another month. Truth and life were altogether too important to waste with argumentative posturing and saber rattling, The Puritans certainly battled many things in culture and in print, but in their writings, those always seem to be penultimate goals—the ultimate goal was increasing love and knowledge of the God of the universe. It won’t actually help, of course – despite the modern belief that the scientific method clears the path of dogma, the truth is much more complicated. Again, though, he focuses on one side of the story, failing to acknowledge some of the health risks that accompany the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

I highly recommend against the audio book, unless you want to hear the author use an obnoxiously childish tone when discussing things he doesn't like or disagrees with, completely undermining any legitimacy his claims might have. This, according to him, is the ultimate sign that the only thing we are headed towards, is our own end. While these examples illustrate how civilization has corrupted our initial nonaggressive human nature, Ryan doesn’t tackle any possible exceptions. Book: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.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. His new book, Civilized to Death, questions whether civilization has been a net benefit to our species. I commend For the Children’s Sake to parents trying to figure out how to make a choice about educational methodologies.

There is not a word about the fate of the foraging Neanderthals, our closest relation in the Homo genus.He also dispels a number of myths along the way here – not least the ‘short’ part of Hobbes’s quote above. The book itself is not enough to form a bigger picture of what is civilization and what we gained from it (probably no book will ever be big enough to answer that question). Bossis believes that psilocybin-assisted therapy could help patients by triggering a cathartic state of enhanced spiritual awareness. This is because we not only believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but even that the world is getting increasingly better. Chris also shares humorous and touching stories from interviews and travels in his van, Scarlett Jovansson.