Thanks to opioids that only treat “superficial symptoms rather than underlying structural problems in how we live our lives”, now more Americans die every year (just due to overdose deaths) than soldiers died during the entire Vietnam War.

Foragers don’t necessarily die at an earlier age than those born in agricultural societies. There may be a higher mortality rate among infants and children, which statistically, brings the average of life expectancy down, but those who live usually do so into a healthy old age, similar to those in agricultural societies. Except the children who grow up in the foraging communities had better quality of life in regards to childcare, clean air and water, communal support, etc. In “ Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress,” author Christopher Ryan proposes a controversial explanation for what’s wrong with our world today: The problem began with the advent of agriculture, and the subsequent shift from a life of communal foraging to one of competition for personal gain. As Ryan explains, scholars wonder why, for thousands of years, when humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies, “nothing was happening” to signify progress. The author’s explanation is that humans were essentially happy and satisfied with their lives. When they became civilized, the concept of progress led to misery.Dr Pangloss, Voltaire’s inspired character from Candide, knows that we live in the best of all possible worlds – which is not unlike the opinions of Professor Pinker who has recently written a couple of book seeking to prove much the same thing. Pangloss even goes on to provide optimistic explanations for what might not otherwise appear material from the best of all possible worlds opinion – you know, like his being hanged for heresy by the inquisition. While precivilization is condemned, civilization is often seen as perpetually improving, all despite human nature’s competitive, aggressive, and bloody history. This view of humankind is routinely used in the justification of slavery and war and colonialism. Rather than connecting more intimately with one another, civilized people are conditioned to not trust each other, to compete, to feel shameful over their bodies and instincts.

I not only accept this author's premise, but fully embrace it. This book articulated something I have been feeling for a long time, and has been touched on in other books I've read, actually - that modern society and civilization in general, as a result of it's ignorance to our human origins, has done and will continue to do, a great deal of harm to our species, physically and mentally. Christopher Ryan (born February 13, 1962) is an American author best known for co-authoring the book Sex at Dawn (2010). Living in agricultural settlements with swelling populations drastically altered human beings. Status, family dynamics, power, treatment of women and children, food quality, exposure to new diseases, relationship to death, worsened. Even the worship of friendly and nourishing gods transitioned into religions where a God dominated nature and had absolute power with His control. While foraging societies protected their young ones, having an extended family to raise a child, within agricultural societies, children were seen as property, labor, as potential heirs to wealth, as rivals. After getting through all the authors complaints, I was left wishing there was any call to action. There were absolutely no specific or even vague solutions set forth by the author to fix the problems he believes exist. That's what the entire book should've been, and we couldn't even get a full paragraph of it at the end .

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While I do agree with Ryan that the earth, ecosystem, and humans would have been better off not evolving, I disagree with him over the fact that civilization is all bad. I think that it is a chance for us, and for everyone after us. It is varied and requires skill and intelligence, leading to the satisfaction of being good at something that requires our full attention. "The [foragers'] abilities include physical skills, honed by years of practice, as well as the capacity to remember, use, add to, and modify an enormous store of culturally shared verbal knowledge." Ryan gave a TED talk [4] titled Are we designed to be sexual omnivores? in February 2013, contributes to Psychology Today [5] and hosts a popular podcast called Tangentially Speaking with Dr. Christopher Ryan. [6] Ryan makes an absurd amount of certain claims that just seem ludicrous, at one point insisting that modern humans have all been trained to find things like rape and enslavement normal. I don't know where he's getting that from.