Scan barcode
A review by anotherpath
Civilized to Death: What Was Lost on the Way to Modernity by Christopher Ryan
5.0
Whenever I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with an author's central premise, I tend to nitpick at nearly ANYTHING that irritates me within the book. I hold my allies to a higher standard than my enemies!
This book is a twenty year body of work that is timely, necessary, and probably not influential enough to correct the wrongs that it half-heartedly seeks to. My qualms with the book are few and far between, and the only takeaway that sticks out is towards the end when he said Progressive politics tend to align with Hunter-Gatherer values. I disagree.
The books central invalid hangup is that it doesn't target Mammon (money) as THE problem with civilization, and instead gets hung up on the idea that equal pay for women means ancient people's social equity. It doesn't, and much of what progressives deem necessary for equity would have to be eschewed to return to balance with nature/life.
There's so much that the book has going for it! A genuine recommend.
Civilization means 4X the menstrual cycles for women. 2X the work for men and women, and for it, you lose access to your natural diet, your natural spiritual life, your community, sex and your health and sanity. In return we get Sephora and Toll Roads.
Let's hit the red fucking button and stop.
"Once we accept that all human beings are, in fact, equally human, it becomes clear that human nature offers little to help explain systematic cruelties common to civilizations but rare or nonexistent among foragers (subjugation of women, slavery, extreme disparities in wealth, and so on)."
"The popularity and persistence of scientific narratives often have more to do with how well they support dominant mythologies than with scientific veracity."
P.S. to the Goodreads community at large claiming this book had no scientific merit are guilty of the bastardization of the term. The work is inundated with study after study, and journal reference after reference. In addition to that, I think Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is the only body of work I've ever read with a larger pool of citations. Hobbes, Boethius, Pinker, Harris, Dawkins, and a consortium of others are cited destructively, others like Diamond, Harrari, and their ilk come out looking clean. If you're not familiar with all these bodies of work, ONLY THEN, could you think what you think.
This book is a twenty year body of work that is timely, necessary, and probably not influential enough to correct the wrongs that it half-heartedly seeks to. My qualms with the book are few and far between, and the only takeaway that sticks out is towards the end when he said Progressive politics tend to align with Hunter-Gatherer values. I disagree.
The books central invalid hangup is that it doesn't target Mammon (money) as THE problem with civilization, and instead gets hung up on the idea that equal pay for women means ancient people's social equity. It doesn't, and much of what progressives deem necessary for equity would have to be eschewed to return to balance with nature/life.
There's so much that the book has going for it! A genuine recommend.
Civilization means 4X the menstrual cycles for women. 2X the work for men and women, and for it, you lose access to your natural diet, your natural spiritual life, your community, sex and your health and sanity. In return we get Sephora and Toll Roads.
Let's hit the red fucking button and stop.
"Once we accept that all human beings are, in fact, equally human, it becomes clear that human nature offers little to help explain systematic cruelties common to civilizations but rare or nonexistent among foragers (subjugation of women, slavery, extreme disparities in wealth, and so on)."
"The popularity and persistence of scientific narratives often have more to do with how well they support dominant mythologies than with scientific veracity."
P.S. to the Goodreads community at large claiming this book had no scientific merit are guilty of the bastardization of the term. The work is inundated with study after study, and journal reference after reference. In addition to that, I think Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy is the only body of work I've ever read with a larger pool of citations. Hobbes, Boethius, Pinker, Harris, Dawkins, and a consortium of others are cited destructively, others like Diamond, Harrari, and their ilk come out looking clean. If you're not familiar with all these bodies of work, ONLY THEN, could you think what you think.