With risk of famine, less dietary variety, larger-scale warfare, and increased disease (especially in urban areas), the civilizations that sprang up after the transition to permanent cities and large-scale agriculture were a disaster for the physical health of the individual. It would be weird if they just so happened to perfectly fit the psychological health of the individual. I keep coming back to that description I once read of Renaissance Italy, where a songbird with broken wings was considered a perfectly appropriate toy for a small child, who would play with it until they crushed it to death. Even at what have been considered its historical peaks, our civilization has often been monstrous, in ways we have often tried to normalize in exactly the same way fucked up families try to normalize their own behavior.
Indeed, and in the case of nutrition we only really turned the corner in the second half of the 20th century. And we did so not by any particularly sophisticated understanding of nutrition, but by brute-force increase of the number of calories available until malnutrition was no longer a serious issue.
But the implication you’ve made above, that we have made similar progress on the problems of psychology, doesn’t seem to hold up. Available statistics suggest that modern living is worse psychologically than older lifestyles. To make a crude comparison, when it comes to mental health we are at best in the early 19th century, just barely beginning to understand how bad our situation is, with a bunch of remedies that barely work mingled heavily with nonsense and charlatanry.
(If playing with an injured bird is “monstrous”, then I don’t think there has ever been a non-monstrous society of any kind, at any stage of human history. Hunter-gatherers do three monstrous things before breakfast.)
Available statistics suggest that modern living is worse psychologically than older lifestyles.
I would be very interested in seeing these statistics. I would be particularly interested if
i. they seem in any way trustworthy in their data (e.g., not tabulating happiness based on self-reports);
ii. they seem to be using any understanding of human thriving that can be any way aligned with mine (e.g., not using “failing to make waves” as a signal of everything being fine); and
iii. they’re controlling for obvious widespread-but-nonstandard global-scale-transitional lifestyle stupidities (e.g., “I’m liberated from the social circle of the village where I was born, so I definitely don’t need any real friends at all!”). This last one may represent something of an unfair standard, in the sense that you can at least make an argument to the effect of “those allegedly-transitional stupidities are precisely the problem with modern lifestyles,” but…in fact transitions don’t last forever, the kinks in new social structures get worked out, and I’d bet money that this particular kind of problem-with-modernity just isn’t going to last all that long.
Because without that one sentence, I agree entirely with everything you’re saying here, and I don’t think it leads even a little bit to the kind of conclusion you support.
Yes! We are just barely beginning to have the infrastructure needed to think usefully about how to live well, in the way that early-19th-century doctors were just barely beginning to have the infrastructure needed to think usefully about how to keep us healthy. And, much like those doctors, we would be insane to look backwards for solutions. The past is a psychological hellpit. As you suggest, there has never been a non-monstrous society, not by any operationally-useful standard.
Certainly there’s no benefit to be gained in going back to the hunter-gatherer systems for which we evolved; evolution selects for niche-functionality but not for fulfillment or glory, and those systems were horrible by any measure we’d currently care to employ, as much so as Bronze Age agricultural life or Victorian life or whatever.
Figuring out how to build new systems from scratch is really really hard, and we’re going to screw up lots and lots, but there really isn’t a better plan.
IMPORTANT SIDEBAR, BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE ARE HOPELESSLY DENSE:
Just because past societies were terrible, on certain important axes, doesn’t mean that we’re not allowed to love and admire them for their many virtues.
My impression is that, in modern eras, you are probably not going to be tortured or enslaved or stranger/soldier-raped, nor will your family, and you and yours will probably die of old age or a disease related to ageing or one that onsets in late middle age if not later, after access to painkillers of unheard of efficacy to any previous eras (not to mention recreational drugs of previously unheard of efficacy, if that’s your thing).
Like, an atomized society has plenty of legit criticisms leveled at it, but for the most part, the probability of your life making a turn towards the nightmarishly horrifying is astronomically lower than in most historical eras, across the board. Not to say that nightmarishly horrifying things don’t happen today, but they’re so rare that worrying about eg. Half your family dying in a plague is nuts rather than a reasonable concern.
This is true but misses the point of the argument, unless there’s something I’m not getting (which is certainly possible).
I think we all agree that modernity is better in terms of things like medical tech, prevalence of violence, etc. Most people have no trouble going so far as to agree that this ultimately trumps other considerations – otherwise, you’re an Actual Fucking Primitivist, and those are very uncommon people who are not involved in this conversation on any side.
The question is whether the present is also better than the past in purely psychological / spiritual terms.