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.
Here’s two studies which suggest that the prevalence of depression is increasing over decadal timescales:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2648043
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~daneis/symposium/2012/readings/Twenge2010.pdf
Of course even the oldest one only goes back to the 1930’s, which is well into the period that we call “modern” and so doesn’t tell us much about the premodern world. The problem, as noted above, is that before that there’s so little data and such a wide gap in definitions that meaningful comparisons are almost impossible. Nonetheless, even an 80 year sample is sufficient to establish that there hasn’t been anything like the psychological equivalent of the discovery of penicillin or the Green Revolution.
Responding to the rest of your post, there’s only a few things I want to point out:
- Yes, new social structures take some time to pan out, but we’ve been in a state of ~continuous disruption~ for, oh, 200 years now? The point is, new social structures cannot settle into a stable state if the technological and economic conditions that support them get upended every few decades. Given that at least half of the problem is what you call “transitional stupidities”, it is actually a significant issue that new social arrangements are not actually allowed to reach stability before they get upended again. I unironically believe that we need a multi-generational plateau in technological progress if we hope to have any sort of stable social arrangements again. (Note: “stable” does not always equal “good”, but “unstable” is pretty much always bad.)
- “They would be insane to look backwards.” Similarly, it would be insane for doctors to look at some gross, unevolved agent like a fungus to try and fight bacterial infections. Fungi grow on rotten food. Fungi are often parasites. Fungi are themselves the cause of many kinds of disease. Obviously there is nothing useful to learn from a fungus.
- Okay, less sarcasm, let me make a single, specific assertion: a necessary feature of a successful culture is the ability to provide most people with healthy and positive networks of kin relationships, and the cultures and ideologies considered “liberatory” have exactly the opposite effect.
0.
Nonetheless, even an 80 year sample is sufficient to establish that there hasn’t been anything like the psychological equivalent of the discovery of penicillin or the Green Revolution.
Agreed. Our progress on this stuff is currently at the stage of, oh, let’s say van Leeuwenhoek – “there is such a thing as the psyche, we have a very rough idea of what kind of inputs are relevant to its functionality.” Certainly I have no trouble saying that most of our strategies for doing anything relevant to psychological well-being are either neurochemistry or voodoo.
1.
I unironically believe that we need a multi-generational plateau in technological progress if we hope to have any sort of stable social arrangements again.
This is certainly possible, although (unsurprisingly) I sincerely hope it’s not true.
It’s not unthinkable that we can develop a social structure (at least an available default social structure) that’s robust enough to withstand major tech changes. This becomes a lot more imaginable if you’re sufficiently post-scarcity that your social structure doesn’t have to be built around the fulfillment of material needs. Which is one reason that getting there strikes me as a major priority, and that I believe we need to be more trigger-happy in switching from explore to exploit in terms of economic arrangement.
Obviously this is a huge topic requiring a dive down the rabbit hole; I’m happy to go there if people are interested.
2.
Har har. But seriously, “let’s scan the past for useful bits and bobs that we can scavenge and repurpose” is entirely different from “let’s try to replicate the systemic solutions of the past because our present systems aren’t working well enough.” I am all about scavenging cool bits of social tech. I am probably willing to go way further in that direction than standard-issue modern liberals or standard-issue tradcons.
3.
Kin networks seem like an especially terrible base for this kind of thing, what with the part where there’s really no flexibility at all in who your kin are. I’m in favor of preserving the ability to have kin networks if that’s your thing, to the extent that it doesn’t conflict with better and more widely-useful technologies, but I place a much higher priority on the ability to form actual functional networks with selected individuals.