Stop hunting for that mythical happy era
To be alive in 2025, according to a widely prevalent view, is to be the victim of a unique historical misfortune. We are the obese, anxious, isolated, screen-addicted victims of a corrupting and alienating modern civilisation. Young people have never been so lonely or so anxious. Work has never been so precarious or meaningless. Read enough commentary in this vein and the Dark Ages begin to look positively agreeable. Harvest failures and Viking raids would at least supply an invigorating alternative to the ennui induced by seven hours of daily screen-time.
A pessimist by inclination, I sympathise with those who fret over the ills of modernity. Indeed, I tend to think the fretting is useful.
Historically, discontent with the fruits of progress has proved one of the most important sources of progress.
We should be glad the Victorians — prone to similarly gloomy ruminations about their own civilisation — did not choose to rest on their laurels after building railways or filling northern towns with factories.
But, increasingly, I notice justified anxiety about civilisation shading into unjustified hostility. There is an ambient strain of pessimism which holds that the solution is not to amend civilisation but, so far as possible, to do without it. A more “natural” way of life is required. I’m routinely amazed at how often intelligent people, most of whom show no signs whatever of aptitude at outdoor pursuits, confidently inform me that we would undoubtedly have been happier in our “natural” state as hunter-gatherers. The tight community bonds! A diet entirely free of ultra-processed foods!
Nostalgia for cave-dwelling premodernity underpins a stream of bestselling diagnoses of modern ills.
In Humankind, Rutger Bregman eulogised the inherent kindness of the neolithic band. In Tribe, Sebastian Junger yearned for its tight community bonds. In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow were full of praise for the supposed egalitarian social structures of traditional societies. Yuval Noah Harari, whose Sapiens is one of the bestselling books of the century so far, presented the agricultural revolution as among the greatest disasters in human history. A book praising the virtues of lightbulbs and antibiotics would doubtless be insufficiently counterintuitive.
These ideas find their popular expression in wellness fads that promise to help adherents return to a more “natural” life. The “paleo diet” requires adherents to eat only foods that were widely consumed 10,000 years ago in the paleolithic era.
Indeed, hunter-gatherer communities are now mined for all kinds of dubious lifestyle tips. Hunter-gatherer practices can help you to sleep (How to Sleep Like a Caveman), exercise (Your Primal Body), and forge friendships (The Primal Connection), etc. No parenting guide is without at least a chapter of speculation on how hunter-gatherer babies “naturally” sleep, play and feed.
"Anti-modern thinking has acquired a weird political power, too
Much of this is not new. Marketers have long understood the almost mystical power of the word “natural” (especially applied to foods, clothing fibres and child-rearing techniques) over the anxious middle class. And the fear of alienation from nature is as old as industrial modernity itself — its first great exponent was the 18thcentury French philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who theorised that before the advent of corrupting civilisation, men and women had not even needed community, roaming the woods in lonely contentment.
But recently, this sentiment has mutated into something new and dangerous. The modern anti-science and anti-vaccination movements get a lot of mileage out of our unthinking reverence for nature. The vaccinesceptic US health secretary Robert F Kennedy — currently presiding over a needless measles outbreak in Texas — has praised the efficacy of “natural immunity” to disease. Numerous influencers have built followings on the idea that serious diseases can be cured through “natural” lifestyle changes. Most egregious among them is Belle Gibson, who fraudulently claimed to have brain cancer which she was curing via “a quest to heal myself naturally”. That Gibson was able to sign a lucrative book contract thanks to her preposterous story is testament to the potency of nature as an ideal, even among intelligent people.
Anti-modern thinking has acquired a weird political power, too. Bronze Age Mindset, a popular tract on the Trumpian right, lauds the harsh manly virtues of the Heroic Age of Greece. On the left, where doubts about civilisation are sharpened by guilty feelings about colonialism and capitalism, “indigenous communities” are scoured for reassuring clues that the human past was impeccably progressive (there was a period in which you never stopped hearing about the advanced gender views of indigenous peoples). More radically, the “degrowth” movement sees the rapacity of modern capitalism as an ill that must be reversed. Indigenous societies, progressive economists muse, may offer a better model.
I suspect much of the dangerous attraction of these ideas derives from the comforting thought that we can get back to a happy and uncorrupted mode of human existence, if we only eat properly and tune into ancient wisdom. Of course, that uncorrupted life never existed. Hunter-gatherers may have been more sociable than we are but they also suffered diseases, starvation and injury with a frequency that most of us would find intolerable. Infanticide is common in hunter-gatherer communities and per capita deaths from war are higher in traditional societies than in nuclear-armed states.
In his wise and fascinating book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, the evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse reminds readers that humans evolved to successfully propagate their genes, not to be happy. Anxiety and depression are a feature, not a bug, of the human condition — worry and sadness spur us to survival. There is no natural, tranquil state we could ever return to.
Discontent has always been with us.
Relax and enjoy the vaccines.
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