Christopher Ryan (born 1962) is an American writer and podcaster, co-author of Sex at Dawn (2010), whose book Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (2019) argues that the story of civilisation as steady progress from a nasty, brutish past is an ideology, not a fact. He makes the case that nomadic hunter-gatherers lived egalitarian, sharing, grateful and largely healthy lives, and that agriculture and settlement were a bad bargain whose costs we are still paying, a case that runs close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s own account of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer and Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer.
Who is Christopher Ryan? #
An American writer on human nature and prehistory. Born in 1962, he studied English and American literature and, some twenty years later, took a master’s degree and doctorate in psychology at Saybrook University. His first book, Sex at Dawn (2010), written with the psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá, challenged the standard account of human sexual evolution and drew a great deal of attention and criticism. Civilized to Death followed in 2019. He also hosts a long-running podcast, Tangentially Speaking.1
What does Civilized to Death say? #
That we have been sold a story. Ryan calls it the Narrative of Perpetual Progress: the assumption that everything since the coming of civilisation has been an improvement, with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s picture of life before the state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as its central premise. The narrative, he argues, “claims to explain the superiority of civilization while taking it as a given”.2
Against it he sets what anthropologists have found amongst nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, the way our species lived for well over ninety-five per cent of its existence. He picks out three characteristics. The first is fierce egalitarianism and sharing: autonomy is not negotiable, leadership is informal and cannot be imposed, and hoarding is not tolerated. The second is mobility: bands split and join, so people can walk away from a brewing conflict. The third is gratitude: foragers tend to see themselves as fortunate recipients of a generous land and a benevolent spirit world.3 For the politics he leans on the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, whose work shows equality amongst foragers actively protected by the group. See What did Christopher Boehm find about how early humans kept power in check?
From there the book follows the costs of the agricultural bargain into modern life: diseases of civilisation such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and many cancers, rare amongst foragers; the loneliness and anxiety of modern childhood, adolescence and adulthood; and a culture in flight from death. With farming and settlement, Ryan writes, “Our species went from living in the world to living in a zoo of our own making.”4
Did hunter-gatherers really live short, brutal lives? #
Not in the way the story says, on Ryan’s reading. The common figure for prehistoric life expectancy, somewhere between thirty and forty years, is an average dragged down by the deaths of infants and young children; it does not mean that people who survived childhood were old at forty. Ryan is clear about the price. Foragers paid for their health and freedom with high infant mortality, “a very high price”, in his words.5
The usual view of hunter-gatherers is the one Hobbes set down in Leviathan, a time of war of every man against every man, and it is the view the dominant culture still teaches. The winners write history, and portraying hunter-gatherers as savages has long been used to justify colonising them.6 The violence of the last six thousand years is cultural, not innate, and so it can change. Biologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share saw something like this in a wild baboon troop in Kenya. When the aggressive alpha males died, the troop became calmer and kinder, and the new culture was passed on to the young males who joined it.7 Ryan draws the same lesson from the opposite case, the baboons at Monkey Hill in London Zoo in the 1930s, whose terrible violence had at least as much to do with their cages as with their nature. See Isn’t the Fall just noble-savage romanticism?
How does Civilized to Death relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, on the diagnosis. Therapeutic Shamanism’s account of the Fall and Taker culture is the same story told from the shamanic side: domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this beginning with the Neolithic around 11,000 to 10,000 BC, accelerating with the first city-state cultures from about 4000 BC, and a culture that tells itself it is the civilised one. The word ‘civilisation’ itself comes from civitas, city-state culture, and calling everyone else uncivilised is already a hierarchy. Ryan’s gratitude, his picture of foragers who see the world as “spiritually alive, welcoming, and generous”, and his fiercely egalitarian bands are close to what Therapeutic Shamanism calls the Leaver culturesLeaver culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. Read the full answer and the Original Instructions.8 See What is the Fall? and What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
Therapeutic Shamanism also shares Ryan’s refusal to throw everything modern away. Not everything in the modern world is bad. Clean running water, a warm shower, modern medicine and the ability to reach people across the globe are real goods, and there are also clearly things about the way we live now that are deeply wrong. Hunter-gatherer life is not to be romanticised either; it was physically dangerous, with parasites, dangerous animals, times of scarcity, many children who did not reach adulthood and many women who died in childbirth.9 The point is relativity, not idyll. Relative to the farmers who came after them, hunter-gatherers lived in a far healthier relationship with the Earth.10
Where the two part company is in what the answer is. Ryan’s book is anthropology and argument, and it ends on death, psychedelics and community. Therapeutic Shamanism adds what no book of argument can supply: the lived relationship with the Animal, Plant and Stone People, and the shamanic practice that grows from it. As long as human numbers remain as they are, the future does not lie in all of us going to live in the woods; it lies in facing what is wrong and building new solutions on the healthiest template we have, the wisdom of our animist, Leaver-culture ancestors.9
Does Ryan think we should go back to hunting and gathering? #
No. His own image is the zoo. Since the behaviour of caged animals has at least as much to do with the cages as with their natures, he argues, we should think carefully about the design of our own enclosures and build human zoos that fit the kind of animal we are, so that our lives fit us “like slippers, not high heels”. Understanding how our species lived in the wild is, for him, how we learn to design the modern zoo better.11
What do critics say about Civilized to Death? #
That it stacks the evidence. Kirkus Reviews called it “a nostalgic portrayal of the prehistoric world with little relevance for our current era”, and Publishers Weekly found it “entertaining and provocative, but not very convincing”, resting on a one-sided selection of studies. The science writer Elizabeth Svoboda, reviewing it for Undark, agreed with many of its points about modern life but found that it often “suggests causality where there is none” and plays down how farming allowed far more people to live. The broader view Ryan argues against is the one set out by the psychologist Steven Pinker, that violence has fallen steadily as states and civilisation have grown.12
Ryan saw the charge coming. He expected readers to accuse him of romantic nostalgia and cherry-picking, answered that any argument about human nature is “a picked-cherry pie”, and said that blind faith in progress is driven by motives just as obvious as any yearning for a golden age. He is open about the high death rate amongst forager infants, and his remedy is not a return to the past but a better-designed present.13
