UNNATURAL:
How
Modern Society is Destroying Human Happiness
(a work in progress)
Introduction
Although we who live in the 21st century currently enjoy the greatest personal wealth, the most plentiful food, the most effective medical care, and the longest average life-spans in human history, a shockingly large number of us are desperately unhappy. Hundreds of studies by medical and social scientists confirm that happiness and satisfaction in today’s world is seriously undermined by an epidemic of chronic stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness that is without precedent in human history.
Seeking relief from the psychological torments of modern life, we have sought relief in eating and overeating unhealthy foods for pleasure, ingesting an endless stream of mind-altering drugs, and indulging in the unnatural companionship of electronic communication. But our growing addiction to such panaceas has itself created a host of new problems, including dramatic increases in heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and drug addiction—as well as a long list of physical and emotional disorders from which we are suffering in increasing numbers.
This book explains how the unnatural lifestyles made possible by modern technologies have led to a widespread loss of human happiness. But in order to understand the origins and nature of this paradox, it is necessary to understand the many ways in which, over millions of years, our species adapted to its natural environments throughout the long history of human evolution.
Our prehistoric ancestors spent their lives hunting wild game and gathering plant foods, wandering endlessly in search of new supplies of food, sheltering in caves or in primitive huts, and staying warm and safe near their ever-burning campfires. Armed with simple tools and weapons and protected from the elements by erecting temporary dwellings made from vegetation and fashioning crude clothing from animal hides, prehistoric humans all pursued a nomadic hunting and gathering way of life for more than a million years.
It was only a few thousand years ago that humanity developed an entirely new way of life based on agriculture and settled down to live in enduring houses and permanent communities. The abandonment of hunting and gathering eventually led to the emergence of cities—and ultimately to the rise of civilization and large-scale societies that have flourished throughout the inhabited world for most of the past 5,000 years. Finally, only a few hundred years ago, the industrial revolution completely revolutionized human life and catapulted the earth’s human population to more than a thousand times its original size.
Industrialization has not only destroyed much of the earth’s wilderness habitats but has also so radically transformed human environments that the vast majority of us no longer live in the natural world. Instead, we now spend most of our lives living in the unnatural environments of concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass.
This book will explain how the disconnect between our inherited human natures and the artificial lifestyles of modern society is gradually destroying human happiness.
Chapter 1: Human Nature in an Unnatural World
Hunters and Gatherers in the Natural World
Humanity's Natural Way of Life Has Gradually Disappeared
The Plentiful Evidence of a Universal Human Nature
The Disconnect Between Human Nature and Modern Life
Neural Adaptation: How the Brain Adjusts to Unnatural Conditions
Social Acceptance: The Power of Other People’s Perceptions
Submission to Authority: It is Human Nature to Obey
Many behaviors that are found in all human societies are unique to the human species, including the use of fire and the cooking of food, a complex spoken language, religious worship, singing and dancing, and our uniquely human expressions of emotion. These and other universal human behaviors show that we have all inherited a definable human nature that evolved during our species’ long history as hunters and gatherers, but our human natures never evolved to harmonize with the unnatural world of modern industrial society. Yet we go through life with little or no awareness of this disharmony, because the human brain naturally adapts to almost any condition as long as it is persistent, because we naturally accept the perceptions of the people around us, even when they fly in the face of reality, and because it is human nature to submit to the will of authority figures.
Chapter 2: A Rising Tide of Unhappiness
Stress, Anxiety, Loneliness, and Depression is the New Normal
The Loss of Freedom and Autonomy
The Loss of Human Companionship
The Shock of Cultural and Social Change
Environmental Pollution and Mind-Altering Chemicals
The Apocalypse on the Horizon
Chronic Anxiety and Stress
While advanced technologies have bestowed numerous benefits on humankind, they have also created significant hazards to our psychological well-being. These hazards include the loss of personal freedom and autonomy; the loss of human companionship; the shock of rapid and continuous change; unnatural alterations in the genetic makeup of plants, animals, and humans; frightening warnings about the apocalypses looming just over the horizon; and an environment increasingly poisoned by industrial pollutants that disrupt and distort our minds and emotions. The result, especially in the world’s most technologically advanced societies, is unprecedented levels of chronic depression, anxiety, and stress.
Chapter 3: Unnatural Sleep
Artificial Light, Unnatural Schedules, Sleep Deprivation,
and Chronic Insomnia
Sunrise, Sunset, and the Moon
Sleeping With Fire and Staying Up Late
Lamplight, Candlelight, and Electric Light
Sleep and the Clockwork Society
Putting Sleep Last
The Risks of Inadequate Sleep
When the industrial revolution replaced the dim, flickering light of fires, lamps, and candles with the artificial daylight of electric lighting, the sleep centers in the human brain ceased to take their cues from the rising and setting of the sun. As a direct result of the proliferation of brilliant electric light, humanity lost its ancient connection to the celestial rhythms of daylight and darkness that govern the behavior of all other forms of terrestrial life. No longer connected to these natural rhythms, human sleep has taken a back seat not only to the demands of work but also to the temptations of social life and electronic entertainment. As a result, sleep disorders have become commonplace and chronic, and the unnatural patterns of sleep in modern life have reached the point where they have become a serious risk to human mental and physical health.
Chapter 4: Unnatural Food
Ruining Our Health by Seeking Comfort in Eating
Overfed Yet Malnourished
Chemical Additives and Food-Like Substances
Shunning Red Meat and Other Food Taboos
Sugar and Salt, Oil and Fat
The Wages of Obesity
Many of the foods that dominate the modern diet are eaten not so much to sustain life as to provide comfort in the midst of unhappiness. It is human nature to crave sweet and salty foods, as well as meats rich in fats and oils, because these foods, while essential to human health, previously existed in very limited amounts in our ancestors’ natural environments. But now that they are produced in massive quantities by industrial agriculture, all of these foods have become both plentiful and inexpensive.
Foods that are unnaturally rich in sugar, salt, oil, and fat are marketed relentlessly and sold in prodigious quantities—and the result is an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease without precedent in human history. Since people are aware that their dietary habits are both unnatural and unhealthy, modern societies have embraced a bewildering variety of diets and food taboos—yet many of these diets are actually depriving their adherents of foods that are essential to proper health. Meanwhile, both obesity and malnutrition have increased at alarming rates in modern life.
Chapter 5: Unnatural Medicine
Unnatural Therapies and the Medical Plutocracy
Treating Normal Emotions With Psychoactive Drugs
Drug Addiction, Legal and Illegal
Drugging Children to Make Them Behave
Drugging Adults to Blunt the Pain of Their Unhappy Lives
Therapies That Alter the Body’s Natural Functions
Modern Healthcare, Big Pharma, and the Thirst for Profit
Modern medicine has found cures for infectious diseases, developed effective treatments for wounds and infections that used to be fatal, and greatly extended the average human life span. But excessive overmedication in recent decades has become commonplace in medical practice—not only for a vast range of psychological problems but also for the feelings and behaviors that are the natural reactions to the unnatural conditions of daily life. In ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier generations, modern medicine’s reliance on psychoactive drugs to control human emotions has now become accepted as normal and reasonable. As a result, a large and growing segment of our population—including both children and adults—are not only habitual drug users but have become, in every sense of the word, medically-sanctioned drug addicts.
By now, the pharmaceutical industry—as well as large segments of medical practice in general—has become hopelessly corrupted by the massive profits gained from prescribing and selling specialized drugs and other therapies to entire populations, while the demand for powerful intoxicants such as opiates, cocaine, and methamphetamines has spawned a multi-billion-dollar international criminal enterprise. Hundreds of thousands of people currently die every year worldwide by overdosing on opioids, both legal and illegal, while millions routinely interfere with the body’s natural functions through unnatural therapies and medications.
Chapter 6: Unnatural Communication
How Electronic Media Have Distorted Human Interaction
The Instinctive Need for Human Communication
Natural Communication in Small-Scale Societies
How Agriculture Limited Human Communication
How the Industrial Revolution Stifled Human Communication
Filling the Void With Electronic Communications
The innate human need for constant communication with others is part of our human DNA. Over many decades of observation, cultural anthropologists have seen that people in hunting and gathering and other nomadic societies talk to each other almost constantly from morning to night. But the long hours and isolated homesteads of agricultural societies made interaction outside of the immediate family more difficult, and with the advent of the industrial revolution, interaction became increasingly limited, even within the nuclear family. Men went to work, children went to school, and women stayed home. Now, in our post-industrial world, loneliness and solitude—almost unknown in small-scale societies—have become an increasingly common source of human unhappiness.
Nevertheless, the need and the desire for companionship and communication remains deeply embedded in human nature. In response to this disconnect, modern technology has produced a series of electronic communication technologies—telephones, radio, movies, television, and smartphones—that have increasingly replaced the natural companionship and face-to-face communication that humanity enjoyed for all but the last hundred years of human history. But in replacing face-to-face interaction, modern electronic communication has created an unnatural form of social interaction, distorting human communication and deepening the social and emotional isolation that seems to grow more acute with each new generation.
Chapter 7: Unnatural Work
Employment as a Form of Servitude
Hunter-Gatherers at Work and Play
Drudgery and the Agricultural Revolution
The Servitude of Industrial Employment
Boredom, Insecurity, Anxiety, Overwork, and Burnout
When anthropologists began to
study the working life of hunting and gathering societies, they were astonished
to find that even in the harshest environment, people spent less than twenty
hours a week hunting and foraging for the food they needed—and spent the rest
of their daylight hours socializing, making things, eating, playing, and relaxing.
In small-scale agricultural societies the weekly workload increased, but for
the most part working hours were heavier during the seasons between planting
and harvesting, with the winters—or the dry seasons—often a time for lazy
indulgence.
But with the coming of the industrial
revolution, a new type of society arose, built on the premise of continuous
employment for wages within a money-based economy. In today’s industrial
society, the vast majority of adults depend for their livelihoods on doing
specific—often repetitive—jobs during fixed hours of the day and week under the
supervision of bosses or superiors who, except for interactions over work, are
otherwise virtual strangers. For most adults in modern society, the wage-earner
has no option other than employment, since the loss of employment ultimately
means the loss of food, shelter, clothing, and status in society. The great
sorrow, for the majority of adults, is that their working lives are often
dominated by chronic boredom, insecurity, anxiety, overwork, and burnout.
Chapter 8: Unnatural Childhood
Growing Up in Captivity
Childhood Was Once a Time of Freedom
Adult Supervision, Structured Routines, and Social Isolation
Excessively Schooled and Starved for Play
Walled Off From the Adult World
How Age Segregation Destroys Cultural Traditions
The Modern Educational Establishment and the Failure to Mature
Childhood in tribal societies was a time of freedom, exploration, intense interaction with other children, and daily exposure to adult life and adult role models. But children in modern society are raised in virtual captivity. Their movements are confined, their interactions are limited, and their lives are unnaturally structured from morning to night. In school, children sit for hours in their assigned seats, prohibited from freely interacting with their peers and forbidden to engage in the unstructured play that is essential for normal physical and social development. Moreover, modern children are typically segregated from children older or younger than themselves—which chokes off the normal flow of values, attitudes, and traditions from older children to younger children, interrupting one of the most important ways that cultural traditions are transmitted from one generation to the next. Finally, modern children have limited contact with the adult world—so that, upon coming of age, they will enter adulthood ignorant of its dangers and unprepared for its temptations. For all of these reasons, children in our society typically struggle—often without success—to develop meaningful adult roles and authentic adult personalities.
Chapter 9: The Disappearing Family
Weakened Roles and Broken Relationships
The Ancient Human Family
Clans, Kinfolk, and the Extended Family
The Gradual Disappearance of Family Life
How Mothers and Fathers Have Lost Their Traditional Roles
Family
Responsibilities Versus the Obligations of the Nation-State
Homeless Amid Plenty
For nearly all of human history, the family—especially the extended family of parents, children, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents—has been the bedrock of human society. But in modern times this bedrock has been crumbling. Traditional family roles have fallen by the wayside, and the sharing of work, wealth, and property among family members has become increasingly obsolete. Many modern people now live with only minimal contact with their families—and some live without even a meaningful connection to society at large. In recent decades, the nation-state has assumed the primary responsibility for the welfare, protection, and support of its citizens. Has the human family finally become obsolete?
Chapter 10: The Quest for a More Natural Life
Restoring Harmony Between Human Nature and Modern Society
Respecting
the Need For Sleep
Eating More Naturally
Ending Dependence on Mind-Altering Drugs
Rediscovering Human Communication
Reinventing Work
Liberating the Young
Restoring the Family in Human Life
Reconnecting
With the Natural Environment
Our technology-based world is here to stay. Civilization is not going to devolve back into some form of preindustrial way of life, because that is not what most people want. Yet in a world where happiness, satisfaction, and the simple pleasures of life are often in short supply, the thirst for change is strong. By exploring, analyzing, comprehending, and acknowledging our inherited human natures—and by understanding how modern culture has stifled and frustrated our natural human needs—modern society could chart a path to new cultural traditions and a more natural way of life. In doing so, we might begin once more to find the harmony that has been lost between our inherited human natures and the technological world that we have created—and by doing so, to restore the human happiness that we are so tragically in the process of losing.