Better food, worse sex?

I have just completed Jared Diamond’s at times fascinating account of how the economic geography of today’s world came into play. Predictably, the major culprit (or hero if you will)  is the same agricultural revolution which Ryan and Jethá in Sex at Dawn blame for the human race’s unnatural fate of sexless monogamy, in turn both blamed by Reich for giving rise to endemic neurosis and feted by Freud as a precondition of civilization. This inevitably raises the question of whether it is actually possible for the human race to buck this secular trend and live a natural existence of any sort under by now fundamentally transformed social conditions.

Mystics often float the idea that our species is engaged in a spiritual evolution. It is quite hard for me to buy into this notion. Evolution in any case is not a one-way street: organisms also get simpler to adapt to their environment, not only more complicated. Indeed, both Diamond and Ryan document instances of this happening in our own species. We tend to assume we in the West are smarter than hunter-gatherers, but it turns out that the opposite applies. Intelligence is much more predictive of the chances of passing on ones genes in primitive societies than it is in post-industrial ones, and in keeping with this, the average native of Papua New Guinea is more intelligent than the average Englishman. He also has a larger penis and significantly higher sperm count.

It seems to me that we basically live in a state of alienation which we have some idea now how we got into, but no idea how to get out of. Not only is the Enlightenment myth of constant progress dead, but we perhaps have to get used to the idea that we have regressed instead. And even if we do believe that human societies are getting fairer, less violent and generally less neurotic, then clearly there has at least been a period, presumably until fairly recently, when the contrary was the case. Moreover, Freud’s Faustian bargain might even have been acceptable if it was only about sex. But if the cost of adapting to modern civilization is in fact a large loss of enjoyment in life and atrophy of both body and spirit, then might we not really be better off abandoning much of what we have built and starting over?

I do not have an answer to this question other than to observe it is not an obvious or even well-defined option. The myth of the Golden Age is omnipresent in our collective memory and wildly opposing views on the quality of prehistoric life pitted philosophers in the iconoclastic, naturalist tradition of Rousseau and later Nietzsche against the likes of Burke, Hobbes and Voltaire. The so called “paleolithic diet” is a controversial attempt to restore an analogous nutritional environment to the one that existed in hunter-gatherer times, and the barefoot movement shares similar aims. But primitivism, it seems, whilst it can be a source of inspiration in trying to uncover some of the ways in which modern life does not serve our health and happiness, can hardly be an agenda.