Civilized to Death - A Review

It’s rare that I read a book that is exceptionally bad. Normally the publication process weeds out the truly bad books, but the editors failed the author in this case. Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress is a book that should have never made it to press.

Christopher Ryan has followed up on a best-selling book, Sex at Dawn, with a book about the maladies of modern life. Civilized to Death looked like an interesting one based on the blurb and even I disagreed with the conclusions, this promised to be an engaging read. It should have been a red flag when the dust jacket blurbs were drawn from praise for the previous book and none of them from sources with significant credentials in the area of interest.

Civilized to Death is a train wreck. There is no question that Ryan can put together a sentence, but it isn’t immediately apparent that he understands the fundamentals of logic, argumentation, or research.

I have to confess that, though I read roughly a hundred books a year and try to carefully read the books that I review, I stopped reading carefully and moved more quickly through the last hundred pages of this book because it wasn’t worth the time to read it carefully. Ryan didn’t write or think carefully, so I returned the favor.

Ryan’s basic thesis is that everything you know about culture and civilization is wrong. He rejects the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress” and if you saw what he had seen, you would, too.

As far as that goes, I do not disagree. There is little doubt that in our over-industrialized, hyper-sexualized, logically backward, and consumeristically driven culture we have lost sight of the good life. One need only look at the rise of lifestyle-based diseases and the general loss of meaning in culture to see that. Ryan lays those ills at the feet of civilization.

Ryan’s remedy for civilization is to pursue aspects of the life of a hunter-gatherer. In truth, he doesn’t get to the point of any meaningful recommendations until the second to last page of the book, and that solution is so brief that I will quote it in full, lest I misrepresent it:

“What is we tragically bring hunter-gatherer thinking into our modern live by, for example, replacing top-down corporate structures with peer progressive networks and horizontally organized collectives and building an infrastructure of nonpolluting locally generated energy? If Homo sapiens sapiens were to divert spending on weapons, redirecting resources into a global guaranteed basic income that incentivizes not having children, thus reducing global population intelligently and without coercion, we would be taking steps toward [a meaningful solution]. Once we start down this road, every step would lead us closer to a future that recognizes, celebrates, honors, and replicates the origins and nature of our species. This is, as far as I can see, the only road home.”

This conclusion is air dropped out of nowhere. The book simply doesn’t build up to it. It’s as if he got to the end of the allotted word count, decided he needed to land the book and wrote a conclusion. The book is a great example of a non-sequitur.

More significant than the abrupt and ill-supported ending is the means by which Ryan supports his argument. As I was reading along in the first few chapters, I started to recognize that Ryan was glossing over counter arguments and cherry-picking data. About a page later, he writes, “Some readers will accuse me of romantic nostalgia and cherry-picking evidence. That is understandable. . . . Any argument concerning human nature will be a picked-cherry pie.”

Fair enough, I suppose. I have biases against some of his views, yet I do recognize that research cannot be comprehensive. But he goes on to immediately assert, “I’ve included copious references and recommendations for further reading in the endnotes to keep the text from getting too bogged down.”

Now, my interest was piqued, so I began to peruse the “copious references” in the endnotes. There are 18 pages of endnotes, which might sound like a lot, but when compared to the 16 pages of index that pad the book, it begins to wane in significance. Then consider that Ryan is trying to upend everyone’s understanding of civilization. Compare this to Mark Moffett’s book, The Human Swarm, which is also a sweeping volume, which has 38 pages of much more concise notes in a smaller print and makes much less radical claims.

But there is more than volume to the value of notes, so I went on in my investigation. Many of Ryan’s notes are to blogs and websites. They give evidence that a search engine supplanted real research and understanding, because they tell the reader where quotes are drawn from. Also absent are citations of anyone who disagrees with Ryan. In one chapter, Ryan criticizes Steven Pinker’s take on Western Civilization, but he only cites an online article by someone who was reviewing and interacting with Pinker. There is no evidence that Ryan ever picked up Pinker’s work to read it or understand it. Far from being “copious” the notes are limited and basic and they demonstrate that Ryan is an entertainer not a thinker.

It then becomes quickly apparent there are no real opponents to Ryan’s sweeping theory. He quotes thinkers in the same argument who disagree with each other radically as supporting the same point, which always supports his position. He classifies F. A. Hayek as a “conservative economist” despite Hayek writing an essay explaining why he is not a conservative in quite strong terms. He criticizes and dismisses the work of psychologist Viktor Frankl, but shows that he has no knowledge of the man’s actual arguments. To call this book sophomoric is an insult to sophomores.

I came to the book expecting to find common ground with Ryan, but couldn’t get past the effluviant mess that was intended to pass for deep thinking.

The book is, quite simply bad. My hope is this is the worst book I read this year. It would be an excellent tool for use in an undergraduate logic course to provide examples of bad reasoning for students to analyze.

Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress

By Christopher Ryan

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.