 that describes Taylor – but not me, nor anyone I know.
I’m actually sympathetic insofar as Taylor contends that our underlying human nature is benign, and a lot of what civilization wrought, like war and organized religion, is kind of nuts. I argued, in my own last book, that people are more good than bad. And civilization, with technological advancement, does enable acting out our worst impulses. “Primal” peoples simply lacked the capability for warfare on a modern scale; but they didn’t wear “Make Love Not War” buttons. They did the best they could at killing, and there’s plenty of evidence that, for all their technological limitations, they were pretty effective.
As for harmony with nature, undoubtedly our forebears had us beat in woodsy knowledge. They had to; no supermarkets. But their rape of nature was, like war, limited more by technology than psychology. Yet here again they could be pretty effective. Western Hemisphere large mammals were wiped out soon after Man’s arrival.
At least Taylor, unlike some misanthropes, believes we’re now recovering from the “Fallen” paradigm’s “insanity” and returning to a lost golden age. But I don’t believe pre-4000 BC was any kind of paradise; what we’ve seen is simply progress. And Taylor’s explanation for it is (like much of his book) kind of strange. He says, “The fundamental difference between us and our ancestors 300 years ago may be that we are more alive than they were” (his emphasis). I don’t think so. He also holds that our cultural progress is actually somehow biological, and that biological evolution may be “not accidental, but propelled by a kind of force within living beings which makes them develop along predetermined lines.” No serious scientist believes such moonshine.
Of course civilization, in this imperfect world of imperfect people, has been a mixed blessing – but a blessing nevertheless. Its main role is literally to civilize us. It’s within civilization that we are socialized to master our baser impulses and settle down to live in relative peace and harmony. This civilizing process is a key theme in Pinker’s book, showing how it has increasingly relieved humankind of the blight of violence.
Thus we enjoy lives far more rewarding than our “primal” ancestors could have experienced. Taylor’s halcyon picture of carefree ancient people living it up, off the fat of the land, in some Woodstock-like paradise, is absurd. I’ll take modern life – with dentistry.
* Taylor notes Julian Jaynes’s theory that modern consciousness only arose around 1000 BC in response to supposedly unique stresses at that time. That crock of hooey will be addressed here by and by.