“Air conditioning is emblematic of all of the insanity and paradoxes of what we consider progress,” said Jeff Goodell, the author of a book that seeks to educate the public on the threat posed by excessive heat and the “racism” that prevents Western governments from managing it. Goodell’s indictment of this weapon in his war on heat centers on the notion that it is “both a technology of personal comfort and a technology of forgetting.”
Your failure to languish in interminable summer temperatures, dehydrate, and die from thermal shock isn’t just a personal moral failure but a shortcoming of civilization itself. As the Guardian observed, Goodell resents the extent to which “non-tech, carbon-neutral solutions dating back centuries” have been rendered obsolete by technological progress. Climate control has taught us to forget how to open a window.
The same hostility toward modern technology and the human social contrivances that make it possible is apparent in the argument Cambridge University professor Helen Thompson made for the Times of London. She claims that decarbonizing the global economy will involve the “reinvention of civilization,” which entails popularizing “a narrative of shared sacrifice.”
Thompson laments the “world of permanent energy politics” we’ve inherited. That implicitly locates the moment where it all went wrong for the human species in the industrial revolution, when mankind first discovered how to surpass the energy outputs provided by pack animals and natural phenomena through the combustion of fossil fuels. But others who mourn the horrors of civilization believe mankind took a wrong turn much earlier with the advent of agriculture.
The popular historian and author Jared Diamond posited at the turn of this century that fonts of human misery like “malnutrition, starvation, epidemic disease,” “deep class divisions,” and even sexism are an outgrowth of a cultural shift away from nomadic, tribal structures and toward a more static lifestyle around farming and city building. Writing for the New Yorker in 2017, the journalist and novelist John Lanchester offered a similar observation in his review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, a book by Yale professor James Scott. It isn’t just farming that led to the formation of complex societies and the horrors that accompany them but the development of writing — a tool of “control” from which “war, slavery,” and “rule by elites” flow — that imprisons mankind in an unnatural state of affairs.
The woeful experience shared by all participants in the unitary culture around farming with the tribal enterprise — often unfavorably, Lanchester wrote. “It turns out that hunting and gathering is a good way to live,” he observed. That is also the upshot of novelist Daniel Quinn’s popular but (or, perhaps, and) misanthropic Ishmael series, in which the protagonist is guided toward the conclusion that civilization as we know it is an aberration — a distortion of the ideal state in which mankind thrived for the vast majority of its existence.
Of course, the idea that mankind might have somehow rejected the science of agriculture as have the planet’s few scattered tribal societies is unconvincing. Those societies are few and far between because they were out-competed. The inevitability of humanity’s technological development leads those predisposed to mourn modernity toward Dr. Warren Hern’s more-in-sorrow conclusion that mankind is a plague upon the earth.
In an interview with Salon, Hern, the author of Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth, doesn’t just argue that humanity is a cancer on the planet. He also advocates treating it with a similarly therapeutic regimen. After all, Hern told his interlocutor, “the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process.” As his book’s title suggests, humanity has evolved to the stage at which it has become the devourer of worlds.
Hern heaps praise on the ideas, if not the methods, adopted by the eco-terrorist outfit Earth First!, whose values were “very romantic.” Indeed. At least as a disposition, these laments are all a form of romanticism familiar to students of Rousseau. For that 18th-century philosopher, “it was iron and corn which first civilized men and ruined humanity.” The inescapable logic of economic specialization brings with it “the dissolution of morals,” Rousseau observed, because “the necessary consequence of luxury brings within its turn the corruption of taste.” Among the corrupting tastes to which we’ve succumbed is the affinity for modern conveniences like air-conditioning, which is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
If the only alternative to modern excesses was to regress back to the Neolithic age, the task before us would be a daunting one. Fortunately, more often than not, the remedy for the ills of technology is more technology. The fatalism of civilization’s critics is designed to convey more about the critic than about civilization. One of the things you can say in civilization’s favor is that it affords its beneficiaries the luxury of romanticizing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Those who still adhere to pre-modern ways of life just don’t have the time.