Is technological progress good or bad? Yes.

Technology keeps getting better. Do our lives get better as a result? In certain specific ways, maybe yes, but in general, I would say, not really. How is that possible? I think there are two big things at work. Technology is evolving semi-independently of the humans that produce it. We don’t control the evolution of our tools any more than we control the evolution of our gut fauna or infectious diseases. Also, the pace of technological change is a lot faster than the pace of our genetic evolution. Our brain anatomy is having a hard time keeping pace with the changes in the world that we’re making inadvertently with our tools.

The Stone Age was long, modernity is short

There have been anatomically modern humans for a million years at least. For nearly all of that time, we didn’t make much progress on the technology front. Only in the past forty or fifty thousand years has there been the fast technological change that brought us to our present state. Jared Diamond calls the turning point the “great leap forward.” After a million years of flint knives being made the same way, generation after generation, there’s this moment when, all of an evolutionary sudden, the archaeological record starts to include bone flutes, representative sculptures and paintings, fishhooks, and even math tools.

Agriculture and domestication of animals are only ten to twenty thousand years old. Reading and writing are probably only half that old. Agriculture has created denser populations, which accelerates our social and technological change. I think it’s safe to say that the external circumstances of your typical homo sapiens have changed more in the past thousand years than in the previous million years combined. We mostly assume that this relatively sudden turn of events has been a good thing for humanity. Sure, the modern world has its problems, but would anyone really rather be a caveman? Maybe so, maybe not.

The Stone Age was no fun

Here are some quotes from a book called Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph Nesse and George Williams:

[O]ur hunter-gatherer ancestors lived with enormous difficulty and hardship… Death always balanced reproduction, even though people reproduced at something approaching the maximum feasible rate.

Infant mortality and death in childbirth were the norm in the Stone Age. So were starvation, injury and accident, conflict with other hominid bands, wild animal encounters, water- and insect-borne parasites and incurable infectious diseases. As for the menu back then, it was pretty grim. Think of Tom Hanks trying to get the coconut open in Cast Away.

The mainstay foods in the Stone Age would seem to us inedible or too demanding of time and effort. We would find most of the game strong-tasting and extremely tough. Most of us have little appreciation of the tedious skinning and butchering it takes to turn a wild animal into a serving of meat. Many wild fruits, even when fully ripe, are sour to our tastes, and other plant products are bitter or have strong odors… Most natural human foods require a far greater labor of preparation and chewing than the foods we eat now. Domesticated animals and plants have been artificially selected to be tender, nontoxic and easily processed.

In addition to xenophobic conflict with other groups, social strife within groups, famines, and toxic diets, there were many other environmental stresses. Our ability to tolerate the atmospheric pollution of modern cities may owe much to our many thousands of years of exposure to smoke toxins from woods and other fuels. Atmospheric pollution was different [in the Stone Age] but it was substantial and real. We would find the odors of a Stone Age settlement most unpleasant… The average Stone Ager lived in a dump and moved away when conditions got really bad.

Children grew up, and adults lived out their lives, in the constant awareness, and sooner or later the personal experience, of woeful illness, painful injury, physical handicaps, debilitation, and death. There were no antibiotics, tetanus shots, or anesthetics, no plaster casts, corrective lenses, or prosthetic devices, no sterile surgery or false teeth. Our remote ancestors had few cavities, but they had many other dental problems… Abrasive plant products can wear molars down to gum level, as seen in some fossil skulls and even some contemporary groups.

The present world seems like a nicer place to live than the world of the distant past. And yet, like Louis CK says, everything is amazing and nobody’s happy. How is it that we can have hot running water, comfortable and rugged shoes, central heating and A/C, vaccines and treatments for so many dreadful ailments, Facebook and Nintendo and so on, and yet still be so miserable so much of the time?

The emotional life of the Stone Age

Cultural evolution happens fast. Biological evolution happens slowly. Our outer lives may have been completely transformed in the past few thousand years, but our anatomy has barely changed at all. People who were identical to us at birth lived for hundreds of thousands of years as foragers in basically chimpanzee-like conditions. We’re all born designed for the Stone Age. Jared Diamond argues that the modern hunter-gatherers who most resemble our remote ancestors have it better than farmers and their high-tech descendants in a lot of basic ways. Here’s an excerpt from an essay he wrote in Discover Magazine called The Worst Mistake Ever Made:

Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only twelve to nineteen hours for one group of Bushmen, and fourteen hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

Nesse and Williams imagine the emotional life of the Stone Age:

You were born into a nomadic band of forty to a hundred people. Whatever its size, it was a stable social group. You grew up in the care of various close relatives. Even if your local band consisted of a hundred or more people, many of them were distant cousins. You knew them all and knew their genetic and marital connections to yourself. Some you loved deeply and they loved you in return. If there were those you did not love, at least you knew what to expect from them, and you knew what everyone expected from you. If you occasionally saw strangers, it was probably at a trading site, and you knew what to expect of them too. In a sparsely peopled world the necessities of life – plant and animal foods uncontaminated by pesticides – were there for the taking. You breathed the pure air and drank the pure water of a preindustrial Eden… The bonds of kinship and friendship could be strong and a source of great pleasure and security. In seasons of plenty there would be abundant time for play: games, music and dancing, storytelling and poetry recitals, intellectual and theological disputes, and the creation of ornamental artwork… And our ancestors also had the ability to look on the bright side in times of adversity and to find reasons for laughter. Mark Twain’s hero Sir Boss in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court lamented having to listen, at a sixth-century campfire, to the same jokes he had already found tiresome in the nineteenth. We suspect that if he had gone back to the Stone Age he would have groaned at many of the same jokes.

Relationships are hard in the modern world

For everyone alive today and for the far future, there’s going to be a tension between our instinctive, nonconscious responses programmed in to anticipate the African savannah a million years ago and the facts of the world as it is now. I think a lot of our present woes arise from this tension. It’s true that your brain is highly flexible and shapeable, but our neural plasticity has its limitations.

Humans literally depend on our social groups for basic survival, as do other large-brained social predators, from whales to wolves to chimpanzees. A modern American’s social and family life is radically unlike the one we’re expecting at birth. Growing up, I saw my mom every day, but never during working hours. After age five, I only saw my dad on Wednesdays and every other weekend. I saw my grandparents every few weeks on average; I saw my aunts and uncles and cousins every few months. I received a lot of high-quality caretaking from hired professionals like nannies and teachers, but these relationships are evolutionarily novel and thus uncertain, harder to trust. Meanwhile, I live in a city with nine million other humans, nearly all of whom are perfect strangers. I have plenty of friends, and a wonderful marriage, but my relationships with other people have been fraught for most of my life, and my social rootlessness continues to be a hardship for me.

With the amount of emotional upheaval we’re constantly experiencing, it’s no wonder that we’re having some major problems forming and maintaining attachments, and it’s no wonder that depression and its many cousins are at epidemic levels. How do we map our instinctive tribal circles onto big complex modern societies? Nesse and Williams again:

Natural selection clearly favors being kind to close relatives because of their shared genes. It also favors being known to keep one’s promises and not cheating members of one’s local group or habitual trading partners in other groups. There was, however, never any individual advantage from altruism beyond these local associations. Global human rights is a new idea never favored by evolution during the Stone Age. When Plato urged that one ought to be considerate of all Greeks, not merely all Athenians, it was a controversial idea. Today, humanistic sentiments still face formidable opposition from parochialism and bigotry… As Michigan biologist Richard Alexander so neatly put it, today’s central ethical problem is ‘within-group amity serving between-group enmity.’

Our emotions were valuable survival strategies in the environment they evolved in. We’re intrinsically affectionate towards members of our tribe, and intrinsically suspicious of or hostile towards other tribes, the same way that chimpanzees and wolves and whales are. Our emotional toolkit will be slow to keep up with technological and social change. That puts the burden on us to understand our own evolutionary history and to design better strategies for reconciling it with the realities of the modern world. Between-group enmity is a universal human reflex that needs to be recognized, validated and managed as best we can, since we can never hope to completely remove it from ourselves.