The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live: how exactly we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die.

Just about everyone has instinctive evidence the world is stopping—balmy December days, face-to-face discussion replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a global at constant battle, a political system in disarray. We listen to some misconceptions and lies therefore regularly that they feel like truths: Civilization is usually humankind’s about Civilized To Death: The price tag on Progress greatest success. Progress is definitely undeniable. Count your blessings. You’re lucky to become alive here and now. Well, probably we are and maybe we aren’t. Civilized to Loss of life counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing the fact that “improvement” defining our age is certainly analogous for an advancing disease.

Prehistoric life, of course, was not without serious dangers and disadvantages. Many infants died in infancy. A broken bone, contaminated wound, snakebite, or hard pregnancy could possibly be life-threatening. But eventually, Ryan argues, were these pre-civilized problems even more murderous than contemporary scourges, such as car accidents, malignancies, cardiovascular disease, and a technologically extended dying process? At a time when our ecology, our society, and our very own sense of selves feels progressively imperiled, a precise knowledge of our varieties’ longer prelude to civilization is key to a clear sense of the ultimate value of civilization—and its costs. In Civilized to Death, Ryan makes the declare that we should start looking backwards to find our way right into a better future.