This book got some exposure on The Daily Show. While I'm not so sure that this is the best venue, it does expose the ideas to at least an audience of 2 million or so. For another view on the topic, you might want to read Against The Grain or some excerpts.
Selected excerpts from Pandora's Seed:
Forward epigraph:
True, western societies are much better off materially than they were 40 years ago, but why is there so much crime, vandalism, and graffiti? Why are divorce rates so high? Why are we seeing declines in civic engagement and trust? Why have obesity and depression reached epidemic proportions, even amongst children? Why do people call this the age of anxiety? Why do studies in most developed countries show that people are becoming unhappier? -- Richard Tomkins, Financial Times, October 17, 2003
Overeating and low levels of physical activity, leading to obesity, and cigarette smoking, leading to hypertension and caner, are the major causes of preventable death in the world today. As my own doctor says, "It's really not that complicated -- exercise and don't smoke and you'll be healthy." But such a prescription is not so easy to follow, as we have a couple of things working against us in the form of evolutionary baggage. First, the desire to eat is a basic survival instinct, so it's unnatural to try to reduce the amount of food we consume. Second, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have found the idea of exercise for exercise's sake ludicrous... [p.69]
I think that we can design a society -- more vertically integrated -- that enables members to get exercise through activities such as gardening, farming, and winemaking. Sure beats sitting behind a desk.
Innovation is a complex process, but at its most basic it involves imagining new ways of solving a problem and then implementing them. The first step requires the sort of imagination that is reflected in the creation of art...and the second requires some way of explaining the innovation to others. [p.112]
I need help with the second.
There is a problem with the success of our cultural adaptability, though. In the process of creating a densely populated, agricultural way of life, we were forced to subsume our individual desires for novelty to the desires of the broader culture. In contrast to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who were free to explore any and all cultural possibilities, from fishing for salmon to hunting mammoths on the central Asian steppes to creating beautiful artistic depictions on the walls of French caves, their Neolithic descendants were forced to channel theirs in order to suit the broader needs of society. In effect, minds that had once been free, with the endless territory of the Paleolithic globe in which to realized their musings, were now caged, limited in both geography and focus. We had gone from living in "the original affluent society," as anthropologist Marchall Sahlins famously referred to hunter-gatherer populations, with free to [sic.] time to devote to seemingly idle activities, to being a group of worker bees with looming deadlines to meet. [p.113]
And we are so far down the road that we cannot even understand the frustration of those artisans -- aka Luddites -- that were drug kicking and screaming into the industrial age. I think that we can get some of this freedom back and keep some of the comforts that meaningful, not mindless, technology has provided.
As a species that has long been accustimed to growth, expansion, and consumption, we will have to use our ingenuity in new ways to create a lifestyle with long-term sustainability. It's certainly not going to be an easy transition, but just as with the other crisis points in our species' history, we do possess the intellectual abilities to adapt. First, howver, must come a sea change in our worldview. [p.183]
Bring it on!
