Nasty, brutish and short or the Garden of Eden? We explore the Return to Monke meme and ask whether we are right to yearn for a more primitive lifestyle.

In this podcast, we examine our origins as hunter-gatherers and explore whether things were better or worse before we became civilised. We look at food scarcity, environmental damage, child mortality rates and a whole host of other fun stuff. We also address the morality of primitivism and consider what would actually happen if we all tried to Return to Monke.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• Know Your Meme: Return to Monke
• The Unabomber manifesto: Industrial society and its future
• Life expectancy in hunter-gatherers
• Are hunter-gatherers the happiest humans to inhabit earth?
• Uncontacted tribes: What do we know about the world's 100 hidden communities?
• Holocene calendar

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're talking about returning to monkey.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And unusually, because of the lockdown, we are recording this remotely. Nick, I don't know what this is about something to do with the internet and returning

to monkey. What are we talking about? Some meme? I don't know. Yeah, one of these meme things.

least about five times a day, I find myself ranting to my family, how this, you know, I'm fed up with all this, because I've lost my mobile phone or whatever, and getting fed up with people pinging me, you know, the trappings of modern life, and that I want to go off and move to rural Wales. God knows why. You wouldn't be alive. Yeah, but Chris, go for it. Yeah, I was just going to say,

I mean, I think the fact that we're all here and able to talk about this is a virtue of the fact that our life expectancy is no longer 33, for example, as it was during the Paleolithic era. So that's not an uncontroversial claim, by the way. Well, no, that is true. And in fact, the Paleolithic era in particular, for some reason, seems to have been, you know, led to greater life expectancy than later periods. So yes, it is not straightforward, but I dare say our lives, it's probably uncontroversial to say that our lives are full of less hardship than

they were in the Paleolithic era. No, that's controversial as well. And probably two out of four of us would never have made it out of infancy as well. I'd have died several times from infections

if it hadn't been for antibiotics. But no, what you said, Chris, that is controversial. I think we'll want to return to that, the health implications of modern life. I thought, Chris,

you were going to go in a different direction, the fact that we're all talking to each other remotely, and we're all at different ends of the country. Well, that's true, yes,

technologically. I was slightly surprised, Chris, as the representative from antiquity to be so

surprising. The arch-modernist. Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, I think I'm not anti-technology or advancement by no means. But I think there is definitely this, there's a naive romanticism of a primitive lifestyle. And particularly, the thing that annoys me is not whether or not it's better for us, things like the Paleo diet, and whether actually that was the diet that Paleolithic humans would have consumed. And not to mention the fact that food was obviously at times very difficult to come by.

Do you mean it literally grows on trees?

Literally grows on trees, provided, you know, you haven't just had a massive volcanic explosion, or, or indeed, it hasn't been subjected to drought or whatever it might be. But anyway, my objection really is not about whether or not this lifestyle is better for you. The thing that really gets my goat, I think, is the notion that somehow it was more morally pure. That's the bit that annoys me. This sort of idea that somehow humanity has moved away from this natural balance. And, you know, kind of, that it's become more and more rapacious. And that this is, you know, that modernity is morally corrupting. That's the thing that particularly gets my goat. Okay, Peter, where do you sit on this one?

I share Chris's feelings on it. I have a very deep suspicion and I really don't like this emotion around like, for example, whole foods and the idea that natural things are inherently better or morally better than non natural things. I think that's a very dangerous sort of crude, naive logic that gets used to cite by the anti GM people often cite this as a sort of it must be better because it's natural. Well, Well, and anti-vaxxers as well. Yeah, and anti-vaxxers. It's just it's not that's not the case. You know, there's a lot of a lot of technologies which are, you know, just just manifestly better than not having that technology. And then agriculture is agriculture is one advanced agriculture that we have now is one. And, you know, genetically modified food is not is potentially is one as well. So the idea that just because it's inherently natural is, is basically is a fallacy to start with, because nothing is, you know, the food, the natural food that you eat has been cultivated. It's not naturally.

I think I think the point that a lot of these modernity skeptics monkey people would say is yes, that's where it's all gone wrong is since the invention of farming, which is only the last 10% or so of human existence, you know, as far as we're aware, if not less. But so I just want to address some of these alleged facts about hunter gatherer lifestyles. And I'm not going to I'm not going to die in a ditch over any of these, but they're just claims that I've seen, you know, academics make is that actually life expectancy wasn't significantly lower. Child mortality was right, children much more likely to die, more likely to die in childbirth, more likely to die as a young age. That's uncontroversially true. You can tell that from, you know, the skeletons and things. But some of the others, I mean, in terms of health, and diet, diet was much more varied in hunter gatherer, among hunter gatherers. And you can tell that by looking at, you know, middens that kind of, you know, leftover foods and seeds that were in, you know, people's waste pits and that kind of thing. There, people did more physical exercise were healthier, you know, they had to, but yes, they did do more physical exercise than the more sedentary lifestyle of a farmer. And but had more free time at the same time. So I mean, the farming lifestyle is quite hard work compared to being a hunter gatherer. Actually, you know, when you look at the lifestyles of the uncontacted peoples now, so far as we can make inferences about that, diseases, pandemics, right, the like the one we've got now, they have all almost all emerged from the fact that we are in such close proximity to animals, our vulnerability to famines is higher, because we're dependent on a few staple crops than hunter gatherer bands who would simply, you know, face a migration to somewhere where there wasn't, you know, a famine or a drought. I think we should make life hard for ourselves, at the very least by saying, well, actually, maybe it isn't all that, you know, the modern lifestyle, we think it's easier. But look at what people do. They, people spend all day in offices in jobs working, you know, 10 hours for people they don't know producing things that they have no really real contact with. It doesn't seem like a particularly

good bargain. No, no, I mean, yeah, I mean, I accept that, that modern life has difficulties. But things like food security and predictability are obviously very, very important in terms, I mean, a lot, there's a lot that gets said about the environmental impact of our modern lifestyle. But if you look at humanity, you know, there's a period where humanity only exists in Africa. And they, you know, a lot of studies have shown that sized biased extinction in Africa, far outstrips the rest of the world at the time. And that if you look at, if you look at the average African, that's us hunting stuff, yeah, out of out of existence, you know, so this notion that we were somehow lived in, in balance with our environment is not true. And woolly mammoths,

American, hold on, hold on. But I think deforestation of much of North. Yeah,

I don't think that's what Nick was talking about. Because I think he raised some interesting points there. And you've expressed them way better than I can. But it was quite convincing. What you say, essentially, like we, our lot, maybe wasn't quite as bad as we thought back in, you know,

in primitive times, during the paleo. I mean, I think I think Nick, Nick was making a distinction between, like, technology being bad, and like modern life being bad. So I think I would agree insofar as that I think in modern life, we've got it pretty good. You know, you're not gonna, you're probably not going to die, you know, as a child or in childbirth, you're probably going to live to a reasonable age, you've got shelter, you've got food. I think I would agree with Nick is that we perhaps squander what we have. So we have we've the modern world, the people, the jobs that people do, the, the way that people live, are there, they're bound by sort of very historical precedent, rather than if we ripped everything up and said, right, we'll keep all the technology. But we're not going to have banks, we're not going to have rich people or poor people, we're not going to have anything, and we just redesign society from scratch, then potentially, we could do a lot better, we could be happier, we could be we could be more fulfilled, not doing designing society from scratch hasn't got a very good track record. I'm not saying that we we as humans could actually do it, but if it could be done, so if we could put that in the hands of some hyper intelligent alien race, say, just tell us what we need to do to be happier and more fulfilled. I think the technology

would allow us to do that much more so than had we without it. I feel like that, you know, if what we can't do is we can't get rid of the 7 billion people we happen to have generated through this this form of, you know, and by one measure of success, our proliferation, you know, clearly, what we have been doing recently has been very good for that, right, you know, there are a lot more people than there were. And that's partly, you know, just a sort of population increase process that could have happened with other lifestyles. But it's obviously accelerated, you know, fairly rapidly. And I'm just trying to envisage what a paleolithic society would look like with 7 billion people roaming around the planet, and how pleasant that would be for everybody.

Yeah, I think the genie is, that's the thing, the genie is out of the box, right? Is that the right metaphor? But I mean, the point is that we can't, we simply cannot, because we just, you know, you need the debt in order to feed all the people on the planet. For one thing, you need a density of food production, which is just simply not possible without farming. But I think this goes, you know, we did, we've done, I think, one or two podcasts about Derek Parfit, and his discussion of the mere addition paradox, which, you know, is to do with essentially saying, is it better to have, you know, 7 billion people who are sort of 10% happy? Or would it be better to have sort of 100,000 people who are 100% happy? But I mean, honestly, there's no kind of obvious answer to that. But I think I want to think about, drill into this idea of kind of happiness and the type of happiness we have. Because I think that we, you know, we clearly have a lot of our material wants satisfied. No doubt about that. But I've got a quote here was a thought experiment about thinking about a case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Right, such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first, he'll have a lot of fun. But by and by, he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually, he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisure aristocracy tend to become decadent. It does feel a bit like that. I must say, that sounds like Christmas every day. That's Mr. Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. But I think that touches on an important point, which I think a lot of people, that is something that a lot of people complain about, is the fact that, you know, without meaningful goals, without a meaningful sense of struggle, you know, going and working in a bank to produce something you have no meaningful connection to, satisfies all of the things you think you want. But it doesn't give you what you really want, which is the need to struggle. Just one analogy or one example. When I asked my daughter, who's nine, whether or not we should, you know, return to Monkey, she said, well, the thing is that then she'd miss, she'd really miss playing Minecraft. And it occurred to me that Minecraft is a simulation of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Minecraft is literally giving us a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, that modern life is depriving us of. So life would be Minecraft if we returned. I think that's very profound.

Yeah, you're right. When you play board games, or computer games, or a lot of these, they're just simulating some kind of struggle, some kind of adversity that you're trying to overcome, either against the game or against your opponents. Yeah, but I don't see that there's any

more inherent struggle in wandering around and trying to find the right berries or catch, you know, a deer in the grasslands, than there is necessarily to building up a business and out competing your competitors, or climbing, you know, getting a promotion at work, or indeed, you know, competing in sports or whatever it might be. I don't see that they're inherently more satisfying. They're tied. I mean, you could argue if you're sat around in this mythical, bountiful, you know, paleolithic world that existed where, you know, the Garden of Eden, what happened in the Garden of Eden? Well, they got bored and they got corrupt. So if it was so great, then the same corrupting forces would be present. If it were easy to get food, and you know, there were a bit of a bit of a struggle, but it wasn't, you know, your life expectancy was fine, and food, you know, finding food was easy. I think your struggle disappears in that scenario as well.

Yeah, I wonder to what degree this sort of dissatisfaction with modern life is a modern phenomenon. I mean, I think it's probably relative. I think I'm sure, you know, when where do you start modernity? Where does modernity start? But so I can imagine, you know, our grandparents probably thought life in the universe was getting a bit complicated when electrical appliances were commonplace and washing machines were there. It's like, oh, you know, it wasn't a simpler time when we just did our own washing, and we didn't have to get a repair man in to fix the washing machine. And yeah, they had to pay the bills and etc, etc. Yeah, I can imagine, by extension, going way back to like, when the horse and carts were appearing and roads or, you know, tracks between settlements and things, people go, okay, guys, you're really getting really complicated. Because now I've just met a third, a third new person from a whole new village I've never heard about. And it's just really, I'm getting really confused. And like, you can imagine, it's like, where does it start?

you look like you've got something to say. Yeah, well, I was just, I was just gonna say, in terms of practicalities, you know, what's going to be achieved, right? So if you look at societies where technology has gone backwards, right, it's fairly rare, you know, for that to happen. But if you look at things like medieval Europe and the Dark Ages, you know, named the Dark Ages after the sort of fall of fall of Rome, and so on, and a deletion of knowledge and technology. And if you look at other things, like, you know, the technological and societal atrophy in China, you know, through the sort of latter half of the last millennium. And you kind of think about what happens under those circumstances, right? And it's, it's usually what happens is something comes along that is better, that is more technologically advanced and replaces it, you look at indigenous people who existed outside of the spheres of European technology and society, and what happened to them when the Europeans turned up, they were effectively replaced by something that was more technologically advanced. And so I think, you know, let's say, let's say, Western society, or even, you know, globalization, you know, across large parts of the of the earth, try to become more primitive, somewhere, there will be there's a competitive force driving what we're doing. Why? Why are we doing this? It's to gain competitive advantage. And so I think us taking a step back is all, you know, very, very nice. But at some point, something else will replace it quite ruthlessly. And that will be, you know, to our cost. Yeah, I think this is the fundamental problem

that modernity, the seeds of modernity are in the Paleolithic person, you know, because we, although we, you know, there is the, we want the end results of health and happiness, right. But at the same time, we have evolved to want to remove effort from our lives, we've evolved the ability to create tools to make life easier. You know, you first you invent a stick, then you invent a bow, then all of this involves making doing slight putting slightly less effort in to get your food. And before you know it, you're farming, because it's just, it seems easier, right. And I think that's, that's the problem. We've evolved a set of desires in an evolutionary environment, which imposes a bunch of constraints on us. But eventually, we get so good at problem solving that we get rid of those constraints, you know, and that's when sort of near starvation is replaced with obesity and heart disease. But we cannot undo that, that inherent desire, we have to solve those problems to kind of fight against those constraints. And I don't know, it sort of feels to me like, imagine, imagine if plants could could invent technologies, right, plants would probably think to themselves, you know, what's great is light, nighttime, that's boring. Let's just, let's just create loads and loads of lights, and let's turn them up. And that's probably bad for plants. But you can see how plants would do that. Or moths, you know, moths seem to like light bulbs, don't they? But, you know, if moths could invent things, they'd probably invent loads of light bulbs, and then they'd crash into them and die. It feels a bit like that, you know, that we're kind of inventing the technologies which remove the constraints we don't like. But the problem is that that life beyond

those constraints isn't what we thought it would be. Yeah. Chris? I think there's two, two things there. The first is that, you know, where we sort of develop technologies that actually move, make us less safe or less happy. So, you know, you look at things like nuclear weapons, right? Nuclear weapons were developed as part of this competitive desire, but they obviously make us, make us less, well, they potentially bring us closer to mass, you know, extinction. And, you know, the same thing could be said of like, you know, biological weapons, for example, and, you know, the development of viruses for, you know, weaponized purposes. So, yeah, there's times where we develop technologies to that basically make us less, yeah, less safe. And then there's also the issue of the fact that I don't think we've ever been in stasis, right? When we were Paleolithic people, you look at flint knapping technologies, right? And you look at something from early Paleolithic and later, you know, sort of, well, I mean, the Paleolithic period itself is obviously broken into periods and, you know, the Neolithic period, and they do refine what it is they're doing in terms of the flint tools they're making. So, yes, they're not vastly different, but they are different and they are better. And then you get things like, instead of agriculture, you know, there was a lot of, sort of, deliberate use of fire to create environments for, you know, livestock, well, not livestock at the time, but wild animals to graze in. And also the cultivation of plants and so on that wasn't mass farming, but was on that trajectory. All that's happened is we speed it up. So, there was no mythical period of stasis.

Mm hmm. Okay, we really do need to stop shortly. Peter, is there anything you want to add at this

point? No, well, just to shout to something that I fairly recently discovered, the way that helps you frame history in a more kind of linear sense, is called the Holocene calendar. Basically, you take the current year and you add 10,000 years because it sets year zero at the time when humans started this acceleration, this sort of, when we started moving into the really becoming distinct species from the rest of the animals, when we started doing agriculture, we started cultivating things. First proposed by an academic called Cesar Emiliani. It is worth checking out. It does sort of, it helps you, it helps you put history in a more sort of sensible time frame. Is it currently in the year 12,000 or whatever? Yeah, it's year 12,020. And if you're looking at that, looking at history through that lens, you see that yes, we did, progress was agonizingly slow for much of the time. And it's only in the last few hundred years that it's really kind of accelerated. Well, the last thousand years or so, it's really accelerated. So yeah, maybe that's right. Maybe it's the rate of change has got too great. And actually with this disquiet we have with modern life is because of the rate of change rather than the amount of change. Okay. All right.

So just to finish things off, which aspects of modern life would you most like to return to,

Monkey? Yeah, I think for me, you know, actually one of the drivers for leaving the civil service and setting my own company up was this sense that there was something so artificial about the, the set work day. And, and that, you know, it's, we should just be working when we feel productive and sort of sleeping or doing something else when we're not feeling productive. I feel like that would be the thing I'd like, I'd like to see. Now that's very, and it's very, very hard, right? For a company to go, well, here's your contract. You've got to kind of do an average of eight hours a day, but you can do it whenever you like. It's very, very hard to do that. That's one of the problems with, you know, industrial organization is, is getting, so, but I think that's the, that's the thing that, that makes the most impact on me. I think, you know, when I'm on holiday, it's that ability to just sort of, you know, do your own thing and live in the present rather than be thinking all the time about what time it is. And, you know, I think so, yeah, that's, it's the sort of the, the, the daily grind, I think will be the thing I'd,

right. So like the daily, because I got distracted and I won't edit this out because apologies, listeners, because Peter was sneezing all over the place. But you, you, you said that, so is that structure of a day, that kind of thing, the way that you're of there being a time at which

things happen. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Right. Right on Chris. I think I would just love to experience not, not for, not permanently, but for a period of time, the, the earth with, you know, a few thousand people on it. And, you know, I just think that, that, that sense of vastness, emptiness would, would be, and also the complete lack of a safety net, you know, that there's no hospital to come and pick you up. And I think that would be an incredibly exhilarating experience. So, so far,

we've got Nick saying, let's get rid of time. Chris saying, albeit briefly, let's get rid of

people for a bit. Yeah. Peter. Yeah. Like Chris, I'm not, I'm not completely convinced that I'd like it any better than I like now, but so yeah, I'd like, I'd like to try sort of a six month kind of sabbatical going back to maybe a sort of medieval kind of village. I'd like, I'd like to be the blacksmith or the engineer in the village, sort of solving problems, living day by day, hand to mouth, kind of just, you know, fixing things that are kind of visceral and, you know, literally earthy problems, banging things, digging things, you know, digging irrigation channels and just generally sort of solving very physical problems that are here and there. And I can have feel the direct benefit from once I've completed it. Yeah. I think it's that direct thing. Actually,

we, we, we didn't really talk about that. I think that's one of the things that sometimes feel is missing that direct sort of seeing the fruits of our labors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really have anything other than to say, just before we started recording this, I was wondering around the house shouting, where are my glasses? Where are my glasses? And of course my glasses were just right here on the top of my head like this. And I, I think that sort of maybe illustrates why I just struggle with modern life and even just glasses, just a kind of bit too much of a technology leap

for me. Yeah. It'd be much better if you just couldn't see Fraser, as would have been the case

in the, in the stone age. Yeah. And that's it. And so I would not have fit my environment.

And so that would be, be gone, but not holding back tribe. As the technology optimist. I think the only answer is more glasses. If you just had glasses everywhere in your house and everywhere you put your hand, you land, they land on some glasses. They wouldn't be a problem anymore. Like Henry VIII who had 80 pairs of glasses, apparently. Oh, really? You'd be deprived of

that struggle to find your glasses and that feeling of happiness when you find it. Yeah.

Just like I'd slaughtered my, um, a mammoth. Yeah. Okay. All right. We'll stop there. Uh, thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.