Sex at Dawn полностью

In 1902 the New York Times carried a report headlined “Laziness Germ Discovered.” It seems one Dr. Stiles, a zoologist at the Department of Agriculture, had discovered the germ responsible for “degenerates known as crackers or poor whites” in the “Southern States.” But in fact, our laziness seems less in need of explanation than our frenzied industry.

How many beavers die in dam-construction accidents? Are birds subject to sudden spells of vertigo that send them falling from the sky? How many fish drown to death? Such events are all rather infrequent we’d wager, but the toll exacted upon humans by the chronic stress many consider a normal part of human life is massive.

In Japan, there’s a word for it, death from overwork.

Japanese police records indicate that as many as 2,200 Japanese workers committed suicide in 2008 due to overwhelming work conditions, and five times that number died from stress-induced strokes and heart attacks, according to Rengo, a labor union federation. But whether our language contains a handy term for it or not, the devastating effects of chronic stress are not limited to Japan. Heart disease, circulatory problems, digestive disorders, insomnia, depression, sexual dysfunction, and obesity—behind every one of them lurks chronic stress.

If we really did evolve in a Hobbesian ordeal of constant terror and anxiety, if our ancestors’ lives truly were solitary,

poor, nasty, brutish, and short, why, then, are we still so

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vulnerable to stress?

Many otherwise reasonable people seem to have a burning need to locate the roots of war deep in our primal past, to see self-sufficient foragers as poor, and to spread the misbegotten gospel that three or four decades was a ripe old age for a human being in pre-agricultural times. But this vision of our past is demonstrably false. iQuepasa?

If prehistoric life was a perpetual struggle that ended in early death, if ours is a species motivated almost exclusively by self-interest, if war is an ancient, biologically embedded tendency, then one can soothingly argue, as Steven Pinker does, that things are getting better all the time—that, in his Panglossian view, “we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on Earth.” That would be encouraging news, indeed, which is what most audiences want to hear, after all. We all want to believe things are getting better, that our species is learning, growing, and prospering. Who refuses congratulations for having the good sense to be alive here and now?

But just as “patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it” (G. B. Shaw), the notion that we live in our species’ “most peaceful moment” is as intellectually baseless as it is emotionally comforting. Journalist Louis Menand noted how science can fulfill a conservative, essentially political function by providing “an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are.” “Why,” he asks rhetorically, “should someone feel unhappy or engage in anti-social behavior when that person is living in the freest and most

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prosperous nation on Earth? It can’t be the system!” What’s your problem? Everything’s just fine. Life’s great and getting better! Less war! Longer life! New and improved human existence!

This Madison Avenue vision of the super-duper new and improved present is framed by an utterly fictional, blood-smeared Hobbesian past. Yet it’s marketed to the public as the “clear-eyed realist” position, and those who question its founding assumptions risk being dismissed as delusional romantics still grieving over the death of Janis Joplin and the demise of bell-bottoms. But that “realistic” argument is riddled with misunderstood data, mistaken interpretations, and misleading calculations. A dispassionate review of the relevant science clearly demonstrates that the tens of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, while certainly not a time of uninterrupted utopian bliss, was for the most part characterized by robust health, peace between individuals and groups, low levels of chronic stress and high levels of overall satisfaction for most of our ancestors.