Monday, April 15

The suspicion of modernity that animates much of today's prattling seems to owe something to bourgeoisophobia. Even though by most objective measures, as this piece from the British Medical Journal states, technophobia makes a lot of us to feel worse than our ancestors. I'm all for the
unnatural:
Consider the true state of nature. In pre-modern, pre-urban society, men and women lived in filth and were hostages to disease. According to science commentator Ronald Bailey, life expectancy at birth for a primitive hunter-gatherer was 26. For early agricultural communities, it was even lower: 19 years of age. It could even be argued that rape and unwanted pregnancy are both features of nature. The proscription of non-consensual sex is something guaranteed by civilisation.

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