We love to hear stories of the idyllic lives of hunter-gatherers who lived in harmony with nature, until the big, bad Agricultural Revolution came along, which led to a series of other revolutions, including the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution. These revolutions continuously robbed us of our equality, and made life more complicated than it needs to be. Now we must do our best to return to nature, and lose modern technology.
One word: BULL.
The lives of the hunter-gatherers were neither short and brutish, nor idyllic lives of equality and freedom. They were long and hard, though they enjoyed levels of equality. Yes, the Agricultural Revolution and the revolutions that followed robbed us of that equality, and it is slowly being won back. However, anybody who claims that life today would be better if the Agricultural Revolution had not happened is guilty of the Post Hoc fallacy. The technological revolutions were not evil, they were simply a change in human outlook and ability.
Today, instead of clinging to primitivism, an nigh-unattainable goal, we must look to the future as a time when we can find the balance between technology and nature. The computer that I work at is using electricity, adding greenhouse gases to the environment. This and many other tasks destroy the world around us continuously. However, I do not know if many humans could live without these things any more.
Instead of ignoring today's problems, and instead of trying to remove all that humanity has accomplished in the past 10,000 years, we must balance what we cause in nature with what have been turned into necessities for living. That, or we must let go of said "necessities". Which will it be? I don't know.
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