Well, I’m with you with the analysis of our brittle, spiritually denuded, out of joint /out-of-balance... for a while my blog had the subtitle ‘very far from grace’ which is how I feel about the way I live my life. The internet has been a disaster for me and then when my wife encouraged me to get a smartphone that was like more or less injecting smack direct into my veins.

However I think the truth is we don’t know how pre-industrial people felt.  They lived closer to nature and natural cycles, daylight hours, the seasons – but they were also at the mercy of them.  Terrible weather or pestilence would be catastrophic.  They might have had mythology that made them feel integrated with reality in a way that was psychologically beneficial – but they also had superstitions, fear of evil spirits, scapegoats and sacrifices.

With pre-industrial societies, for the majority of the population it was a grim struggle for basic survival and shelter etc.

 Going back isn’t an option anyway.

 I have been rereading Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex which I first read when I was 19 -  came across these passages... 

“Reproduction of the species cost women dearly, not only emotionally, psychologically, culturally but even in strictly material (physical) terms: before recent methods of contraception, continuous childbirth led to constant ‘female trouble’, early ageing, and death.”

 In other words, for half the population, the hunter-gatherer life wasn’t particularly Arcadian.

 Shulamith Firestone thought the only way forward was to go through the technological

 “Humanity can no longer afford to remain in the transitional stage between simple animal existence and full control of nature. And we are much closer to a major evolutionary jump, indeed, to direction of our own evolution, than we are to a return to the animal kingdom through which we evolved. Thus in view of accelerating technology, a revolutionary ecological movement would have the same aim as the feminist movement: control of the new technology for human purposes, the establishment of a new equilibrium between man and the artificial environment he is creating, to replace the destroyed ‘natural’ balance”