About this item
We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they become difficult to distinguish from the voices in our heads: Civilization is human-kind's greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. Today is better than any yesterday. Count your blessings. You're lucky to be alive here and now. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren't. Civilized to Death counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the "progress" that defines our age is closer to the progression of a disease than its cure.
About the Author
Christopher and his work have been featured just about everywhere, including: MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, Playboy, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Outside, Salon, Seed, Big Think, and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. Chris has been a featured speaker all over the world, from TED in Long Beach, CA to Ciudad de las Ideas in Mexico, to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House. He's consulted at various hospitals, provided expert testimony in a Canadian constitutional case, and contributed to publications both scholarly and popular.Even before co-authoring the New York Times best-seller, Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships, with partner-in-crime, Cacilda Jethá, MD, he was on a wild ride. After receiving a BA in English and American literature in 1984 he spent several decades traveling around the world, pausing in unexpected places to work at decidedly odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York's Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research) . In his mid-30s, Chris decided to pursue doctoral studies in Psychology.Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Chris' research focused on distinguishing the human from the cultural, first by focusing on shamanism and ethnobotony - studying how various societies interact with novel states of consciousness and sacred plants - and later, by looking at similarly diverse cultural perspectives on sexuality. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the prehistoric roots of human sexuality, and was guided by the world-renowned psychologist, Stanley Krippner, at Saybrook Graduate School, in San Francisco, CA.More at ChrisRyanPhD.com---------------------Cacilda Jethá has an Indian face, a European education, and an African soul. She was born in Mozambique to a family that had immigrated two generations earlier from Goa, India. As a child, she fled civil war to Portugal, where she received most of her education and medical training before returning to Mozambique in the late 1980s. A young physician determined to help heal her country, Cacilda spent seven years as the only physician serving some 50,000 people in a vast rural district in the north of the country. While there, Cacilda also conducted research (funded by the World Health Organization) on the sexual behavior of rural Mozambicans in order to help design more effective AIDS prevention efforts.After almost a decade in Mozambique, Cacilda returned to Portugal, where she completed her medical residency training in both psychiatry (at the prestigious Hospital de Julio de Matos in Lisbon) and occupational medicine. She and Christopher Ryan currently divide their time between Portland, Oregon and Barcelona, Spain. She speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish, Catalán, English, and some rusty Swahili.
