The type of article written by someone who presumably has never needed a cavity filled, never contracted any disease requiring antibiotics, and does not need glasses to get around day to day.
"but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses."
People who need glasses or medicine but can't afford them do rely on the impulse to treat others like you want to be treated and be social. Having a cavity filled is a much better experience if you're helpful to the dentist and they to you; I once worked in a hospital and a doctor put some tube into a patient so abruptly the scream made people of the other clinic building come to the windows, and I still can't tell you what is more spooky, such an action or how people just perk up and then down. Technology isn't worth much in the wrong hands, and it's the hands I'm personally more interested in than the technology. I consider technological progress a given like rain dew. It can collapse or go at different speeds but I don't think it can stop outright, not without enforcement by a dystopian "civilization", anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer
> One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food.
Don't get me wrong, storing food is a great idea, spoken like someone who never had to starve. It seems more like as soon as we get the capacity to be jerks, we seize that. That is, I don't think those hunter-gatherers don't store food because it's more fair to eat together right away, but because they don't have the means to. Why can't we have progress and decency, i.e. be more worthy recipients of progress? The question isn't just health and longevity, but also what we do with it. I know that's banal and again I'm not claiming you disagree, it's not like I disagree with you either, after all. But the rift between what we could do and what we do do is growing in my eyes. George Carlin called it sneakers with lights in the heels, I think.
Wild animals die when their teeth go bad. Zoos have dentists taking care of the animals' teeth.