This week’s guest on KK&F is Christopher Ryan, an author and researcher on human sexuality. If you’re not familiar with his book Sex at Dawn, we hope you’ll enjoy watching our conversation with him, covering everything from the personal — are our brains wired for monogamy? — to the societal and political. Drawing upon Christopher’s expertise on ancient hunter-gatherer societies, we were curious to learn how the advent of settled agriculture and private property transformed human societies in every way from how we raise our kids to how we think about sex to whether we emphasize the individual or the collective.
Perhaps we weren’t expecting to hear that a social-democratic political model maintains the ethos of the hunter-gatherer society more fully than a capitalist society, but Christopher is full of compelling, provocative insights. Too often, conversations about leftist political models are shut down by the argument that “humans are inherently greedy” — we’re willing to bet that the vast majority of leftists in the United States have been fed this line. Like you, perhaps, Christopher shows that it’s more complicated, and that classifying humanity as “good” or “bad” by nature doesn’t address the real question: How do we choose to act? Acknowledging that our baser or more greedy personal impulses exist doesn’t mean we must deny other people basic rights. Even alongside those impulses, we can recognize the imperative of a society that prioritizes human well-being and allows us all to live our fullest lives.
We hope you enjoy this conversation! Audio of Episode 15 is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and more. Thank you very much for joining us. To subscribe to our video conversations, which are released Friday, click below:
Episode 15 Audio: Christopher Ryan