If I were an Atheist

[AdamLOV]

...although we have no reliable data on life expectancy in the Inca Empire. The real issue is whether a culture attaches significance to prolonging life at all costs. ...The technology that prolongs the lives of human individuals now is manufactured, for the most part, in ecologically unsustainable ways. ...it could easily be the case that ...[industrial] societies...are not...more effective than...hunter-gatherer societies.

There is a downside to the way we do things, and a risk that our plump, flush days of easy living may be numbered. For Egypt, life expectancy at birth was around 15 to 20 years, with kids surviving their first 5 years usually reaching age 30 or so. This was probably a shorter lifespan than for most hunter-gatherers. Egyptian agricultural society meant low dietary diversity, worms, smallpox, lots of flies and shit, dirty drinking water. Infant mortality was high for pre-civilized humans but in Egypt death rates were high at all ages, with only the elites having even fair chances to see an old age. Getting civilized marked a step back health-wise; it doesn't seem we bettered the life expectancy of Cro-Magnon peoples until about the 18th century.

Yet epidemiology discovered some low-tech measures, like keeping feces buried away from flies and drinking water, washing hands, and providing basic nursing care to the sick which added years to life expectancy without any medical heroics. We could probably sustain a high technology society if we just agreed to limit our populations, a step governments have been reluctant to take.

Obviously there are value questions involved, on which reasonable people can differ. But young folks if offered a choice tend not to choose an early human lifestyle (fulltime as opposed to hobby) over a modern one. Traditional societies have a problem with their children leaving for the city.

Truth is not a social construct. What is true is not a matter of opinion or popularity contest...Science is the only method that works to get to the truth of matters...

This may be a definitional matter, but truth is not the same thing as fact. Established facts don't change with popular opinion, but truth, which has a large interpretive component, does show dependency on culture and point of view. Science seems to be the best tool for getting at certain kinds of truth, usually when questions arise about how matter or biological systems work. To declare only these questions and answers within the purview of truth is rather limiting.

For instance, Americans subscribe to a truth that they are free. But are we really freer than members of any other society? In certain ways, including uncensored political expression, perhaps yes. But in other ways, perhaps no. We have to work longer hours and have less time to spend with family and friends than people in some traditional cultures, or even in Europe. Our law enforcement and penal institutions are among the planet's most retributive, in a long-term sense, with a variety of minor behaviors classified as felonies, rampant shooting of suspects by police, and branding of offenders with labels likely to compromise them for life, in contrast to some countries which are more forgiving in that regard.

Both truth and facts do show a tendency to vary. As for modern young people "choosing" modern lifestyles instead of traditional ones, this can hardly decide anything at all, at least from a "truth" perspective. Social phsychology, such as cognitive dissonance research has highlighted that most human beings cannot exercize choice even when given the opportunity. Humans have evolved to value stability over freedom. For most humans who have lived, perhaps the majority of those inhabiting the world today, stability has been far more important than the freedom to decide. After all, we might not be able to decide. It could even be the case that there is no Self that is doing the hypothetical "deciding" (for more on this from a philosophical perspective: Giles, James. "The no-self theory: Hume, Buddhism, and personal identity." Philosophy East and West (1993): 175-200.) Therefore the so-called choices made by individuals "choosing" certain lifestyles do not give us much information about which lifestyle is, ethically speaking, the "better" one. There may or may not be one ideal lifestyle, and even if nobody elects to live such a life, it would still be the best lifestyle of all.