LAST WEEK, the Monterey County Herald’s luddite columnist, Joy Colangelo, argued that the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a good thing — indeed, a “fantastic” thing — because it might inspire mankind to abandon its reckless dependence on science and technology and return to the “luxurious life of hunting and gathering” when humans only worked, according to the columnist, a “few hours a day.”

While this trivial column is barely worth mentioning, the underlying philosophy is so common among supposedly educated Europeans and Americans, it is worth asking the question: Why do so many people feel the need to deny their own incredible good fortune to be alive today instead of at any other time in human history?

Of course, the current era is not perfect. There are many problems yet to be solved, and the dependence of modern civilization on fossil fuels — and the concomitant risks of that dependence, including disasters such as the gulf oil spill — isn’t even the worst of them. Nevertheless, by almost any measure, things are much better today than they ever were. Even the biggest cities of the United States, Europe and Canada are very healthy places to call home. Truly, it is remarkable to live in an era when, in this country at least, obesity has become a major health problem among the poor!

Two hundred years ago, it made sense for anyone, much less an intellectual or a philosopher, to yearn for a return to nature. In those days, cities were pestilential places, with contagious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and the plague wiping out urban dwellers to a much greater extent than their brethren who lived in the countryside. (In 1845, it was a no-brainer for Henry David Thoreau to prefer Walden Pond to Boston or New York. Nevertheless, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 44.)

While the Bible refers to the human lifespan as “three score and 10,” anthropologists tell us the average life expectancy for a person born in the days of the Old Testament was probably no more than 30 years. And even in the United States of Thoreau’s era, it had barely increased, to a mere 40 years.

But thanks to modern science, technology and all the other things luddites hate, that figure has increased dramatically and is now more than 75 years in the developed parts of the world — in other words, the parts where science and technology have had the most impact.

Literacy has increased. Travel is safe and inexpensive. Democracy, advanced concepts of human rights and concern for the natural environment have spread. World wars are no more. The Internet has been invented.

But perhaps most telling of all is the astounding increase in life expectancy in the modern era.

And, no matter how much anyone might pretend otherwise, science and technology deserve the credit.

So the next time a newspaper columnist thinks about picking up her computer to expound enviously about the wonderful, bygone days of hunting and gathering, she might want to stop and think: If those days were still here, chances are she and most of the people she cares about would have died soon after they were born.