I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion that I had with all of my classes today regarding the problems with the term civilization. I know that inner/outer circle puts you on the spot a bit, but you'll get used to it over time. The first one is always the hardest, and you guys did EXCELLENT today. So... what do you feel is the worst mistake in the history of the human race? It's interesting that Jared Diamond (writer of the bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel) wrote an article with that very title, and in it he says that this "worst mistake" was the decision to begin settled agriculture (aka, farming). In fact, in the very first paragraph he states the following:
"...recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence."
Wow, strong words. How does he qualify this statement? Really, we've always been taught, as Diamond points out, that the decision to farm was a positive decision because "since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherer never had." Granted, it is very difficult to prove that life got better or got worse for humans as a result of farming since the transition began roughly about 10,000 years ago. So how can we come to an educated conclusion? Well, why not look at hunter-gather societies that remain in existence today. For example, the people of the Kalahari desert of sub-Saharan Africa remain hunter-gathers. As Diamond points out, "it turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania [hardly the 40+ hour work week of our society]."
Additionally, there is an emerging field of science called paleopathology (essentially the study of stone age diseases), and in a lot of cases, these scientists give us insight into the world before farming because they have almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. These scientists have actually concluded that agriculture was bad for health and for three reasons...
1) "hunter-gathers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition."
2) "because of the dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed"
3) "the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infections diseases... Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities."
Interesting! Have you ever taken the time to consider any of this? What else emerged in humanity as a result of farming? As Diamond next points out, "farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food... they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses." Powerful logic indeed!
Additionally, Diamond argues that as a result of farming, inequality between the sexes emerges. In reality, he has a point because there is no available evidence of women being treated as below men until agricultural societies emerge. Diamond suggests this may have occured because, "freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts- with consequent drains on their health." We talk more about this emerging inequality between the sexes in the next couple of weeks. Then there is the issue of farming allowing for more free time. Can this be proven? It can't actually. In fact, modern hunter gathers have at least as much free time as farmers. Finally, as Diamond mentions, "with the advent of agriculture the elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the [idea] that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls." His answer is very simple: "Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life." How does it support more people? (1) "Because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants." (2) "Because nomadic hunter-gatheres have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide [the killing of infants] and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years." So Diamond's basic conclusion is simply that what looked like possibly a good thing produced a much worse quality of life. However, once we dove in, there was no way out.
Diamond therefore ends his article this way: "Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visisted from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 pm we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?"
I'm not asking you to adopt Jared Diamond's point of view fully. What I would like you to do is look at a point of view that stands in stark contrast to what you have probably always been taught. Think critically about the matter therefore. I'm not telling you what to think, but I am telling you TO THINK. So what do you think? Was farming truly the worst mistake in the history of the human race? Your thoughts please...
