Counterpoint: nearly all of those of us in developed countries are now better-off with agriculture, due to:<p>- Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter)<p>- Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)<p>- Vastly lower mortality (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)<p>The way I look at it, agriculture made things <i>way</i> worse... until we advanced far enough to get <i>way, way</i> better.<p>And even if you argue there are some populations in developing countries which are still worse-off, it's hard to believe that's going to last long as economic development progresses.
Help me understand why this isn't a sublimely silly argument. The era of hunter-gatherers spans the time from 12:00 midnight on Diamond's metaphorical clock all the way to 11:54PM. Virtually every advancement in human history, from the Enlightenment through the germ theory of illness all the way to the Internet, occurred <i>after</i> that time. What ordinary person would elect to time-travel one-way to 11:30PM on Diamond's clock, as opposed to living at 11:59PM?<p>By Diamond's reasoning, we could live far longer on this planet if we lived like chimpanzees, scavenging what we could from the natural bounty of the land without bending it to our will. But I don't particularly want to be a chimp. Couldn't his argument be reframed as "the worst mistake in the history of the world is the human race"?
As a counterpoint to this argument:
<a href="https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/</a>
David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that both oppression, and freedom, are present in every society from tiny to huge, the "egalitarian hunter gatherer" trope is a huge oversimplification, and really it's the cultural choices we make that determine whether we live in a free society or one full of domination and oppression. My favorite quote:<p>"Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."
I don't find this particularly compelling as given the author's fundamental assumptions regarding inequity and sexism as natural outcroppings of agrarian society. For example the mongols were a largely non-agrarian society that was highly stratified, and deeply sexist that committed human rights violations on the global scale.
> “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”<p>—Ben Franklin
This is a topic that you can't meaningfully unpack in a short essay. Whether or not you think this has merit, I'd recommend reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, it tackles this subject in a more philosophical way and is very thought provoking. It is similarly opinionated, but helps you question things you would have never even considered before.
For a more recent take on this, see James Scott's "Against The Grain". Scott presents evidence from archeology that the early state (at the dawn of state-organized agriculture) had to exert considerable effort to prevent agricultural workers from departing to pursue a hunter-gatherer or pastoralist lifestyle. If you're not an elite, the latter is more pleasant in every way. In other words, most people at the time of the transition to mass agriculture did not consider it an improvement.<p>Note that Scott's subject is the <i>early</i> state; he does not address the very-long term benefit that arose only after many millennia. He does give some account of how these early states (gradually) prevailed over the alternatives. Nor does he address the other major economic/productive transitions from grain empire to modernity (e.g. industrialization, digitization). That's for some other book.<p>I should also add the Scott shows that there were cultures with a mixed agriculture/hunter gatherer lifestyle, and that some places moved back and forth for various reasons; and also (in case you've read other word by Diamond) that Scott has a different take on "collapse" of early states: since they were, in general, highly coercive, some (but not all) of what we see now as a collapse were net improvements for the lives of all but the few at the top; they did not (always) include major loss of life, but only appear to be collapses because fewer permanent artifacts were created.
I'm pretty sure that this essay is farcical, sarcastic, and/or ironic.<p>Also, I'm guessing from the style and topic this is the same Jared Diamond who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel? Particularly the clock idea I believe is repeated there.<p>It's also curious to note that this copy seems to have been OCRed, given that there's at least one occurrence of "fanners" instead of "farmers".
Eh, I think agriculture was inevitable. It isn't as if we could have had the world government at that time just ban agriculture, or create an information campaign to educate Farmers on the long term harm if the agrarian lifestyle.<p>Agriculture led to industrialization. When someone can make guns, and when others can't... Someone is getting conquered.
Yes, nice example, let's all just eat mongo-nuts (which btw I have never seen lying on the ground where I live...)<p>"One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"<p>Places where there is easy access to food have never evolved any technological progress and the societies are still messed up, because they never had to understand co-operation and just have tribalism of some sort. Just compare africa (probably the richest country in resources) with eg. europe.<p>What a stupid article.
> As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers.<p>But we're not looking at the free time of only farmers, but of society as a whole, thanks to specialisation and division of labour. Farmers produce food, others produce other goods and service and trade them for food. Economics 101: everyone is better off and more efficient because they do whatever they have a comparative advantage at.
It is not a mistake, silly. It is evolution. There are is no right / wrong in evolution. Each is a step out of countless (metaphorically) possibilities played out.<p>Maybe, it is unfair to call it a mistake without knowing what life would have been at this point in time (or say in future.).
Early adopters of agriculture most likely had the option to choose between farming and keeping their old way of hunter/gatherer life, and yet agriculture become dominant
I read something a while back stating the studies these theories of hunter-gatherer paradise are based upon were flawed in that they only took into account the actual time it took to gather food and not preparation and whatnot which turns out to add up to significant amounts of time.