Many people who know what they are talking about claim that humans’ abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle — the invention of agriculture — is one of the most meaningful events in the history of mankind. It is that invention that led to the rise of civilization and thus all the good things we know of — mathematics, medicine, poetry, computers, space travel, microwave ovens, Twinkies, and so on.
This is a fascinating topic and one post will not do it justice. For one, I find it interesting that what we now see as examples of mankind’s intellectual superiority and conceptual ability is simply a by-product of necessity, all stemming from agriculture. For example, agriculture increased the importance of land — suddenly the concept of ownership developed. Ownership necessitated the need to keep track of what belongs to whom, which led to accounting which led to writing which in turn led to higher, more abstract thought (and, yes, also poetry). But agriculture increased the importance of schedules which led to the idea of a calendar, which led to astronomy and then to mathematics. What if we hadn’t adopted agriculture? Would we still have mathematicians and poets? Would some other need necessitate the development of these abstract disciplines? I think so — it seems to me that fields such as mathematics lie on top of the pyramid of abstraction, and as mankind solves its problems — any problems — and becomes more efficient at whatever it does, it travels up that pyramid, ultimately arriving at those high abstractions.
What is more interesting than asking about the consequences of agriculture is questioning it in the first place — there are dissenting voices — that agriculture was, in fact, mankind’s greatest mistake. There is some compelling archaeological evidence, such as the fact that we’re just now beginning to match our pre-agricultural ancestors’ average height and disease rate, plus it’s not particularly clear to me what short-term benefit an agricultural life that demands much more of humans has — just like today you’d think I’m crazy if I tried to convince you to become a hunter-gatherer, it wouldn’t have made much sense to the humans eight thousand years ago to do the opposite.
Whether or not you subscribe to the dissenting view or the prevalent one, I think this is an extreme example of what I would call a local view of history, a phenomenon related to a kind of confirmation bias we have about events that have happened recently. In other words, we may be blind to a fact that what we’re experiencing is not what it appears to be because we haven’t stepped back enough and considered a broad enough historical perspective. Often, what appears as fundamental properties of our society are just arbitrary results of a chain of events that seem irrelevant and relatively insignificant.
For example, a lot of Americans consider eating food very pleasurable, but — arguably — prior to Julia Child’s efforts, food had a much more utilitarian function in the American society. Similarly, we value financial success but that has not always been the case, as the pursuit of material comfort has its roots in Calvinism.
Taking this notion to the extreme, perhaps agriculture — and with it the notion of progress — is also arbitrary; zooming out enough (more than eight thousand years to the times of our hunter-gatherer ancestors) displays an entirely different flavor of society that may not necessarily be inferior to ours. What, therefore, is progress, and is it a good thing?
On a total tangent, the topic of agriculture as an unlikely villain has been raised in a freakish display of coincidence in three very distinct sources I happen to be a subscriber of — PRI’s To The Best of Our Knowledge, BBC World News, and a Stuff You Should Know podcast. It happens every so often and I am beginning to form a theory that it’s a phenomenon rather than just coincidence — similar to how studios sometimes come up with near-identical movies within few months of one another.
The latter source remarks that it is not the desire for efficiency that caused us to adopt agriculture, but the desire to brew alcohol. Beer, it is quite likely, may have led to human civilization.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time here lately: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/, which is all about getting better health results via living more like a hunter-gatherer. He alsosargue that agriculture was a major mistake, at least from a health perspective.
The way I look at it “was agriculture a mistake” is kind of a meaningless question: it happened, it had consequences, some were positive, some were negative; it would be really damn hard to undo; so what’s to ask? A better way of looking at it, I think, is just dropping the evaluative aspect and understanding the variety of causes and consequences. I like the beer theory.
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