The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987)
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- Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter)
- Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)
- Vastly lower mortality (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)
The way I look at it, agriculture made things way worse... until we advanced far enough to get way, way better.
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.
That, and protection from mosquitos, basically assures that I'm living a better life.
What I can say quite confidently is that you likely never had to go thirsty because you couldn’t risk drinking the water or contracted cholera, heck you likely never even got a bad case of food poisoning thanks modern sanitary regulation and functional infrastructure.
You never had to worry about if that insect bite laid larva under your skin or if the blistering rash you got on your leg is going to spread and imobalize you.
You live a cushy comfortable and safe life which is afforded to the vast majority of people who live in developed nations.
If you want to go back to huts and other “evolutionary compatible habitats” be my guest there are plenty of places on the planet that are a bad day away from being completely sent back to the Stone Age which you can relocate too, just don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and fill your instagram with the experience to your hearts content.
...talk about projecting!
for all the damage done to ecological systems, now the chances of humans and some of those systems actually surviving beyond the life left in this planet is now some number above zero. that's a good thing imo
You have more variety, but not of more “fresh” foods. The only fresh food you can eat will always be local, so the variety only went up for foods transported from elsewhere… but fresh food in general is getting harder to acquire in Western society. Most people don’t eat fresh food at all so this point is just wrong. In traditional villages people are not afraid to eat vegetables with bugs and dirt on them -- that's what it means to eat fresh, and they don't need pesticides or preservatives.
> - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)
Our culture is richer, but I'm not sure if the life of the average person is. You do have access to an absolute wealth of rich cultural material, but the majority of people do not utilize it. I’ve lived in traditional villages* and people there have surprisingly rich cultures, even if it was not mass-produced and massively-available, vapid nonsense. Also, contact with nature is more meaningful than most modern time-wasting activities like working in an office, commuting, or checking social media.
*Agricultural societies, but I suspect pre-agricultural cultures were also very rich.
- Vastly lower mortality
Not sure what the data says about mortality rates. As far as health goes, most people in Western society are incredibly unhealthy. The amount of obese people in America is frankly revolting, not to mention the epidemics of hormone imbalances, digestive issues, awful posture, awful skin, etc. and the medicine/supplement regimens of pills that people have become dependent on to function or live, etc. The means to live more healthily are available, but the average person is not healthier than people with traditional lifestyles. We are weaker, more useless and have poorer sex lives.
> (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)
Thanks to modern medicine, you’re not dead, but you’re bankrupt due to medical fees and addicted to painkillers and your gut flora is destroyed by antibiotics. The modern diet has little gut-promoting effect so you have to buy probiotic pills now. Etc.
- re variety of food: Americans are among the fattest people in history.
- re richer lives: reading and writing is for the literate. Not guaranteed by agriculture. I might argue that the creation of excess directly contributed to a treatment of education as a precious resource.
Culture and art are not dependent on and predate agriculture.
- re: mortality rate. We don’t die by falling from trees, but we’re also much worse at being in trees. Monkeys are pretty unlikely to die by falling out of a tree. We are worse at operating our own bodies in proportion to our reliance on modern medicine
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"?
Yuval Harari, author of the excellent "Sapiens" also believes it.
Uh huh, Sapiens as excellent... there are ... problems. Some:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5613ac/in_hi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xvsia/how_d...
Perhaps those immigrants getting on boats that are so much in the news in Europe and the US?
Things exist which did not then, but many of the problems which exist now did not exist then. Global warming, anthropocene mass extinction, discussion of a new nuclear cold war on Russia's western border - go back 10,000 years and these problems fade away, particularly ones that could lead to human or other mass species extinction.
Of course being human in 2018 seems ok to white American heterosexual makes of the upper middle class (or higher), but that is a small percentage of humanity.
The hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon don't seem anxious to enter Brazilian wage slavery. Why should they, mining interests are currently massacring them.
(The carrying capacity of the Earth for that lifestyle is likely in the low hundreds of millions)
So you'd be exchanging your privileged few for those privileged to be alive.
The funny thing about that argument is that chimpanzees, and all other creatures, exist in some kind of hierarchy, usually involving sex and power. His premise is simply wrong.
For a more convincing argument along these lines, see Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29?wprov=sf...
It posits that, amongst other things, agriculture (food supply) is allowing us to violate laws of nature by overextending population beyond what is sustainable. Of course, you can't violate a scientific law, so the metaphor used in the book is akin to a plane careening towards the ground and everyone claiming they took off and flew so there can be no problem now.
I'm not sure if I would rather live in a doomed and enlightened (sounds like an oxymoron) society than an ignorant but stable world of hunter gathering tribes.
What good is all our technological advances if it also leads to ecological collapse that nullifies all of it?
*permanent being like Musk’s notion of humanity being a multi-planetary species
When in the current climate I worry about the life my 8 year old son will have and that of my future grandchildren, I couldn’t give a damn about any permanent survival of the species plan that people like Musk might have.
I am also not convinced that technological advancement couldn’t have happened with hunting-gathering societies. At the very least people would have had more time, whereas right now I worry we might not survive another century.
Also, fun fact: life on Mars would be much worse and much more expensive than anywhere on Earth. Fixing Earth to ensure our survival for another 1000 years is more doable than colonizing Mars in any meaningful way. And yes, we should colonize Mars, but we are unable to fix problems in our own back yard and the clock is ticking.
It's not really intended to be much of a serious argument, is my guess. In 1987 the idea that members of agricultural societies didn't necessarily live better lives than hunter-gathers wasn't as widely known or accepted. He presents that idea in a popular magazine in proto-clickbaity terms.
"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."
You could argue that agriculture and modern globalization is exacerbating preexisting, inherent problems, but that's not the articles stance.
—Ben Franklin
Note that Scott's subject is the early 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.
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.
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.
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".
Agriculture led to industrialization. When someone can make guns, and when others can't... Someone is getting conquered.
"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?"
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.
What a stupid article.
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.
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.).
TL;DR: agriculture.