MmHg, I like my fellow human beings, I prefer more of them than less of them, and therefore agriculture is positive, as are culture, cities, medical science, and so forth.
I think not. This is very much in line with what I know from cultural anthropology, and the writer is Jared Diamond, who you might know as the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse".
My guess it that the submitter found it in a response to this [1] recent article on environmentalism. The author of this touches similar themes and also mentions the same studies as the Discover article.
"To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, 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."
Science, astronomy, biology and archaeology -- all advanced culture -- cannot happen without the critical mass of population provided by cities, fed by agriculture. This article is such nonsense.
For all our tremendous advances and expansive knowledge, we still have some billions of people that that are malnourished or starving, some that live on less than a dollar a day, some that die by the hundreds of thousands in wars over resources or religion; we have nations and societies that collapse within a few hundred years as they generally grow too top-heavy to function without replacement; we are depleting resources at tremendous rates without care to the cost; and so on.
As the article says, if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs. Today, you would most likely be born as one of the masses of poor subsistence farmers throughout the world, but most likely in China or India, who's life and work is miserable/back-breaking enough that they'll choose to make our electronics for 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day and consider it an improvement.
It seems that only in the last decade has modern technology reached the point where it can be provided to the masses and begin what might be a global transformation that leads to better lives for all - rather than better lives for a few at the expense of the many.
"if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs"
If you survived your first year of life, then your first 5 years of life, etc
Then you would have to hunt or do dangerous stuff with precarious tools, no health care in case of accident, etc
That you would speak of doing dangerous stuff with tools and a lack of healthcare and follow that with a mention of the Chinese factory... I find ironic.
Further, while infant mortality was a problem (and has continued to be up until the last hundred years), you would probably not die by your thirties (life expectancy calculations are throw off precisely by infant mortality rates - the life expectancy for a person in almost any society goes up to at least 50 if you discount deaths of those under a year of age or so.)
Is there something wrong with hunting, or difficult about it? I'm fairly sure we were good enough to wipe out a few species before the rise of agriculture. As for "dangerous stuff with precarious tools"... by all means, enlighten me. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything more dangerous than a sharp edge in any non-technologically advanced society. The number of dangers we have today from our tools (heard about a car crash on the radio recently?) and the lethality of them (how many people die from gun accidents? from mixing bleach and ammonia? electrocution? power tools? industrial machinery?)
Do I even need to cover healthcare? Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? Or how the majority of medications we develop don't demonstrate a greater effect than a placebo?
You are really comparing apples with oranges. Here's something you should do: go visit a farm.
" Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? " You are very removed from reality.
The majority of people, even in very poor countries have access to aspirin, antibiotics. As tragic and cruel and "modern", kids that lost limbs to landmines are, they would have died without 20th century medical care, and they are alive today.
Aspirin has been known since antiquity. Health care generally refers to reasonably complete care with practicing physicians, not a few varieties of antibiotics and painkillers.
I don't see your point about visiting a farm, or your point about landmines; there's no lack of people around the world that die from things as simple as lack of drinking water and malnutrition, which I would consider the absolute minimum any kind of health care could provide.
It is beautiful, magnificent and utterly capricious - inured to cries of mercy, fairness or justice.
If you have ever been camping or in a forest or walked through shrubland this fact will be made abundantly clear to you.
Immobile things like plants have edged leaves, burrs and seeds to sink deep into furs, thorns to prevent casual damage, let alone poisons and allergens. Forget mention of the thousands of insects and their colonies.
The environment is inimical to today's civilized primates we call man.
Hunting IS difficult, as is building tools without things like muscle force multipliers. Sharp edges? Want to beat stones together to get edges? Or do you want to move up to the Iron age? Now you have the option of living long enough to die of dysentery.
What you further ignore is that even accrued tribal knowledge is slowly lost if populations don't achieve a certain concentration. Imagine rediscovering the "art" of smithing, only to lose it by the third generation.
Whats dangerous in that society isn't the sharp edges, its the lack of anything else. Sick? Can't hunt? Good luck. Artery sliced open? Sepsis? Need antibiotics? Lets hope the witch doctor has good juju.
No. It doesn't make the Chinese factory look good. [edit: removed because it sounded too mean to me]
I suggest watching some documentaries about Asian nomads or other indigenous peoples. They live a primitive life, sure. But they seem pretty content and stress free. I'm not even sure if I prefer my own pampered life to theirs.
I'd rather kill myself than work in a Chinese factory. From what I hear on the news, I'm not the only one who thinks that way.
And you heard about the Chinese factories on the same documentaries right?
But the Chinese workers have a choice, most of them came from the Chinese countryside willingly.
Now, why did they choose that instead of having a simple, stress free life in the Chinese countryside? It's probably "easier" than being an Asian nomad, and some may have that exact background.
re Chinese factory: you must be aware that millions of people migrate to coastal cities in China in order to work in these factories, have some heating in winter, buy a phone and avoid being farmer? Do you think they all stupid? You must be aware that half of the world (Vietnam, Brazil, India, ...) is trying very hard to get a little piece of the "Chinese factories" cake?
That's essentially average-utilitarian (has the happiness of a random person in the population gone up?); I guess many people are closer to total-utilitarian (ie. the total number of happy/surviving people is also important).
Wouldn't total-utilitiarian then prefer a population of 1000000 mostly unhappy people over a population of 100 very happy people? In that case it would at least be an awkward benchmark, as you just need to procreate as much as possible to get the "best" scenario.
Yes, there's an interesting thing on that here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
I haven't looked at enough philosophy to be able to figure out what I'd place myself as, average-utilarianism also seems to lead to morally-counter-intuitive stuff.
Agriculture is hardly to be blamed for hunger. In modern economics you need to pay to get something. And you need a job to earn money. What this basically means is, hunger is basically a problem of affordability and not food production. No jobs means, no food. Not just that it also means no good shelter, no good clothing and access to health facilities.
The biggest failure should be to look at why we haven't leveraged automation in agriculture to a point where one shouldn't have to work just to survive. But the way I see, in another coming decades this is something which is going to be inevitable.
In my country(India), it suggested all along the years that the biggest struggle for resources is going to be for water. In fact we are already facing a massive water crisis. It is believed there will massive riots, big war like stand off between states and mafia like control over water resources very soon. Much of this is a result of reckless mismanagement of water resources Eg: Waste dumping(both industrial and civic), turning lakes into sites for real estates in cities, over consumption of ground water. Some more time from now and India is all set for a major water crisis.
The miserable back breaking 12-14 schedules making electronics for you, is far better. The alternates are far worse. I can tell you it was more worst in India even in the past. There was rampant caste system. If you weren't born a male in a high caste warrior or priest family you were essentially screwed. And yes at least now people can chose some alternatives, back then it was slave labor bonded through generations. All you could do was slog in the fields for a rich landlord/king and hope you could eat bread twice a day. Or at most die building structures like the Taj Mahal or The Giza Pyramid. And yes there were famines, plagues and epidemics. In short, life in the past was scary.
I would say we are far better off then what we were before.
All the things you cite as the scary parts of life in the past were after the development of agriculture. The article (and my point) is that life for the average person was better in the millenia prior to that. Indeed, the fact that life was so miserably for the people that built Giza or the Taj Mahal is precisely the point - hunter-gatherer tribes of a few hundred people never did such things.
And my point about the endless hours making electronics is that if this is the best we can do for the majority of people in the world today, which is an improvement on the miserable times of earlier civilization/agricultural society, how pathetic is that compared to times of tribal societies when things were much more equal and life (on average) was much better?
And I think you answer your own question about automation - our economic system is the reason we have people starving even when we have enough food to feed everyone. Automation won't change that by itself.
I don't its that plain black and white. The only reason why (we assume) pre agriculture hunter gatherer tribes to be well off is because they were not intelligently aware of their own selves. So no countries, no religions, no color based problems or whatever.
Of course they didn't have medicines, shelter to protect themselves from epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes. Which I also think kept their population growth in check. Imagine getting your hand or a limb fractured then! Or catching dysentery. I am sure when things went fine, they went fine- The problem is basically when you get into a trouble which doesn't a solution at the present.
Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.
Its difficult to say what is better. Agriculture is basically is mass production of a basic element for survival called food .I would consider pharmaceutical companies as mass producers of another (now) basic necessity called health care. What ever you could say about agriculture you could also say about medicine.You could say people with cancer 1000 years back war far better off, at least they would just die instead of spending their life savings on fighting a disease they can't get cured off.
Not intelligently aware of themselves? In what way? There was little difference between what they knew and how they acted - there was their own tribe, and there were other tribes - and people today, where you can see cliques and groups naturally form in schools and elsewhere.
> epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes.
These things were supremely rare. As the article notes, the rise of death by disease at scale was a direct result of higher population and density, as well as likely poorer sanitary conditions.
Let us presume a disease randomly shows up and infects a tribe, killing all of them. Now what? The disease dies out. In fact, our tribal nature is in effect a preventative measure against precisely this, as it causes most human societies to develop boundaries with each other. A deadly disease survives by spreading, which is a difficult thing to do in a world of tribal societies.
> Which I also think kept their population growth in check.
All animal populations are kept in control by basic ecology - when there's enough food to support a larger population, the population grows; when there is not, it does not. Humans are no different (until modern times with birth control/women empowerment/etc.)
> Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.
This is an interesting point. Agriculture has allowed larger societies (tribes are organized societies, and good ones), but not better ones (yet). I don't find this particularly surprising - a highly refined technology or method is almost always better than a newer one, even if the newer one eventually equals and surpasses it. The gun took hundreds of years to replace the sword, the car decades to replace the horse, and today we see new forms of energy production gradually moving to replace oil. Humans and developments in human society are no different - agriculture is the only way to support larger societies, but we have yet to correct for all the problems it brings that tribal societies had long since solved.
This is just silly. Agriculture has allowed the population of the Earth to explode, and that has included increasing the population of poor people. However, technology is also lifting those people out of poverty. The developed world includes more countries today than it did in 1950, or even 1980. In the next 50 years several more countries are poised to join the ranks of countries with wealth similar to that of the G7 today. In all likelihood there will be a swathe of newly minted developed countries including Brazil, Nigeria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, etc. as well as many Eastern European countries by the mid 21st century. And in the meantime many of the most poverty stricken regions of the world will be less so by then.
This is not hope or optimism, it's merely following the trends that have been consistent for the last 2 centuries.
The article claims it was a catastrophe in many ways, not in all of them.
I'm glad I was born into my time, in a rich country. And why shouldn't I? I live like a king and don't have to put any real effort into anything to maintain my status. All my problems are literally first world problems. But on a global scale agriculture fucked us up something fierce. And while I take a lot of pleasure in the nicer aspects of advanced culture, I wouldn't just assume that it justifies the horrible things that would never have come to be if we would have kept on living in a healthy symbiotic relationship with our natural environment.
Or as Louis CK said at the Beacon Theater (I'm paraphrasing): "God: I gave you everything you need. Why did you put that shit there? Guy: So I can go faster!"
It's a matter of tradeoffs. Yes, agriculture had some severe disavantages, but the advantages were also huge. Without the stability that agriculture gave us, we wouldn't be what we are now.
The article specifically mentions that the top X% are better off in agriculture. If you have an enjoyable high-tech lifestyle, then you are probably a part of them (as most of HN).
I wonder if the evolution of agriculture has been similarly negative/positive for the other animals that do it, namely some species of ants. Ants overall make up 15-20% of this planet's animal biomass, visiting aliens wouldn't be crazy to call them one of our planet's dominant species (and completely ignore the hairless apes).
And at 11:59pm we adopted the Enlightenment, egalitarianism, scientific method, self-determination. Just because something was the case for a long time doesn't mean it was by default the best case.
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?"
I'm sure this would seem like a much more profound statement if I hadn't yet learned ecology.
You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here: I remember high school courses teaches us that nature, through natural selection, influenced mankind. Until man empowered enough intelligence and influence back its environment, through Agriculture first, shaping the lands, steering water streams and so on. Then through industrial revolution. Generating green house gas emissions. I am not sure which one of a bushman or a agriculture lead to the best ecologic behavior then. :-/
Some forms of farming cause ecological destruction. Many species have gone extinct because of farming methods. Animals and plants have been bred to extremes; some animals are unable to breed without assistance, others have trouble walking. Huge areas of rainforest are cut down and replaced with unsuitable palm tree plantations. Humans introduce foreign invasive species as a method of "pest control". Those new species cause havoc. Farming contributes significant amounts of pollution in the form of fertiliser runoff or CO2 or slurry lakes.
"We eat what we need. We protect what we need." seems pretty profound to me.
And because he knows he can feed hundreds of people, the farmer will have a dozen or so children, most likely erring on the side of too many and negate all benefits of this abundance!
As much as I disagree with the OP, I viscerally hate crowded cities, having more than 2 people per sq km population density, oversocialization of human beings and social hierarchies everywhere and all the other crap we had to put up with to get to the current level of progress in science and technology, but I hate it even more when people forget that it is only worth putting up with all this crap because of the goal of progress in science and technology and the hope that it will in the end set us free from the "slavery" of biological mortality and of biologically limited brainpower!.
Maybe in a few thousand years time people will be reading about how the widespread adoption of computers and the internet in the 20th century was actually a catastrophe because before that it was so much easier to maintain your privacy and there weren't so many goddamn robots everywhere.
Jesus Christ could the author take longer to get to the point? Also, they are terribly selective of their evidence. It's perfectly possible that life expectancy decreased following invention of agriculture and that people had more stressful lives, but the other benefits of social organisation so totally make up for that, as shown by the huge increase in life expectancies since then. Do you realise just how much more peaceful we are in organised society than in hunter-gather societies? Watch the talk on "the surprising decline in violence" by Stephen Pinker: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
Also, life expectancy is a tricky thing, in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would. And the end result would be that in the settlement you'd have an explosion in terms of person-years lived, even though on a per person level the life expectancy might have gone down.
> in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would
Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
How it happens isn't relevant, we know for a fact that hunter-gatherer tribes have low population growth rates compared even to stone age agrarian settlements. Exactly why this is so is probably an interesting question. A few things to remember: fertility is dependent on consistent nutrition, people don't necessarily have sex like rabbits all the time, and in low population tribes the ability to find a mate may be a challenge. Also, infant mortality during the winter can be a bitch, even in an agrarian society with tons of stored food.
Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.
It's funny how technology brings us back to this "hunter gatherer heaven":
- population crowding is no longer necessary as telecommuting is a viable way of doing most jobs (hopefully the naysayers will be "silenced" in a few generations... like Moses's people that had to die in the desert before reaching the "promised land" as their mentalities were not compatible with it)
- we're becoming "hunters" again, as we engage in competitive activities to earn more "game" (money), dedicating more resources to this "hunting" than to actually "producing things"
- we're "gatherers" again - only that we gather from the supermarket instead of the bushes and we gather from the fruits of mechanized agriculture and industry instead of the fruits of the land
...but better still, we may soon be able to have the cake and eat it too: space colonization, ocean colonization, even higher yield concentrated agriculture via new biotech breakthroughs and "too cheap to meter" energy via large scale thorium reactors deployments and later fusion will allow even faster exoponential continuous population growth.
Let our Zerg (err... Human) swarm grow exponentially and engulf the universe! :)
If anyone actually agrees with this article, I would like to invite you to forgo agricultural methods and live a nomadic life, leaving the rest of society as we strive for the 'greater good' (what ever that might be).
This sort of paean to the "noble savage" always glosses over some of the worst aspects of such lifestyles. Such as excessive tribalism and racism, lack of individual liberty, and a stultifying lack of art and cultural refinements.
It's fascinating to me how some of the most liberal folks can idolize some of the most regressive and socially conservative lifestyles and cultures in history.
One important difference was how society was organised. Before agriculture, hunter-gatherer groups were collaborators. They depended on each other to put down game and gather vegetables. The more individuals in the group, the stronger they were. That's a completely different situation from a farming community in which its inhabitants are in competition to each other. The more farmers on a given area, the worse for each of them. They have to compete with each other over the arable land.
I'm not sure I completely agree with this view. It's not confronting the other argument: what if we were still all hunter-gatherers, and agriculture never became mainstream?
I'm not sure we would reach the same level of a sophisticated society that we enjoy today. Would the writer of this article have time to dedicate to writing, if he had to hunt for food, instead of having it ready in a dish in a few minutes? I highly doubt it.
I also think there's an evolutionary benefit that came out of agriculture. As the complexity of our behavior towards dealing with an agricultural system increased, so did our intelligence.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure we would reach the same level of intelligence - through natural evolution - that we have today, if we didn't build highly complex systems that required lots of logical thinking (agriculture). If we were all still hunters, we would not be as intelligent.
you mean the same level of knowledge, not intelligence - people were just as intelligent back then. Knowledge accumulation required agriculture, since it freed up time.
The author is Jared Diamond - IMHO one of the great thinkers of our time, who certainly deserves serious consideration. His books, "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse", "The Third Chimpanzee" are excellent, thought-provoking (even worldview-altering) reads.
That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes.
Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - is that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile.
I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting.
And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.
I guess some people here dont understasnd the point of the article.
There are 3 levels on which we can think about survival.
1. Population level
On this level, agriculture is clear benefit as it provided stable microenvironment to practice abstract sciences that led us here.
2. Individual level
On this level, we clearly lost it. Degenerative disease, particularly dental one and so called diseases of civilization. It may or may not reflect on u as individual depending on ur environment and genetics, but it reflects badly on majority of people. So this is middle ground heading bad way ATM and in what direction will it go depends on how fast we can adapt (epigenetics etc.)
3. Cell level.
Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).
> 3. Cell level.
Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).
i have heard that humans didn't used to eat so much sugar. It was a desirable food, high energy concentrations. but it was "hard" to get in nature. But with modern tech, it is now so cheap that the process of evolution hasn't really "selected" for people who could cope because it happened so fast.
If you, unlike most, don't believe modernity = progress history I'd recommend you read Ishmael. Great story which explores the cultural and environmental effect of leaving our hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] thread[1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277
Science, astronomy, biology and archaeology -- all advanced culture -- cannot happen without the critical mass of population provided by cities, fed by agriculture. This article is such nonsense.
As the article says, if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs. Today, you would most likely be born as one of the masses of poor subsistence farmers throughout the world, but most likely in China or India, who's life and work is miserable/back-breaking enough that they'll choose to make our electronics for 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day and consider it an improvement.
It seems that only in the last decade has modern technology reached the point where it can be provided to the masses and begin what might be a global transformation that leads to better lives for all - rather than better lives for a few at the expense of the many.
If you survived your first year of life, then your first 5 years of life, etc
Then you would have to hunt or do dangerous stuff with precarious tools, no health care in case of accident, etc
Oh and you would probably die by your 30s.
Makes the chinese factory kind of look good.
Average life expectancy at birth is heavily influenced by infant mortality. Most people didn't really die in their 30s.
Not sure about the actual figures for that time period, though.
Average: 30 years.
I oversimplified a bit, but you can see the overview of the statistics misinterpretation.
Further, while infant mortality was a problem (and has continued to be up until the last hundred years), you would probably not die by your thirties (life expectancy calculations are throw off precisely by infant mortality rates - the life expectancy for a person in almost any society goes up to at least 50 if you discount deaths of those under a year of age or so.)
Is there something wrong with hunting, or difficult about it? I'm fairly sure we were good enough to wipe out a few species before the rise of agriculture. As for "dangerous stuff with precarious tools"... by all means, enlighten me. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything more dangerous than a sharp edge in any non-technologically advanced society. The number of dangers we have today from our tools (heard about a car crash on the radio recently?) and the lethality of them (how many people die from gun accidents? from mixing bleach and ammonia? electrocution? power tools? industrial machinery?)
Do I even need to cover healthcare? Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? Or how the majority of medications we develop don't demonstrate a greater effect than a placebo?
" Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? " You are very removed from reality.
The majority of people, even in very poor countries have access to aspirin, antibiotics. As tragic and cruel and "modern", kids that lost limbs to landmines are, they would have died without 20th century medical care, and they are alive today.
I don't see your point about visiting a farm, or your point about landmines; there's no lack of people around the world that die from things as simple as lack of drinking water and malnutrition, which I would consider the absolute minimum any kind of health care could provide.
It is beautiful, magnificent and utterly capricious - inured to cries of mercy, fairness or justice.
If you have ever been camping or in a forest or walked through shrubland this fact will be made abundantly clear to you.
Immobile things like plants have edged leaves, burrs and seeds to sink deep into furs, thorns to prevent casual damage, let alone poisons and allergens. Forget mention of the thousands of insects and their colonies.
The environment is inimical to today's civilized primates we call man.
Hunting IS difficult, as is building tools without things like muscle force multipliers. Sharp edges? Want to beat stones together to get edges? Or do you want to move up to the Iron age? Now you have the option of living long enough to die of dysentery.
What you further ignore is that even accrued tribal knowledge is slowly lost if populations don't achieve a certain concentration. Imagine rediscovering the "art" of smithing, only to lose it by the third generation.
Whats dangerous in that society isn't the sharp edges, its the lack of anything else. Sick? Can't hunt? Good luck. Artery sliced open? Sepsis? Need antibiotics? Lets hope the witch doctor has good juju.
No. It doesn't make the Chinese factory look good. [edit: removed because it sounded too mean to me]
I suggest watching some documentaries about Asian nomads or other indigenous peoples. They live a primitive life, sure. But they seem pretty content and stress free. I'm not even sure if I prefer my own pampered life to theirs.
I'd rather kill myself than work in a Chinese factory. From what I hear on the news, I'm not the only one who thinks that way.
And you heard about the Chinese factories on the same documentaries right?
But the Chinese workers have a choice, most of them came from the Chinese countryside willingly.
Now, why did they choose that instead of having a simple, stress free life in the Chinese countryside? It's probably "easier" than being an Asian nomad, and some may have that exact background.
The biggest failure should be to look at why we haven't leveraged automation in agriculture to a point where one shouldn't have to work just to survive. But the way I see, in another coming decades this is something which is going to be inevitable.
In my country(India), it suggested all along the years that the biggest struggle for resources is going to be for water. In fact we are already facing a massive water crisis. It is believed there will massive riots, big war like stand off between states and mafia like control over water resources very soon. Much of this is a result of reckless mismanagement of water resources Eg: Waste dumping(both industrial and civic), turning lakes into sites for real estates in cities, over consumption of ground water. Some more time from now and India is all set for a major water crisis.
The miserable back breaking 12-14 schedules making electronics for you, is far better. The alternates are far worse. I can tell you it was more worst in India even in the past. There was rampant caste system. If you weren't born a male in a high caste warrior or priest family you were essentially screwed. And yes at least now people can chose some alternatives, back then it was slave labor bonded through generations. All you could do was slog in the fields for a rich landlord/king and hope you could eat bread twice a day. Or at most die building structures like the Taj Mahal or The Giza Pyramid. And yes there were famines, plagues and epidemics. In short, life in the past was scary.
I would say we are far better off then what we were before.
And my point about the endless hours making electronics is that if this is the best we can do for the majority of people in the world today, which is an improvement on the miserable times of earlier civilization/agricultural society, how pathetic is that compared to times of tribal societies when things were much more equal and life (on average) was much better?
And I think you answer your own question about automation - our economic system is the reason we have people starving even when we have enough food to feed everyone. Automation won't change that by itself.
Of course they didn't have medicines, shelter to protect themselves from epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes. Which I also think kept their population growth in check. Imagine getting your hand or a limb fractured then! Or catching dysentery. I am sure when things went fine, they went fine- The problem is basically when you get into a trouble which doesn't a solution at the present.
Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.
Its difficult to say what is better. Agriculture is basically is mass production of a basic element for survival called food .I would consider pharmaceutical companies as mass producers of another (now) basic necessity called health care. What ever you could say about agriculture you could also say about medicine.You could say people with cancer 1000 years back war far better off, at least they would just die instead of spending their life savings on fighting a disease they can't get cured off.
> epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes.
These things were supremely rare. As the article notes, the rise of death by disease at scale was a direct result of higher population and density, as well as likely poorer sanitary conditions.
Let us presume a disease randomly shows up and infects a tribe, killing all of them. Now what? The disease dies out. In fact, our tribal nature is in effect a preventative measure against precisely this, as it causes most human societies to develop boundaries with each other. A deadly disease survives by spreading, which is a difficult thing to do in a world of tribal societies.
> Which I also think kept their population growth in check.
All animal populations are kept in control by basic ecology - when there's enough food to support a larger population, the population grows; when there is not, it does not. Humans are no different (until modern times with birth control/women empowerment/etc.)
> Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.
This is an interesting point. Agriculture has allowed larger societies (tribes are organized societies, and good ones), but not better ones (yet). I don't find this particularly surprising - a highly refined technology or method is almost always better than a newer one, even if the newer one eventually equals and surpasses it. The gun took hundreds of years to replace the sword, the car decades to replace the horse, and today we see new forms of energy production gradually moving to replace oil. Humans and developments in human society are no different - agriculture is the only way to support larger societies, but we have yet to correct for all the problems it brings that tribal societies had long since solved.
This is not hope or optimism, it's merely following the trends that have been consistent for the last 2 centuries.
We develop one advance and instead of using it to be happier, we use it to be just more people, and poorer.
Seriously, we need to stop being more and more just for the sake of it.
I don't think most people would appreciate the demand to stop having children because infant mortality these days is so low.
I'm glad I was born into my time, in a rich country. And why shouldn't I? I live like a king and don't have to put any real effort into anything to maintain my status. All my problems are literally first world problems. But on a global scale agriculture fucked us up something fierce. And while I take a lot of pleasure in the nicer aspects of advanced culture, I wouldn't just assume that it justifies the horrible things that would never have come to be if we would have kept on living in a healthy symbiotic relationship with our natural environment.
Or as Louis CK said at the Beacon Theater (I'm paraphrasing): "God: I gave you everything you need. Why did you put that shit there? Guy: So I can go faster!"
And at 11:59pm we adopted the Enlightenment, egalitarianism, scientific method, self-determination. Just because something was the case for a long time doesn't mean it was by default the best case.
I'm sure this would seem like a much more profound statement if I hadn't yet learned ecology.
Not surprising, "controversial" claims often require selective myopia in order to make claims that counter how the world works.
"We eat what we need. We protect what we need." seems pretty profound to me.
That's got to be a logical fallacy.
A single farmer with modern tools can feed hundreds of people.
As much as I disagree with the OP, I viscerally hate crowded cities, having more than 2 people per sq km population density, oversocialization of human beings and social hierarchies everywhere and all the other crap we had to put up with to get to the current level of progress in science and technology, but I hate it even more when people forget that it is only worth putting up with all this crap because of the goal of progress in science and technology and the hope that it will in the end set us free from the "slavery" of biological mortality and of biologically limited brainpower!.
Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.
[Which makes H-G society sound rather less peachy than the original article seems to have been claiming...]
- population crowding is no longer necessary as telecommuting is a viable way of doing most jobs (hopefully the naysayers will be "silenced" in a few generations... like Moses's people that had to die in the desert before reaching the "promised land" as their mentalities were not compatible with it)
- we're becoming "hunters" again, as we engage in competitive activities to earn more "game" (money), dedicating more resources to this "hunting" than to actually "producing things"
- we're "gatherers" again - only that we gather from the supermarket instead of the bushes and we gather from the fruits of mechanized agriculture and industry instead of the fruits of the land
...but better still, we may soon be able to have the cake and eat it too: space colonization, ocean colonization, even higher yield concentrated agriculture via new biotech breakthroughs and "too cheap to meter" energy via large scale thorium reactors deployments and later fusion will allow even faster exoponential continuous population growth.
Let our Zerg (err... Human) swarm grow exponentially and engulf the universe! :)
It's fascinating to me how some of the most liberal folks can idolize some of the most regressive and socially conservative lifestyles and cultures in history.
Did anyone else envision an awesome zombie movie while reading this?
I'm not sure we would reach the same level of a sophisticated society that we enjoy today. Would the writer of this article have time to dedicate to writing, if he had to hunt for food, instead of having it ready in a dish in a few minutes? I highly doubt it.
I also think there's an evolutionary benefit that came out of agriculture. As the complexity of our behavior towards dealing with an agricultural system increased, so did our intelligence.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure we would reach the same level of intelligence - through natural evolution - that we have today, if we didn't build highly complex systems that required lots of logical thinking (agriculture). If we were all still hunters, we would not be as intelligent.
That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes.
Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - is that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile.
I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting.
And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.
There are 3 levels on which we can think about survival.
1. Population level
On this level, agriculture is clear benefit as it provided stable microenvironment to practice abstract sciences that led us here.
2. Individual level
On this level, we clearly lost it. Degenerative disease, particularly dental one and so called diseases of civilization. It may or may not reflect on u as individual depending on ur environment and genetics, but it reflects badly on majority of people. So this is middle ground heading bad way ATM and in what direction will it go depends on how fast we can adapt (epigenetics etc.)
3. Cell level.
Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).
Is this true? (The bit about cancer)