Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Please use this thread for discussing the above mentioned section of Sapiens.
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geo wrote:Part Two is rather depressing so far. I haven't finished reading it, but as DWill said earlier, it's not exactly a feel-good narrative for us Sapiens. With our multiplying numbers, we have wreaked havoc on the environment, wiping out most of the mega-fauna and creating an increasingly artificial environment for ourselves, casting off our symbiotic relationship with nature and sprinting towards “greed and alienation.” (pg. 98).
(pg. 87-88)Harari wrote:One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it. . . . Over the last few decades, we have invented countless time saving machines that are supposed to make like more relaxed - washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. . . . We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.
Of course, Avatar didn't give the impression that life was particularly hard for those hunter-gatherers, which we can be sure it was for most humans in pre-Neolithic times. That doesn't mean that the people weren't happy. But the evidence pertaining to quality of life for those simple groups seems to be mixed, and we can be certain that there was a wide variation according to what the environment offered. Some evidence from h-g groups that persisted into modern times indicates high levels of violent death. Pinker cites some of this in Our Better Angels. When we did settle down, it probably wasn't the case that bad effects ensued right away, and there could even have been some paradisiacal societies. Herman Melville writes of his experience a with South Seas tribe that held him in very plush captivity for a time.geo wrote:The movie Avatar seems a pretty good allegory for the Sapiens story. It depicts the indigenous species of the planet in harmony with nature, while showing humans as invaders intent only on pillaging the planet’s natural resources. I have read that many fans experienced depression after seeing the film because it only underscores our alienation with nature. People saw that we could be living in a completely different world than the one we actually do live in. We miss the communal experience of our previous hunter-gatherer existence, although I’m sure we do create a rosy picture of the past. Still, I often wonder if the Fall depicted in the Bible and the myth of a past Golden Age really are about the onset of this neolithic period—the Agricultural Revolution—when humans turned away from a hunter-gatherer existence and started to embrace agriculture. Did we kick ourselves out of the Garden?
The Romantics might have been reviving the Greek and Roman pastoral tradition, in part. For the English of the 19th Century, the cause was more urgent and wasn't so much about agriculture as it was about the industrial revolution wiping away the innocence of the earlier farming traditions. So Blake condemned the appearance of "dark Satanic mills."The Romantics of English literature often use a pastoral motif, alluding to a past when humans spent their time peacefully roaming about the countryside, minding the flocks and playing their pipes. Blake, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, to name a few, drew on the pastoral tradition to reveal such trappings of modernity and lament our alienation from the natural world. It seems to me this points to a transitional point somewhere between hunter-gatherer phase and complete submission to the toils of the Agricultural Revolution, though the poets in pre-Victorian times were well aware that the myth of a golden pastoral age was just that—a myth.
If you happen to be out of range of that breakneck rushing around for a couple of weeks, it does come as a shock to experience it again. One big difference these days is that people don't live locally much anymore. Our homes tend to be centers for media and we often work and socialize far away. So we're always on the move to somewhere else.If you look around at today’s world, especially if you have to drive on a six-lane highway around Atlanta or Miami or Boston, you have to wonder, what the hell went wrong with us? Is this the world we wanted to create? I don't think so. We have probably made many Faustian bargains on our way to the top, and we are still making them.
Artificial, from "artifice", is the point. Humans are the animals who make their environment. Alienation is built in.geo wrote:With our multiplying numbers, we have wreaked havoc on the environment, wiping out most of the mega-fauna and creating an increasingly artificial environment for ourselves, casting off our symbiotic relationship with nature and sprinting towards “greed and alienation.” (pg. 98).
In college I did a paper on child-rearing in communes, mainly the Israeli kibbutzim. The one thing the investigators could agree on was that the children raised as a cohort with each other as the main source of stability was that they were very tight, and resented the brainy, studious kids who made the others look bad. Not that this is all that different from kids raised in their own home, of course.geo wrote:We miss the communal experience of our previous hunter-gatherer existence, although I’m sure we do create a rosy picture of the past.
I think his schtick is pointing out unsuspected effects of what we call "progress". For the most part we have always assumed that it was progress when homo sapiens finished off Neanderthals. And maybe it was, but it's worth examining the assumption. For the longest time, the side effects of agriculture were pretty much ignored, and the greater amount of food was seen as an obvious good. And maybe it was, but it's worth examining the assumption.geo wrote:If you look around at today’s world, especially if you have to drive on a six-lane highway around Atlanta or Miami or Boston, you have to wonder, what the hell went wrong with us? Is this the world we wanted to create? I don't think so. We have probably made many Faustian bargains on our way to the top, and we are still making them.
And that’s my takeaway so far, which Harari does allude to several times. We have given up a lot in order to support the 7.62 billion souls that currently live on our planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were already past our planet’s carrying capacity.
I was struck by Harari's claim that child mortality went up considerably, with the advent of agriculture and settlements. He has some explanations, and they make some sense, but I would still like to see a closer examination of the evidence. Is it, for example, just a result of the higher percentage of the population who are young, which is what you get when you increase birth rates and shorten the time between births? Is it due to children who die in agricultural societies being buried close to parents, so they are more likely to show up in an archaeological dig?DWill wrote: Of course, Avatar didn't give the impression that life was particularly hard for those hunter-gatherers, which we can be sure it was for most humans in pre-Neolithic times. That doesn't mean that the people weren't happy. But the evidence pertaining to quality of life for those simple groups seems to be mixed, and we can be certain that there was a wide variation according to what the environment offered. Some evidence from h-g groups that persisted into modern times indicates high levels of violent death. Pinker cites some of this in Our Better Angels.
Interesting. We usually teach about good and bad sides of specialization, with greater productivity but more boredom and alienation. I don't think variety of stakeholders is the main problem with assessing the costs or benefits of globalization and standardization: the blessings are mixed and it is hard for even a single individual to decide if, on balance, it was helpful or harmful.DWill wrote:Harari is good at bringing things to attention that escape our notice, perhaps proving the truism that the hardest things to see are those right before our faces. Is a kind of standardization or simplification inherent in the march of history? Although we often look at our world as burgeoning in complexity, from a certain angle it seems that complexity, or at least diversity of all kinds, is being winnowed out. Languages are lost (as many as 250 in Australia alone); species die off by the thousands; cultures become more similar with globalization. One world, the Star Trek utopia, could actually be a reality in a couple hundred years. It's impossible to say whether this is good or bad; there are too many stakeholders who each may have their own subjective argument.
Yes, toxic knowledge has become one of my stalking horses. Maybe toxic ignorance is worse, but there do seem to be some kinds of knowledge we are better off not knowing.DWill wrote:There do seem to be inventions that acquire overwhelming force such that they seem to take individual decision out of the picture.
More to the point, people's "elitism" drives much of the "advancement" which then turns out to strike back at us. People's apparent need to feel superior to others has put inventiveness and advancement on steroids. And individual conscience seems vastly inadequate to the task of restraining the bad consequences. But of course the whole psychology of defining identity by comparisons is guaranteed to make a zero-sum game (or a Red Queen's race, if you prefer) of the whole thing.DWill wrote:But I also have to believe that someone was pulling the strings, taking positive advantage of these new plants and animals. Maybe it was the dreaded elites that made it all happen.
Or maybe to preserve deep knowledge of climate and seasons. See the "Memory Code" thread by Robert Tulip.DWill wrote:I found it interesting that after trying to convince us that "the agricultural revolution was a trap" (83), Harari brings in a theory that puts agriculture at the service of Sapiens' religious needs. In other words, people were motivated to accumulate food surpluses so that they could feed the large groups needed to build monuments to gods. He is not dogmatic, which I appreciate.
Maybe, but some of the small-scale cruelties like blinding pigs seem to have sprung up without any market incentives. Let's not forget that we are talking about "making friends" with animals, including providing them with food, so that we can eat them. Whether or not Harari is a vegetarian, you have to get that this is a relationship of dominance and exploitation, creating or using such impulses in human biology and culture. Before we enslaved other humans, we "mastered" other creatures.DWill wrote:I won't get into this next point too deeply, but I suspect Harari is vegetarian. He devotes a good amount of space to the abhorrent cruelty of what we have called factory farming, getting ahead of himself chronologically. We might assume that early on, domestication of animals didn't brutalize them quite so much as what occurred with the second agricultural revolution many centuries later.
Harari is getting rather too much mileage out of his classification of abstractions as "fiction" and "myth." He is implying that someone thought up a good plan for a social order, invented a myth, and everybody else said, "Cool, wish I'd thought of it" and fell in line. The truth is that his "fictions" are descriptions of a plan or order which people follow, or can understand based on what they are already doing and so are almost following.DWill wrote: In the "Building Pyramids" section, Harari expands on his notion of Sapiens fictive ability. At this point in the development of societies, more elaborate fictions were needed to keep larger populations under the sway of central authority, which essentially extended the reach of the tribe. We can probably assume that in the small hunter bands, cohesion--tribalism-- was provided mostly by the physical close contact of members of the group, with a lesser role for myths that encouraged everyone to fall in line. We use the word tribalism a lot today to describe our fractured society, but I wonder how similar this condition is to that of literal tribes.
Harari talks about the imagined orders that Sapiens invented to regulate society. These are a mix of religion and politics, religion providing the base for the political order, as with Hammurabi's code. Harari compares Hammurabi's imagined order, or myth, with that of our Declaration of Independence and finds them equally mythical. That each class of person in a society has a worth that can be expressed in money terms is no more mythical than all persons being created as equals.