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?
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.
You must be right that by the time Genesis was recorded, the agricultural lifestyle had become enough of a grind that that a myth was told to explain how humans got into such a fix. It had to have been a punishment!
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.
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."
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.
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.
Now a few random points on this section.
Amazing that with all of our advances in technology and knowledge, "no noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years" (78). 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.
Wouldn't Malthus be amazed, though? Our food supply has provided for the geometric increase in population, due to incredible improvements in productivity. To have so few people in modern societies even tangentially involved in food production is astounding. We do not know if this system is sustainable over the long haul, though.
Why are humans so smart? Don't thank civilization, made possible by the agricultural revolution, despite our universities. Thank the hundreds of thousands of years we spent as hunters and foragers, during which almost everyone needed to know everything that was essential for survival. Today each of us benefits from an encompassing safety net that enables us to be competent in minute aspects of life that we've invented over a few millennia.
Harari's idea that wheat, rice, and potatoes domesticated humans is provocative. It's an interesting thought experiment to entertain--wheat using humans to spread its genes from a restricted area in the Mideast to worldwide. This reminds me of meme theory. A meme doesn't care whether its spread benefits the host, which is just Harari's point about wheat and other domesticated plants--the lifestyle they required didn't benefit most people. I guess I can halfway agree with Harari's thinking. There do seem to be inventions that acquire overwhelming force such that they seem to take individual decision out of the picture. 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 humans all along were seeking ways to accumulate wealth, finding it hard to do in hunter bands (you can't take it with you), but much easier when you could stay put. Grain was among the first currencies. The one certainty Harari gives us on this transition to farming is that it made us perhaps the most successful species of all time, if success is earned by creating billions of copies of ourselves.
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.
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.