Sapiens Lesson Two
Essay Assignment:
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
Study Questions for Lesson Two
One. Why does Harari call the narrative about human agriculture as a sign of progress a “fantasy” and one of the most stupid myths foisted on society?
For 2.5 million years, foragers lived relatively healthy lives. Then 10,000 years ago, Sapiens learned to “manipulate the lives of a few animal and plant species” with the belief that this domestication of plants and animals would make it easier to produce more fruits, grain, and meat.
But only select areas of the Earth have the climate for agriculture, so that the remaining parts of the Earth are dependent on a small land mass for food.
Secondly, there is no evidence that Sapiens had mastered the “secrets of nature” any better than foragers (79).
In fact, farmers worked harder, longer hours and ate a less nutritious diet than foragers (79).
Foragers were in less danger of starvation and disease (79).
Two. Who or what was guilty of manipulating Sapiens into abandoning a foraging lifestyle for agriculture?
The “culprits” were a “handful” of plants, such as wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Sapiens. A glaring example is that in a few millennia, Sapiens spent night and day tending to wheat all over the world. Their work increased from 5 hours as foragers to three times that much as farmers. They got fat, over exhausted, and malnourished in the process.
Wheat was horrible. It was high maintenance. It was attacked by bugs and rodents. It was greedy for water. It required animal feces for nourishment.
The human body is not meant for farming. All the toil destroyed the body by damaging the spine, creating scoliosis, arthritis, hernias, and a host of other afflictions (80).
Economically, wheat was a disaster. One bad crop or more could destroy a whole family and lead to starvation and destitution.
According to Harari, farming is not a sign of intelligence and evolution. Farming is a sign of stupidity and de-evolution.
The appeal or Faustian Bargain of wheat is that it offered more “food per unit of territory” and therefore allowed massive population expansion of Sapiens (82). We read: “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: The ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
The Agricultural Revolution was not based on a legal fiction or a decision. The Agricultural Revolution was a “trap.” Harari calls it the “Luxury Trap.”
In this trap, babies died more often from disease and malnutrition (less milk and more gruel) but so many more babies were being born that the population continued to grow. Yet life was brutal. In farming societies, 1 in 3 children died before turning 20.
Three. Why did Sapiens continue with the brutal farming life?
Sapiens “could not fathom the full consequences of their decisions.” Likewise, most continue to use smartphones and social media without knowing the effects of these gadgets that are taking up so much of people’s time.
Further, Sapiens drank the wrong Kool-Aid from the adage “If you work harder, you would have a better life.”
Harari observes that it is human nature that once we invest time and effort into something, we resist cutting our losses; rather, we continue to slog ahead in the face of our evident self-destruction and misery. He cites the example of modern day humans working hard to pay for elaborate lifestyles where they cannot afford and suffer immense misery as they try to live beyond their means, yet they cannot or will not choose any other way of life (87).
Harari also observes that domesticating animals led to their widespread misery and we can infer our insensitivity to that misery has compromised who we are morally as human beings with souls (93). There is no comparing the misery of animals domesticated for slaughter with the quick death an animal suffers at the hands of a hunter.
In other words, we were “successful” from an evolutionary standpoint, but we were also compromised. In the words of Harari, “This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution” (96).
Farmers lived in artificial enclaves, were alienated from nature, tortured livestock, and were prone to greed. They also had to constantly fret over future weather conditions whereas foragers could live in the present. Farming created a peasant society, which was an exploited class of people that joined the exploited animals.
Eventually, a myths about agricultural society emerged that glorified “the homeland” and some all-powerful patriarchal god in order to draw tens of thousands to these farming cities and create “mass cooperative networks.” These places use myths to create an “imagined order” as a refuge from life’s chaos even though this “imagined order” may present its own chaos.
Social order is maintained through some religious code of absolute and eternal principles that also establish authority and hierarchy. For example, we can look to the Hammurabi Code, the Ten Commandments, or the Declaration of Independence to refer to “universal and eternal principles of justice,” which Harari argues are neither universal or eternal. Nor are they true. For example, he observes, we are not created; rather, we evolve. In addition, he argues we have no equality because evolution defines us by differences to sameness (109).
So Harari is arguing that a lot of societal myths are designed encourage mass cooperation. Of course, one could argue that this is a manipulation of sorts.
These myths are important because they create a social contract of cooperation, social reciprocity, and condemnation of brutality; in the absence of these myths, hordes of the human race may resort to being the “barbarian throng” that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes feared.
Five. Can myths be eradicated by bloodshed?
The short answer is no. Harari observes that the institution of slavery in the United States based on the myth of white supremacy resulted in the Civil War against forces that rejected the white supremacy myth, but even in the loss of the Civil War, many whites still proudly brandish the Confederate flag, venerate Confederate generals in the form of statues and monuments of various kinds, and hold white supremacy beliefs.
Myths live because their adherents believe they come from God or are an “indisputable law of nature” or a necessary for keeping order or some other deeply held belief that the adherents share with their tribe.
Myths imbue the culture in the form of art, fairy tales, poetry, literature, TV, movies, etc. Look at the Jim Crow Museum on Youtube and you will find how white supremacy saturated American culture with myths of white superiority.
The American myth of the masculine pioneer creates a deeply seated love for guns that does not exist in any other country.
The American myth of “follow your passion” deludes Americans into believing they will have their “dream job” if they are simply “true to themselves and their real inner passion,” when in fact only about 2% of people have a career that could be called their dream job. Most people work jobs to support themselves and their families, and they make the best of it regardless of how unpleasant the job usually is.
The myth of consumerism tells us we cannot be happy unless we work our butts off to buy lots of stuff we don’t need, and the myth works because the majority of people go down Consumer Road and often die there.
The myth of consumerism has infected our notion of marriage so that we desire to experience our spouse as a “consumer experience,” and if the experience is less than our expectations dictate, we are entitled to seek a new consumer experience in the form of a new spouse until “we get it right.”
Six. What is the key question in understanding human history in the millennia after the Agricultural Revolution?
How did humans organize in mass cooperation networks when they lacked the biological instincts, such as ants and bees, to do so?
Humans created “imagined orders and devised scripts” (131).
These scripts created artificial hierarchies or economic and social stratification with Haves and Have-Nots, lords and serfs, royalty and peasants.
Hurari breaks the system down into Superiors, Commoners, and Slaves, and this stratification was reinforced by some “divine code” or other.
People in power and privilege like to talk about “justice and equality” but only as a smokescreen in order to perpetuate their advantage over others.
Political and religious codes, Hurari observes, are canards, deceptions, BS, that the powerful create to pacify and to shut up the masses.
These codes help maintain civil order and control, but they do little to help promote equality and justice.
Social codes, Hurari observes, emphasize purity on one hand and pollution on the other. To scapegoat, marginalize, and eliminate a certain group of people (minorities, women, Jews, gays, to name a few Hurari refers to on page 138), these people are dehumanized by the code.
Hurari points out that the morally repulsive and abhorrent slave trade in America was supported by phony codes that supported ideas of white supremacy and black inferiority in order to get white people to cooperate with the evil system of slavery.
Hurari further points out that many societies created codes that designated women as a man’s property. Universally speaking, humans have made man codes or patriarchal codes because, according one theory, men are more violent and aggressive (154). But in the end, Hurari says no one theory can explain patriarchal systems.
Seven. How does Hurari’s argument above support his larger argument that the Agricultural Revolution is the greatest fraud perpetrated on the human race?
Clearly, exploiting of the less fortunate is part of the social control and mass cooperation, and Hurari makes the case these codes did not exist in forager society; rather, they flourished in the Agricultural Period.
Comments