2-26 We will cover arguments for or against Agricultural Revolution ( no peer edit)
2-28 No essay due because it's due March 1 at 11:59 p.m. No homework today. We will look at essay #2 options. If we have time, we will look at essay topic from Hasan Minhaj. We will examine logical fallacies. We will watch Harari’s Ted Talk “Bananas from Heaven.” We will review top 20 grammar errors.
Homework #4 for 3-5: Read Sapiens, pages 163-187, and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the development of money.
Mediocre Informative Thesis for Option A
Humans separated from other mammals through the Cognitive Revolution because humans have superior language skills, a propensity for gossip, and a capacity to share common legal fictions.
The above is too factual and too self-evident.
Improved Argumentative Thesis Statements
The very shared legal fictions that allow us to cooperate on a mass level and dominate other creatures is the same drive that will lead to humans' demise.
While humans are superior to other animals due to their capacity to share imagined stories, these imagined stories have been largely used for evil: slavery, racism, and structural inequality.
Humans' competing legal fictions are coming to a head in the democratic and authoritarian story. According to Timothy Snyder, author of The Road to Unfreedom, the story of inevitability is at war with the story of eternity. This war could lead to the world's destruction.
We can see in the context of Sapiens that without a strong story to believe in, humans cannot attain any kind of success.
Harari's claim that shared fictions created a Cognitive Revolution is too obvious to be worthy of merit. He is simply stating what is self-evident, that humans, unlike other animals, rely on abstractions and language to form societies. To make a fuss over Harari's book is to be ignorant of an already shared understanding of human history.
Feel free to compare Agricultural Revolution to Workism as defined in Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Millennials Miserable."
Sample Thesis and Mapping Components for Your Body Paragraphs
In Derek Thompson's insightful essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Millennials Miserable," we see there are parallels between the false promises of the Agricultural Revolution and Work Worship (Workism): manipulating workers to work harder by celebrating overwork resulting in the workers' demise; making self-worth and identity dependent on the job; becoming a cog in the machine of structural inequality; embracing the false promise of finding life meaning through work; crashing into a state of job burnout resulting in mind-numbing "zombification"; forgetting the value of free time and not knowing how to enjoy free time.
Choice A
Develop an argumentative thesis about Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution.
Importance of Counterarguments:
You need a counterargument section to show that you have submitted your thesis to rigorous opposition. This makes you seem more credible and persuasive.
You can find counterarguments for Harari's notion of Cognitive and Agricultural Revolution in C.R. Hallpike essay "A Response to Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind."
Sample Refutation Thesis
C.R. Hallpike's essay "A Response to Yuval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is an attempt to discredit Harari, but Hallpike's critique is too larded with Straw Man, non sequitur, semantic, faulty comparison, and other logical fallacies to be persuasive.
Here is an excerpt that challenges Harari's notion of legal fictions with my interjections:
"Did the Move From Hunter-Gatherer Life Make Us Better Off?" by Milovan
Excerpt:
However, Gray makes some interesting points when trying to show that move from hunter-gathering to farming actually didn’t bring improvement in some key areas of life such as freedom or well-being.
We think of the Stone Age as an era of poverty and the Neolithic as a great leap forward. In fact the move from hunter-gathering to farming brought no overall gain in human well-being or freedom. It enabled larger numbers to live poorer lives. Almost certainly, Paleolithic humanity was better off.
…
Hunter-gatherers normally have enough for their needs; they do not have to work to accumulate more. In the eyes of those for whom wealth means having an abundance of objects, the hunter-gathering life must look like poverty. From another angle it can be seen as freedom: ‘We are inclined to think of hunter-gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free,’ writes Marshall Sahlins.
…
The move from hunter-gathering to farming harmed health and life expectancy. Even today, the hunter-gatherers of the Arctic and the Kalahari have better diets than poor people in rich countries – and much better than those of many people in so-called developing countries. More of the world’s population is chronically undernourished today than in the Old Stone Age.The shift from hunter-gathering to farming was not only bad for health. It greatly increased the burden of work. The hunter-gatherers of the Old Stone Age may not have lived as long as we do, but they had a more leisurely existence than most people today. Farming increased the power of humans over the Earth. At the same time it impoverished those who turned to it.
How Humans Ended up in This Trap?
Yuval Noah Harari tries to explain how humans ended up in a trap that came with farming and settling up. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari explains how plants, such as wheat, domesticated Homo Sapiens rather than vice versa. He calls agricultural revolution the History’s biggest fraud.
The irony of the story is that wheat manipulated Homo Sapiens to its advantage. According to Harari, the wheat didn’t give people economic security, because the life of a peasant is less secure than that of the hunter-gatherer. Nor did wheat offer security against human violence – “The early farmers were at least as violent as their forager ancestors, if not more so”.
Humans became slowly more and more trapped in the way of life that wheat brought to them. The change happened in stages, each of which involved just a small alteration in daily life. And when looked from a broader perspective, the state into which people ended up is a giant trap.
Here is how Harari explains the mechanism by which this trap evolved:
One of history’s few 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.
…
The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.And finally, this decision is just another one in a series in which humans couldn’t predict the overall effect it will bring to them.
Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life.
That was the plan.So Are We Better off Today Than We Were Back in the Paleolithic Age?
Let’s go back to the question from the title of this article. Aren’t we better off today than we were back in Paleolithic times?
One of the pillars of the myth of human progress is certainly the idea of human freedom. A man who is free to choose is a free man. And if we turn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he claims that “a man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”
Leaving aside the claim that “man is born free”, what do we make of the cult of freedom itself? Is freedom what makes us human? Is freedom of conscious choice what makes us superior, better than animals?
In The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom, Gray goes back to Heinrich von Kleist and retells some points of Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre”. In the essay, Kleist builds a story about a man (called Herr C.) who says that he is “aware of the damage done by consciousness to the natural grace of the human being.”
According to Herr C., both puppets and animals are freer than human beings. And that is because neither the beasts nor the puppets are cursed with self-reflective thought. And precisely because of that they are free. They do not labor under the burden of choice.
For Kleist,
freedom is not simply a relationship between human beings: it is, above all, a state of the soul in which conflict has been left behind.
So where does the journey of scientific progress and human beings conquering their freedom ends? Where will our freedom to choose ultimately lead us?
According to Kleist, one of the two outcomes will occur:
Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.
"The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" by Jared Diamond (with Interjections)
Fallacy of Steady Progress
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. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence. At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
False Assumptions about Hunters and Gatherers
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.
Seduced by False Promise of Agriculture
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?
The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. 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?"
Farming = Inferior Nutrition and Compromised Health and Longevity
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunter-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."
Hunter's Varied Diet Vs. Farmer's Mono Crop Diet
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants — wheat, rice, and corn — provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.
Deep Class Divisions and Exploitation from Farming
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
Women Exploited in Farming
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts -- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
Thus with the advent of agriculture the elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
Farming = Higher Population But Inferior Life Quality (Might Makes Right)
One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.
At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunters Win in the Test of Time (12 Midnight to 11:54 p.m.)
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?
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. They were self-sufficient, they didn't work a repetitive, mundane job, they didn't have an exploitative boss, they didn't live in societies defined by mass economic and social stratification with a few Haves and a majority of Have-Nots, they didn't succumb to the health problems of an agricultural diet.
Things Changed
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.
Inequality
Farming had prime areas so that people flocked to those geographical areas, causing crowding in those cities. Non-farming areas became dependent on farmed food for their survival.
Secondly, there is no evidence that Sapiens had mastered the “secrets of nature” any better than foragers (79).
Farmers Worked Harder to Get Less Nutrition
In fact, farmers worked harder, longer hours and ate a less nutritious diet than foragers (79).
Let's look at the equation again: Farming requires more time and more work to get less nutrition. This data could be used as evidence in a thesis that supports Harari's claim that Agricultural Revolution (AR) is a fraud and a delusion perpetrated on society.
Foragers were in less danger of starvation and disease (79).
Foragers
In many ways, foragers had a “more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle” than industrial Sapiens. In affluent societies today, people work 45 hours a week with little free time and few friends, are full of stress, and overworked to deal with declining real wages. In developing countries, people today may work 80 hours a week and are essentially work bots.
In contrast, foragers had leisure time with one another and worked maybe 3-6 hours a day (50).
Foragers had a more diverse, nutritious diet as opposed to a diet of monocrops, same crops, and same food for farmers. Today, we load up on processed food and sugar.
Of course, Harari points out, foragers often led short, brutish lives, often rife with infanticide and similar atrocities, but on balance their lives could be richer and more affluent than the lifestyles of those in Agricultural and Industrial Periods.
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.
Failure of Critical Thinking
To allow wheat to ruin society because it's supposed to be the best life attainable shows a flagrant absence of critical thinking. Slavish devotion to a principle that has no justification for existence is the opposite of critical thinking. It's living life in autopilot.
Farming is sign of stupidity and de-evolution.
According to Harari, farming is not a sign of intelligence and evolution. Farming is a sign of stupidity and de-evolution.
Keeping More People Alive in More Concentrated Areas Under Worse Conditions
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.” I would call it the False Luxury Trap because I don't see any luxury.
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.”
Being unable to fathom the consequences of our decisions leads to our demise. Take, for example, that most people continue to use smartphones and social media without knowing the effects of these gadgets that are taking up so much of people’s time. Gadgets hack our brain to our loss of free will.
The Lie of Working Harder Equals a Better Life
Another lie of agricultural age: Sapiens drank the wrong Kool-Aid from the adage “If you work harder, you would have a better life.”
With agriculture, we cannot cut our losses:
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).
Animals Suffer More as Livestock Than as Prey
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.
Agriculture Made Us a Degraded Version of Ourselves
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).
Life of Farmers Was Hideous
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.
Myths that feed the lie of agriculture:
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.
Review of How Humans Were Degraded:
Farmers had to work more for less nutrition.
More people lived in concentrated areas under worse living conditions.
More people bought into AR as best way of life possible in spite of contrary evidence because of powerful mythology of the "homeland" and other shared collective delusions of the imagination (thank you, Cognitive Revolution).
Working harder to become a better person became the work ethic, all based on a lie.
Animals underwent mass suffering as livestock (think factory farming) instead of prey.
AR encouraged greed and economic stratification.
Farmers lived in artificial enclaves and homes.
Farmers were alienated from nature resulted in lost self-sufficiency.
Farmers tortured livestock.
Farmers now had to constantly fret over future weather conditions whereas foragers could live in the present.
Farmers created a peasant society, which was an exploited class of people that joined the exploited animals.
Five. Can myths be eradicated by bloodshed?
The short answer is no.
Even after a tribe loses a war, it clings to its false myth. For example, 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. Such people embrace what is called the false religion of The Lost Cause. Even after losing a war, such people cling to a racist ideology that gives them identity and meaning based on tribalistic narcissism.
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.
Dangerous Myths That Persist
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.
Sample Thesis Statements
Concurring with Harari, I propose that the Agricultural Revolution was the Mother of structural inequality, racism, and sexism, all wrapped in an inferior diet and lifestyle so that in total the AR was a curse to the human race.
Harari, McMahon, and others are guilty of scapegoating the AR when in fact human evil is such that structural inequality, racism, and sexism exist in all human lifestyles. It's just that AR exploded the human population so that evil grew on a mass scale.
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