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.
Essay Options Dovetail into 1
Whether we address Cognitive or Agricultural Revolution for Essay #1, both topics deal with our strength and vulnerability.
Our strength is the power of our collective imagination to cooperate in the service of world domination.
Our vulnerability is the power of deception to manipulate us so that we are fooled into believing we are acting in our best interests when in fact we are shooting off our own foot.
Agricultural Revolution and Workism both are collective movements that lead to innovation AND self-destruction.
It seems effective essays will address this double-edged sword of "human progress."
When we are deceived into believing less is more for Essay Option #1:
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.
Secret Sauce for Option 1: Find a mass movement that leads to our destruction so that your essay will have a specific example:
social media
Workism
Slavery and Jim Crow fueled by white supremacist "Lost Cause" ideology ( a great book on this topic is award-winning Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi; Guardian book review; Washington Post book review; History book review)
Secret Sauce for Option 2: Counterarguments (2 is good)
Example: If you're arguing that the AR is a fraud, you need to anticipate your opponents' counterarguments.
Possible Objections for Your Counterargument Section
One. Yes, agricultural society was brutal and unjust so was life for H&Gs.
Two. The birth rate exploded during the AR compared to the H&G Period. What's that tell you?
Three. You can't stop progress. Humans will always march forward.
Four. H&G's couldn't store food for times of scarcity.
"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.
Harari 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, Harari 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, Harari 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 Harari refers to on page 138), these people are dehumanized by the code.
Harari 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.
Harari 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, Harari says no one theory can explain patriarchal systems.
Seven. How does Harari’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 Harari 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.
Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael (featuring talking gorilla) support Harari:
One. What was the consequence of Sapiens’ evolution to tools, social ties, making fire, and ascent to top of the food chain?
We became, in the words of Daniel Quinn, “Takers,” wreaking havoc on the ecological system.
There were just about a million of us in East Africa in the beginning. Today, we’ve eclipsed 7 billion, and we’re so overpopulated it’s hard, for example, to find housing in Los Angeles.
Sapiens’ brain power and social bonding apparently made them more cunning warriors than their different populations, such as Neanderthals, and this resulted in genocide or interbreeding or both.
Over 70,000 years Sapiens “have conquered the globe.”
From Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
One. We are in captivity to mythologies and stories that shape our identity, purpose, and behavior.
Two. Fictions, as Yuval Noah Harari tells us, separate Sapiens from other creatures.
Three. We absorb these stories from “Mother Culture” from our youth so that we embrace their systems and rules without questioning it.
Four. Takers are post-Agriculture. Leavers are foragers (41). Their lives are governed by radically different fictions.
Five. “Culture is people enacting a story” (43).
Creation Myth Destroys the World
Six. What is the “creation myth” that is destroying the world? That the world was created for man. Man is entitled to use the planet as a vast resource for his pleasure.
Seven. Agriculture made man the dominant species.
Eight. Agriculture gave birth to culture, to the story that that Earth is for mankind to take (73).
This story “casts mankind as the enemy of the world” (80).
Nine. Agriculture Gives Us Unbridled Man Hellbent on Destruction of the Earth
In Ishmael we read:
“Man was at last free of all those restraints that . . . The limitations of the hunting-gathering life had kept man in check for three million years. With agriculture, those limitations vanished, and his rise was meteoric. Settlement gave rise to division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. With the rise of technology came trade and commerce. With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science, and all the rest. The whole was under way at last, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
But in spite of man’s mastery, he cannot restrain himself in ways that will save the planet from his own ruin and self-destruction.
His blindness to his defects combined with his unbridled appetites, greed, and rapacity combine to make his own undoing.
Ten. Taker culture relies on the stories of religious prophets to propel its worldview and its narrative; in contrast, Leavers don’t rely on prophets.
The prophet stories tend to be hopeless in terms of life on this world: They give a “story of hopelessness and futility, a story in which there is literally nothing to be done. Man is flawed, so he keeps on screwing up what should be paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t know how to live so as to stop screwing up paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about that. So there you are, rushing headlong toward catastrophe, and all you can do is watch it come” (95).
Eleven. Taker Culture is Narcissistic
Takers believe they are exceptions to Laws of Nature because they are the “end product” and center of creations. All their religious writings say so. In this regard, their religious writings reinforce their childish, narcissistic view of the world and themselves. This is the view that both Daniel Quinn and Yuval Noah Harari have of religion.
Could it be that they are taking the worst of Taker society and asking us to see it as the generalization that fails to address the complexities of post-Agricultural society?
Ten things I hated about the first half of Ishmael
by Allen B. Downey
I have a standard deal with my students that if they recommend a book to me, I will read it. One of my students recommended Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, which turned out to be my least favorite book ever.
After the first half, I jotted down some of the reasons why. Here is a list of problems I have with the book, most of which are either logical fallacies or just rhetorical stunts that annoy me.
- replacing the progress fallacy with the doomsday fallacy
Quinn argues against the assumption that things are necessarily getting better, but he commits the opposite error, the assumption that things are necessarily getting worse.
It is almost certain that some things are getting better and some worse. If Quinn wants to make the argument that we are headed for an environmental doomsday, he has to make the argument empirically.
- poisoning the well
Pointing out the influence of culture on our thinking, Quinn sets up a ready answer for anyone who disagrees with him: the opponent is blinded by culture!
Of course it is important to be skeptical of conventional wisdom, but we are no better off rejecting blindly what "Mother Culture" tells us than we would be accepting it blindly.
- the meta fallacy
When someone produces a meta-x, they often pretend it is not, itself, an x. For example, when a news story gets hyped out of proportion, some reporters start covering the hype as if it were a story. They think their meta-hype is better than the hype, but it's not.
Similarly, Quinn tries to place himself outside culture in order to create meta-culture, but he can't. He is just as much a victim of "Mother Culture" as the rest of us, and his book is just another piece of it.
In fact, this kind of work has become a genre! Another book in the category is "Mutant Message from Down Under," in which the author uses the rhetorical device of being kidnapped by Australian aborigines to give herself a voice apparently outside the culture of civilization. Quinn uses a telepathic gorilla, but its the same device with the same deceptive intent.
- the naturalist fallacy
There aren't many ideas in philosophy that are universally accepted. The one that comes the closest is the maxim that you can't get "ought" from "is." In other words, you can't derive an ethical system from empirical observation.
Historically, there have been lots of people that tried, and the results have been universally disastrous.
Quinn attacks this view straight on, arguing that there is a law that all species (except humans) follow, and that we can figure out what this law is empirically.
He fails on two fronts: the law he presents is empirically false, and even if it were true, it still wouldn't make it possible to know what we should do. At best, it would help us predict the consequences of our actions, but that is not sufficient to derive an ethical system.
Why do I say his law is empirically false? Well, one counterexample is trees. Trees are engaged in a internecine competition for sunlight in which they squander resources on preposterously long trunks, deprive other species of their food source, and poison their environments to eliminate competitors. Ever look at the floor of a dense pine forest? Nothing but pine needles.
- the Lorax fallacy
Quoth the Lorax, "I am the Lorax, and I speak for the trees!" To which I reply (1) what makes you think you know what the trees want, and (2) what makes the trees so special?
It is probably wrong to assume that nature has intent, but in any case it is ridiculous to presume that we know what its intent is. To see how ridiculous this is, consider the unpublished first draft of "The Lorax," in which another irritating troll appears and shouts, "I am the Borax, and I speak for the grass, and I say, chop down those trees -- they're blocking all the sun."
Then, "Wait! I am the Snorax, and I speak for the dung beetles, and I say, please breed enormous numbers of cattle."
Then, "I am the Thorax, and I speak for the slime molds, and I say, please make big piles of decaying organic matter."
And so on. You can see why it wasn't a big hit.
- the biocentrism fallacy
Quinn argues against anthrocentrism, the view that the universe was made for humans and that we have the right to do what we want with it.
The alternative is biocentrism, an ethical system in which animals and other parts of nature have rights as well. It is often (wrongly) assumed that an ethical system that extends rights to more entities is morally superior to one that is more stingy.
Of course, we already extend some rights to some animals, and we could extend more rights to more animals, but that does not change the fact that (a) we're still the ones extending the rights and it's still our choice, and (b) we would still be in the position of trying to figure out the intent of nature, if there is one.
Anthrocentrism may seem self-centered, but there is no sensible alternative.
- inconsistency regarding the role of humans
Sometimes Quinn considers humans part of the natural world, sometimes not, as it serves him.
Where this error hurts his argument the most is his claim that all species that follow the law live forever, environmental conditions permitting. What "environmental conditions" is he talking about? He seems to mean the abiotic environment, but that's absurd. For every species, "the environment" includes every other species. I am not sure, but I would guess that of all the species that have become extinct (for reasons that have nothing to do with humans) the vast majority have been wiped out because of other species (too many competitors, too little prey) rather than the abiotic environment.
Humans are part of the environment, and every species that has been wiped out by human activity has been wiped out by "environmental conditions." Quinn's distinction in this case between natural causes and human activities is contrary to his argument in the rest of the book that humans are part of nature.
- identification of science as a form of mythology
Quinn stamps the current scientific understanding of the origin of the universe as mythology. He pulls this stunt with a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
He offers an anthrocentric story of creation and then rejects it because it is anthrocentric. In fact, the narrator was invited to offer an explanation of "how things came to be this way" in an environment that was completely surrounded by human artifacts. It was perfectly reasonable to explain such an environment by focusing on the human activity that led this to be "this way."
In any case, telling and rejecting an antrocentric version of the origin of the universe does not undermine the claim that our scientific understanding is qualitatively different from the stories we usually label mythology. Specifically, if representatives from two cultures with different creation myths met, there is nothing one could say or do to persuade the other to adopt a new myth (at least not rationally).
By contrast, there is a lot we can do to convince someone to adopt the scientific view --- in fact, millions of people, raised to believe some version of Genesis, have come to adopt the scientific view on the basis of evidence and reason.
- ignorance of evidence
When Quinn bothers to present empirical evidence for his position, it is almost always false. I already mentioned one biological error, the claim that no other species competes with other species the way humans do. I'm not a biologist, but I thought of 10 counter-examples before I turned the page. I already mentioned trees. What about the mold that produces penicillin? Simians that kill members of other species for sport, and members of their own species for social standing or mating privilege? Beavers that wreak environmental havok to build safe housing?
Species evolve mechanisms and behaviors that allow them to survive (more precisely, the ones that didn't aren't around). Quinn observes, rightly, that most of these mechanisms are peaceful, but that's because non-violence is generally a good survival strategy, not because the species are following laws. There are exceptions throughout nature, including some aspects of human behavior.
As for the economic relationship between population and food supply, Quinn gives a half-hearted voice to some 19th century ideas, but seems oblivious to a century of subsequent work. His model is absurdly simple and provably false.
I don't know as much about anthropology, but many of Quinn's claims are contrary to what little I know. Judging by his track record, I am hardly inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt
- ugly misanthropy
The population crisis is a serious and difficult problem. Its central questions are
(a) if we keep doing what we're doing, will the population grow to a level that is either unsupportable or supportable only with an unacceptable quality of life?
(b) if so, is there something different we can do that will lead to a smaller population and a better quality of life?
The first is an empirical question. The only way to answer it is by using evidence and reason as best we can. Quinn has no interest in evidence or reason -- he just assumes that he knows the answer.
The second is an ethical question. Obviously there are a lot of things we can do to reduce the population. The hard part is finding one that actually makes things better.
To do that, we have to think about ethics. If there is, in fact, a population crisis, then it makes a lot of traditional ethical problems harder. For example, saving a life becomes an alloyed victory.
The problem, of course, is that once the sanctity of human life is off the table, the table becomes slippery and steep in every direction. Finding an acceptable ethical system in that context is a hard problem.
Quinn's misanthropy is a lazy, ugly solution. We can do better.
Recognizing Logical Fallacies
Begging the Question
Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.
Major Premise: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy.
Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Lexus GS350.
Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.
Circular Reasoning
Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.
Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.
Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.
Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.
Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.
I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.
I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time-consuming.
I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.
I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.
Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison
Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.
A toxic relationship is like cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).
Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)
Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)
Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)
“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”
A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not a personal attack.
“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”
Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.
“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”
Straw Man Fallacy
You twist and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.
“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”
Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)
“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”
“I’ve met three Americans with false British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all Americans, such as Madonna, who contrive British accents are annoying.” Perhaps some Americans do so ironically and as a result are more funny than annoying.
Either/Or Fallacy
There are only two choices to an issue is an over simplification and an either/or fallacy.
“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”
“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”
“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”
“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is everyday foreign policy.)
“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”
“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”
Equivocation
Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.
“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”
“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”
The seller is equivocating.
“I told you to be in bed by ten.”
“I thought you meant to be home by ten.”
“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”
“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”
“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”
“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”
Red Herring Fallacy
This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.
“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”
“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”
“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”
Slippery Slope Fallacy
We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.
“If we allow gay marriage, we’ll have to allow people to marry gorillas.”
“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored.”
Appeal to Authority
Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.
Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.
Tradition Fallacy
“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”
“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be.”
Misuse of Statistics
Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.
“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).
“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in a home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)
Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation
Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?
The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?
You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?
You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it a placebo effect?)
Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)
The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.
Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.
McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.
Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.
Bandwagon Fallacy
Because everyone believes something, it must be right.
“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”
“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral.”
Choice A
Develop an argumentative thesis about Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution.
Choice B
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Sample Thesis Statements for Choice A
Mediocre Informative Thesis
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.
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.
Spending one's life eating HomeTown Buffet and being a zombie in your mother's basement as you check your social media status and watch Netflix is the shared dream of Slovenly Hedonism. Therefore, having a shared dream can ruin your life. It's not the shared dreams that makes us successful but our ability to use our metacognition combined with our capacity to choose a worthy dream that separates successful humans from failed ones.
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.
Choice B
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
Sample Thesis Statements
While Harari's claim about humanity being slaves to wheat is provocative and contains some truth, such a claim is too sweeping and reductionist to be a persuasive refutation of the Agricultural Revolution.
Harari's claim that Agricultural Revolution perpetrated a colossal fraud on the human race is persuasive when we consider that this revolution scaled human evil to new forms: slavery, serf society, the brutalities of livestock slaughter, longer work hours, an inferior diet, hordes of people living helplessly in fabricated domiciles, and exploitive hierarchy systems.
While Harari's refutation of the Agricultural Revolution has some compelling points, his book Sapiens is a fraud because it is a thinly veiled anti-religious screed.
While there is some truth to Harari's refutation of the Agricultural Revolution, his overall argument is shoddy, pathetic, and unconvincing when we consider that he relies too much on speculation, over generalization, and his bull-headed ignorance of tribal societies and some of farming's advantages for developing more complex, sophisticated societies.
