September 5 Logical Fallacies and Signal Phrase review; Go over Sapiens to page 159. Homework #4 for next class: Turn in tentative thesis.
September 10 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write introduction and thesis paragraph.
September 12 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write 3 supporting paragraphs, your counterargument-rebuttal paragraph, and your conclusion.
September 17 Essay 1 Due on turnitin
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 and Outline
Harari makes a persuasive case that the AR has been a curse to Sapiens evidenced by __________________, ________________, ____________________, and ______________________.
Contrary Thesis
While Harari's observations about the AR are true and self-evident, he fails to persuade us to stay in the cave, to glorify foraging, and to embrace ignorance in the face of the human drive for innovation, which made the AR inevitable.
Another Contrary Thesis
While Harari does an excellent job of showing the liabilities of the AR, his suggestion that Foragers lived in a relative paradise is myth-making of its own right that fails to account the brutalities of hunters and gatherers.
Paragraph 1: Introduction explains the differences between foragers and inhabitants of the AR.
Paragraph 2: Thesis or claim
Paragraphs 3-6: Supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 7: Counterargument-rebuttal
Paragraph 8: Conclusion is powerful restatement of thesis
Counterarguments: Noble Savage Myth
Possible counterarguments in Quillette: “Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer” by William Buckner
Excerpt
But what about egalitarianism? In a 2004 study, Michael Gurven marshals an impressive amount of cross-cultural data and notes that hunters tend to keep more of their kill for themselves and their families than they share with others.12 While there is undeniably a great deal of sharing across hunter-gatherer societies, common notions of generalized equality are greatly overstated. Even in circumstances where hunters give away more of their meat than they end up receiving from others in return, good hunters tend to be accorded high status, and rewarded with more opportunities to reproduce everywhere the relationship has been studied.13 When taking into account ‘embodied wealth’ such as hunting returns and reproductive success, and ‘relational wealth’ such as the number of exchange and sharing partners, Alden Smith et al. calculated that hunter-gatherer societies have a ‘moderate’ level of inequality, roughly comparable to that of Denmark.14 While this is less inequality than most agricultural societies and nation states, it’s not quite the level of egalitarianism many have come to expect from hunter-gatherers.
In the realm of reproductive success, hunter-gatherers are even more unequal than modern industrialized populations, exhibiting what is called “greater reproductive skew,” with males having significantly larger variance in reproductive success than females.15 Among the Ache of Paraguay, males have over 4 times the variance in reproductive success that females do, which is one of the highest ratios recorded. This means some males end up having lots of children with different women, while a significant number of males end up having none at all. This is reflected in the fact that polygynous marriage is practiced in the majority of hunter-gatherer societies for which there are data. Across these societies, the average age at marriage for females is only 13.8, while the average age at marriage for males is 20.7.16 Rather than defending what would be considered child marriage in contemporary Western societies, anthropologists often omit mentioning this information entirely.
According to anthropologists Douglas Fry and Geneviève Souillac, “Nomadic forager data suggest a human predilection toward equality, including gender equality, in ethos and action,”17 yet the available data do not support this notion in the slightest. On the contrary, in 1978 Robert Tonkinson had found that, among the Mardu hunter-gatherers of Australia, “Mardu men accord themselves greater ritual responsibility, higher status, more power, and more rights than women. It is a society in which male interests generally prevail when rights are contested and in the centrally important arena of religious life.”18 Among the Hiwi of Venezuela, and the Ache of Paraguay, female infants and children are disproportionately victims of infanticide, neglect, and child homicide.19 20 It is in fact quite common in hunter-gatherer societies that are at war, or heavily reliant on male hunting for subsistence, for female infants to be habitually neglected or killed.21 22 In 1931, Knud Rasmussen recorded that, among the Netsilik Inuit, who were almost wholly reliant on male hunting and fishing, out of 96 births from parents he interviewed, 38 girls were killed (nearly 40 percent).23
A related criticism is in Will Day-Brosnan's book review:
Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism. In this section, the bibliography and citations are also problematic, Harari makes claims for which it is difficult to trace a source. For example, he affirms that ‘loneliness and privacy were rare [amongst hunter gatherers]’; that the human population ‘was smaller than that of today’s Cairo’; that the ‘average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes’; and that ‘hunter gatherers living today… work on average for just thirty five to forty five hours a week’ (52-6). If sources for these claims exist, they are very difficult to correlate with the text.
Sample Counterargument and Conclusion
While I love Sapiens as a life-altering book on how I regard the human race, where we came from, where we are today, and where we are going, I am not totally drinking the Noah Yuval Harari Kool-Aid. I in fact agree with those critics who observe that Harari commits a sort of implied Noble Savage Fallacy by suggesting that pre-agriculture society was vastly superior to the evils evident in a post-agricultural state. Ruthless tyrants indeed flourished in the Agriculture Age, but evil “shot-callers” have always been with us. Any microsociety has an Alpha who dominates the others. Where I agree with Harari is that the Agriculture Age scaled this evil because agriculture resulted in a population explosion.
Secondly, it is too late to fret over our morbidly obese, tooth-decayed post-Forager condition. The Genie is out of the bottle, so to speak. Rather than long to run through jungles in animal skins with our ripped bodies, we need to look at how we might flourish in a world sodden with mono-crops and a growing appetite for mass-produced animal flesh. Here, Harari argues that that A.I. might navigate us out of our self-destruction if we don’t kill ourselves first.
In sum, Harari’s Sapiens is a masterpiece, an unflinching critique of our violent and irrational appetites, our grand imagination, and our drive for dominance, which may or may not spell our demise.
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.
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.
Contrary Thesis
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.
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."
Essay Guidelines:
About 80% of your essay should be written in your voice with your words.
Another 20% of your essay will consist of quotations, paraphrase, and summary from the book Sapiens and credible source of your choice. We call this "cited material."
When you introduce your cited material, you must use signal phrases.
Example Link #1
Example Link #2
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Example Link #1
Example Link #2
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
We include the author's background information to give author credibility or ethos in our argumentation.
After we cite the information, we present our own analysis to show how this material supports our argument.
Examples of a signal phrases:
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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