March 3 Cover the Agricultural Revolution. Homework #5: Read Sapiens to page 159 and in 200 words explain how “imagined orders and hierarchies” resulted in “unfair discrimination.”
March 5 Logical Fallacies and Signal Phrase review; Go over Sapiens to page 200.
March 10 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write first half of the essay.
March 12 Chromebook In-Class Objective: Write second half of the essay.
March 17 Essay 1 Due on turnitin
Essay #1 (1,000 words)
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Choice A
Read Tad Friend’s New Yorker online article “Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?” and look at two opposing camps on the role of alternative protein sources as a viable replacement for meat. One camp says we face too many obstacles to accept non-animal alternative proteins: evolution, taste, and cost, to name several. An opposing camp says we have the technology and the proven product in Impossible Foods and other non-meat proteins to replace animal protein. Assessing these two opposing camps in the context of Tad Friend’s essay, develop an argumentative thesis addresses the question: How viable is the push for tech companies to help climate change by replacing animals with alternative proteins?
Choice B
Read Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and defend, refute, or complicate the author’s claim that non-religious societies offer a superior moral framework for human evolution than religious societies.
Choice C
In the context of the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, develop an argument about how Yuval Noah Harari's explanation of the Cognitive Revolution exposes human vulnerability to mass manipulation, deceit, and Groupthink.
Choice D
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph 1: Introduction, explain key differences between foragers and people living in AR.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis or claim.
Paragraphs 3-5, supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 6, counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 7, conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Last page is Works Cited with 2 sources.
Sample Thesis and Outline
Harari makes a persuasive case that the AR is inferior to the Forager Age evidenced by __________________, ________________, ____________________, and ______________________.
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.
How does the pre-agricultural period affect Sapiens today?
Gorging Gene
Harari observes that “nearly entire history” of Sapiens is pre-agricultural society, also known as foraging society or hunting and gathering society.
This historical period defines who we are today.
After foraging, Sapiens lived for 10,000 years in Agricultural Age: farmers and herders.
For only 200 years, we have lived in Industrial Age: urban laborers and office workers.
This foraging and need to survive famines have led to the gorging gene, the drive to overeat in order to stave off inevitable starvation.
Gorging Gene in the Industrial Food Age (Processed Food and Fast Food = Death)
For most of us in the world of Industrial Eating, starvation is not a problem; we have the gorging gene and an abundance of food as we read in this Gorging Gene blog post.
Our gorging gene is traced to our need to eat before competing predators could eat our kill and our discovery of sweet fruit. Of course, now we’re maladapted to all the calorie-dense food produced in the Industrial Age.
We may be slighter dumber with slightly smaller brains than foragers because foragers had to have everyday survival skills and know how to work in the environment whereas we can be lazy slobs, turn on a light, turn on a computer, flip a switch, order a pizza, and watch Netflix (49).
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.
Weakness in Harari's Argument?
Yuval Noah Harari's claim is that the Agricultural Revolution is a crime and a fraud with ill effects in terms of morality and overall health.
One of the grounds for his claim is that our bodies became fat, afflicted with tooth decay, and crippled by spinal scoliosis after we left the Hunter-Gatherer stage.
Some Argumentation Terms
The claim is the argument.
Harari's claim is that the Agricultural Revolution was a disaster for the human race and inferior to the previous age of Hunters-Gatherers or Foragers.
On what grounds does he make his claim? The grounds is one of the reasons for offering concrete, logical support for a claim.
One of his grounds is that after we abandoned hunting to become farmers and then eventually consumers, we suffered obesity, tooth decay, and scoliosis.
Argument's Against Harari's Claim:
One. Is it logical to say that because the AR was a Hell 10 on the Hell Scale, that if Foragers were an 8 on the scale, we should admire foragers or look up to foragers as a superior lifestyle?
Two. Is it logical to aspire to be ripped forager who suffers violent death at the age of 19 rather than be a fat farmer with cavities who dies of stroke at 60?
Three. We can concede that the abundance of available calories and the gorging gene lead to obesity, but is reverting the clock and reversing course to becoming Foragers the answer?
Four. No one wants to have face long periods of starvation again. There is no emotional appeal to this argument.
Five. No one wants to devote their time and labor to hunting and gathering their food again.
Six. It's too late to reverse the clock. The world population, at around 8 billion, cannot revert to foraging.
Seven. Only super rich people can afford a true organic quasi-Paleo diet in which they consume only finest ingredients for maximum performance.
Eight. All major technological breakthroughs are disruptive, which means they result in both good and bad things.
For example, Facebook and other social media platforms brought a lot of friends and family together for convenient communication. However, these platforms can be addictive, lead to depression, and become vectors for fake news feeds, disrupting elections, and wreaking havoc on democratic societies.
Does this mean we're going to get rid of social media platforms? Of course not. The genie is out of the bottle. The toothpaste is out of the toothpaste tube.
Just because we face an overabundance of calories, does this mean we should subject ourselves once again to food scarcity so we can have trim waistlines? That is an utterly preposterous proposition.
Nine. It's stupid to tell the human race to abandon technological advancements and "go back to the cave."
With that in mind, let's look at Choice D:
Choice D
Support, refute, or complicate Harari’s assertion that the “agricultural revolution was the greatest crime against humanity.”
Sapiens & The Agricultural Revolution
Transition from Pre-agricultural period to Post-Agriculture
Harari observes that “nearly entire history” of Sapiens is pre-agricultural society, also known as foraging society or hunting and gathering society.
This historical period defines who we are today.
After foraging, Sapiens lived for 10,000 years in Agricultural Age: farmers and herders.
For only 200 years, we have lived in Industrial Age: urban laborers and office workers.
Gorging Gene
Our gorging gene is traced to our need to eat before competing predators could eat our kill and our discovery of sweet fruit. Of course, now we’re maladapted to all the calorie-dense food produced in the Industrial Age.
We may be slighter dumber with slightly smaller brains than foragers because foragers had to have everyday survival skills and know how to work in the environment whereas we can be lazy slobs, turn on a light, turn on a computer, flip a switch, order a pizza, and watch Netflix (49).
Overview
Agricultural Revolution (Farming) results in the following:
One. more work hours
Two. less nutrition
Three. inferior health (tooth decay, curved spines, stunted growth)
Four. more pregnancies
Five. more exploitation of women
Six. higher population density with more spread of disease
Seven class divisions: huge disparity between Haves and Have-Nots (economic stratification)
Eight. animal cruelty on a mass scale (factory farming)
Nine. 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).
Ten. Working harder to become a better person became the work ethic, all based on a lie. This is a way of gaslighting people into participating in their own exploitation (getting punked).
Faustian Bargain
With all of these liabilities attached to AR, what is the appeal?
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.
Viruses spread more quickly in concentrated population centers.
Critical Thinking Failure
"Sapiens could not fathom the full consequences of their decisions"
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.
We cannot fathom:
impact of agricultural revolution on us today
impact of smartphones as a necessity
impact of giving up our privacy through technology
impact of giving up our free will to A.I.
impact of man-made global warming
Harari succeeds in showing that Sapiens' greatest weakness is our failure to comprehend consequences of our actions
Foragers Vs. People Today
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.
AR Myth Persists
Can Myth of AR be eradicated by bloodshed or anything else?
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.”
Imagined Orders
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.
Greatest Fraud
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 Hurari makes the case these codes did not exist in forager society; rather, they flourished in the Agricultural Period.
But Harari's hypocrisy is elevating Foragers to same mythic level as Farmers.
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 is inferior to the Forager Age evidenced by __________________, ________________, ____________________, and ______________________.
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
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.
Counterarguments: Noble Savage Myth
Possible counterarguments in Quillette: “Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer” by William Buckner
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.
Signal Phrase 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.
Sample List of Signal Phrases (active as of 2-29-20)
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
You need minimum 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Signal Phrases
Purpose
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.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
Another Purpose: Providing Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "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."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "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."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there is statistics that show . . ."
Credentials, Establishing Authority, and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
Partial List of Signal Phrases
acknowledges adds admits affirms agrees answers argues asserts claims comments concedes confirms contends counters counterattacks declares defines denies disputes echoes endorses estimates finds grants illustrates implies insists mentions notes observes predicts proposes reasons recognizes recommends refutes rejects reports responds reveals speculates states suggests surmises warns writes
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
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."
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