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The Case Against Civilization

60 points by dsr12 9y ago

throwawayjava 9y ago
Science did not begin at Bacon. Saying crop rotation or glasses or fire were not science is a bit like saying ancient geometric constructions are not algorithms.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Technology isn't science. Science is a systematic discipline meant to understand the world in naturalistic terms. Technology has come to heavily rely on science, because it gives good, reliable results. Better than the hit/miss tinkering from before.
  - srtjstjsj 9y ago
    You think that crop rotation was just lucky guessing, and not learned from experience?
    - goatlover 9y ago
      Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science. There's more to it than that. Of course humans have been learning from trial and error since before we were homo sapiens. But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc. Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices. It wasn't until science was an actual practice that we began to have systematic naturalistic explanations we could fit controlled experimental results into.
      - throwawayjava 9y ago
        > Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science. There's more to it than that. Alhazen's Book of Optics is "not science" in exactly the same sense that constructions in Euclid's Elements are "not algorithms". Both claims are drawing, IMO, indefensible post-hoc epistemic lines in the sand. > Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices I don't see why this matters. 1. Scientists, following a scientific process (perhaps not particularly well, but that's just a Scotsman argument), found themselves believing all types of crazy shit. Read about the 1950's. Science certainly dispels a lot of superstition, but it's not a bulwark against bad or lazy thinking. 2. Just because there existed supernatural explanations for e.g., crop rotation or glasses doesn't mean that the people who discovered those things weren't following a fundamentally scientific process. > But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc. And? Hell, there are still people who believe lightening and eclipses are supernatural events. It does not follow that we don't have a science that explains these phenomenon.
XorNot 9y ago
The type of article written by someone who presumably has never needed a cavity filled, never contracted any disease requiring antibiotics, and does not need glasses to get around day to day.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bkohlmann 9y ago
  I'm actually sympathetic to your argument, but the author himself says this in the early paragraphs: "but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses."
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- charlesism 9y ago
  The first two aren't such good examples. Dental problems due to modern diet, and resistance to antibiotics... it's not cut and dry.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Archeologists have surmised that the Egyptian Pharoahs were in considerable pain from dental problems, from studying their mummies.
    - charlesism 9y ago
      There are indigenous people who don't eat a "modern" diet. Why speculate about Egyptian Pharaohs? How about wild animals. Do they have dentists?
      - WalterBright 9y ago
ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago
Got as far as the first paragraph and all I could think was, this author doesn't know what science is. Or is just artificially restricting its definition for the benefit of his article using weasel phrases like, "and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science." "Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method." No, just no. The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  The scientific method in layman's terms could be written "whatever works". All the things mentioned in the article were things that worked, and were refined over time to work even better.
- goatlover 9y ago
  The scientific method isn't just whatever happens to work. It's subjecting what works to rigorous testing that's meant to overcome human bias and subjectivity inside various theoretical frameworks to provide us a better understanding of the world.
- grondilu 9y ago
  Are suggesting that trial and error, heuristics, empiricism and so on, are the basis of scientific method? You probably do, considering your mention of animals and brains. I'm not expert in epistemology, but I very much suspect it's more complex than that.
- kelnos 9y ago
  > The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development. Science is a discipline we've invented in fairly recent times (think on the order of a few thousand years) as a rigorous means of determining how to explain the world around us and make predictions that can be tested to be true or false. Science isn't throwing things at the wall until you find something that sticks, or randomly stumbling upon something useful. That's just simple trial-and-error development of technology. Science is not technology, and science is not required for technology, even though today's technological progress often leans heavily on science.
arjie 9y ago
Romanticism about nature and whatnot. Regardless of the merits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, one thing marks it far inferior: the ability of the author to make his argument and have it heard. H-g societies lack knowledge beyond the most immediate needed to survive. The author himself probably knows more about the world and the universe (excepting the specifics of how to survive in the wild - a mundane problem) than the entirety of all hunter gatherer societies. I'd rather drink HFCS-infused water, eat processed meat, and breathe diesel fumes than be unable to think the thoughts I think today because I lack the framework to even think them. No thanks.
Ygg2 9y ago
For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet protein was from humans. This is the world we would "return" to.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you're saying? The Paleo diet is a modern creation. The paleolithic diet was probably whatever people could eat. I would think if 10% of human diet consisted of human meat then prion diseases would have been more prevalent.
  - Ygg2 9y ago
    Paleo diet as in prehistoric hunter gatherer diet. I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein. Also some people have genes resistant to prion diseases https://youtu.be/SXjIzDexPoU https://youtu.be/SXjIzDexPoU
    - jcranmer 9y ago
      > I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein. You said, and I quote: > For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet was from humans. This is the world we would "return" to. That is a statement I would reject without seeing very strong evidence, and I don't know that we can have strong evidence of the sources of meat in Paleolithic diets on a holistic basis. Furthermore, cannibalism is one of the most widespread taboos among diverse cultures, and thus labeling your enemies as cannibals was a good way to delegitimize their claims independent of the veracity of those claims.
      - Ygg2 9y ago
        Well that's an error. Fixed. Comparable cannibalism rates have been observed in other mammals. Do you assume humans are exempt of it? If so why? Cannibalism makes a lot of sense, in hunter gatherer societies. After all one source of protein that is always present in human group is human. Did you see the video I linked? There are links in the description. Cannibalism is usually a taboo in modern western societies. Instance of ritualistic cannibalism mentioned in video was in 1960 in Oceania.
cdoxsey 9y ago
> But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilisation to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase ... and the coals in the coal-scuttle ... and pianos ... and policemen." The whole case for civilisation is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible. - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Geez. I prefer civilization because I can sit in my warm office and work on projects I like, I have good food to eat, etc. Under savagery I'd be living mostly outside, shivering, wondering if I could get enough food to live through the winter, and would have little hope of living past 40. I'd suffer from routine episodes of famine, backbreaking labor, and the tribe booting me out to die when I was no longer carrying my weight. I'd watch most of my children die young, and would fear all sorts of stupid mythical boogeymen. I'd have to train with weapons constantly, and live in fear of the next tribe over attacking me and my family at any moment. No thanks.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Well, we evolved to live in the warm African climate, not the Northern hemisphere, so you may or may not be shivering in the winter. Also, they did have fire, clothing and shelter. I think the evidence suggest hunter/gatherers lived longer than civilized people prior to modern medicine and sanitary practices, had more exercise, ate better, and didn't catch the same diseases (domesticated animals were a big source of disease). That's not saying it's preferable. I have no way of knowing, having grown up with all the advantages of modern life. I do notice the large amount of overweight people, the preponderance of mental illness, and the various complaints about abuses from governments and corporations, the environmental impact of 7.x billion people, and the large number still living in abject poverty. Also the history of institutional slavery, war and genocide. So it's not all roses. If I were forced to pick between medieval life in London or hunter/gather, I would pick the latter, unless I was nobility.
vtange 9y ago
The article presents a sort of naive assumption that if we stayed primitive we may have ended up in a more egalitarian, less brutally competitive world. Problem is, in a less developed culture, there is still competition due to human nature and due to uncontrollable factors such as natural disasters. Pre-European-Contact Native Americans often fought against one another during periods such as drought.[1][2] Ironically one of the benefits of civilization is a stronger ability to handle situations of disaster and shortage that forces populations to go to war. I'd also add that in a "civilized world" there are probably more avenues in life open to a person who isn't bound to the responsibility of food production (which constitutes 90% of a hunter-gatherer society). Science, history, the arts? Aside from oral traditions, all are outside the reach of a primitive society. Oh, and at least in a modern civilization such as ours we have a small fighting chance against say, an incoming apocalyptic asteroid. [1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thanksgiving-guilt-trip-how-warlike-were-native-americans-before-europeans-showed-up/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thanksgivin... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_native_american_tribes_peaceful_with_each/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_...
- UnpossibleJim 9y ago
  It also seems to ignore the existence of war in pre neolithic species like chimpanzees. While it might be difficult to argue that a direct correlation of behavior exists, it shows a distinct seperation of war and agriculture.
  - toss1 9y ago
    Perhaps you didn't read to the end where they discussed how the bushmen got past the level of Chimps: >>. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not tolerated.”
baron816 9y ago
This is basically what the book Sapiens is about. One thing that has constantly been on my mind since reading Sapiens is that no one has been able to definitively explain why men have dominated all of the positions of power in societies (up until a just a few years ago, at least). Civilizations that emerged completely independently from each other (whether in the fertile crescent, China, Mesoamerica or elsewhere), universally became patriarchies. Before the Neolithic era, and in some surviving hunter gatherer cultures today, matriarchy was not uncommon. Women still tend to report being happier than men in survey data, and just going by the men and women I know, I think the men would prefer to abandon civilization before women. But I think if we want advance more women into positions of power in all tiers of society, then we need stop just trying to wrack it up to discrimination and sexism, stop trying to have the government regulate men and women's paycheck, and actually try to figure out why women have universally faired worse in societies. For example (this is just a theory, I have no evidence whatsoever here), the men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside their family. Perhaps women are not as good at that? If that is the case, then it might be wise to try to encourage women to improve that subset of social skills. I may be way off here, but I think we need to start asking questions, coming up with theories, and testing those theories rather than settle on the one that's easiest but doesn't really get us anywhere.
- projektir 9y ago
  I think you're overcomplicating things. Men are stronger and don't have to bear children.
  - baron816 9y ago
    > Men are stronger and don't have to bear children. Those are two of the three common explanations that are debunked in Sapiens.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Alternatively, psychopathic and narcissistic men are more likely to seek power, affluence and glory, and are good at fooling people.
mehmehmehmeh 9y ago
Lost me where he starts citing the speculation put forth in "Catching Fire" as accepted fact. We had big brains before we discovered fire. My understanding is that it's generally understood humans traded muscle for big brains.
- grondilu 9y ago
  > We had big brains before we discovered fire. Homo Erectus had a much smaller brain than us. And the cooking theory seems fairly well accepted these days. Someone once made the calculus that if you had to grow and sustain your brain with just raw food, you'd have to eat like 18 hours a day or something (can't recall the exact number). That would not give you much time to actually use that brain. It's hard not to conclude on the importance of cooking in the evolution of our brain. There's a TED conf on the subject, if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw
  - srtjstjsj 9y ago
    How to raw-food diet people survive? A diet of raw eggs would easily sustain, for a few minutes eating per day.
    - grondilu 9y ago
      Of course it depends on what you eat. If you eat protein-rich food like eggs, I guess you can eat them raw and get what you need in short time. The calculus I was mentioning was based on assumptions regarding the kind of aliments you'd typically eat in paleolithical time or something. I believe it was in BBC's the origin of us[1], but I'm not sure. They took the example of carrots but I vaguely recall they generalize to a bunch of aliments. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Us
    - pixl97 9y ago
      A diet of eggs from what farm? I don't belive you have any idea how much work it is to gather eggs when birds go to great lengths to hide them from predators. Also, eggs are very seasonal in most places. They are not a reliable food source.
icanhackit 9y ago
(Breaking some HN etiquette here but I think a large portion of responses so far have been from people who've only scanned the introduction - there are some good bits in the article, you'll just need to skip the first few paragraphs to get to the meat) Sorry for the cut-and-paste but it's only a fraction of a pretty long-form article: The other conclusion we can draw from the evidence, Scott says, is that there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest. It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
jcranmer 9y ago
Unfortunately, the development of agriculture and civilization are usually conflated to mean the same thing: people predominantly contrast pre-agricultural, pre-civilization peoples against agricultural, civilized peoples. This causes confusions when people cite instances of agricultural, non-civilized peoples to support claims on one side or the other (I'm unaware of any examples of non-agricultural, civilized states; the closest examples I can think of are still nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists, which is still agricultural even if the reliance is on domesticated animals instead of plants). Also unfortunately, it's hard to know which to prescribe the "problems" and the "benefits" of the agricultural and civilization complex to, agriculture or civilization. The existence of things like specialization and war are hard to find unambiguous evidence for in archaeology (it can sometimes be hard to remember that there are multiple plausible explanations for a find, and picking a certain interpretation may more reflect an archaeologist's biases than the actual truth), and so figuring out when in the course of human development they first appear is difficult if not impossible. I'm generally of the opinion that most of the problems postdate the development of agriculture, but I hold that position less because there's strong evidence for it, but because there's no strong evidence either way and I find it more useful to get other people to consider multiple interpretations of the matter.
- sifar 9y ago
  This was posted in one of the threads a few days back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo Starting at 12:00, Toby Hemenway talks about agriculture led industrial culture & its problems. How we are missing a spot where horticulture can be long-term beneficial.
perilunar 9y ago
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T. S. Eliot I've often thought that the ideal post-scarcity lifestyle would be to live in giant gardens (in giant rotating space habitats no less) where we can run around hunting, gathering, telling stories around the campfire and sleeping under the stars, and occasionally spending time in the lab or workshop or in zero-g building stuff. i.e. hunting and gathering -> agriculture -> industrialisation -> automation -> hunting and gathering (and space engineering)
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  You probably would like Iain Banks' series of novels about The Culture. Some of it described the shenanigans some people got up to after getting bored of such a life.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Going full-caveman might be a step too far, but we could certainly dial-back a few things--especially in the US. I look at my grandparents from the WWII generation, and I think their existences, as modest as they are, have been more agreeable--to both themselves and to the world--than the ones most people endure today. There are many otherwise healthy young people who are morbidly obese who wouldn't have been so 50 years ago. There are so many otherwise intelligent people who cannot deal with other people in a social setting, and everyone's like "oh, it's autism," and maybe in some cases it is, but I have to wonder if some of it is just a case of otherwise ordinary people being raised by television, books, video games instead of other people. I hardly know a person over 30 who isn't already on an assortment of maintenance medications. The doctors had me on two maintenance medications before I was 30, and if I hadn't figured out that hitting the gym and not eating like I was still a teenager works a hell of a lot better, I would still be taking them. Then you look at other parts of the world--where the slaves that make our stuff live--and the rivers are choked with garbage and the smog blots out the daylight. Then there is the nearly unavoidable proliferation of technology. In most tech and sales jobs, regardless of your own preference, you have to have a cell phone and e-mail--unless you want to lose your job. In most marketing and PR jobs, you have to contend with facebook / twitter / etc. "So what?" Neuroplasticity. "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too strong to break." You are literally burning pathways into your brain for compulsively checking/responding to messages/likes/etc. It's like Pavlov's dog, but with humans, and it is a very hard thing to un-learn. Then there's all the stuff Taleb goes on about like iatrogenics and hormesis.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Then there is the nearly unavoidable proliferation of technology That happened before civilization. As it happens, tools are really useful.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    In the older situation where man struggled against nature, the tools served the man. In the modern situation where man struggles against man, you end up with many game-theory scenarios where the man is compelled to serve the tool.
FrozenVoid 9y ago
The only good thing about the article is the analysis of grain dependence. Anarcho-primitivism and its hunter-gatherer lifestyles would support less than 1% of current world population. "Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?" is just a myth of lost Golden Age adapted for modern audience. Civilization enables health and comfort levels that hunter-gatherers never dreamed of: their "lifestyle" options were extremely limited and grim, geared to maximize survival of tribes instead of individual happiness and comfort. Without civilization existing in its current technological level, most people will just die, the minority which will adapt will not live in a paleo paradise. There is no "abundant natural resources" of paleolithic anymore, there is no skills and knowledge of wilderness survival. In the event of civilizational collapse, people will have nothing much to harvest/hunt/gather after initial plundering(long-term impact will not be a priority). The limited resources of current Earth will not support such lifestyle. Even huntergatherers will not survive this, as they'll have to compete with armed civilization remnants searching for any resources to continue its current lifestyle. In short, civilization has one way forward and any collapse will be fatal, a state which cannot "jump start a civilization again", with all easily extracted resources gone and natural environment plundered. The forests and jungles exist only because there are legal frameworks to ensure their continued existence inside a civilization: in case of collapse they'll be stripped for firewood and collapse in a decade.
cttet 9y ago
The social structure shift is really not about preference, it is about collective power and violence. Although people may prefer the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the neighbor farm-based civilization will conquer and enslave them. It is also the same for technology/AI. They may not improve our quality of life, but they allow more powerful armies that would defeat those who resist them. It's sad but it's true.
eb3c90 9y ago
I'm interested if we can have our cake and also eat it. Use advanced technology/manufacturing to make our communities more self-sufficient. So we are less reliant on the state. https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/ https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
Yeah, try convincing 8 billion people that we should all hunt for rabbits. Case against Civilization is case for extinction of all animals 6000 years ago. I would rather be living now and enjoying this earth, than be someone who thinks that he can take on the wild if there weren't as many other people around. And I don't think "human" become "humans" because things were just swell. Precisely because of evolutionary pressure humans evolved. I would rather have us evolved than not.
leepowers 9y ago
One large factor the author misses is the staggeringly high rates of murder and violent death in non-state societies, in some instances reaching as high as 60%[1] This is the core of Hobbes' description of pre-state societies as "nasty, brutish, and short". Prehistoric life was incredibly tough and brutal as there simply wasn't much room for error. If someone is able to steal from you or mistreat you without repercussion you immediately become a target for every other bad actor in the tribe. In this environment reciprocal violence is rational. A neutral state actor with a monopoly on violence tips the incentives towards non-violent resolution of disputes. In modern times if you are unemployed for a month you can collect a check from the government and move on with your life. In prehistoric times if you go a month without successfully hunting or collecting food you get to watch your children starve to death. Again, very very little room for error. Neolithic life had it's own set of challenges namely famine, disease, and inter-state warfare. But over the long term it provided more cushion for common mistakes and the foibles of human nature. It enlarged the margin of error for survival compared to prehistoric peoples. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths/ https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

60 points by dsr12 9y ago

Science did not begin at Bacon. Saying crop rotation or glasses or fire were not science is a bit like saying ancient geometric constructions are not algorithms.

goatlover 9y ago
Technology isn't science. Science is a systematic discipline meant to understand the world in naturalistic terms. Technology has come to heavily rely on science, because it gives good, reliable results. Better than the hit/miss tinkering from before.
- srtjstjsj 9y ago
  You think that crop rotation was just lucky guessing, and not learned from experience?
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science. There's more to it than that. Of course humans have been learning from trial and error since before we were homo sapiens. But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc. Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices. It wasn't until science was an actual practice that we began to have systematic naturalistic explanations we could fit controlled experimental results into.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      > Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science. There's more to it than that. Alhazen's Book of Optics is "not science" in exactly the same sense that constructions in Euclid's Elements are "not algorithms". Both claims are drawing, IMO, indefensible post-hoc epistemic lines in the sand. > Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices I don't see why this matters. 1. Scientists, following a scientific process (perhaps not particularly well, but that's just a Scotsman argument), found themselves believing all types of crazy shit. Read about the 1950's. Science certainly dispels a lot of superstition, but it's not a bulwark against bad or lazy thinking. 2. Just because there existed supernatural explanations for e.g., crop rotation or glasses doesn't mean that the people who discovered those things weren't following a fundamentally scientific process. > But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc. And? Hell, there are still people who believe lightening and eclipses are supernatural events. It does not follow that we don't have a science that explains these phenomenon.

XorNot 9y ago

The type of article written by someone who presumably has never needed a cavity filled, never contracted any disease requiring antibiotics, and does not need glasses to get around day to day.

deleted 9y ago
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bkohlmann 9y ago
I'm actually sympathetic to your argument, but the author himself says this in the early paragraphs: "but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses."
deleted 9y ago
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charlesism 9y ago
The first two aren't such good examples. Dental problems due to modern diet, and resistance to antibiotics... it's not cut and dry.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Archeologists have surmised that the Egyptian Pharoahs were in considerable pain from dental problems, from studying their mummies.
  - charlesism 9y ago
    There are indigenous people who don't eat a "modern" diet. Why speculate about Egyptian Pharaohs? How about wild animals. Do they have dentists?
    - WalterBright 9y ago

ValleyOfTheMtns 9y ago

Got as far as the first paragraph and all I could think was, this author doesn't know what science is. Or is just artificially restricting its definition for the benefit of his article using weasel phrases like, "and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science." "Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method." No, just no. The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development.

WalterBright 9y ago
The scientific method in layman's terms could be written "whatever works". All the things mentioned in the article were things that worked, and were refined over time to work even better.
goatlover 9y ago
The scientific method isn't just whatever happens to work. It's subjecting what works to rigorous testing that's meant to overcome human bias and subjectivity inside various theoretical frameworks to provide us a better understanding of the world.
grondilu 9y ago
Are suggesting that trial and error, heuristics, empiricism and so on, are the basis of scientific method? You probably do, considering your mention of animals and brains. I'm not expert in epistemology, but I very much suspect it's more complex than that.
kelnos 9y ago
> The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development. Science is a discipline we've invented in fairly recent times (think on the order of a few thousand years) as a rigorous means of determining how to explain the world around us and make predictions that can be tested to be true or false. Science isn't throwing things at the wall until you find something that sticks, or randomly stumbling upon something useful. That's just simple trial-and-error development of technology. Science is not technology, and science is not required for technology, even though today's technological progress often leans heavily on science.

arjie 9y ago

Romanticism about nature and whatnot. Regardless of the merits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, one thing marks it far inferior: the ability of the author to make his argument and have it heard. H-g societies lack knowledge beyond the most immediate needed to survive. The author himself probably knows more about the world and the universe (excepting the specifics of how to survive in the wild - a mundane problem) than the entirety of all hunter gatherer societies. I'd rather drink HFCS-infused water, eat processed meat, and breathe diesel fumes than be unable to think the thoughts I think today because I lack the framework to even think them. No thanks.

Ygg2 9y ago

For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet protein was from humans. This is the world we would "return" to.

wavefunction 9y ago
I'm not sure what you're saying? The Paleo diet is a modern creation. The paleolithic diet was probably whatever people could eat. I would think if 10% of human diet consisted of human meat then prion diseases would have been more prevalent.
- Ygg2 9y ago
  Paleo diet as in prehistoric hunter gatherer diet. I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein. Also some people have genes resistant to prion diseases https://youtu.be/SXjIzDexPoU https://youtu.be/SXjIzDexPoU
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    > I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein. You said, and I quote: > For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet was from humans. This is the world we would "return" to. That is a statement I would reject without seeing very strong evidence, and I don't know that we can have strong evidence of the sources of meat in Paleolithic diets on a holistic basis. Furthermore, cannibalism is one of the most widespread taboos among diverse cultures, and thus labeling your enemies as cannibals was a good way to delegitimize their claims independent of the veracity of those claims.
    - Ygg2 9y ago
      Well that's an error. Fixed. Comparable cannibalism rates have been observed in other mammals. Do you assume humans are exempt of it? If so why? Cannibalism makes a lot of sense, in hunter gatherer societies. After all one source of protein that is always present in human group is human. Did you see the video I linked? There are links in the description. Cannibalism is usually a taboo in modern western societies. Instance of ritualistic cannibalism mentioned in video was in 1960 in Oceania.

cdoxsey 9y ago

> But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilisation to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase ... and the coals in the coal-scuttle ... and pianos ... and policemen." The whole case for civilisation is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible. - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

WalterBright 9y ago
Geez. I prefer civilization because I can sit in my warm office and work on projects I like, I have good food to eat, etc. Under savagery I'd be living mostly outside, shivering, wondering if I could get enough food to live through the winter, and would have little hope of living past 40. I'd suffer from routine episodes of famine, backbreaking labor, and the tribe booting me out to die when I was no longer carrying my weight. I'd watch most of my children die young, and would fear all sorts of stupid mythical boogeymen. I'd have to train with weapons constantly, and live in fear of the next tribe over attacking me and my family at any moment. No thanks.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Well, we evolved to live in the warm African climate, not the Northern hemisphere, so you may or may not be shivering in the winter. Also, they did have fire, clothing and shelter. I think the evidence suggest hunter/gatherers lived longer than civilized people prior to modern medicine and sanitary practices, had more exercise, ate better, and didn't catch the same diseases (domesticated animals were a big source of disease). That's not saying it's preferable. I have no way of knowing, having grown up with all the advantages of modern life. I do notice the large amount of overweight people, the preponderance of mental illness, and the various complaints about abuses from governments and corporations, the environmental impact of 7.x billion people, and the large number still living in abject poverty. Also the history of institutional slavery, war and genocide. So it's not all roses. If I were forced to pick between medieval life in London or hunter/gather, I would pick the latter, unless I was nobility.

vtange 9y ago

The article presents a sort of naive assumption that if we stayed primitive we may have ended up in a more egalitarian, less brutally competitive world. Problem is, in a less developed culture, there is still competition due to human nature and due to uncontrollable factors such as natural disasters. Pre-European-Contact Native Americans often fought against one another during periods such as drought.[1][2] Ironically one of the benefits of civilization is a stronger ability to handle situations of disaster and shortage that forces populations to go to war. I'd also add that in a "civilized world" there are probably more avenues in life open to a person who isn't bound to the responsibility of food production (which constitutes 90% of a hunter-gatherer society). Science, history, the arts? Aside from oral traditions, all are outside the reach of a primitive society. Oh, and at least in a modern civilization such as ours we have a small fighting chance against say, an incoming apocalyptic asteroid. [1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thanksgiving-guilt-trip-how-warlike-were-native-americans-before-europeans-showed-up/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thanksgivin... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_native_american_tribes_peaceful_with_each/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_...

UnpossibleJim 9y ago
It also seems to ignore the existence of war in pre neolithic species like chimpanzees. While it might be difficult to argue that a direct correlation of behavior exists, it shows a distinct seperation of war and agriculture.
- toss1 9y ago
  Perhaps you didn't read to the end where they discussed how the bushmen got past the level of Chimps: >>. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not tolerated.”

baron816 9y ago

This is basically what the book Sapiens is about. One thing that has constantly been on my mind since reading Sapiens is that no one has been able to definitively explain why men have dominated all of the positions of power in societies (up until a just a few years ago, at least). Civilizations that emerged completely independently from each other (whether in the fertile crescent, China, Mesoamerica or elsewhere), universally became patriarchies. Before the Neolithic era, and in some surviving hunter gatherer cultures today, matriarchy was not uncommon. Women still tend to report being happier than men in survey data, and just going by the men and women I know, I think the men would prefer to abandon civilization before women. But I think if we want advance more women into positions of power in all tiers of society, then we need stop just trying to wrack it up to discrimination and sexism, stop trying to have the government regulate men and women's paycheck, and actually try to figure out why women have universally faired worse in societies. For example (this is just a theory, I have no evidence whatsoever here), the men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside their family. Perhaps women are not as good at that? If that is the case, then it might be wise to try to encourage women to improve that subset of social skills. I may be way off here, but I think we need to start asking questions, coming up with theories, and testing those theories rather than settle on the one that's easiest but doesn't really get us anywhere.

projektir 9y ago
I think you're overcomplicating things. Men are stronger and don't have to bear children.
- baron816 9y ago
  > Men are stronger and don't have to bear children. Those are two of the three common explanations that are debunked in Sapiens.
goatlover 9y ago
Alternatively, psychopathic and narcissistic men are more likely to seek power, affluence and glory, and are good at fooling people.

mehmehmehmeh 9y ago

Lost me where he starts citing the speculation put forth in "Catching Fire" as accepted fact. We had big brains before we discovered fire. My understanding is that it's generally understood humans traded muscle for big brains.

grondilu 9y ago
> We had big brains before we discovered fire. Homo Erectus had a much smaller brain than us. And the cooking theory seems fairly well accepted these days. Someone once made the calculus that if you had to grow and sustain your brain with just raw food, you'd have to eat like 18 hours a day or something (can't recall the exact number). That would not give you much time to actually use that brain. It's hard not to conclude on the importance of cooking in the evolution of our brain. There's a TED conf on the subject, if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw
- srtjstjsj 9y ago
  How to raw-food diet people survive? A diet of raw eggs would easily sustain, for a few minutes eating per day.
  - grondilu 9y ago
    Of course it depends on what you eat. If you eat protein-rich food like eggs, I guess you can eat them raw and get what you need in short time. The calculus I was mentioning was based on assumptions regarding the kind of aliments you'd typically eat in paleolithical time or something. I believe it was in BBC's the origin of us[1], but I'm not sure. They took the example of carrots but I vaguely recall they generalize to a bunch of aliments. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Us
  - pixl97 9y ago
    A diet of eggs from what farm? I don't belive you have any idea how much work it is to gather eggs when birds go to great lengths to hide them from predators. Also, eggs are very seasonal in most places. They are not a reliable food source.

icanhackit 9y ago

(Breaking some HN etiquette here but I think a large portion of responses so far have been from people who've only scanned the introduction - there are some good bits in the article, you'll just need to skip the first few paragraphs to get to the meat) Sorry for the cut-and-paste but it's only a fraction of a pretty long-form article: The other conclusion we can draw from the evidence, Scott says, is that there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest. It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.

toasterlovin 9y ago

jcranmer 9y ago

Unfortunately, the development of agriculture and civilization are usually conflated to mean the same thing: people predominantly contrast pre-agricultural, pre-civilization peoples against agricultural, civilized peoples. This causes confusions when people cite instances of agricultural, non-civilized peoples to support claims on one side or the other (I'm unaware of any examples of non-agricultural, civilized states; the closest examples I can think of are still nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists, which is still agricultural even if the reliance is on domesticated animals instead of plants). Also unfortunately, it's hard to know which to prescribe the "problems" and the "benefits" of the agricultural and civilization complex to, agriculture or civilization. The existence of things like specialization and war are hard to find unambiguous evidence for in archaeology (it can sometimes be hard to remember that there are multiple plausible explanations for a find, and picking a certain interpretation may more reflect an archaeologist's biases than the actual truth), and so figuring out when in the course of human development they first appear is difficult if not impossible. I'm generally of the opinion that most of the problems postdate the development of agriculture, but I hold that position less because there's strong evidence for it, but because there's no strong evidence either way and I find it more useful to get other people to consider multiple interpretations of the matter.

sifar 9y ago
This was posted in one of the threads a few days back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo Starting at 12:00, Toby Hemenway talks about agriculture led industrial culture & its problems. How we are missing a spot where horticulture can be long-term beneficial.

perilunar 9y ago

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T. S. Eliot I've often thought that the ideal post-scarcity lifestyle would be to live in giant gardens (in giant rotating space habitats no less) where we can run around hunting, gathering, telling stories around the campfire and sleeping under the stars, and occasionally spending time in the lab or workshop or in zero-g building stuff. i.e. hunting and gathering -> agriculture -> industrialisation -> automation -> hunting and gathering (and space engineering)

yourapostasy 9y ago
You probably would like Iain Banks' series of novels about The Culture. Some of it described the shenanigans some people got up to after getting bored of such a life.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

Going full-caveman might be a step too far, but we could certainly dial-back a few things--especially in the US. I look at my grandparents from the WWII generation, and I think their existences, as modest as they are, have been more agreeable--to both themselves and to the world--than the ones most people endure today. There are many otherwise healthy young people who are morbidly obese who wouldn't have been so 50 years ago. There are so many otherwise intelligent people who cannot deal with other people in a social setting, and everyone's like "oh, it's autism," and maybe in some cases it is, but I have to wonder if some of it is just a case of otherwise ordinary people being raised by television, books, video games instead of other people. I hardly know a person over 30 who isn't already on an assortment of maintenance medications. The doctors had me on two maintenance medications before I was 30, and if I hadn't figured out that hitting the gym and not eating like I was still a teenager works a hell of a lot better, I would still be taking them. Then you look at other parts of the world--where the slaves that make our stuff live--and the rivers are choked with garbage and the smog blots out the daylight. Then there is the nearly unavoidable proliferation of technology. In most tech and sales jobs, regardless of your own preference, you have to have a cell phone and e-mail--unless you want to lose your job. In most marketing and PR jobs, you have to contend with facebook / twitter / etc. "So what?" Neuroplasticity. "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too strong to break." You are literally burning pathways into your brain for compulsively checking/responding to messages/likes/etc. It's like Pavlov's dog, but with humans, and it is a very hard thing to un-learn. Then there's all the stuff Taleb goes on about like iatrogenics and hormesis.

icebraining 9y ago
Then there is the nearly unavoidable proliferation of technology That happened before civilization. As it happens, tools are really useful.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  In the older situation where man struggled against nature, the tools served the man. In the modern situation where man struggles against man, you end up with many game-theory scenarios where the man is compelled to serve the tool.

FrozenVoid 9y ago

The only good thing about the article is the analysis of grain dependence. Anarcho-primitivism and its hunter-gatherer lifestyles would support less than 1% of current world population. "Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?" is just a myth of lost Golden Age adapted for modern audience. Civilization enables health and comfort levels that hunter-gatherers never dreamed of: their "lifestyle" options were extremely limited and grim, geared to maximize survival of tribes instead of individual happiness and comfort. Without civilization existing in its current technological level, most people will just die, the minority which will adapt will not live in a paleo paradise. There is no "abundant natural resources" of paleolithic anymore, there is no skills and knowledge of wilderness survival. In the event of civilizational collapse, people will have nothing much to harvest/hunt/gather after initial plundering(long-term impact will not be a priority). The limited resources of current Earth will not support such lifestyle. Even huntergatherers will not survive this, as they'll have to compete with armed civilization remnants searching for any resources to continue its current lifestyle. In short, civilization has one way forward and any collapse will be fatal, a state which cannot "jump start a civilization again", with all easily extracted resources gone and natural environment plundered. The forests and jungles exist only because there are legal frameworks to ensure their continued existence inside a civilization: in case of collapse they'll be stripped for firewood and collapse in a decade.

cttet 9y ago

The social structure shift is really not about preference, it is about collective power and violence. Although people may prefer the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the neighbor farm-based civilization will conquer and enslave them. It is also the same for technology/AI. They may not improve our quality of life, but they allow more powerful armies that would defeat those who resist them. It's sad but it's true.

eb3c90 9y ago

I'm interested if we can have our cake and also eat it. Use advanced technology/manufacturing to make our communities more self-sufficient. So we are less reliant on the state. https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/ https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

Yeah, try convincing 8 billion people that we should all hunt for rabbits. Case against Civilization is case for extinction of all animals 6000 years ago. I would rather be living now and enjoying this earth, than be someone who thinks that he can take on the wild if there weren't as many other people around. And I don't think "human" become "humans" because things were just swell. Precisely because of evolutionary pressure humans evolved. I would rather have us evolved than not.

leepowers 9y ago

One large factor the author misses is the staggeringly high rates of murder and violent death in non-state societies, in some instances reaching as high as 60%[1] This is the core of Hobbes' description of pre-state societies as "nasty, brutish, and short". Prehistoric life was incredibly tough and brutal as there simply wasn't much room for error. If someone is able to steal from you or mistreat you without repercussion you immediately become a target for every other bad actor in the tribe. In this environment reciprocal violence is rational. A neutral state actor with a monopoly on violence tips the incentives towards non-violent resolution of disputes. In modern times if you are unemployed for a month you can collect a check from the government and move on with your life. In prehistoric times if you go a month without successfully hunting or collecting food you get to watch your children starve to death. Again, very very little room for error. Neolithic life had it's own set of challenges namely famine, disease, and inter-state warfare. But over the long term it provided more cushion for common mistakes and the foibles of human nature. It enlarged the margin of error for survival compared to prehistoric peoples. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths/ https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...