6 ms·

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987)

58 points by kartD 8y ago

crazygringo 8y ago
Counterpoint: nearly all of those of us in developed countries are now better-off with agriculture, due to: - Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter) - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art) - Vastly lower mortality (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead) The way I look at it, agriculture made things way worse... until we advanced far enough to get way, way better. And even if you argue there are some populations in developing countries which are still worse-off, it's hard to believe that's going to last long as economic development progresses.
- thrden 8y ago
  Even in the least developed countries on earth life expectancy is nearly double the 26 years quoted in the article. This article feels less like serious analysis, and instead the product of over-problematizing
  - drb91 8y ago
    A long life does not imply a quality life. A short life does not imply a lesser life.
    - chaboud 8y ago
      I have two flush toilets where I live. That, and protection from mosquitos, basically assures that I'm living a better life.
      - drb91 8y ago
        Well, I see this as a fearful worldview. Imagine instead a world without working in an office, or a world without living in a city. It takes a little, but not much, imagination to understand how that might be attractive to someone. Or perhaps imagine living in your evolutionarily suited habitat, if that’s easier to see. Sure, the shitty lives are particularly violent. But it’s a world where your life is dictated by your relationship with your environment and the people you know, not by people far away you have no access to.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Imagine a world where you can’t get clean water so you live a life where a worm uses acid to dig it self out of your foot once every few months then you contract some tropical disease and shit yourself to death.
        drb91 8y ago
        ...a fearful worldview, and a lack of imagination.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Imagination isn’t lacking you don’t need to imagine anything just look towards Africa, parts of Latin America, S.E. Asia and anywhere remote that gets hit by a natural disaster. What I can say quite confidently is that you likely never had to go thirsty because you couldn’t risk drinking the water or contracted cholera, heck you likely never even got a bad case of food poisoning thanks modern sanitary regulation and functional infrastructure. You never had to worry about if that insect bite laid larva under your skin or if the blistering rash you got on your leg is going to spread and imobalize you. You live a cushy comfortable and safe life which is afforded to the vast majority of people who live in developed nations. If you want to go back to huts and other “evolutionary compatible habitats” be my guest there are plenty of places on the planet that are a bad day away from being completely sent back to the Stone Age which you can relocate too, just don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and fill your instagram with the experience to your hearts content.
        drb91 8y ago
        > don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and fill your instagram with the experience to your hearts content. ...talk about projecting!
  - waterhouse 8y ago
    The article specifies "Life expectancy at birth", which, many people have pointed out, is strongly skewed by the number of kids that die in childbirth or at a very young age. I'd be much more interested in life expectancy for those who survive to, say, 15 or 18. Unfortunately, Diamond doesn't give those numbers.
- bjourne 8y ago
  Better off at the cost of destroying most ecological systems in the world and pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. We'll see how long it lasts.
  - autokad 8y ago
    if we continued to live as 'chimps' as some have worded it, the chances of extinction for humans, and all life on this planet is 100%. for all the damage done to ecological systems, now the chances of humans and some of those systems actually surviving beyond the life left in this planet is now some number above zero. that's a good thing imo
    - sk5t 8y ago
      Due to the expanding Sun / asteroid / supervolcano / superbug / something else? Do you think the universe cares about the inevitable, natural cessation of life on this planet?
- Pimpus 8y ago
  > - Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter) You have more variety, but not of more “fresh” foods. The only fresh food you can eat will always be local, so the variety only went up for foods transported from elsewhere… but fresh food in general is getting harder to acquire in Western society. Most people don’t eat fresh food at all so this point is just wrong. In traditional villages people are not afraid to eat vegetables with bugs and dirt on them -- that's what it means to eat fresh, and they don't need pesticides or preservatives. > - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art) Our culture is richer, but I'm not sure if the life of the average person is. You do have access to an absolute wealth of rich cultural material, but the majority of people do not utilize it. I’ve lived in traditional villages* and people there have surprisingly rich cultures, even if it was not mass-produced and massively-available, vapid nonsense. Also, contact with nature is more meaningful than most modern time-wasting activities like working in an office, commuting, or checking social media. *Agricultural societies, but I suspect pre-agricultural cultures were also very rich. - Vastly lower mortality Not sure what the data says about mortality rates. As far as health goes, most people in Western society are incredibly unhealthy. The amount of obese people in America is frankly revolting, not to mention the epidemics of hormone imbalances, digestive issues, awful posture, awful skin, etc. and the medicine/supplement regimens of pills that people have become dependent on to function or live, etc. The means to live more healthily are available, but the average person is not healthier than people with traditional lifestyles. We are weaker, more useless and have poorer sex lives. > (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead) Thanks to modern medicine, you’re not dead, but you’re bankrupt due to medical fees and addicted to painkillers and your gut flora is destroyed by antibiotics. The modern diet has little gut-promoting effect so you have to buy probiotic pills now. Etc.
- djtriptych 8y ago
  Counter counters: - re variety of food: Americans are among the fattest people in history. - re richer lives: reading and writing is for the literate. Not guaranteed by agriculture. I might argue that the creation of excess directly contributed to a treatment of education as a precious resource. Culture and art are not dependent on and predate agriculture. - re: mortality rate. We don’t die by falling from trees, but we’re also much worse at being in trees. Monkeys are pretty unlikely to die by falling out of a tree. We are worse at operating our own bodies in proportion to our reliance on modern medicine
masonic 8y ago
(1987) TL;DR: agriculture.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  I knew this was it before I read it. Almost everyone cites this as the biggest mistake in mankind’s history.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  I thought the title sounded familiar. I believe I read it years ago in my Archaeology of the Middle East class.
tptacek 8y ago
Help me understand why this isn't a sublimely silly argument. The era of hunter-gatherers spans the time from 12:00 midnight on Diamond's metaphorical clock all the way to 11:54PM. Virtually every advancement in human history, from the Enlightenment through the germ theory of illness all the way to the Internet, occurred after that time. What ordinary person would elect to time-travel one-way to 11:30PM on Diamond's clock, as opposed to living at 11:59PM? By Diamond's reasoning, we could live far longer on this planet if we lived like chimpanzees, scavenging what we could from the natural bounty of the land without bending it to our will. But I don't particularly want to be a chimp. Couldn't his argument be reframed as "the worst mistake in the history of the world is the human race"?
- vondur 8y ago
  I’m seriously wondering if the article is just trolling.
  - RachelF 8y ago
    No there's a serious belief in this, mainly among well-fed white intellectuals who believe in the "noble savage'. Yuval Harari, author of the excellent "Sapiens" also believes it.
    - chx 8y ago
      > Yuval Harari, author of the excellent "Sapiens" Uh huh, Sapiens as excellent... there are ... problems. Some: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5613ac/in_his_book_sapiens_yuval_noah_harari_states_that/d8ftm8v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5613ac/in_hi... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xvsia/how_did_the_french_populations_ideological/d6jltp9/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xvsia/how_d...
  - couchand 8y ago
    I'm confident it is, though back in 1987 it was just called sarcasm.
- 8y ago
thrden 8y ago
I don't find this particularly compelling as given the author's fundamental assumptions regarding inequity and sexism as natural outcroppings of agrarian society. For example the mongols were a largely non-agrarian society that was highly stratified, and deeply sexist that committed human rights violations on the global scale.
- kryogen1c 8y ago
  Don't limit your argument to people! Genetic variation creates hierarchies in which some are worse and some are better. It is inherent to literal life. Arguing some arbitrary technology created sexism and power structures is a nonstarter. You could argue that agriculture and modern globalization is exacerbating preexisting, inherent problems, but that's not the articles stance.
- flukus 8y ago
  This is what happens when the "gender is a social construct" rubbish infects academia. They now start off with the assumption that men and women are completely equal in all ways and look for explanations for why that changed, agriculture in this case. Starting off by acknowledging biological differences (men being stronger and faster) and biological necessities for a group to survive (pregnant women make poor hunters and warriors) is now heresy.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    You should quote the parts of the article that support your view that rubbish has infected academia.
mattygh 8y ago
This is a topic that you can't meaningfully unpack in a short essay. Whether or not you think this has merit, I'd recommend reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, it tackles this subject in a more philosophical way and is very thought provoking. It is similarly opinionated, but helps you question things you would have never even considered before.
couchand 8y ago
I'm pretty sure that this essay is farcical, sarcastic, and/or ironic. Also, I'm guessing from the style and topic this is the same Jared Diamond who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel? Particularly the clock idea I believe is repeated there. It's also curious to note that this copy seems to have been OCRed, given that there's at least one occurrence of "fanners" instead of "farmers".
echevil 8y ago
Early adopters of agriculture most likely had the option to choose between farming and keeping their old way of hunter/gatherer life, and yet agriculture become dominant
yosito 8y ago
The way I look at it, most of the humans who didn't adopt agriculture died. So I don't think they were better off.
fallingfrog 8y ago
As a counterpoint to this argument: https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that both oppression, and freedom, are present in every society from tiny to huge, the "egalitarian hunter gatherer" trope is a huge oversimplification, and really it's the cultural choices we make that determine whether we live in a free society or one full of domination and oppression. My favorite quote: "Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."
yawaramin 8y ago
> As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. But we're not looking at the free time of only farmers, but of society as a whole, thanks to specialisation and division of labour. Farmers produce food, others produce other goods and service and trade them for food. Economics 101: everyone is better off and more efficient because they do whatever they have a comparative advantage at.
ansible 8y ago
Eh, I think agriculture was inevitable. It isn't as if we could have had the world government at that time just ban agriculture, or create an information campaign to educate Farmers on the long term harm if the agrarian lifestyle. Agriculture led to industrialization. When someone can make guns, and when others can't... Someone is getting conquered.
UncleEntity 8y ago
I read something a while back stating the studies these theories of hunter-gatherer paradise are based upon were flawed in that they only took into account the actual time it took to gather food and not preparation and whatnot which turns out to add up to significant amounts of time.
jorgec 8y ago
"In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. " A suggestion is the start of a hypothesis, not a thesis. So this article (old article) is saying nothing but a point of view. It is not even worthy of Wikipedia. Anyways, I still don't get it about equality and diversity. How could you embrace both, at the same time?.
Leader2light 8y ago
The worst mistake in human history was when the USA did not take over the world after WWII using the power of nuclear bombs. End of story.
- sctb 8y ago
  Since we've already asked you not to do this we've banned the account.
flerchin 8y ago
The dumbest essay on the internet. Go live ahead and live paleo lifestyle with the bushmen, you moron.
jrd259 8y ago
For a more recent take on this, see James Scott's "Against The Grain". Scott presents evidence from archeology that the early state (at the dawn of state-organized agriculture) had to exert considerable effort to prevent agricultural workers from departing to pursue a hunter-gatherer or pastoralist lifestyle. If you're not an elite, the latter is more pleasant in every way. In other words, most people at the time of the transition to mass agriculture did not consider it an improvement. Note that Scott's subject is the early state; he does not address the very-long term benefit that arose only after many millennia. He does give some account of how these early states (gradually) prevailed over the alternatives. Nor does he address the other major economic/productive transitions from grain empire to modernity (e.g. industrialization, digitization). That's for some other book. I should also add the Scott shows that there were cultures with a mixed agriculture/hunter gatherer lifestyle, and that some places moved back and forth for various reasons; and also (in case you've read other word by Diamond) that Scott has a different take on "collapse" of early states: since they were, in general, highly coercive, some (but not all) of what we see now as a collapse were net improvements for the lives of all but the few at the top; they did not (always) include major loss of life, but only appear to be collapses because fewer permanent artifacts were created.
empath75 8y ago
> “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” —Ben Franklin
bmuppireddy 8y ago
It is not a mistake, silly. It is evolution. There are is no right / wrong in evolution. Each is a step out of countless (metaphorically) possibilities played out. Maybe, it is unfair to call it a mistake without knowing what life would have been at this point in time (or say in future.).
kisstheblade 8y ago
Yes, nice example, let's all just eat mongo-nuts (which btw I have never seen lying on the ground where I live...) "One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" Places where there is easy access to food have never evolved any technological progress and the societies are still messed up, because they never had to understand co-operation and just have tribalism of some sort. Just compare africa (probably the richest country in resources) with eg. europe. What a stupid article.

58 points by kartD 8y ago

Counterpoint: nearly all of those of us in developed countries are now better-off with agriculture, due to: - Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter) - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art) - Vastly lower mortality (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead) The way I look at it, agriculture made things way worse... until we advanced far enough to get way, way better. And even if you argue there are some populations in developing countries which are still worse-off, it's hard to believe that's going to last long as economic development progresses.

thrden 8y ago
Even in the least developed countries on earth life expectancy is nearly double the 26 years quoted in the article. This article feels less like serious analysis, and instead the product of over-problematizing
- drb91 8y ago
  A long life does not imply a quality life. A short life does not imply a lesser life.
  - chaboud 8y ago
    I have two flush toilets where I live. That, and protection from mosquitos, basically assures that I'm living a better life.
    - drb91 8y ago
      Well, I see this as a fearful worldview. Imagine instead a world without working in an office, or a world without living in a city. It takes a little, but not much, imagination to understand how that might be attractive to someone. Or perhaps imagine living in your evolutionarily suited habitat, if that’s easier to see. Sure, the shitty lives are particularly violent. But it’s a world where your life is dictated by your relationship with your environment and the people you know, not by people far away you have no access to.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Imagine a world where you can’t get clean water so you live a life where a worm uses acid to dig it self out of your foot once every few months then you contract some tropical disease and shit yourself to death.
        drb91 8y ago
        ...a fearful worldview, and a lack of imagination.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Imagination isn’t lacking you don’t need to imagine anything just look towards Africa, parts of Latin America, S.E. Asia and anywhere remote that gets hit by a natural disaster. What I can say quite confidently is that you likely never had to go thirsty because you couldn’t risk drinking the water or contracted cholera, heck you likely never even got a bad case of food poisoning thanks modern sanitary regulation and functional infrastructure. You never had to worry about if that insect bite laid larva under your skin or if the blistering rash you got on your leg is going to spread and imobalize you. You live a cushy comfortable and safe life which is afforded to the vast majority of people who live in developed nations. If you want to go back to huts and other “evolutionary compatible habitats” be my guest there are plenty of places on the planet that are a bad day away from being completely sent back to the Stone Age which you can relocate too, just don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and fill your instagram with the experience to your hearts content.
        drb91 8y ago
        > don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and fill your instagram with the experience to your hearts content. ...talk about projecting!
- waterhouse 8y ago
  The article specifies "Life expectancy at birth", which, many people have pointed out, is strongly skewed by the number of kids that die in childbirth or at a very young age. I'd be much more interested in life expectancy for those who survive to, say, 15 or 18. Unfortunately, Diamond doesn't give those numbers.
bjourne 8y ago
Better off at the cost of destroying most ecological systems in the world and pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. We'll see how long it lasts.
- autokad 8y ago
  if we continued to live as 'chimps' as some have worded it, the chances of extinction for humans, and all life on this planet is 100%. for all the damage done to ecological systems, now the chances of humans and some of those systems actually surviving beyond the life left in this planet is now some number above zero. that's a good thing imo
  - sk5t 8y ago
    Due to the expanding Sun / asteroid / supervolcano / superbug / something else? Do you think the universe cares about the inevitable, natural cessation of life on this planet?
Pimpus 8y ago
> - Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter) You have more variety, but not of more “fresh” foods. The only fresh food you can eat will always be local, so the variety only went up for foods transported from elsewhere… but fresh food in general is getting harder to acquire in Western society. Most people don’t eat fresh food at all so this point is just wrong. In traditional villages people are not afraid to eat vegetables with bugs and dirt on them -- that's what it means to eat fresh, and they don't need pesticides or preservatives. > - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art) Our culture is richer, but I'm not sure if the life of the average person is. You do have access to an absolute wealth of rich cultural material, but the majority of people do not utilize it. I’ve lived in traditional villages* and people there have surprisingly rich cultures, even if it was not mass-produced and massively-available, vapid nonsense. Also, contact with nature is more meaningful than most modern time-wasting activities like working in an office, commuting, or checking social media. *Agricultural societies, but I suspect pre-agricultural cultures were also very rich. - Vastly lower mortality Not sure what the data says about mortality rates. As far as health goes, most people in Western society are incredibly unhealthy. The amount of obese people in America is frankly revolting, not to mention the epidemics of hormone imbalances, digestive issues, awful posture, awful skin, etc. and the medicine/supplement regimens of pills that people have become dependent on to function or live, etc. The means to live more healthily are available, but the average person is not healthier than people with traditional lifestyles. We are weaker, more useless and have poorer sex lives. > (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead) Thanks to modern medicine, you’re not dead, but you’re bankrupt due to medical fees and addicted to painkillers and your gut flora is destroyed by antibiotics. The modern diet has little gut-promoting effect so you have to buy probiotic pills now. Etc.
djtriptych 8y ago
Counter counters: - re variety of food: Americans are among the fattest people in history. - re richer lives: reading and writing is for the literate. Not guaranteed by agriculture. I might argue that the creation of excess directly contributed to a treatment of education as a precious resource. Culture and art are not dependent on and predate agriculture. - re: mortality rate. We don’t die by falling from trees, but we’re also much worse at being in trees. Monkeys are pretty unlikely to die by falling out of a tree. We are worse at operating our own bodies in proportion to our reliance on modern medicine

masonic 8y ago

(1987) TL;DR: agriculture.

AznHisoka 8y ago
I knew this was it before I read it. Almost everyone cites this as the biggest mistake in mankind’s history.
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
I thought the title sounded familiar. I believe I read it years ago in my Archaeology of the Middle East class.

tptacek 8y ago

Help me understand why this isn't a sublimely silly argument. The era of hunter-gatherers spans the time from 12:00 midnight on Diamond's metaphorical clock all the way to 11:54PM. Virtually every advancement in human history, from the Enlightenment through the germ theory of illness all the way to the Internet, occurred after that time. What ordinary person would elect to time-travel one-way to 11:30PM on Diamond's clock, as opposed to living at 11:59PM? By Diamond's reasoning, we could live far longer on this planet if we lived like chimpanzees, scavenging what we could from the natural bounty of the land without bending it to our will. But I don't particularly want to be a chimp. Couldn't his argument be reframed as "the worst mistake in the history of the world is the human race"?

vondur 8y ago
I’m seriously wondering if the article is just trolling.
- RachelF 8y ago
  No there's a serious belief in this, mainly among well-fed white intellectuals who believe in the "noble savage'. Yuval Harari, author of the excellent "Sapiens" also believes it.
  - chx 8y ago
    > Yuval Harari, author of the excellent "Sapiens" Uh huh, Sapiens as excellent... there are ... problems. Some: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5613ac/in_his_book_sapiens_yuval_noah_harari_states_that/d8ftm8v/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5613ac/in_hi... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xvsia/how_did_the_french_populations_ideological/d6jltp9/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xvsia/how_d...
- couchand 8y ago
  I'm confident it is, though back in 1987 it was just called sarcasm.
8y ago

thrden 8y ago

I don't find this particularly compelling as given the author's fundamental assumptions regarding inequity and sexism as natural outcroppings of agrarian society. For example the mongols were a largely non-agrarian society that was highly stratified, and deeply sexist that committed human rights violations on the global scale.

kryogen1c 8y ago
Don't limit your argument to people! Genetic variation creates hierarchies in which some are worse and some are better. It is inherent to literal life. Arguing some arbitrary technology created sexism and power structures is a nonstarter. You could argue that agriculture and modern globalization is exacerbating preexisting, inherent problems, but that's not the articles stance.
flukus 8y ago
This is what happens when the "gender is a social construct" rubbish infects academia. They now start off with the assumption that men and women are completely equal in all ways and look for explanations for why that changed, agriculture in this case. Starting off by acknowledging biological differences (men being stronger and faster) and biological necessities for a group to survive (pregnant women make poor hunters and warriors) is now heresy.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  You should quote the parts of the article that support your view that rubbish has infected academia.

mattygh 8y ago

This is a topic that you can't meaningfully unpack in a short essay. Whether or not you think this has merit, I'd recommend reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, it tackles this subject in a more philosophical way and is very thought provoking. It is similarly opinionated, but helps you question things you would have never even considered before.

couchand 8y ago

I'm pretty sure that this essay is farcical, sarcastic, and/or ironic. Also, I'm guessing from the style and topic this is the same Jared Diamond who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel? Particularly the clock idea I believe is repeated there. It's also curious to note that this copy seems to have been OCRed, given that there's at least one occurrence of "fanners" instead of "farmers".

echevil 8y ago

Early adopters of agriculture most likely had the option to choose between farming and keeping their old way of hunter/gatherer life, and yet agriculture become dominant

yosito 8y ago

The way I look at it, most of the humans who didn't adopt agriculture died. So I don't think they were better off.

fallingfrog 8y ago

As a counterpoint to this argument: https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/ David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that both oppression, and freedom, are present in every society from tiny to huge, the "egalitarian hunter gatherer" trope is a huge oversimplification, and really it's the cultural choices we make that determine whether we live in a free society or one full of domination and oppression. My favorite quote: "Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."

yawaramin 8y ago

> As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. But we're not looking at the free time of only farmers, but of society as a whole, thanks to specialisation and division of labour. Farmers produce food, others produce other goods and service and trade them for food. Economics 101: everyone is better off and more efficient because they do whatever they have a comparative advantage at.

ansible 8y ago

Eh, I think agriculture was inevitable. It isn't as if we could have had the world government at that time just ban agriculture, or create an information campaign to educate Farmers on the long term harm if the agrarian lifestyle. Agriculture led to industrialization. When someone can make guns, and when others can't... Someone is getting conquered.

UncleEntity 8y ago

I read something a while back stating the studies these theories of hunter-gatherer paradise are based upon were flawed in that they only took into account the actual time it took to gather food and not preparation and whatnot which turns out to add up to significant amounts of time.

jorgec 8y ago

"In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. " A suggestion is the start of a hypothesis, not a thesis. So this article (old article) is saying nothing but a point of view. It is not even worthy of Wikipedia. Anyways, I still don't get it about equality and diversity. How could you embrace both, at the same time?.

Leader2light 8y ago

The worst mistake in human history was when the USA did not take over the world after WWII using the power of nuclear bombs. End of story.

sctb 8y ago
Since we've already asked you not to do this we've banned the account.

flerchin 8y ago

The dumbest essay on the internet. Go live ahead and live paleo lifestyle with the bushmen, you moron.

jrd259 8y ago

For a more recent take on this, see James Scott's "Against The Grain". Scott presents evidence from archeology that the early state (at the dawn of state-organized agriculture) had to exert considerable effort to prevent agricultural workers from departing to pursue a hunter-gatherer or pastoralist lifestyle. If you're not an elite, the latter is more pleasant in every way. In other words, most people at the time of the transition to mass agriculture did not consider it an improvement. Note that Scott's subject is the early state; he does not address the very-long term benefit that arose only after many millennia. He does give some account of how these early states (gradually) prevailed over the alternatives. Nor does he address the other major economic/productive transitions from grain empire to modernity (e.g. industrialization, digitization). That's for some other book. I should also add the Scott shows that there were cultures with a mixed agriculture/hunter gatherer lifestyle, and that some places moved back and forth for various reasons; and also (in case you've read other word by Diamond) that Scott has a different take on "collapse" of early states: since they were, in general, highly coercive, some (but not all) of what we see now as a collapse were net improvements for the lives of all but the few at the top; they did not (always) include major loss of life, but only appear to be collapses because fewer permanent artifacts were created.

empath75 8y ago

> “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” —Ben Franklin

bmuppireddy 8y ago

It is not a mistake, silly. It is evolution. There are is no right / wrong in evolution. Each is a step out of countless (metaphorically) possibilities played out. Maybe, it is unfair to call it a mistake without knowing what life would have been at this point in time (or say in future.).

kisstheblade 8y ago

Yes, nice example, let's all just eat mongo-nuts (which btw I have never seen lying on the ground where I live...) "One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" Places where there is easy access to food have never evolved any technological progress and the societies are still messed up, because they never had to understand co-operation and just have tribalism of some sort. Just compare africa (probably the richest country in resources) with eg. europe. What a stupid article.