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I was expecting the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Library of Baghdad ("House of Wisdom"). I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essa

I was expecting the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Library of Baghdad ("House of Wisdom"). I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions. If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here. In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history." Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?

sliverstorm 16y ago
Successful in that humans survived that way without major issue for 98% of their existence. We've only been industrialized for a tiny period of our racial history, and we already have and had a host of problems. (the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best 5,000 years ago.) By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.
- simonsarris 16y ago
  I certainly don't disagree with your last point, but I take issue with your first one. "We've only been doing this for a short while and already all these issues arose" isn't necessarily an argument against something. It could be said about a lot of things, for instance: The early automobile was only out for a short while but already had a host of problems: It was loud, it required hard-to-get petrol, it couldn't go all the places horses could go, it was more expensive than a horse, and horses could be traded more easily than automobiles (more liquid of an asset). And yet we worked through these problems. We built roads, autos are quieter and less polluting. They still have their problems, but they far outpace horses in utility. I think civilization will be the same way. It has troubles at first, sure. Worse nutrition, class divisions, disease. I'll give that. But its getting better. And my optimistic self hopes it will continue to get better as time goes on. If industrialization has only been a tiny period of history, well, give it a while!
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Certainly; it could wind up being fantastic, and we could wind up fixing all our problems and turning civilization to the best thing to happen to humanity. It's just that, at this point, we've got 5,000 years of rocky start compared to 195,000 years of what I would like you to imagine as 'smooth sailing'. At this point, which has proven itself? Which has not? That's all the author was talking about.
- michaelochurch 16y ago
  By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable. I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses. Did people have better nutrition, in 10000 BC, if they were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers? Yes; that's not even debated. I don't know how much should be taken out of that. For example, there's the often made and almost certainly false claim that agriculture led to gender inequality. From a gender-equality perspective, I don't think that pre-agrarian society was the utopia some people make it out to be. Pre-monogamous societies pretty much invariably treated women as property, because access to women was the signal (and primary benefit) of a man's social status. "Alphas" had many wives, "gammas" had none and were sent off to war as soldiers (to either "take" wives or die). It was better to be a woman than a low-status man, but that doesn't mean gender equality was there. It's hard to have gender equality in that sort of morally debased culture. Monogamous marriage (which came much, much later than agriculture) was the very first wave of feminism.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable. I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses. I agree with the rose-colored glasses. However, the post I replied to was hinting they believed it was obvious modern societies would win when compared based on happiness, and I thought it prudent to point out we can't assume that.
    - michaelochurch 16y ago
      I think the highs and lows were a lot steeper in hunter-gatherer societies. The thrill for a 15-year-old hunter after his (or her) first big kill is probably unmatched by the smaller victory of a good SAT score or college admission... or anything we experience in our lives, for that matter. Merely surviving can give people a much stronger sense of purpose than most office jobs. On the other hand, the violent death rate was somewhere around 0.5% per year from conflict with other humans alone. Life expectancy for someone who survived childhood was probably in the mid-50s and some people definitely achieved what would be considered "old age" even today, but if you made it to 65, almost all of your childhood friends would be dead. It's impossible to compare subjective experiences. I know that I wouldn't trade, but that's all I can really say.
pandeiro 16y ago
"If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?" I think he mentions implicitly that agriculture cannibalizes resources that were once diverse and auto-regenerative, in the comment about hunter-gatherers being forced into some of the worst real-estate in the world today. There's a secondary point that heaps of knowledge about the natural world have been lost, since even the modern, technologically advanced life sciences of today do not reconstitute the "working knowledge" that humans had of how to live off of wild plants and animals for food, medicine, and shelter. Current events certainly bolster Diamond's argument in some ways. Look at the speculation/agriculture-driven burning of the world's rainforests, for example, for the conversion of mass tracts of biologically diverse (and productive) land into monocultures of diminishing returns.
yread 16y ago
> "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I think he actually mentioned a possible reason Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others that's engineers and artists and thinkers. They can completely specialize in what they do because they don't have to work to get food. Usually it was because they had a Maecenas who exploited legions of other people to provide (mainly) for himself and (a little) for people who he found interesting (or they provided him with entertainment). And those people created the most innovation, I believe. Innovative farmers would be concerned with how to work on the field so that their backs hurt less, but major advances required seeing the bigger picture.
- michaelochurch 16y ago
  In 3000 BC, artists, thinkers, lawyers, doctors and engineers (to what extent they existed) were all part of one (mostly parasitic, but in some ways quite useful) caste: priests. People tend to think of ancient priests as charlatans, but they were also the people who held onto all the knowledge: that if you chew these "magical" leaves while tilling the fields, you don't get tired; if you plant when this "divine" star is rising, you get the best results. The emergence of artists, engineers, et al, apart from a priesthood didn't emerge until the birth of philosophy in the first millennium BC.
sedachv 16y ago
"Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops." Göbekli Tepe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe) disproves that assumption, and calls to question many others about pre-agrarian society.
- nooneelse 16y ago
  One counter example does not disprove a supposition of "very little".

sliverstorm 16y ago

Successful in that humans survived that way without major issue for 98% of their existence. We've only been industrialized for a tiny period of our racial history, and we already have and had a host of problems. (the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best 5,000 years ago.) By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.

simonsarris 16y ago
I certainly don't disagree with your last point, but I take issue with your first one. "We've only been doing this for a short while and already all these issues arose" isn't necessarily an argument against something. It could be said about a lot of things, for instance: The early automobile was only out for a short while but already had a host of problems: It was loud, it required hard-to-get petrol, it couldn't go all the places horses could go, it was more expensive than a horse, and horses could be traded more easily than automobiles (more liquid of an asset). And yet we worked through these problems. We built roads, autos are quieter and less polluting. They still have their problems, but they far outpace horses in utility. I think civilization will be the same way. It has troubles at first, sure. Worse nutrition, class divisions, disease. I'll give that. But its getting better. And my optimistic self hopes it will continue to get better as time goes on. If industrialization has only been a tiny period of history, well, give it a while!
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Certainly; it could wind up being fantastic, and we could wind up fixing all our problems and turning civilization to the best thing to happen to humanity. It's just that, at this point, we've got 5,000 years of rocky start compared to 195,000 years of what I would like you to imagine as 'smooth sailing'. At this point, which has proven itself? Which has not? That's all the author was talking about.
michaelochurch 16y ago
By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable. I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses. Did people have better nutrition, in 10000 BC, if they were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers? Yes; that's not even debated. I don't know how much should be taken out of that. For example, there's the often made and almost certainly false claim that agriculture led to gender inequality. From a gender-equality perspective, I don't think that pre-agrarian society was the utopia some people make it out to be. Pre-monogamous societies pretty much invariably treated women as property, because access to women was the signal (and primary benefit) of a man's social status. "Alphas" had many wives, "gammas" had none and were sent off to war as soldiers (to either "take" wives or die). It was better to be a woman than a low-status man, but that doesn't mean gender equality was there. It's hard to have gender equality in that sort of morally debased culture. Monogamous marriage (which came much, much later than agriculture) was the very first wave of feminism.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable. I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses. I agree with the rose-colored glasses. However, the post I replied to was hinting they believed it was obvious modern societies would win when compared based on happiness, and I thought it prudent to point out we can't assume that.
  - michaelochurch 16y ago
    I think the highs and lows were a lot steeper in hunter-gatherer societies. The thrill for a 15-year-old hunter after his (or her) first big kill is probably unmatched by the smaller victory of a good SAT score or college admission... or anything we experience in our lives, for that matter. Merely surviving can give people a much stronger sense of purpose than most office jobs. On the other hand, the violent death rate was somewhere around 0.5% per year from conflict with other humans alone. Life expectancy for someone who survived childhood was probably in the mid-50s and some people definitely achieved what would be considered "old age" even today, but if you made it to 65, almost all of your childhood friends would be dead. It's impossible to compare subjective experiences. I know that I wouldn't trade, but that's all I can really say.

pandeiro 16y ago

"If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?" I think he mentions implicitly that agriculture cannibalizes resources that were once diverse and auto-regenerative, in the comment about hunter-gatherers being forced into some of the worst real-estate in the world today. There's a secondary point that heaps of knowledge about the natural world have been lost, since even the modern, technologically advanced life sciences of today do not reconstitute the "working knowledge" that humans had of how to live off of wild plants and animals for food, medicine, and shelter. Current events certainly bolster Diamond's argument in some ways. Look at the speculation/agriculture-driven burning of the world's rainforests, for example, for the conversion of mass tracts of biologically diverse (and productive) land into monocultures of diminishing returns.

yread 16y ago

> "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I think he actually mentioned a possible reason Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others that's engineers and artists and thinkers. They can completely specialize in what they do because they don't have to work to get food. Usually it was because they had a Maecenas who exploited legions of other people to provide (mainly) for himself and (a little) for people who he found interesting (or they provided him with entertainment). And those people created the most innovation, I believe. Innovative farmers would be concerned with how to work on the field so that their backs hurt less, but major advances required seeing the bigger picture.

michaelochurch 16y ago
In 3000 BC, artists, thinkers, lawyers, doctors and engineers (to what extent they existed) were all part of one (mostly parasitic, but in some ways quite useful) caste: priests. People tend to think of ancient priests as charlatans, but they were also the people who held onto all the knowledge: that if you chew these "magical" leaves while tilling the fields, you don't get tired; if you plant when this "divine" star is rising, you get the best results. The emergence of artists, engineers, et al, apart from a priesthood didn't emerge until the birth of philosophy in the first millennium BC.

sedachv 16y ago

"Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops." Göbekli Tepe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe) disproves that assumption, and calls to question many others about pre-agrarian society.

nooneelse 16y ago
One counter example does not disprove a supposition of "very little".