I might be a little late to this, but I couldn't let it be just a passing thought. Being exposed to Jared Diamond's work lately, I had the luck of acquiring a copy of his 1987 five-page essay titled
The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race (pdf accessible
here). This was published almost a decade prior to his much-acclaimed, Pulitzer-winning non-fiction book
Guns, Germs, and Steel (here onwards referred to as GGS), and was written during the course of his 30-year research into the question that both the book and this essay deal with - namely, the influence of weapons, environment, diseases, geographical luck, and most importantly, agriculture & domestication on the development of human race and evolution of world civilizations and societies (the question being: "Why are some parts of the world, and the people living in them, more advanced than others?"). But before I proceed with my criticism and comments, I need to state clearly that Jared's approach to explaining the development of human societies across the globe is strictly and firmly non-racial; he downright discards all notions that genetic factors, notwithstanding rare and minor implications, were in any way responsible for the advancement of some civilizations and the stagnation of others. This view is shared by modern science as well, with the 2000 Human Genome Project discovering that 99.98% of all human genes of all races are identical.
Judging by such a bold title, I was initially skeptical of what he had to say, but as I went through the essay page by page, I was to some extent convinced by the argument, but (but again!) soon, much to my disappointment, I uncovered certain holes or "skipping" of logical next-steps in a couple of places. Over the evening I was preoccupied with the argument in an attempt to find more holes and thus feel proud of my critical reasoning skills, but to the contrary, I could fill in the already-found holes by myself and felt the argument to be at least partly convincing once again. (I was like, "Well yeah, it
is plausible.") I'll address them in a while.
Jared's theory in this essay is focused mainly on the changes taking place in any one arbitrary hunter-gatherer society with the advent of agriculture, as opposed to his theory in GGS which focuses on the changes taking place in the human race as a whole with the advent of various factors. In a nutshell, he submits that agriculture, with all its advantages and benefits, brought upon us an unanticipated evil so great that it plagues the world to this day and has had dire consequences on civilizations throughout human history. And that evil is inequality - inequality in all its forms, ranging from class to gender to skin tone to you name it! It was only after we invented agriculture, says Jared, that the first signs of inequality began to show up. Hunter-gatherer societies, that is the pre-agriculture groups, had little to no reason to divide themselves into classes; everyone had such a crucial role to play in the food accumulation process alone that any division of a society on any basis would only threaten the very survival of the entire group. But with agriculture, all that changed.
The emergence of agriculture was a turning point in history, as the cliché goes. It provided, in relatively abundant quantities, the one indispensable source of survival: food. Farming cut down the time and labor expense needed to find scant and scattered sources of food in the forests through hunting by many fold, effectively reducing the burden on much of the population and hence freeing them of, or at least stripping some of the work load previously borne by them in hunting and gathering. This is a well-established fact in archeology, one that is supported by evidence. As the burden came down, they were able to devote time to other activities (not necessarily leisure), and women, especially, were able to either better care for their children or, because of the dwelling at one place - a new lifestyle - brought about by agriculture, were able to carry more children and hence grow their population faster and provide sufficient food for the extra population through the harvests. (Read the essay for a more in-depth explanation of this section).
Agriculture almost seemed at the time to be a godsend, all-encompassing boon, giving them not only a year-round supply/storage of food they used to so desperately search for but also ample time to expend on developing other survival skills. But amid all this progress and without their knowledge was also taking birth the seeds of inequality which would later determine who amongst them gets to eat, who doesn't, and who does how much. This is where I tumbled upon a missing logical next-step in Jared's argument.
To quote from the essay: "Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses."
The part about hunter-gatherers not having classes is obvious; as I mentioned earlier, everyone played an equally important role in food production process that division would preclude survival. But the last sentence in that quote - about a healthy, nonproducing elite setting itself above the disease-ridden masses - is the part that is elusive, as Jared fails to explain exactly
how that is possible. Why, you might ask, would a producing "lower" class feed a nonproducing "higher" class and let them live healthily at the expense of their own health. If you were a farmer when farming was invented, would you grow crops and domesticate animals only to feed an elite class that doesn't? You might as well ask them to sod off and eat all your crops yourself rather than just giving it away to some other higher class that neither produces nor shares your ill-health. And even if you are crazy enough to do that, why on earth would you be tagged "lower class" while those who don't produce and feed on
your food be tagged "higher class"? Why can't it be the other way round? For, you are the power house of the community, and if anything, it is you who should be placed and revered above everyone else in the community because it you who has saved them all the labor of hunting and provided them with the time to fuck about. Why, then?
Jared conveniently skips answering all those questions and hops from "man invented agriculture" to "man succumbed to deep-class division". He partly draws his conclusion from the way it is today: look at the state of farmers, regardless of the country, and compare them with the nonproducing class of the same country that depends on the farmer for food demands. Or, on a larger scale, an example which Jared himself cites, look at America depending for oil on oil-producing nations of the Middle East and still being better off economically and socially than those nations. The conclusion is clear: producing class is often given a lower social status than non-producing class. But how and why did it happen are the questions that have been denied an answer here. (Additionally, while comparing the farmers of today with the farmers of those day, one needs resist the temptation to ignore the pivotal role money plays. Farmers today produce for money, and farmers of those days had no concept of money.)
The answer lies partly in human nature and partly in the characteristic of agriculture. As noted, farming is an immobile form of food production. Populations harvesting a crop need to dwell at a single place - close to or next to a farm, for example - over long periods of time. In the fullness of time, the population grows, communities become villages, villages grow in size. While this dwelling does provide several advantages over hunting, it also poses a serious threat: the threat of invasion by a foreign group. This behavior has been confirmed by evolutionary biologists for apes, and anthropologists, historians and evolutionary biologists for human beings as well. When food sources run low (either because of the food reserves running out or because of the population exceeding the sustainability of those reserves), we, the modern apes, go in search of other sources elsewhere. During the search, if encountered by other groups (which are by now rivals) who have already taken control of the much-needed food, a conflict occurs and heads roll. The winner stands alone, the winner takes it all. All this is true even today, although with humans today greed plays a role as important as the survival instincts. But with the hunter-gatherer communities, this didn't pose a major problem because they were always on the move and never had the worry of an invader invading 'their' land. They had no land of theirs. Even with them conflicts of this nature occurred, but they were insignificant enough to not make a difference to the social structure of their communities. Farming, however, needed protection from invaders, and that is where the security-providing soldiers enter into the equation.
An average American farmer today feeds the stomachs of 165 people worldwide, i.e., a producer-to-consumer ratio of 1:165. (I wish I had the numbers for Indian farmers). 40 years ago, that American farmer fed 28.5 stomachs (
source). This drastic change can be attributed to the research and development in agricultural practices of yesteryears. So the farmers of nascent agricultural era can be expected to have produced a much lower yield for their crops, as their practices of farming were much more primitive and undeveloped than today's. Even if we assume a producer-to-consumer ratio of 1:1.25 for them (note that it
has to be greater than 1:1, else it wouldn't have made much sense to migrate from hunting-gathering to farming), that is, one farmer feeding 1.25 stomachs, it would have still freed up about 12.5% of the population from the duties of food production. This 12.5%, being skilled as they were at hunting and handling weapons, could now put their skills to use in developing a defense system for the farming community. And the deal? Since money didn't exist, the farmers would pay them in the form of food in exchange for protection, as they are already producing an extra 12.5%. This has effectively formed the first societal division: the division between the farming class and the defense class. The defense class now needs to be organized, as an unorganized army is as easy to defeat as a community without an army. This therefore calls for leadership, resulting in the subdivision of army into various levels of hierarchy, at the top being the leader or commander-in-chief who has control of the army and over how the army advances and occupies surrounding land area for the needs of growing community size, thereby establishing himself as the King, the royal family, or the supreme owner of the land. He now begins to collect taxes in the form of food from farmers - not just for the land they are being allowed to farm in but also for the protection and other facilities such as road, housing et cetera he is providing them (not very different from the tax system we have today in our government, except that in our system much of the tax money comes back to the public in the form of services). Wealth (food) now begins to accumulate more than the needs of the royal family and at the expense of the needs of the producing class.
Despite being responsible for production, farmers would end up paying their share of food in the form of taxes to the royal family and through them a share of it to the army. Even if their production ratio continues at 1:1.25 or higher, because of the taxes and the growing army size, they might have to cut down their own share of the '1' and add it to the '1.25'. This apparently leads to poor nutrition and ill health of farmers and the good health of royals. Since protection is obviously more necessary and important than just good health, farmers are left with no choice but to yield to the demands of the King and his soldiers. The King being the commander and the farmer being the obeyer, and the King being 'richer' than the farmer, the former gets a "higher" social status while the latter gets a "lower". And with that, a new master-obeyer relationship was born.
Meanwhile, during the formation of this defense system, because of increased food production-to-consumption ratio over time, several sub-classes are formed which aren't directly part of the army but without which the army would be worthless. Blacksmiths, an example, are essential to armory (the fact that farming allows a part of the community to devote entirely to the development of arms cannot be ignored). Cooks, another example, are essential to providing cooked food to the soldiers and the King. And since these blacksmiths and cooks themselves need protection from foreign invasion, they are as obliged in their duty to the King and his men as the farmers, but are not farmers in themselves, leading to the inception of two more social classes. Likewise, many other classes could have formed feeding almost entirely on the food produced by the farmer and at the same time leading to a division of society into various classes of various ranks, the farmer being at the bottom of the pyramid.
A mere 1:1.25 producer-to-consumer ratio could produce that much inequality within a community, and with every incremental rise on the right hand side of the ratio, a higher percentage of the population was freed of its food-producing duties which could then be handed over to other self-preservation activities. In fact, it is very tempting to conclude that the more food a farmer produced (i.e., the higher the producer-to-consumer ratio), the more the social classes that took birth and the more the ensuing inequality that propagated in the community. Look at the modern world today. If you strike off the 1:165 producer-to-consumer ratio and if one individual was solely responsible for producing food for oneself, directly or indirectly (i.e., if the producer-to-consumer ratio came down to 1:1), then not only would the world population drop drastically, but almost all societal divisions would vanish altogether. Development, in all its form, would come to a grinding halt, since if every person is expected to produce and consume his/her own food, there wouldn’t be much time or energy left for any other activities that propel the modern world towards progress. The only activity then would be to grow/hunt food, cook, eat, and regurgitate. And perhaps some spare time for recreation.
That finally brings me to the end of this criticism, which oddly is almost as long as the essay itself. Jared asserts that the shift from hunting to agriculture was the biggest mistake in human history, that hunting, despite feeding very few stomachs and therefore limiting human reproduction, was better than farming in that it precluded inequality amongst the people who practiced it. I beg to differ. While it
may be true (I said in the second paragraph that I'm only partially convinced by this theory, given that there isn't sufficient evidence to definitively and conclusively make any claims) that farming brought about certain additional inequalities in human society (keyword: additional; I'm not convinced that agriculture is the root of
all inequalities, and certain inequalities such as gender and age and appearances could already have been present in hunter-gatherer societies), it also cleared the way for exponential human progress on unprecedented levels, the likes of which the human mind had never before imagined. Farming made the modern world possible, farming gave birth to innovation on mind-boggling scales, and, most importantly, farming provided the very sustenance for our species to survive on and grow. Farming, in other words, regardless of all the evil it imposed upon us, is the biggest best-thing to have happened to us in all human history. Every coin has two faces. Deal with it!
Footnotes:
1. Read the essay.
2. Watch a 3-hour PBS documentary based on Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book,
Guns, Germs, and Steel, which also deals with the same subject albeit with a different focus, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgnmT-Y_rGQ. And if you are lucky enough to be in my small circle of friends*, ask me for the documentary and I’ll give you a copy myself.
*Just kidding
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