classic representations of life before agriculture or the state
here are two classic representations of life before agriculture or the state… on the one hand you have Thomas Hobbes who wrote that before the state there were “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death” and certainly with a 10% murder rate in the foraging era this possibility was very real… Hobbes goes on to say “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” and foraging life certainly could be but also it could be quite nice depending on the circumstances… in fact some foragers would have lived happier and healthier lives than some peasants in Hobbes’ own day… the upshot of this narrative is to emphasize the potential anarchy of the foraging existence, to underline the “gift” of the state bringing in law and order and to justify varying degrees of authoritarianism… in Hobbes’ case it was to justify as best as he could the institution of monarchy… on the flip side you have a vision of the “noble savage” where foragers living before the rise of property lived in an age of innocence, peacefulness and plenty… all the bad stuff came from owning property or so it goes… as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said “the first person who having enclosed a plot of land took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society”…[unique_solution]
“what crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried to his fellow men: ‘do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’” and it is certainly true that once humans started organizing themselves into States that violence and wealth disparity became intensified and placed on a much larger scale… but the idea that there was no violence, no conflict, no crime, murder and misery before the rise of the state is simply preposterous… we know too much about our own evolutionary psychology for that… we are in almost every respect the same animal today as existed a hundred thousand years ago, the same obsolete design that evolved with all the troublesome evolutionary wiring that helped us survive and reproduce in the foraging lifestyle… take all the decent people and the criminals, remove all their property, remove society and make them live their entire lives around the same 12 to 24 people and see how they fare… it’ll definitely be a mixed bag at the very least you won’t be confronted with a picture of an egalitarian utopia which is devoid of crime, misery, murder and conflict
At the core of both Hobbes and Rousseau is a mode of political and ideological thinking that has reverberated across the centuries… if you are inclined to think that without some semblance of law and order, governance and a right to property, we would be undoubtedly living in a worse condition than we are today then this colors your views of politics and the world at large… in short you might view human beings as fundamentally flawed characters and so the goal of a greater utopia might seem impossible… in fact it would imply that policy should be dictated on minimizing the damage humans do to each other in order to arrive at a society that while not perfect at least is tried and tested and works… you might in fact find your thinking places you more on the conservative end of the spectrum… at the very least you’ll find yourself in the political center… if on the other hand you subscribe more favorably to the view of Rousseau that the corrupting factor in human affairs is property and that before property ownership was the thing, humans had less to fight over and less to corrupt their social lives, you might take a pretty sour view of the past ten thousand years since the invention of Agriculture… you are more likely to view the foraging era in an idealized light almost akin to a Golden Age or Out of Eden narrative… you’re also more likely to believe that humans are born as blank slates rather than products of flawed evolution and are more likely to attribute bad habits in human society to social constructs than to problems that are more innate to the human psyche… in the Rousseau view of the world it is also easier to facilitate utopian thinking where the human is not fundamentally flawed but rather corrupted by society… all that would be required to fix the problems of the day is social reform… tear down social constructs and replace them with new ones you might be more willing to indulge in social engineering and re-education or even indoctrination in order to shape a new sort of people in a new sort of society that better fit with your principles… the idea that humans might have innate instincts given to them by evolution would make it almost impossible for your social engineering to succeed, however that is a rather unwelcome idea to those who subscribe to Rousseau’s point of view because it would mean that while some things are possible with social reform, ultimate utopia will never be achieved and worse, perhaps your ideas for social engineering might ultimately do more harm than good… these two fundamentally opposed viewpoints have been dredged up in various political conflicts throughout the 18th 19th and 20th centuries and continue to wreak havoc upon us today so take a moment ask yourself which view of the world strikes you as more accurate – Hobbes or Rousseau? The answer that pops into your mind will tell you a lot about how you think politically and philosophically… take a few moments to analyze whether you’ve struck the right balance between nature and nurture, perhaps contemplate the idea that maybe your first principles might put you in danger of putting you out of contact with reality and if ever enacted in society might prevent positive change, or do more harm than good… by now most of us are familiar with the issue of global warming / climate change – it is both a political and environmental issue which can be pursued to varying degrees of productiveness… to quickly recap: increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, pumped out by factories since roughly 1800 in the Industrial Revolution, has captured more of the sun’s heat on earth, raising the average global temperature, potentially altering and even destroying certain ecosystems at a faster pace than has been seen before in nature and geological time… maybe on the timescale of decades, maybe on the timescale of centuries, the damage may be severe… but that is not the focus of this video… what is the focus of this video is the Ruddiman hypothesis that states that humans were increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere well before we had smoke belching factories in the Industrial Revolution… according to the Ruddiman hypothesis, the invention of agriculture may have had the same effect 10,000 years ago. It works like this – in order to create fields for growing crops, you often need to cut down forests, trees that are very good at capturing and utilizing CO2 in the atmosphere… this would have started slowly 10,000 years ago, since only a very small part of the globe was farming, but it would have accelerated by 5000 years ago and by 1,000 years ago somewhere like Europe, which had once been covered in forests, increasingly began to be replaced by more and more fields until you get somewhere like Britain where 300 years ago there was actually a shortage of wood for fuel… sure the forests would be replaced with crops but plants far smaller, that capture far less CO2 and convert it to oxygen than trees… furthermore with the increase of burning wood fires and also smelting various materials like iron and copper for tool use, the CO2 content of the atmosphere might have already been raised and even 5,000 years ago… perhaps even at the start of States this level of deforestation and increase of emission…they have already started to impact the climate… it is possible that even the cooler climate of the last 5000 years of Earth’s history would have been much more severe if we had not switched to agriculture… the Ruddiman hypothesis even goes on to assert that it was the switch to agriculture that had forestalled the onset of another Ice Age, which usually falls about every 10,000 years after the start of an interglacial period… we should be due for one now but it’s nowhere in sight… mind you our ability to detect CO2 levels to a high degree of historical accuracy to confirm the Ruddiman hypothesis is limited… moreover it is very difficult to tell how quickly or how severely increasing levels of CO2 would impact something as chaotic and complex as the climate system so now the Ruddiman hypothesis remains unimproved but it is not unthinkable… consider how dramatically humans were changing the face of the earth in the agrarian period…we were altering, deforesting and terracing entire landscapes… we were domesticating and genetically engineering armies of plants and animals… the tremendous impact of collective learning cannot be denied, which is why the Ruddiman hypothesis remains a very curious and very intriguing idea… it would imply that humans are even more powerful in their influence on the biosphere than those who assert that we really started to make an impact at the start of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago… I think either way it can be acknowledged that humans are quite the force to be reckoned with and with power and complexity that can either lead to a great deal of good or a great deal of destruction, something tells me there will be no clearer a demonstration of this then in the oncoming crashing thunder of the 21st century