5: History’s Biggest Fraud
From Harari—Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
This chapter (and this section of the book) starts discussing the Agricultural Revolution. I’ve heard that it’s a controversial period. Traditional scholarship says it was a great boon for human civilization, while more modern research says it wasn’t that great. Obviously the author is in the latter camp with the title of this chapter.
As with more modern research, the author contends that farmers in the Agricultural Revolution had more difficult and less fulfilling lives. The revolution indeed fed more mouths, but the quality of life for people was lower, especially for the lower class of farmers. It also resulted in an elite class, creating wealth inequality.
The author interestingly portrays wheat as a big winner from an evolution point of view. Wheat manipulated homo sapiens into maintaining and taking care of wheat plants, nurturing them, removing weeds and other obstructions. And as a result, homo sapiens broke their backs and generally endured hard physical labor to accomplish this, since their bodies had not evolved for farming. The author points out from a blind evolutionary point of view, wheat was a clear winner. The copies of wheat DNA at the time exploded because of the Agricultural Revolution. The analysis is intriguing since when people discuss evolution, they usually think of animals first, if not exclusively. Furthermore, even though evolution is by definition “blind”, people may ascribe intentionality to a very high cognitive level. That the author states as a matter of fact, that a plant has fulfilled the criteria here as an evolutionary winner (in that time period), goes to show how little we still understand Darwinian forces. To me, it’s an extremely elegant model, since it abstracts away the debate of “intelligent life” and higher concepts of purpose. If we measure simply by copies of DNA, we can calculate clear winners. And if we clear definitions and consensus, we can build upon those.
The author has a fairly negative view the Agricultural Revolution. He says the pursuit of a better life results in actually more hardship at the end, for homo sapiens. The author hints at it, but doesn’t totally flesh out the argument. It seems that small changes, evolutionary changes in the DNA or society, lead to more broad changes. I would say that these small changes led to some aspects of life being hyper optimized, and society at that time continued to move in that direction. With each step, they were getting more grain, for example, for the winter season, but slowly losing something of worth, such as more meaningful work that is less repetitive. To me, it’s the classic scenario of small local optimization steps that puts you in an end state that is actually not something you would want if you knew it right at the beginning.
The chapter ends with the author commenting on how farmed animals have horrible living conditions, even today. Yes, from a DNA copy perspective, they are winners. But from a suffering perspective, of a quality of life, they are losers. But like I mentioned earlier, it’s harder to objectively argue this. Because there are different ways to measure quality of life and utility. But certainly we need to continue to do so, with some philosophers ascribing value of any animal to “feel” or “suffer” as criteria in the calculation, in the addition to the more tradition standards of mental cognition.
