The Original Sin of Agriculture: Prehistory

The Story of B opened my eyes to a linguistic problem that reveals some truth about the way we read and perceive history. We tell the story of history beginning with the rise of agriculture. Everything before the rise of agriculture is referred to as “prehistory.” That can be taken to mean simply that this was a time before history was recorded or written down. In another more subtle way it belies the way we think about the kind of life and people that existed before agriculture. In a sense this was non-history, non-life and they are therefore non-people.

This was certainly part of what allowed colonizers and religious imperialists to conquer in the name of civilization. Savages and barbarians were not real people. Their ways of life, thinking and relating could not possibly be anything more than animalistic instincts and perhaps demonic deception. They were primitive people who had not yet been blessed by the advances of civilization, progress and technology. There was nothing to learn from these people and everything to teach them.

I don’t mean to romanticize tribal civilizations by any means. There are harsh realities that come with another vision for the way the world works. But this is exactly what they offer in response to the failures of our technocratic society, another vision of the world.

In this other vision of the world, human beings are subject to the same rules and limitations as the rest of creation. The way we order our lives is based on living in harmony with the natural rhythms of the world. This includes the natural process of life and death. We are not as much in control of nature as we are subject to it. As mentioned in the previous post, this means there are tradeoffs concerning the population that the planet can sustain and how we move away from our current destructive practices. What this other vision offers is a refocusing and reorientation of the way we think about the problems we face, their sources and causes.

I don’t know that hunter-gatherer societies offer a viable solution for the near future. What they do offer is an alternative vision and a challenge to the modern myth of progress that has brought us to the brink of disaster. Perhaps they can help us find a path forward, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

This is the continuation of a series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

The Original Sin of Agriculture: Population Control Revisited

In the initial series I summarized the argument in Ishmael by saying

The expansion of agriculture to feed the population serves to enlarge the population necessitating the continued expansion of agriculture to feed an ever-growing population. The result of the ongoing “progression” and evolution of agriculture has not actually resulted in fewer people going hungry.

The Story of B goes further in exploring some of the implications of this idea. He uses the analogy of mice in a cage. If you feed the mice a certain amount of food they will reproduce and grow in population size as long as the amount of food is able to sustain the number of mice. If you then increase the amount of food the population will continue to increase. If you stop increasing the food the population will level off and remain basically static. If you incrementally decrease the ration of food the population will decrease. When that idea is translated to human beings it sounds very unnerving, callous and disturbing.

The productivists argue that agricultural production has continued to increase and keep pace with world population. There is no real conversation about the relationship or correlation between production and population. We know that the world hunger problem is not a production problem, but a distribution problem. The world now produces enough food for every human being on the planet to have 3,500 calories per day, which is more than the recommended amount. So, why do we continue to push for higher production and greater yield to solve the population problem? Are we in fact fueling the population crisis by continually increasing our production?

Some will question how this can be true when population growth is correlated to other factors like income or education. The character B’s response in the book is over and over again to ask what people are made of if they are not made of food. If the population continues to increase, then the larger population must sustain itself somehow and the only way that is possible is by eating something. That certainly doesn’t mean the larger population is eating well, but they are eating enough to survive.

Whether production increases or decreases, distribution is the real problem. Either way inequality will continue as long as food is not distributed equitably. The underlying question concerning population growth is whether we can actually deal with the problem if we are continuing to fuel it by producing more and more food. When I mention the possibility of decreasing production as a way of dealing with the population problem, it sounds like I’m recommending starving the marginal brown people of the world. As the system currently stands that would certainly be the case if we simply decreased production overall. A decrease in production would have to go hand in hand with an overhaul of how our food system functions. This is a long term problem that requires long term thinking and solutions.

The planet we live on has a limit to the amount of life it can sustain. Like an elevator or bridge that is only built to handle a certain weight, the earth has certain limits built into the ecosystems. We can push those boundaries with technology and science, but eventually they will break. For many in the world they have already broken, and they suffer the consequences of our over extension of the planet’s resources.

We don’t like to think that we are responsible or in control of other people dying. The truth is we already are responsible for that. Our (American) culture has an uneasy and unnatural relationship with death. Death is a natural part of life. Decreasing food production (in concert with reorganizing our food system) may in fact be the most ethical and just choice given the trajectory of human society. This would, of course, be a long gradual process in which the reduction of food production and slowing of population growth would happen naturally over many decades, if not centuries.

Please share your thoughts and objections. I know this probably sounds scary and crazy to some, but a lot of it makes sense to me. I would appreciate thinking it through more thoroughly with your help.

This is the continuation of a series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

The Story of B

I just finished The Story of B the sequel to Ishmael, which inspired The Original Sin of Agriculture series. The second book has more of a plot, but less in the way of new ideas. What it does is spin out the ideas in Ishmael. The further exploration is certainly worth the read. I’m still processing it.

Initially, I didn’t want to start another series on the ideas and implications of this book. However, it has stuck in my mental craw. It is haunting me wherever I go and posing questions to other ideas I hear (See Religion, Violence and Agriculture?). So, it appears that an old school Holy Ghost revival of the Original Sin of Agriculture series is imminent.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but here’s a sneak preview of what I’d like to think more about:

The Story of B covers more in depth the ideas that were most controversial last time around concerning population control and the relationship between increasing production and increasing population. The deeper explanation was helpfully thinking through the implications, objections and possible solutions to the relationship between production and population.

While Ishmael pointed out a lot of our modern assumptions, The Story of B sometimes sought to go behind those assumptions and ask what people were like before agriculture, their religion and their relationship to the earth and each other. If everything before the rise of agriculture is “prehistory,” then it is a vast unknown territory where people that we can barely understand live. Trying to understand them may help us overcome ourselves.

Finally, I’m fascinated with the sequel’s take on religion, because I both agree and disagree with it. I think the author vastly oversimplifies things and ends up dismissing the world religions entirely. At the same time I agree wholeheartedly with the critique of my own religion, Christianity. I just think that Christianity holds the possibility of embracing the truth that Quinn reveals in his book.

So… here we go again…

The Original Sin of Agriculture: Knowledge of Good and Evil

One of the most interesting aspects of this discussion, particularly in Ishmael, is the application to the interpretation of biblical texts. This series is called the “original sin” of agriculture in part because of the interpretation of Genesis 3 and 4 in Ishmael. Chapters 3 and 4 tell the story of the Fall and Cain and Abel respectively. These are stories that are embedded in our culture and ones we read with a lot of assumptions and preconceptions. Without disregarding many of those readings of these texts, let’s try to hear a fresh interpretation and ask what it might contribute to our understanding of sin, history and agriculture.

We’ll begin with Cain and Abel. This story is clearly about the rivalry between two kinds of agriculture, farmers and shepherds. Ishmael contends that this represents the rivalry between Takers and Leavers. Cain, representing Takers, conquers Abel, representing Leavers, through violence as he murders his brother. This is a story told by Leavers against Takers. The nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life is threatened by the surging agriculture and social changes the Takers advocate. After Abel’s murder Cain and his descendants go on to found the first city, domesticated animals, musical instruments, tools of bronze and iron basically all the building blocks of civilization and culture as we know it, agriculture, weapons, art and cities.

Ishmael describes the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 through an alternate mythology. In his interpretation the gods struggle with knowing who should live and who should die. For example, from one perspective it seems right for the lion to kill his prey, a deer, one day in order to keep the population down and feed the lion. However, from another perspective shouldn’t the deer live in order to feed on the grasses and play its role in the ecosystem. You see the conundrum? How do you decide when to let the deer escape and when it should die, along with millions of other decisions within a given ecosystem? The gods decide that one day the deer will live and the next it will be food without any real reason or explanation. It’s left a mystery.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil has always been kind of a mystery. There have been many different ideas and interpretations about what it means or represents. None have ever been very satisfying to me. Ishmael suggests that the knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge of who should live and who should die. The consequence of Adam and Eve eating from the tree was not that they actually possessed this knowledge, but that they thought they possessed this knowledge.

So, what’s the original sin of agriculture? The Leavers originally told the stories of creation and fall to point out the problems in Taker’s way of life, but Takers took it as a flaw in human beings in general. Takers believed that the reason they were not able to ultimately free themselves from the constraints and limitations of creation was something inherently wrong with themselves as human beings and not their way of life.

The original sin of agriculture is the notion that we, humans, possess a kind of knowledge that we do not. We believe that we are able to manipulate and control nature, bending it toward our ends in order to become masters over it and eventually free ourselves from it. The sin is that this way of thinking about who we are and how we are related to the earth is a lie.

This is the final post in a series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

The Original Sin of Agriculture: Competition vs. Cooperation

There is no arguing that the revolution of agriculture changed the way that we relate to the world around us. Ishmael makes the argument that agriculture led us to see ourselves as competitors with everything that is not our food. Therefore, we kill off plants and weeds that compete with the grains and legumes that we want to harvest and eat. We then must also kill off the animals that feed on those competitors to our food. We might also have to kill off the animals that feed on those animals lest they come around licking their lips at us.

In this way of thinking we see nature primarily in terms of competition. Altruism and cooperation are really aberrations in the normalcy of competition and violence. This is the way it seems people tend to think about “survival of the fittest.” All the players in the ecosystem are competing for scarce resources against natural obstacles and barriers. Those who are able to beat out their competitors, within their own species or other species, survive and flourish. Isn’t that what we see on Discovery Channel when predators are hunting their prey and picking off the weak member of a herd?

The problem is that ecosystems are not made up of only predators, and even predators may not be as cutthroat as we think. More and more evidence suggests that cooperation is at least as powerful a force in nature as competition. In fact, it may be stronger than competition. It’s difficult for us to conceive that cooperation is a basic and primal force in nature. Our culture and world revolve around the idea of competition. Most of our economic ideas are based on the assumption that competition is the basic building block of nature and society and that when it is allowed to run free it results in the best possible results for all. Our education system is based on competition, scoring, testing, achievement and success. Sports and athletics are not influencing the rest of our culture. They are the natural outgrowth of a culture of competition.

Just as in nature, this may not be the best way to organize ourselves. Perhaps we have allowed our assumptions about the natural world to form the way we think about human society and civilization. There are plenty of examples where human societies valued cooperation over competition and flourished. Many Native American cultures made decisions based on consensus rather than voting which always excludes the minority. There are worker owned factories in Spain and Latin America (the specifics elude me) that have done very well with a cooperative approach to business.

How have our assumptions about the way the world is structured and functions on the most basic, natural level shaped the way we choose to organize ourselves and order life together? Is there another, better way? I hope and pray that there is.

This is part of an ongoing series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3.