Agriculture: Need we worry?

Primitive man has lived twice: once in and for himself, and the second time for us, in our reconstruction. (Gellner, 1988: 23).

To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths. (McCloud, 1994: 69)

One of humanity’s most important inventions is agriculture. This decisive step freed people from the quest for food and released energy for other pursuits. No civilisation has existed without an agricultural base, whether in the past or today. Truly, agriculture was the first great leap forward by human beings. (MacNeish, 1992 cited in Kiple, K.F., 2007: 61)

Why was Jared Diamond (1987: 66) led to the assertion that ‘the’ so-called ‘Neolithic Revolution,’ which had its beginnings around eleven thousand years ago at the dawn of the Holocene, was the “worst mistake in human history?” It was a bold suggestion to make, and because the consequences of this ‘revolution’ permeate most societies and the world at large to this day it is an important one to confront. In this discussion, this view will take the form of a challenge, and because there are only really two weak links in his pithy claim, first that it was a ‘mistake’ and then – the more tenuous of the two – that it was the ‘worst’ of them, these will support the skeleton of the assault. Perhaps because – unlike today – these early ancestors of ours were not likely to have the option to eat less, Diamond says that the mistake resulted from their choosing to produce more food, rather than to limit their population. While he has good evidence to say that “starvation, warfare, and tyranny” resulted from this choice, it will be a challenge for even a more comprehensive balance sheet to settle whether this was the ‘worst’ of our species mistakes; the staunchest luddite must admit after all the benefits that agriculture has bestowed. Is it possible that agriculture has opened the possibility of solutions to some of the very problems it has also created? (Kiple, K.F., 2007: 3)

To meaningfully discuss agriculture, we should be clear about what exactly a community practicing it does, and more importantly what might be meant by any ‘revolution’ inherent to this kind of living. A suitable definition of an agricultural society could be based on that used by Price and Bar-Yosef (2011: S165): one that lives with a diet predominantly of domestic plants and/or animals. What about adopting this kind of diet was revolutionary? Looking back over thousands of years makes it possible to see any dramatic effects of a process, so is this merely an attribution resulting from anthropological hindsight? Did its pioneers consider it a massive step from prior procuring practices? There are at least two reasons to believe otherwise. One is latent in the earlier definition itself: early practitioners did not rely on it exclusively and still did some hunting and/or gathering; the other reason is that it does not seem a particularly rare development: Cochran and Harpending (2010: 31) point out that humanity has managed it on at least seven independent occasions, and Price and Bar-Yosef’s more recent survey (2011: S163) has inflated that figure to ten separate locations, adding that the origins of domestication – a prerequisite for agriculture, at least – continue with new evidence to be placed earlier in time.

While the times and places of agriculture’s emergence are not a great mystery, there have been several reasons proposed for the shift and consensus has not congealed about any of them, probably due to the variety of circumstances.  Diamond’s thesis does not depend on a particular cause, but he did propose it alongside an assumption that the choice was forced by population pressure. This is dubious in the light of it being fairly recently realised that early experimenting with agriculture occurred in fail-safe environments of relative plenty, and is also weakened by the fact that most evidence of significant population growth post-dates agriculture. This latter tendency does however bolster his central point, given a number of flow-on effects of this growth. The main incontrovertible negative of agriculture has been epidemiological: with growing populations tend to come denser populations, and denser populations foster the spread of infectious pathogens, and promote in particular the spread of zoonoses where this is accompanied by greater contact with animals (some notable examples being HIV and various strains of Influenza). While humans are able to respond to these threats to some extent, consciously (through improved hygiene, vaccinations, antibiotics, bacteriophages, etc.) or unconsciously (mutations affecting susceptibility), we are fundamentally – though not completely – limited in our ability to control their evolution for the better. (Diamond, 1987: 66; Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S168; Ewald, 2007)

Some authors make the shady assumption that the population growth of agriculturists is inexorable. While it is true that forager cultures have an innate restraint on their population, “since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be overharvested without immediate harm,” there can be cultural forces keeping the growth of agricultural communities in check. They need not be so draconian as those in China, either. Hans Rosling (2012) highlights the UN Population Division’s forecast that the world’s population will stop growing at ten billion, partly as a consequence of simple – and interrelated – things like increased educational level of women, greater numbers of women integrated in the workforce, and increased ages at first marrage. While it will without doubt be a demanding problem to feed a global population reaching this ceiling, it is misleading to label the issue intractable. (Hemenway, 2006: 3)

When cultural factors are more prominent than biological, it is plausible that future trends could be directed to a greater extent, so while inequalities – economic and gender-based - were greatly exacerbated by the growth in sedentism resulting from agriculture, that these are mutable can be witnessed by the fact of national differences in income inequalities – or the successes of the feminist and suffrage movements in various areas – across the modern world. Still, post-agriculture disparities appear early in the record, for example in the behaviour of the living – evinced through the building of monumental structures, or nutritional deficiencies via skeletal remains – and the treatment of the dead – from differences in grave artifacts alongside remains. (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S167-S169; Diamond, 1987: Kiple, 2007: 62-63)

The core corollary to Diamond’s position – affirming some views that had been expressed through the 20^th century but had become especially salient in the 1960s – is that hunter-gatherer societies were indeed the ‘original affluent society.’ That he justifies this partly by extrapolating backwards from modern hunter-gatherers (who thus never made the switch) is cause for concern, as a hypothetical difference between their culture and an ancestor’s sibling-cultures could itself explain why they did not follow the majority. Kaplan expertly illustrates how evidence has in the past been selectively accommodated to suggest that such people are generally of a disposition “more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game,” and in doing so either quells or demolishes various conclusions. Estimates of foragers’ hours of leisure, for example, are somewhat diminished when one is careful demarcating what constitutes ‘work’ and ‘leisure,’ highlighting how the latter can often be more strenuous than the former. He also manages to tear up the “somewhat rosy picture” of their “well-balanced diet.” Just as other commentators have decried early agriculturists’ protein insufficiency, he points to – for example – the !Kung tribe’s lack of a reliable source of carbohydrates or animal fat. There were no doubt varying degrees of nutritional wealth between different hunter-gatherer groupings, but Kaplan shows us how careful one needs to be in linking approaches to subsistence. (Sahlins, 1972; Kaplan, 2000: 302, 305, 309-310, 312-313)

Cochran and Harpending (2010: ix, 14, 23, 65-66) are of the perspective that we cannot approach a macroscopic understanding of the changes in human society between (or beyond) hunting and gathering and agriculture without taking biological evolution seriously. Previous anthropologists, they propose, were led to the misconception that human evolution had halted because they only attended to easily observed characteristics. There were many forces, however, continuing to shape human living in ways unique to the disparate populations across the globe, and they assert that agriculture was the most important of all of these: that by stimulating population’s growth, we accelerated our own evolution by increasing the frequency of favourable mutations, and highlight the perhaps counter-intuitive importance of such mutations to later generations: that it takes “only twice as long [for an advantageous allele] to spread through a population of 100 million as it does to spread through a population of 100 thousand.” Together these conclusions lend compelling support to the suggestion from the outset of this discussion, that even though agriculture had negative social and biological consequences our species had no chance to foresee, the provenance of these changes would continue to yield us further tools to combat them.

Is it reasonable to talk of the Neolithic ‘Revolution’ as a ‘mistake’ only when considering it in the short term? Does an encompassing view – both temporally and spatially – lead to a conclusion that the transition to agriculture was just “an inevitable step in the evolution of human society?” Given that humans have not even practiced sedentary agriculture for “one-tenth of one per-cent of their time on earth,” it is easy to imagine that unforseen advances still to accrue – in both our knowledge and accomplishments – may provide future chapters for this ongoing debate. (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S168; Kiple, 2007: 3)

List Of References

Cochran, G. and Harpending, H., 2010. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

Diamond, J., 1987. The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Discover 52(5): 64-66 [online] Available at: [Accessed 17 September 2012].

Ewald, P., 2007. Paul Ewald asks, Can we domesticate germs? [video online] Available at: [Accessed 24 September 2012]

Gellner, E., 1990. Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hemenway, T., 2006.  Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?,  Permaculture Activist [online] Available at: [Accessed 17 September 2012].

Kaplan, D., 2000. “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society.’” Journal of Anthropological Research 56(3): 301-324. Available through: JSTOR [Accessed 16 September 2012].

Kiple, K.F., 2007. A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McCloud, S., 1994. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial.

Price, T.D. and Bar-Yosef, O., 2011. “The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas.” Current Anthropology 52(S4): S163-S174. Available through: JSTOR [Accessed 16 September 2012].

Rosling, H., 2012. Religions and Babies | Video on TED.com. [video online] Available at: [Accessed 24 September 2012].

Sahlins, M.D., 1972. “The Original Affluent Society.” In Stone Age Economics. Available at: [Accessed 22 September 2012].

"Economic Globalisation," too convenient a phrase?

Winston Churchill once remarked that “We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.” Historical consequences often seem to become drivers of change in and of themselves. Economic globalisation is a complex instance of this general trend, and this essay will question its significance. Has it indeed become the most significant force for change by the end of the twentieth century?

The grammar of the question is unfortunate, because it is unclear what makes a historical contingency significant: to be so, must it exert more of a ‘push’ (or ‘pull’) than any other we can name would alone? Or must it instead be the root of a chain of causality that matters? In relaying the philosopher Hegel, Francis Fukuyama has supported the thesis that the ‘struggle for recognition’ is the most significant driver of history, simply because all human action would stem from that struggle. Alongside that struggle, a number of circumstances had to accrue before globalisation – let alone economic globalisation – could become so important, and this would happen over thousands of years: populations would grow, trade would develop between rising centres of wealth, this trade would allow minerals from disparate sources to unite and form the basis for advances in technology such as the industrial revolution, which further sped along the growth of rapid communications of information, and a particular form of that information, currency. All being necessary for this massive interdependence of economic units that falls under the moniker ‘globalisation,’ are these factors any less significant? What instead this discussion considers is the idea that economic globalisation is instead a convenient proximate cause, a label that conveniently encapsulates the many prior justifications we could make for the events that occur today.

A vivid – though often hidden – corollary of indulgence in modern technology throughout the more developed nations are the conflicts that this demand only makes more heated. Minerals sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, are used in the construction of modern consumer goods, and our demand for these goods drives up the prices of these minerals. Rather than being a boon to the Congolese economy, this only enflames the ethnic conflicts there. Though these arose from a nationalistic fervour that erupted with the inundation of Tutsi refugees from the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, they are spurred on by outside countries’ dependence.

The strong division of labour and sources of minerals that our economy has become dependent on has itself become a sort of butterfly effect. Small changes in far off countries that many have never heard of can have significant consequences for all of us. Rising labour costs in one country (perhaps due to simple changes in legislation promoting better rights) could cause a profit-seeking company to find talent – or just numbers – elsewhere, in turn damaging that country’s economy. This interconnectedness makes any changes inherently more unpredictable and far-reaching, though it would be simplistic to call the economic globalisation evident here significant. It is just a convenient catch-all label for its more basic preludes.

A (very) sketchy look back at the 60s

Their message could be articulated. They had a voice, and they used it well. Yet try dissecting it, try classifying them, and you would quickly be branded a “straight.”[1] In some cases this is not a clear-cut expression of anti-intellectualism, and is instead a concern that trying to do so may just detract from the fluidity of the subculture in responding to the needs of and – perhaps more importantly – whims of its members. That people should just “get in and do it.”[2] Can this simply be construed as cowardly evasion? That if no end-goal is defined then criticising its attainment is impossible? Or is it a more optimistic appeal to the numinous and the unknowable, an admission of uncertainty in the face of establishment orthodoxy?

To evaluate the legacy of the hippies we must somehow lay down measuring posts, at least temporarily.  Where did they succeed and where did they fail? The intervening years since the soixante huitard and their ilk captured the world’s attention, and even recent events, make this an auspicious time to look back at this inimitable subculture. Primary sources are in a unique position to reveal the flowering of the movement, yet have a forced myopia towards assigning weight to specific, salient events, especially those damaging to its image. While the sociologist John Robert Howard tries his best, and Richard Nixon his worst, to critique the upwelling discontent of the sixties, both men reach a limit; the former constrained mainly by the zeitgeist, and the latter – being generous – blinkered by political ambition. It has been astutely observed that counter-culture contains the seeds of a future over-the-counter culture, yet it is doubtful that these would be able to germinate were elements of the subculture not able to shed earlier weaknesses.[3] Much as natural selection leaves standing those organisms that most effectively evolve to fit changing environments, the course of history is most kind to those ideas that meet its dialectical challenges. In that sense, this and other secondary commentaries would be well placed, as opposed to contemporary sources, to assess the movement’s successes. These surveys are complementary, not exclusive, with later sources providing context to those closer to events.

Two of these contemporary publications, The Digger Papers and Abbie Hoffman’s 1968 Lincoln Park address, reveal that both the Diggers and the Yippies wanted essentially the same thing: the absence of outside domination of thought and action. Each group emphasised very different means for moving towards these shared hopes, the Diggers the cooperation of entire communities to sustain ‘Free Cities’ relatively independent of ‘straight’ society, and the Yippies the individual means – through “guerrilla theatre,” while embedded in the ‘system’ – to free oneself from and continue resisting dependence and control, that desperate “holdin’ on to their fuckin’ pig jobs ‘cause of that little fuckin’ paycheck.” As Howard observes, for the Diggers it is in the somewhat codified volunteerism where they unwittingly encode their own downfall. While aspiring that “every brother should have what he needs to do his thing,” the Diggers seem to miss that this volunteerism calls for the implicit Marxian precondition: “From each brother according to his ability.”[4]

With Nixon’s fear-mongering denouncement aimed at civil disobedience in general instead of the hippies in particular, it requires some context to accommodate it in this discussion. That said, it is plausible that groups like the hippies would be ashamed of their successes did they not draw the ire of such figures, as those who have occupied Wall Street recently may feel towards Mitt Romney painting that campaign as “dangerous … class warfare.”[5]  It must also be asked if Nixon was any more responsible than many of those he attacked – or to what extent he should be taken seriously – in his misleadingly quoting Robert Kennedy as saying that the law was a foe to “the Negro,” as opposed to his actually pointing out that many Negroes justifiably considered it antagonistic.[6]

Reflecting on these contemporary documents in the light of years past – and especially recent events – reveals parallel perspectives on social justice to this day.  This in itself highlights a massive success of the hippie movement; more than its music struck a chord then, many of its ideals impassion us still.

Bibliography

Boxer, Sarah B. “Romney: Wall Street Protests ‘Class Warfare’.” National Journal, last modified 5 October 2011, accessed 21 September 2012. http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-wall-street-protests-class-warfare--20111004.

Brown, Charles E. “Shouts of ‘We’ll Kill Whites,’ ‘Burn’ to ‘This is War’ Heard” in JET, ed. John H. Johnson. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2 September 1965: 5-10.

“The Digger Papers” (c.a. 1966), pp. 273-278 in Bloom and Breines, eds. “Takin’ It to the Streeets”: A Sixties Reader, 2^nd edition. Oxford 2003.

Hoffman, Abbie, “Media Freaking,” The Drama Review: TDR 13. Summer 1969: 46, 48-51.

Howard, John Robert. “The Flowering of the Hippie Movement.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382. March 1969: 44-48.

Nixon, Richard. “If Mob Rule Takes Hold in the U.S.,” originally published in U.S. News and World Report, a news magazine, in 1966. pp. 294-297 in Bloom and Breines.

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[1] John Robert Howard, “The Flowering of the Hippie Movement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382 (March 1969): 45.

[2] Abbie Hoffman, “Media Freaking,” The Drama Review: TDR 13 (Summer 1969): 51.

[3] John Robert Howard, “The Flowering of the Hippie Movement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382 (March 1969): 46-47.

[4] “The Digger Papers” (ca. 1966), in Bloom and Breines, eds., “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, 2^nd edition (Oxford, 2003): 273-277; Abbie Hoffman, “Media Freaking,” The Drama Review: TDR 13 (Summer 1969): 46, 48.

[5] Sarah B. Boxer, “Romney: Wall Street Protests ‘Class Warfare’,” National Journal, last modified 5 October 2011, accessed 21 September 2012, http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-wall-street-protests-class-warfare--20111004.

[6] Charles E. Brown, “Shouts of ‘We’ll Kill Whites,’ ‘Burn’ to ‘This is War’ Heard”, JET, ed. John H. Johnson (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2 September 1965): 8.