
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987) - kartD
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
======
crazygringo
Counterpoint: nearly all of those of us in developed countries are now better-
off with agriculture, due to:

\- Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than
before (especially in winter)

\- Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and
art)

\- Vastly lower mortality (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself?
Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)

The way I look at it, agriculture made things _way_ worse... until we advanced
far enough to get _way, way_ better.

And even if you argue there are some populations in developing countries which
are still worse-off, it's hard to believe that's going to last long as
economic development progresses.

~~~
thrden
Even in the least developed countries on earth life expectancy is nearly
double the 26 years quoted in the article. This article feels less like
serious analysis, and instead the product of over-problematizing

~~~
drb91
A long life does not imply a quality life. A short life does not imply a
lesser life.

~~~
chaboud
I have _two_ flush toilets where I live.

That, and protection from mosquitos, basically assures that I'm living a
better life.

~~~
drb91
Well, I see this as a fearful worldview. Imagine instead a world without
working in an office, or a world without living in a city. It takes a little,
but not much, imagination to understand how that might be attractive to
someone. Or perhaps imagine living in your evolutionarily suited habitat, if
that’s easier to see. Sure, the shitty lives are particularly violent. But
it’s a world where your life is dictated by your relationship with your
environment and the people you know, not by people far away you have no access
to.

~~~
dogma1138
Imagine a world where you can’t get clean water so you live a life where a
worm uses acid to dig it self out of your foot once every few months then you
contract some tropical disease and shit yourself to death.

~~~
drb91
...a fearful worldview, and a lack of imagination.

~~~
dogma1138
Imagination isn’t lacking you don’t need to imagine anything just look towards
Africa, parts of Latin America, S.E. Asia and anywhere remote that gets hit by
a natural disaster.

What I can say quite confidently is that you likely never had to go thirsty
because you couldn’t risk drinking the water or contracted cholera, heck you
likely never even got a bad case of food poisoning thanks modern sanitary
regulation and functional infrastructure.

You never had to worry about if that insect bite laid larva under your skin or
if the blistering rash you got on your leg is going to spread and imobalize
you.

You live a cushy comfortable and safe life which is afforded to the vast
majority of people who live in developed nations.

If you want to go back to huts and other “evolutionary compatible habitats” be
my guest there are plenty of places on the planet that are a bad day away from
being completely sent back to the Stone Age which you can relocate too, just
don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and fill
your instagram with the experience to your hearts content.

~~~
drb91
> don’t forget to get your shots, bring your monthly supply of soylent and
> fill your instagram with the experience to your hearts content.

...talk about projecting!

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tptacek
Help me understand why this isn't a sublimely silly argument. The era of
hunter-gatherers spans the time from 12:00 midnight on Diamond's metaphorical
clock all the way to 11:54PM. Virtually every advancement in human history,
from the Enlightenment through the germ theory of illness all the way to the
Internet, occurred _after_ that time. What ordinary person would elect to
time-travel one-way to 11:30PM on Diamond's clock, as opposed to living at
11:59PM?

By Diamond's reasoning, we could live far longer on this planet if we lived
like chimpanzees, scavenging what we could from the natural bounty of the land
without bending it to our will. But I don't particularly want to be a chimp.
Couldn't his argument be reframed as "the worst mistake in the history of the
world is the human race"?

~~~
vondur
I’m seriously wondering if the article is just trolling.

~~~
RachelF
No there's a serious belief in this, mainly among well-fed white intellectuals
who believe in the "noble savage'.

Yuval Harari, author of the excellent "Sapiens" also believes it.

~~~
chx
> Yuval Harari, author of the excellent "Sapiens"

Uh huh, Sapiens as excellent... there are ... problems. Some:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5613ac/in_hi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5613ac/in_his_book_sapiens_yuval_noah_harari_states_that/d8ftm8v/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xvsia/how_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4xvsia/how_did_the_french_populations_ideological/d6jltp9/)

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fallingfrog
As a counterpoint to this argument: [https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-
human-history/](https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/) David
Graeber and David Wengrow argue that both oppression, and freedom, are present
in every society from tiny to huge, the "egalitarian hunter gatherer" trope is
a huge oversimplification, and really it's the cultural choices we make that
determine whether we live in a free society or one full of domination and
oppression. My favorite quote:

"Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite
commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical
verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began
at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic
servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest
intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to
understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power,
and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is
here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult
work of creating a free society will have to take place."

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thrden
I don't find this particularly compelling as given the author's fundamental
assumptions regarding inequity and sexism as natural outcroppings of agrarian
society. For example the mongols were a largely non-agrarian society that was
highly stratified, and deeply sexist that committed human rights violations on
the global scale.

~~~
flukus
This is what happens when the "gender is a social construct" rubbish infects
academia. They now start off with the assumption that men and women are
completely equal in all ways and look for explanations for why that changed,
agriculture in this case. Starting off by acknowledging biological differences
(men being stronger and faster) and biological necessities for a group to
survive (pregnant women make poor hunters and warriors) is now heresy.

~~~
maxerickson
You should quote the parts of the article that support your view that rubbish
has infected academia.

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empath75
> “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and
> habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one
> Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But]
> when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the
> Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and
> treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among
> the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of
> life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the
> first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there
> is no reclaiming them.”

—Ben Franklin

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mattygh
This is a topic that you can't meaningfully unpack in a short essay. Whether
or not you think this has merit, I'd recommend reading Ishmael by Daniel
Quinn, it tackles this subject in a more philosophical way and is very thought
provoking. It is similarly opinionated, but helps you question things you
would have never even considered before.

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yosito
The way I look at it, most of the humans who didn't adopt agriculture died. So
I don't think they were better off.

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jrd259
For a more recent take on this, see James Scott's "Against The Grain". Scott
presents evidence from archeology that the early state (at the dawn of state-
organized agriculture) had to exert considerable effort to prevent
agricultural workers from departing to pursue a hunter-gatherer or pastoralist
lifestyle. If you're not an elite, the latter is more pleasant in every way.
In other words, most people at the time of the transition to mass agriculture
did not consider it an improvement.

Note that Scott's subject is the _early_ state; he does not address the very-
long term benefit that arose only after many millennia. He does give some
account of how these early states (gradually) prevailed over the alternatives.
Nor does he address the other major economic/productive transitions from grain
empire to modernity (e.g. industrialization, digitization). That's for some
other book.

I should also add the Scott shows that there were cultures with a mixed
agriculture/hunter gatherer lifestyle, and that some places moved back and
forth for various reasons; and also (in case you've read other word by
Diamond) that Scott has a different take on "collapse" of early states: since
they were, in general, highly coercive, some (but not all) of what we see now
as a collapse were net improvements for the lives of all but the few at the
top; they did not (always) include major loss of life, but only appear to be
collapses because fewer permanent artifacts were created.

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couchand
I'm pretty sure that this essay is farcical, sarcastic, and/or ironic.

Also, I'm guessing from the style and topic this is the same Jared Diamond who
wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel? Particularly the clock idea I believe is
repeated there.

It's also curious to note that this copy seems to have been OCRed, given that
there's at least one occurrence of "fanners" instead of "farmers".

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ansible
Eh, I think agriculture was inevitable. It isn't as if we could have had the
world government at that time just ban agriculture, or create an information
campaign to educate Farmers on the long term harm if the agrarian lifestyle.

Agriculture led to industrialization. When someone can make guns, and when
others can't... Someone is getting conquered.

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kisstheblade
Yes, nice example, let's all just eat mongo-nuts (which btw I have never seen
lying on the ground where I live...)

"One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting
agriculture, replied, Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in
the world?"

Places where there is easy access to food have never evolved any technological
progress and the societies are still messed up, because they never had to
understand co-operation and just have tribalism of some sort. Just compare
africa (probably the richest country in resources) with eg. europe.

What a stupid article.

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yawaramin
> As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by
> providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as
> much free time as do farmers.

But we're not looking at the free time of only farmers, but of society as a
whole, thanks to specialisation and division of labour. Farmers produce food,
others produce other goods and service and trade them for food. Economics 101:
everyone is better off and more efficient because they do whatever they have a
comparative advantage at.

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bmuppireddy
It is not a mistake, silly. It is evolution. There are is no right / wrong in
evolution. Each is a step out of countless (metaphorically) possibilities
played out.

Maybe, it is unfair to call it a mistake without knowing what life would have
been at this point in time (or say in future.).

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echevil
Early adopters of agriculture most likely had the option to choose between
farming and keeping their old way of hunter/gatherer life, and yet agriculture
become dominant

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masonic
(1987)

TL;DR: agriculture.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I thought the title sounded familiar. I believe I read it years ago in my
Archaeology of the Middle East class.

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UncleEntity
I read something a while back stating the studies these theories of hunter-
gatherer paradise are based upon were flawed in that they only took into
account the actual time it took to gather food and not preparation and whatnot
which turns out to add up to significant amounts of time.

