Davka

Debate Starts: No Later than July 30.

Achwienichtig vs. Anselm

The Advent of Civilization has been Disastrous for Humanity

The Statement: To debate that the preponderance of scientific evidence, whether historical, environmental, or sociological, indicates that the advent of civilization has had a powerful negative impact on humanity.

The debate will have a minimum of 3 rounds, posted concurrently. Up to 2 more rounds may be added at the request of both participants.

The parameters of the debate can be found here.

Audience comments go in the Peanut Gallery. The principals may not post in the peanut gallery until after the debate ends, whereupon they are encouraged to do so.

Anselm

[Davka - please note that I'm submitting this in two parts, because 5,000 words is too much for one post.]

Thanks to those who set up and maintain this excellent site, from which I have learned so much in the last couple of years, and who have inter alia created such an ideal means of debating issues. In this respect, I am especially grateful to the seasoned Davka for being our moderator and to achwienichtig for taking the opposing view, despite his admission that his sympathies lie more with than against the proposition. I am sure that he will be better able to put his feelings to one side over the next few weeks than I could if I had to argue against Wagner’s assertion that J.S. Bach “is the greatest miracle in the history of music” – a proposition I gather from our brief conversations on the subject he accepts even more fervently than I do. Much as it pains me to dispute with him, however, I must steel my heart against his Bachian blandishments.

When he wrote Leviathan in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes couldn’t have known what we have since found out about our prehistoric ancestors. But this ignorance has not prevented his famous phrase “nasty, brutish and short” being misapplied to Palaeolithic and Mesolithic foragers when Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 began to reveal our true pedigree. That misapplication, which continues to this day in popular imagination (although not, as I shall show, in scholarship), is one of my targets. By the end of this essay, I hope to have shattered the common stereotype of prehistoric hunter-gatherer life being inferior to that of civilised farmers. In fact, I shall show that in two important respects it was the other way around.

It would be useful to establish the prehistoric context for this discussion. Two million years ago, during the Pleistocene era (commonly known as the “Ice Age”) the genus homo evolved. The only survivor of that genus, the species homo sapiens, existed for less than the last tenth of that period. After the ice sheets reached their maximum extent at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 20,000 years ago, the climate gradually warmed for the next 10,000, with food resources becoming so plentiful by about 12,000 BC in a few areas that previously nomadic foragers could afford to become sedentary while still continuing their forager lifestyles. The prime example is the Natufian culture in what is now the Levant. After the last “Big Freeze” of the Younger Dryas, which set things back for about 1,300 years from about 10,800 BC, the ice sheets finally retreated for good, sea levels rose and what we now call the Holocene era began. Over a period of some 13,000 years from 20,000 BC full-blown cultivation of domesticated cereals by sedentary farmers, followed by the domestication of animals, was developed in the Levant and the Fertile Crescent, a development known as the “Neolithic Revolution”. This happened by a series of accidents – it was not a planned development, and the end of agriculture was not foreseen at the beginning when wild cereals were harvested. After a few hundred years urban settlements arose in this area that included all the hallmarks of what we now call “civilisation”: people unconnected by kin and including non-food producers housed together in towns and cities consisting of permanent dwellings, in stratified societies ruled by an elite which, as well as receiving as tribute or taxation, and to a greater or lesser degree redistributing or storing, the food surplus produced by the peasantry, embarked on massive public works such as irrigation schemes, pyramids and temples that required the co-option or co-operation (and hence organisation) of large numbers of people and the creation of institutions staffed by bureaucrats. This “civilised” mode of existence was predicated on the Neolithic Revolution. All of these developments were independently repeated at various times and places across the globe: China, Central America, South America, New Guinea and Africa, as far as we can tell at present. The practice of agriculture and civilisation has since spread by colonisation and diffusion throughout the human world – very few hunter-gatherer societies are left, and their conditions make it problematic at least to determine by extrapolation what pre-agricultural life was like thousands of years ago.

Three things should be noted. The first is that literacy is certainly not indispensible to farming, nor even to civilisation. Full-blown writing developed millennia after the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, while the highly sophisticated Inca civilisation was basically non-literate; widespread literacy is a relatively modern phenomenon. The second is that a sedentary lifestyle, specialisation of roles and corporate life characterised by cultural and intellectual sophistication and permanent, monumental art are all indispensible to civilisation but can also characterise foragers (a term I use synonymously with hunter-gatherers and Mesolithic homo sapiens); only the addition of the other elements mentioned above can form the package we call “civilisation”. The third point is that I shall be generalising – a lot. Hunter-gatherer communities varied enormously, from the nomads at the edge of the ice to the sedentary Natufians. But such evidence as we have does indeed allow generalisations to be made about foragers as a whole when compared with their agricultural successors. These generalisations are highly revealing, so make them I shall.

I shall now examine the main factors commonly adduced in discussions of this topic, in order to decide whether each actually belongs in the credit or debit side of the ledger.

Life expectancy and morbidity

• Longevity

“Nasty, brutish....and short”. But how short exactly? One regularly hears figures of 20-30 years trotted out as fact. But prepare for the first stereotype-buster: examination of recent scientific literature, as opposed to uninformed reassertions of the common misconception, shows this to be quite simply wrong. A wide-ranging study by Gurven and Kaplan synthesising previous examinations of existing and prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities concludes that 68-78 is the modal evolved lifespan for homo sapiens, and that “it was not uncommon for individuals [from prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities] to reach these ages”. This seems to have been the prevailing condition either side of the Neolithic Revolution and its civilisational offspring. In other words, the Neolithic agricultural revolution was irrelevant to trends in life expectancy, as was the advent of civilisation proper. Atheist that I am, I cannot resist quoting Psalm 90:10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten”. Apparently, 2,500 years ago 70 was the commonly accepted human lifespan, with 80 by good luck – as it appears to have been at least since the end of the Ice Age, well before the appearance of agriculture and civilisation.

Other sources claim much shorter lifespans. The widely quoted study by MacLennan and Sellers analyses grave goods from Neanderthals through to Anglo-Saxon burials, finding in nearly all cases that the maximum age of burial was 45 (41 for the Neanderthals). Whatever the life expectancy, the conclusion is the same as for Gurven and Kaplan, and for the rest of the scientific literature: the Neolithic Revolution and civilisation had absolutely no effect on longevity. In fact, Rachel Caspari would go further, arguing that a sudden increase in longevity around 30,000 years ago (before which life actually was “short”, average expectancy really being 30) meant that for the first time three human generations, not just two, were regular contemporaries, and that this “dramatic increase in longevity in the modern humans of the Early Upper Paleolithic....contributed to population expansions and cultural innovations associated with modernity” . In other words, it is more likely that an increase in longevity influenced the Neolithic Revolution and the introduction of civilisation, not the other way around.

Segue to the present: Hans Rosling’s entertaining BBC Four presentation graphically illustrates what we all know: life expectancies over the last 200 years have gradually risen. Around 1800, expectancy (presumably at birth) in the UK and the Netherlands was the highest in the world – a mere 40. The present figure is around 67. This has been the “other” real growth period in life expectancy, due largely to the drastic reduction in child mortality worldwide. Again, that’s nothing to do with the agricultural revolution, or with civilisation for that matter, until the amazing advances in medicine, public health and sanitation in the last couple of centuries – but more on this below.

• Disease, ill health and malnutrition

It would seem, then, that the lives of our Mesolithic ancestors were no shorter than those of their agriculturalist successors, whichever research you use. But what about the “nasty” bit of the epithet? If by this we mean disease, ill health and malnutrition, surely the civilised, agricultural lifestyle was far superior? In fact, the demolition of civilisation’s claims to superiority over previous modes of human existence is perhaps nowhere easier than in this regard.

There have been two major changes in our circumstances as a species since the LGM. One led to the marked increase in human life expectancy illustrated by Hans Rosling, while the other was an even more marked deterioration in the human condition with the advent of farming and civilisation. That hunter-gatherers were in the main healthier than their “civilised” successors has been accepted by researchers for a number of decades now, at least since the publication in 1984 of Cohen and Armelagos’ Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, in which the authors discerned a trend towards declining health in 19 of 21 societies that had undergone an agricultural revolution. Mummert et al’s 2011 meta-study (a synthesis of previous research) reaches the same conclusion (perhaps not surprisingly – one of its four authors is Armelagos): “....empirical studies of societies shifting subsistence from foraging to primary food production have found evidence for deteriorating health from an increase in infectious and dental disease and a rise in nutritional deficiencies”, with reduced stature, worsened dental condition and increased numbers of lesions being leading markers of this worldwide deterioration attendant on the adoption of agriculture. Average skeletal height is a good indicator of diet and overall health, and Diamond demonstrates that this “crashed”, from 5’9” for men and 5’5” for women towards the end of the Ice Age to 5’3” for men and 5’ for women by 3000 BC, once farming and civilisation had taken hold, continuing that “modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.”

It is outside the remit of this essay to explain why this should be so, but suffice it to say that hunter-gatherers had what farmers lacked: a balanced (because much more varied) diet, which protected them from the malnourishment that results from a diet deficient in one or more basic nutrients, as an agricultural diet usually is. This variety also helped protect them against famine caused by the failure of a staple crop, as witness the million Irish lives lost when potato blight struck in the 1840s. Unlike foragers with their mix (variously) of nuts, seeds, berries, fruits, vegetables, fish, birds and lean meats, they had no alternative to starvation.

In fact, agrarianism and civilisation have been responsible for every aspect of this holocaust, including its genesis. The most destructive diseases in history began when agriculture did, in conjunction with our domestication of animals with which we then lived in close proximity for extended periods of time. Measles, whooping cough, smallpox, tuberculosis, taenid tapeworms and falciparal malaria are six of our greatest killers. Once they had become endemic in the human population, that population’s growth – especially when clustered in dense urban concentrations – proved ideal breeding grounds for germs, as Jared Diamond entertainingly points out. Consequently, whenever the Eurasian population expanded through aggregation, pandemics struck. In the 400 years centred on the birth of Christ, the four major empires occupying Eurasia (those being from west to east the Roman, Parthian, Kushan and Chinese) began to come into direct contact with each other, with the result that their populations for the first time formed a continuous band nearly 6,000 miles wide. The result was a pandemic very similar to bubonic plague that began in India and killed between a third and a half of the population in most areas of Eurasia (it didn’t reach Western Europe). Other pandemics followed in the eighth century as the Islamic and the Chinese worlds (i.e. those at either end of the continent) first came into direct contact, and the 14th, facilitated by the largest land empire of all time, the trans-Eurasian Mongol. The slowest Eurasian population growth since agriculture began consequently occurred between 200 and 1000 AD, and between 1200 and 1400 it remained static. Then Europeans “discovered” the New World, and devastated its inhabitants with their infectious diseases, with millions more deaths. All of these were due to farming and to civilisation.

Segue to the present: To the horrific category of lethal pandemics that have periodically devastated communities, societies and indeed whole continents, we can now add chronic, non-infectious diseases caused by the high life that we in the “civilised” world have become used to in the past couple of centuries, and that middle and low income countries are also beginning to adopt. Conditions such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes have now overtaken infectious diseases as the major killers of our species, with 80 per cent of those deaths occurring in low and middle income countries ; this proportion is forecast to rise at least until 2015. The burden far exceeds the death toll, of course: the increasingly used Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) combines morality and morbidity into an index of years of life lost through disease. The World Health Organisation’s estimated worldwide DALYs for 2004 were 1,523,259,000 in a total population of 6,436,826,000 – in other words, out of every five individuals alive then, the equivalent of nearly one would have died through the effects of disease, with non-communicable diseases accounting for nearly half this figure . The only major disease we have eliminated (perhaps only temporarily) is smallpox. It would seem that we can’t even wait to finish dealing with the infectious Frankenstein we unwittingly began to create some 10,000 years ago before we saddle ourselves with his chronic brother! And that’s not even mentioning the issue of mental illness...

• Mental illness

This is much harder to quantify, but at the same is much less controversial as a “con”. Freud’s Civilisation and its discontents examined what happened to our mentalities when we first started living in large communities of strangers, maintaining that our natural aggressive instinct had to be stifled. This is the basis for the neurotic state in which we now live, in which the whole apparatus of state justice buttressed by organised religion serves to repress the ego’s natural instincts. Doubtless this work, written in 1929, has been overtaken in part, but its theme continues to be influential. Basically, Freud considered civilised existence to be in a fundamental sense psychologically unhealthy. This state that manifests itself in a variety of ways, from individual neuroses and pathological behaviours to social repression on a national level, as we are presently witnessing in the “Arab spring”.

His view of our basic aggressive instinct is interestingly echoed by Jared Diamond in a somewhat less speculative fashion. In Chapter 14 of Guns, germs and steel he outlines the broad progression, from the Palaeolithic era to modern times, from bands and tribes of people connected by kin to chiefdoms, states and empires of strangers. Civilisation (as opposed to agriculture) led to a quantum leap: “With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.” Killing other humans was doubtless sometimes necessary when they belonged to competing hunter-gatherer bands or tribes, but when they became part of the same society this instinct would have had to have been repressed, internally or by force. The instinct has not ceased, and so neither has the need for its repression.

Segue to the present: Let me speculate: alienation is one of the principle causes of mental illness today, a situation that stems directly from our civilised habit of living in large communities of strangers. Nearly half a billion people worldwide have a mental health problem. Nearly a million kill themselves every year. “Four of the six leading causes of years lived with disability are due to neuropsychiatric disorders (depression, alcohol-use disorders, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder[, while o]ne in four families has at least one member with a mental disorder.” Whatever the cause, mental illness is the equivalent of a major disease, with huge ramifications not just for sufferers but for families and whole economies. We live in a pressure cooker, to put it bluntly. Individually we can be happy, says Freud, but not as a society.

But nature will out, it seems: our predisposition to interact with our kin and to distrust anyone else having been thwarted by our civilised habit of living in towns and cities, finds expression in our creation of “surrogate kinship relationships” through the small-group dynamics, whether at work, socially or in the military. The importance of such intimate relationships in the latter has been recognised at least since the Second World War, and military training specifically takes this into account. In other words, we revert to what we know best in evolutionary terms: bands of people connected by kith and kin, or as near to it as we in our massive cities can get.

Inequality

But at least we brought these Frankensteins into being unwittingly. What then should we say of a corporate mentality that quite intentionally mandates and violently enforces such a disgusting profusion of injustices and inequalities on the majority of its members over thousands of years? Only a truly “civilised” sensibility could have inflicted such a perversely byzantine profusion of neuroses on itself. Consider the following miserable category:

• Economic inequality

This begins to manifest itself in pre-agricultural burials, where some people (usually males, sometimes younger) are buried with obviously greater amounts of adornment than others. However, these burials are as nothing compared with the gross inequalities perpetrated throughout the history of civilisation. These began with the Neolithic Revolution, which introduced the concept of “ownership” in association with the historically most valuable commodity of all: land, the basis of subsistence. As civilisation developed, farmers’ land or its produce or both were increasingly appropriated by the elite for their own benefit. Whether we are referring to the obscene wealth of Pharaohs, kings or emperors or the equally obscene poverty of the undifferentiated mass of peasants, the story is the same. The food surplus produced by the latter has historically been appropriated by the former, their agents or their local equivalents as tribute or taxation, which may sometimes have been ploughed back into society in the form of useful public works, but was more often employed on useless ones such as pyramids – if it did not go straight into the ruler’s pockets. The poor, meanwhile, remained poor – and died, either through the direct or indirect causes of over-expropriation of their produce by the elite, or when they were conscripted into their rulers’ armies and sent off to slaughter each other for reasons that more often than not had nothing to do with them. The result was a civilised society, which by definition was an unequal one.

• Ideological inequality

Ideology is the means by which we justify what we do, which appears to be a psychological necessity for our species. Rulers convince themselves of their superiority over those who keep them alive by producing their food or performing other services for them (perhaps by identifying themselves with or declaring themselves to be deities), and they persuade their peasantries and citizenries to sacrifice themselves for their own aggrandisement. The elite justify their expropriations to themselves in similar terms. One race of people convince themselves that they are inherently superior to another, and allocate the “subhumans” the role of slaves (a practice indulged in to varying degrees by every civilisation from ancient Sumer to Europe and the United States) or vermin to be exterminated (as the Jews mythically did to the Canaanites in the Bible, and the Assyrians, Mongols, Greeks, Romans and Vietnamese variously did to their enemies). (In this respect, Aristotle’s teaching that some races are natural slaves should be recalled.) One group of people holding a certain belief convince themselves that opposing beliefs are “evil” and that those who hold them must be persecuted or exterminated (a more recent phenomenon that seems to be associated with the rise of intolerant, monotheistic religions, especially Christianity – as the Christians did to the “pagans” and various Christian sects did to each other in the 16th and 17th centuries). Of course, all of these have been conflated at various stages in civilisation’s march of progress. Religion has often been used to buttress such practices: one of the most notorious instances was the Pope Nicholas V’s bull “Dum Diversas” in 1452, reissued by three succeeding popes, granting the kings of Spain and Portugal “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be….and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery”.

Segue to today: Every one of these dreadful attitudes has found expression in modern times. Economic inequality is rising both within and between nations. The Gini index (which measures level of inequality on a scale from 0 (perfect equality, where income is the same for everyone) to 100 (where one person has all the income) for the U.S. shows that economic inequality in the land of the free and the richest nation on earth is rising from 39.7 in 1967 to 46.9 in 2005, a trend that is reflected in several other “developed” countries. Growing income inequality between world regions is depicted by Hans Rosling’s aforementioned BBC Four presentation, and to me his final optimism rings hollow given the clear two-century trend depicted. Such inequality, with all the attendant ramifications, has the appearance of being systemic – hardly an advertisement to a forager for the benefits of civilisation! There are 27 million slaves today – more than at any one time in the world’s history . The Nazi Holocaust is a genocide still within living memory, and the Cambodian, Rwandan and Serbian massacres are more recent still, while politics has been added to religion as grounds for ideological persecution.

The real point here is that all of these historic and modern outrages could only have been perpetrated by “civilised” societies. Obviously hunter-gatherer communities clashed, but over issues (i.e. resources) that were of real import to all their members. The concept of wiping out an entire tribe of people because they were generically inferior in some way would have been technically impossible for most foraging societies, to say nothing of being conceptually inconceivable. Only “civilisation” could be capable of such refinements.

Anselm

[Hi Davka - here's part two.

Environmental degradation

This is the least controversial of civilisation’s “cons”. The sorry saga of our self-destruction by burning our environmental house down with us inside it ought to be well enough known, and it only needs stressing here that – climate sceptics notwithstanding – the scientific consensus is that human-induced climate change is a fact, with possibly incalculable consequences. There has been enough written about the history of this topic to make it plain that such degradation is inevitable when civilisation strikes. The Neolithic village of Beidha in Jordan was occupied for 700 years until soil erosion caused by tree felling and overgrazing around 7500 BC led to its evacuation. This saga has been repeated on small and large scales by civilisation(s) ever since, with Easter Island providing the proverbial case study. There is not one historical civilisation whose collapse does not feature environmental degradation as one of its at least putative causes. The same situation is facing us today, with this difference: earlier societies could usually “move house” when they burned theirs down. Because ours is global, we can’t. Civilisation is responsible for this state of affairs. What will our great-great grandchildren think of us as their pitiful remnants forage for food amid the ruins of our mighty cities?

“PROs”

I shall end with a brief consideration of two arguments that are usually brought into play to clinch the debate in civilisation’s favour, leading to the conclusion: “You wouldn’t want to go back to the Stone Age, would you?” This is lazy. What it actually means is that we have no intention of giving up our lifestyles whatever the result of our discussion, and we need to justify this conclusion.

The first argument has to do with advances by developed countries in the last couple of centuries that have improved our lives for the better. This applies especially to developments in medicine and public health. But there is a logical flaw here. I have shown three things in this regard.

1. Civilisation has had no discernable effect on life expectancy until the last two centuries.
2. Our medicinal arts have only succeeded in returning us more-or-less to our state of health before farming began, with its suite of new, virulent diseases whose effect was intensified by civilisation.
3. Our civilised lifestyles have introduced a brand-new suite of chronic diseases whose effect has likewise been magnified by the very increase in life expectancy mentioned in 1. above. More people are living longer, to be afflicted by these diseases. Medicine has thus been hit with a double whammy, whose total effect is to return us to a state of well-being that is actually lower than that of our prehistoric forebears. The addition of mental health, which is inherent in the very civilisational enterprise itself, leads to the inescapable conclusion that medicine is constantly fighting a losing battle.

There are also advances (or, as concerns the arts, developments) that are purported to raise our cultural level far above that of hunter-gatherers. “Where would we be without Shakespeare, the Sistine Chapel ceiling or Bach?” the “pundits” cry. But this argument assumes that hunter-gatherers had no culture, an assumption that flies in the face of the evidence.

The cultural lives of foragers became increasingly rich as time went on. There is prehistoric evidence of nearly every branch of artistic endeavour, and some interpret that evidence as being as old as our species; certainly our Neanderthal cousins were also capable of artistic sensibility. The earliest musical instrument is a 40,000 year old bone flute, although the primeval musical instruments – the human voice and the two human hands clapping – leave no separate archaeological traces, with the plausible inference that they might be millions of years old. The earliest two-dimensional art is the cave paintings at the Grotte Chauvet in France, estimated at 32,000 years – the beginning of the longest known continuous art tradition, spanning some 20,000 years. So-called “Venus” figurines date back to at least 35,000 years ago. Monumental architecture was practiced by sedentary hunter-gatherers at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey 11,000 years ago. It is perfectly reasonable to postulate that drama, perhaps taking the form of dramatic ritual or retellings of hunts, was normal practice, and that these might have included what we now call poetry. The only art forms that would have been inaccessible to such communities would have been literate ones – and that has been the case until the rise of printing in China towards the end of the first millennium AD – although determining what that tells us about mass literacy is, to the best of my knowledge, an imprecise exercise at best.

So who is to say that there wasn’t some Palaeolithic Shakespeare, some Mesolithic Mozart or Michelangelo? Certainly the prehistoric world was full of Leonardos. More realistically, I wouldn’t for a moment assume that if I had an artistic temperament it couldn’t have found expression before the rise of agriculture. I might have been quite artistically satisfied in 15,000 BC – or even 150,000 BC, for that matter.

As far as so-called “life-enhancing technology” that makes our lives infinitely more convenient even than it was 200 years ago is concerned – again, there are two answers. Firstly, they managed then without satnavs, HDTVs and all the other appurtenances of “civilised” existence. If we survive as a species for another 200 years, our descendents will probably wonder how we got along without their gadgets. Satisfaction is a state of mind, not of technological sophistication. Secondly, every “advance” has negative connotations. Cars lead to massive pollution and contribute to a rise in obesity by reducing the necessity for physical exercise. There’s no such thing as absolute “improvement”, certainly not of the kind that makes for happiness. I daresay your average hunter-gatherer might very well have been “happier” than your average civilisational sophisticate.

Conclusion

Let me finish by recapitulating the opening in a different form. For all but one hundredth of the time that our genus has existed, and for more than nine-tenths of the time that we have been homo sapiens, we have been hunter-gatherers living in relatively small, nomadic groups of kin, subsisting on widely varied diets of, variously, fruits, cereals and leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds, meat, fish and seafood and making decisions for the next day or at the most the next year. That’s what we evolved to do. In the last 10,000 years – that is, in the blink of an evolutionary eye – we have been catapulted into a lifestyle for which we are not mentally or physically equipped: that is, into a fruit- and vegetable-less diet and a communal life lived in huge agglomerations of strangers, indulging in behaviours that demand thinking sometimes decades in advance, while hobbling us psychologically. Most of our civilised history has been a Malthusian cycle of increasing food production lagging behind ever-increasing population. Only in the last two centuries have we freed ourselves from this cycle – but for what? My gripe is not with civilisation per se. Within living memory the leaders of the two competing power blocks into which the world was divided were ready to blow that world up in a nuclear holocaust, killing untold millions of innocent civilians (their own as well as their “enemies”’) for the “benefit” of their own side. This is simply hunter-gatherer behaviour writ large and taken to the extreme – two bands squabbling over the same territory. In those days, the losers could move on. We hunter-gatherers in suits can’t. That’s what I’ve got against civilisation: we haven’t evolved fast enough to be ready for it. Give us another few hundred thousand years and we should be fine with it. Have we got even a hundred years?


Sources used:


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MacLennan and Sellars (1999) Ageing through the ages. Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 29 (1), 71-75

Caspari, Rachel and Lee, Sang-Hee (2004) Older age becomes common late in human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101(30), 10895-10900

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Achwienichtig

First of all, I would like to thank the moderators who are facilitating this discussion. Most previous moderated debates here have focused on issues distinctively centered to religion. With this current debate and the concurrent debate on global warming, the value of this forum is highlighted in its branching out into a multiplicity of topics and disciplines, demonstrating a truly intellectual atmosphere.

The issue at stake here is, to put it simply, is civilization worth it for humanity? Has civilization rendered more good than harm on the whole for humanity? Before addressing this question, a few preliminary remarks need to be made.

First, a word must be said about what civilization is. Anselm and I have both agreed to define civilization as “the spectrum of human activity that resulted directly from the agricultural revolution.” Anselm expanded on this definition with the following: “This activity is characterised by large, settled communities of people unconnected by either kinship or acquaintance, a substantial minority (and latterly in developed countries an overwhelming majority) of whom were not primary food producers. This would exclude nomadic pastoralism, as well as our hunter-gatherer forebears.” I have agreed to this expanded definition for reasons I will make evident later, but for now it is important to realize that the agricultural revolution will be the focal point of this debate.

Secondly, we need to clarify exactly what we mean when we say something is good or bad for the whole of humanity. When asking the question of whether civilization is good for humanity, there are at least three senses in which it might or might not be good: first in the evolutionary sense, secondly in the teleological second, and thirdly in the utilitarian sense. In the evolutionary sense, civilization will be termed good if it contributes to the likelihood of our survival as a species. In the teleological sense, civilization will be good if expands the full potential of mankind’s capabilities and renders those capabilities more readily accessible. In the utilitarian sense, civilization will be good if it increases the overall well-being of human individuals.

It is prima facie conceivable that civilization has been good for humanity in certain respects and bad in others. For instance, at our current point in history, which I shall simply call modernity, we have exceeded all previous civilizations in teleological respects, having achieved a human potential for science and understanding unfathomable to any before us. Furthermore, we have demonstrated great utilitarian strides in increasing the well-being of individuals, with medicine, social institutions, etc. On the other hand, as we have used our technology for the betterment of individuals, we find ourselves doing great harm to our environment. As population increases and environmental degradation becomes more widespread, it is easily conceivable that humanity is setting up its own extinction.

We find ourselves faced with the issue of weighing these different standards of good and bad. Ideally, these three standards would align perfectly. Unfortunately, they do not always do so. In fact, it is questionable if they ever do so. Furthermore, we very often expect risks in the pursuit of betterment and happiness, and there is no reason to suppose that the creation of agriculture and civilization did not pose its own risks. For every person the amount of risk they are willing to accept changes. Questions may be posed like: how much risk to your evolutionary well-being are you willing to accept to make advances in utilitarian well-being? Charles Darwin, for instance, said that the virtue of compassion was evolutionarily unsound, since it allowed the week of the species to propagate, yet he also thought this risk was worth it because compassion is the most evolved trait (that is, he saw compassion as the teleological height of humanity for its utilitarian benefits).¹

Even in cases where the risks associated with betterment turn into the reality of bad fortune, it is hard say unequivocally that it was not worth it. What we perceive as disastrous might in fact be a new opportunity for even greater conquests. On the other hand, where something that contributes to current prosperity, perhaps even long term, ends with disaster, how to we measure if it was worth it. Is a thousand years of prosperity under nuclear energy worth it is the human race eventually dies of nuclear fallout? Two thousand years? Ten thousand? In cases where the means are prosperous and the ends are disastrous, or the ends prosperous and the means disastrous, how do we weigh one against the other?

The subjective axiology involved in these considerations is sure the generate differences of opinion even amidst agreement of fact. The best I can do is argue for those values I consider the most important. Perhaps I can even try to convince others of their importance, but this sort of meta-analysis is not the purpose of this current debate. I will simply make the case that, as far as those thing which I value go, and which I assume many others value also, the advent of civilization, though at times disastrous, has on a whole has to the betterment of mankind.

There is one last preliminary issue I must address. It is hard to determine what in our society exists necessarily because of civilization, what couldn’t exist without civilization but doesn’t exists necessarily because of it, and what is only accidental to civilization. If civilization is the sufficient cause of X, does the consideration of X weigh differently in our assessment of civilization than if civilization were merely the necessary, but not the sufficient, cause of X? To give a concrete example which I will later be examining, to what extend does consideration of slavery affect our consideration of civilization? The assessment of civilization will change depending upon the connection we see between the two, on whether we see slavery as wholly intrinsic to, merely facilitated by, or extrinsic to civilization.

With these considerations in place, I can now outline my plan for this initial essay. It is my desire, if I am capable, to focus on those aspects of civilization which were directly spurred on by the advent of agriculture. Agriculture is, after all, our focus and the beginning of civilization as we know it. I shall attempt to show (1) the causal effects surrounding this agricultural revolution and the revolution’s connection to the basic institutions of historical mankind, and (2) that the unfolding history of these institutions, though at times disastrous, has ultimately been towards the betterment of mankind, made evident by (a) qualitative improvements in our historical life and (b) the quantitative expansion of these improvements to a greater number of people.

Allow me to begin this analysis by recasting a popular myth that life prior to civilization was “nasty, brutish, and short.” This myth comes to us from Thomas Hobbes and was first formulated in his book On the Citizen and later revisited in his Leviathan.² Hobbes speculates on the state of nature, that is, how humans were prior to civilization, by reasoning that the fundamental principle of life is self-preservation. From here he argues that all men would have what he calls the right of nature, that is, the right to secure all things he perceives as necessary for his personal survival. However, scarcity would create a competition for these needs, and so a war of all against all would ensue, making life “nasty brutish and short.”

Hobbes’s method is brilliant, as he is later able to demonstrate that the drive towards self-preservation leads one to follow what he calls the law of nature, and the law of nature is the dictate to give up your right of nature. That is, he shows that self-preservation is best accomplished through mutually giving up your right to all things through the creation of a sovereignty. Ultimately, Hobbes’s model leads to a peaceful society (if you have no problem with monarchy).

However, one major issue with Hobbes’s model is that it does not take instincts and drives into account. It functions purely under the assumption that all choices are rational. Even Hobbes’s notion of war is rational. He makes war in the state of nature a right, as if it were an action that one rationally chose to exercise. No war, on this account, is fought on blind impulse but always with rational interests. If this is true of war, than it is equally true of peace, which Hobbes defines negatively as the absence of war. These is no such thing as an instinct for peace in Hobbes, because there is no such thing as instinct period. For instance, Hobbes interprets the family as a contractual unit rather than a naturally bonded unit.

I am not arguing that there was no war prior to civilization, nor am I making the claim that prehistorical life was clean, humane, and long. I simply want to level out the playing field by noting that man is a social animal, a zoon politikon. This is something that Hobbes vehemently denied. I am not trying to negate mankind’s irrational motivation to war. In fact, I am emphasizing that this motivation really isn’t rational: something that Hobbes did not do.

Charles Darwin himself noted a distinction in humanity’s natural selfish instincts and what he called the social instincts. These instincts run contrary to each other, but they are both part of our thinking and motivation. They need not be rational, but they both influence our behavior. In his book The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins uses game theory to show that evolution does not selected purely for aggression nor purely for pacifism, but for a mixture of both. We can assume humans have always had such a mixture. These drives is pre-rational, arising from the interaction of mutation and environment, and they serve as a substratum upon which we may impose human act.

I do not wish to get into a discussion of evolution per se. However, it is important to realize that humanity has always had impulses towards both war and peace, love and hate. This is, perhaps, best illustrated if I concede a point to my opponent. Let us suppose that nomadic hunter-gatherers were peaceful, but once they they developed agriculture, they became more violent. Surely this view favors my opponent’s position. It seems to me, however, that a simple shift towards agriculture would not itself create hostility in humankind. It is far more likely that the propensity towards hostility was always there and that agriculture merely created the circumstances for such tendencies to be utilized. In other words, it appears to me that territorialism, and the need for war it creates, was a necessary feature of agriculture, not because there was anything wrong with agriculture, but because there was always something of the territorial spirit in humans.

Are we to submit that it would be better had mankind never settled down but remained always unattached from the land? Perhaps another 100,000 years of nomadic wondering would have eventually weeded out mankind’s need for aggression. This seems very unlikely, since hunting itself constituted an important feature of paleolithic life, both for food and clothing. This need to kill for sustenance and survival engendered aggression. Furthermore, the upper Paleolithic era brought with it greater improvements in hunting weapons. Indeed, it was the inventions of these hunter-gatherers that facilitated violence between humans. Once locality became a feature of our way of life, the need to kill extended to the protection of the locality upon which one’s life was based.

As far as violence is concerned, violent predispositions existed, and weapons of killing were invented, prior to the Neolithic revolution. The neolithic revolution, far from being a great evil, was simple the last ingredient to the mix, since it took our pre-existing propensities and put them in an environment where they acted in new and not always amicable ways. Surely, that doesn’t make agriculture evil.

Anthropologist Raymond C. Kelly has argued that the apparent dip in violence we see during the paleolithic times resulted not because humans had gotten more peaceful, but because the development of weaponry at that point created a need for tactical violence, giving an advantage for the defender, thus discouraging aggression.³ This supports my view that the propensity towards violence always existed.

Of course, at this point, all I have done is absolved the agricultural revolution of its moral culpability for war. I have not answered the more important question: were we better off beforehand? Perhaps we need to ask ourselves again, would it be better off had we not gotten attached to the land? if we had not invented agriculture?

To answer this question, we must look to the causal factors surrounding the evolution of violence. I will here reference the case study of Ofnet as explained by the late UCSB anthropologist Phillip L. Walker.

Ofnet is significant because the violence took place during a time when agriculture was [being] developed, but in a location where agricultural changes hadn’t yet taken place. I. J. N. Thorpe has elaborated on Ofnet:

In that same study, Thorpe gives an example of another example of a mesolithic culture that had invented agriculture but did not leave any evidence of violence.

Thorpe himself concludes that there is no one complete theory explaining the appearance of violence during prehistory.

I think the evidence I have laid out is sufficient for this initial essay to demonstrate that the causes of violence and warfare cannot be neatly pinned down. The most we can say is that violence and war appeared to grow more common in the upper paleolithic and mesolithic and into the neolithic. The causal trains of events leading up to this increase in frequency of violence appear to be particular to individual societies.

I shall revisit this issue at the end of this essay. For now, I wish to talk about this general topic of causation, which this present conversation about war and violence has led to. As with war, the origins of agriculture are not easily pinned down. To begin with, agriculture was not simply invented once. There are at least seven distinct places where agriculture developed.⁸ Furthermore new research shows that the transition in cereal production from foraging to agriculture might have taken as many as 3000 years.⁹ Animal domestication, long thought to have always come after plant domestication, has actually been shown to precede it in several cases.¹⁰

Most notably, scholars have even questioned the relationship between agriculture and sedentism. Archaeologist Yvonne Marshall has this to say about sedentism:

As to the issue of the exact causes of agriculture, this is an area which I fear to even offer an opinion on. There are any number of theories ranging from climatic shift and population growth to coevolution and the invention of storage. I am not read up on the issue well enough to offer an opinion, but the accounts appear conflicting.

One more issue to be brought up is that of social stratification. Even here, it is hard to say whether agriculture created social class structures or whether it merely helped to reinforce that structure. This might be demonstrated with the appearance of shamanism, which is usually viewed as the oldest form of religion (assuming there is a connection between religion and social class). The oldest shaman burial discovered thus far is a 12,000 year old woman in the Levant, considered to be the birthplace of agriculture. The discovers of this burial have this to say about their find:

Here again, we find it is extremely difficult to locate the causal relations. We can only say that there is an interplay of some sort.

NOTE: I have had to split this statement up into two post. It was withing the word limit, but exceeded the character limit the message board allows.

Achwienichtig

(First statement continued)

What is my purpose in questioning these causal relationships? It is, quite simply, to keep my opponent from asserting a causal paradigm. For instance, prior to really investigating this matter, I had always thought that the invention of agriculture forced people into sedentism, and sedentism led to territorialism, which in turn led to war. The causal chain to war would thus lead back to agriculture, which would work in my opponent’s favor. This model, however, is frightfully naive.

I have no idea if Anselm is going to construct such a model, nor what his model would look like. However, I wish to warn against any rigid model right now. The causal systems at work here are simply too complicated.

However, I myself agreed to the definitions offered by Anselm as to how we should define civilization, part of that definition being that agriculture had a causal influence on civilization. Am I now contradicting myself? To a certain degree, I must, since I need to follow the evidence where it leads. However, I still believe the spirit of Anselm’s original definition of civilization is intact, but in order to show this, I need to construct my own thinking on the evolution of civilization.

On this topic, I am very much influenced by Hegel’s philosophy of history. Far from being an abstract metaphysics, Hegel’s philosophy can be summed up in a phrase, there are reasons which reason knows not. For Hegel, any action carries two types of reason, the individual reason and universal reason. The former includes all those concepts and ideas which a person associates with the action he is carrying out. The latter includes all those concepts and ideas actually associated with the action, whether understood by the individual or not. It is these latter reasons which shape history. For instance, the drafters of the fourteen amendment surely did not have marriage equality in mind when they wrote it, but in reality the amendment contains the rationale for marriage equality that gay rights supporters are currently using in their advocacy. This rationale always existed within the amendment, but it was only recently realized. (Here in New York it was just realized into law.)

Hegel attributes this universal reason to Geist, a sort of universal spirit. I personally view this Geist as a metaphorical device rather than as an actual entity, since the reification of this Geist carries too much metaphysical baggage. The advantage of looking at our prehistory from this angle is that it allows us to view bundles of logical associations within prehistory without forcing us to assume that ancient humans followed that logical path out through their intentions Eventually the logical undertones of their actions would come to the surface over time, but they themselves were not compelled to follow those undertones nor to realize the totality of the systems they had constructed.

The second system of thought I wish to touch upon briefly is dialectical materialism, which is an offshoot of Hegelian thought. I will make this point short. One of the tenets of dialectical materialism is that qualitative change eventuates quantitative change. Think of the notion of a critical mass. An atomic bomb will not explode unless it contains a certain mass of uranium. If there is any less than that mass, the nuclear reaction will not occur. I think this notion of critical mass can be applied the the origins of civilization.

Allow me to outline my thoughts. Rather than viewing the development leading towards civilization as a series of causal effects, my view is that something precipitated a qualitative change in human development. This qualitative change contained within it a rational for all the development we see from the upper paleolithic through the neolithic. No one change brought about any other change, but they were all bundled together into one qualitative mutation. The development we see is actually the process of the unfolding rational of the one qualitative change.

This theory of mine is supported by the the previously mentioned fact that agriculture was independently invented in no less than seven locations. This is what we would expect if a previous qualitative and universal change in human behavior were to unravel itself in multiple localities. The admonitions of I. J. N. Thorpe that we must look for the causes of war and violence in individual circumstances rather than in a universal causation also fit into my theory, since the rationale for war would be always be present, but it would unfold differently in each culture.

This is why I agreed with Anselm’s definition of civilization, not because I see agriculture as bringing about all these changes like social class distinctions and large communities, but because these changes are spurred on by the same qualitative development in ancient human life. I must note, however, I do not mean to imply agriculture did not produce its own effects. I think it did, but the effects that it produced were simply new forms of the same qualitative change. Thus, I can still hold a differentiation between modern societies based on agriculture and modern pastoralists, though I tend to see this difference in a different light.

Now the inevitable issue arises: what is the qualitative change we are looking for? No doubt, it will be found in the evolution of modern man from homo sapiens to homo sapiens sapiens. I am afraid that I have run out of time to begin a discussion of this matter in my opening statement. I shall have to pick up here next time. However, I have accomplished the majority of the first point in my outline by showing the causal relations between human developments. In my next post, I shall begin dealing with my second point by discussing the qualitative changes that have taken place in humanity.

[HR][/HR]

Foot notes:

1)There is a passage to this effect in Darwin’s Descent of Man, which I currently do not have access to. Perhaps if Darwin had been familiar with game theory he might have thought differently, but this is speculation.

2) can provide appropriate citations for my references to Hobbes if requested. I have worked mostly from memory.

3)Raymond C. Kelly. The Evolution of Lethal Intergroup Violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol. 102, No. 43, Residential Mobility of Low-Income Populations (Oct. 25, 2005), pp. 15294-15298

4)Phillip L. Walker. A Bioarchaeological Perspective on the History of Violence. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 30, (2001), pp. 573-596

5)I. J. N. Thorpe. Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare. World Archaeology Vol. 35, No. 1, The Social Commemoration of Warfare (Jun., 2003), pp. 145-165

6)ibid.

7)ibid.

8)Based on archaeologist Bruce Smith’s assessment.

9)Dorian Q. Fuller. An Emerging Paradigm Shift in the Origins of Agriculture. General Anthropology Volume 17, Issue 2, pages 1–12, Fall 2010

10)ibid.

11)Yvonne Marshall. Introduction: adopting a sedentary lifeway. World Archaeology
Vol. 38, No. 2, Sedentism in Non-Agricultural Societies (Jun., 2006), pp. 153-163

12)Leore Grosman, Natalie D. Munro, Anna Belfer-Cohen. A 12,000-Year-Old Shaman Burial from the Southern Levant (Israel). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 105, No. 46 (Nov. 18, 2008), pp. 17665-17669

Anselm

I would first like to apologise to my readers for the omission of the endnote numberings in the text and in the endnotes themselves in my first essay. Not being exactly the most techno-savvy homo sapiens on the planet, I used MS Word’s Endnote facility without realising that it and the other formatting wouldn’t translate into the forum post. There was thus a little too much of the last-minute dash about proceedings. The endnotes are in the order in which they appear in the text, however, so matching them up, at least when reading the latter, should hopefully not be too problematic.

I should also point out that Achwienichtig and I have adopted different approaches to writing our statements. His is one statement split over two or three rounds, while I put all my eggs into the first basket. I will thus use this second round to both answer the main thrusts of his argument and elaborate those of mine for which there was not space enough in my first statement.

The good, the bad and the downright ugly

Achwienichtig need not fear: I have no intention of “asserting a causal paradigm” when the situation is as complicated as both of us acknowledge it to be. In dealing with the present topic, concluding that such-and-such a factor led to such-and-such an outcome in a particular case is as difficult if not impossible as it is unwarranted to generalise that conclusion to every other comparable instance. Agriculture developed, as we have both noted, in different places around the world for different reasons.

No, I offer not a paradigm but something far looser: a bunch of empirically-derived generalisations whose implications are clear. When its 10,000-year record is examined, civilisation will be found to fail each of my opponent’s three criteria for judging worth. In the evolutionary sense it has reduced the likelihood of our survival as a species by introducing lethal epidemic diseases and the conditions in which they would thrive, while impairing our ability to resist them. Its introduction of technology to defeat this menace has only worked in a single case (smallpox), while adding to our burden of morbidity with chronic diseases engendered by our very technological sophistication. All the while we have saddled ourselves with psychological problems that affect every facet of our civilised existence, all because we inhabit a 10,000-year old artificial environment for which we are biologically and psychologically manifestly unsuited. 10,000 years provides next to no evolutionary basis at all on which to deal with our biggest environmental change since we left the oceans – and that took millions of years. If your bent is towards equilibrium, in which long periods of stasis are interspersed with relatively sudden and drastic changes, the last ten millennia will offer you very few examples of evolutionary development other than the lactose tolerance which became necessary when we began to rely on our domesticated animals for their byproducts. This hardly begins to fit us for the hitherto unnatural demands of the civilisation we have lumbered ourselves with.

Teleologically, inequality within and between societies and regions over this period has always been vast. The statistics are too well-known to need more than the briefest recapitulation. In the US top one per cent of the population earned nearly half of the country’s wealth in 2007, up from just over a quarter in 1968¹. Globally the situation is even worse: in 2000 the one per cent at the top of the world’s richest adult list owned two-fifths of the world’s assets, while the bottom half owned barely one per cent². The whys and wherefores are open to debate, but historically this inequality has been and continues to be as inherent in civilisation as religion seems to be in our species – in neither case, I would argue, for the better. My opponent, heartened by the oft-quoted recent decline in those on the poverty line, might breezily proclaim that the promised universal civilisational Elysium is just around the corner, or at least on the horizon. My answer would be: let’s postpone this discussion until that happy outcome actually looks like eventuating. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath. Both weight of history and fundamental structures of power militate against any such happy prospect.

Such revoltingly gross inequalities would be unimaginable in a forager society. In my statement I provided evidence to show that prehistoric foragers ate in the main more nutritiously, if not more in bulk, than their agricultural successors. I should stress that that statement applies to most if not all foragers of whom that can be said. Agriculture and civilisation did away with such egalitarianism, not just globally but regionally and even within societies. Inequality is endemic in today’s world at all levels. Sweden, at 23 on the Gini index (see my statement for an explanation), is currently the world’s most equitable country³. This is roughly the state of inequality in a range of hunter-gatherer groups studied by Smith et al⁴. If one can extrapolate backwards from these findings to our foraging forebears (and, given Ferguson’s stricture below, it’s a big “if”), one would have to say that, while their lives weren’t as idyllic as some people would like to believe, they were a lot more egalitarian than the average global level at any time since. Simple reason would bear this out: far from being of value to nomads, possessions (other than purely personal and portable ones) would be an irksome impediment to them.

The “civilised” life

Money, or its actual or conceptual equivalent, can indeed buy happiness, if that be construed as a more than even chance that you will live out your allotted threescore years and ten. But if by “human potential” my opponent means something more than the fulfilment of the animal needs that constitute the first three steps of Maslow’s five-step hierarchy (biological and physiological, safety, and “belongingness” and love) – something, in other words, distinctively human (i.e. the last two, and especially the last, Maslowian steps of esteem and then self-actualisation) – he must allow leisure time, that being defined as waking time spent on that crucial last step. What leisure opportunities exist for the bulk of humanity may be seen in the case of access to safe water. Quite apart from the mortality and morbidity rates relating to lack of access to clean water (in the early 1990s a billion people became sick and 3,300,000 died each year from this cause alone – and those are just the figures for diarrheal diseases⁵),

This is but one instance of the staggering loss of human potential directly consequent on our adoption of agriculture and civilisation, and our consequent commitment to a grinding Malthusian cycle in which we spend all our waking hours desperately producing enough food to keep pace with our growing numbers, never mind having the leisure for “self-actualisation”. 25,000 people each day don’t make even the basic animal steps, dying of hunger or hunger-related causes. You and I can doubtless feed ourselves quite handsomely with little or no trouble, doubtless congratulating ourselves that we are in the well- (over-?) fed third of the world’s population that has freed itself from that cycle and won itself the leisure to fulfil its grandiose dreams, leaving another third underfed and the remaining third actually starving.

In this respect, one might consider the Renaissance, that period characterised by an incredible efflorescence of the great and powerful in the arts and in the human spirit. Or was it? Sure, it was the age of Leonardo and Michelangelo – but what was it actually like for the bulk of the population? What was their share of this artistic largesse?

One can picture a destitute Florentine wool comber walking “home” at eight o’clock at night after a day’s grinding toil, for barely enough remuneration to keep his and his family’s body and soul together, past the Rucellai family’s grand palazzo in the latest neo-classical style and thinking, as Blackadder says to his servant Baldrick in the TV comedy Blackadder, that the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people. If we could talk to the estimated 200,000 who died raising Peter the Great’s magnificent new capital of St Petersburg, including the beautiful Winter Palace, from a dank, fetid swamp, or the thousands who died in similar conditions in order to glorify Louis XIV through his Versailles, or the untold number who died building the Pyramids at Giza, they would disagree: “civilisation” indeed happened to them, only in a way they would far rather have done without. I submit that the grand pattern of “civilisation” has ever been thus: the tens, hundreds and thousands live in the grandeur created and maintained by the tens and hundreds of thousands and millions who die for the privilege. Exaggerated? Perhaps. But closer to the truth, I submit, than the suggestion that “civilisation” has improved the lives of the bulk of the people who have lived in the last ten millennia.

I therefore submit that, whatever the theoretical ins and outs, the evidence I have presented thus far demonstrates that as a matter of historical record civilisation has not so much failed to improve the chances of survival for our species, or to expand the potential or increase the well-being of the vast bulk of the human population in the last 10,000 years, but rather made things worse for the majority of the world’s population over that period by several orders of magnitude. I’m not one of those who think that life was all hunky-dory in the Stone Age. I’m fully aware that they had their problems. But in terms of the proposition, my point is a relative one: their problems were not nearly as many, or as bad, as ours – “ours” meaning the bulk of the world’s population since the Neolithic Revolution, not just we happy few in the developed world in the last couple of centuries. I believe this also nicely answers my opponent’s utilitarian criterion.

Warfare

I will wait to see how my opponent develops his theoretical argument before deciding whether to tackle it in the last of my three posts. I will deal, however, with a topic that initially frightened me enough to try surreptitiously to ignore it in my statement, but that he has confronted headon: warfare. At first I was quite rattled by Ofnet, about which I was unaware, and that unease only increased when my further reading turned up Schletz and Talheim, all sites of massacres. Could it be that my attempts to rehabilitate our forager forebears were misguided – that they were no more free of Nankings, Mÿ Lais, Babi Yars, Wounded Knees, Amritsars and Rwandas than their “civilised” successors?

However, I am emboldened to take up my opponent’s challenge by an anthropologist quoted by Thorpe, R. Brian Ferguson, a professor at Rutgers University who has spent his whole career studying warfare. He summarises the archaeological record with specific regard to instances that can be interpreted as evidence of prehistoric battle⁶, criticising two practices that can easily lead to a false picture of prehistoric warfare (and, by extension, other areas of life). The first is the retrospective attribution of contemporary hunter-gatherer behaviours to their prehistoric forebears, a mistake that does not (yet) bear heavily upon this discussion.

His second target is the mistaken lumping together of “prehistory” into one homogeneous mass, with especial reference to conflating later Mesolithic with earlier Palaeolithic conditions. As both achwienichtig and I have pointed out, life never has been that simple. Our species has existed for nearly 200,000 years, and in that time has come to inhabit a wide variety of environments, latterly including artificial ones. As a consequence, human culture has always been hugely varied over time and space. The failure to recognise this results in the use of a site like the 7,720-year-old Ofnet to characterise all of prehistory, wherever and whenever homo sapiens was found. Thorpe specifically warns against this error. I find Kelly trickier to deal with because in the historical (as opposed to systematic) section of his essay he seems to assume that weapons were used to kill fellow homos as well as animals. Ferguson’s summary of the actual archaeological evidence (from skeletons, from depictions in art, from weaponry such as maces and daggers that are undoubtedly people-killers, and from the layout of settlements) shows that

Site 117, also known as Jebel Sahaba, is the Sudanese site of a massacre of 37 women and children and 19 males aged over 19. At 14,340 years old at most and 10,000 at least (according to Kelly), it is commonly acknowledged as the earliest evidence of warfare.

Note the “interpersonal violence”. This wide category includes one-on-one murder as well as “proper” warfare. He is careful to stipulate that the dearth of evidence before this date is not due to any less of it being available for the pre-agricultural period – in fact, it is. The evidence simply does not bear out assertions that interactions among our genus before that period were anywhere near as violent as they subsequently became. This includes the period before our species arose. Kelly constructs a tripartite schema of a period of frequent coalitional killing using hand-held weapons being brought to an end around a million to half a million years ago with the development of the more lethal throwing spear, resulting in what achwienichtig characterises as “tactical” decisions by groups to co-operate with each other rather than fight (and incidentally precipitating homo sapiens’ migration from Africa), only for warfare to resume as society became increasingly segmented and the advantages of organised “warfare” became apparent. However, all but the last part of this schema relies on observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer and chimpanzee groups, and thus involves a good deal of speculation when applying the conclusions to our prehistoric ancestors. His purported frequency of intergroup violence prior to the invention of the throwing spear relies especially on such observations, which appear problematic, as Ferguson indeed points out.

Instead, I’ll see his speculation and raise him firm archaeological evidence. Whatever may or may not have been the case 1.5 million years ago with the invention of the throwing spear, there is an indubitable – indeed striking – trend towards warfare that occurred across the globe as societies became larger and more complex. This trend may not have been caused by agriculture, but it is an inextricable part of the complex that led to it. Ferguson points to six preconditions for the development of warfare: sedentarism, increasing population density, social stratification, trade, bounded social groups and ecological reversals⁹. Between all of these and the development of agriculture and civilisation there is also, as achwienichtig so elegantly puts it, “an interplay of some sort”, whatever that might be. In other words, warfare may not have happened as a direct consequence of agriculture, but it certainly happened as part of a constellation of factors closely related to it, both conceptually and chronologically. It certainly didn’t happen 50,000 years earlier.


Endnotes

¹ Aldrick, Philip (2011) Davos WEF 2011: Wealth inequality is the "most serious challenge for the world". Daily Telegraph, 26. Jan. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/f...the-world.html [accessed 13.8.11]

² Wikipedia, International inequality. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_inequality [accessed 13.8.11]

³ Distribution of family income – Gini index (2011). CIA World Factbook [www]. Available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat.../2172rank.html [accessed 12.8.11]

⁴ Smith (2010)

⁵ One billion affected (2011) water.org [www]. Available at http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/billion/ [accessed 12.8.11]

⁶ Pacific Institute (1995) Estimates of global morbidity and mortality of water-related diseases (early 1990s) World Health Organisation [www]. Available at http://www.worldwater.org/data19981999/table22.htm [accessed 12.8.11]

⁷ Ponting (2000) p.555-556

⁸ Ferguson (2003)

⁹ Ferguson (2008a)


Sources used

Chen, Shaohua and Ravallion, Martin (2007) Absolute poverty measures for the developing world, 1981-2004. World Bank: Development Research Group. Available at http://www-wds.worldbank.org/externa...EX/wps4211.txt [accessed 12.8.11]

C. Brian Ferguson (2003) The birth of war. Natural History, 112(6), 28-36. Available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...g=content;col1 [accessed 8.8.11]

------ (2008a) Ten points on war. Social Analysis, 52(2), 32-49. Available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...g=content;col1 [accessed 8.8.11]

------ (2008b) War before history. In: de Souza, Philip (ed) The ancient world at war: a global history. London: Thames and Hudson. Chapter available at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~socant...y%20(2008).pdf [accessed 8.8.11]

Mithen, Steven (1996) The prehistory of the mind: a search for the origins of art, religion and science. London: Thames and Hudson

------ (2004) After the ice: a global human history 20,000 – 5000 BC. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson

Ponting, Clive (2000) World history: a new perspective. London: Pimlico

Smith, Eric A. (2009) ANTH 457: Ecological Anthropology [www] University of Washington. Available from: http://courses.washington.edu/anth457/ [accessed 2.8.11]

Smith, Eric A. et al. (2010) Wealth transmission and inequality among hunter-gatherers. Current Anthropology, 51(5), 19-34. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2999363/ [accessed 12.8.11]

Achwienichtig

I would like to apologize for my lateness in submitting this post. As Anselm is already aware, I am transitioning into the role of a stay at home dad, and let me tell you, I had more free time on the job. In this light, I would also like to ask for an extra week to submit for the next round, giving three weeks in total.

At the end of my last essay, I said I would would begin this one by talking about the qualitative change that led towards civilization. However, I shall have to reserve that analysis till the second half. Anselm has giving several arguments that need to be addressed first. I hope that in addressing Anselm’s points I shall be able to shed light on my own view of human development and perhaps even touch on the qualitative change I am talking about.

First, I would like to assess a factual claim about the life expectancy of hunter-gatherers. Anselm referenced Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan’s study “Longevity among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination”[1] to show that prehistoric life expectancies were actually quite high. However, the majority of hunter-gatherers looked at in the study were modern day hunter-gatherers. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers are also considered, but there is a twist we need to look at.

If you look at figure 3 from that study, entitled “Age-specific life expectancy: Expected number of years remaining for six sample populations with sufficient data quality and Sweden, 1751-51,”[2] you will notice that prehistoric hunter gatherers have a much shorter life expectancy than modern hunter-gatherers. In fact, the overall life expectancy is put at 20 years. Comparing prehistoric mortality rates to those of modern foragers, they have this to say:

The authors of this study figure there must be some sort of bias in the archaeological data. In order to make up for this, they use modern hunter-gatherer information to reinterpreted the prehistorical life span. Even so, the best they are able to come up with is a 33 year mean lifespan.[4]

The fact of the matter is, archaeological evidence still suggests pre-agricultural humans had a short lifespan. In one very recent study of the Pleistocene fossil record by Erik Trinkaus, we read the following in the abstract:

It seems to me that point on longevity cannot be so easily asserted, and interpreting ancient lifespans by using statistics for modern populations ignores the vast environmental influences on those ancient peoples. For instance, Anselm himself notes that food resources became more plentiful after the end of the ice age. This surely would create a different demographic for the pre-historical societies as compared to modern hunter-gatherers.

In the study just mentioned, Trinkaus speculates that the dearth in older individuals was due to lack of mobility. In those times, hunter-gatherers may have been well fed, but they might have had to travel greater distances to procure their food. Those too weak to make the journey would have been left behind. Trinkaus draws particular notice to the fact that none of the specimens from that period demonstrate any kind of immobilizing lower limb injures, suggesting that such individuals were left to fend for themselves and to ultimately succumb to nature and wild animals.

Anselm used Jared Diamond’s essay “The worst mistake in the history of the human race” as one of his sources. In that essay, there is a wonderful little sentence I would like to reproduce here. “[N]omadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults.”[6] Here, Diamond sees the issue with mobility, only here affecting the young.

I mention this theory of mobility because I wish to concede the point that pre-agricultural societies tended to be healthier than the first agriculturalists. It appears prima facie contradictory to say they were healthier but they did not live any longer. However, there are mechanisms by which a healthier population does not necessarily translate into a longer lifespan. Hunter-gatherers may have had fewer diseases than the first agriculturalists, but the impact of disease and injury might have been greater.

I concede that ancient hunter-gatherers were healthier than the first agriculturalists.

The issue of mental illness is hard to assess. Of course, the fossil record isn’t really going to tell us anything about prehistoric depression, if such a thing existed. However, even on a theoretical model, I cannot say that the sort of mental illnesses brought about by society is all that bad of a thing.

To begin with, the picture of mental illness that Anselm paints is Nietzschean in all respects. This is not difficult to understand, considering that Freud was very much influenced by Nietzsche.[7] Diamond’s assessment that humans had to learn how to live with each other without killing each other points in this direction. For Nietzsche, the result of this learning to live with each other is the internalization of violence that manifests itself as guilt. He believed that this “slave morality” of guilt needed to be tossed aside in favor of a “master morality” which manifests itself as the will to power. Freud, on the other hand, thought repression was the only way to continue living together and that this repression needed to be properly balanced.

Concerning the specific discontents in question, I am of the opinion that such discontents are but a small price to pay for humans not killing each other. Also, I am much more inclined now towards Jung than Freud. Back when I was going through deep depression, I used to think that Freud was right. Ever since coming out of that depression, I can come to discover the Jung’s model was more realistic. For Jung, depression is a transformative process, a retreat of the libidinal energy into the subconscious when the conscious ego is no longer able to integrate its contents. What emerges from this transformative process is an integrated personality.[8]

Mental illnesses such as depression and ADD, except in extreme pathological cases, are actually indications on an evolved consciousness. It is not as if humans never had such mechanisms prior to civilization. It stands to reason that such machanisms must have, in some way, benefited our hunter-gatherer predecessors as well. These mechanisms of psychological automation, when properly understood, act to assist the individual in the process of personality integration.

I have elsewhere presented an essay on the need of conflict in the structuring of moral codes.[9] If the rule to not kill is gained only at the expense of the psychological conflict, then it must be so. To ask for a universal moral code, negative feedback is necessary. On a large scale, this negative feedback drives social progress. Reaction against the existing norms, when those norms are flawed and inhuman, though sometimes painful, is necessary.

Here, I am endorsing a teleological model over a utilitarian model. That is to say, I am endorsing a Marxist model over Anselm’s Nitzschean model. Herein lies the difference between the Nitzschean view and the Marxist view. The Nietzschean wishes to overcome morality. The Marxist wishes to perfect morality. The Nietzschean regrets ever living in a world where morality gets in the way of well being and is determined to overcome such a world. The Marxist sees the pain of morality as leading to the goal where the the teleological principle will finally be one with the utilitarian principle. I shall return to this line of thinking later.

The next issue, which falls closely on the back of this one, is inequality. As to this, we know that agriculture is not a necessary condition for slavery. The northwest coast of North America is well noted in the literature for being home to several complex hunter-gatherer tribes, many of whom practiced slavery and had clear social classes.[10] What is interesting about these societies is that they had a rich supply of natural resources, most notably salmon. The irony is quite obvious. These tribes are the ideal hunter-gatherer societies, living in the abundance of nature, lacking nothing. Yet, they invented slavery. I am inclined to think that the only reason most hunter-gatherers didn’t invent slavery was simply because they didn’t have enough resources. If that is the case, the lack of slavery in such societies is more a demonstration of their poverty than an indication of their equality. Indeed, it has been suggested that inconsistent weather patterns and lack of rich resources are some of the main hindrances to a developed social hierarchy.[11]

Social rank and slavery seem to have more to do with abundance than with agriculture. If Anselm wishes to live in a prehistoric classless society, it is important to note that he actually wants to live in a society without rich resources.

Lastly, allow me to take up the issue of the environment. This is an area in which I greatly agree with Anselm. The environmental degradation done by civilization, especially since the industrial revolution, is almost unthinkable. I am greatly concerned for future human generations, and anybody who is not, in my not so humble opinion, is living in a fantasy.

However, it is important to realize that much environmental degradation was taking place before the advent of agriculture. For instance, the overkill hypothesis, which holds that humans are the ultimate cause of the extinction of megafauna, though contested by many scholars, is still accepted by many others. The evidence for this theory is that the fossil record indicates the geographic extinction of these animals corresponds to the geographic dispersal of human activity.[12] Jared Diamond also supports this theory:

If the global extinction of megafauna is a bit too much to accept, perhaps a smaller scale case study would suffice. Studies of the Pacific islands show a strong correlation between human hunting and bird extinction.[14] The fact that these particular extinctions took place after the advent of agriculture makes no difference. It is hunting which brought these birds to extinction, and hunting is, according to our parameters, a pre-civilized activity. In fact, hunting of one of those activities that sustained humans prior to agriculture.

Such is the magnitude of the human impact on the environment that even before we had invented agriculture we were able to bring about the extinction of species. If humans have a knack for ruining the planet, you may rest assure they had this knack long before they were civilized. They killed animals and they ate plants. These activities impact the environment.

Now that I addressed these issues, I want to get back on track with my own line of thought started in my last essay. We have seen that societies can be complex in their social structures even without agriculture. I believe this is because the human mind became complex first. Here, I wish to concede another point to Anselm on the issue of art. In the Hegelian tradition, art is inextricably tied to the formation of reason. I see no prima facie reason to disagree with this. If we look at the archaeological reason, the Upper Paleolithic stands out as a boom period for technological developments in tool making.[15] This inventiveness seems to stand out as a new horizon in human thinking. That art would appear around the same time is not surprising, given that the tools for art would have been invented around this time.

The relational thinking involved with tool construction, for instance, relating X (e.g. a spearhead) with Y (e.g. killing a deer), demonstrates a reflective nature that would ultimately lead to self-reflection, relating X (e.g. a tree) with itself. Of course, the principle of identity was surely not lost to humans prior to this point, but at this time symbolic thinking begins to emerge. It is this symbolic thinking we see in such things as social order, where people get tattoos to signify rank. It is this symbolic order that behooved the people at Lascaux to venture deep under the earth just so they could paint images of bison and deer on cave walls. Lascaux is beautiful not because it was made by cavemen but because it was made by artists, that is, by symbolic thinkers.

As Lascaux demonstrates, at some point, the symbols themselves became important independent of their usefulness. That is what art is, a symbol separated from its usefulness. That is what distinguishes art from blueprints. One may think of the slogan “Ars Gratia Artis,” (art for the sake of art), to recall to mind that even Metro Goldwyn Mayer agrees with me on this point. Of course, as much as I love philosophy of art, I point this out only to demonstrate the creation of art is a new frontier in human symbolic thinking. This new frontier is the expanse of human symbolism even to the point giving up functionality.

As the functional aspect of the symbol diminishes, and the symbol gains importance in relation to its object, there comes a point where the symbol not only becomes primary but even becomes totally separated from any object. Symbolism can thus give rise to an illusion.

Please notice where this symbolism has gotten us. This symbolism has created religions, as every element needed to have its own symbol in the form of a god. This symbolism has created myths, as the representation of people became more important than the people themselves. This symbolism has created delusions, as people now believe that stories depicting their salvation will ultimately save them from catastrophes that they themselves do nothing to stop. In short, this symbolism created the Bible.

It seems to me that at least two important symbols need to be addressed. First, there is the symbol of place. The invention of art in many ways necessitates a certain amount of sedentism. “This is the cave with all our paintings,” is a way of saying “this place is more significant than the rest.” I am not saying that art made people sedentary to begin with, but I am saying that if they weren’t already sedentary, it would be necessary for them to become so. Not only were resources a factor in territory, but now territory itself had symbolic meaning.

Secondly, there is the symbolic control of man over nature characterized in agriculture. Of course, this control is an illusion. Of course, the control that man has over the seeds of the earth is real to an extent. However, the symbol has exceeded the reality. I mention these two aspects because I wish to show that the real blame of the civilization is to be placed on this evolution of symbolism, and even if one desires to blame agriculture for the woes of humanity, agriculture itself can be blamed on this development.

The art that we see in the cavemen was the beginning of our downfall, so to speak. I believe that richness of human life expressed in art also produces the core of errant thinking. To return to Freud, it was indeed Freud who held that art was an expression of repressed libido. Anselm cannot use Freud to argue that civilization produces discontent unless he is willing to argue that the cavemen producing art were also in such a discontented mood. Indeed, Freud’s book “Civilization and its Discontents” is in German “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” (Discontent in Culture). Culture and civilization are the same thing in Freud’s theory,

Lacan, in expanding on Freud’s theories, developed the idea of the objet petit a, the object of fantasy which exists only in a person’s longing for it. It is a symbol which does not correspond to anything but the desire for its fulfillment. This type of psychology places the discontents of man in the very evolution of our symbolism, not to any particular event in history.

I am attempting to shift the focus from agriculture to linguistics. I believe this move is called for, since I believe many of those evils Anselm talks about are misplaced. We have seen that in psychology symbolism is the key to our discontents, not agriculture. We have noted, as in the case of some Northwest Coast tribes, instances of slavery existing without agriculture. We have seen that man was capable of inflicting harm on the environment even before he mastered the soil.

In the next round, I will discuss this topic from the new focal point, and I shall argue that humanity is still the better for developing its symbolism, despite the evils it has produced.

[HR][/HR]

[1]Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan. Longevity among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination. Population and Development Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Jun., 2007), pp. 321-365

[2]ibid. pg. 332

[3]ibid. pg. 345

[4]ibid. pg. 346

[5]Erik Trinkaus. Late Pleistocene adult mortality patterns and modern human establishment. PNAS January 25, 2011 vol. 108 no. 4 1267-1271

[6]Jared Diamond.The worst mistake in the history of the human race. Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66. On web: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

[7]Scott Greer. Freud's “bad conscience”: The case of Nietzsche's Genealogy. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Summer2002, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p303-315;

[8]For in introduction to Jung’s theory, see: W. Steinberg. DEPRESSION: A DISCUSSION OF JUNG'S IDEAS. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Oct89, Vol. 34 Issue 4, p339-352

[9]A paper I presented at a conference and am looking into publishing entitle, In Praise of Moral Conflict.

[10]SEE, Kenneth M. Ames. The Northwest Coast: Complex Hunter-Gatherers. Ecology, and Social Evolution. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 23 (1994), pp. 209-229, AND Slaves, Chiefs and Labour on the Northern Northwest Coast. World Archaeology, Vol. 33, No. 1, The Archaeology of Slavery (Jun., 2001), pp. 1-17. ALSO SEE Jeanne E. Arnold. The Archaeology of Complex Hunter-Gatherers. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 77-126

[11]“The overall aridity and variability of the Australian climate and the unavailability of highly localized, storable resources imposed severe constraints on the development of enduring forms of inequality in the context of prevailing Aboriginal technologies and forms of social organization.” Ian Keen. Constraints on the Development of Enduring Inequalities in Late Holocene Australia. Current Anthropology, Vol. 47, No. 1 (February 2006), pp. 7-38

[12]Todd Surovell et al. Global Archaeological Evidence for Proboscidean OverkillProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 102, No. 17 (Apr. 26, 2005), pp. 6231-6236

[13]J. M. Diamond, N. P. Ashmole, P. E. Purves. The Present, Past and Future of Human-Caused Extinctions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 325, No. 1228, Evolution and Extinction (Nov. 6, 1989), pp. 469-477

[14]SEE. Richard P. Duncan, Tim M. Blackburn, Trevor H. Worthy. Prehistoric Bird Extinctions and Human Hunting. Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol. 269, No. 1490 (Mar. 7, 2002), pp. 517-521 AND David W. Steadman. Prehistoric Extinctions of Pacific Island Birds: Biodiversity Meets Zooarchaeology. Science, New Series, Vol. 267, No. 5201 (Feb. 24, 1995), pp. 1123-1131

[15]SEE Ofer Bar-Yosef. The Upper Paleolithic Revolution. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 31, (2002), pp. 363-393

Smullyan-esque

[STAFFWARN]Time limit exceeded. Debate closed.[/STAFFWARN]

[STAFFWARN]Reopened at the request of the participants.[/STAFFWARN]

Anselm

I should like to start this final round by thanking achwienichtig for a most eye-opening and productive debate from which I have learned very much indeed. He has not convinced me to change my basic approach from an empirical to a theoretical one, but his arguments, especially in the latter half of his second statement, have given me enough material to propose a more nuanced model which, I believe, fully bears out the proposition that the advent of civilisation has been disastrous for humanity.

The fundamental thrust of his argument is that civilisation and agriculture are conceptual human constructs that did not spring Minerva-like from the human consciousness but from antecedents which were (and are) the real culprits in the move to a “civilised” mode of existence. My general reading, and the reading I have done for this debate in particular, lead me to agree entirely with this hypothesis.

The nature of human consciousness and thought is indubitably both complex and much-debated, but as far as I am aware there is general agreement that it evolved, initially at least as a result of the same sorts of evolutionary pressures that led to speciation of the subtribehominina from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees about 7 million years ago. Subsequent developments (a term used without any suggestion of either determinism or qualitative improvement), including the speciation of the genus homo from hominina about 2.5 million years ago, and of the only survivor of that genus, the species homo sapiens, about 200,000 years ago, were driven by a mutually reinforcing cycle of environmental pressures and internal dynamics that saw our ancestors descend from the trees, become bipedal and more omnivorous, lose their body hair and begin to increase their brain sizes before acquiring more distinctively human characteristics such as tool-making capacity, speech, art and religion, finally becoming fully sedentary and settling in large, hierarchical communities sustained by domesticated plants and animals.

The role of consciousness and thought in this progression (and again, I use this term with no qualitative implication) is obviously the crucial one that drove it. There came a point at which our distant ancestors became conscious of the natural world as an entity distinct from themselves, a change that entailed self-consciousness. From this change sprang the capacity for symbolic thought and representation to which achwienichtig refers:

I disagree only in degree: symbolic thought is but part of the wider phenomenon of consciousness and self-consciousness. But achwienichtig is basically right.

He refers to a “takeoff point” in human prehistory that has also struck me in the course of my reading for this whole debate. In my case, I have come across two quite disparate sources that ascribe a fairly precise date (well, as precise as one can expect from prehistory) to this takeoff: 30,000 BCE. Give or take a few thousand years, it was around this time that humans became….well, fully human. I have already cited the first source in my opening statement: Caspari and Lee’s paper Old age becomes common late in human evolution, in which the authors point out that, for the first time in the history of our genus, we lived long enough to know our grandparents. Assuming their treatment of the evidence to be sound, this jump in longevity,for whatever reason it occurred, led to a quantum leap in the amount of information transmitted through the generations, with obvious implications for both individual potentialities and social structures. In my second essay I also referred to the other source: Steven Mithen’s The prehistory of the mind. Mithen makes a case that before 30,000 BCE the early human mind had a “general” intelligence to which specialised modules for social, linguistic, natural history and technical intelligence were appended. These were discrete – until about 30,000 BCE, when they became linked, and in Virginia Woolf’s profoundly unsettling statement, “human nature changed”.

Now, you can take that theory or leave it, but the fact is that around that time something happened. Mithen points to the explosion of visual art, both two- and three-dimensional, including the first appearance of personal adornment items; to the related manifestation of a religious sensibility; and to the sudden increase in tool-making sophistication and hunting proficiency: people now began practising the much more demanding exercise of tracking individual animals rather than picking them out of herds.

The difference between 50,000 BCE and 20,000 BCE might seem like nothing compared to that separating 20,000 BCE and today. Not content with raping to death the planet that we depend on for our very survival, we are creating a rubbish dump in the space surrounding us. Doubtless our late Ice Age ancestors could not have conceived such a state of affairs. But what we are talking about here is potentiality. Chimpanzees in their current state of development are not capable of creating such a situation. Nor would Australopithecus afarensis, homo habilis or even late Pleistocene, anatomically modern, humans have been. But those distant ancestors had begun a train of development that, as it happened, led to a species capable of carrying out geocide: homo sapiens. Given different environmental demands, things could have turned out otherwise. But they didn’t, so we developed our bigger and more complex brains and became anatomically modern humans. However, our brains have not become complex enough to enable us as a species to envision the effect of our actions on the distant, or even the near, future. So we remain foragers in suits, living for today, concerned not nearly enough with tomorrow.

In saying this, I think I largely concur with the picture achwienichtig paints of the course of human evolution since 30,000 BCE. He also paints the picture of antecedents – things that made agriculture and civilisation possible, and with it their destructive effects. However, before I continue, I must pick him up on one of the rebuttals in his last submission.

He attempts to mitigate the effect of civilisation’s disastrous effect on its environment by pointing to our ancestors’ purported destruction of the megafauna. As he himself admits, the jury is out on that one. But even if they did – so what? Isn’t that what every species does if it can? The grey squirrel in the UK is in danger of wiping out the red; North American sabre-toothed cats caused the extinction of their South American ecological equivalents, the terror birds such as Gastornis, when those two continents collided around four million years ago. Modern pre-industrial, even pre-civilised, humans can have a similar effect. The native Maoris of my homeland, New Zealand, gorged themselves on moa, the biggest bird that ever lived, until they killed the last one. The natives of Easter Island destroyed their environment completely, and all but destroyed themselves in the process. But my opponent fails to recognise the fundamental difference between this activity on the one hand and post-civilisational – and especially, but by no means exclusively, post-industrial – environmental degradation on the other.

It’s simply a matter of scale. The picture achwienichtig paints is one of the gradual accrual of the mental, conceptual tools of environmental destruction and all the other ills that civilisation has inflicted upon us. Yes, sedentary northwestern Indians practised slavery. Yes, our ancestors slaughtered infants at Schletz and Talhelm. But none of them did so with planetary effect. The survivors of whatever self-inflicted blows our ancestors landed on each other or on their environment could move on. We can’t; and our ancestors found it much harder to do so once they’d tied themselves to the land with agriculture and civilisation. Now, people’s “lands” could be invaded and they could be slaughtered and enslaved wholesale and deported, as the Assyrians and then Nebuchadnezzar did to the Jews and Stalin did to the Volga Germans. Whole peoples could be annihilated, as the Nazis tried to do to the Jews. When a civilisation exhausted its environment, it collapsed, bringing whole societies to their knees. Civilisation entrenches vast, obscene social and economic inequalities within societies and between them.

All of these were beginning to become apparent as the ice melted after 20,000 BCE. But these trends were only piecemeal. Yes, sedentary northwestern Indians practised slavery. But their Natufian counterparts, as far as we can tell, did not. Yes, our ancestors slaughtered infants at Schletz and Talhelm. But their predecessors a few generations earlier did not. We have the capacity for evil, and in some cases before 8,000 BCE that capacity was realised. But it was only in some cases, and it was only local. The capacity for such behaviour to become endemic and large-scale did not exist before 8,000 BCE. Nothing our ancestors did before that date could even remotely be classed as “disastrous for humanity”.

The scale for such an outcome to be realised is only made possible by agriculture and civilisation. Everything other precursor is only that: a precursor, a creator of potentiality. This is where I believe my opponent has confused potential with actuality. I have the potential to be a murderer. I may only have a needle at present, with which I cause as much damage as I can, however relatively minor it might be. But knowing that, would you give me a knife? Civilisation is that knife writ large, with this difference: because of our evolutionary heritage, we have no choice in using it for ill once we have it. Civilisation is the catalyst that empowers us to realise all our worst latent tendencies – and until agriculture and civilisation came along, these were just tendencies. We didn’t have the capacity to realise them, even on a regional, let alone a global, scale.

This is the plot of the story we’ve been enacting for the last six million years. We got clever – too clever, and yet not clever enough. As a species, we’ve realised that we’re no longer part of our environment, but rather that we can control it. We used our cleverness to create the bonanza of civilisation, which enabled us to do the same as all our fellow living species, which is to satisfy our desires – but only we can become uniformly successful at it. We’re not in danger from our environment any more. Whatever we want, we can have. Our wants are now as pressing to us as our needs, and we can fulfil both with equal ease. But we’re just as incapable of thinking about the effects of those actions as a species of predator that lands on an island full of helpless birds and kills them all, only to die out through starvation. I think that disjunction between capability and foresight is what will doom us as a species; you might argue to the contrary, but I suspect the argument would be a close one, with the balance of probability favouring me. If we do somehow squeak through in the next couple of hundred years – will the “benefits” of civilisation have been worth it even then, after such a close shave?

A quick rejoinder to achwienichtig’s point about depression: again, I would stress the global perspective. We in the “civilised” world, freed as we are from the necessity of personally finding our next meal, are blessed with the chance to deal with our personal problems without affecting our chances of survival. But what of the majority of the world, whose inhabitants are not in such a fortunate position? What of those millions affected by a depression that prevents them doing what they must to survive until tomorrow? What of their dependents, who must likewise stop subsisting in order to care for the patient?

This is the crux of the position I've adopted in my previous two posts: none of the benefits of civilisation he proposes have percolated to anything like half of the world's population at any time in its history, including the present. They are left with the misery. Is that worth it? No, for humanity as a whole (not just we, the fortunate minority) civilisation has indeed been disastrous.

Achwienichtig

In the last round, in discussing the connection between violence and agriculture, Anselm admitted that we cannot claim the invention of agriculture was what spurred on violence and war. Rather, he settled for the position that war is part of a constellation of factors in the development of agriculture. “[W]arfare may not have happened as a direct consequence of agriculture, but it certainly happened as part of a constellation of factors closely related to it, both conceptually and chronologically.”

I believe this manner of thinking is correct, however, I go even father in asserting that this constellation of factors is, in fact, incredibly large, accounting for the entire history of mankind. I have spent my first two statements concentrating on the negative aspects of history, and demonstrating that no causal relationship can be established for certain, but rather that all these negatives are part and parcel of a progressive constellation of human history.

Anselm’s method has been to connect agriculture with this constellation of negative factors, creating the impression that agriculture too must be negative: a sort of guilt by association. However, it is my assertion that this constellation contains many positive attributes, enough to call into question the thought that the constellation itself is negative. Among this constellation, I see factors like the proliferation of art, the invention of writing, the expansion of morals and ethics, etc.

Let me take art as an example. I agree with Anselm that great art existed amid the hunter-gathers. I mentioned Lascaux as an example of this. However, as I touched upon in my last statement, art conceals its own dangers. We need only look to the personal lives of artists to see this. It is not without reason artists are typically stereotyped as suffering from personality disorders. The connection between art and psychosis was originally observed by Freud, and it is easy enough to find case studies of artists with mental illnesses. Da Vince was antisocial and obsessed with the grotesque; Michelangelo is suspected of having had Asperger’s; Van Gogh was admitted to an asylum (prior to killing himself); Gauguin was syphilitic and depressed; Tolstoy was suicidal most of his life and addicted to prostitutes; Jackson Pollack was severely depressed and committed suicide; Dostoevsky was a gambling addict; Franz Liszt was a sex addict; Nietzsche went insane; Beethoven was bipolar; Monet was clinically depressed; Picasso was schizophrenic; Hemmingway committed suicide; Poe was depressive and (reportedly) wrote some of his poetry while high on drugs; etc.

The sheer number of such cases of mentally ill artists deserves consideration as something more than merely a coincidence. Indeed, there are many people who have superhuman mathematic or artistic abilities who are otherwise incapacitated by mental illness. Such people are called savants (or, more properly but less politically correct, idiot savants). Take, as an example, Derek Paravicini. He was born blind, with a severe developmental disorder and signs of autism, yet he can remember every single piece of music he’s ever heard and play it back after one hearing. Or take Alonzo Clemons, who is developmentally disabled, but yet is an expert sculptor. My point is this: Anselm wants to blame the majority of mental diseases on civilization, but he wants us to view art as a pre-civilized development. However, mental disease and art show too strong of a correlation to accept this prima facie.

I have already touched on the symbolism involved in art in my last statement. Even though the foundations of art are pure, art soon begins to establish itself as a metaphysical justification for domination. Plato was the first to warn of this perversion of art. He said in his Republic that stories of the gods needed to be censored, lest humans should do evil by imitating them. Marx likewise saw in art nothing but a justification for the proliferation of economic status quo. I do not want to go as far as either Plato or Marx, but I do want to point out that art, as a symbol laden medium, can become a danger.

This explains why the Greeks were so focused on rhetoric, that is, the art of speaking persuasively. They were well aware of what we would call propaganda. Propaganda is nothing more than obscuring the truth with misleading symbols, symbols which become important in themselves but do not, in fact, symbolize the truth.

In any case, I have already talked about all this in my last statement. The point I want to drive home right now is, I do not think we can have art without it also being used as deception. On the other hand, I think that is a risk worth taking in order to have art. Art does indeed serve to fulfill the upper levels of the Maslowian hierarchy. I do not think Anselm would deny this. However, I see the side effects, as it were, of this fulfillment. As to whether those side effects are worth it, I shall simply limit myself to saying that I think they are. Perhaps future conversation will elicit reasons out of me for this.

Let me now take up the point of writing. The most accepted theory on the origin of writing is that it began as a way of keeping records for the purpose of trading and borrowing. In other words, it began as a tool for private property. Now this is significant, for writing reveals itself as a means for the exploitation of private property, and thus injustice. Nevertheless, writing has also been one of the major contributions in the advancement of liberation.

In terms of statistics, low literacy is correlated with higher crime rates. Also, female literacy has been correlated with lower birthrates and lower infant mortality rates. Both these correlations indicate signs of a more stable population.

In terms of power struggles, historically, literacy is one of those privileges that is actively denied to the suppressed classes, whether they be slaves or women or simply lower class citizens. Literacy on the one hand has helped spread ideology in propaganda by being used as a power medium for expressing opposition to oppression. Take Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” as an example of this. On the other hand, by depriving the oppressed of the ability to read, powerful ideologues are better able to entrap the masses in a their ideologies.

Literacy has thus served as an institution for the powerful, for the continuation of their control. It was also served as a tool for the overthrow of suppression. The effects of writing are bifurcated, and I believe this bifurcation is indicative of historical development in general. We have already seen the same in art. The historical development of this bifurcation is a bit too much to track right now.

Consider this bifurcation on the level of fossil evidence. It is true that people who lived prior to agriculture tended to be healthier. We know this because the fossil records show much more stress on the bone structures of the first agriculturalists. However, there is a flip side to the fossil evidence, for it indicates that those first agriculturalists were able to survive chronic stress in a way that is not indicated in the pre-agricultural examples.* In other words, although the first agriculturalists were not as fit as hunter-gatherers, the life they developed specifically allowed them to survive in a less fit state, a state which they likely would have died in had they lived in a hunter-gatherer environment.

This newfound ability to survive in a less fit states allowed for greater advancements in ethical codes. The weak could now be protected as well as the strong. No longer would humans have to practice infanticide (one method of population control Diamond mentioned in a quote above) in order to help the tribe survive. No longer would the sick have to be left behind because they could not keep up.

The thread of history is a web. One development frequently has positive and negative effects working against each other. Creativity and insanity are closely aligned. Tyranny and freedom use the same means. People survive as a whole because they develop a lifestyle to support the weak as they become weak developing the lifestyle.

However, I believe it is a mistake to call this progress negative or merely neutral. At every step of the way, there is the foundation for something quite new, a fulfillment of some deep human desire. Allow me to talk about Moslowian self-actualization, the higher lever needs Anselm brought up in his last statement. Many of Anselm’s objections to civilization are that it does not even allow people access to the basic maintenance needs let alone actualizing needs. How can we be worried about these intellectual abstractions when people are starving?

This is a very good question, but I believe it totally overlooks the very people Anselm is praising, namely, the hunter-gatherers. If Anselm is right, these people had abundance and free time. In other words, their maintenance needs were met. What, pray tell, did they do with their free time? They partook in higher lever needs for self-actualization, of course. They painted on cave walls. They made arts and crafts. They made up stories. And they invented agriculture!

Allow me, for a second, to tell a tale. I have no idea if it’s true, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be. One theory of how agriculture started is based on population pressure. As populations grew, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t able to support everybody, and so they needed to develop ways of making their own food rather than simply gathering it. On top of that, people started feeling guilty about killing their own children and leaving grandma and grandpa out in the cold to die when they couldn’t keep up with the tribe. They wanted more people to live.

Given the rich abundance of free time they had, some hunter-gatherers began looking into how they could harvest more food. Some of them did this because they felt morally obliged to support more people. Others did it because they didn’t want to practice infanticide anymore. Others simply enjoyed filling up their free time with this new activity. Still, others felt a great satisfaction in figuring out how plants worked and how they grew. Others got a great satisfaction out of training animals how to behave. What I am suggesting is simply this: agriculture came about because the hunter-gatherers themselves developed it to fulfill their own higher lever needs.

If Anselm is right in supposing these people had all their maintenance needs met, then it stands to reason they were not pressured into developing agriculture. If they did not have all their maintenance needs met, then he must stop pretending they had such great lives. Therefore, let us suppose the former. Now, does Anselm wish to deny that these people were capable of having such higher needs? That is certainly not the picture he has painted thus far. Was no man back then capable of using his free time to study the plants and master the animals? What if the entirety of out agricultural system was founded in the free time of the hunter-gatherer? I see no prima facie reason why this couldn’t be the case, and if it is the case, then to deny the value of agriculture is to insult the ingenuity of the hunter-gatherer whom Anselm praises.

But this is all only a tale. Suppose Anselm holds that it was pressure that made those hunter-gathers develop agriculture. But what sort of pressure could this be? If it was overpopulation , then this proves that the problem of overpopulation is not caused by agriculture and civilization. Was is environmental conditions? Then environmental issues must have plagued them as much as us. The fact of the matter is, we don’t really know how agriculture came about. Most likely, it was a combination of pressure and leisure. It seems to me, however, that one does not just accidently plant a garden. These hunter-gatherers were scientists. At some point, they observed plants growing where seeds had fallen, and they used this knowledge and conducted an experiment in planting.

Nor does one accidently domesticate an animal. Over time, humans showed a great patience in influencing natural selection itself by sorting out the tame animals from the wild. It seems to me that this is but one more thing they would have done in their free time.

I am suggestion that civilization arose because that is where the higher lever needs of mankind lead to. In fact, civilization itself might be nothing more than the playing field of higher level needs. If this is so, than to restrict hunter-gatherers to their lifestyle is to deny them the one thing that made their free time valuable.

That is where I stand. I see development itself bifurcated into positive and negative attributes, but the whole of development is nothing more than the self-actualization of mankind. In other words, I am a Hegelian.

Of course, this process goes on in a series of positive and negative events. Of course, the negatives seem to be getting worse. However, that is part of the challenge of self-actualization, coming forward to meet the challenge wherever it surfaces. Of course we need to address issues of overpopulation, environmental degradation, and so on, but as we face these issues, we learn a little bit more about ourselves, about our creative powers and ingenuity, about our values and ethics. In this way, we are always moving in a positive direction.

[HR][/HR]

*Henry Harpending suggested stress markings were an indication of better health, since it meant people were able to withstand illnesses.

I apologize for my lack of references. I worked with little time and mostly from memory. I can provide any references you might ask for later.