Quantity over Quality

Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We F—D It All Up

Around 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, humans started doing things very differently. They had what you might describe as “a change of lifestyle,” and in this case it meant a lot more than cutting down on carbs and joining a gym. Rather than the traditional approach to obtaining food—namely, going to look for it—they hit upon the neat trick of bringing the food to them. They started planting crops.

The rise of agriculture wouldn’t just make it easier to grab some lunch; it would completely upturn society and profoundly change the natural world around us. Before agriculture, the standard thing for human groups was to move around with the seasons, following where the food was. Once you’ve got a load of rice or wheat growing, though, you really need to stick around to look after it. And so you get permanent settlements, villages and, sometime after that, towns. And, of course, all the stuff that goes with that.

Agriculture was such an obviously great idea that it sprang up independently in loads of different places, all within a few thousand years of each other on several different continents—in Mesopotamia, India, China, Central America and South America at the very least. Except that there’s a school of thought that says agriculture wasn’t actually our greatest leap forward. In fact, it may have been a dreadful, dreadful mistake.

For starters, the origin of agriculture was also the origin of the fun concept of “wealth inequality,” as elites began to emerge who had way more stuff than everybody else and started bossing everybody else around. It may also have been the origin of war as we know it, because once you have a village, you also have the danger of raids on it by the next village. Agriculture brings new diseases into contact with humans, while living together in ever larger settlements creates the conditions for epidemics. There’s also evidence that suggests people in nonagricultural societies ate more, worked less and may well have been healthier.

Basically (this idea goes), an awful lot of what sucks about modern life was because thousands of years ago somebody stuck some seeds in the ground. Agriculture hung around not because it made everybody’s lives better, but because it gave societies that did it a Darwinian leg up over the ones that didn’t: they could have more children faster (agriculture can feed more people, and once you’re no longer moving around all the time, you don’t have to wait for your kid to be able to walk before having another), and they could claim more and more land, eventually chasing all the nonfarmers off. As the author Jared Diamond, a proponent of the “agriculture was a horrible mistake” theory, put it in a 1987 article in Discover magazine: “Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare and tyranny.” In short, we went for quantity over quality.

—

War, empires, all results of agriculture. I don’t think it could be stopped though; the idea is emergent, you give enough time ppl will start figuring it out. The rest will be history. Preferring quantity is not too bad in itself (increases chances of survival), we just need to come to terms with what happened, the culture that was created afterwards (and destroy it).