From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 02 2002 - 19:56:25 MST
Asking whether agriculture was "worth it," even if only from a
consequentialist perspective, is too speculative a question to begin
to answer. Agriculture was as necessary "way back when" as it is now.
For example, it's quite evident (and Diamond agrees) that peoples who
develop agriculture can pretty much kick any hunter-gatherer society's
collective ass when it comes to direct conflict.
There's more to this fact than the mere point that agricultural
societies can sustain higher birth rates than hunter-gatherer
societies. There's also the diseases; Diamond points these out, but
he neglects to point out their advantages in war.
When agricultural Europeans came to the Americas, they brought their
diseases with them. Having faced years of plague, their constitutions
were able to handle anything they encountered in the New World; native
Americans died of stuff that would never kill a European. The reverse
effect, Europeans dying of native American pathogens, is historically
negligible.
Then, of course, there's the specialization of labor. Diamond sees
this as essentially a bad move, but once he concedes that agriculture
made modern specialization (as well as, he concludes, the class
system) possible, it's hard to imagine how he'd refute the
"progressive" argument that the B-minor Mass was thanks to
agriculture. At any rate, _Guns, Germs and Steel_ used this argument
convincingly to suggest that this was the reason the Europeans were
the ones sailing to America on complicated sea-faring vessels, rather
than the other way around.
At any rate, I think that the naive argument that agriculture has made
us better off in *every* way is easily refutable: some pretty bad
things happened as a result of agriculture. But I don't think Diamond
makes his case that agriculture was, by and large, a bad idea.
Agriculture is a political necessity; not just because we're now
"locked in" after the fact, but because agricultural societies are at
an extreme political advantage over hunter-gatherer societies. Given
that, you find yourself asking highly impractical questions like:
"Would it be better if agriculture DIDN'T provide a political
advantage?"
I think we've got to conclude that agriculture was as necessary then
as it is now, and that we've got to find some better way to solve our
political, economic, and epidemiological problems than wishing that
nobody had tried to get an advantage or imagining what the world would
be like if agriculture provided no advantage.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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