“an iron law of history”
From 12500 BC to 9500 BC, humans (homo sapiens) began to cultivate agriculture as the spearhead of their survival. The Nathuf people are hunter-gatherers who make a living by consuming dozens of wild species, but they live in permanent and permanent villages, devoting much time to the intensive collection and processing of wild grains. They built houses and barns made of stone. They store grain for use in times of shortage. They invented new tools such as stone sickles for harvesting wild wheat, and mortar and pestle for grinding it.
In the years after 9500 BC, the descendants of the Nathuf people continued to collect and cultivate grain, but they also began to cultivate the plant in an increasingly modern way. When gathering wild grain, they set aside a portion of the harvest to scatter in the fields for the following season. They found that they could achieve much better results by planting the grains in the soil, rather than simply scattering them on the surface. So they started hoeing and plowing. Gradually they also began to weed the fields, protect the fields from parasites, and irrigate and fertilize the fields. As more and more efforts are devoted to grain cultivation, there is less and less time to gather and hunt wild species. The hunter-gatherers then turned to a farmers.
There is no single step that separating female wild wheat gatherers from a female farmer that domesticated wheat, so it is difficult to say exactly when the decisive transition to agriculture will take place. However, in 8500 BC, the Middle East abounded in permanent villages such as Jericho, where the inhabitants spent most of their time cultivating a handful of domesticated species.
With the move to permanent villages and an increase in food reserves, the human population began to expand. After leaving the nomadic lifestyle, women can give birth to children every year. Babies are weaned at a younger age -they can be fed porridge and boiled grains. Additional hands are desperately needed in the fields. However, those extra mouths quickly depleted the surplus food, leaving more fields to be cultivated. As humans began to inhabit settlements that became hotbeds of disease, and as each child competed for porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality increased. In most agricultural societies, at least one in three children dies before the age of twenty. Still the birth rate outperforms the death rate; humans continue to have children in larger numbers.
However, slowly the “wheat offer” is becoming more and more burdensome. Children died in groups and adults could only eat bread after hard work. The life of the average person in Jericho 8500 BC was heavier than the life of the average person of Jericho in 9500 BC or 13000 BC. But no one realized what really happened. Each generation continues to live like the previous generation, only making small improvements in doing things. Paradoxically, a series of “improvements”, each intended to make life easier, only tightened the noose around the peasants’ necks.
Why are humans wrong in making such fateful calculations? The reason is similar to that of sharing human miscalculations throughout history. Humans are incapable of weighing the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decide to do a little extra work -say plowing a field instead of just scattering seeds on the ground- people think “Yes, we’ll keep working hard. But the harvest will be huge! We don’t have to worry about the bad years anymore- famine year. Our children will not sleep in hungry.” Quite a reasonable word. If we work harder, our lives will be better. That’s the plan.
The first part of the plan went smoothly. Humans do work harder. But they did not realize that the number of children would increase, which would mean the extra grain would have to be shared among more children. The early farmers also did not foresee that feeding children more porridge and reducing breast milk would weaken the child’s immune system, and that permanent settlements would become hotbeds of infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single food source, they were actually making themselves more vulnerable to the dangers of drought. Nor did the peasants expect that during years of good harvests, their overcrowded barns would attract thieves and enemies, forcing them to start building walls and taking turns guarding.
So, why don’t humans just abandon agriculture when the plan turns into a disaster? Partly because it takes generations for small changes to build up and transform society, and ultimately no one remembers they ever lived differently. And partly because population growth means there is no turning back for humanity. If plowing the land could increase the population of a village from one hundred to one hundred and ten, which ten people had to volunteer to suffer hunger so that the others could return to the good old days? The answer is that we can’t go back. The trap has been tucked shut.
The pursuit of an easier life causes more trouble, and not for the last time. It’s happening to us now too. How many young college graduates take demanding jobs in top companies, vowing that they will work hard to earn the money that will enable them to retire and pursue their true interests by the time they are thirty-five? By the time they reach that age, they find themselves with huge mortgage debts, children to send to school, a suburban house that requires every family to have at least two cars, and a feeling that life isn’t worth living without delicious wine and expensive holidays abroad. What should they do then? Go back to digging the tubers? No, they redoubled their efforts and continued to indulge themselves.
One of the few iron laws of history is that luxury tends to become a necessity and breeds new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they accept it as a matter of course and begin to multiply it. Eventually they reached a point where they couldn’t live without that luxury. Let us take a familiar example from our own time. Over the last few decades, we’ve created countless time-saving tools meant to make life more relaxing — washers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, telephones, cell phones, computers, e-mail. It used to take a lot of time to write letters, write addresses and postage stamps on envelopes, and take them to the post box. It can take days or weeks, maybe even months to get an answer. Now I’m rushing to write an e-mail, send it to someone half the world away, and (if the person I’m writing to is active on the internet) receive a reply a minute later. I no longer bother and waste time, but is my life becoming more relaxed? Sadly, it’s not.
In the past, in the age of ordinary letters, people usually wrote letters only when there was something important to say. Instead of writing down the first thing that comes to mind, they carefully consider what they want to say and how to say it. They expect to receive an equally well considered answer. Most people write and receive no more than a few letters each month and rarely feel compelled to reply immediately. Now I receive dozens of e-mails every day, all from people expecting a quick reply. We think we save time; but instead we continue to accelerate the conveyor belt of life to ten times its initial rate and make our days filled with more anxiety and restlessness.
Every now and then the remaining Luddites (anti-new technology) refuse to open e-mail accounts, just as thousands of years ago some human herds refused to join in on farming and thus escaped the trap of luxury. But the Agricultural Revolution did not require all the herds in a given area to join. The revolution only needs one. Once that one herd settled down and started working the land, whether it was in the Middle East or Central America, agriculture could no longer be resisted. Because agriculture created conditions that favored population growth, farmers were usually able to outperform hunter-gatherers purely on numbers. The hunter-gatherers could run, leaving their hunting fields for fields and pastures, or starting to join the plow. Whichever one is chosen, the old life is over.
The story of the trappings of luxury carries an important lesson. Humans’ quest for an easier life (modernity) unleashes the forces of change that are reshuffling the world in ways no one could have imagined or expected. No one planned the Agricultural Revolution or sought to create human dependence on grain cultivation. A series of trivial decisions had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient hunter-gatherers to spend their days carrying buckets of water under the scorching sun.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. Random House, 2014
