And then, about 12,000 years ago we began planting crops. Hello, modernity. It has been hailed as a great step forward ever since.
Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788) disagreed. He is just one of many thinkers who have experimented with the “state of nature.” That is, what would we have if humans were left to their own devices: no government, no religion, no economy, no laws, nothing but rabbits and figs. Rousseau concluded that humanity was much better off under such circumstances. This is not to suggest that the state of nature actually happened. But what would one get in such a scenario? (You need to know whom you're organizing before you can organize them, this is the job of a political philosopher.) Anthropologists and archaeologists agree that something like this did exist. Humans as foragers.
As the record shows, pre-historic humans were highly cooperative. This is how we became us. The cave paintings in Lascaux, France, were painted by us. These were impressive people. They likely did not tear each other limb from limb. Sure, fights broke out, but it wasn’t just wanton savagery. Humans became what we are because of cooperation. We are a social species. Chimpanzees fight, but it’s not chaos in the jungle. See Oxford historian Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling Sapiens, Rutger Bregman’s Humankind, and primatologist Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist. Oh, and I can recommend another real good book on the subject. [Ahem]
Fast forward to the twenty-first century, Harari in Sapiens makes a point—that we were better off as foragers—that Rousseau would have been on board with. Harms, for what it’s worth, is also on board.
Modernity has spelled suffering for untold millions of people. The Industrial Revolution? The Atlantic slave trade? World War II? Famine, poverty? It’s been a 12,000-year disaster. You might like your laptop and your central heating, but think about the numbers. And it shouldn’t take you very long. How many died in WWII? Fifty million people in five years? How many foragers died from tigers? Twelve? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? We were happier, healthier, and stronger prior to the catastrophe that was the Agricultural Revolution. We ate a far more varied diet. We were much healthier.
Read Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. Read Marx. The factory system was torture. For millions upon millions.
So, yes, I’m typing this blog post on my very nice iMac, next to my space heater. And I like them just fine. But that doesn’t justify millennia of pain. However, as Rousseau is quick to point out, there is no going back. We need to move forward.
