Wheat didn’t make the farmer’s life easier. It made more farmers.
The usual story of farming is a story of progress. Humans stopped wandering, started growing their own food, and life got better. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens tells it the other way round. The Agricultural Revolution, he argues, was not a great leap forward. It was the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Foragers worked less, ate a better diet and suffered less disease than the farmers who replaced them.
If that is true, two questions follow. Why did anyone choose farming, and why didn’t they go back once they saw what it cost?
How the trap closed
Nobody chose it all at once. Each step, planting a few seeds, building a granary, irrigating a field, made life slightly easier in the short term. But a farmed field produces more calories per acre than foraging, and more calories meant more babies, which meant more mouths, which meant that within a few generations there was no going back. The population now depended on the surplus, and the surplus depended on the labor. The trap was locally optimal at every step and worse in total.
The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. Harari draws one of history’s few iron laws from it: luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. A granary is a luxury until there are enough people that a bad harvest without one means famine. Then it is a necessity, and it needs guarding. The forager could move when threatened. The farmer tended to stay put and fight to the bitter end.
Nor did the diligent peasants achieve the future security they craved. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up to live off the surplus and leave the peasants with bare subsistence.
The priest and the story
That raises a puzzle. Why would millions of peasants keep handing over their grain? Soldiers can force it, but soldiers are expensive and have to be fed from the same surplus. Harari’s answer is that the cheaper tool was belief: A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers — far more cheaply and effectively.
The priest points to the book’s larger claim. Could you convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven? You could not. Humans, though, can weave common myths and believe them together, and that is what makes large-scale cooperation possible: millions of strangers can work together because they believe the same stories about gods, nations, corporations and money.
Calling these things fictions sounds like a debunking, but it isn’t one. Money works not because gold has inherent value but because everyone believes everyone else believes it does. Religion asks us to believe in something; money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. That is why the stories that organize civilization are neither true nor false — they are functional or dysfunctional.
The trap is still running
The iron law didn’t stop with grain. Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. People eat too much and then buy diet products, contributing to economic growth twice over.
Harari compresses an enormous amount of history, and specialists still argue over just how well foragers lived. The trap doesn’t depend on foragers having lived in paradise, though. It only needs each step to look like an improvement to the people taking it, while the total leaves their descendants with more obligations and no way back.
That is what makes Harari’s closing worry sharp. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires, the real question is not “What do we want to become?” but “What do we want to want?” The farmers didn’t choose their trap; they only chose the next easier year. We are wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
References:
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind