Is agriculture flawed?

Question

Considering the fact that before agriculture we once lived at peace with the world - tribes working together for the survival of the community and consuming what the land gave them.

After the Neolithic Revolution we see that human social structures change. There is seperation of powers and seperation of people (classism). We also see states begin to organize for the purpose of defense and aggression. Over-population starts to become a problem due to food surpluses. Poor sanitation and animal domestication leads to diseases in society. War becomes a large part of life and remains so. Curroption of power and subsequent revolutions become apart of human behavior. Slavery gives land owners free labor and eventually becomes a international trade... I can go on forever.

I mean, considering that most of these things never existed without agriculture, do you think that agriculture is flawed?

Answer 1

I don't perceive agriculture as any more 'flawed' than having zillions of Someone Elses produce electric power I just plug into & pay for, or someone else build my shoes or a new truck and all its parts, or all that went into my computer and the internet so I can make this post here.

Answer 2

Oh please, that's leftist propaganda. Even chimps and gorillas have

dominance hierarchies and inter-clan 'wars', as do modern

hunter-gatherer people. Even the native american hunter-gatherers

slaughtered white people, and eachother, before white people started

slaughtering them.

Heh heh, a negative rating. Exposure hurts, doesn't it?

Answer 3

I don't think it's so much agriculture as it is the change in lifestyle afforded by not hunting & gathering.  If you've ever hunted, it takes all day (if your lucky, only 1 day) to find & kill & then bring your prey back to dress/cook/eat.  Wild plant harvest may be easier to find, but are seasonal & unpredictable.  Considering that most people like to eat every day & you may be feeding a family to feed, you really don't have time for anything else but getting food.  It wasn't so much people were at peace with the world, it was that they didn't have time to do anything else but try to survive.  With the development of agriculture,  you could plant some veggies & harvest them in your own backyard or raise livestock so you wouldn't have to roam miles to find them.  Given a reliable source of food, people had time on their hands to do other things, which allowed society to grow.  Without the constant hunt for food, more people could be supported on less land (1 acre for crops produced more food than ranging over 20 acres looking for wild veggies) & "tribes" were able to come together for mutual benefit.  By joining together, they could share skills & protect their resources from others.  Just as in the "tribe" situation, some groups would have more food, better land, etc... than others & war would ensue.  The difference in who decided the war was a matter of numbers-if there were 5 people in your tribe, it would be easy to say "Let's go attack them".  When you've got 5,000 people in a village, you can't get them all together & wait for them to agree while the enemy is approaching, so someone must take charge & make decisions for the group-simple as that.

Classism occurs anytime you have "x" amount of any given organism.  If a tribe was large enough, it would have undoubtedly had a chief or lead hunter, those who could hunt would be considered more valuable to the tribe than those who couldn't (elderly/injured/etc...) & this would have caused them to be treated differently or to receive more/less food, respect, etc...  It's also important to remember that the people who rose to the top did so by doing what the hunter-gather's were trying to do-gain more resources to ensure their childrens' future.  While hunter-gather's expanded their hunting range, aristocrats acquired more land-same principle.  Slavery would have existed within the tribes as except for the fact that this would have been another mouth to feed-so instead of enslaving opposing tribes, they would just kill them.  Now I'm not supporting slavery, but I'm gonna bet that it's better than being killed & knowing your family will starve b/c you were the primary hunter.

Over-population only became a problem due to the fact that people had a constant source of food & therefore mortality was reduced.  Over-population is a relative term, as 10 people on 10 acres would have been over-populated for the hunter-gather's as their hunting ranges would have overlapped while 10 acres of agriculture can easily support 10 people.  Given enough time, the hunter-gather's would have probably faced the same problem, but their concept of over-population would have been a much lower number.

Disease also occurred in the hunter-gather setting.  Considering that the easiest prey to catch was the sick/injured animals, it is believable that at the very least, hunter-gather's suffered from parasites from eating these animals.  However, having to constantly ward off starvation, they probably didn't stay alive long enough for this to kill them.  Being largely isolated from other people keep the disease from spreading while the larger communities had more people to be infected & therefore had a larger number of deaths.  Similar death tolls were probably seen in the hunter-gather's after a harsh winter, only the deaths were more spread out.  Any living environment is constantly challenging your immune system on some level & several people mixing with several other species in a small concentrated area forced the systems to react & evolve & survive.

I think your forgetting the things that agriculture did provide-the time to develop art, music, literature, science, democracy, & many other things that make our world beautiful.  Would you rather read Shakespeare, listen to Mozart, study Einstein's theories or crouch in a ditch for several hours in the cold & rain with your stomach growling waiting for some hapless deer to wander by?

Answer 4

errrr.... have you heard tribes fighting. probably not. agriculture is not flaw, you have been brain washed into believing that back in the days it was better junk. anyway back in the days there was no tiolet paper, give than up for a while and wipe your butt on your hand and youll find out a big difference. clean water is another thing. different foods.

Answer 5

With agriculture, and the subsequent increases in both sedentism and cereal/grain consumption, humans became subject to a host of deliterious conditions. Tooth decay, for one, became more prevalent. We see that clearly in the archaeological record. There is no doubt that agriculture created many new problems. Some argue that it was a bad idea entirely, or that it caused more problems than it solved. There is evidence that hunter gatherers lead generally healthier lives and had more free time. We don't have a lot of evidence of large-scale warfare until after the advent of agriculture. Sure, there's evidence of violence, but not so much of organized fighting and killing. There's also the issue of more complex civilizations developing rigid stratification, which isn't always positive for all the people all the time.

But one could also argue that it had enough to benefits to justify its existence. Why did people keep doing it if it was so bad? Agriculture usually meant more security in the food supply, and it eventually meant a much larger food supply, which meant much larger populations. We do not generally see big cities and civilizations in the record until after agriculture, or at least some form of cultivation, is developed. We might just owe our complex societies today in large part to agriculture.

I'm not an expert on agriculture or its origins, so I won't comment more deeply on the matter. I will say that, good or bad, agriculture was possibly so successful because it gave people something they wanted, something they were willing to work very hard to get.

Aaron W: I think you're severely misrepresenting the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer. Not that it was easy, but it almost certainly wasn't a short, disease-ridden existence on the brink of starvation. Modern HGs don't do all that badly for themselves, and archaeology has revealed many different tactics that HGs used to make life easier, like bison jumps. Not to mention that large fauna like deer, which may have been difficult to catch, were less important in many areas than things like turtles and fish, which are pretty easy to catch.  From what we see in the skeletal record, average lifespan did not significantly change until much more recent eras.

Answer 6

Why blame agriculture when humans hunted hundreds of species to extinction.