Distortion: The advent of agriculture, animal domestication and permanent settlement made us civilized.
That impulse – the systematic growing and harvesting of food – has been the work of 300 generations of human beings. Its origins, around the end of the last ice age, mark the first definitive step toward what we think of as civilization. It enabled us to draw 50 times as much energy from the land around us, and to store that energy. This in turn made it possible for us to turn our efforts to tasks other than the gathering of food for survival – building places to live, constructing fences, developing new technologies to facilitate a new way of living.
But agriculture was, at best, a mixed blessing. Contemporary anthropologists are cautionary in their characterization of its impact on human development.
“Agriculture was one of the great stupid mistakes in human history,” said Prof. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University. “That was a bad move! The main advantage of agriculture is that is allows you to concentrate capital and resources in the hands of a few people and start making stratified societies and all sorts of nasty stuff…”
According to Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, “The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s greatest fraud.”
And this from American anthropologist Jared Diamond:
“Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?”
Agriculture was unquestionably a Pandora’s box for humanity’s development. We’ve listed the pros; here are the cons:
Property. With permanent settlements came a commitment to stay in one place, and a need to protect the land from outside invasion, and internal struggle over who owned what piece. For the first time ever, human beings had true motivation to fight not just the environment and predation, but each other;
Inequality. With property came the potential for some to have more than others;
Misogyny. With systematic division of labor came the tendency to relegate less desirable tasks to those who were physically weaker;
Inheritance. With ownership of land came the impulse to secure the land as an economic advantage for one’s own offspring, bringing about the development of social classes;
Famine. Humankind went from eating 300+ different things to three or four grains and five or six animals; as we lost the freedom to move from place to place, we became vulnerable to food shortage;
Disease. It became possible, through food accumulation, to gather populations beyond Dunbar’s Number in one place, bringing about the spread of disease – often occurring because of constant proximity to domesticated animals.
Not quite what we bargained for.
Agriculture was, in many ways, a step forward survival-wise, for the species as a whole; but it was a giant step backward in our social evolution, bringing with it a weaker and more vulnerable way of living in exchange for the added security of stored food.
But no longer did we stand and fall together, live and die together; now it truly was everyone for themselves…
How Agriculture begat Religion, changing everything
Before moving on, a few words about how religion became a thing.
Futurist Yuval Noah Harari has noted that the modern era, which has steadily increased the existential and spiritual self-sufficiency of humankind as religion has receded, faces the problem of infusing life with meaning in a post-religion world.
That challenge has been met, he writes, by humanism, which he defines as “a revolutionary new creed that conquered the world during the last few centuries...the humanist religion worships humanity, and expects humanity to play the part that God played in Christianity and Islam, and that the laws of nature played in Buddhism and Daoism.”
“Whereas traditionally the great cosmic plan [of religion] gave meaning to the life of humans,” he continues, “humanism reverses the roles and expects the experiences of humans to give meaning to the cosmos.”
Humanism, he writes, creates meaning for a meaningless world; it calls upon us to draw the meaning of our own lives from our inner experiences, and then to extend that meaning to the universe as a whole. Humankind, in Harari’s summary, is the author of meaning.
In his book Homo Deus, this idea is presented as the best path forward for humanity. But in reality, it is more; it’s a return to the path we originally walked.
Religion has been with us for a little over 12,000 years, in the best guesses of modern anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists like Azim Shariff, who suggests that ‘God’ was invented when agriculture began at the end of the last Ice Age, and large communities became possible – communities where it was impossible to police the behaviors of all, making it necessary to invent an all-seeing, all-punishing policeman.
But humankind has been around far longer than 12,000 years. In our present form – Homo sapiens – we've walked the earth for almost 300,000 years, and in less advanced form, ten times that long.
Were those thousands of centuries meaningless?
The millions of humans who lived and died in those years had brains like ours, communicated by language as we do (at least for the past 100,000 years or so), and built lives of shared experience, just like us. To read Harari without keeping this in mind is to passively assume that those millions of lives had no meaning – that “meaning”, in the sense that we use it today, only came about with the invention of religion.
But is that even plausible?
The creation of meaning is built into the human brain. It isn’t an invention of philosophers or poets or pastors; it’s a natural function of the conscious mind. We are, each of us, makers of meaning.
This is why the question of meaning in our lives and in the universe around us matters so much in the first place: meaning necessarily exists in the mind, as it is an idea; and we all hunger for it, which tells us it’s both natural and a function of mind.
If we’ve had it all along, then what is meaning, and where did it go?
The first clue can be found in the assumption that God(s) was/were ever a source of meaning; if we created God, then by definition, we are not only seekers of meaning – we are the creators of meaning. Our need for it follows our production of it.
Then we must accept that of all the life on Earth – as far as we know – and, for that matter, in all of time and space – as far as we are able to know – we are the only beings like ourselves to ever emerge, to ever get this far. We are on the leading edge of meaning; we are, in the universe, its sole source, its only repository.
Finally, we consider that while we may search for meaning as individuals, while we may each come up with solitary solutions in that quest, meaning itself is a community trait; when we find it, we share it, and it becomes a tying bind. Whatever distortions religion introduced into the nature and application of meaning, it positively underscores that meaning, by definition, is a group force. We create it together; we perceive it together; we enjoy it together. It nurtures us as one.
In our final analysis - we are meaning. We, humanity, are meaning.
We define meaning. And if we’ve lost our innate sense of that, it’s because our attention has been long diverted, obfuscated by emotional plunder and garish charlatanry.
We are not, then, robbing the gods. We are not overweening usurpers or pretenders in taking up Harari’s call; we have always been his cosmic adjudicators, the chancellors of ultimate truth. Why? Because no others in creation can take up the task. It has always been ours. And we are, in the end, our own answer: humanity isn’t taking meaning over; we’re taking meaning back.
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