For a minute there I thought I had to get off my couch, when all the while the fact is we don't have to do anything much but keep things afloat for just a few decades more! In fact, we'd best shut up about PO, because if our offspring finds out we knew about it all along, they'll turn and wring our necks come 2036!
Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 6:19 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Heineken wrote:
EnergySpin wrote:
Where did I dismiss anything?
Gee . . . on page 4, nine posts from the top. Immature, inflammatory, dismissive.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste, ES. You've got a good one, and boy do you waste it defending the indefensible.
Com'e on Heineken .. you guys are lambasting everyone else that does not join hands with you and sing: "bad westerner, you are going to pay for your deeds".
Maybe my language areas have been disconnected from my overloaded days, but:
a) I do not dismiss the idea that the myth of the lost paradise might have to do something with the transition from HG->A
b) in fact I did write (it is probably the part that you found "immature, inflammatory, dismissive.") that this whole way of thinking ("natural" is "better") is non-original and it shows up in different ages/cultures/civilizations/cults (the PO-doomers are prime examples of such a cult)
The reality is that recent archaeological findings point out to a semi-simultaneous "discovery/invention/development" of agricultural technologies around the globe in spite of the absence of a "globalized" community/method of communication. This suggests (at least to me), that there were obvious advantages to the inventors, which are lost to the pampered North American and European descendants. Same thing can be said about all discoveries ... from the domestication of animals to the general theory of relativity and quantum field theory. There was a cultural/situational context that facilitated the "discovery/invention" of every single technological development. _________________ "Nuclear power has long been to the Left what embryonic-stem-cell research is to the Right--irredeemably wrong and a signifier of moral weakness."Esquire Magazine,12/05
The genetic code is commaless and so are my posts.
Joined: Apr 05, 2005 Posts: 1619 Location: Springsteen Country (NJ)
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 12:43 am Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
EnergySpin wrote:
The reality is that recent archaeological findings point out to a semi-simultaneous "discovery/invention/development" of agricultural technologies around the globe in spite of the absence of a "globalized" community/method of communication. This suggests (at least to me), that there were obvious advantages to the inventors, which are lost to the pampered North American and European descendants. Same thing can be said about all discoveries ... from the domestication of animals to the general theory of relativity and quantum field theory. There was a cultural/situational context that facilitated the "discovery/invention" of every single technological development.
I don't see that as "the reality". It seems that thousands of years separated each development of agriculture. According to Wikipedia:
Quote:
It isn't until after 9,500 BC that the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on PPNB sites in the Levant, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be sown and harvested on a significant scale.
By 7000 BC, sowing and harvesting reached Mesopotamia and there, in the super fertile soil just north of the Persian Gulf, Sumerian ingenuity systematized it and scaled it up. By 6000 BC farming was entrenched on the banks of the Nile River. About this time, agriculture was developed independently in the Far East, probably in China, with rice rather than wheat as the primary crop. Maize was first domesticated, probably from teosinte, in the Americas around 3000-2700 BC, though there is some archaeological evidence of a much older development.
And I think the main reason that agriculture was developed and encouraged is quite well-know to us pampered North American and European descendants.
Quote:
The ability of farmers to feed large numbers of people whose activities have nothing to do with material production was the crucial factor in the rise of standing armies.
It just seems to me that once agriculture got started and the social hierarchy got established, "the powers that was" were constantly looking for ways to expand their power, no matter what the cost to their people. Having a bunch of spear fodder to throw against an enemy and take over his farming/gathering/hunting area to grow more crops to expand your army is almost a guaranteed way to become more important. After all, we don't know the names of ancient farmers, but we do know the names of ancient kings, especially those that used their standing armies to conquer many other peoples, h/g and agrarian.
For crap's sake, they're still doing it today, aren't they?
I'm of the opinion that the overriding factor favoring h/g over agrarian is the lack of ability to go on extended war campaigns and cause suffering to larger orders of magnitude of people. While h/g peoples might have had border skirmishes, it takes agriculture to conquer the lands from Greece to India, Spain to Britain to Egypt or Pakistan to Turkey. Without agriculture, Alexander would have been known as The Great Hunter to his tribe, nothing more and Caesar would be a salad only. _________________ Joe P. United Political Debate
"Only when the last tree is cut; only when the last river is polluted; only when the last fish is caught; only then will they realize that you cannot eat money." - Cree Indian Proverb
New genetic evidence suggests that goats travelled around the world with early farmers, serving as a walking milk supply and a tool for bartering.
The animals probably helped our ancestors conquer new territory and develop early trade.
_________________ "Thank you for attending the oil age. We're going to scrape what we can out of these tar pits in Alberta and then shut down the machines and turn out the lights. Goodnight." - seldom_seen
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 1:08 am Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
EnergySpin wrote:
Heineken wrote:
EnergySpin wrote:
Where did I dismiss anything?
Gee . . . on page 4, nine posts from the top. Immature, inflammatory, dismissive.
Com'e on Heineken .. you guys are lambasting everyone else that does not join hands with you and sing: "bad westerner, you are going to pay for your deeds".
For Fark's sake, just admit that the statement referenced by H was "immature, inflammatory, and dismissive." Do you think everyone here is so stupid that they can't understand plain English?
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 6:18 am Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Few more thoughts on the entire agriculture vs. hunter-gatherer thing.
First I don't have many illusions about the entire 'Hunter-gatherer' existence. Likely it was a brutal and ugly existence for many.. at this point it's hard to say one way or another as the golden 'HG' age is well past and left little in the way of recorded history.
I've got a few brain farts this morning on several things agriculture may have lead to. First there's the concept of wealth/money/accumulation which was likely brought to a new level with the rise of agriculture. Perhaps one can argue that the concept of wealth/money as a static thing, something that can be accumulated without end, came about with agriculture. And this has proven to be a very destructive concept, IMO. The fruits of this concept can now be seen everywhere. Perhaps the large concentrations of food enabled by agriculture cultured and abstracted the concept of money and wealth in a similar way. Instead of a flow - as most things in nature are- wealth became abstracted as something static. Something that could be (and is) sought after for its own sake, and accumulated to point of being ridiculous amongst the very wealthy.
Then there's the concept of 'ownership', which again was likely quickened with agriculture. No doubt early hunter-gatherer societies had some sort of concept of possesions and 'ownership', but it was nothing like under the ag. system. Perhaps in hunter-gatherer times what you owned amounted to little more than what you could carry and guard at all times. Under agriculture the land itself became an object to be 'owned', much more so than in hunter-gatherer times - what with the tremendous investment placed in the crops.
Finally there was the new social strata enabled by agriculture, and the development of a necessary but parasitic ruling class. The new intensified concepts of wealth and ownership rapidly selected the most ruthless rulers (which may have paradoxically spawned the powerful ego and intellect in modern humans), eventually coming to seek wealth and power for their own sake.
I think agriculture was and is a wondrous thing, but we have used it without wisdom and without tempering our baser instincts. The entire game under agriculture became all about accumulation - of both wealth (food & money) and power (over other people). So we see the rise of excess food, which supported a rapidly growing population. Humanity had found a way around the checks and balances of nature, and the entire weight of our genes, which say 'breed, breed & breed' ran unchecked, leading (along with the discovery of fossil fuels) to the current population explosion.
In my not-so-humble opinion this is leading the entire species to destruction. I don't have solutions other than to point out this obvious fact.
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 12:51 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
I love it when a bunch of cage dwelling, farmed humans talk about "hunting and gathering." It's like listening to a virgin who only looks at pornogaphy talk about sex. What a farking hoot.
I also think it's hilarious to talk about how much "work" these "H/G's" did. Keep in mind that a great many agriculturally produced humans will save up months worth of paychecks, or go further into debt to go camping, hunting, and fishing. The richest people fly to other countries to shoot animals. The rest go fishing with poles at tainted reservoirs, camp in RV's at "protected" land, and hunt in designated zones. It appears that they have to work in order to work. Foragers were doing the same thing that most farmed people consider a vacation.
Now that I'm on the verge from pissing myself laughing, I find it funny when the dough-loaded people talk about how unreliable foraging is, while articles about how various crops are failing because the weather was just a bit too cold start to emerge. The deer, turkeys, fish, and hardy "weeds" around here didn't freeze to death; some of them even thrived. And this is even in the context where the farmers destroyed everything. Foraging has proven itself to work in all climates, even in the Fark arctic. That's the difference. Foraging is proven; agriculture turns the land it trashed into a desert, and is unstable until it reaches that state. It's inherently suicidal.
As for the "nasty, brutish," nonsense, sorry, guys, Hobbes, another indoor, farmed philospher, is dead, and his irrelevant projections of the horrifying shortcomings of his own culture have gone down with him. Furthermore, on the topic of war, whining about some symbolic fight or occasional raid that foragers participated in -- while you and your farmers and all industries that they enable directly support the killing, raping, and mutilating of millions of people in ways that would make any decent person vomit -- is pathetic, and to think that you have any moral authority is laughable.
And then there's this romantic bullshit about people "adopting" agriculture. People adopted agriculture just like how sweatshop workers and sex slaves "applied" for the job.
This is the story of agriculture: A ridiculously small minority of people, horticulturalists, who had bloated numbers of people at their disposal, chopped down mass acres of forest. The human inhabitants are exterminated, and the survivors are worked to death in the fields. If the survivors are traumatized to the point of total compliance, they are allowed to exist as the lowest class possible. The trees from the forest are used to make weapons, so that when crops fail -- and they always fail -- they can send out more thugs to chop, burn, murder, and torture, and begin the same thing over again, until the land looks like the Middle East, North Africa, the Gobi Desert, and a good chunk of North America if it didn't routinely dump chemicals on its crops.
I should also mention that agriculture is not about feeding people; it's about selling food to people. And most of these popular annual grasses are addictive, so it is basically the selling of drugs with calories and dismal nutrition. The land owners don't give their grass away; they lock that crap up and put armed guards in front of the granaries. Foragers undermine the goal of the farmer. The forager eats; the farmer sells. In order to keep the agriculturally produced people from leaving their cages, the foragers must be exterminated, and if that can't be done, then massive amounts of propagada must be produced to demonize them.
Foraging is easy, and hunting would be far easier if it weren't for the agriculturalist institutions and citizens that exist to keep people from eating. Farmed people will say that such laws are to keep people from overfishing/hunting, but this is moot, since the biggest killers of "wildlife" is agriculture and all industries it enables. People will whine about "poaching" but most of those poached animals are sent to wealthy, farmed people in other countries.
"Oh farmers, pray that your summers be wet and your winters clear," said Virgil. I would add, "otherwise you're Fark."
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 1:37 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Itch wrote:
I love it when a bunch of cage dwelling, farmed humans talk about "hunting and gathering." It's like listening to a virgin who only looks at pornogaphy talk about sex. What a farking hoot.
I also think it's hilarious to talk about how much "work" these "H/G's" did. Keep in mind that a great many agriculturally produced humans will save up months worth of paychecks, or go further into debt to go camping, hunting, and fishing. The richest people fly to other countries to shoot animals. The rest go fishing with poles at tainted reservoirs, camp in RV's at "protected" land, and hunt in designated zones. It appears that they have to work in order to work. Foragers were doing the same thing that most farmed people consider a vacation.
Right, like you're speaking from experience. I suppose you just got back from a lifetime of foraging in the sticks to share this wisdom with us.
Itch wrote:
That's the difference. Foraging is proven; agriculture turns the land it trashed into a desert, and is unstable until it reaches that state. It's inherently suicidal.
Have to agree with you here - in fact I've got to agree with most of what you say here. It's just your holier-than-thou attitude annoys me. Going back to ag trashing the land - well there can be no doubt about that. Agriculture doesn't develop soil, it depletes and destroys it. Look at the mideast and Iraq - the 'cradle' of civilization. At one time it apparently had very fertile soil. Now it's so much DU laced dust.
Itch wrote:
(...)
I should also mention that agriculture is not about feeding people; it's about selling food to people. And most of these popular annual grasses are addictive, so it is basically the selling of drugs with calories and dismal nutrition. The land owners don't give their grass away; they lock that crap up and put armed guards in front of the granaries. Foragers undermine the goal of the farmer. The forager eats; the farmer sells. In order to keep the agriculturally produced people from leaving their cages, the foragers must be exterminated, and if that can't be done, then massive amounts of propagada must be produced to demonize them.
Foraging is easy, and hunting would be far easier if it weren't for the agriculturalist institutions and citizens that exist to keep people from eating. Farmed people will say that such laws are to keep people from overfishing/hunting, but this is moot, since the biggest killers of "wildlife" is agriculture and all industries it enables. People will whine about "poaching" but most of those poached animals are sent to wealthy, farmed people in other countries.
"Oh farmers, pray that your summers be wet and your winters clear," said Virgil. I would add, "otherwise you're Fark."
You raise some excellent points and I agree with most of them (again). However I think you're simplifying things a bit here. Ag in and of itself is not that awful, if practiced in a less intensive manner. It's more the entire culture that was indirectly spawned by Ag that's proven so destructive. At this point we're f*cked. There are far, far too many people to go back to H/G, and many of the poeple in current populace have been bred to accept the current system without question. There's no going back at this point, at least not until and if there's a (badly needed) dieoff.
Just a bit of bitterness wafting off your post
Ah, Eden lost...
Joined: Dec 02, 2005 Posts: 6284 Location: Oil-addicted Southern Californucopia
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 2:19 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Itch wrote:
...while you and your farmers...
So you have never, ever, not even once in your life, taken a bite of any food that was not grown on a farm, run through a processing plant, packaged, shipped on a truck, and sold in a grocery store?
Every single bit of nourishment you have ever taken in your life was gathered in the wild, or was hunted, killed, and cooked by you personally?
What in Christ's name are you raving so self-righteously about? Who do you think you are, Jeremiah Johnson?
If the human race had never abandoned the Neanderthals' H/G model, do you think the computer you transmitted your little diatribe on would exist? Do you think the heater that keeps you warm would exist? Do you think the electrical power you use so unconsciously would be available to you, or anybody else?
We've seen some arrogant posts on this forum, but I can't recall seeing anything like yours. _________________ "Thank you for attending the oil age. We're going to scrape what we can out of these tar pits in Alberta and then shut down the machines and turn out the lights. Goodnight." - seldom_seen
Last edited by Zardoz on Fri Jan 19, 2007 6:02 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 6141 Location: Rural Virginia
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 2:34 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
I agree with much of what Itch says, but his tone seems unnecessarily unpleasant and harsh. It is possible to get pretty emotional about these issues, though---I know I have at times.
I have felt that bitterness about a wrecked world. _________________ "Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog
"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother
Joined: Nov 09, 2004 Posts: 1223 Location: Big Rock Candy Mountain
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 4:12 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
King's 'Farmers of 40 Centuries" is the classic text on sustainable agriculture as practiced by the Chinese for millenia. Preindustrial agriculture was essentially unrelenting toil occasionally interrupted by Baby-Eating-grade famines (search: "hungry ghosts"). There are few alive today who could adapt to such a way of living.
We survived through hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages, supervolcanoes, etc. as hunter-gatherers; we may not survive 200 years of Petroindustrial "civilization".
Joined: Dec 27, 2004 Posts: 11991 Location: zombie horde wonderland
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 5:44 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Yep, agriculture is a stable but not especially adaptable way of life.
We've put all our eggs in one basket and that basket is falling apart. _________________ "...powerdown so soft and fluffy you'll think you're living in a pillow..." - jboogy
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 5:54 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Thanks for the reference, oowolf. Those Chinese farmers were pretty amazing. But don't overly romanticize them. They wiped out every trace of the biological life native to the areas where they farmed longest and most intensively.
I looked at a map that indicated what the nature of the original biotic community was around the world before agricultural monocultures took hold. A huge swash of central and eastern China was just white, marked "unkown" due to continuous intesive farming for thousands of years.
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 9:07 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Zardoz wrote:
Who do you think you are, Jeremiah Johnson?
Jeremiah Johnson had a Winchester. _________________ Gravity is not a force, it is a boundary layer.
Everything is coincident.
Love: the state of suspended anticipation.
To get any appreciable distance from the Earth in
a sensible amount of time, you must lie.
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 9:26 pm Post subject: Re: Hunter-gatherer vs. Agrarian
Quote:
It's just your holier-than-thou attitude annoys me
What are you talking about?
Quote:
Right, like you're speaking from experience. I suppose you just got back from a lifetime of foraging in the sticks to share this wisdom with us.
I'm not sure what you are specifically talking about. I personally don't know what it is like to grow up in a foraging culture, and neither does any other person like me. But since people here are pretending to know what it is like, and then project their own cultural creations -- in this case "work" and extermination warfare -- on other people without even looking at their perspectives, such talk is exactly what I said: being a porn-gazing virgin and then claiming to know what sex is like.
Quote:
At this point we're f*cked. There are far, far too many people to go back to H/G
If you're on a steady diet of cool ranch Doritos and Wonder Bread, and don't know about anything else, or won't settle for less,then you're Fark. But the point of too many people "going back" to H/G is moot. They wouldn't want to, nor can they, since they know nothing and don't want to know about it. If they die because of that, then Fark them.
Quote:
and many of the poeple in current populace have been bred to accept the current system without question.
Though I suspect this is true, in order for this to be something other than mere speculation, these people would have to be observed while not being propagandized by the current system.
Zardoz's post is a good example of puritan ideology. He completely ignores the current context of how farmed people like me are raised, and whines about me using electricity. I didn't grow up in a tribe of people who knew everything about the land they were on; I grew up in the suburbs, for Fark's sake. So tell me, Zardoz, where did all of that precise knowledge about the area I live go? Destroyed by empire. There is only a small percentage of such information left in libraries and the Internet. His post reminds me of this passage:
"Dusenberry smiled with a kind of arch smile. He said, `One time they [the native americans] were supposed to have food, you know, from before the white man came. Blueberries and venison and all that and so what did they do? They broke out three cans of DelMonte corn and started opening all the cans with a can opener. I stood it as long as I could. Finally I told them "NO! NO! NO! Not canned corn," and they laughed at me. They said, "Just like a white man. Has to have everything just right."
What Zardoz basically means is that, because I'm not living according to his expectations, I should be dismissed. And I'm the arrogant one, remember. If he was consistent, and maybe he actually does this, he would whine about Iraqis using scavenged American weapons against them, or would yell at birds for making nests under school roofs because a nearby forest was cleared.
Zardoz is interested in purity; I am interested in having the opportunity to eat food without an entire society keeping me from doing so. I don't need their tainted food and water, but it will only get worse until this mass agriculture fad goes out of style.
Quote:
Ag in and of itself is not that awful, if practiced in a less intensive manner.
So does that mean that there are less slaves and weapons? At what point is agriculture appropriately intensive? Do you have any examples? Why would everything that is crushed on its behalf think it is "not that awful?" I'd like to know if you know of any such cultures. The Hopi came to mind, but they are horticulturalists, I think.
Quote:
It's more the entire culture that was indirectly spawned by Ag that's proven so destructive.
I disagree. I think that technology is an expression of the culture that creates it. If you develop a technology that is meant to control people, it sounds like these people were assholes in the first place.
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Right, like you're speaking from experience. I suppose you just got back from a lifetime of foraging in the sticks to share this wisdom with us.
