Thursday, September 17, 2015
Mistake or Awesome?
If you couldn't tell already, Jared Diamond seems to really be against all agriculturally based societies. Although his points about the negatives of agriculture, I think he is just trying to make an argument out of nothing. Diamond is not wrong when he says that people were subjected to epidemics due to living in close quarters with each other, however if it weren't for these epidemics then there would have been no need for humanity to create modern medicine. Without modern medicine, or any sort of medical outlook, people would still be living to the ripe age of twenty-six! That means I have eight years left to live. Diamond mentions the point that once life switched to farming the average life span dropped to age nineteen, which would only give me one more year to live. Diamond mentions war, and how it was a by-product of human settlements fighting over resources. Yet, if foragers needed meat and there is one mammoth left with two groups of people wanting it, there is going to be a fight. Diamonds claim that violence is associated with farming is stretching it, to put it nicely. At the end of the day, Diamond is free to argue the negatives of the agricultural lifestyle all he wants, but it will never change the fact that people did make this switch, and that it is because of this switch that people have developed into a species that is capable to leave this planet. (In 11 hours and 54 minutes that people spent foraging, they got nothing done. However once farming came around, the last 6 minutes, people have developed technologies that allow us to travel to other planets.)
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I think you guys made a lot of good points. Just building on this I think that a lot of good has come out of this after it is all said and done. Although yes there were sicknesses that spread through all the people, and yes the average age did drop, is this not the case with the beginning of any era? There is a large learning curve for any new era. Without someone to tell them which berries they could eat without dying and which animals they could hunt without becoming the hunted the beginning of the foraging era likely had a very low life expectancy. In the same way the agrarian era needed a learning period before they were capable of surviving properly and knew to balance their diet. Conflict is inevitable no matter where we are in time. It is in our human nature to be interested in conflict and that results in war. Could we have jumped from the foraging era to the modern era? No we would still be out picking berries. The entire modern era is a product of the agrarian era. So Diamond needs to ask himself how do you actually categorize a successful era? Is it how much people sleep, or what they eat? Or is it about what it inspired? Although it was not perfect the agrarian era was a necessary stepping stone in history.
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