Saturday, January 30, 2010

A New Interpretation of the Fall

In Ishmael and The Story of B, Daniel Quinn proposes that the solution to our generation’s cultural collapse lies not within our culture itself, but outside of it. What is our culture? He calls East and West, “modern” society, one culture because of its shared belief in salvation and human conquest: “The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it.” (188) In other words, what we refer to as globalization or “McDonaldization” is not a new phenomenon. Rather, it has its origins in the not-so-recent past, 10,000 years ago, when a single culture decided that its survival hinged on “devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.” (85) At that point in time, the “Great Forgetting” occurred. What did we forget? We forgot that before the advent of this single, all-powerful culture, “before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.” (245)

Humankind dates back millions of years, yet, its history commences just ten thousand years ago. Everything before that receives the label prehistory. What changed between the periods of history and prehistory? Minds. With the emergence of modern – what Quinn refers to as “totalitarian” – agriculture came “a new mind-set, a mind-set that made us out to be as wise as the gods, that made the world out to be a piece of human property, that gave us the power of life and death over the world. They thought this new mindset would be the death of Adam – and events are proving them right.” (97) That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the Fall of humankind. I’d prefer not get into a religious debate about this new interpretation of the Fall. Rather, let us delve into the argument about agriculture.

Quinn discusses how during prehistoric times existed several different styles of agriculture. Totalitarian agriculture differed from these earlier styles by its “subordinate[ion of] all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food.” (247-248) Biology necessitates competition, but within other species (and ancient humans) that means fighting competing groups or species, not destroying them. Only within the culture of modern humans has competition come to mean elimination of the enemy. Quinn gives the example of farmers killing coyotes to save their chickens. Ancient humans would have hunted the animals that entered their farms, not wiped out the entire population of coyotes in a given area (Reston, VA is a case in point). He posits that “It is the policy of totalitarian agriculture to wipe out unwanted species.” (257) Why adopt such a brutal strategy?

Totalitarian agriculture was not adopted in our culture out of sheer meanness. It was adopted because, by its very nature, it’s more productive than any other style…Many styles of agriculture…produce food surpluses. But, not surprisingly, totalitarian agriculture produces larger surpluses than any other style…You simply can’t outproduce a system designed to convert all the food in the world into human food. (260)

“So?” you might ask, “What’s the big deal?” Population spikes, war, crime, corruption, slavery, revolt, famine and plague, economic chaos, drugs, species extinction, exploitation, poverty, genocide, and finally cultural collapse. From 5000 B.C.E. to 2000 A.D., the population grew from 50 million to 6 billion. During the same period emerged a whole horde of problems that had never before existed on such a large scale in human history. For millions of years the number of humans increased by an infinitesimally small annual growth rate. Since the emergence of modern agriculture, the population has doubled 7 times!

Ever heard of the story of the king and the wise old man? The king decides to grant the old man one boon, to which the latter asks for one thing: a chess board’s worth of grains of rice. On square one the king should place 1 grain of rice; the quantity must then be doubled for each of the 64 squares of the board. That means that on square two he has to place 2 grains, on square three 4 grains, on square four 8 grains, and so on. The power of the square, 264. Try calculating that sum. A calculator can’t do it. Now square our population. It took 2000 years – 5000 and 3000 B.C.E. – for our population to increase from 25 million people to 50 million. It only took 40 years – from 1960 to 2000 – for our population to double from 3 billion to 6 billion people! That’s scary!

Population increases as a result of an increased food supply. That’s a fact. So why do we continue increasing the food supply? Quinn gives the example of a box of 100 mice. Give them enough food to sustain 200 mice and they will reproduce until they have a population of 200 mice (or at the very least a population that fluctuates between 190 and 210 mice). Produce enough food for 6 billion people and the population will stabilize around 6 billion. Why continue to pursue a strategy of totalitarian agriculture that produces food for more and more people year after year when it only results in a population increase year after year? Think about it.

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