We did not?
It did?
Without thumbs?
This is the next post in my ninth and final journey through the book Sapiens.
We are in Chapter 5: History's Biggest Fraud, and have arrived at one of the most memorable moments in the book: not only are we domesticated animals, but wheat did this to us. So... no matter how we may control our diets, we will never truly be gluten-free!
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| Not a problem if we are "gluten full". |
Wheat and all of agriculture, it's a trap, Harari says. And this chapter--with all its lamenting the loss of free-time and belittling of the wits of farmers--echoes Marshall Sahlins' "original affluent society" and Jared Diamond's "the worst idea in the history of human history."
Here we are, then. This thing we need to live and, for those of us who love pizza, makes life worth living... is THE WORST. Suddenly, the familiar is strange and who doesn't love that?
I've heard someone compare the experience of reading Sapiens to so many weed-enhanced dorm room conversations. Like, Do you think that your blue is the same blue as mine or have we just agreed, externally, out there, that that's blue. Like, for a moment, if you could see the blue I see, through my eyes and with my brain, would you still see your blue or would it be something else? Would it be a whole other color you've never seen??? (... which reminds me to share this fun story)
Nothing against drugs, per se, but I wish more people knew that you can have some pretty trippy thoughts without them.
And when you have such thoughts, you might find that reading, "We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us..." leads to the realization that it's just as untrue as it accuses common sense of being.
This chapter is a pretty compelling case against anyone's imagination who insists on the intentional invention and implementation of wheat domestication. It's a pretty compelling account of how humans passively came to rely on agriculture, scaling it up to what we have now.
Anyone who is reading Sapiens should definitely also read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (or "The Davids" as our seniors in last year's anthropology seminar liked to say). Theirs is a wonderful consideration of agriculture's early days according to some eye-opening archaeological sites and I really don't think anyone should be reading Sapiens without also taking in another point of view, such as theirs which doesn't necessarily refute Harari's but also doesn't match it.
Even from Sapiens, alone, a reader can come away with two truths. From the present view, it's true that "we domesticated wheat" but from a ground-level, imaginary perspective about how it actually happened, it's also true that "we did not domesticate wheat." And, for different reasons, we can say, that "wheat domesticated us." Or not.. But it's just not true that things were one way (common sense about who domesticated whom) or the other (Sapiens' bong rips). So, once again, Sapiens has raised some intriguing questions and inspired brilliant conversations (at least among my co-professor and students).
But, once again, there is a but: it's maddening because Harari seems to claim, as a rhetorical strategy, or does claim (hard to know the difference) some "facts" that are simply not knowable, scientifically, and therefore cannot be the scientific truth. And, once again, that wouldn't be so maddening if this weren't a "science book."
And another thing. Who is this "we" who did or did not domesticate wheat? It's certainly not any of us writing or reading this blog post. When we call all of our ancestors "we", what are we doing exactly?
I can think of a few answers to that question...
1. We are taking credit for their lives and internalizing that as some kind of human nature.
2. We are taking blame for their lives and internalizing that as some kind of human nature.
3. We are drawing a line across space-time about who is included in "we" and, therefore, who is not.
Ahhhh. And if we buy the evolutionary psychology presented as fact in Sapiens (for example, see nearly every prior post), then #3 is simply "we" doing what "we" so-called tribal, "xenophobic," and "us vs. them" sapiens evolved to do.
It’s funny. We (heh) will say, “We put a man on the moon.” But we never say, “We painted the Mona Lisa”. It’s like, as soon as it’s a group project, it’s “we” even if “we” only contributed pennies of our taxes to it. Even if we weren’t old enough to pay taxes in 1969. Even if we weren’t even born yet in 1969.
And in the group project called existence (a.k.a. evolution)
that preceded ours, “we” played no role. So it’s even more strange to refer to our hominin
ancestors, even just our sapiens ancestors, as “we”. What are "we" doing?
Maybe it’s just me. I’m immersed in evolutionary thinking. And, go back far enough in time and everything’s origins are the same. It’s far beyond Darwin’s insights about relatedness, this entire universe is one big “we.”
You could say I took evolutionary thinking a little too far there and that I could just keep it to Earth. Fine, but then I could say that extending "we" too far back is far worse: it's forgetting evolution is true.
Evolution is true. So, why make ourselves prisoners of the past, but even worse…why make ourselves prisoners of a make-believe one? Why call our ancestors, whom we can only know in very limited ways, “we”. We are not them any more than they are us. Or… if we are going to be them, which we are if we are so large, then THEY ARE US. Which means what?
They were just living in their time. Like we are. They could have been like us, now, but because of their context, they weren’t. So even if we knew they were murderous rapists, which we can’t, but even if we did, which they probably weren’t because it doesn’t’ sound like a recipe for existence, but even if they were, then that was then, only then. I mean, I’ve got some German ancestry, should I worry if any of their descendants were Nazis? As if any of that says something about me?
I don’t even call my mom “we”, so why would my distant ancestors I never even knew "we" to me?
Calm down.
When we were fishes. That's normal stuff.
When we were cavemen. Normal stuff, too.
When we were our mothers. That's nowhere.
But.
If "we" used to be fish, if we insist on referring to our ancestors as "we" then we used to be our mothers, too. And Shakespeare! And anyone who came before.
So, we are our mothers? We are Shakespeare?
We used to be early wheat cultivators, and not?
We used to be enslavers and slaves?
Hey. No.
You never hear a white American say, "We used to be slaves."
And you never hear a man say, "We used to be women" or a woman say, "we used to be men."
But if "we" are our ancestors, then men are women and women are men and free people are both slaves and enslavers.
I’m all twisted up over “we” because I believe that identifying with only some of our ancestry (whose behaviors are largely made-up fantasies) keeps us from realizing our magnificent potential.
Instead, here we are, where no man was ever a woman and no woman was ever a man. And so we get patriarchy's desperate power grabs like POTUS's executive order, DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDERIDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
How did I wind up complaining about patriarchy in a post about the origins of wheat domestication?
Maybe because it's all about the bread. All of our modern context (wealth first and foremost) might be far more powerful in shaping "common sense" that goes into "just how humans evolved" even in the minds of "brilliant scientists" than we realize.
Who am I kidding? I don't believe it "might be"... I believe it absolutely is. Why else would "we" keep believing what "we" imagine about our ancestors, like their "tribalism" and their gender roles is just the facts about our evolved human nature--that oxymoronic view that imputes the (unobservable) biology of our ancestors and into now, unchanged. Evolutionary psychology feels like another trap, doesn't it?
But it's the only way to accept evolution to so many people right now. They believe that "we" are simply trapped with what "human nature" we 100% imagine we inherited from our Plio-Pleistocene ancestors, in this modern world where in-born, programmed bio-psychology that once boosted humanity's survival and reproduction is, now, unnaturally depleted by boner-killing feminists.
Peace love dope!
Just getting revved up for chapters to come, I suppose. Chapter 6 is next. To be continued...
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