although civilizing culture was from the beginning its own propaganda machine, the
changeover involved a monumental struggle. Fredy Perlman’s Against Leviathan! Against Hisstory!
is unrivaled on this, vastly enriching Toynbee’s attention to the “internal” and “external
proletariats,” discontents within and without civilization. Nonetheless, along the axis from
digging stick farming to plow agriculture to fully differentiated irrigation systems, an almost
total genocide of gatherers and hunters was necessarily effected.
The formation and storage of surpluses are part of the domesticating will to control and make
static, an aspect of the tendency to symbolize. A bulwark against the flow of nature, surplus
takes the forms of herd animals and granaries. Stored grain was the earliest medium of
equivalence, the oldest form of capital. Only with the appearance of wealth in the shape of
storable grains do the gradations of labor and social classes proceed. While there were
certainly wild grains before all this (and wild wheat, by the way, is 24 percent protein compared
to 12 percent for domesticated wheat) the bias of culture makes every difference. Civilization
and its cities rested as much on granaries as on symbolization.
The mystery of agriculture’s origin seems even more impenetrable in light of the recent
reversal of long-standing notions that the previous era was one of hostility to nature and an
absence of leisure. “One could no longer assume,” wrote Arme, “that early man domesticated
plants and animals to escape drudgery and starvation. If anything, the contrary appeared true,
and the advent of farming saw the end of innocence.” For a long time, the question was “why
wasn’t agriculture adopted much earlier in human evolution?” More recently, we know that
agriculture, in Cohen’s words, “is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a
higher quality, more palatable, or more secure food base.” Thus the consensus question now
is, “why was it adopted at all?”
Many theories have been advanced, none convincingly. Childe and others argue that
population increase pushed human societies into more intimate contact with other species,
leading to domestication and the need to produce in order to feed the additional people. But it
has been shown rather conclusively that population increase did not precede agriculture but
was caused by it. “I don’t see any evidence anywhere in the world,” concluded Flannery, “that
suggest that population pressure was responsible for the beginning of agriculture.” Another
theory has it that major climatic changes occurred at the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,000
years ago, which upset the old hunter-gatherer life-world and led directly to the cultivation of
certain surviving staples. Recent dating methods have helped demolish this approach; no
such climatic shift happened that could have forced the new mode into existence. Besides,
there are scores of examples of agriculture being adopted or refused in every type of climate.
Another major hypothesis is that agriculture was introduced via a chance discovery or
invention as if it had never occurred to the species before a certain moment that, for example,
food grows from sprouted seeds. It seems certain that Paleolithic humanity had a virtually
inexhaustible knowledge of flora and fauna for many tens of thousands of years before the
cultivation of plants began, which renders this theory especially weak.
Agreement with Carl Sauer’s summation that, “Agriculture did not originate from a growing or
chronic shortage of food” is sufficient, in fact, to dismiss virtually all originary theories that
have been advanced. A remaining idea, presented by Hahn, Isaac and others, holds that food
production began at base as a religious activity. This hypothesis comes closest to plausibility.
Sheep and goats, the first animals to be domesticated, are known to have been widely used in
religious ceremonies, and to have been raised in enclosed meadows for sacrificial purposes.
Before they were domesticated, moreover, sheep had no wool suitable for textile purposes.
The main use of the hen in southeastern Asia and the eastern Mediterranean the earliest
centers of civilization “seems to have been,” according to Darby, “sacrificial or divinatory rather
than alimentary.” Sauer adds that the “egg laying and meat producing qualities” of tamed fowl
“are relatively late consequences of their domestication.” Wild cattle were fierce and
dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor the modified meat texture of such castrates could
have been foreseen. Cattle were not milked until centuries after their initial captivity, and
representations indicate that their first known harnessing was to wagons in religious
processions.
Plants, next to be controlled, exhibit similar backgrounds so far as is known. Consider the
New World examples of squash and pumpkin, used originally as ceremonial rattles.
Johannessen discussed the religious and mystical motives connected with the domestication
of maize, Mexico’s most important crop and center of its native Neolithic religion. Likewise
Anderson investigated the selection and development of distinctive types of various cultivated
plants because of their magical significance. The shamans, I should add, were well-placed in
positions of power to introduce agriculture via the taming and planting involved in ritual and
religion, sketchily referred to above.
Though the religious explanation of the origins of agriculture has been somewhat overlooked,
it brings us, in my opinion, to the very doorstep of the real explanation of the birth of
production: that non-rational, cultural force of alienation which spread, in the forms of time,
language, number and art, to ultimately colonize material and psychic life in agriculture.
“Religion” is too narrow a conceptualization of this infection and its growth. Domination is too
weighty, too all-encompassing, to have been solely conveyed by the pathology that is religion.
But the cultural values of control and uniformity that are part of religion are certainly part of
agriculture, and from the beginning. Noting that strains of corn cross-pollinate very easily,
Anderson studied the very primitive agriculturists of Assam, the Naga tribe, and their variety of
corn that exhibited no differences from plant to plant. True to culture, showing that it is
complete from the beginning of production, the Naga kept their varieties so pure “only by a
fanatical adherence to an ideal type.” This exemplifies the marriage of culture and production
in domestication, and its inevitable progeny, repression and work.
The scrupulous tending of strains of plants finds its parallel in the domesticating of animals,
which also defies natural selection and re-establishes the controllable organic world at a
debased, artificial level. Like plants, animals are mere things to be manipulated; a cow, for
instance, is seen as a kind of machine for converting grass into milk. Transmuted from a
state of freedom to that of helpless parasites, these animals become completely dependent on
man for survival. In domestic mammals, as a rule, the size of the brain becomes relatively
smaller as specimens are produced that devote more energy to growth and less to activity.
Placid, infantilized, typified perhaps by the sheep, most domesticated of herd animals; the
remarkable intelligence of wild sheep is completely lost in their tamed counterparts. The social
relationships among domestic animals are reduced to the crudest essentials.
Non-reproductive parts of the life cycle are minimized, courtship is curtailed, and the animal’s
very capacity to recognize its own species is impaired.
Farming also created the potential for rapid environmental destruction and the domination
over nature soon began to turn the green mantle that covered the birthplaces of civilization
into barren and lifeless areas. “Vast regions have changed their aspect completely,” estimates
Zeuner, “always to quasi-drier condition, since the beginnings of the Neolithic.” Deserts now
occupy most of the areas where the high civilizations once flourished, and there is much
historical evidence that these early formations inevitably ruined their environments.
Throughout the Mediterranean Basin and in the adjoining Near East and Asia, agriculture
turned lush and hospitable lands into depleted, dry, and rocky terrain. In Critias, Plato
described Attica as “a skeleton wasted by disease,” referring to the deforestation of Greece
and contrasting it to its earlier richness. Grazing by goats and sheep, the first domesticated
ruminants, was a major factor in the denuding of Greece, Lebanon, and North Africa, and the
desertification of the Roman and Mesopotamian empires.
Another, more immediate impact of agriculture, brought to light increasingly in recent years,
involved the physical well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researches show that “the
diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that their
health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.”
Conversely, Farb summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited number
of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much
more costly in terms of human labor expended.”
The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic conclusions, stressing, as
does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and nutrition” caused by the changeover from food
gathering to food production. Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised.
Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the sixteenth century tell of Florida Indian fathers
seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was long believed that primitive people
died in their 30’s and 40’s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury and
severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries. During the industrial age only
fairly recently did life span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in
Paleolithic times humans were long-lived animals, once certain risks were passed. DeVries is
correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization.
“Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic
plague the appearance of large cities,” wrote Jared Diamond. Malaria, probably the single
greatest killer of humanity, and nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of
agriculture. Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of
domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental caries, and mental
disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture; previously women gave birth with no
difficulty and little or no pain.
People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R. H. Post, have heard a
single-engined plane while it was still 70 miles away, and many of them can see four moons of
Jupiter with the naked eye. The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall
decline in the quality - and probably in the length - of human life among farmers as compared
with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated.
One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a Golden Age of
innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance, referred to the “life-sustaining soil,
which yielded its copious fruits unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of the huntergatherers
and the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been
that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease.
The history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature from human
experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food choices. According to Rooney,
prehistoric peoples found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas “All
civilizations,” Wenke reminds us, have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six
plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.”
It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are
actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The world’s population now depends
for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are
replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied.
The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods
increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed worldwide so that an Inuit
Eskimo and an African native may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin
or frozen fish sticks from a single factory in Sweden. A few big multinationals such as
Unilever, the world’s biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated
service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an everincreasing
consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the world.
When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use is
the whole duty of man, our separation from nature was virtually complete and the stage was
set for the Industrial Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingers in the
person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History, who pronounces that
our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer re-cross a certain threshold of civilization
and once again become part of a natural habitat. He further states, expressing perfectly the
original and persevering imperialism of agriculture, “As the earth in its primitive state is not
adopted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human destiny.”
The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at base all
mass production is farming. The natural world is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks
of the mid-American prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to plow in order to cut
through the soil for the first time. Or a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris,
in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin
Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once.
Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical
corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near-monopoly of the world’s
seed stock define a total environment that integrates food production from planting to
consumption.
pp. 6873
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