“A living nuclear weapon destined to walk the Earth forever. Indestructible. A victim of the modern nuclear age.” – Godzilla 1985
Ahh, sexy nuclear power.
I was at a job I had (while we lived in Houston) and I was getting coffee. One safety tip: the most dangerous place in the world is being between Ocasio-Cortez and a camera. The second most dangerous place in the world is being between me and the office coffee pot. On this particular day a gentleman who worked for a parallel department to mine was also at the coffee bar. We exchanged the ritual office grunting. “Ugh, John hate Mondays.” “Ugh, me hate Mondays too.” As I waited for my coffee to brew, he asked me this question:
“John Wilder, what do you think the most important invention in human history was?”
I thought about it. I didn’t have a ready answer, but this popped into my head. “Besides the bikini, I’d have to go with agriculture.” Who doesn’t love swimwear named after nuclear bomb testing?
See, told you nuclear power was sexy.
He was a little surprised. I think he expected me to say “stapler” or “strapless gown” or some other word starting with “s”, but, no, agriculture was my answer. And upon several years’ worth of reflection, do I stand by that answer? Yes.
Why?
Agriculture has remade our culture. Prior to agriculture, there was no real reason to stay in one location. In fact, if you hunted out an area, it would make sense to move to an area that hadn’t been hunted out – that would have been pressure for them to be nomadic and move periodically. A nomadic people has a limit to the amount of stuff they can have – they have to be able to carry it (or, if they’re a girl, convince the guys to carry it – fur bikinis were useful for that) to the next place they’ll make camp.
Okay, I’d carry her stuff.
Obviously, this lack of stuff limits the ability to create a technological society, and the nomadic lifestyle also makes it difficult for Amazon to deliver the hand-crank margarita maker you ordered since you don’t have an address. Why build a house, or a village? You’re just going to be leaving it to follow the critters you’re hunting. Certainly there were artifacts that were made before agriculture – Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey was built before agriculture, starting at around 10,000 B.C., or about the same time your mom was learning to drive.
But nomadic tribes stayed small – limited by Dunbar’s number – this post is from when I wrote about it last year (Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings):
Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which explains why I need to have my children program the streaming box hooked up to my television – my working memory is full of details like the shoe preferences of the administrative assistant at work from six jobs ago.
Göbekli Tepe – these people knew how to rock.
Now that doesn’t mean that Göbekli Tepe is proof that villages didn’t occur – Neanderthal habitations have been found even farther back in time, but those were probably seasonal as they followed the game. Göbekli Tepe was probably a ceremonial location where those people who collect ceramic figurines of frogs met for the annual ceramic frog convention, though this is just my speculation. But what isn’t speculation is that villages and settlements didn’t really exist until agriculture started, also around 10,000 B.C.
Perhaps the high point of Western Civilization?
And at that point everything changes. Archeological evidence indicates that hunter-gatherers worked just a fraction of the time (less than 20 hours per week) that the farmers worked after agriculture was invented. The hunter-gatherers spent time doing things that we think of as “fun” today – men take time off from work to hunt or fish. Women take time off to go and shop – modern-day gathering.
So why on earth did we stop doing things we’d been bred to find fun? We stopped hunting and gathering to trade for long hours of backbreaking farm labor in crowded villages that could allow violence, disease, and theft. My best guess that those hellish villages provided enough technological sophistication to provide constant streams of beer for the guys and red high-heeled shoes and makeup for the women. Oh, and the villages allowed for another unique feature: slavery. If you had an army (which you could now) you could go and take men, women, and crops from other villages. You could eat their food, and then make them plant more for you. And then you could make more beer.
But the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer is possibly enshrined in the Bible book of Genesis, in the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain the farmer, killed Abel the shepherd. The farmer killed the hunter-gatherer, which is what eventually happened within all of society.
Hey, bro, want to be a metaphor?
This change also impacted the genetics of humanity. As divisions of labor were made possible by the villages, genes for hunters were less in demand (except for soldiers) and genes for farmers were in demand. Artisans making pottery and accountants and tax collectors were now needed. The breeding for people changed: for the first time ever, people need to read, to do math. From my observation, it seems like math and reading are innate in many of the children I’ve worked with. The concepts are already within them.
That would indicate a pretty successful breeding program. Too dumb to read? No kids for you. Can’t add two plus two? Enjoy being the last of your family line.
In this way, man made civilization, and civilization changed man. If 10,000 B.C. man took a stroll in Central Park, Manhattan in modern clothes, he’d be indistinguishable physically from a modern man, if you could ignore the raw goose he was gnawing on. But mentally? He’d be incapable of living in a modern city. It’s probably he could never learn to do math, even rudimentary math. Reading would likely be possible only at the lowest levels, things like true crime books.
But he’d be a sucker for beer. And nuclear fur bikinis.
Göbekli Tepe photo by Zhengan [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
I don’t think they killed the hunter gatherers as a goal, but after they couldn’t go hunting, except on certain weekends (with the required license), they would hunt beer, and gather at the local watering hole for watching football. After that, since they had less money, they failed to pursue health care, acquired the usual health problems, and many died from cardiac arrest.
I’m sure their spouses were sad, but life insurance policies allowed them to continue with nails on Thursday, and Saturday night out with the girls.
Complete with little black dresses and fruity drinks with umbrellas . . . maybe we need to get back to caves?
The last of the major tribes of hunter-gatherers has (mostly) settled down on the Arabian peninsula within our lifetimes. The Asian and American steppes were settled by farmers in the 1800’s.
There is a very good reason why military units are certain sizes. Squads are 8-12: a family. Platoons are 30-50: an extended family. Companies are 120-150: a tribe.
It’s amazing how well that works out in real life – I’ve been shocked to see how once that magic number is reached – a company fragments into those tribes.
Some Americans may have felt uneasy 35 years ago when DUI laws, DWI checkpoints, seatbelt laws, and car liability insurance laws were started, but most people felt that the experts must be right.
Pro-police state shows like “COPS” and “America’s Most Wanted” were then aired, neighborhood watch groups were formed, “get tough on crime” candidates were elected, and laws allowing mandatory minimums, IMBRA, 3 strikes laws, curfews, police militarization, teen boot camps, school metal detectors, private prisons, and chain gangs were enacted.
Nanny state smoking laws then started appearing.
When 9/11 happened, the Patriot Act was passed, NSA wiretapping, no knock raids, take down notices, no fly lists, terror watch lists, Constitution free zones, stop and frisk, kill switches, National Security Letters, DNA databases, kill lists, FBAR, FATCA, Operation Chokepoint, TSA groping, civil forfeiture, CIA torture, NDAA indefinite detention, secret FISA courts, FEMA camps, laws requiring passports for domestic travel, IRS laws denying passports for tax debts, gun and ammo stockpiles, laws outlawing protesting, Jade Helm, sneak and peek warrants, policing for profit, no refusal blood checkpoints, license plate readers, redlight cameras, speed cameras, FBI facial and voice recognition, tattoo databases, gun bans, the end to the right to silence, free speech bans, searches without warrants, CISPA, SOPA, private prison quotas, supermax prisons, FOSTA, sex offender registration laws, and sex offender restriction laws were allowed.
Now that the USA is a total police state, Americans are finding out that changing anything is impossible and that freedom is lost forever.
If you did a documentary on day to day life and showed it to an audience in 1950, would they even believe it???
JW:
If you haven’t already, there are two books you ought to read.
The Day The Universe Changed, and The Axemaker’s Gift, both written by James Burke (of Connections fame).
Everything you said and more, expanded gloriously, interestingly, with a copious bibliography and footnotes.
(The former volume with a companion late 70s-era BBC series findable in bites on YouTube, until the minions of copyright squelch it.)
The first book shows how the exchange of knowledge changed civilization in four great bursts: the advents of the written word, the printed word, telecommunication, and finally personal computing/internet.
The second book shows how technology improves life, and simultaneously makes us slaves to technology, in greater and greater leaps.
Both books are simultaneously brilliant, fascinating, enlightening, and depressing. So probably revealed truth.
(Connections – the entire lot of them – FTR, is him explaining in 100 illustrations, that history is not linear, but rather wheels moving wheels moving wheels, demonstrating with irrefutable logic that Jamaican sugar production led to the space shuttle, and how industrial weaving gave you the computer. Just FYI. I’ve yet to find anything he’s written that’s dull, or wrong, and he should be Sir James, the Queen’s Official Historian of Western Civilization, with a spiffy office at Oxford or Cambridge and nice honorarium, and paid just to think, write, and make more BBC series. Maybe sometime, when I’m emperor for a day.)
I saw Connections on PBS when I was just a kid. Loved every second of it. I even saw Burke on a speaking tour – he was like a rock star, packed a 5,000 seat auditorium, and talked (with near 100% accuracy) about some of the implications of the information age.
I have not, however, read those books. Both are now on order. Thank you!!!!
I’ll have to make the boys watch Connections. Great series.
You have more interesting questions posed to you at the coffee maker than most…and also far more thought provoking answers.
Without coffee, I have no personality, though.
Our breeding program may have hit the “Idiocracy” stage. I’ve seen articles indicating that while IQs appeared to have been increasing over the last century, they started to decline after the 1970s.
Agreed, and the Flynn Effect probably masked it (to some extent). This also may explain Taylor Swift.
No doubt it is coincidental that the decline in IQ happens to correspond with the immigration “reform” in 1965 that opened the doors of America to the world.
For me it is an age thing: I knew everything when I was 16 and know virtually nothing now that I’m [censored]. More seriously, though, the same thought had occurred to me. The initial research showing this effect was done in Norway, which showed the decline first set in during the mid-1970s. I’ve always considered Norway to be heterogeneous, which would seem to indicate that the decline was not due to immigration. But in doing some quick research (the best kind) to write this response, I found that “[i]n the late 1960s, a combination of a booming economy and a population shortage led Norway to accept a number of labor migrants from Morocco, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and particularly Pakistan. These guest workers, though expected to be temporary, remained in the country and were eventually followed by other migrants, including refugees and family reunification candidates.” ( https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/norway-migrant-quality-not-quantity). So immigration seems a reasonable hypothesis. But where is the researcher that would dare test that hypothesis?
And where could he or she or xir get the research published? I think the content would disappear in short order off the Internet . . .
And one thing that has been established is that “national” IQ is a primary determinant in both economic output as well as ability to self-govern.
Enjoy the decline!
You really can’t overemphasize what a difference it makes to have food in surplus and readily obtainable by means other than hunting-gathering. If people had to spend most of their waking hours finding food for that day, they wouldn’t have time to invent coffee makers or write books. When you stop and think about how many people in this country are being fed by such a tiny number of actual farmers, it is kind of amazing. After our abundant fresh water, our fertile agricultural lands are America’s greatest natural resource but many Americans deride that farmland and the unprecedented labor saving it provides as “fly-over” country.
On the flip-side, if there is a serious disruption to the supply chain so your local Wal-Mart doesn’t get food delivery for a week, people are going to be in trouble and will start freaking out. Look at what happens to grocery stores when there is a hint of inclement weather, people pick them clean in hours. Now multiply that times a week, add in widespread power outages and you get that dystopian future in real-time.
I’ve heard the average family has enough food for three days in their house. Fortunately in flyover we have grain silos with enough wheat and other grain to keep us in porridge and whiskey until the new Republic starts . . . .