Agricultural Blunder
Agriculture enabled civilization*, but what else bad can be said about it? Sapolsky is another member of the not completely a fan club:
Which brings us to agriculture. I won’t pull any punches— I think that its invention was one of the all-time human blunders, up there with, say, the New Coke debacle and the Edsel. Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leading humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do, namely living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably the unequal distribution of surplus, generating socioeconomic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies. And from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump until we’ve got Mr. McGregor persecuting Peter Rabbit and people incessantly singing “Oklahoma.”
Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (p. 415). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.Hey, I say that the farmer and the neuroman should be friends, but, whatever.
*with concomitant war, epidemic disease, and inequality.
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