Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Jared Diamond.  "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race."  Discover Magazine, May 1997, 64-66.

I discovered Diamond's essay for the first time several years ago, while I was reading up on human health (in an ongoing quest to improve my own).  I was intrigued, and eventually convinced, although I know that there are important points to be made against Diamond's pessimistic take on agricultural civilization (e.g. the arguments raised by Steven Pinker).  That said, this post is going to be my version of Diamond (dumber, shorter, and with less references).  I wrote the original version of the post in response to a friend, who forwarded an article lamenting recent decline in the birth rate among nations of the First World.  I have seen several such articles, all of them implying that social upheaval (broken economies, crime, etc.) is owing to a lack of babies, a lack that these writers (if I understand them correctly) seem to ascribe to widespread laziness.  My fellow First Worlders are not "putting out" as industriously as they should, and will be rewarded with the implosion of their padded social safety nets (as fewer kids exist to care for more and more parents, aged and helpless).  I doubt this.  Following the train of thought developed by Daniel Quinn, I further doubt that a reduction in human population worldwide would be a bad thing (necessarily: I am not saying that it would be great, either; it might, however, be natural -- as good or bad as rocks, waterfalls, and bacon).  Here is what I wrote, with a little minimal editing.

I think population reduction is a healthy response to imbalance in resources.  We simply don't have the goods to fuel endless growth (in people or the things they require to exist, things like food, water, shelter, clothes, entertainment -- unless we are willing to drastically reduce our expectations in these areas).  We are adjusting to several environmental factors, e.g. globalization (and concomitant competition for increasingly scarce resources), climate change (which may or may not have anything significant to do with us), and technological revolution (which has addicted increasing numbers of us to luxuries like running water, food that someone else prepared, housing that someone else built, gadgets that someone else invented and mass-produced, and lifetimes spent working narrow careers with companies that don't go belly up). 

Historically, the agricultural model for human survival has been to reproduce like insects: we made lots of people -- lots of sick, blind, stunted, relatively weak people -- and took over from the hunter-gatherers (who were healthier, sharper-sighted, taller, stronger, and even more mentally capable than we) by sheer force of numbers.  One familiar episode in this ongoing saga is the displacement of the American Indians by boatloads of European riff-raff (whose guns, germs, and steel paved the way for them to become a dominant force worldwide).  Indians were healthier (as individuals), more sustainable (as communities), and less numerous than the immigrants who replaced them.  We were the mites and moths and hornets who overran their beehive.  Now, it's our turn to be overrun.  Maybe the result will be just another opportunistic parasitism, but I don't know.  I get the feeling that other societies are collapsing too: people are living shorter and sicker lives all over the world; standard methods of producing the energy modern civilization requires to exist are failing; economies are imploding (not just in Europe and North America: India, China, and their neighbors are also looking less than robust these days).  I think we may just have to learn to live with less; and that may mean that there will be less of us.  Our old methods for solving these dilemmas are (1) plague and (2) wars: the last century saw us pushing (1) away while embracing (2) with all our might.  I think we might be due for a switch, with (1) returning (in the form of rampant diseases of civilization: diabetes, syndrome X, autoimmune disorders, obesity, failure to thrive, infertility, heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc.) and (2) fading (as we stagger away from a century of vicious fighting).  I could be wrong, of course.

A central concern here is quality of life.  If we are all willing to live in really primitive conditions (such as many of our forefathers endured), then the agricultural model offers a kind of haven, but it comes with a price, deliberately breaking the individual to save the community: better 1000 people barely alive than 100 thriving.  The price for the civilization that is India is the dung-heap that is Mother Teresa's Calcutta.  The price for the relatively few rich and prosperous people worldwide is a much larger group of starving and miserable people (who make clothes for the rich, grow their food, clean their houses, etc.).  This is the way agriculture is and ever has been (even in Mormon Utah: Brigham Young and his close friends were millionaires while others eked out a hardscrabble existence in a howling wilderness that has yet to blossom as Temple Square).  Do we want to perpetuate that?  I am not sure.  I don't have final answers.  But I think a lot of people with elective power are using it (in their own lives) to build a kind of middle-class freedom that is ultimately anathema to the agricultural model (which requires them to be serfs).  Women don't want to be baby-making machines.  Men don't want to spend their lives slaving away for the Man so that their fourteen sons can fight for the privilege of taking their spot on the line when they are too wasted and decrepit to hack it any more.  Nobody wants to bet on the longevity of social contracts that are collapsing all over (as education becomes increasingly overpriced and meaningless, at least in terms of securing long-term gainful employment that serves the employee rather than his feudal masters).  There is your threat to the family: good, old-fashioned supply and demand.  If there is no food for my family, no place for them to live, no job that will allow me to provide them with these things, then how am I supposed to have one (a family, that is)?  Many people just cannot afford it (unless they are willing to bring their kids up as serfs, which those of us in the First and Second Worlds are loathe to do: we were raised as gentry or honorable artisans, not slaves).  So population declines, with acts of God (plague, environmental conditions) and human anxiety (increasing uncertainty about the future) as proximate causes.

Since this is a topic of recurring interest to me, there will be more about it on the blog.  I am not done with it yet by any means.

God vs. gods

Daniel Quinn.  The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit.  New York: Bantam, 1996.  ISBN 0553379011.

In my last post, I included this quote but did not really say much about it (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):

Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis.  When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky.  They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable.  I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis.  I really don't.  But they're not our problem.  I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods.  They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are.  If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are.  The gods are here...I mean here.  Among the Alawa: here.  Among the Bushmen: here.  Among the Navajo: here.  Among the Kreen-Akrore: here.  Among the Onabasulu: here...

This isn't a theological statement they're making.  The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods.  Nothing of the kind.  They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.'  They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods.  The gods are to be found among them--living where they live.  The god is what animates their place.  That's what a god is.  A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world.  A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god.  All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider.  Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.

Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis.  Can you imagine that?  Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled.  Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin.  Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished.  Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again.  Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons.  The god knows how to take care of that place.  It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before.  It doesn't need to be what it was before.  You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived.  This is nonsense.  What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time.  There is no such form and never will be any such form.  Everything here is on the way.  Everything here is in process.

The picture of deity given here is one that appeals to me a lot in the wake of my faith crisis.  Contrary to what many people seem to expect (and to what this blog may sometimes appear to indicate), my conversion to disbelief did not make me an immediate "expert" on life, the universe, and everything.  When people ask me "why?" now, I give them guesses (like the one I posted in my last entry) not once-and-for-all answers (like the truth I was certain of as a believer).  My lack of knowledge regarding the ultimate causes of things means that I am necessarily still comfortable with the idea of "unknowns" -- in theory, I have nothing against referring to these unknowns with names (like "God").  But in the wake of considering the world as I see it (and reading Quinn), I think "gods" is a better name for life's unknowns as I experience them than "God".  Let me try to explain what I mean by this.

In the world I live in, life consists of multiple mysterious systems in balance (from galactic star clusters down to atoms, with everything in between, including the planet's biosphere with its different ecosystems, and the bodies of individual plant and animal organisms, each of which is an ecosystem unto itself).  I cannot know what keeps these systems running (hence the mystery), but I can see that they are all running at different rates, in different ways, with different points of interface linking them to one another.  I see that when something disturbs the equilibrium of one system and not another (when someone runs my buddy over with a car but does not hit me, for example), the disturbed system suffers (and may die), while the undisturbed one continues on (to an inevitable dissolution: all systems are eventually recycled).  So each system has its own unknown, its own mysterious center of balance that holds it together until it falls apart: its own "god" (if you will).  My "god" (the unknown center of the complex of systems that is me) presides over the interface of several other "gods" within me (multi-organ systems, individual organs, cells, and independent organisms who live inside me), and is presided over in turn by other "gods" (which define the ecosystem that is my habitat, the planet that houses that ecosystem, etc.).  These "gods" are real.  I interact with them in a material and vital way every day.  They are also vulnerable.  As Quinn says, a flamethrower (or shopping mall) has the power to destroy or weaken them.  Unlike the almighty God I imagined as a Mormon, they represent something I might actually destroy in a careless fit of whatever it is that causes people to detonate bombs, deplete soils, and generally waste resources wantonly.

I am not adamantly opposed to the idea of some almighty uber-controller managing all systems: I do not deny the possibility that a big "God" exists out there somewhere.  But when I examine life as I experience it, it makes more sense to posit lots of smaller, more local, weaker "gods" who manage the mystery of life between them.  When I look into the world, I do not see a grand, unitary purpose rolling forward to inexorable fulfillment: I see multiple purposes, some realized and some not, some great and some small.  I do not know the causes for all things, but I do get the feeling that there are causes (in the plural) rather than a single cause (Aristotle's Prime Mover).  More urgently, I see that my previous focus on the possibility (which I regarded as a certainty) of a single ruling cause led me to neglect paying too much heed to smaller causes.  Since I assumed God was capable of restoring whatever havoc I might wreak in his world, I was not particularly worried about overtaxing the environment: I was philosophically down with killing many small (real) gods wantonly in the name of my big (imaginary) God.

Before you decide to ignore me as some kind of crazy, New Age hippie, you should know that I have no illusions about "saving the world" as it is.  Like Quinn says above, there are no eternal, Platonic forms for life as we experience it: it is a journey, not a destination.  Today's gods must die to make way for those of tomorrow.  I know this fact, and embrace it: life is death (as Heraclitus would say).  But I also know what follows from this: to waste death is to waste life.  If we kill all the bison for sport today, there will be none left when our grandchildren are hungry tomorrow.  If we strip all the soils down to bedrock today to feed our modern civilization, our grandchildren (billions of them) will have to discover some new life to take if the race is to continue.  Based on our past experience (the lessons of history as I read them), we cannot subsist happily writing blank checks for unlimited resources and hoping God (the big one) will honor them with manna from on high.  Rather than consume the small gods today and hope the big one sends us a fat paycheck tomorrow, picking up the tab for our indulgence, we need to cultivate the small gods: we need to refocus our efforts toward intelligent production.  Make every life lost count for something valuable, something that preserves (as much as possible) the integrity of the whole system as it moves into eternity.

In Search of Human Ethics

Marvin Harris.  Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures.  1977.  New York: Vintage, 1991.  ISBN 067972849X.

Daniel Quinn.  The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit.  New York: Bantam, 1996.  ISBN 0553379011.

Losing the perspective brought by Mormonism meant losing the ostensible purpose of my life ("I am here to serve God and his church in whatever way I may decide and/or church leaders may require").  When I no longer had this as my ultimate "reason" for everything (the final "because" to the toddler's "why?"), I had to take a step back and ask myself why I did things.  What was I trying to do?  What were communities (like the church) trying to do?  Part of my faith crisis involved looking intensely at human communities and discovering that they exist to perpetuate themselves (not fixed moral codes); this became problematic when I realized that the church was no different: its leaders said what they said, did what they did, so that we would all keep on "keeping on" as members, regardless of what Joseph Smith really said or did (maybe he was a bit crazy, but that's not worth looking at too carefully), or what the reality of man's destiny was (your purpose is to build our society with work and offspring: don't get distracted by other stuff).  Unfortunately for me, I really cared about these things (especially the latter), and found I had little interest in the LDS church without them.  So I was left wondering why people do what people do (i.e. create societies that must go on and--ideally--get bigger to the point that they fill the earth)?

Enter Marvin Harris.  My interest in human fitness led me eventually to the "paleo diet," the premise of which was that the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years ago paved the way for the introduction of many anti-nutrients into the human diet, leading ultimately to the set of "civilized" diseases currently plaguing much of the world (metabolic syndrome, diabetes, auto-immune disorders).  Knocking around the Internet in search of "paleo" information to flesh out this thesis, I found the immense website of Ricardo Carvalho, which is named after Harris' book title (translated into Portuguese).  (Carvalho also recommends the book on his extensive Amazon reading list, which I have consulted several times when searching for good reads.)  I was intrigued and checked the book out from my local university library.  Its thesis is relatively simple: human societies shape their behavior to match the quality of the resources available to them, changing behavior as the surrounding environment succeeds (or fails) to supply what they need to survive (adequate food, shelter, and reproductive possibilities).  Most interesting is his explanation of Aztec cannibalism, which he traces back to a chronic lack of animal protein (a precious resource): in the absence of domesticated herds or wild game, the Aztecs were reduced to eating other people.  They did not eat people because they were any more "wicked" than others; what they needed was not "repentance" but food.  Contrary to everything I would have thought in my life as a Mormon, their problem was not one to be remedied by civilization (the "gift of the gods").  Instead, civilization (and the exploding population that has always accompanied it since the agricultural revolution) was the problem (Harris, Cannibals and Kings, 165):

Mesoamerica was left at the end of the ice age in a more depleted condition, as far as animal resources are concerned, than any other region.  The steady growth of the population and the intensification of production [two things that always come with civilization in the wake of the agricultural revolution] under the coercive managerial influence of the classic highland empires virtually eliminated animal flesh from the diet of ordinary people.  The ruling class and their retainers naturally continued to enjoy such delicacies as dogs, turkeys, ducks, deer, rabbits, and fish.  But, as Harner notes, the commoners--despite the expansion of the chinampas [floating gardens]--were often reduced to eating the algae skimmed off the surface of Lake Texcoco.  While corn and beans in sufficient quantity could provide all of the essential amino acids, recurrent production crises throughout the fifteenth century meant that protein ratios were frequently depressed to levels which would have biologically justified a strong craving for meat.  In addition, fats of all sorts were perennially in short supply. 

Mesoamerican cannibalism was just one extreme example of the kind of crisis of availability that has defined human civilization from the agricultural revolution.  (As an aside, the astute reader will notice that this protein-starved Mesoamerica looks very different from anything in the Book of Mormon, whose theories of cannibalism and "Lamanite" life in general are clearly folklore from nineteenth-century New England.)  The crisis works as follows: (1) a society produces crops (usually some kind of grain, i.e. grass seed); (2) grain production allows for a higher birth rate; (3) more numbers provide the resources necessary to take over more land, dispossessing people and animals living in a less "civilized" (and more ecologically sustainable) way; (4) the cost of having more people is that many are under-nourished, especially as the rest begin putting major dents in the best non-agricultural food sources available; (5) in the end, society is either saved by technological revolution (a farming break-though that allows us to sustain the burgeoning population) or falls prey to warfare (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people) or famine (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people).  Basically, Thomas Malthus was right (though he did not know that grain is poisonous to humans individually as well as collectively).

Harris' thesis was a compelling analysis of human community, for me, but I was left rather stranded by it: after several thousand years in living in constant debt (to the earth, other species, and ourselves), how are we supposed to transform ourselves back into productive mode (a way of living that does not inevitably kill everything around us)?  Harris was the doctor who informed me that I had an incurable disease, dissecting the disorder minutely when all I could really hear was "incurable."  In addition, I now had way too much "technical" information to share whenever people asked me about my increasingly odd opinions regarding diet, religion, and politics.  A simple question deserves a simple answer, not a litany of jargon.  I had a worldview that made sense to me logically.  What I needed now was a simple narrative for relating to it more personally (and pro-actively) and sharing it with others: in short, I needed a myth.  Enter Daniel Quinn.

Quinn tells an engaging story, a fictional account of a modern Catholic priest sent to Europe to spy on someone who may be the Antichrist.  Upon making contact, the priest discovers that the Antichrist (a mysterious character called "B") is preaching against civilization (the agricultural revolution and everything that has followed from it), which he regards as a disease inasmuch as it reduces complex, beautiful reality (life) to simple, ugly reality (death).  The book is extremely interesting (with an ending which I will not give away), and I will not attempt to summarize it here.  Instead, let me offer one of my favorite passages (Quinn, The Story of B, 159-161):

Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis.  When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky.  They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable.  I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis.  I really don't.  But they're not our problem.  I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods.  They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are.  If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are.  The gods are here...I mean here.  Among the Alawa: here.  Among the Bushmen: here.  Among the Navajo: here.  Among the Kreen-Akrore: here.  Among the Onabasulu: here...

This isn't a theological statement they're making.  The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods.  Nothing of the kind.  They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.'  They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods.  The gods are to be found among them--living where they live.  The god is what animates their place.  That's what a god is.  A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world.  A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god.  All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider.  Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.

Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis.  Can you imagine that?  Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled.  Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin.  Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished.  Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again.  Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons.  The god knows how to take care of that place.  It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before.  It doesn't need to be what it was before.  You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived.  This is nonsense.  What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time.  There is no such form and never will be any such form.  Everything here is on the way.  Everything here is in process.

Quinn's solution to the problem of civilization posed by Harris (and Malthus) is conceptually very simple.  Stop increasing human food supply every year.  We already produce more than enough for everyone; our problem is not lack, but something else (the inevitable inequality in distribution created by civilization).  Quinn illustrates his solution with a story about mice.  A population of mice fed more than it needs to survive always increases in number (even as some mice starve to death because others don't let them at the food), while a population fed no more than it requires to survive inevitably (without any form of birth control whatsoever) remains stable, replacing itself without growing any larger.  To top things off, you can slowly cut down the overall population of the mice by gradually decreasing food supply, without starving any of them (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):

Someone says, here's what to do.  Yesterday five hundred kilos of food went into the cage.  Today we'll reduce that by a kilo.  Oh no, another objects.  A kilo is too much.  Let's reduce it by a quarter of a kilo.  So that's what they do.  Four hundred ninety-nine and three quarters kilos of food go into the cage.  Tension in the lab as everyone waits for food riots and famine--but of course there are no food riots and no famine.  Among sixty-four thousand mice, a quarter of a kilo of food is like a flake of dandruff apiece.  Tomorrow four hundred ninety-nine and a half kilos of food go into the cage.  Still no food riots and no famine.  This procedure is followed for a thousand days--and not once is there a food riot or a famine.  After a thousand days only two hundred fifty kilos of food are going into the cage--and guess what?  There are no longer sixty-four thousand mice in the cage.  There are only thirty-two thousand.  Not a miracle--just a demonstration of the laws of ecology.  A decline in food availability has been answered by a decline in population.  As always.  Semper et ubique.  Nothing to do with riots.  Nothing to do with famine.  Just the normal response of a feeder population to the availability of food.

To me, this looks like the most painless way to accomplish what we are already doing anyway.  If we do not find some way to keep our civilized growth in check, we will run out of food eventually.  We can wait for nature to fix that problem with diseases, real famine (sudden withdrawal of all sustenance), or something worse, or we can put ourselves on a diet (and get back to something like health: I have a feeling Quinn is right to say that involves a radical transformation in the way we live, the things we value, and ultimately what it means to be human).  This does not mean that we should all begin living in caves, hunting wild animals for food, or going naked all the time (though some of us might choose to do this: good luck to them--they'll need it in spades).  What we need is a way forward, a road that leads beyond agricultural civilization rather than back to whatever existed before it.  Quinn provides a very easily accessible account of the best route I have found to date, proving that all other alternatives are really just so many ways of ignoring the same problem: civilization, or modern life as we know it since the agricultural revolution, is killing us, de-stabilizing our moral values, destroying our homes, and inexorably taking away with one hand what it pretends to offer with the other.