Nasty, Brutish, and Long

History traces the grand.  I know that the ancient Sumerians devised cuneiform, that the Mayans conceived the number zero, that the Greeks dreamed up western philosophy, and that the Romans constructed great roads, because I learned those things in social studies.  But I don’t know what life was like for an average Sumerian, Mayan, Greek or Roman.  Maybe writing the history of an “average” citizen would be harder than outlining the achievements of a civilization – or maybe not – but in any event, it might be more useful for a student who wants to understand his own life in the context of other humans’ lives.

This civilization-level focus – as distinct from an individual- or family-level focus – distorts our view of the past.  We tend to perceive cultures like ours, where mouths are fed by farming instead of by hunting and gathering, as offering lifestyles that are superior to the lifestyles offered by hunting and gathering cultures.  Thomas Hobbes summed up this viewpoint when he described a hunter-gatherer’s life as “nasty, brutish and short.”

The thing is, Hobbes was wrong.  It’s true that life expectancies in modern agriculture-based societies exceed those of most hunter-gatherer cultures, but hunter-gatherers’ lives were neither nasty nor brutish, and in comparison to the lives of early city-dwellers, not short.  Modern archeology has revealed that hunter-gatherers enjoyed more leisure time than average people in farming-based cultures could ever dream of – as Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs, and Steel, and as Felipe Ferndanez-Armesto discusses in the audiobook (to which I’m now listening) Ideas that Shaped Mankind, a hunter-gatherer could generally secure a week’s worth of food in two or three days of work.  In farming-based economies, that can’t happen.

It is true, of course, that agricultural societies have made nearly all of history’s grand “advances,” as we define the term.  For instance, it generally took agricultural societies to create new systems of governance.  In a hunting-gathering band, which generally consisted of a few family units, complex political institutions were unnecessary.  But in the denser populations that intensive agriculture can support, some system of governance is required to keep the peace.  And it took agricultural societies, which necessarily stayed in one place as crops grew to maturity, to produce cultural artifacts and architectural innovations.  Hunting-gathering societies, which were nearly always nomadic, didn’t produce anything that couldn’t be readily transported.  And it took agricultural societies, with their necessary accumulation of goods, to devise systems of writing, which emerged originally as a means of counting stored goods.  Nomadic hunting-gathering societies generally didn’t store goods, and therefore never experienced the necessity of record-keeping that prompted to the invention of writing.

Agriculture-based societies have a nasty side.  Despotism and tyranny could generally only arise in agricultural societies, because the same social needs that conduced the rise of government – the need for dispute resolution, the need to store and distribute food during the non-harvest season – permitted the concentration of power in the hands of a few.  (Think of Egyptian pharohs directing thousands of peasants or slaves to build giant pyramids to serve as the pharohs’ personal tombs.)  Increased population densities led to previously unknown problems of disease and sanitation – until the twentieth century, most major cities had a net-negative birth/death rate and relied on immigrants from the country to keep their populations growing.  And it took a densely populated nation-state, with a strong governmental system, to convince members of the population that the perpetuation of the nation-state was important enough to justify the sacrifice of the individual’s life.  This new brand of ideological control, in addition to the ability of a farming-based culture to support specialized fighters that collectively formed a standing army, led to the brutish kill-or-be-killed nature of warfare between agriculture-based socieites.  Fights between huning-gathering societies were generally less deadly, with more yelling and spear-chucking than killing.  Hunter-gatherers tended to be less convinced of the need to die for their systems of political organization.

And yet it is the farming societies that we praise in social studies class.  We laud the development of writing, philosophy, mathematics, drama.  That’s because, I think, we focus on the grand-scale achievements of agriculture-based societies.  That stuff is interesting.  But for someone who wants to understand his own life in the context of the way his forebearers lived, we ought to focus on ordinary lives.  Less on Sophocles’s innovations regarding the number of actors onstage, and more on how an average Athenian put bread on the table.  Less about Mayan mathematics, and more about surviving in the jungle.

This same problem of focus applies to some fur-trade histories.  There is too much focus on who was the first white man to be where – on what trapper “discovered” South Pass, on which explorer first saw Yosemite Valley.  But I don’t think that’s why people care about mountain men and cowboys.  People care about mountain men and cowboys because mountain men and cowboys are our cultural ancestors.  They embodied, supposedly, many of the traits that modern Americans like to perceive in themselves – freedom, self-reliance, toughness, a capacity for violence.  To understand whether, and to what degree, the early fur trappers embodied those characteristics, it doesn’t matter which white man first followed an Indian trail through South Pass.  It matters how the mountain men lived, day in and day out.  At the end of this trip, I hope to be able to say something about that.

Duke expresses his view of my historical pontification.