Judgement Day, 10,000 years in the making
After ten thousand years of living in history, is our time finally up?
Many different styles of agriculture were in use all over the world ten thousand years ago, when our particular style of agriculture emerged in the Near East. This style, our style, is one I call totalitarian agriculture, in order to stress the way it subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food. Fueled by the enormous food surpluses generated uniquely by this style of agriculture, a rapid population growth occurred among its practitioners, followed by an equally rapid geographical expansion that obliterated all other lifestyles in its path (including those based on other styles of agriculture). This expansion and obliteration of lifestyles continued without a pause in the millennia that followed, eventually reaching the New World in the fifteenth century and continuing to the present moment in remote areas of Africa, Australia, New Guinea and South America.
— ‘The Story Of B’, Daniel Quinn, pp247-248
Homo habilis was using stone tools including knives, axes and scraping tools used to work animal hides as long as 2.5 million years ago. A million years later, Homo erectus was wearing clothes to cover his naked body, building shelters, and using fire to cook his meals. There is evidence that 400,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis was already burying his dead. The oldest piece of art ever found is a 233,000-year-old female figurine, found in the Golan in Israel. The oldest cave painting is a red hand stencil in a cave in Spain, daubed there by a neanderthal more than 64,000 years ago, while a rock face in South Africa carries an even older painting, dated to 73,000 years ago.
In short, when the first Homo sapiens emerged 300,000 years ago, they were born into a world already populated by people who made tools, controlled fire, cooked their meals, wore clothes, buried their dead, and made art. For hundreds of thousands of years, people who were just like us in every way that matters lived lives that we would recognise as human. Just like us, they had the intellectual capacity for abstract thinking and creativity. Just like us, they liked to explore, moving into new habitats and territories the world over. Just like us, they felt joy and anger, love and sadness. Just like us, they were able to look up the stars of the night sky and wonder what was out there. And if we could put them in a time machine, just like us, they’d be perfectly happy to eat pizza and potato chips and watch Netflix, because they were every bit as human as we are.
And yet, the lives of these people are consigned to a period of time known to us as ‘pre-history’. Why is that? What happened 10,000 years ago that pitched humans from pre-history into history? And what is it about the last 10,000 years that differs substantially from what came before?
The oldest known story, a tale known as ‘The Smith and the Devil’, has been told in a recognisable form for 6,000 years, but there is every reason to believe that stories have been told for much longer than that. Because stories endure, and because they contain the information that each generation finds the most worthwhile to pass on to the next, stories act as time capsules. Uniquely among all of our inventions, they allow us to reach back into the far past and converse with our distant ancestors about knowledge, wisdom, values and truths.
Paleontologists and historians tell us that 10,000 years ago, an event known as the Agricultural Revolution took place in the Fertile Crescent. This was the pivot point; the moment when pre-history ascended to history. From that moment on human endeavour has been one long mad scurry towards civilisation and modernity. Within a few thousand years of the revolution villages had grown into towns, towns into cities, cities into kingdoms, and kings began to fight. Empires arose, built on the backs of slaves. A military class also sprang up and, time and time again, took control. Workers and slaves periodically rebelled and threw off their masters, for a time. We are all familiar with this history. Some of it is fuzzier in our minds than other parts, but we can all name ancient kings and kingdoms; military rulers and slave rebels. Many of them are heroes to this day.
But we also have this narrative in another form, one that hasn’t come through the dry medium of what we now think of as science, but through the more ancient medium of storytelling. In that version, the same history runs something like this:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree [of the knowledge of good and evil] was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
In these passages, taken from the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis (written about 4,000 years ago), we find the foundational beliefs of our culture:
That humans were created to be the dominant species on the planet, and that every other living thing was created for our use and benefit.
That Homo sapiens became what we think of as human for the first time in the Fertile Crescent (the area between the four rivers), which is also identified as Eden, a garden of plenty where humans could simply reach out and take food from the trees around them as they pleased.
That before this, humans were completely primitive: naked, without fire, without cooking, without art, without anything that we would recognise as ‘civilisation.’
That in the garden, the first humans did something that caused us to be cursed and cast out from this happy state and forced us to work hard for our food in a perpetual battle with nature forevermore.
Furthermore, the fourth chapter of Genesis tells us what happened next:
Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.
Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering — fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.
Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
In these short paragraphs is found the history of the agricultural revolution — and we discover why, in the passage that began this essay, the agriculture we practice is referred to as ‘totalitarian agriculture’.
What the story of Cain and Able recounts is a potted history of how totalitarian agriculture spread across the planet: Cain is a totalitarian agriculturalist, planting and harvesting wheat. Able, on the other hand, is a shepherd. To this very day, shepherds who live the self-same lifestyle as Able can be seen grazing their flocks on the hills of Judea. Not much grows there, but the goats are able to pick a living from the little amount of scrub that does, and the shepherds in turn benefit from the meat and milk that the goats provide. It is a form of agriculture, but one that depends upon being in harmony with the natural world rather than working against it.
In Genesis, God curses Cain for Abel’s murder, but Cain is not killed. Instead he goes out into the world and builds the first city. His offspring become the first people to make stringed and wind instruments, but also to work bronze and iron into tools, including the first purpose-made weapons of war. They are people who inhabit history.
It’s important to understand that while Cain and Able may have been fictional persons, their story is not made up. Totalitarian agriculture allowed for huge food surpluses to be farmed, but it also required ownership of the land to the exclusion of all others, both other people and other species. Time and again, Cain did indeed rise up to murder Able, to clear the way for more totalitarian agriculture and in time to build cities and develop what we now think of as civilisation, although some of the components — clothes, cooking, art (but not cities; weapons) — were there long before any of this happened.
In 2018, archaeologists working at a site in Jordan where the Natufi tribe had lived made a remarkable discovery. Sweeping up ash and soot, one of the archaeologists realised that she was looking at the charred remains of breadcrumbs.
According to NPR: “As the team analyzed the crumbs further, they found out that the Natufians were sophisticated cooks. Their flour was made from two different types of ingredients — wild wheat called einkorn and the roots of club-rush tubers, a type of a flowering plant. That particular combination allowed them to make pliable elastic dough that could be pressed onto the walls of their fireplace pits, much like flatbreads are baked today in tandoori ovens — and baked to perfection. Besides the einkorn and tubers, the team also found traces of barley and oats. The Natufians may have had rather developed taste buds, too. They liked to toss some spices and condiments into their dishes, particularly mustard seeds.”
While ancient breadcrumbs are always interesting (to archaeologists), what really set them back on their feet was the date of the site. The charred breadcrumbs they were looking at were 14,000 years old, some 4,000 years before the Agricultural Revolution took place.
That means that ancient people were not, as we assume, ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherers, living lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Hobbes put it, before being saved by the civilising forces of government and society. To the contrary, prehistoric man was still man as we would recognise him, farming in a sustainable fashion, baking bread, wearing clothes, making art, and telling stories. And if the book of Genesis is accurate, it was abandoning this way of life in order to practice totalitarian agriculture that led to inequality, murder and war. It was totalitarianism that made life nasty, brutish and short, and continues to do so to this day.
As I write this, the people of Sri Lanka are carrying out a revolution against their government. They have already deposed their Prime Minister, driven to desperation by food and fuel shortages which were brought about because of the government’s reckless drive to convert the country to wholly organic farming. Dutch farmers are on track to do the same, also driven to desperation by green policies that will put an estimated half of all Dutch farmers out of business. Both of these countries are net exporters of food, meaning that the knock-on effect will be food prices rise for people the world over, tipping millions more into poverty.
At the same time, I walked into my local shop today and saw a whole basket of avocados that had turned black and rotten before being sold. Our culture (by which I mean the civilised world) throws away about a third of all food grown each year, some 1.3 billion tonnes, equivalent in value to about $1 trillion.
Of course, absolutely no-one deserves to be driven to starvation, especially by government diktat. But it’s notable that our food industry and farming system is so wholly dependent on chemical fertilisers and pesticides that any attempt to farm more sustainably means that millions of people world-wide will starve, even as a glut of surplus is being produced.
That, more than anything else, is indicative of the totalitarian — and unsustainable — nature of our culture’s farming practices, and it’s not a problem that has been created by Bill Gates or George Soros or Klaus Schwab.
It’s a problem that is 10,000 years in the making, one which was always inevitable as soon as the first totalitarian farmers began to insist that their way of farming was the only acceptable way. For 10,000 years we have been moving inexorably toward the day when the chickens finally came home to roost, and now that day has come. Today is Judgement Day.
There is a way of farming that regenerates rather than depletes the land. It is possible to do without the commercial fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides, but then that wouldn't make money for Big Ag and the promoters of GMO's, so it is not exactly mainstream news. And animal husbandry is a necessary part of the whole. Bad news for wannabe insect farmers and producers of synthetic meat.
https://www.backtoedenfilm.com/#/
https://www.permaculture.org.uk/
https://www.tenthacrefarm.com/what-is-permaculture/
Even if we carry on using chemical feetilisers doing so slowly removes goodness from the soil, unless we at least bury the dead in fields or redirect sewage there (ew).