3: The Agricultural History of the World
To start with, here’s an example of what scientists have discovered, as it relates to people.
Dr. Jared Diamond figured out how to write a physical, chemical, and biological history of civilization, which he tells in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. This is a completely different version of history than we learned in public school.
Humans are made of atoms, food is made of atoms, and everything else in the world is made of atoms. But we can’t see atoms. To us, people, food, and everything else in the world look like different things. So we naturally think of them as different things. But people, food, and everything else in the world are only different things in the sense that they’re different combinations of about 100 kinds of atoms. The atoms are only different from each other because they’re made up of different combinations of protons, neutrons, and electrons, each of which which are the same from one atom to another. So when I say that what sounds like anti-Capitalist ideology coming from me is really atomic physics, that’s what I mean.
Molecules contain energy in the molecular bonds between their atoms. Chemical reactions either absorb or give off energy, as a result of molecular bonds being created or broken. When plants absorb sunlight through their leaves and nutrients through their leaves and roots, they use the sunlight energy to create new molecular bonds, to turn the nutrient atoms into bigger molecules. Firewood, food, and fossil fuels are all made up of big molecules, which are broken when firewood and fossil fuels are burned and food is digested, which is why they all give off energy. You get energy from the food you eat because you’re eating sunlight.
The food cycle of an environment is the process by which atoms and energy move through the environment. In healthy environments, the atoms and energy keep moving at consistent rates, which is why the environment sustains itself instead of breaking down. Plants absorb sunlight and nutrients, herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat herbivores, and carnivores eventually die and are eaten by bugs, worms, and bacteria, which break the dead animals down into the soil nutrients that are eaten by plants. All the energy that cycles through the environment came from the sun (unless the environment also involves geothermal energy).
Atoms and energy move back and forth between people and the environment. Atoms and energy move from each person to the environment at a fairly consistent rate. If atoms and energy don’t move from the environment to people at an equal rate, it means the people aren’t getting enough to eat, which is more commonly known as a famine. When a woman gets pregnant, she needs to eat more. By eating more, she uses her digestive system and her uterus to turn topsoil nutrients into a baby. We are all made out of topsoil nutrients, because our bodies are all made out of the food we’ve eaten.
A lot of people think it’s wrong to think of people as being made out of dirt, so they say we shouldn’t use science to try to figure out how the world works. But just because you don’t like thinking about a certain thing doesn’t prove you have the power to make the world work differently than it does. Voluntary ignorance is not personal empowerment; it just gives you the illusion of personal empowerment. You can’t save the world by hiding your head in the sand. Your body, including your brain, is made of nutrients that came from the food you ate. The nutrients in your food came from the dirt. Get over it.
A lot of people say that they agree that people’s bodies came from the dirt, but what about their minds? What about their spirits? What about their souls? Those aren’t made out of dirt, so that must prove that human consciousness originates on some invisible plane of existence.
People who make that argument are trying to use their own ignorance of science to prove that they’re experts at science. You are able to perceive your mind, your spirit, and your soul because of your brain, and your brain is made out of dirt. Everything you’re able to think about, you’re able to think about because of your brain, and your brain is made out of dirt.
Your brain is an organ, just like every other organ of your body. Just like every other organ of your body, your brain does certain things, and thinking is what your brain does. Your brain is the most complicated organ of your body, which has made it the hardest to figure out, but just because something is hard to figure out doesn’t prove that supernatural powers must be causing it.
Back in the days of the Bubonic Plague in Europe, people didn’t have microscopes, so they had no way of knowing that plagues were caused by germs. They thought plagues were caused by evil spirits. But that doesn’t prove the Bubonic Plague was caused by evil spirits, that only proves that people thought it was caused by evil spirits because they didn’t know it was caused by germs.
So once again, voluntary ignorance is not personal empowerment. Just because something is hard to figure out doesn’t prove that the simple version you want to believe in must be true.
That brings me to Dr. Diamond’s history of the world. The world wasn’t conquered by Europeans, or Whites, or Christians. The world was conquered by the people who were the most successful at turning topsoil nutrients into people. Those people turned out to be Europeans, Whites, and Christians. It’s easy to assume that their conquering the world had something to do with them being Europeans, Whites, and Christians, but it doesn’t. Those are just the easiest things for people to see—as opposed the atoms the people and their food were made of, or all the chemical reactions that were involved.
10,000 years ago, people were spread out over all the habitable land in the world, with the exception of some islands they hadn’t reached yet. The people were—as people still are—evolutionarily equal members of the same species. That meant that no group of people was superior or inferior to any other group because of who they were.
In Mesopotamia at the time, the environment was the most favorable for people of any in the world. It made matter and energy move around in ways that people could best take advantage of. The environment in Mesopotamia produced more food that people could eat than any other environment in the world, along with providing sufficient drinking water and hospitable weather.
The environment in Mesopotamia had the highest food productivity in the world because it was the easiest place in the world for food plants to grow. That also made it the easiest place in the world for people to figure out how to grow their own plants, because once people figured out how to plant seeds, it didn’t really matter what they did after that. Through trial and error they figured out a lot of things they could do to help the plants grow, and produce more food as a result. Since the plants grew so well in the environment all by themselves, the Mesopotamians could afford to make more mistakes than anyone else in their learning process—which let them learn faster.
To cut a long story short, the people of Mesopotamia developed agriculture before anyone else in the world not because of any personal advantage, but because they lived in the most favorable growing conditions in the world. If those people settled somewhere else and any other group of people settled in Mesopotamia, it still would’ve been the people who settled in Mesopotamia who were the first to develop agriculture.
Homo sapiens are a constant. The environment was the variable. The people who settled in Mesopotamia adapted to living in their environment, just like the people who settled in every other part of their world adapted to living in their environments. Ultimately, it wasn’t the Mesopotamians who developed agriculture; it was the interaction between Homo sapiens and the environment in Mesopotamia that caused the development of agriculture.
Here you can see an example of the comparative method of scientific observation. Agriculture was developed independently in at least four other places on Earth and possibly as many as eight. Paleo-botanists had found enough remains of plants from each of those places to figure out what their environments were like at the times agriculture was developed. So Dr. Diamond compared the nine environments to each other, and discovered that they all had a lot of characteristics in common. Out of all the environmental conditions Dr. Diamond discovered that contributed to making plants grow well enough that the people who lived there figured out how to farm them, Mesopotamia had the most.
The basic environmental requirements for the development of agriculture were hot summers and wet winters, which creates hardier plants than in any other environment, and a higher proportion of annual plants. Annual plants grow from seeds in the spring, over the course of a few months produce a lot of seeds, leaves, roots, and stalks that people can eat, and then they die and are replaced by a new crop of plants the following year, which produce a lot more food.
The human population in an original center of agriculture had to have exceeded what the wild environment could sustain. Farming is the act of replacing a wild environment with an artificial environment, where people intentionally grow food-producing plants. That means farming necessarily produces more human food than a wild environment does. But prior to the development of agriculture, humans and their pre-human ancestors had lived by hunting and gathering in wild environments ever since life began. As long as people could still produce enough food by hunting and gathering in their wild environments, no one would had any reason to think of a completely different means of food production, or have any reason to want to try it. If they already knew how to produce enough food to live, why should they go to the trouble of trying to invent a new one? The development of agriculture changed the way we live, but no one of the time had any way of knowing that, or imagining how it would change people’s lives, because life in the wild was the only life anyone had ever known.
Also, the environment had to produce enough food that the people could live in sedentary villages year-round. That means first the evironment produced a lot of food, then the people built permanent settlements, then they built up their population sizes, and then their population sizes grew so big that the environment no longer produced enough food for all the people who lived in it. This is true for a number of reasons.
First, farming is the year-round intentional manipulation of a landscape, so it isn’t physically possible for nomads to farm—because nomads don’t live in the same area year-round, by definition.
Second, the development of agriculture depends on the development of tools for harvesting plants, and of facilities for storing the produce. Nomads couldn’t develop as many specialized tools as sedentary people, because they had to be able to carry all their belongings with them when they travelled. They couldn’t develop specialized storage facilities either because nomadic people have no use for permanent buildings.
Third, farming depends on people planting seeds in the spring and harvesting their crops in the fall. If the people don’t have enough food stored from the previous year, and can’t collect enough wild food, to sustain themselves in the meantime, they can’t develop agriculture, because they’ll starve to death before their crops come in—which means they’ll have no motivation in the first place to try devoting their efforts to a method of food production that won’t pay off for six months. Nomads can’t carry a year’s supply of food with them when they travel—or rather, if they could accumulate a year’s supply of food, they wouldn’t need to be nomads in the first place.
If you’re interested in learning more about the agricultural history of the world, you can find it in my book Zapatista University—which is written for peasant farmers with negligible scientific background but who spend their lives working with plants and animals. Of course, you could also read Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Farming let people produce a lot more food. With all that food, Mesopotamian women were able to turn soil nutrients into babies a lot faster than women in any other part of the world. So Mesopotamians built up the biggest and densest populations.
With all those people, the Mesopotamians had the most people to think of new ideas. By producing all that food, they could also support some people who didn’t have to farm full time, so those people could devote their time to other things. That included full-time political leaders, bureaucrats, inventors, craftsmen, religious leaders, and soldiers. Each of those new occupations made new things happen in the society that hadn’t been happening before.
That let the Mesopotamians invent a lot of things other groups of people didn’t invent. That included bigger governmental structures, to organize all those people and keep them working together. They invented writing, to keep track of everyone’s taxes. They also invented more technology, and metallurgy in particular, which helped them grow more food, build bigger civilizations, and conquer their neighbors more easily.
The most people, the biggest political organizations, and the most technology meant the biggest and most powerful armies in the world. What happened next was inevitable.
Then, not being able to see the connections between people, food, and everything else in the world, came back to haunt the Mesopotamians. Farming changed the environment, because it changed the type and number of plants that were growing in the environment. If you plow a wild field and plant wheat in it, you’ve turned it into an environment where only one species of plant grows. That isn’t a very healthy environment, because all the plants in the new environment are trying to use the same soil nutrients. You no longer have a variety of plants fertilizing each other and protecting the topsoil from erosion with their root systems.
Since the Mesopotamians were the first farmers in the world, they had no way of knowing that over farming was possible. They turned their topsoil into people until they used up all the nutrients in their soil. Meanwhile they lost a lot of topsoil to erosion, and their fields were salinized by their irrigation. So they burned out their farmland and turned the most favorable environment in the world into a desert.
The environment around the Mediterranean Sea was a lot like the environment in Mesopotamia, so Mesopotamian agriculture spread into Europe pretty quickly. When the Mesopotamians destroyed their environment, their economy, and their political systems, the Europeans started building the biggest populations, biggest political structures, and biggest armies.
From there, as they say, the rest is history. The White European Christians conquered the world by very straightforward processes of turning a lot of soil nutrients into people, and using their advantages in population size and technological level to direct more physical force at other people than anyone else could direct at them. They killed their rivals, used all their rivals’ resources for themselves, and filled the world up with their own genes, which is how animals have always competed against each other.
Imperialistic people love to find out about things like this, and say that the fact they conquered the world proves they’re fulfilling their roles in the world by survival of the fittest. But that’s just an example of people who don’t understand what science is not looking at all the evidence. It’s easy to say you’re fulfilling your part in the natural cycles of the world by conquering everyone else by survival of the fittest when you’re winning. But the simple piece of evidence that people don’t like being conquered proves that human behavior isn’t as simple as everyone learning to accept survival of the fittest as their political system. One ability people have is the ability to cooperate with others for their mutual protection. Another ability people have is the ability to think of these things ahead of time and realize that conquering people is only going to result in people fighting back. And as anti-Capitalist revolutionaries, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
On the other hand, learning about things like this gives us the choice to act differently. A lot of people assume that intellect makes us a lot different from the other animals because we can build computers and space shuttles. But when you look at the way we’re using all the things we invent, you can see that all we’ve done is to find new ways to act just like any other animal species. Even now that we’ve gone from historical agricultural imperialism to modern globalization, that still hasn’t changed.
This is an example of how the economic system of life is so natural to us that if we act upon what we feel to be true about the world we create a lot of problems and can’t figure out where they’re all coming from. That makes it easy for people to point their fingers at other people, or supernatural powers, or the environment, and say that everything that’s going wrong is someone else’s fault.
Everyone naturally has a gigantic blind spot to the effects of their own actions. By learning about blind spots like this, we can learn to see through them. Once we learn to see through them, we can stop being ruled by them, because we give ourselves the choice to act differently. We can use our intellects to decide what kind of a world we want to live in, and then figure out what we’ll have to do to make it happen. This is why anti-Capitalism depends on so much more education than Capitalism. If we want to be civilized people, first we have to learn how to stop acting like animals.