In the last paragraph of the Introduction to the Fairservis book the author writes:
“Some men achieved civilization in the past and passed it on as a potential for all individuals; it has not, however, been accepted by all individuals, even through paradoxically all individuals live within it.” (p. 9)
Francis Pryor advocates a very similar idea in Britain A.D., in which he hypothesises that the collapse of towns in post-Roman Britain was because the natives weren't ready for it despite the intervening few centuries. I don't buy it, because, as the post goes on :
....Prior to the advent of civilization, the natural world was the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) for human beings; since the advent of civilization, and its spread across the planet entire, civilization has been the EEA for subsequent human evolution, although civilization has not yet persisted for a biologically significant period of time.
Or has it ? At some point in the not too distant past, we developed brains complex enough to solve differential equations and ruminate on the nature of reality. So far as I'm aware, a human being from 10,000 B.C., if whisked forward in time to the modern era, would have had just as high a chance of winning a Nobel prize as the rest of us, even though the only immediate evolutionary advantage of intelligence is (apparently) being able to dig holes, plant seeds, and sharpen spears. You don't need trigonometry - much less complex numbers and Fourier analysis - to work out how to bash rocks together and fend off lions. Yet your brain has got that anyway. Maybe civilisation has had a genetic effect, or at least an epigenetic one via better nutrition and health, e.g. especially cooking. I dunno, I'm thinking on the keyboard here (if that wasn't already obvious).
While civilization is pervasive, if Fairservis is right about this (and I believe that he is right), it admits of exceptions and ellipses. These exceptions may be as small and insignificant as the individual, or perhaps as small as a single idea entertained by a single individual, or an exception may be as large as a community. If a community (and not merely an individual) increasingly opts out of civilization, and if this community is growing, this exception to civilization can grow to destabilizing dimensions within civilization, and this would be one explanation (though not the only explanation) of civilizational collapse.
I'm not saying this reasoning is correct, just interesting. Also that's why I like the Matrix sequels despite whatever anyone else says :
"As I was saying, she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99% of all test subjects accepted the program as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near-unconscious level. While this answer functioned, it was obviously fundamentally flawed, thus creating the otherwise-contradictory systemic anomaly that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those that refused the program, while a minority, if unchecked would constitute an escalating probability of disaster."
http://geopolicraticus.tumblr.com/post/176927779222/opting-in-and-opting-out-of-civilization
I'm not sure about the civilization part, but I can say from personal experience, having done each, that hunting/gathering, and subsistence farming take far more brain power than solving differential equations.
ReplyDeleteThe former is far more complex and difficult, by several orders of magnitude. I'm not sure if it is classism, racism, imperialism, or what, that would cause a person to think otherwise.
Nila Jones beat me to it: I have read (and expect) that subsistence living especially while migrating is very mentally taxing.
ReplyDeletePlease pardon my naivety. That's a very interesting and wholly unexpected response. I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest that life in the Neolithic (or earlier) would be more mentally challenging than life as, say, an Oxbridge professor.
ReplyDeleteThe closest I've ever come to hunting is swatting a fly, or perhaps catching a fish while cleaning a pond. The closest I've got to farming is growing a few plants. With that in mind, here's my overtly biased (possible classicist/racist/imperialist ;)) perspective on prehistoric life :
The basics of farming are easy. You observe that things falling out of trees taste nice if you eat them and grow into other food-producing trees if you plant them. So you stick some in the ground somewhere convenient and let 'em grow. Similarly hunting : you discover that throwing a rock at a rabbit tends to make the rabbit easier to catch. Building a shelter isn't that difficult either (even I've done that) - you prop up some sticks and cover it with leaves, and more sophisticated variants are covered in mud. Knapping flint I imagine to be much more challenging but more from a hand-eye coordination point of view than any mental gymnastics or conceptual leaps.
I don't doubt that prehistoric life could be tremendously mentally stressful, but I have a very hard time seeing in what way it could be mentally challenging. After all, animals both hunt and farm (http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20150105-animals-that-grow-their-own-food) and they don't appear to have the mental capacity to build radio telescopes or MRI scanners or whatnot.
Part of the difference is that even our wildest places these days are distinctly managed wilderness: we really don’t ever have to _compete_ with any other animal, except maybe ants. The fruits you see dropping out of trees are almost all highly-cultivated products of selective breeding projects that neolithic peoples started. When you build your shelter it really doesn’t matter if it leaks, rots or has lurking egg sacs because you won’t be depending on it through the winter. The total number of species you have to pay attention to is very small and contains few lookalikes because people before you stripped out or differentiated them. And it feels easy to build a shelter because you’re well-nourished and have been your whole life, all your limbs work and you don’t have to worry about cutting yourself and getting tetanus, sepsis or whatever. And you’re not at war with next door.
ReplyDeleteI’m not saying the style of thinking is comparable with doing higher maths, but the mental agility needed is great.
Richard G I agree, but even very rudimentary skills ought to be beneficial - a few seeds that grow with little or no effort are better than none at all, a shelter that keeps most of the rain off is better than being completely drenched. I can see how that would lead to an evolutionary feedback cycle of building better shelters, better fires, better food, etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat I can't understand is how the skills need to do that would lead to the skill set needed to muse on the curvature of spacetime. I would guess (again naively) that the fastest route to improvement for early civilisations would be social cooperation : you don't need to be a genius to use a spear, but you do benefit more if everyone is using spears to benefit the entire group. There was a recent suggestion that it was tool use coupled with communication about tool use that led to the emergence of civilisation, which I thought was rather interesting.
The social aspect of intelligence seems persuasive at least as a partial answer to me. I can imagine that communications about emotional motivations and the interplay between group members could have evolutionary advantages that might require more complexity than whittling a sharper stick, and have unexpected side-effects. Still not sure that works either, because mathematical reasoning and formal logic don't appear to anything much like emotional reasoning. And, to get back to the original point, I would expect that a preference of living in groups is very much older than civilisation - enough to get it an evolutionary component. So it's hard to see an evolutionary reason why there might be refusniks who don't want to integrate.
Again, thinking on the keyboard here. I might be babbling.
Civilisation is at best a thin veneer over the rotten substrate of packs of vicious hominids, very proud of their ability to heap up blocks of stone - more precisely, their ability to capture, enslave and force-march others into the quarries to mine and square up those stones.
ReplyDeleteI would argue these supposed lapses and backslidings of soi-disant cultures are merely the former slaves and servants choosing not to square up stones for a good long while....
I grow most of what I eat. I grew up on a small family farm, and I am now middle-aged, so I have decades of experience. I also have family, friends, the internet, and libraries to draw on.
ReplyDeleteI also have decades of experience teaching permaculture and sustainable living professionally.
I have an IQ around 160, depending on the test. I got 10 points less than a perfect score on the SAT, when I took it at 16 years old and dropped out of high school to attend college. I minored mathematics, and my mother is a university math instructor.
Just so you know where I'm coming from :-).
I could build a shelter that would probably be adequate in a temperate climate. (In fact, using industrial tools and materials, I built the house that I live in. But that's different.)
But I would be surprised if I could survive a year only on what I grow and gather. Or maybe I would survive, but I would not be in as good a health as I am now. Which would decrease the probability that I would survive a second year.
People cannot survive on tree fruits. Seeds dropped on the ground may sprout, but not in quantities that will keep you alive.
Hunting and gathering requires maintaining encyclopedic knowledge in your head of tens of thousands of species -- how they respond to different weather patterns in the short and long-term, where to find them, how to identify them, including identifying plants when they are just dead brown stalks in the winter, what eats what, and what eats you.
It was a warmer than usual winter. What does that mean for elk hunting? The elk won't be where they usually are. Where will they be? What do they need, and where will they look for it? Will they be crankier than usual? Skinnier or fatter than usual?
That snake just bit you. What plant do you need to treat it? How many months does it take to prepare the treatment? Did you make some last year? Do you still have some left?
As for how animals do it, the main answer is that they don't. Survival rates for animals in the wild are shockingly low.
ReplyDeleteFarming, too, is incredibly difficult. The amount of food you need to grow to survive the year is much larger than you probably imagine. And even after many decades of experience, about a third of what I plant doesn't grow for one reason or another.
ReplyDeleteAnd how are you going to preserve your harvest? Until electric refrigerators, people in europe experienced severe seasonal nutritional deficiencies, which led to disease and shortened their lifespan. (Speaking of disease, 4 out of 5 people used to die of smallpox before they were five years old. That's only one disease. The plague was worse. That's only one more disease.)
And that gets into another thing. Even if you are some kind of Super Genius farmer-hunter-gatherer, and able to reliably provide for yourself, for the vast majority of your lifetime you will not be physically able to do it.
First you would be a baby, then little kid, later a middle-aged person with bad knees, then a slightly older person with heart disease (which was as common in paleo times as it is now) and then an actual old person.
So, you need community. And that means Super Genius you needs to not only provide for yourself, but for your kids, grandkids, grandparents, best friend who broke his leg and can't walk for a year, other best friend who tore her ACL and will probably never walk again, other best friend who is severely ill...
Ok, I'll shut up now ;).
Nila Jones A very interesting and thought-provoking response.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it all depends on when our "super genius" brains actually began. The agricultural revolution is usually set at ~10,000 BC, whereas tool use, cave paintings, and burial rituals go back very much further. It seems clear that if we had a time-travelling child abductor snatch an infant from 5-10,000 BC and raise them in the modern era, they wouldn't have any difficulties. But 50-100,000 BC ? I'm not so sure. Those people clearly had some similarities to modern humans, but maybe didn't have identical neurophysiologies.
If the agricultural and (more particularly) urban revolutions were really very sudden events, then the model in the OP of people not fundamentally accepting civilisation has merit. If, however, it was a more prolonged growth, a series of little steps of learning and changing mindsets, then this is less probable because there's been sufficient time to evolve a species-wide predisposition to civilised life. IIRC, these revolutions seem to have happened independently, suggesting a genetic component and not just some super-genius saying one day, "hey y'all, let's do cities now".
What I would imagine happened is more slow and steady progress with intelligence building gradually. My point in my previous comments was that you don't need to start with fully-fledged mechanical combine harvesters to have an evolutionary advantage. Planting seeds, as long as you supplement this with other food sources, gives you an edge even if it's initially unreliable. And that definitely doesn't take understanding of complex mathematical abstractions. But combine this with communication, social interactions and feedback from technologies on brain development... well, that's an evolutionary model of intelligence I can believe. Slowly learning how to plant more and more reliable crops, build better shelters : a related development of improved technologies and the mental development to use them. In essence, while civilisation itself may not have persisted for a biologically significant time, the mindset to handle it probably has. We didn't need brains capable of solving differential equations to stick seeds in the ground... but maybe we did need these for the much more recent, sophisticated developments of well-managed crops and urban environments. That I can believe, at least.
If correct, then I have do disagree with the original idea that people are choosing to opt-out of civilisation because they're innately, biologically not ready for it. If they are choosing to opt-out, the reasons might be psychological (e.g. cultural and environmental) instead of biological.
+rhys taylor have you seen Jim Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed?
ReplyDeleteyalebooks.yale.edu - Art of Not Being Governed | Yale University Press
It’s a study of previously “more civilized” people who apparently have chosen to withdraw from bigger polities mostly to avoid exploitation.
You seem to still be starting with the assumption that farming and cities require more intelligence than hunting and gathering. I honestly do not think that is true, in fact I think the opposite may be true.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor: I believe that once a creature has a certain minimal level of cognitive hardware plus a subsystem for learning, it will inevitably be able to at least follow abstract maths even if it might not easily notice new useful abstractions. This minimal level of hardware is, I strongly suspect, much smaller than commonly thought; a jumping spider's brain could probably learn algebra and calculus, if it wanted to.
ReplyDeleteModern brains often have a large number of specialised structures and subsystems for particular senses and particular kinds of intuitions. Mathematical abstractions do not rely on almost any of them, although great mathematicians seem to be able to hook some of their mental models into some such intuiting subsystem, perhaps most commonly vision processing. Most of mathematical thinking seems to instead rely on a brain's general, abstract, thinking ability, and I believe that's necessarily emergent in all systems that can learn to model their environment, no matter how they're built, as long as they get a chance to experience a suitably stimulating environment and don't run out of hardware resources too fast.
Nila Jones and Richard G I just noticed your comments were flagged as spam so I didn't see them. This seems to be happening quite a lot lately, no idea why.
ReplyDeleteg+ has been getting twitchy these past 2 weeks. I think they’re trying to tighten up their measures against troll accounts and IP violations.
ReplyDeleteAs planting seeds goes, both corvids (and a few other bird species) as well as squirrels have been observed to systematically scatter-hoard plants' seeds in such ways that provide reproductive advantages to the kind of plants whose seeds they like to eat.
ReplyDeleteI know the squirrels are always trying to turn my garden into a walnut orchard.
ReplyDelete