An Eden Project?

I came across this piece by Professor Jared Diamond last week in which he argues that the adoption of agriculture was the worst mistake in the history of humanity.

It's essentially a modern scientific update of the Eden myth in which our hunter-gatherer forefathers collectively plugged for progress and growth (economic and demographic), thereby inadvertently opting into inequality, unbalanced nutrition, shorter statures and lives of high-dudgeon, for the majority at least.

Diamond seems to be arguing that because hunter-gatherers only had to 'work' for 14 hours a week, they were necessarily a happier bunch and no less capable of composing the B-minor Mass than those whose leisure derives from economic surplus. Hmm.

Anyway, in the context of Live8, it's worth giving this perspective some serious think-time.

Good and Evil both seem to have far greater impact on the human world once the apple of agriculture has been munched. Most Westerners implicitly understand the hidden cost of comet-colliding space-probes, and Live8 represents part of their effort to set limits to the degree of loss that can be suffered in a competitive world. But are we able to say that as a species that we would be better off leading an unchanging in-tune-with-nature existence? Would we sacrifice all of modern science and medicine just so that no human child ever goes hungry again?

In our secular era the whole idea of social stagnation seems like an affront to what is perhaps the key mystery of the cosmos- Time. If we can't believe in personal salvation, we can at least believe that our fellow humans are heading somewhere meaningful.

A few last points:

- Diamond forgot to mention that we owe most of our infectious diseases to the domestication of animals. Still, who knows what impact a pandemic might have had historically on communities organised the way Diamond suggests if they had persisted globally into the last Millennium.
- Neanderthals led a specialist lifestyle and got tossed out of the simian tree by more chameleon-like homo sapiens. Evolution favours the exploration of new possibilities.
- One word...Yanomami.