I think this is romanticizing. Hunting and gathering is a constant struggle for survival. It’s waking up every morning of your life with no food and not knowing if you’re going to eat that day. Every day you have to go out and find something to eat. If you don’t find something to eat you go to sleep hungry and you wake up weaker tomorrow. If it’s winter time or there’s a drought, you may not find something to eat for several days in a row and you’ll die. If you get sick or injured, you don’t eat until you recover. If you don’t recover quickly enough, you starve to death. Eventually you get too old to go out and get food, so you die.
Agriculture is hard work but it gives you something back. You control the food you’re eating and you can make extra. You can go to sleep knowing that you already have the food you will eat tomorrow. You can start making plans that have a broader scope than trying to find something to eat today.
But it’s also been going down the tubes ever since - youngsters not listening to their elders, people being corrupted and softened by comforts and vices, institutions constantly threatened or cast down by dangerous progressives, not to mention the ever present spectre of folk music.
It’s all very paradoxical.
I wouldn’t call hunter-gathering or even subsistence farming “good years”, not as such.
I dunno, this sounds like romanticizing, although in Jared’s case he might be saying something controversial to get people to think (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt). The most glaring point I haven’t seen addressed, mentioned by the OP, is why didn’t HG societies have larger populations.
HG societies did have most of the problems of agricultural societies. John Keegan mentions how brutal Native American tribes were to each other in his book “On War”.
Lastly, did any HG society progress past primitive arts? Did they write plays, or even have writing? It seems to me that the average Greek in 500BC had a better life then the average HG.
Why wouldn’t a drought decimate a HG society? I guess they have the option of moving to a non-drought area but that assumes there isn’t someone already there.
Native Americans are a weird case. The were mostly agriculturalists, although some were forced into a semi-nomadic, h/g lifestyle after the arrival of Europeans. I wouldn’t take them as typical of the h/g lifestyle.
Writing is something associated only with civilization. Many agricultural societies would not qualify as “civilized”. Most of what people think of today as “primitive h/g societies” are actually agricultural societies-- eg, the varies tribes found in Papua New Guinea.
I think her point was that agriculture was not a guarantee against an uncertain food supply. Draught, insects, disease can make even agriculture uncertain.
I think by “romanticizing” he means that people misinterpret the existential crisis that can manifest itself as a side effect of living in a post-industrial capitalist society where mot of our daily wants and needs are provided for us as some sort indication that life would be preferable in a more primitive hunter gatherer society.
But even here, farmers are better off than hunter-gatherers. Both will be hurt when the food supply diminishes due to natural causes. But farmers have some food in storage - they have more options for traveling to somewhere else unaffected by the drought.
The reason widespread famine is an agricultural phenomena is because they had a standard to compare it to - they recognized periods when the food supply was stable. For hunter-gatherers, the state of always being on the verge of starving to death was just the way they lived.
Ok. Well I don’t think that Graham or myself are romanticizing the hunter-gatherer life by that definition. As I said, I think it was probably pretty lousy.
Well, we have to remember what it was early in the development of agriculture and cities, if my children have a chance to grow up relatively safe from the nomad hordes behind the walls of the city, you bet it is a good trade; it is true that slavery came almost right away, but that was mostly the result of organizing an army thanks to the invention of writing and other things to help us deal with those hordes. IIRC becoming a slave had less to do on a choice of the original farmers in relation to the first city states, it was people who were conquered or defeated who got turned into slaves. Not much of a choice.
Not to imply that I want to pursue this any further, but your original post didn’t even mention agriculture. It wasn’t clear that you were talking about specific times and places, but rather living in captivity vs not.
Well, remember: context, context and more context. I was replying to another poster that BTW was not talking just about slavery or captivity but about brains among hunter gatherers now having to deal with [del]cuneiform tablets[/del] paperwork, and I was taking the the OP into consideration.
I read a book about the traditional, h-g society of the Khoi people. It was an interesting read. It wasn’t that they were always on the brink of starvation out in the Kalahari, but they had serious energetic constraints on them. For instance, children tend to be spaced out every five years so that there was never two siblings nursing at the same time. A mother could only gather enough to support herself and one child. So infanticide was an unfortunate but not uncommon thing.
I was replying to another poster that BTW was not talking just about slavery or captivity but about brains among hunter gatherers now having to deal with [del]cuneiform tablets[/del] paperwork, and I was taking the the OP into consideration.