In class, we came up with the following notes/questions (pasted below)
Please address any of these questions and/or the larger question of whether agriculture was a mistake.
Please read other people's postings before you jump in, so you can see who you agree with and who you disagree with.
* * * NOTES FROM CLASS * * *
But this begs the question of… what do we mean by “better off”?
What makes a civilization successful?
Is it economic power?
Is it justice?
Is it sustainable/stable?
A combination of justice/peace*, food supply, architecture, music, economics
Fringe Culture/Arts is not squelched but encouraged
An ecosystem that can coexist
More advanced – higher quality of living
Industry/science
Utopia?
· What is justice? What is peace?
· People coexisting without (major) problems?
*Highest quality of life for the most amount of people
Is the world a civilization?
Are there multiple civilizations? What are they?
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5 comments:
I definately believe that a successful civilization occurs when the most amount of people have the highest quality of life. But in order to achieve that goal, different civilizations have to do different things. (Yes, that means I think that there are many differnt civilizations. There's no way that people in Russia can be considered the same civilization as people in Africa.) Each civilization is going to have different needs in order to achieve or come closer to Utopia. Becasue of this, farming may be better for some societies than others, however, I am still strongly against Diamond's argument. As a strong supporter of the arts and sciences, I feel it is necessary to have animals and plants around today in order to study and observe them. If all of the animals and plants were gone before we even had a chance to document information about them, we wouldn't know as much about things such as medicine and animal habits.
Katelyn, you seem to presume that hunter gatherers will hunt animals to extinction. Isn't it possible to be a thoughtful hunter/gatherer who makes sure not to wipe out various species? And how are we doing in terms of preserving the rainforests? And how did certain species that are extinct get to be extinct? Was that attributable to hunters or farmers? I agree that we would not likely have the same medical advances if we stayed hunter-gatherers, but then again, we might lead more healthy lifestyles if we were outside more. [but not necessarily on a 100 degree day :) ]
I think that Jared Diamond was wrong. The reason I believe this is because we were leading that direction anyways. The people are not always going to stick with the same way of life all the time. We as a civilization are changing our ways all the time because of technology and the people who strive for better. I think that if we didn't go into farming we would still get there later in life but we would not live the way we live now if we started farming later in life.
I agree with Taelor because when you try something new, then there are always going to be problems. It just takes a while for things to get better. So it wasn't a mistake, it just had to get bad before it got better. Also, if we had stayed with the same way of living there would have been no advances in civilization because we wouldn't have had the ambition to try to get a better/different life.
I think that Josh brings up a great point. If we did not make the switch to farming, then we would go nowhere in life. As Jared Diamond said, humans as spend 23 hours and 54 minutes hunting and gathering and only 6 minutes farming. However, in those 6 minutes, there have been so much more advances in science, technology, and other things of that nature.
Katelyn also mentioned that a successful civilization occurs when the most amount of people have the highest quality of life. Farming reduced the quality of life for the average person, but the way we live today is definately higher than the people who were hunting and gathering. Farming could have been a poor choice, but it was a step in the right direction to get to where we are today.
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