A monument to the idea

Anyone who has played Farmville knows how arduous farming can be. I’m still waiting for the release of a game called Hunter-Gathererville, so we can see that life for our pre-history predecessors might not have been so “nasty, brutish, and short” as we’ve been led to believe. And if it does turn out that hunter-gatherer lives were just as happy as our high-definition, 3D, fibreoptic modern existences, what does that say for the efficacy of agriculture, capitalism, and democracy (which go hand-in-hand)?

I quote from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel:

Scientists used to quote a phrase of Thomas Hobbes’s in order to characterize the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as “nasty, brutish, and short.” They seemed to have to work hard, to be driven by the daily quest for food, often to be close to starvation, to lack such elementary material comforts as soft beds and adequate clothing, and to die young.

In reality, only for today’s affluent First World citizens, who don’t actually do the work of raising food themselves, does food production (by remote agribusiness) mean less physical work, more comfort, freedom from starvation, and a longer expected lifetime. Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do. Archaeologists have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. If those first farmers could have foreseen the consequences of adopting food production, they might not have opted to do so.