The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on February 20, 2020, 10:05:08 am ---
And I just noticed that there seems to be a new TV critic!
--- End quote ---
I hadn't even heard that!
https://www.thewrap.com/new-yorker-reshuffles-emily-nussbaum-to-expand-her-writing-doreen-st-felix-named-new-tv-critic/
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on February 18, 2020, 03:20:39 pm ---I finished the profile on Harari last night.
--- End quote ---
I'm reading that now. I don't find the article, or him, particularly engaging. I haven't finished it yet, so I haven't come to the "who cares?" conclusion, but as I read it, I find myself thinking, Maybe he's right that the invention of agriculture sowed the seeds of the eventual destruction of Homo sapiens, but it seems a little strange that someone who has benefited from thousands of years of civilization would be complaining about or condemning civilization.
Without civilization, the lives of Homo sapiens would no doubt be "nasty, brutish, and short."
Front-Ranger:
I've been rethinking the roots of civilization lately after reading about early cultures in the Americas. We've been taught to think that real civilization started when people stopped wandering, settled down, started agriculture and formed cities. But there are other models if you look at indigenous populations outside of the borders of Mesopotamia. In Central America, there were cultures who farmed and were settled that lasted thousands of years. They followed sustainable practices, not having the advantages of being in a flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates.
Harari is thinking big but not big enough. His lens is the Jewish and proto-Jewish cultures of the Middle East. If he knows anything about other cultures, he has dismissed them or is excluding them. His bias is showing. Of course, I've only read the article, not the books, and I plan to.
serious crayons:
I'm still struggling through the first part of the profile, which seems much more about his husband than about Harari. So far the piece has divulged very little about what has made Harari famous and successful, except where it has very briefly touched on The Singularity. I haven't reached the future part of his book, so I'll withhold judgment but I don't really buy into the whole Singularity thing, but maybe he'll convince me.
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on February 21, 2020, 09:54:43 am ---it seems a little strange that someone who has benefited from thousands of years of civilization would be complaining about or condemning civilization.
Without civilization, the lives of Homo sapiens would no doubt be "nasty, brutish, and short."
--- End quote ---
Was Hobbes talking about hunter-gatherer life, or just life without a central government? In any case, I can't imagine 17th-century Europeans were all that knowledgeable about prehistory.
I wouldn't say Harari is condemning civilization per se. He's saying hunter-gatherer life was, in some ways, less nasty and brutish back then than we like to think. It was short, no doubt, because an infected cut, poison berry, intertribal conflict or attack by a saber-tooth tiger (or whatever they had back then) could kill people at a young age, bringing the average lifespan way down.
And yes, I'm sure Harari recognizes that civilization has made his own life more comfortable and enriched. The argument is that hunter gatherers as a whole were, some ways, more comfortable. More leisure time, less viral or chronic disease, less dependence on successful crops to avoid starvation, etc. And that while it's easy for Harari or for us to say our lives are way better because of agriculture and consequent civilization, his point is that many, many people in the world still do not share those benefits, even now, let alone for the past however many millennia.
So he's not really tossing out his computer and complaining that he himself can't live on a nice soft bed of leaves in the forest.
I have an article he wrote on this topic on a tab on my computer. I'll try to read it over lunch.
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on February 21, 2020, 12:11:19 pm ---Harari is thinking big but not big enough. His lens is the Jewish and proto-Jewish cultures of the Middle East. If he knows anything about other cultures, he has dismissed them or is excluding them. His bias is showing. Of course, I've only read the article, not the books, and I plan to.
--- End quote ---
Actually he writes quite extensively about other parts of the world. For example, the one that comes to mind is how quickly and brutally a small number of Spaniards managed to destroy longstanding Latin American cultures like the Incas and Aztecs. He takes examples from all over the place -- including many from this country. His book starts out with the evolution of homo sapiens, so by necessity it's in a particular part of the world, but he follows as humans spread through Europe and other continents. One interesting part is his exploration of how Europeans managed to subdue and colonize other cultures, partly because non-European cultures didn't take as much interest in exploring the world outside their own areas, let alone conquering other places.
serious crayons:
This wasn't the article i was looking for, but here's a science publication with a pretty concise summary of the anti-ag argument, which actually long predates Harari, though it quotes him, too.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/03/the_agricultural_revolution_historys_biggest_fraud.html
And here are some excerpts from Sapiens on Harari's website regarding agriculture and other things.
https://www.ynharari.com/topic/money-and-politics/
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