In November I gave a seminar talk for the Planetary Limits Academic Network about why I believe modernity to be a dead-end, while also touching on underlying attitudes that drive us in this destructive direction. When presenting the narrative that sequential development of agriculture, writing, money, science, and fossil fuels collectively constituted a decisive trap leading us to the current state, I got pushback from a few in the audience over the notion of determinism. See my Time on the River post for a flavor of this narrative.

Fans of Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything (and there are many, especially in the left-leaning academic circles from which I hail) tend to be—like the authors—allergic to suggestions of determinism. They find the notion very appealing that we could just as well have designed and conjured the ideal technological society: egalitarian, global, peaceful, prosperous, clean, and all the rest. See Abundance as recent example of such eco-modernist fantasy. I was honestly stunned by the gross simplifications in Graeber & Wengrow’s book, which elicited a sharp critique from me.

The moderator of the seminar prodded Chris Smaje, in attendance, to comment on my negative portrayal of agriculture. Chris has written, among other books, A Small Farm Future, runs a blog of the same name, and is generally an advocate of a small-scale agrarian response as a path to exit modernity—which in itself I believe is a fine (transitional) strategy.

The discussion prompted Chris to draft a blog post, which he passed by me to avoid misrepresentation and to solicit comments. We had an engaging e-mail exchange for a bit, and last week his post (By the Rivers of Babylon: debating agrarianism with Tom Murphy) went live. This post offers my follow-up response on the subject.

Debate is a Strong Term

While Chris used the word “debate” in his post, our interactions really had none of the adversarial quality that such a label might imply. First, if you created 100 person-sized bins into which random members of our culture could be sorted according to their sense of modernity’s degree of viability, Chris and I would be wedged into the final bin together—and enjoy the company: he seems like a genuinely pleasant guy. Thus, compared to throwing darts at the phone book (remember those?), Chris and I are far closer than most. Our exchange had none of the tension that a conversation between me and Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Sean Hannity, or even “lefties” like Ezra Kein or Bill McKibben would have, where sparks would be more likely. (As pointed out before, I’ve moved too far off the usual spectrum to be recognized as “friendly” to any pro-modernity camp, whether left or right.)

Given our broad agreements, the conversation about whether agriculture is intrinsically bad news therefore represents an issue on the margins. But even here, we found common ground in that we each seek a better understanding, so that we were both listening to each other, admitting the limits of what we know for sure, and not just mansplaining. I value such explorations. In this particular case, we are each eager to resume in some form now that our initial essays are posted.

At the risk of undercutting these fine sentiments, I will disclose the concern that Chris is bodily committed to agrarian pursuits as his life’s purpose—in a way that may make it more difficult to land in a place disparaging agricultural practices entirely. The Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” That said, I did not get the sense that Chris was entirely unwilling to examine the prospect that agriculture is problematic in the long term (and he said as much, explicitly).

Meanwhile, here I am doing the opposite of defending my life’s work in astrophysics, as I was primarily a contributor to the destructive machine of modernity. I wish the whole tragedy had never happened—that’s right: even the alphabet. Moreover, I am biting the hand that feeds me in the sense that my metabolism is almost wholly dependent on agricultural practices, even if I’m unhappy about the predicament. Maybe I’m dumber than the man Upton Sinclair had in mind. But I’m stuck on agricultural support, and can’t (easily, legally, socially, communally) ditch it for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Besides, Earth cannot sustain 8 billion hunter-gatherers (or 8 billion food-growers, for that matter; see the post 8 Billion Will Die!). Whatever transition lies ahead will certainly continue to involve humans growing food for many generations. Off ramps are great, and necessary. What Chris is doing is something I wish many more people would embrace, and I don’t want in any way to disparage his important efforts.

Much of the lack of convergence between us comes down to timescales of interest, and (ugh) metaphysical preferences.

The Remaining Gap

While careful to note that metaphors can never fully capture a complex reality and will always have flaws, Chris takes two metaphors I have used and runs with them. The first is the River metaphor, and the other is the menagerie metaphor employed in my critique of the Graeber/Wengrow book.

Chris basically likes the river metaphor—at least its late-stage expression—agreeing that we are now caught in a turbulent torrent fueled by fossil energy and capitalism. Escape has become perilous.

However, Chris seems less willing to cast aspersions on agriculture, writing, or money—able to imagine ways in which these practices need not be deal-breakers. For me, a focus on fossil fuels and capitalism has an insufficient temporal horizon, excluding the imperial conquests running rampant long before either of these recent influences came to prominence. When the world still ran on renewable energy, the forests of Europe and Britain were denuded. The solar/wind-powered British navy could no longer sustain its ship-building requirements using domestic timber, beginning to source prime wood from around the world. It seems to me that well before the fossil fuel era the core predicament was already present as an expression of ecological detachment. “New” land was assessed not for the peculiar ways its Community of Life thrived—or with any interest in tucking into that peculiarity by embracing local Indigenous ways—but for its potential as a substrate for cookie-cutter importation of the exploitative “one true way” via planting and extraction.

So, when indeed did ecological ruination of Earth become essentially baked in? For starters, maybe it was the Big Bang itself. Maybe it was life forming on Earth. Maybe it was the Chicxulub impact. Maybe it was primates branching into Homo. Maybe it was the adoption of fire, or flint knapping, or the atlatl. Maybe it was agriculture, or writing, or money. The argument is not one that can possibly be settled, because we’re simply not smart enough. The most appropriate stance is one of skepticism. This is why I distrust anything that originates in meat-brains, and favor instead what evidence the universe hands us (though meat-brain interpretations inevitably vary, including my own).

Timescales

We are reasonably confident that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, Earth is 4.5 billion years old, Chicxulub cleared out (most) dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and humans appeared as new members among ten million other species about 3 million years ago. Fire has been utilized by humans for 1.5–2 million years, and our particular species branched off the evolutionary tree about 250–300 thousand years ago. Evidence for complex hunter-gatherer societies (somewhat hierarchical) began appearing maybe 30–40,000 years ago. Otherwise, small-band, egalitarian, “immediate return” hunter-gatherers predominated. The climate stability of the Holocene kicked in around 12,000 years ago, ending a long series of ice ages that had characterized the entire human saga leading up to it. Shortly thereafter, agriculture took root in independent starts around the globe. Any claim of coincidence in this timing ought to be treated with great skepticism.

It was at this inflection point—again hard to argue coincidence, especially in light of storable food surplus—that human population began its inexorable expansion. The doubling rate had been tens of thousands of years prior to this epoch, and was suddenly reduced to a few thousand years: an order-of-magnitude jolt. That’s not insignificant! The embrace of agriculture marked a true turning point, for rather plausible reasons. It is questionable practice to diminish the many causal influences at play.

As a rough mathematical guide, starting at a population of (say) 10 million humans 10,000 years ago and sustaining a doubling time of 2,000 years (a paltry 0.035% per year), humans would reach a population of 10 billion (thousand-fold increase) in about ten doublings, or approximately 20,000 years. Okay, so we managed to accelerate the process to achieve the same result in half the time (bravo?). But so what? What’s 10,000 years against timescales relevant to ecology and evolution? Even before the cascade of subsequent (inevitable?) elaborations, agriculture alone appears to have put us on a track to ecological overshoot—by experimentally detaching us from the intricate web of time-tested ecological relationships within which we became human in the first place, and by which the other organisms of Earth abide.

Chris points to the earliest known agrarian tools being 23,000 years old, casting agricultural practices as having “been around for a substantial part of Homo sapiens history. Not really a historical eye-blink.” Perhaps this is a semantic mismatch, but should a phase lasting less than 10% of the total be called “substantial,” or is it closer to a “blink,” or does it occupy the nebulous middle-ground? Also, a minor point is that picking the most extreme outlier (23,000 years) may not fairly characterize the widespread adoption of agriculture, which by all accounts awaited the arrival of the Holocene. It isn’t particularly surprising if developments this major have sporadic long-tail slow-burn precursors spanning millennia (still contextually short, in any case). Chris takes the longer view thusly:

Biological evolution came up with humanity. It worked for a short while… In the longer term even [local agrarianism] might not prove sustainable, and may at best be part of a trajectory toward a world that ends up with a much lower human population involved mostly in foraging once again. I don’t have a problem with that—I’m not committed to defending agrarianism for the sake of it, although I do baulk at overdrawn ‘foraging good—farming bad’ dualisms.

Well put—even if one might balk at different spelling conventions. Real life is always complex and nuanced. Context matters. As for “short while,” humans have participated in ecological communities for timescales I would characterize as relevant: much longer than the brief agricultural phase that we call “history.” What is a sufficient duration? Chris suggests:

People lived substantially local agrarian lives for many, many generations without their societies devolving to a growth-oriented, world-eating, predatory system of states”

Is that long enough to be fully relevant? Is even 1,000 or 10,000 years long enough to prove-out in ecological—or even societal interaction—terms? I am seriously skeptical. To me, these short-run experiments are still isolated in a “cage” before fully interacting with the wider post-agricultural world or proving themselves in ecological terms. What became of such enclaves?

Counterfactuals

A fair bit of the mismatch in perspectives concerns differing tolerance for counterfactuals. It likely boils down to dissimilar metaphysical stances, which happens to me a lot lately as I occupy a minority position within our culture. Part of where the disconnect shows up is in how much stock one puts in the human mind as the driver (I am systematically and perhaps relentlessly critical of meat-brain prowess). Chris says:

…it strikes me that if there’s some fateful human tendency that’s hustling us downstream to oblivion, it lies in our human ability to abstract a world-as-it-might-be beyond immediate sensory experience.

If abstraction is the driving force, it becomes hard to explain why it took so many thousands of generations to go from spears to atlatls to bows and arrows. Even the “eye-blink” transition to agriculture took more than a hundred generations (3,000 years): long enough that Graeber & Wengrow gripe that something so gradual can’t really be called a “revolution.” That’s some sluggish abstraction going on. On the timescale of a single meat-brain’s earthly tenure, it seems that the spark of ingenuity takes a back seat to the incrementally-evolving state of material/cultural conditions—itself rapid next to ecological evolution.

Our lens on what humans are, fundamentally, is highly distorted by living in a (demonstrably) most unusual time. The sort of abstraction that is commonplace today, for instance, didn’t really take off until after the advent of phonetic alphabets, as brilliantly explored in David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: a profoundly insightful book. Agriculture was already well in hand—and had already permanently degraded some regions into desert—by the time abstraction entered in a significant, accelerated way.

But let’s edge back to the question of causality—central to counterfactual games:

There’s nothing much we can do about this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have, simultaneously humanity’s blessing or genius and also our curse. Writing, farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it.

Maybe. It seems a bold assertion, especially given that less than 0.5% of humanity’s time on Earth (<5% of Homo sapiens) has been spent in this farming/writing mode. The pace of innovation (applied abstraction) has not been constant over this vast temporal span, even on a per-capita basis. The level and type of abstraction we take for granted today is not characteristic of humans across all time and ecological lifeways (the amazing Pirahã people offer a great example). As indicated above, abstraction was itself boosted immensely by the super-catalyst of writing (as the Abram book elucidates). Just as the chicken–egg conundrum is unresolvable as inextricably-interconnected joint phenomena, the suggestion that abstraction caused farming is suspect.

Chris invokes Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion (cute/fun, but unfounded in my view) that “If you could spool through the history of life on the planet on repeat play over and over again the outcome would be different every time.” Would it? What does it even mean to invoke the impossible? What are the rules, and who gets to make them? Does every fundamental particle start in the same exact state and quantum superposition, or are we instantiating each time a fake mental universe that didn’t happen? Do quantum probabilities (which we interpret to be a source of randomness) actually respond to connections we have not elucidated, so that they would dutifully repeat the same branches, or are they free to go willy-nilly? We simply don’t know enough to make these grand claims: they’re far beyond our pay-grade. What we do know is that what happened happened, in one huge causal tangle beyond our cognitive capacity to track. It seems we have to settle for the one instance as the only real evidence we’ve got. Everything else is unfounded mental speculation, worth almost nothing, in my view.

Chris goes on to say that claiming it had to go the way it did is:

…[on] shakier ground unless you establish that there are larger—evolutionary?—forces at play such that these events were always going to happen.”

That’s exactly what I’m suggesting (and my main point in the Graeber/Wengrow critique): dynamics, even those not smoked by our meat-brains from a great temporal distance, are relevant—not to be ignored or discounted. The Holocene is important. More factors than we can possibly identify play a role: how would we stop them from doing so? Counterfactuals build a fake universe in a tiny (cerebral) corner of the universe that can’t possibly rival the power of the actual universe—which has no choice but to process all factors at once, interactively. When we run counterfactuals about the past, we leave out untold number of contributing elements and conjure a stripped-down, simplified, decontextualized, fantasy version in our heads (dispatching thousands of years in a few paltry brain-seconds) that has very little to do with the actual workings of the vastly-more patient and full-context universe.

It feels like hubristic ground, to believe we can accommodate the universe in our skulls! We really don’t know what we’re doing. I’m thus deeply skeptical that we have the mental power to engage in meaningful counterfactualism. As if I have any standing to do otherwise, I defer instead to the real, single universe as it has run: complete with myriad unintended consequences and unsuspected influences.

Chris uses phrases like “But it’s not impossible to imagine…” which raise a red flag for me: entering dangerous territory in which we are unqualified to make conclusive statements. Imaginations are not constrained to be realistic.

This, then, is perhaps the basic metaphysical split. I view humans and their activities as products of a universe just doing its thing (deterministic bent) instead of as generators of a universe designed to suit. As mentioned in my last post, I believe the pain point isn’t so much about the fungibility of past events as it is about malleability of the future. Adopting the view that the past went the one way it could go seems like saying that we can have no impact the future: that it’s all “long written in the stars” as Chris phrases it. But that’s not what determinism says at all.

Even a deterministic future is open-ended and wholly unpredictable: not one bit of it is yet written anywhere. Determinism does not mean predetermined: lots of unexpected developments can—and very much will—happen. In fact, we suck at the whole “expecting” game. So, just as humans were genuine (albeit constrained) factors in the path we traveled to this point, humans undoubtedly will be (constrained) players/partners in shaping the future—in response to the various stimuli presented. In the deterministic view, it is as inevitable that we will shape the future as it was that the past went the way it did. Ideally, we learn from past experience so that our reactions might avoid previous pitfalls going forward. This is the essence of feedback, which the universe does not prohibit and basically all Life employs as the core engine of evolution.

Who’s got the right metaphysics, here? We obviously can’t know. The reason I land where I do is not because I find it to be the most appealing or mentally expedient, but because it is based on substantial empirical evidence (it’s how the universe of matter and interactions actually appears to function, with no known exception at any scale of experience). My sense is that the more common metaphysics leans primarily on affinity: we don’t want to believe in determinism, as it seems to rob us of some elevated, transcendent (but illusory) status.

Cages and Wrap-Up

In my critique of Graeber & Wengrow, I charge them with setting past (often brief) societal arrangements in non-interacting isolation—like beautiful but caged animals in a menagerie. Chris expands on this metaphor, detailing various options for the way things could play out once the cage doors are opened. I had a hard time getting into it. The key is that the animals will all interact in some way, which Graeber & Wengrow basically ignored. Also of paramount relevance from my point of view: the full-context experiment has already been done, and we live the result. Our imaginings of how it might otherwise have gone are surely of little value next to the real deal. Graeber & Wengrow were perplexed as to why we are stuck in modernity, but I would say that’s because they didn’t even acknowledge the dynamics (e.g., game theory) of a cage-free scenario.

From my perspective, the circumstantial evidence does not look great for agriculture: suspicion is fully justified. The practice separated us from more deeply-embedded and ancient ecological roles as members of a Community of Life, promoting ourselves to masters who get to decide which beings live or die (i.e., weeds, pests). Sedentary lifestyles built possessions and (hereditary) patriarchy, while surplus drove expansion, a security industry, hierarchy, and accounting (thus writing and money). All of that really happened, and not according to some grand plan. My sense is that these elaborations couldn’t have been stopped from emerging (somewhere), and once that whole horse/barn thing happens the inherent expansionism and competitive advantages overwhelm ecologically-based communities. How many times must we witness the story play out, with few or no tracks heading in the opposite direction? The overall flow is clear.

While it seems an eternity to our fleeting lives, 10,000 years is far too fast for a real vetting. Even before the destructive embellishments of writing and money (and later science, fossil fuels, and capitalism), agricultural practices were transforming lush habitats into deserts as one-time nutrient-mining operations, together with deposition of salts and other unvetted imports. Agriculture has simply not had time to prove itself, and has every indication of being an ecological misfit that has monotonically pushed us toward this moment of planetary peril.

I contrast short-lived agriculture with fire, which in itself may well be a bridge-too-far, but at least fire was ecologically tolerated for millions of years. I can’t ignore that fact, making fire and agriculture non-equivalent. To be self consistent, I can’t argue against the idea that fire eventually and inevitably set us up for agriculture. But recognizing so does not mean that a future is precluded where fire-wielding humans can once again live in ecological reciprocity for another few-million years: we have an established real-world precedent, and that’s huge. The same can’t (credibly) be said for agriculture. If we do come to embrace non-agricultural ways going forward, the return of climate instability may hold off a large-scale resurgence of agriculture—and deep depletion ensures that a fossil fuel episode won’t repeat for many millions of years, if ever.

I am strongly supportive of a small-scale agrarian transition period away from large-scale agriculture as the human population (presumably/inevitably) deflates toward ecologically-sustainable numbers—the only other long-term-viable option being to collapse to zero. However, I am highly dubious that such inherently problematic (dualist, separatist) practices can be viable in the long term, in an ecological context—especially if unable to acknowledge and remedy the deep flaws/dangers intrinsic to such an approach. It seems worthwhile to again point out: we have zero proof that agricultural practices can run the ecological marathon, while knowing that pre-agricultural modes endured for far longer. That’s not nothing.

The Precautionary Principle would seem to apply here. It is dangerous to continue playing with a “fire” that has burned us badly enough to initiate a sixth mass extinction. I am reminded of one common reaction to escalating mass-shootings: “guns don’t kill people,” so… we should have as many as we want? The danger should be evident. Why play Russian Roulette with planetary health? It isn’t hard to identify legitimate dangers of agriculture, as evidenced by the actual trajectory of the last 10,000 years, so why play with fire/guns when other (proven) options exist? Sure, we can agrarian our way in that direction, but maybe let’s not presume it to be a viable longer-term solution: just a way to phase out the worst practices as we lick our wounds and explore other ways of being. It seems that Chris and I do not fundamentally disagree on this point.

Best is to admit that we don’t really know what we’re doing. We’re not smart enough to design a substitute for ecological integration. The most impressive thing we’ve ever designed—or even the collection of all such things—is absolute child’s play next to Life in evolved, ecological relationship. Humility serves us well. Look outside the skull for answers—for what’s proven to work.

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