Back to Eden?

evolveMy friend and former student Yuval Harari, I am proud to say, needs no introduction from me. His book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has sold more copies than any other non-fiction work in the entire history of Israel. It occasioned a special exhibition—not a very good one, incidentally—at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It has also been translated into thirty different languages, becoming a best-seller in many of them. That is why I want to discuss it here.

Harari is not alone. Sapiens is one of several similar volumes that have done well in the last decade or so. Some were written by historians, others not. Regardless, all belong to the genre known as “big” history. Meaning that the authors do not pay attention to trivia such as individual people, places, dates, and events. At least one considers himself equal to Newton. So great are his intellectual powers that he is able to span, not to say scan, tens of thousands, millions, sometimes even billions of years.

All also have this in common that they try to place the history of man—talking it for granted that the term covers women too, I am sufficiently old fashioned to use it—within a wider context. One that consists of paleontology, biology, chemistry, physics, cosmology and what not. Had doing so been possible, surely they would have gone back not only to the big bang, as some of them actually do, but beyond it too.

Another thing they have in common is the idea that our species has been going steadily downhill. In this they differ from previous efforts such as Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973). Once upon a time, so the new story goes, we humans—there were very few of us then—were in Eden. We lived in small bands of 30-40 people all of whom were related by blood or marriage. The bands wandered around in unspoiled nature, gathering food and hunting such small animals as came their way. Evenings were spent relaxing, telling stories around the campfire, and making love. From time to time they joined some other bands similar to themselves. On those occasions they would have a big feast with much singing, dancing, and worshipping their necessarily primitive gods. Food was shared, marriages were concluded, and some simple presents exchanged.

All the individuals who made up each group were more or less equal. There was no accumulation of property and no government to oppress people and extract resources from them against their will. Cain had not yet killed Abel, so that violence and war were unknown. Men, those cruel, heartless beings who are always intent on one thing only, did not lord it over poor, defenseless women. How women can be both poor and defenseless and lay claim to important positions in society, incidentally, has always been a mystery to me. There was no work to be done, no deadlines to be met, no stress. No traffic jams. No pollution and no unwholesome food (all food was “natural”).

Right? Dead wrong. Food may indeed have been “natural.” Whatever that may mean; did anyone ever see food that was un- or supernatural? However, since it could not be preserved for very long its quality was often dubious and its supply always uncertain. The outcome were alternating periods of boom and bust that could decimate entire populations and even finish them off. If there was no pollution, then only because the energy at people’s disposal consisted almost exclusively of what their own muscles could produce. What that meant was nicely illustrated the other day when a French student hooked a toaster to a pedal-operated dynamo. Only to discover that, in the entire world, there are perhaps two or three people sufficiently fit to produce enough power to toast a single slice of bread. Having succeeded in doing so, more or less, they were far too exhausted to even try toasting another.

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Far from leading a relaxed life our ancestors, spreading out from Africa, had to cope with many kinds of wild animals. Quite a few of which were both very dangerous and much stronger than themselves. To say nothing of enduring the weather in what makeshift shelters they were able to dig or erect; how many of you readers would really want to live in a cave or some kind of shed? As far back as we can look, even the simplest, most backward, societies have always been run predominantly by men, not women. Violence and war, far from being unknown, were endemic. If you have any doubt about that, I suggest you read Napoleone Chagnon’s The Fierce People.

Government, in the sense that some individuals had priority over others and were entitled to consume resources they did not produce, has always existed. As is clear from the fact that, even among chimps, alpha males regularly take what they need from their weaker neighbors, both male and female. Equality only existed to the extent that it did not interfere with the pecking order, i.e. hardly at all. And the pecking order itself was absolutely essential to prevent every minor conflict from degenerating into violence. People also suffered from a permanent shortage of animal protein. Indeed the fact that it was men, not women, who hunted was one reason why the former were able to dominate the latter.

If there was no overpopulation, then one very important reason for this was that a great many infants died soon after they were born. So did a great many newly-delivered women; by the best available figures, so-called perinatal death was perhaps two hundred times as prevalent then as it is in today’s most advanced societies. Only fifty percent or so of infants ever reached adulthood. As a result, life expectancy at birth was probably not much more than thirty years. Person of fifty was considered very old and looked and acted the part. For lack of proper care people’s teeth fell out at an early age. Festering wounds and infectious diseases, which today can easily be cured by means of antibiotics, could and did kill people of all ages. For anatomical reasons that I do not have to explain, many of these problems affected women more than they did men. With the result that, in marked contrast to the situation as it has developed over the last two centuries, the latter tended to outlive the former by a considerable margin.

Life, to quote Thomas Hobbes, was nasty, brutish, and short. Or why else were all those nefarious inventions Harari and others tell us about made? But suppose the story they tell were true. If so, what would it take to take mankind back to Eden? The answer is simple. It has been calculated that, had we still been hunters and gatherers as we used to be until about twelve thousand years ago, the earth could only have supported about eight million of us. In other words, out of every thousand people alive today nine-hundred-ninety-nine would have to die.

And that I respectfully submit to Harari, his fellow authors and their countless followers, is too high a price to pay for returning to Eden. The more so because, in all probability, it has never existed.