Tamers or tamed?

Every time humanity has marched forward towards what has always been regarded as advancement, we have actually brought upon ourselves disasters, yet slowly. When the Cognitive Revolution happened 70,000 years ago, giving us the ability to imagine things we had not seen, we caused the extinction of other human species before shifting our gaze at ourselves.

When the Agricultural Revolution came about 12,000 years ago, we not only settled in one place we laid claim to, but also went to war over land and resources. We became deadly. While women were better able to give birth to more children because of the end to a nomadic life, more people died of hunger because people started depending on wheat more than hunting. Infectious diseases became frequent because of living in the same place. The hunters turned into farmers. The healthy lifestyle of a hunter gatherer was replaced by the lifestyle of a farmer who spent his entire day tending to crops and land to ensure his diet. Hunter gatherer could weather difficult times because he survived on various species for his diet. If one species disappeared, he could turn to another.

Ironically, less people died of starvation and diseases as nomadic hunter gatherer than as farmers. Instead of looking for a hunt, man got busy taking buckets of water to his land. He had to live near the wheat field to tend to it. We didn’t domesticate plants, the plants domesticated us. We are the ones stuck in one place to ensure a food supply. The hunter gatherer roamed the planet freely. We lost our health and quality diet. Yet, the Agricultural Revolution is seen as the dawn of civilisation.

In the TV show, Black Mirror, a future is depicted where humanity’s greatest innovations rub against its conscience, creating an anxiety that is suffocating to imagine. The sad reality is that today’s lifestyle of human beings would create the same feelings in our hunter gatherer ancestry. Similarly, when we imagine living the life of a hunter gatherer, all that scares us is how physically demanding that lifestyle would be. Imagining that life doesn’t give us mental and psychological hits.

We made washing machines, television, cellphones, computers, and so forth to make our lives easier. However, it is an unquestionable trait of humanity that our luxuries eventually become our necessities. What starts off as an added feature or an extra benefit becomes a need with time. We didn’t harness the energy and employ the machines for our ease. We have instead become slaves of those machines. Can we remain idle for 60 seconds without taking out our cellphones?

The reason why we are at a disadvantage when it comes to losing the addiction of what we call advancement is because those steps are gradual. We had cell phones in 1997, and at the time changing course would have been easy because we had known a different lifestyle back then; one without cellphones. Today, we do not know that lifestyle. The transition from hunting to farming was no different.

Similarly, the internet has been hailed as a great tool of connectivity and information sharing. However, what it really did is create more distances between people. There are more news sources but the world is less informed. News reports reach faster than ever but true knowledge of issues is almost a relic of the past.

In any given era, humans progressed toward sophistication but only to make life difficult for themselves. Today, sapien the industrialist is bringing upon himself the disaster of climate change by driving the beautiful cars he so adores. The irony is that the marvels of human development is the very reason behind the destruction of our climate. We burned fossil fuel to hasten our travel on this planet and minimise our input. In reality, it is indeed our input that is hastening our journey out of this planet.

 

 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 30^th, 2020.

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