Taming nature, then man
The short version of human history might go something like this: First we were prey, then we were hunter-gatherers, then farmers — and from that came civilization. Not quite, said James Scott, a celebrated Yale political scientist who delivered the first of the season’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values Wednesday (May 4) in Lowell Lecture Hall. In fact, he said, humankind — attached to foraging — embraced the growing of fixed crops only reluctantly, following millennia of halting and hesitation. After all, making the transition from nature to civilization required trading a complex system of diverse nutrition and robust health (foraging) for a more regimented style of living that shortened lives and replaced leisure with drudgery (farming). Borrowing a phrase from an earlier scholar, Scott called early hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society.” But embrace agriculture we did, eventually. It was a step that also made nation-states possible, which in Scott’s view triggered large-scale,...