Posted on 05/27/2010 10:21:00 AM PDT by C19fan
IN THE MAIL: From Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.
More food but also disease, craziness, and anomie resulted from the agricultural revolution, according to this diffuse meditation on progress and its discontents. Wells (The Journey of Man), a geneticist, anthropologist, and National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, voices misgivings about the breakthrough to farming 10,000 years ago, spurred by climate change. The food supply was more stable, but caused populations to explode; epidemics flourished because of overcrowding and proximity to farm animals; despotic governments emerged to organize agricultural production; and warfare erupted over farming settlements. Then came urbanism and modernity, which clashed even more intensely with our nomadic hunter-gatherer nature. Nowadays, Wells contends, we are both stultified and overstimulated, cut off from the land and alienated from one other, resulting in mental illness and violent fundamentalism. Wells gives readers an engaging rundown of the science that reconstructs the prehistoric past, but he loses focus in trying to connect that past to every contemporary issue from obesity to global warming, and his solution is unconvincingly simple: Want less.
Just kiss good-bye thousands of years of struggle and progess because we are denying out inner "hunter-gather". Let us put this author with Bushmen in Africa and see how long he lasts. Of course, this is nothing new as civilized for some reason has idoloized the savages going back to at least Tactius.
I believe Reynolds acknowledges receipt of books he receives. However, that doesn’t mean he reads them. I think he’s said before he gives away quite a few of the books he does receives.
Yes, clean water, refrigeration and air conditioning are blights on the human spirit. (gag)
I think my son read this book while studying anthropology at Berkeley.
Do you never read anything that you disagree with?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.