Back in May 1987, a bit more than 20 years ago, Jared Diamond wrote something (or maybe gave a talk, I can’t tell) called “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”. Just to take care of the quick answers that I’m sure are leaping to your mind, this mistake is not (1) nuclear weapons, (2) pollutants that mimic estrogens, or (3) the Internet. No, he’s talking about agriculture, which arguably made the other three possible. 20 years ago I’m sure that this was a pretty startling thesis, but thanks in part to the popularity of Diamond’s Pulitzer-prizewinning book Guns, Germs, and Steel (in which this idea is developed more completely), it’s an argument I seem to hear more often. Or if not an argument per se, a sort of angst, a feeling that we screwed up everything when we started farming.

I’m suspicious of such a feeling. For one thing, it’s easy to pass the buck one level of causality up and say no, we screwed up when our brains got big enough to conceive of farming, or when we developed enough language to say, “hey, instead of following the food around what if the food followed us?” For another, hunting and gathering is not an authentic choice anymore for most of the world’s population, so pining about it ends up creating a kind of safe, catchall scapegoat: “Darn this complicated health insurance!” “Well, that’s agriculture for you.”

Diamond does have a point, of course. Complicated health insurance is not a concern of hunter-gatherers. Rather, they use back-to-basics methods to manage the health of the community: “nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults.” Something about this sentence and the tone of similar apologists always makes me feel like they’re inventing lifestyles for other people to live, people who are not themselves. It’s so easy to get nostalgic about ways of life that neither you nor generations of your ancestors have ever really tried.

This is not to say that the way we live now is good for us in the short or long term, or whether it is sustainable at all. It’s good to ask questions about why we made the tradeoffs that we did, as a culture, especially when it comes to trying to decide what to do next. But I hope that we can do it without falling prey to the persistent illusion that different is always better.



Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. —Ecclesiastes 7:10