February 21, 2018 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Uncertainty Rules Agriculture Harvest
It would be of course wrong to say that
violence was non-existent among the foragers or that they were living in some
kind of utopia where everything was peacefully shared.
Yet agriculture is fundamentally linked to
capitalistic mode of life and private ownership of capital inherently fuels
violence among human apes.
Harari writes:
“Farmers had more possessions and needed
land for planting.
The loss of pasture land to raiding
neighbors could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation, so
there was much less room for compromise.
When a foraging-band was hard pressed by a
stronger rival, it could usually move on.
It was difficult and dangerous, but it was
feasible.
When a strong enemy threatened an
agricultural village, retreat meant giving up fields, houses and granaries.
In many cases, this doomed the refugees to starvation.
Farmers, therefore, tended to stay put and
fight to the bitter end.”
Even in today’s India states that obtain
their water supply from the river basins end up with deep resentment against
each other and sometime even outright hostilities and violence.
The dispute between the southern states of
Tamil Nadu and Karnataka keeps on surfacing time and again, more acutely in the
times of draught or lean monsoons, regarding sharing of water of the river
Kaveri.
If even today in many nation states a child
can die of mal-nutrition because of failure of his father’s crops, then one can
imagine how it would have been throughout the past ten thousand years.
In developed countries farmers are even
today heavily subsidized and protected by their wealthy governments.
So if there is so much wrong about
agriculture as the case here is being made out to be, why did our ancestors
chose to go after grains particularly wheat (though some say it was the wheat
that manipulated and coerced the humans for its benefit)?
What was it that wheat gave to them that made
them give up a pretty decent and interesting way of life for a sub-standard one
that increased their working hours and uncertainty and took away leisure from
them?
This is what Harari has to say:
“It offered nothing for people as
individuals.
Yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens
as a species.
Cultivating wheat provided much more food
per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply
exponentially.
Around 13,000 BC, when people fed themselves
by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals, the area around the oasis of
Jericho, in Palestine, could support at most one roaming band of about a
hundred relatively healthy and well-nourished people.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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