From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 21:01:10 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> [Agriculture] also set us on the path towards culture, superhuman
> intelligence and the stars.
This is akin to the "progressivist perspective," which Diamond flatly
rejects. As he puts it, "The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so
far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has
taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and
since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the
wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it
was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the
B-minor Mass... While the case for the progressivist view seems
overwhelming, it's hard to prove... It turns out that [HG'ers] have plenty
of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming
neighbors... One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring
tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so
many mongongo nuts in the world?... Gorillas have had ample free time to
build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to...."
One could extrapolate from this passage that according to Diamond's view of
progressivism, agriculture set us also on the path towards "culture,
superhuman intelligence and the stars," but that hunter-gatherers would not
and should not care about such things.
It seems a bit presumptuous to assume that superhuman intelligence and a
reaching toward the stars would even be seen as desirable by a contrafactual
humanity that might still live in a pristine world not ruined by agriculture
and its modern cultural ramifications.
One might even argue that extropianism is a philosophical attempt to prepare
an escape from the doomed world we created at the advent of agriculture.
-gts
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