In Therapeutic Shamanism, the turn from hunting and gathering to large-scale farming was the beginning of the break from animism, and threw humanity into a mess it is not yet clear we will survive. But ‘mistake’ is not quite the word, because nobody chose it: people slid into farming over generations, without foreseeing where it led, until there was no way back. Writers such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari call it the worst or biggest mistake in human history, whilst others, including David Graeber and David Wengrow, question whether there was ever a single turning point at all.
Who has called farming a mistake? #
A good many people. The scientist Jared Diamond called it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” in a famous article of 1987; his evidence, from the skeletons of the first farmers, is set out in What did Jared Diamond mean by calling farming “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”? The historian Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens, calls the Agricultural Revolution “history’s biggest fraud”: it enlarged the total amount of food, but the average farmer worked harder than the average forager for a worse diet, and the extra food went into more people and pampered elites. His best-known line turns the usual story round: “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”1 The same view has been put by people as different as the naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham and the anarcho-primitivist writer John Zerzan.2 See Who is John Zerzan, and what is anarcho-primitivism?
What does Therapeutic Shamanism say? #
That hunting and gathering was by far the most successful and longest-lasting culture in human history, and that agriculture threw us into a mess that it is unclear whether we will survive, and that may take a great many other species with us.3 What it means by farming needs care. Some hunter-gatherer peoples grew things on a small scale, but mostly they hunted and gathered. What spread from around 11,000 BC was something else, what the writer Daniel Quinn called totalitarian agriculture: clearing land to grow only what we want, and waging war on every other plant and animal that competes for it.4
The deepest change was not in diet but in consciousness. Instead of being a part of the land, children of the earth sharing it with our non-human kin, we decided that we owned the land and would decide who lived on it. The goats became ours; the wolves were to die; the wheat could grow and every other plant would be killed.5 That is why, in this teaching, the break from animism begins with domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the Neolithic, and then accelerates into the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer with the first city-states, from around 4,000 BC. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures? and What does domestication do to us?
If it was a mistake, why did people make it? #
Probably not by deciding to. Taking up farming was likely less a decision than something people slid into over a few hundred years, as Harari suggests.6 Once it began, farming had a momentum of its own. It generally produces a surplus, so the same land supports more people, and populations grow; more people need more land, and so farming spread, overwhelming the hunter-gatherer peoples in its path.6
It was also a trap. Hunter-gathering is flexible: hundreds of possible foods, knowledge of what to eat in a famine, and the freedom to move on. Farming relies on a handful of crops. The more farming spread, the more it destroyed the wild plants and animals that hunter-gatherers lived on, the more the old skills were forgotten, and the more people there were on the same land. So when the great crop failures came around 4,000 BC, going back to hunting and gathering was no longer possible.7 Seen this way, ‘mistake’ fits only loosely; it was more a road taken step by step, each step making sense at the time, that ended somewhere nobody had chosen.
Didn’t farming bring real benefits? #
Yes. Agriculture brought undeniable benefits, above all food surpluses to help people through hard times, and it came with huge costs.8 Nor did everything go wrong at once. The first seven thousand years of farming seem to have gone reasonably well, maybe not a golden age, but a silver one, before it all started to go catastrophically wrong with the rise of the first city-states.9
The same holds for the modern world that farming made possible. Mobile phones, cars, modern medicine, central heating and running water all have real upsides, but they come at an enormous price in time, effort and stress, as well as in what they cost the land and the other Peoples.10 The question is not whether farming gave us anything, but whether what it gave was worth what it took.
Does everyone agree it was a turning point? #
No. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything (2021), argue that there was no single ‘Agricultural Revolution’ to call a mistake. In the Fertile Crescent, they write, the domestication of crops took as much as three thousand years to complete, and unequal concentrations of wealth mostly came millennia after farming began. In between, people were “effectively trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will”, moving in and out of it and keeping a wide enough range of wild foods that farming never became a matter of life and death. They call this flexibility an ‘ecology of freedom’.11 Diamond’s own skeleton evidence has also been questioned, since health after farming varied a lot from region to region, as the Diamond answer sets out.
On the other side, the slow, uneven picture is close to the one in Therapeutic Shamanism, where farming is something people slid into and the worst of it comes thousands of years later, with the city-states. What Therapeutic Shamanism adds is that the turning point was never only about food or wealth. It was a change in how people saw their place on the land, and that change is what the Fall made total. The political scientist James C. Scott, who found a gap of more than four thousand years between the first crops and the first states, tells the same long story through grain and taxes; see What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain? and Who was David Graeber, and what does The Dawn of Everything say about the Fall?
Does this mean we should stop farming? #
No. With human numbers as they are, the future does not lie in everyone abandoning technology and going to live in the woods by foraging, and not everything in the modern world is bad.12 What is suggested instead is that the principles hunter-gatherer societies lived by, which by any sane measure created the most successful human culture there has been, can be reclaimed and used as templates for finding radical new solutions to the problems we face now.13 See Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism? and What is the Fall?
