The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 25

Scott shows that the domestication of humans, plants and animals and their crowding into the domus, worsened their health and increased the mortality rate. At the same time, the transition to sedentary life increased the birth rate so much that it more than compensated for the increased mortality: the value of children as labor force is higher for a peasant than for a hunter-gatherer. So the rise of agrarian societies led to the displacement of hunter-gatherers (cf. Scott 2017, pp. 82-3, 113-4).

We saw above that the emergence of culture became the first “needs trap”: when hominids resorted to meanings for self-reproduction, they could no longer remain animals, but had to evolve into humans. The transition to agriculture proved to be the second “needs trap.” Once an agrarian culture-society had emerged, it could not return to the hunter-gatherer state since it would not have been able to feed itself.

More people meant more meaning and faster evolution. We can identify four variables that influence the level of complexity and speed of evolution of a culture-society: (1) diversity; (2) connectedness; (3) interdependence; (4) adaptation or learning (Page 2009, pp. 10-2). The increase in population size and density in early agrarian societies affected all four variables.

“Human population grew in a sort of chain reaction in which greater density of occupation of territory tended to produce new opportunities for specialization and thus led to an increase of individual productivity and in turn to a further increase of numbers. There also developed among such large numbers of people not only a variety of innate attributes but also an enormous variety of streams of cultural traditions among which their great intelligence enabled them to select—particularly during their prolonged adolescence” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 1, p. 126).

The increase in population, its density and specialization associated with the development of agricultural production led to greater diversity, connectedness and interdependence: people became more different, the number and intensity of their contacts expanded.

“Prehistoric changes brought about by better tools, the mastery of fire, and better hunting strategies were very slow, unfolding over tens of thousands of years. The subsequent adoption and intensification of permanent farming lasted for millennia. Its most important consequence was a large increase in population densities, leading to social stratification, occupational specialization, and incipient urbanization” (Smil 2017, p. 407).

Nevertheless, increasing population density, coupled with the concentration of livestock, domesticated plants and parasites, often led to massive epidemics and the collapse of entire civilizations. In an agrarian society, the vast majority of the population can only satisfy their minimum needs through subsistence farming. The primitive economy relied mainly on agriculture, on the achievements of which the slow evolution of society largely depended. We would not be mistaken if we said that about three-quarters to four-fifths of the traditional labor force was employed in agriculture (cf. Livi Bacci 2000, p. 12).

According to Thomas Malthus, in a traditional society, the population grows geometrically, while food production grows arithmetically. Geometric population growth with arithmetical production growth is a path to the Malthusian trap, that is, to the crisis and death of the entire society or that part of it that cannot feed itself. An agrarian society remains, to a large extent, part of its natural environment: the development of its meanings constantly encounters natural constraints—be they environmental disasters, crop failures or epidemics.