Previously I recapped our biological evolution. Now for civilization.
About 10,000 years ago, butting up against the limits of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we invented something different: growing food and domesticating animals. This was truly a revolution, humanity’s first declaration of independence — from nature’s cold mercies. Now we could exert some control, some mastery, over our conditions of existence.
Some of this could not be evident to people at the time, or else they would not have embraced agriculture. Life’s key problem was sustenance, and agriculture (for all its vagaries) seemed to enhance food security.
Harari may be right that this was a mistake — during most of human history. Only in the last century or two have we really gotten the payoff (because we finally truly mastered the thing).
Which brings us to the second revolution — the industrial one. It was mainly an energy revolution. At first limited by just our own muscle power, we then exploited animals (horses, oxen) to do much more work. That was pretty good. But nothing compared to how much energy and work is gotten out of a steam engine. And a single gallon of gasoline contains energy equal to about 49 horsepower hours, or 500 hours of human work (and I don’t mean paper pushing).
This obviously was propelled by a scientific revolution, as we grew in understanding nature and how to harness its forces. But a book by historian Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: a History of Capitalism, illuminates something else little understood: how the industrial revolution also depended upon what was really a second agricultural one.
That cycle had indeed long been repeating; as Appleby puts it, Malthus was an excellent prophet of the past. But he wrote just when the picture was changing.
The answer lies in that second agricultural revolution. It was not a thunderclap, but a gradual process, beginning around the early seventeenth century, in the Netherlands and Britain. A key factor limiting food production was soil depletion, requiring fields to “rest” every third year or so. But by fiddling with different crops, the Dutch and Brits found ways around this. Other innovations too emerged, so that, over a couple of centuries, food output (relatively speaking) soared.
So no longer did we need everybody in the fields (today it’s down to almost nil). Many could work instead in factories. Of course, that was hellish — but not as awful as life stuck on the farm. Anyway, now we could produce sufficient food plus factory goods. That made society wealthier overall — with enough money in people’s pockets to buy the added stuff.
Likewise, we take for granted the idea of striving to improve one’s life. But there was no such thing in feudal society. People worked just to exist, nothing more. They could not have imagined the kind of life we have today. Only with the revolutions into modernity did we begin to grasp the concept of proactive self-betterment. Observers were actually surprised to see ordinary folks attracted to unaccustomed consumer goodies. This sparked a virtuous circle, energizing people into the kind of industrious striving that, in turn, turbocharged our continuing agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Of course this too meets with censure. The market economy and “consumerism” that fuels it are condemned. Yet this was also a social revolution, creating a bold new idea of the individual. The word “individual” was never even applied to human beings before the seventeenth century. Now the social chasm between oligarchs and commoners was bridgeable. The egalitarian ideal that many today put in opposition to capitalism is in fact a product of that very thing.