The Neolithic Revolution and the Repugnant Conclusion

The Repugnant Conclusion is a result in population ethics which the man who came up with it (philosopher Derek Parfit) finds distasteful, but difficult to avoid. Basically, it states that for any given population with a high quality of life, there's a much larger population whose existence, if other things were equal, would be better even if its members have lives barely worth living. That is, the aggregate quality of life of the larger population dwarfs that of the smaller population by reason of its numbers alone.

An interesting and disturbing concept, but somewhat theoretical, isn't it? Well, the fact is that the scenario used to illustrate the Repugnant Conclusion closely resembles an aspect of the Neolithic Revolution mentioned in places like Jared Diamond's essay Humanity's Greatest Mistake.

Apparently, hunter-gatherers lived longer and healthier lives than agriculturalists, with more leisure time. However, their way of life did not support high population densities (that is, they correspond to the high-quality-of-life-but-small-size population in the Repugnant Conclusion). Hunter-gatherers were nevertheless displaced by the agriculturalists, who were worse fed, suffered from more diseases, lived less, and had to work more. Why, then, the latter prevailed? Because agriculture supports greater population densities. Thus, farmers will end up overwhelming hunter-gatherers. (Are the various myths of a past Golden Age a dimmed cultural memory of the hunter-gatherer epoch of human history? Or is that benevolent conception of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the newest iteration of the myth of a Golden age?)

It is often argued that agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, but this has been disputed by the finding that nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter (see "Disease" below). In actual fact, by reducing the necessity for the carrying of children, Neolithic societies had a major impact upon the spacing of children (carrying more than one child at a time is impossible for hunter-gatherers, which leads to children being spaced four or more years apart). This increase in the birth rate was required to offset increases in death rates and required settled occupation of territory and encouraged larger social groups.

(Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution. And here is a dissenting view critical of Diamond.)

From the vantage point of our modern society, in which we are far better off than any hunther-gatherers (though some may disagree) the transition to civilization may have been worth it after all. But suppose for a moment that, for whatever season, the development of human societies had stopped at the level of the Ancient Near East, of even the Middle Ages, and had stayed at that level forever. Would the transition have been worth it in that case?

Lets remember that, until relatively recently, the vast majority of humans were farmers who did not receive any significant benefit from civilization, which was the prerogative of a tiny elite (the governing and priestly classes, city dwellers in general). In fact, that elite ruthlessly exploited farmers for its own benefit. They were what historian William H. McNeill calls macroparasites in his book Plagues and Peoples.

Many of the greatest cities of classical times were placed within sight of forbidding highlands. Every year their inhabitants ransacked the surrounding countryside to feed themselves. Describing the symptoms of widespread malnutrition in the countryside in the middle of the second century, the doctor Galen observed: "The city-dwellers, as was their practice, collected and stored enough corn for all the coming year immediately after the harvest. They carried off the wheat, the barley, the beans and the lentils and left what remained to the country folk." Seen in this light, the history of the Roman empire is the history of the ways in which the 10 per cent of the population, who lived in the town and have left their mark on the course of European civilization, fed themselves, in the summary manner described by Galen, from the labours of the remaining 90 per cent who worked the land.

(Peter Brown: The World of Late Antiquity)

The typical Middle Ages farmer didn't give a fig that Plato ever existed. The pressures of rapacious nobles and tax collectors were much more real to him. Not that city dwellers fared better in all respects, either. Until relatively recently, cities were demographic sinks ravaged by disease who needed a constant influx of people from the countryside to maintain their population level.