When is progress not really progress?

I'm currently manfully ploughing my way through Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Subtitled A Brief History of Humankind, it's a thick tome of anthropology, evolutionary psychology, history and politics, a tour de force of grand scope that attempts nothing less than a critical summary of the whole of human history (and prehistory).

It's full of fascinating observations and surprising conclusions (and I'm less than a quarter of the way through!) It is written in an engaging, no-nonsense style, albeit with the weight of copious analysis and academic research behind it.

Just to take one example, starting about 10,000-11,000 years ago, humankind across the world started gradually moving away from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled agricultural life, cultivating a much more limited number of crops and animals. This was the so-alled Agricultural Revolution, usually considered one of the most important steps in human progress, and a great leap forward in our development.

Harari, however, calls it "History's Biggest Fraud". He argues that the Agricultural Revolution was not evidence of humanity's increasing intelligence, not was it the renunciation of a gruelling, dangerous hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favour of a pleasanter, easy-living, bucolic life of farming.

Rather, the new farmers typically had an even harder life than before: backbreaking work clearing fields, weeding, building fences, guarding against pests, watering, collecting animal faeces to nourish the soil, etc, etc. Yes, it allowed for greater food production, albeit of a much more limited and less healthy variety of foods, and the improved food supply and settled homes allowed for more babies to be born. But more babies needed more food, and babies were fed cereals rather than breast-milk to allow the mothers to work more, reducing their immune systems, and leading to many more infant deaths.

It doesn't end there. If the staple crop failed due to an infestation or bad weather, peasants died by the thousands. Tribe-against-tribe violence increased, as the best agricultural land was fought over tooth and nail. Infections and diseases flourished in the busier, closer, more enclosed living quarters. Forests were cleared to make room for mono-culture plantings, a process still going on today. Once free-roaming animals were domesticated, penned, whipped, harnessed, even mutilated and tortured, before being unceremoniously slaughtered at a young age, all in the interests of human food production.

And, once the process was started, and populations were continuously growing, there was just no going back to the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This is what Harari calls the "luxury trap", and he describes a couple of interesting modern analogies. 

College graduates take demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing to work hard, earn lots of money and retire at 35. But, by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children in school, houses in the suburbs, and a taste for the high life. There is no easy way to retire, and they continue to slave away for decades.

Another modern example: when email arrived, people stopped spending so much time writing, addressing and posting physical letters, and then waiting days or weeks for a reply, opting instead for the ease and convenience of firing off a quick email, and expecting an almost immediate reply. But now people dash off emails for the slightest of reasons, not just when there is something important to relate, and we are all tied to our over-full inboxes, stressed and anxious. Progress?

I'm looking forward to the next three quarters of the book.