The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

by Daniel Quinn

In our culture—East and West, twins of a single birth—human history is only what’s happened since our agricultural revolution began.

When I view the human horizon, I’m looking back three million years past the Mesopotamian horizon, so it’s simply grotesque to think of our agricultural revolution as signaling the beginning of human history. It signals something, to be sure, but not remotely ‘the beginning of human history.’”

“I have heard naive thinkers suggest that our agricultural revolution came about as a response to famine.” “Why is that naive?” “It’s naive because starving people don’t plant crops any more than drowning people build life rafts. The only people who can afford to wait for crops to grow are people who already have food.” “Yes, that makes sense.” “You will also hear it conjectured that agriculture was pretty much an inevitable development, because it makes life so much easier and more secure. In fact, it makes life more toilsome and less secure. Every study of calories spent versus calories gained confirms that the more your food comes from agriculture, the harder you have to work for it. The first Neolithic farmers, who probably only planted a few crops and depended largely on foraging, worked much harder to stay alive than their Mesolithic ancestors. Later farmers, who planted more crops and did less foraging, worked even harder to stay alive, and completely modern totalitarian farmers, who depend entirely on crops, work harder to stay alive than anyone else. And famine, far from being banished by agriculture, is actually a by-product of agriculture and is never found apart from it. Travel to the most inhospitable desert of Australia during the most horrendous drought—and you won’t find a single starving aborigine anywhere.”

“It’s become popular in recent decades to speak of ‘demonizing’ people who are especially feared or hated, turning them into monsters of depravity. I’ve never actually heard the opposite tendency mentioned, but of course it’s equally possible to ‘angelize’ people who are especially admired or revered—to turn them into perfect beings who embody all desired qualities. For example, there’s been a recent tendency for people to angelize Leaver peoples wherever they’re to be found, to imagine them as infinitely wise, selfless, farseeing environmentalist saints who practice perfect gender equality and never speak in contractions.