Human Domestication, Ft. Saint Andrew

Andrew leads a discussion on humanity’s reliance on modern agriculture, inspired by James C. Scott’s book Against the Grain.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
That's a horrible way to begin. It could happen here.
That's how we start a podcast. And Robert Evans podcast,
Things falling apart, put them back together, all that good stuff.
Co hosts here today Garrison Davis, our our our buddy Chris,
and of course the great Saint Andrew, Andrew Blessing take

(00:34):
it away, Good morning, and in case I don't see you,
good afternoon, good evening, and good night. Speaking of the
Truman shoe, solid reference, well done, Thank you. I wanted
to spend today's episode discussing a concept that has been
brought up in the work of James C. Scott and
Christopher Ryan, the idea of human domestication. And before people

(00:58):
start clicking off, I'm not going to go all and
pri him or anything, you know, It's just I think
it's an interesting thing to think about. I think that
Scott explores it in a very interesting way in chapter
two of Against the Green, and so relating as I
guess to the Truman Show, because I mean, why did

(01:20):
I bring it up? Truman lives in a suburban picket
fence American dream dome of a world that's meant to
keep him, you know, contained and content and ignorant about
the fact that he's on a TV show. Truman has
trapped in this wound that he kind of conformed too,
but he can't escape, at least initially, and so you

(01:43):
could tell that you know, there's something wrong, and he
probably felt that way for a long time. It's only
over the course of the movie that he develops a
sufficient awareness of his condition to leave home and become
a true man, Thank you very much. Holy alright, alright,
good episode, guys. Um and humans like Truman have been

(02:12):
stewards and cultivators of the natural environment for a long time, right,
one of the only creatures who do that. By the way,
I see a lot of people who see who kind
of like adopt this assumption that he wants just like
imposing our will on the environment that is otherwise unscathed
by our presence and all that. And I mean, yeah,

(02:32):
we do a lot of very very terrible stuff the environment,
but a lot of our actions are also beneficial. And
we have the only creatures to shape and sometimes harm
and sometimes benefit the natural environment. I mean beavers, elephants,
prairie dogs, bees, and tom not to mention the networks

(02:53):
of trees and other plants that all manipulate the environments
to soothe them and there comfort and their survival. You know,
but there's no nature as we know it as we
see it um that sort of untouched wild idea without
the activities of humans. You know, humans have been planting

(03:13):
seeds and tubers, shaping the evolution of many plants species,
burning and desirable flora, weeding out, competition, pruning, thinning, trimming, transplanting, mulching, relocating, bark, ringing, compassing, watering,
and futilizing. And for animals, you know, we have hunted

(03:34):
even selectively, you know, spared females or reproductive age, or
hunted based on life cycles, or fish selectively managed streams
to promote spawning and shellfish beds, you know, transplanted the
eggs and young of birds and fish, and even raised
juveniles in some cases. That's kind of how we ended
up domest skating a lot of animals. And I'm gonna

(03:55):
get into that. So through fire, through plow, through hunting,
through a whole array of different activities, humans have domesticated
whole environments. You know, well before you know the full
the full society is based on you know, fully domesticated
wheat and barley, and goats and sheep. The spectrum of

(04:18):
subsistence moods that we have utilized, whether we're hunting, foraging, pastoralism,
or farming, have existed and complemented each other, you know,
sort of harmony. Millennia and I mean those of you
who have read don't have everything. You kind of see
that picture coming into shape as it progressed through the book.

(04:38):
But of course James C. Scott also discussed it years
before in Against the Green so as he says, enter
the Domas, just as we transformed our landscapes, we transformed ourselves.
The Domas was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields,
seed and green stores, people and domesticated animals and hangers

(05:02):
on like mice and rats and covids, all co evolving
with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen. You know,
dogs and pigs and cats, all of them. Their entire
evolution was shaped by their relation to this dom and
humans are not the exception. Of course, there's some animals

(05:24):
that easier to domesticate than others, which is why you
don't see people commonly riding or hooding zebras and gazelle
um they will make the best cattle or ride um
and probably knock your brains out if you tried. So
it's probably best to stick to the ones that we

(05:45):
have sort of who evolved with, like you know, llamas
and goats and sheep and pigs and over generations, you
see the domesticated creatures, unlike their wild counterparts, developer level
of submissiveness and a decreased awareness of their surroundings. Right,
So that emotional dampening is basically a condition of life

(06:08):
because when you're in that domas you know, yeah on
the human supervision, that instant reaction to predator and you know,
pray they no longer the most powerful pressures. Because you're
in this sort of cultivated environment, your physical protection and
nutrition is more secure than it would be in a

(06:29):
more wild environment. So the mestigated animal is less allude
to its surroundings, less away of its surroundings than its
cousins in the wild. UM. And we could see as well,
you know, with human sidenters, there's also been a reduction
mobility UM and that of course had consequences for health.

(06:52):
To be very honest with you, I was actually kind
of consumed about covering this and I was trying to
figure out how to cover this um in a way
that doesn't make me look like I'm trying to like
retire into the deeps of Amazonia or something. Yeah, I

(07:15):
just I find it interesting to think about her environments
shape us. Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can think about
these things without becoming a hermit and hiding in the woods.
As as as attractive as an idea as that, well,
yeah for sure, for sure. I mean like I have
this like kind of canon in my head, you know,

(07:37):
like the whole idea of multi verses. Yeah. I figured
somewhere in the multiverses a version of myself we have
retired into the forest and gone through this whole kind
of like anime training arc and emerged as this like
one punchman beast of a human. I would I would.
I would also like to be that tipeline. I think

(07:57):
that would be very interesting, like a train so either
all my hair falls out, able to snap trees with
just a breath. It is like, yeah, the the the
the quintessential wildman. That's yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's
also multiverse version of me where I'm president or something.

(08:23):
It would be pretty interesting to see, Like I should
be kind of cool. I just had an idea of
like this, um, this team of versions of oneself that
team up to like fight the evil versions of themselves
across the multiverse. It's kind of like kind of the Conqueror,

(08:43):
except I think in most versions of the multiverse, he
is evil. Yes, I have, I've definitely, I've definitely read
that comic before of the good Ones fighting the bad Ones.
I mean, the Injustice comics and video games are pretty
pretty pretty big, pretty big staples of that genre. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
of course an Injustice it's different characters, Whereas it will

(09:06):
be interesting to see like a cast that's all just
one person, just like the same dude, the exact same person,
but they all grew up in such different environments. Even
though they share the exact same DNA, they're like different people.
It would be an interesting commentary on society because we
do live in one. After all, we do live in
a society for better for worse. Yeah, But anyway, like

(09:31):
I'm saying, you know, environments shape us. We shape environments,
and to me, we need to start shaping our environments again,
so we could either shape up or chip out of
existence as a species, right, Um, you know, because the
way the trajectory were on is not sustainable. Um. So

(09:56):
we can see, of course, in this transition to domas um,
the sedentary, green growing sort of community that you know,
in archaeological studies of the bones of the inhabitants, you
could see like repetitive stress injuries shaping their bodies, you know,
like the skeletal signatures of like grinding grain and you know,

(10:20):
like ah, cutting and sewing and kneeling and bending and
moving in you know, very repetitive ways, you know. And
of course with these concentrations of people, we also see
like epidemics and stuff and parasites starting to fester not
just within humans or just not just within species, but

(10:42):
also like cross species pathogens and stuff. Yeah, you know.
And so as we all on this kind of same arc,
sharing this micro environment, sharing our gyms and parasites, you
end ups getting more and more brutal versions of like
wild diseases, you know, because they basically go through the

(11:04):
the iron quantlet of you know, like that the disease
thunder doom, We're only one could come out as Victoria's
and so they battled out and became these more refined
and more severe forms, which is why you see in
Europe where they had this high population densities, they the
diseases that developed there when they were introduced to the

(11:26):
coote and quote New World. You know, the really ravaged
population that didn't really live on that level of density.
Not to say they didn't have cities, because they did.
The had cities and villages and collaborations and such a
people spanning across like large areas, but it wasn't organized

(11:46):
in quite the same way. It wasn't generalizing quite fairly.
But you know, it's two whole continents. UM. We also
see that like ye, nutritional stress starts to develop in
the bones and teeth of um more quote domiciled humans. UM.

(12:11):
You see like I and deficiency anemia in people whose
diets were consisting increasingly of grains and you know, as
I said told, you know, their diets became narrower, you know,
less variety UM in both plants and proteins. And so
that ended up leading to you know, like declining tooth

(12:36):
size and reduction in statue and skeletal robustness. And of
course this change and like our physiology and dimorphism as
a history such as like a lot fool of the
pact than just in ulithic, but sidentis um and crowding
definitely left and immediate and legible mark on the archaeological record.

(13:04):
I do find it interesting. Um. I read this book
I think last year called Botany of Desire, and in
it the guy um what's his name? And in it
Michael Pollan talks about all the plans we thought we
were domestigating. Domesticated us too, you know, because if you

(13:26):
think about it, you know, you up in the garden
on your hands and knees, day after day, sun and rain,
reading and fertilizing and untangling, protecting and reshaping an environment
just to suit you little tomato plants. He'll potato plant,
and I mean the plant kind of hasn't made you know, Um,

(13:49):
they don't have to worry about the sort of things
they would usually have to worry about outside of the domas.
You know, you were there to make sure that their
competitors are weeded out. You were there to make sure
they get all the nutrients they need. You're there to
make sure that do insects and stuff come and like
ravage them, and you even help to fuutilize them as well.

(14:10):
And so you know, it's kind of like I want
to say, uh, mutual relationship because as you know, these
domesticated plants have continued long this path of domestication. A
lot of them can no longer thrive without our help.

(14:31):
And in the same way, you know, we can't just
not go on without them. You know, we also are
dependent on like a handful of domesticated cultivars. Like we
can't just certainly switch and just be like, oh, we're
not gonna grow wheat and corn and potatoes anymore. But
I mean that's been the foundation of all diets for

(14:52):
too long. Now. That's what you know, most of our
food production back you don't have percentages, I won't say most,
or just say a lot of our food production is
like centered around that, and so um, you know, we
can't just jump out to that, especially with the population increases,

(15:13):
so you just have grown increasingly reliant on a few
like grains and cereals, um and starches. So yeah, we
do we need them more than they need said a
lot of senses. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, because I mean
a lot of them they do still have like wild
counterparts that can always you know, take over. It's just

(15:34):
a wild counterparts generally less appetizing than the ones you've
gotten used to. I'm sure a lot of people have
seen that picture of the different types of bananas out there, um,
or you know, the different types of cooling out there. Um.
Of course, a lot of corn species that are edible
because you know they were cultivated in massive America. UM.

(15:58):
I would like to try them, be because the corn
that I've grown up with gotten used too much of
what it's called. But I don't like it. Um. I
find the texture and taste of it to be kind
of lack of a vet would revolting. So I mean, like,

(16:21):
and I've been this way for like a long long time, right,
Like I growing up used to be refusing to eat
like an entire plate of food because it had corn
in it. I didn't like one. And if people used
to point out the irony and the fact that I
would readily eat like corn pie, what would eat popcorn?
What would eat like corn bread? Yeah? But to me,

(16:43):
it's it's not the same, you know, like corn on
the cob and and stuff is it's not the same.
And so like I've tried some some different types of corn,
Like I've tried it was kind of like soft baby
corns that they're get in like soup songs. Oh yeah,
and those delicious you know, I wouldn't such your sights

(17:06):
too much on those various corn varieties because one of
the oldest ways of eating corn before we had really
nice soft kernels. One of one of the oldest ways
is we would we would take we would take the
heart the hard corn kernels, um pop them inside a
inside like a frying pan to make this tart expand
then crush that up and mix it with like a

(17:27):
liquid to have a very disgusting, starchy gruel. And that
was the way that we ate corn for a long time.
And eventually that was eventually we were able to to
like um like tortise and stuff. But for a long
time it was just kind of corn rule. Yeah, this
was this was a problem. This was a major problem
during the Irish potato famine because in short, the potato

(17:52):
crops failed um and so the British government imported a
bunch of what they called Indian corn at the time,
which was corn grown in the Ad States um. And
this was even though Irish people were growing plenty of
corn to feed themselves, but that corn was being exported um,
and the Indian corn was seen that it was harder,
so it was seen as of lower quality. So they
had to develop a bunch of methods of grinding it down,

(18:14):
and eventually the government was just like, hey, just soak
it for like several days and then boil it in
water for hours and add some milk or some grease
if you have it. And some of the problems that
costes that, like the Irish people were starving to death,
and because when you're starving to death, your your stomach
is not as hardy as it is when you're not

(18:36):
starving to death, and so the corn, even after being boiled,
would cut their stomachs and there is some feel lining
and cause like in some cases people would like die. Um.
So yeah, corn, see I could I could add that's
my reasons to despise corn, like anti Irish violins. I'm

(19:08):
gonna I will briefly ranch about corn subsidies. People think
I've actually done that on the show. Yet there's there's
there's there's a there's a thing about that'll be high
traffic domess. That's like like in terms of sort of domestication,
in terms of human domestication, you know, and in terms

(19:29):
of the the extent to which we're being shaped, you
have to be I think, very careful to make sure
that you're attributing agency to the thing that actually has agency,
because there's there's a tendency to sort of attribute stuff too,
you know, Okay, well, this is just a way the
technical process works. And because this is the way the
technical process works, here are the social structure is that

(19:50):
inevitably results out of it. And that's true to some extent.
But you know, for example, like if if we're talking
about like whose domestic and whom we look at corners like, well, yeah,
because we growing and grow an enormous amount of corn.
But it's not because of sort of like like that
that's the reason we have so much corn is entirely political.
It's entirely about the fact that, like there's a corn

(20:11):
lobby in the US that is enormously powerful. And because
of the way the Senate works and because of the
way sort of like the primaries work, you have to
be pro corn. And this means that the American corn
industry has billions and billions of dollars and subsidies that
like this is this is like the only thing every
economist across the entire political spectrum agrees on like you

(20:32):
will you will get like the Heritage Foundation agreeing with
like Marxists who are agreeing with like like that the
standard LiPo comes. Everyone agrees this is awful to free
trade people agree with this, the anti free trade people
agree with this, and it just sticks there because of
you know, because because because of a very sort of
a very contingent set of political processes. And I think

(20:53):
that that's something that's important to keep in mind when
you're thinking about stuff like domestication, which is that like, yes,
on the one hand, it is true that you are
being shaped by the production process, but it's also true
like for example, you know, if you go back to
the women in the story who you know, you can
see in in their bones right that they've been sort
of like bending over like husking crops and stuff. Wells

(21:14):
like well, that that it's true to some exat that's
that's because of the production process. But the production process
works like that because of social reasons, like okay, like
why is it women doing this work? Right? Like there's
there's always simultaneously sort of human constructive social systems operating
at the same time as you have these mechanical systems,
and people love to attribute all of it to the

(21:35):
mechanical systems in a way that loses you know it
it naturalizes things that are bad and could actually be changed,
and loses the capacity for sort of well yeah, I
mean our sort of culpability and both the fact that
it could be different than the fact that we do
it this way. Yeah, I mean, yeah, but it's still

(21:57):
I think it's still important to like think about like
how reliant we still are on it as a resource
in terms of like maze and like you know, corn
syrup and like getting like glucose get like, like it's
so we rely on it for so many facets beyond
just eating like a corn on the cob, and like, yeah,
it's kind of it's like it's like a it's like

(22:18):
a it's like a figure right infinity loop here that
we've kind of we've we've kind of like tied ourselves
into a knot. Um. Yeah, but I'm saying like, like like
a lot of this stuff also has to do with
the fact, like you know, part of the reason that
there's we use corn syrup is they were like taxes
on sugar and you could get you can get around
and then has all there's all these like yeah, there's
all these sort of feedback cycles of like we become
dependent on something because of a social process, but now

(22:38):
we're dependent on the physical process. And it's yeah, I mean,
so you can you can like tie this into the
idea of like, once you switched over to large scale agriculture,
we need to kind of have somebody that that governs
how it works, because now we're no longer reliant on
smaller more like individualized farms or forest farming. We're instead
reliant on a bigger you know, like a bigger stake

(23:02):
in the land. So if that fails, we're all more
in trouble. Now, agriculture does not equal sieve. That's not
that's not an actually sound um and the like like anthropology,
Like if if you look at the anthropology, that's actually
not a superstand argument. I think you can you can
read the the not of everything that makes they make
that point pretty clear. But still when you do have

(23:23):
when you do have a large population relying on very
few like um, very large crop like like of only
a small diversity of large crops, and there's a lot,
there's a lot, there's a lot more stakes on it,
So you're gonna you know, there's gonna be processes that
are going to have like authority, authoritative, hierarchical elements to
help organize those crops so that they don't get you know, famines,

(23:46):
which of course if you look at Maos China you
can see that worked out very well. Yeah, and I
should note for the record, when we're talking about the
Irish potato fam and that a lot of people didn't
die because the government imported corn, which they stopped doing
after the first year of the famine because of TRAVALI. Anyway,
what we're doing, we'll be doing an episode on the
potato famine. I didn't want to completely shift on the

(24:08):
corn that was imported by the government because it was critical.
It's just also eating corn doesn't historically, as as was
brought up earlier, eating corn historically does not mean what
you you think about now. Yeah, well, and and you
know what, we will also do things on on the
Mao famines. And part of that also was that the
centralization of agriculture was a like epocle disaster in a

(24:31):
lot of ways that took like decades to recover from,
which yeah, is a is a fun time. Yes, And
when Chris says a fun time here, he is not
the end the tru but there was new audias are wondering,

(24:54):
thank you, thank you and Drew for that clarification. I
was I was slightly I was slightly used. Yes he is.
He is slash J. He is not slash SR. Yeah.
I mean it occurs to me that I'm not sure
I've ever gone back into the record to see if
anyone in my family died from the famines. I know
people died later, I don't know if people died specifically
from that. Which is a good time again, but Chris

(25:17):
has a good time. What they actually made is not
a good time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back to against the grain,
back to against the green. So as we're talking about,
you know, this reliance on this one steep will whether
it be corn or green or any cereal, really it

(25:40):
kind of brings to mind um. And also we're going
to talk about the centralization of farming. Um. You know,
we've grown to be so reliant on these single things.
And not only that, but less people know about the
processes that go into a food than before. UM. We
see and like as time progresses, UM and as James C.

(26:04):
Scott points out, and to gatherers, you know, they had
this ghost of natural rhythms that they had to observe.
You know, they had like the movement of hoods to season,
migrations of foods, you know, the resting and nesting places
of fish, cycles of who holds the different fruits and nuts. Um.

(26:26):
And if you in the Caribbean, you would know about
things like you know, mango season and plum season and
China season, all these different seasons at different times of year. Um.
And to keep track of all those plus several more
because they had such diverse diets, I mean, the way
to attrack the appearance of you know, different mushrooms, um,

(26:47):
the locations of different types of game. You know, it's
all these activities that require tool kits, right in, different
techniques that have to be mastered, have to be understood,
have to be shared from generations generation. You know. They
also in addition to that, you know, these foes they
had the ability to cultivate you know, a lots of

(27:10):
different stands of you know cereal. Um. They had the
different tools they had to make sickles and you know,
um what you call those again sling shots and blue
dots and all these different tools would have used spears, arrows,
and they also would have had to recognize the seasonality

(27:33):
of sometimes different ecosystems. You know, they might have been
crossing for white lands and forests and savannahs and arid environments.
And so as they understood they had to understand these
um these rhythms, and they had to be generalists and
opportunists that could take advantage of these different rhythms, all

(27:53):
the different episodic bounties that nature may provide or rather provide,
but you know, bring their way that they would have
to kind of fight four in some cases. But they
have this sort of metronome. Right. Farmers on the other hand,
you know, as we sort of moved to that sort
of farming dominant, sedentary sort of way of life, you know,

(28:17):
you largely can find to this one single food web. Right,
your two routine has a particular tempo you s left, observe, observe,
you know, different seasonalities and different movements. But it's a
bit more limited. You know, you have a handful of
crops that you have to bring successfully to harvest every year,
and I mean it's complex. A lot of things have

(28:37):
to look out for, whether it be you know, diseases
and pathogens and you know different insects and and pests
at me UM come at your crops. You know, you
have to look out full of different things, but it's
usually uh closer less expansive range of activities, at least

(29:04):
in comparison to hunt gatherers. On the other hand, farming
and the nuances of cereal grain farming um far more complex,
require far more skill and much wider range of knowledges

(29:26):
than you know. Working on an assembly line you know
UM as believe Adam Smith points on Wealth of Nations.
You know, you have all these people on this assembly
line making pins. But Alexis they took a Ville asks
what can be expected of a man who has spent

(29:47):
twenty years of his life putting heads on pins? You know,
this sort of a restriction in terms of a contraction
in terms of the range of knowledges and expert teases
that you know one can be expected to take on UM.
And so I guess that kind of links into my

(30:09):
whole idea of anti work. It's this idea of moving
outside and beyond this kind of restriction to like one
or two or a few rigorous activities that you expected
to do for the rest of your life, and also
opening people up to exploring a wider range of knowledges

(30:30):
and expertises and experiences and practices that you know they
can we eve into their everyday life rather than you know,
just one minutely choreographed routine of dance steps. You know,
there's a bit more expression, a bit more freedom in

(30:52):
terms of, you know, how we live, in terms of
how we work, in terms of how we educate, in
terms of how we build um, are we socialize um
being able to sort of much just smashed to one
beat but sort of generally took a company of music absolutely, absolutely,

(31:16):
because I think no matter whether or not you own
a share in the pinmaking factory, I think you're still
gonna face alienation from your environment by just doing the
same repetitive taskt hours a day. Like I don't. I
don't think that's actually much better. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly,

(31:39):
And it requires transmission. And so for those who haven't seen,
you know, I did a video on anti work sort
of discussing it, so we can check that out when
this comes out. I suppose I just wanted to that

(32:04):
right now, we live in a society that um, that
is governed by institutions that often demand behavior that conflicts
with our innate capacities and predilections. You know, the millions

(32:24):
of years of us living in these you know, cooperative
social sharing environments, you know, where community, communal and individual
UM rights and and stuff and such were valued and respected.

(32:47):
I mean to sort of draw back to the Truman
Show analogy. It's almost as if, you know, we went
from living in the world to living in a zoom
of our own making. It were just being well, I
guess we're watching ourselves in this suit. Yeah, It's it's
like the zoo keeper who lives inside the zoo and
is also the attraction exactly. And and so I think

(33:11):
that while obviously we can't switch back to like foraging,
you know, that's not necessarily desirable. I do think that
we need to we consider our approaches to you know,
health and security and work and leisure and the way

(33:33):
we relate to the natural world. You have to sort
of change the story and changed how we organize. It's
going to take Charlione are of course, UM. Anyone who's
organized can tell you that it is far from easy
UM and is replete with setback and failure. But I

(33:58):
think we have a responsibility to m remique. Yes, it's
not as cool to write the wrongs of yesterday to
the end tomorrow, nows it? WHOA throw in a couple
of air horns here. Make sure they're pitched lower so
that it's not horrible to listen to. No, never do that.

(34:26):
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