I'm still thinking about Linknoid's recent comment, and my response to it. Maybe I'll begin this rambling by continuing with the topic on which I trailed off, and go from there.

Issue of debate: Did paleolithic people (i.e. pre-agricultural hunter/gatherers) do more or less "work" than farmers? Than modern day urban dwellers? Than Captian Picard on the Starship Enterprise?

An almost universally held belief amongst people in our culture (unless you're one of those fringe thinkers who befriend talking gorillas) is that those in ancient times had it so rough and hard that we can barely imagine their misery. Everything humanity has done during the past 6000-10000 years has made our lives easier and easier, better and better, and this trend will only continue in the same direction into the future.

In the article I linked to, Jason Godesky presents a well-bibliographed summary dispelling what he calls the four biggest myths told by agriculturists. He's obviously done his homework.

But here's the crux: I haven't.

I do have some desire to find ways to become a more effective communicator, so that even if people don't agree with me, they will at least be able to understand where I'm coming from. I can talk easily enough about obvious stuff like why free speech is important, and I think I've been getting a little better at taking on what might be termed the "divine right of private property" dogmas, but when it comes to addressing Really Big Stuff (like, say, agriculture!), I shy away, feeling as if the myths I would be confronting are so hopelessly ingrained that all I would do by arguing is discredit myself in the eyes of anyone who doesn't want to question what the culture considers "common knowledge".

While Jason Godesky and Ran Preiur have taken the time and energy to find and cite "authoratitive sources" (whatever the hell that means), I, for myself, rely to a large extent on my own intuition, because frankly, I consider any source claiming to know what was going on 6000 years ago to be suspect.

So perhaps I just don't consider it worth my time to spend hours dredging stuff out of anthropology textbooks, scientific studies, and research papers on the slim chance that if I amass and memorize an encyclopedic volume of facts and statistics, some other people might take me more seriously. To hell with them. To hell with it all. What does knowing or not knowing even matter?

Regardless of what the past holds, we're not going back to it. We're heading into the future! But what future? That's what I'm interested in. It always has been. It's why I watched Star Trek religiously as a teen.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

Herein lies my problem. Whenever we advocate taking earth-centered approach to anything, it's almost inevitably pigeonholed as "wanting to get back to the past." Then "the past" is conflated with hardship and misery, to be "solved" by the inventions of modernity.

While I applaud the work Jason Godesky and others are doing, I'd like to get away from depending on any particular narrative of what things were like thousands of years ago, or even on the few remaining undisturbed autonomous human tribes that haven't yet been extinguished. While there might be some value in these things, the case would be stronger if it could be made independently of them.

I think Jesus had the right idea when he talked about using the "lilies of the field" and the "birds of the air" as a model for living. With just the right "spin" (I hate the term, but there it is), we could make a similar argument. If humans lived like squirrels...

(I'm using squirrels because I see them so damn often whenever I go outside, although I think I liked the prairie dogs back in Colorado even better because they had such nice communities.)

Is the life of a squirrel fraught with labor and hardship? Do squirrils have to "work" 16-hour days just to eke out a survival? Do they till the soil, plant seeds, and water them to make sure there will be food enough for winter? If they don't do this, how can they possibly hope to make it? Don't they know that if they don't get busy developing a military strategy, they're going to be beaten to the punch? They better wise up, and start hunting down the squirrels in the neighboring tree; otherwise those other squirrils will multiply and start consuming whatever meager food supply they have, and they won't be properly equipped to defend it.

Yes, life for the primitive squirrel was hard and brutish. They knew of no such thing as leisure, for almost every moment was consumed in the act of mere survival against the elements.

But on one magic day, a new strain of squirrel appeared, caused either by a slight random mutation in the gene, or an accidental mode of behavior. This squirrel discovered the magic of destroying all the plants around him that he couldn't eat, and he shared this secret with his brethren. Thus, the lives of squirrels everywhere improved improved considerably. Now, entire masses of land could be used to grow nothing but squirrel-food. The squirrel population boomed, allowing some squirrels to spend all of their time divising even more efficient ways to turn everything around them into more squirrel-food, while at the same time getting better at killing other squirrels!

Oh god, this is getting beyond silly. Anyone who spends any time at all watching squirrels ought to be laughing hard and long at the part about their primitive lives being "hard and brutish".

Now I know this sort of approach isn't going to sit well with academics who like to have everything spelled out and proven like a mathematical theorem. Hell, I'm sure it's all full of logical fallacies too. Maybe I'm sinking to the level of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore with such tactics. But both of them seem to do a pretty damn good job of persuading a lot of people, so if persuading is what you're after, it seems to call for a little over-the-top irreverant lunacy.

But still, I'm not even sure I really want to persuade anyone. Maybe I'd rather just romp, prance, and play around in the grass like a little squirrel, and to hell with all this intellectual bullshit wankery. The idea of just letting go of it all and allowing flow to permeate does hold a certain appeal. Try it sometime, will you?