It Could Happen Here - Human Domestication, Ft. Saint Andrew

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

Andrew leads a discussion on humanity’s reliance on modern agriculture, inspired by James C. Scott’s book Against the Grain.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's a horrible way to begin. It could happen here.

That's how we start a podcast. I'm Robert Evans. Podcast, things falling apart. Put them back together. All that good stuff. Co-hosts here today, Garrison Davis, our buddy Chris, and of course, the great St. Andrew. Andrew. Blessings be upon you.

Take it away. Take it away. Good morning. St. Andrew. Andrew. Blessings be upon you. Take it away. Take it away. Good morning. And in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night. Wow. Speaking of the Truman Show. Solid reference.

Well done. Thank you. I want to spend today's episode discussing a concept that has been brought up in the work of James E. Scott and Christopher Ryan. That's the idea of human domestication and before people start clicking off i'm not gonna go all and prim 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 it i guess to the truman show because i mean why did 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 is trapped in this world that he cannot conform to, but he cannot escape, at least initially. And so you could tell that, you know, there's something wrong and he's already 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 all right all right good episode guys what an episode yeah um and humans like truman have been stewards and cultivators of the natural environment for a long time,

right? We're not 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 humans just like imposing our will on the environment that is otherwise unscathed by our presence and all that. And I mean, yeah, we do a lot of very, very terrible stuff to the environment, but a lot of our actions are also beneficial. And we are the only creatures

to shape and sometimes harm and sometimes benefit the natural environment. I mean, beavers, elephants, prairie dogs, bees, ants, termites, and not to mention the networks of trees and other plants

that all manipulate their environments to suit them and their comfort and their survival, you know. But there's no nature as we know it, as we see it, that sort of untouched wild idea, without the activities of humans. You know, humans have been planting seeds and tubers, shaping the evolution of many plant species, burning undesirable flora, weeding out competition, pruning, thinning, trimming, transplanting, mulching, relocating, bark wringing, coppicing, watering and fertilizing.

And for animals, you know, we have hunted even selectively you know spared females for 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 domesticating a lot of animals and i'm going to 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 first society is based on you know fully domesticated wheat and barley and goats and sheep. The spectrum of subsistence modes that we have utilized, whether it be hunting, foraging, pastoralism, or farming, have existed and complemented each other in a sort of harmony for millennia.

And I mean, those of you who have read Dawn of Everything, you kind of see that picture coming into shape as it progressed through the book. But of course, James C. Scott also discussed it years before in Against the Green. So as he says, enter the domus. Just as we transformed our landscapes, we transformed ourselves. The domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people and domesticated animals, and hangers-on like mice and rats and corvids, 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 the stumas.

And humans are not the exception. Of course, there are some animals that are easier to domesticate than others. Which is why you don't see people commonly riding or herding zebras and gazelle. They don't make the best cattle or ride and probably knock your brains out if you tried. So it's probably best to stick to the ones that we have sort of quavered with, like, you know, llamas and goats and sheep and pigs.

And over generations, you see that domesticated creatures unlike their wild counterparts develop a level of submissiveness and a decreased weariness of their surroundings right so that emotional dampening is basically a condition of life because when you're in that domus you know you're under human supervision that instant reaction to predator, you know, you're under human supervision. That instant reaction to predator and, you know, prey, they're 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 more wild environment.

So a domesticated animal is less alert to its surroundings, less aware of its surroundings than its cousins in the wild. And we could see as well, you know, with human sedentism, there's also been, you know, a reduction in mobility and that, of course,

had consequences for our health. To be very honest with you, I was actually kind of concerned about covering this. And I was trying to figure out a way to cover this in a way that doesn't make me look like I'm trying to like retire into the deeps of Amazonia or something. I find it interesting to think about how environments shape us. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you can think about these things without becoming a hermit and hiding in the woods. As attractive as an idea as that may be at times. Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, I have this kind of canon in my head

of you know like the whole idea of multiverses yeah i figure somewhere in the multiverse is 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 punch man beast of a human. I would also like to be in that timeline. I think that'd be very interesting. Yeah, like I train so hard that all my hair falls out. I'll be able to snap trees with just a breath. It's like, yeah. Might be the quintessential wild man.

Yeah. And I mean, I'm sure there's also a multiverse version of me where i'm president or something i don't know it might be pretty interesting to see like actually be kind of cool i just had an idea of like this um this team of versions of oneself that team up to fight the evil versions of themselves across the multiverse. It's kind of like Kang the Conqueror, except I think in most versions of the multiverse, he is evil.

Yes, 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 big staples of that genre yeah but of course in Injustice it's different characters whereas

it'll be interesting to see a cast that's all just one person oh 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. I think it'll be an interesting commentary on society.

Because we do live in one after all. We do live in a society. For better or for worse. Yeah. But anyway, like I was 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 ship out of existence as a species, right? You know, because the way the trajectory we're on is not sustainable. we're on is not sustainable um so we can see of course in this transition to the domus um this 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 like uh 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 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 germs and parasites you end up getting more and more brutal versions of like wild diseases you know because they basically go through the the iron gauntlet of you know like the the disease thunderdome where only one could come out as victorious and so they battled out and became these more refined and more severe forms, which is why you see in Europe where they had these high population densities, the diseases that developed there when they were introduced to the quote-unquote new world, you know,

it really ravaged the population that didn't really live in that level of density. Not to say they didn't have cities, because they did. They had cities and villages and collaborations and such of people spanning across large areas, but it wasn't organized in quite the same way. Of course, I'm generalizing quite severely, but it's two whole continents.

quite severely but you know it's two whole continents yeah um we also see that like nutritional stress starts to develop in the bones and teeth of um more quote-unquote domiciled humans um you see like iron deficiency anemia in people whose diets were consisting increasingly of grains and you know as they settled you know their diets became narrower you know less variety um in both plants and proteins and so that ended up leading to declining tooth size and a reduction in stature and skeletal robustness. with the fact than just the Neolithic, but sedentism and crowding definitely left an immediate and legible mark on the archaeological record. I do find it interesting. I read this book, I think last year,

called Botany of Desire, and in it, the guy, what is his name? And in it, Michael Poulan talks about how the plants we thought we were domesticating domesticated us too. Because if you think about it, you're up in the garden on your hands and knees day after day, sun and rain,

weeding and fertilizing and untangling, protecting and reshaping an environment just to suit your little tomato plant, your little potato plant. And I mean, the plant kind of has it made. They don't have to worry about the sort of things they would usually have to worry about outside of the domus. You are there to make sure that their competitors are weeded out. You are there to make sure they get all the nutrients they need. You are there to make sure that no insects and stuff come and ravage them. And you even help to fertilize them as well. And so, you know, it's kind of like, I want to say a mutual relationship because as, you know, these domesticated plants have continued along this path of domestication, a lot of them can no longer thrive without our help.

And in the same way, you know, we can't just not go on without them you know we also are dependent yeah on like a handful of domesticated cultivars like we can't just suddenly switch and just be like oh we're not gonna grow wheat and corn and potatoes anymore yeah i mean that's been the foundation of our diets for too long now that That's what, you know, most of our food production, I actually don't have percentages. I won't say most. I'll just say a lot of our food production is like centered around that. And so, you know, we can't just jump out of that.

Especially with like population increases, we just have grown increasingly reliant on a few, like, grains and cereals and starches. So, yeah, we do, we need them more than they need us in 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 the wild counterparts are generally less appetizing yeah 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 corn out there um of course a lot of corn species that are edible because, you know, they were cultivated in Mesoamerica. I would like to try them because the corn that I've grown up with, gotten used to, I'm not sure what it's called, but I don't like it.

I find the texture and taste of it to be kind of, for lack of a better word, revolting. So, I mean, like, 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 corn. of food because it had corn in it i didn't like one i know people used to point out the irony in the fact that i would readily eat like corn pie or i would eat popcorn or i would eat like corn bread yeah but to me 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 different types of corn. I've tried those kind of like soft baby corns that you get in like soups and stuff. Oh, yeah.

And those are delicious. I wouldn't set your sights 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 the oldest ways is we would we would take we would take the the hard the the hard corn kernels um pop them inside a inside like a frying pan to make the starch expand then crush that up and mix it with like a 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 you know eventually we were able to like turn it to like um like tortillas and stuff but

for a long time it was just kind of corn rule yeah yeah this was this was a major problem this was a major problem during the irish potato famine because in short the potato 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 United States. And this was even though Irish people were growing plenty of corn to feed themselves. But that corn was being exported. And the Indian corn was seen. It was harder. So it was seen as of lower quality.

So they had to develop a bunch of methods of grinding it down. 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 it caused is that like the Irish people were starving to death. And because when you're starving to death, your stomach is not as hearty as it is when you're not starving to death and because when you're starving to death your your stomach is not as hearty as it is when you're not starving to death and so the corn even after being boiled would cut their stomachs and there is a 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 violence Welcome

I'm Danny Thrill Won't you join me at the fire And dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows Presented by iHeart and Sonora An anthology and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network available on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts I will briefly rant about

corn subsidies but I don't think I've actually done that on the show yet we could do it with you on episode of corn subsidies but i don't think i've actually done that on the show yet yeah episode i mean i think subsidies there's there's there's a there's a thing about that'll be high traffic domus that's like like in terms of sort of domestication in terms of human domestication you know and in terms 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 a tendency to sort of attribute stuff to you know okay well this is just the way the technical process works and because this is the way the technical process works here are the social structures that

inevitably result out of it and that's true to some extent but you know for example like if we're talking about like who's domesticating whom we look at corn it's like well yeah okay so we grow and grow an enormous amount of corn but it's not because of sort of like like that that's the the reason we have so much corn is entirely political it's entirely about the fact that like there's a corn lobby in the u.s 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 in subsidies that like, this is, this is like the only thing every economist across the entire political spectrum agrees on. Like you will, you will get like the heritage foundation agreeing with like marxists who are agreeing with like yeah like the standard liberal comes everyone agrees this is

awful the 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 of a very sort of a very contingent set of political processes and i think 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 that 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 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 well it's like well that it it's true to some extent that 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 constructed social systems operating at the same time as you have these mechanical systems and people love to attribute all of it to the mechanical systems in a way that loses you know it 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 in both the fact that it could be different than the fact that we do it this way yeah i mean yeah it's still 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 maize 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 corn on the cob yeah um yeah exactly and like yeah it's kind of it's like it's so – we rely on it for so many facets beyond just eating like corn on the cob. Yeah, exactly. And like, yeah, it's kind of – it's like a figure eight infinity loop here. We've kind of like tied ourselves into a knot. Yeah, but it's – like a lot of this stuff also has to do with the fact like part of the reason that we use corn syrup is there were like taxes on sugar and you could get you can get around this has all these 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 we're dependent on the physical process and it's yeah i mean you can you can like tie this into the idea of like once you switch over to large scale agriculture we need to kind of have some body that that governs how it works because now we're no longer reliant on smaller, more individualized farms

or forest farming. We're instead reliant on a bigger stake in the land. So if that fails, we're all more in trouble. Now, agriculture does not equal sieve. That's not an actually sound anthropology. If you look at anthropology, that's actually not a super sound argument. I think you can read the dot of everything.

They make that point pretty clear. But still, when you do have a large population relying on very few, very large crops, of only a small diversity of large crops, then there's a lot more stakes on it. So there's going to be processes that are going to have authoritative hierarchical elements

to help organize those crops so that we don't get famines. Which, of course, if you look at Maoist 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 famine 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 trevallion anyway we'll be doing an episode on

the potato famine i didn't want to completely shit on the 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 then you know we will also do things on on the mao famines and part of that also was that the centralization of agriculture was a like epochal disaster in a lot of ways that took, like, decades to recover from. Indeed. Which, yeah, is a fun time. Yes, and when Chris says a fun time here,

he is not being literal. For those in the audience who are wondering. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, for that clarification. I was slightly confused. Yes, he is slash J. He is not slash SRS. Yeah, I mean, it occurs to me that I'm not sure I've ever gone back into the records 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. famines i know people died later i don't know if people died specifically from that which is a good time is a again when chris has a good time what they actually mean is not a good time yeah yeah anyway back to against the grain back to against the grain so as we're talking about you know this reliance on this one staple whether it be corn or grain or any cereal really it kind of brings to mind um and also when we talk about the centralization of farming and how 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 our food than

ever before um we see kind of like as time progresses um and as james c scott points out hunter gatherers you know they had this ghost of natural rhythms that they had to observe you know they had like the movements of herds the seasonal migrations of birds you know the resting and nesting places of fish the cycles of whole hosts of different fruits and nuts um and if you in the Caribbean you would know about things like you know mango season and plum season and chinette season all these different seasons and 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 track the appearance of you know different mushrooms um the locations of different types of game you know it's it all these activities they require toolkits right in

different techniques that have to be mastered have to be understood have to be shared from generation to generation you know they also in addition to that you know these foragers they had the ability to cultivate you know lots of different stands of you know cereal um they had the different tools they had to make sickles and you know um what do you call those again slingshots and blow darts and all these different tools would have used spears arrows and um they also would have had to recognize the seasonality of sometimes different ecosystems. You know, they might have been crossing over wetlands and forests and savannas and arid environments. And so they had to understand these rhythms.

And they had to be generalists and opportunists that could take advantage of these different rhythms. All the different episodic bounties that nature may provide. Or rather not provide, but, you know, bring their way that they would have to kind of fight for in some cases. But they have this sort of metronome, right? Farmers, on the other hand, you know, as we sort of move to that sort of farming-dominant, sedentary sort of way of life, you know as we sort of move to that sort of farming dominant sedentary sort of way of life

you know you're largely confined to this one single food web right your routine has a particular tempo you still have to 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 you have to look out for, whether it be, you know, diseases and pathogens and, you know, different insects and pests that may come at your crops. You know, you have to look out for those different things, but it's usually a closer, less expansive range of activities, at least in comparison to hunt gatherers. farming and the nuances of cereal grain farming are far more complex require far more skill and much wider range of knowledges than you know working on an assembly line you know um

as i believe adam smith points out in wealth of nations you know you have all these people on this assembly line making pins but alexis de toqueville asks what can be expected of a man who has spent 20 years of his life putting heads on pins you know there's sort of a restriction in terms of a contraction in terms of the range of knowledges and expertises that, you know, one can be expected to take on. idea of anti-work. It's this idea of moving outside and beyond this kind of restriction to one or two or a few rigorous activities

that you're expected to do for the rest of your life. And also opening people up to exploring a wider range of knowledges and expertises and experiences and practices that they can weave into their everyday life so 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 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, how we socialize, being able to sort of not just march to one beat, but sort of generate a cacophony of music. Absolutely. Because I think no matter whether or not you own a share in the pin making factory,

I think you're still going to face alienation from your environment by just doing the same repetitive task eight hours a day. Like, I don't think that's actually much better. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly and it requires transmission and so for those who haven't seen you know i did a video on anti-wook sort of discussing it so we could check that out when this comes out. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast i suppose i just want to point out that right now we live in a society that's um that is governed by institutions that often demand behavior that conflicts with our innate capacities and predilections. social sharing environments you know where communal and individual rights and and stuff and such were valued and respected i mean to sort of draw back to the

truman show analogy it's almost as if as if we went from living in the world to living in a zoo of our own making. We were just being... Well, I guess we're watching ourselves in this zoo. Yeah. It's like the zookeeper who lives inside the zoo and is also the attraction. Exactly.

And so I think that while obviously we can't switch back to foragingaging, you know, it's not necessarily desirable. I do think that we need to reconsider our approaches to, you know, health and security and work and leisure and the way we relate to the natural world. We have to sort of change the story and change how we organize. It's going to take trial and error, of course. Anyone who's organized can tell you that it is far from easy and is replete with setback and failure.

But I think we have a responsibility to remake this status quo, to right the wrongs of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And that's it. Woo! Throw in a couple of air horns here, Dale. Make sure they're pitched lower so that it's not

horrible to listen to no never do that it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media

visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. from the shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore

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