"And you may ask yourself..."

The rise of the agrarian culture. Health-care reform. Jared Diamond's book Collapse. Public dialogue about governmental and international policy. Talking Heads. Businesses that awaken too late to impending demise. Fear of failure. These are all on my mind today.

It all started innocently enough, as my husband and I, enjoying a lovely late-summer bike ride this morning, discussed our hypotheses on the establishment of agriculture by formerly migratory human populations. (I guess some people exercise to exercise -- that is, to become more fit or achieve athletic goals. I exercise to think; it's a marvelous way to give the brain what it needs to think creatively, and what great fortune that the rest of the body benefits as well!) So anyway, as we talked, I started imagining what it may have been like to live in a culture that started the transition from opportunistically gathering food from the surrounding environment, to creating sources of nutrition that could sustain a settled population.

I'd never really thought about this much. In school I was told that once people started farming, they weren't so mobile and they settled down and started creating social mechanisms to support and defend their settlement. I must have assumed that (1) this was the sequence of events (farming then settlement then defense and other infrastructure) and (2) this was a life style choice - like city dwellers leaving to start up farms in the countryside. But someone who has lived after the establishment of agriculture has the advantage of accumulated human knowledge: even if the individual knows nothing about farming, he or she can easily find out from people who know, and has access to markets that will supply the raw materials and tools that are required. What if there is no human knowledge to be had, and farming tools are nonexistent?

The first humans to engage in farming must have failed a lot before they succeeded. Creating knowledge is like that: you start from ignorance, and try things out. You learn what works and what doesn't from the mistakes you make. Risk of failure must be quite high: a lot of effort with poor yield in the beginning, and long lead times (a growing season) before you know whether your efforts were successful or not. Meanwhile, you're caring for yourself and others who need nutrition every day, and your movement is limited, since you have to remain close to the plants you're trying to grow. Chances are, the area where you've settled is not overly rich in naturally-occurring food, or why would you be putting so much effort into farming your own? The risk of failure is quite high -- starting from ignorance, it's probable that initially, failure is certain. People die if crops fail and they aren't able to supplement their diet sufficiently with nutrition from the immediate environment. How is it that people stayed with this endeavor long enough to accrue the necessary knowledge to become successful?

I can only imagine that the immediate risks of not doing it were much higher than the risks of doing it. Groups of people do not assume any risk, much less one that could only have resulted in death amongst their own population, unless they are compelled to do so by a much more extreme and inescapable risk. As a species, we are extremely unimaginative. Risks that could eventuate next year - much less in your child's lifetime -- are just not compelling enough. It could happen -- and the optimistic, here-and-now human brain thinks "Yeah, but it's also possible it won't happen, so let's not rock the boat." It's not enough that the status quo produces hardship and loss; if we've become accustomed to these, they are less fearsome than the fear of the unknown. Diamond's book explains eloquently how one civilization after another faced imminent collapse because of the choices they made, and how many of them clung to the catastrophic choices that ultimately destroyed them. So whatever was happening in these proto-agrarian societies must have been fearsome indeed. Some populations probably decided they could not change their practices, and they perished. Some did, and generations have been sustained by their decision.

There's a lesson here, regardless your viewpoint on how to tackle the many issues facing this nation and those around the world. You can take your pick of disasters: the status quo is unacceptable in any of them. We have to make different choices. We have to do things differently than we've ever done them before, and because we will be novices, we will fail as we seek to learn how to be successful. It could be that, as in the apocryphal Thanksgiving parable, we can metaphorically learn from others how to plant corn and stave off the impending starvation of the colony. It can also be the case that we face some things (how to maintain peace in an increasingly volatile nuclear world; how to sustain the environment as the atmosphere starts to boil) as a species for which we have no collective wisdom.

On a smaller scale, businesses need to do the same: both Wall St and Main St businesses have failed to see disaster looming, and even after this recession's corporate body blows, so few businesses have actually taken on the equivalent of the migratory tribe's foray into agriculture. Too many businesses are just waiting for the bubble to return; that's their plan. Unfortunately, some will stick with the plan until they are no longer around -- wiping out the livelihood of their employees and adding to the continued rise of unemployment. And if the business is considered too big to fail -- well, we'll all pay for that, won't we?

It helps me to realize that what I see around me is the same as it ever was; not that this is comforting, but at least it it helps me understand why so many are clutching desperately to fictions rather than face what is blindingly apparent. And yet, there's a part of the human psyche also that can be thrilled by the adventure of going 'where no man has gone before.' Leaders need to do a much better job of tapping into the uplifting aspect of adventure and opportunity in the face of adversity, while steadfastly loosening the population's terrified grip on the deadly status quo.