Chapter6-2 The Coming of the Future

Paragraph 5 Consequently, from the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind. Where farmers depended on rains to water their fields, the onset of the rainy season meant that each morning the farmers gazed towards the horizon, sniffing the wind and straining their cycles. Is that a cloud? Would the rains come on time? Would there be enough? Would violent storms wash the seeds from the fields and batter down seedlings?   P6 Peasants were worried about the future not just because they had more cause for worry, but also because they could do something about it. They could clear another field, dig another irrigation canal, sow more crops. The anxious peasant was as frentic and hard-working as a harvester ant in the summer, sweating to plant olive trees whose oil would be pressed by his children and grandchildren, putting off until the winter or the following year the eating of the food he craved today.  P 7 The stress of farming had far- reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasant's surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.  P8 These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites - kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers - who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.  Things to Discuss 1 To get rid of anxiety of the future, agriculturalists started to go frenetic and hardworking. Steven's idea in the last class that having more children came from the farmers' desire to make their farming succssful is related to this idea. Do you think that this is human's incessant greed or a good surviving tactic?  2 With the surplus food, social hierachy sprang up. But how it happened isn't illustrated in the book. What are your guesses? Can you brige the gap? How did some become elites and rulers and how did others remain commoners?