Salutations, dear reader. I don’t know your name, your gender, the color of your hair, your ethnicity, or your political ideology, but I do know one thing about you (with 99.9999% certainty, through sheer probability alone, but we’ll get to that later): you and I are of the same culture. Now, don’t get offended. Yes, I am your average 5th-generation American mongrel, and you may be pure Japanese going back for as long as there has been a Japan, but that’s not what I’m talking about. While our ethnicities may be very different, what we share is a common cultural world view, a world view that has been around for the last 10,000 years, give or take. This world view that has spread throughout the East and West alike, leaving only tiny pockets of other cultures untouched, numbering somewhat less than 100,000 people total, making this vast culture the culture of 99.9999% of the globe. I first became aware of the commonality of global culture while reading different works by author Daniel Quinn. Where relevant, I will refer to specific examples and terms Quinn has used, but as much as possible I will try to explain the situation in my own way, as it relates to the specific issue with which I am presently concerned, that is, world hunger.
Ah, finally, I’m getting to the point. This is what I’m really talking about, world hunger, just another of the problems we’ve been trying to fix, like global warming or the destruction of the rainforests. Surely I don’t need to draw this global culture idea into the fray, do I? Sit back, my friend, and listen.
Before I begin to explain how we came to have this massive hunger problem, I must explain a concept or two. When I say that a certain group will not do Z because Z is not evolutionarily stable, this does not mean that no one has ever done Z. It means that those who have done Z are no longer around because doing Z results in elimination from the gene pool. Therefore, if a certain group is around, they have not been doing Z. Please remember that we are speaking on an evolutionary scale, where it may take hundreds of thousands of years to weed a trait completely out of the gene pool.
The first modern humans appeared about 100,000 years ago somewhere in Africa. They spread out over the globe, developing their own ways of living each suited to their particular locales. There were as many ways to live as there were peoples. Some peoples hunted for all of their food, some hunted a little and gathered a little, some gathered a lot and planted a little, some planted a lot and gathered a little and hunted a little. Diversity is, after all, the key to an evolutionarily stable ecology. This life was fine for them, for 90,000 years. I am not saying that it was a paradise, that humans during this period were free from any negative emotions, that they were free of problems inside the tribe caused by jealousy or anger, such as murder or infidelity.
What I am saying is that there was tolerance between tribes - indeed, between species. That is to say that humans, like lions and deer and trout, respected the law of limited competition. Quinn has phrased the law as follows: “You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food.” Tribe A might give a show of force to Tribe B to protect their territory and their resources, but they won’t massacre Tribe B or take over their territory, because such a course of action is not evolutionarily stable.
I am speaking here of the law of limited competition with regard to humans, but it applies to all of nature. Humanity is not exempt from the effects of disobeying the law of limited competition, any more than they are exempt from the effects of disobeying the law of thermodynamics. This is what makes something a law of nature: its universality. Natural law theory as a formal philosophical theory was expressed first by the Greeks, saying that “the world is a rational order with values and purposes built into its very nature.” Natural law theory is not merely a metaphysical theory however: it is often applied to ethics. What is natural is equated with what is right, what is unnatural is equated with what is wrong. The Christians took well to natural law theory, with one addition: their God, God being the one who built this purpose and value into nature. And because God had created this order, God was the one who had decided what was right and wrong.
Natural law theory has not had many adherents in recent years, due at least in part, albeit perhaps unconsciously, to David Hume’s criticism. He thought it the height of foolishness to equate what is natural with what is right; that move was, in his opinion, completely unphilosophical. Other critics of natural law theory have also regarded negatively the move of drawing morality into natural laws. Nature is what it is, there is no sense, indeed no compelling reason or rationale for placing ethical labels on natural states. I do think there is some merit to this view, but for different reasons than the holders of the view themselves might have. However, we need to return to the story of humanity.
This was how the stage was set 10,000 years ago. In different places all over the globe, within a few hundreds or thousands of years of each other, a few cultures decided to pursue a different kind of agriculture, called totalitarian agriculture by Quinn. It has a new set of precepts, which are contrary to the law of limited competition. They are: 1) food dedicated to human use may be denied to all other species, 2) any species that would compete for human food may be destroyed at will, and 3) food needed by other species may be destroyed at will to make room for the production of human food. This culture change is generally called the First Agricultural Revolution, or the Neolithic Revolution.
The reasons for this sudden shift in food management are not always examined by the average person. You know that this revolution happened of course, but perhaps you have not found it necessary to think too carefully about why it did or what the immediate effects were. One thing is definite: our cultural ancestors did not embrace totalitarian agriculture because it was easier. Two or three hours of labor per day is enough to sustain the average hunter-gatherer, while we zip about with our eight or nine hours workdays – not forgetting, of course, that our farmer forebears often worked 10, 12, or even 16 hour days, and that in some areas of the world people still work those kinds of hours just to make ends meet. The immediate effect of totalitarian agriculture is a population explosion, necessarily followed by a rapid geographical expansion. Now remember that at this time there were thousands of cultures living in relative peace alongside one another. A culture who embraced totalitarian agriculture would soon outgrow its boundaries and need to spread out, obliterating surrounding (and incompatible) cultures. And so the revolution continued, and continues to this day, swelling and swallowing every other culture in its path. This is what I meant when I said we are of the same culture. The food we eat, the way we gain our sustenance, is based on the principles of totalitarian agriculture.
Examining totalitarian agriculture from an evolutionarily stable standard is almost horrifying, and certainly cause for alarm. Not only does it flaunt the law of limited competition at every point, it decreases biodiversity exponentially, leaving the involved ecosystem vulnerable to complete obliteration. It is not surprising to hear that each day more than 200 species are lost to the juggernaut of totalitarian agriculture. The population explosion continues to this day, and we continue to outstrip our resources. We are producing enough food to feed all the people on earth, only for some reason not all the people who need it are getting it: it’s not being distributed equally. So we produce more food. Except you and I know what more food production yields: population growth. Every time. We look at the world around us and we see that people are starving and rather than allow our population numbers to fall so that our current food supply is accurate, we respond with public outcry and take steps to increase our food production. The problem is increased food supply equals still greater population growth. So once again our numbers rise, outstrip our food sources, and people starve.
In producing more food, we are not alleviating the problem of unequal distribution, we are just fuelling population expansion, which will amplify the effects of the unequal distribution problem and continue to have devastating consequences for the sustainability of the global ecosystem. Because charity is constantly a part of our world, so too is population explosion, disparity of wealth, and starvation.
Common explanations of natural law theory justify this egotistical cultural movement by saying that that humans are the natural apex of the world, or that God made the world for man to use. I find this world view to be part of totalitarian agriculture. In taking the whole of worthy food production into our own hands, we are in effect saying that it is our right to do so, that it is right to do so. I am here to offer a breath of life for natural law theory, and a ray of hope for the world as a whole. What is natural is not right merely because it is natural; it is right because it is what works, it is what has worked, by definition. Sometimes we don’t remember that what is natural is the result of billions of years of refining – why would you want to mess with that? The world is in the state that it is because our culture has forgotten or ignored this. The way to reduce world hunger in the future is not to produce more food, it is to allow the population of the world to come back into balance with the resources sustainably available to it.
Sources:
Quinn, Daniel. (1992). Ishmael. New York: Bantam.
--- (1996). The Story of B. New York: Bantam.
Rachels, James. (2003). The Elements of Moral Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
