I've recently started reading Daniel Quinn's The Story of B again after taking a break from it for several months. For those of you who aren't familiar with him, Daniel Quinn is a modern-day philosopher/writer who tells the human story with a neat anthropological twist and manages to put everything right into perspective. One of the most salient themes in his books -which all lend to the same philosophy, though in different ways - is the point at which humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and began sedentary communities. He says that this was the point at which society began, because it was the point at which humans moved away from a dynamic hunter-gathering lifestyle, and towards a societal lifestyle in which everyone has one specific job that they always do in order to make society work more efficiently.
This is what Quinn calls "division of labor", which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of humans dividing up jobs on an individual basis. For the first time in history, humans were supposed to do one thing while depending on others to do their specific job. Human society is, undoubtedly, one of the most complex hierarchical systems the world has ever seen, and I find it interesting to see not only how it works, but just how it is that such a system came together in the way it did. Daniel Quinn gives a wonderful historical account of humanity from our hunter-gathering days all the way up to modern-day metropolitan societies. Like many fabricated systems, modern society is designed for maximum profit/output, and not necessarily to be sustainable. Quinn argues that this is due to the fact that by dividing up labor we are essentially making ourselves inept at all but one (or a few) things and making the system more fragile as a whole.
If you're interested in reading some of his books, I would highly recommend Ishmael. It's an easy read and is in my top three favorite books of all time.
Was this post inspired by Guns, Germs, and Steel*, or is this a happy coincidence? It seems to me that Jared Diamond made a very similar sort of claim, although more as an aside to his own theory and the systemic evidence that supports it. Also, Ishmael* has been recommended to me several times now, perhaps I will make a point of picking it up soon.
ReplyDelete*Please excuse the lack of italics, I have yet to figure out how to make my iPad do that when not using the word processor.
This sounds like a fantastic tie-in to Guns, Germs, and Steel! I'll be very interested to hear how you think Quinn's book relates to Diamond's ideas - are they similar in their conclusions?
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the trajectory of modern life is indeed able to progress at such a fast rate due to our social ability to divide labor and store food, etc. We become more efficient, which allows us to use more resources and create more goods (reinforcing feedback loop). This in itself doesn't create fragility (at least not in the system - certainly at the individual level...if Quinn says that, I would want to know more about why), but the fact that the resources are limited does, as Meadows points out.
Interesting! I thought the same thing here. I learned about the American division of labor in an introductory Sociology class and found it really interesting as well. In accordance to Keli's post about efficiency, when we create more goods through a reinforcing feedback loop, when does this become negative? When we have expired goods that are now wasted. What about clothes that go "out of style" in our country.
ReplyDeleteGuns, Germs, and Steel talks briefly about the differing aspects of a person's environment and I found a really interesting tie in to my Ethnic Studies class here. "...pattern of history, most people will continue to support that the racist biological explanation is correct after all." Race as a social construction is a system that absolutely takes over our world sometimes. I'm excited to read on to see what more Diamond has to say.
When reading this it made me think of the assembly line used to mass produce automobiles, if someone didn't do their job right then a massive amount of vehicles would have to be recalled and fixed. Now everyone depends on others for most of their necessities, food, heating, gas, etc etc. Though it is quicker to produce all of these things by separating the burden wouldn't it be logical for people to be able to sustain themselves?
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