>> Moravec argues that the concept of work was unknown before agriculture
and
>> the industrial revolution and that we'll get rid of it permanently within
a
>> few decades, when smart machines free us not only from household chores,
but
>> also from exhausting tasks such as writing computer software or managing
>> corporations. Contrary to popular fears, we'll celebrate our redundancy
>> because, as hunter-gatherers, indolence and unemployment are part of our
>> evolutionary heritage.
>>
>> Thomas:
>>
>> It was the last sentence that resonated within me. I have long felt that
we
>> deny ourselves one of our birthrights - indolence and unemployment. I
enjoy
>> immensely - doing little or nothing and I enjoy immensely - the pleasure
of
>> following my impulses. Work and employment destroy those natural human
>> attributes and make them into leisure activities that can only be
indulged
>> in after worshipping at the alter of employment. Biologically, I think
we
>> are not workers, but livers of life. I for one, welcome a future of
leisure
>> and indolence.
I believe the picture here of hunters and gatherers is false. Perhaps a
few, here and there, could live a life of indolence and ease, plucking
bananas off the nearest tree at will, etc., but most were very busy year
round. They would follow what anthropologists used to call "the calandar of
the seasons" (perhaps they still do, but I haven't talked with one
recently). The most important objective was to use the bountiful seasons,
summer and fall, to put away as much food as possible for the lean seasons.
I have been to native fish camps in the NWT and Yukon at which fish were
being caught, dried and smoked. Everyone was busy, everyone worked. If it
was not catching and preserving fish, it was berry picking for the women and
children and hunting for the men. Everything that was not consumed on the
spot was preserved in one way or another.
Much has changed in the NWT and Yukon since aboriginal times. Then, small
family groups moved around on the land permanently pursuing one activity
here, another there. In a severe climate, such as that of northern Canada,
the primary objective was, I repeat, to put away enough food to survive the
cold winter. When the fur trade came along, winter became the trapping
season. Families would augment the "income in kind" they had preserved with
goods obtained at the trading post. But the main point is that there was
very little time for indolence. People had fun at fish camps, but having
fun was part of doing work.
If you go into a northern aboriginal community now, you will see plenty of
indolence. I've been to one in northern Saskatchewan in which the indolence
was total. So was alcoholism, drugs, and wife and child abuse. Why?
Because the people were no longer out on the land hunting and gathering and
there was absolutely nothing to do in town except collect welfare. The
hunting-gathering-trapping economy had disappeared decades ago. Then, for a
time, people were employed in a commercial fishery. That collapsed and now
there is nothing.
There is another thought in this, though it's a little speculative. This is
that once one understands how hard people had to work as hunters and
gatherers, and how uncertain it was that they could put away enough food for
the lean season, it is easier to understand why people developed
agriculture. While agricultural work is not easy, it provides a much
greater certainty that enough food will be produced to tide people over
between crops. There was considerable control over this. Sure, crops
failed, but people learned from this and developed sophisticated farming
methods, such as irrigation. Moreover, people could produce, preserve, and
consume their food in a single place; they didn't have to move it around
with them as hunters and gatherers did, wondering if they had enough to get
them to the next food source. For hunters and gatherers certainty was never
possible. The methods that could be used to harvest and preserve food were
quite limited, and, despite the development of shamanism to a high art,
there was virtually no human control over the resource base.
Ed Weick
