The Civilisation and Question of Love: Part IV Farming and Biggest Blunders

Yes the exploration continues over the question of love. In doing so kaleidoscope wishes to show how the advent of farming has severely affected the nature of love. While kaleidoscope says so, he presumes two things first, love is a different feeling than sexual drive. Although sexual drives do have significant connection with love, but love as a feeling can transcend sexual impulses. Therefore, one can love asexually; one can love even without thinking about sex at all. Second, love is a pleasure that comes instantaneously but it requires investment of time and emotions to nurture it. It does mean that if you do not have time you would definitely lose love to a significant extent. 

Love is a highly valued commodity now a day

Love is highly valued but less thought of or cared for. We tend to equate love with commitment to monogamy. We tend to equate relationships with the concept of property. Therefore, everything related to commitment boils down to the question of physical relationships. Being physically intimate with someone else than your partner is the highest form of betrayal. Even in the court of law this holds to be true. In this blog Kaleidoscope wishes to address the issue of love, temporal investments in love and its link to farming and rest of the civilisation.

THE HISTORICAL BLUNDER

For millions of years we were happy with hunting and gathering. We have colonised most part of the world and yet remained hunters and gatherers. The massive mistake, yes kaleidoscope calls it a mistake was conceded by a group of people about 10 thousand years BC somewhere near south western Turkey. The surplus theory which says that the entire civilisation, development etc. has come out of agriculture surplus has actually resulted in misery in average Homo sapiens life and has generated population explosion, and a class of elites (Diamond 1997).

What makes kaleidoscope conclude that farming was a blunder? From purely biological point of view farming before the advent of market economy has yielded nothing but toiling of our ancestors. We were supposed to be expert climbers of trees, trapping games and collecting a wide variety of food to satisfy our omnivorous selves. Instead of doing that we have started taking care of wheat plants throughout the year and there was no look back. We cleared up rocks for them, we fetched water for them sacrificing our lumbar spine and in return wheat has given us carbohydrates. Because these plants needed constant care they have domesticated us. We could not roam around freely. Even today we crave for a vacation, and we spend thousands to enjoy the vacation. If we did not cultivate we could have been much smaller in number with much larger space to live in and a much larger forest to roam around.

Although it is difficult for today to imagine the dire consequences farming sitting in an air-conditioned room enjoying all the luxuries of capitalist society, however we are enjoying all the luxuries at the expense of our ancestors who died of malnutrition, settled to take care of plants in settlements which were hotbed of infectious diseases.

In a foraging society people are usually happy with a wide range of foods to eat, almost no question of malnutrition. In contrast with settled farming society people are to depend more on a particular kind of diet. While our ancestors thought that they need to work harder to make farming more profitable, they did that and for a while they fetched returns too, but the philosophy of their life altered fundamentally. The new philosophy said the harder you work the more profit you make, thereby you are more secure in life.

FUTURISTIC DREAMS:

The very concept future might be linked to farming. In a hunting gathering society there is no point of thinking about tomorrow. It has been a society which is ever present. Everyday you need to go out with your band to hunt and gather. You get your share, you eat, you sleep, you play and you listen to myths and perform rituals. When games and other resources are increasingly becoming scarce you migrate. Not much to think about. With the advent of farming you are constantly thinking about the future. The entire life's philosophy is futuristic in terms of yield, weather and uncertainties. Living in future is a trend that we have inherited and carry with us all the time.

As many of the ethnographers who have worked with recently settled hunting gathering tribes know how difficult it is to make them understand the importance of savings and having bank accounts. Kaleidoscope has studied the savings behaviour of Santals and compared them with neighbouring Mahato communities to find a stark difference. In Jindal Steel Works at Salboni he has found that while Mahatos are able to save some amount of the compensation money, most of the Santal families have made immediate expenditure mostly by celebrating festivals, and in consumption of liquor.

The whole philosophy of work harder for a better tomorrow (which of course never comes) is rooted to this grave mistake of farming. Therefore, Santals who are still hunter and gatherers in their soul fail to understand the need for savings for a future. While we were told that hard work will result in better (luxurious) future it was a lie. It was a lie because what we consider luxury today becomes tomorrow's necessity with newer luxuries hanging beyond us.

FUTURE, SPECIALISATION AND LOVE:

When we constantly think about future uncertainty and luxuries we tend to toil harder in our work at hand. Our brain is taught constantly to work harder with an immediate and also long term goals to achieve. Working hard does not end. We have to be very focus on what we do. Therefore, we are to choose from the available alternatives. These alternatives are given by historical forces, such as family, friend and other associations. Most often we fail to choose what really interests us. Therefore, we are living in someone else's life from the very beginning, we take the burden of someone else's dreams, we are worried about future which was designed for someone else.

In a relationship we tend to equate property rights over the rights over individuals. Womenfolk are the worst sufferers of such a concept. They have been equated with land and reproductive instruments. With time these have only become altered to adopt different forms. Even today virginity is considered as a woman's greatest virtue. Faithfulness is equated with pretention of having a happy life within the lawful marriage rather than love and care.

With such entanglements of someone else in my body and soul we tend to mount on a career horse to reach a future, thereby making our lives ever more complicated. Durkheim once stated the difference between mechanical solidarity (feature of pre-modern society where people usually perform similar tasks) and organic solidarity (modern society works as a organ system with specialisation, people perform different specialised roles). Yes we are specialised to perform certain kinds of works and we do them with ever greater hardship.

Therefore, we have specialists for everything. We even have specialists for working on love and relationships we call them poets, writers and sometimes Archie's gallery. Specialists are framing words, taking photographs, painting and selling them to us in exchange of our labour in our particular field.

The more we engage future, the more we need to work harder, the more we work hard in a specialised arena the less we have time to do other things. The more we are integrated in organic solidarity the less we have time for other things, such as love. Increasingly our species would become lonelier and miserable with machine like soullessness.