James Suzman
Why Do We Work So Hard?
James Suzman - Why Do We Work So Hard
- Welcome back, everybody. It is my great pleasure. This morning, your evening to introduce James Suzman, whom I actually knew when he was a little boy on his bicycle and he used to come visit my friends, the Sonics. And I hope that Esme’s on tonight. And Jenny and the Sonic family, because I know James, that you were very, very close to that family. And I too, was a very, very– Am a very close friend of theirs. So, it’s so wonderful that we’ve come full circle. And then of course, when your aunt reaches out to me and mentioned you, you know, it rang a bell. And my brother, who’s very interested in the Bushmen, has spoken about you several times. I was like, oh my goodness, I definitely need to reach out to James. That gorgeous little 10 year old that I used to remember on his bicycle and see if he would be willing to present to us today on Lockdown University.
So, thank you very much for agreeing to do so. And here you are, a very well known social anthropologist. So, it’s my great pleasure to introduce you today. So, Jame’s first book, “Affluence Without Abundance”, was published in 2017 to wide critical acclaim. And his most recent book, “Work”, was first published in the UK, 2020 and USA in January, 2021. He holds a PhD from Edinburgh University. In 2001, he was awarded the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University. He’s a fellow of Robinson College Cambridge. For much of the past three decades, he has been documenting the encounter between one of the world’s last community of autonomous hunter-gatherers. The Ju/‘hoansi, correct? Is that right?
Yes.
[Wendy] The Ju
Ish.
[Wendy] Khoisan. Khoisan.
[James] That’s it.
Visuals are displayed throughout the presentation.
The Ju/'hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and expanding global economy. Since 2014, he has been director of the anthropological research and support organisation Anthropos, based in Cambridge. In addition to his academic work, James has written for the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The weekly Mail, The Daily Times, the New Statesman sell on courts new Africa Andon. Today James will pose the question, why do we work so hard? For 95% of our species history, our hunter gatherer ancestors had a very different relationship with work, and enjoyed considerably more leisure time than we do now. So today, James is going to take us on a journey through our evolutionary and anthropological history to understand how and why we have come to work as we do now. So, thanks James. Great having you with us. And now, I’m going to hand over to you.
Thank you, Wendy. I’m going to, hopefully, do this thing right. If everybody can hear me. There. Have I emerged from the ether? Can everybody see me? I hope so.
[Wendy] Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
[James] Okay, good.
[Wendy] Looking good.
[James] Okay, fantastic. Okay, I can carry on. Today I’m doing, you may notice it’s probably somewhat different to some of the slide presentations you have and that. Behind me I have, well, it’s not my actual wall or a cave painting, I’m using a green screen. Like many people, I’ve spent a lot of last year on Zoom. And I can tell you doing book launch lectures on Zoom is just not the same thing. And I’ve got tired of being hunched up behind a desk. So today, I’m going to stand and that way I can wave my hands probably much to my father’s irritation. Cause he says I wave my hands too much. But I can talk as if I’m on a real stage. Work. Well the picture behind me, I have to say is something of a hint as to the direction I’m going to take. And I actually, I stole it today. It was from a book review in a German newspaper of the German version of my book. And I actually had a sort of version of my cover shows, hunter gatherers and a computer. And asked this question about what is the fundamental nature of our relationship with work? And to talk about this, what I’m going to do is I’m going to take you a little bit on a journey as to why I came to start thinking about this particular question. Because I can tell you it was not, as an anthropologist, my primary focus.
And it certainly wasn’t during my life, my primary focus. In fact, there’re years and years of school reports which make it abundantly clear that hard work was not my major interest in life by any means at all. And to start the story, I’m not going to start with the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen. But, they come up soon. I’m going to start with actually, this fellow, John Maynard Keynes, the grand economist of the 20th century, and arguably the most influential of all. And a particular essay he wrote in 1930, which, really when I read it, set me on this journey to start thinking. It actually set me into writing a previous book, and then onto this one. And this essay was called, “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”. Now, he wrote this essay in 1930 after having lost his own personal fortune in the Great Depression, when the stock market crashed that preceded it. And it spoke back to Cambridge not far from where I am today. And was trying to make sense of the Great Depression, but in a larger context than people normally engage with. And what he wanted to do was to use his own phrasing, was to disabuse himself of short-term use. And to do that, what he did was he voyaged a hundred years into the future in his mind. And what he predicted was that a hundred years from then, 2030, more or less now, as a result of continued capital growth, improvements in productivity and advances in technology, he predicted that nobody would be working more than 15 hours a week.
And he predicted this because he believed that we would be so productive, so efficient, all of our basic needs would be met on really a minimum of work. And he believed actually the 15 hours was a fairly arbitrary number. Partially because he felt he needed to pluck it out there. And he believed that 15 hours would continue because he believed people needed to work. They still required this desire to work, and it was something that we’d have to be weaned off. Now, when he made this prediction, Maynard Keynes made a series of particular calculations around productivity and capital growth. And we met those thresholds that he identified, he thought would need to be met before we entered this kind of post-work future, this economic utopia as we call it. We crossed these thresholds actually in 1980. Yet the truth is we still continue to work pretty much similar hours to what people did back in the 1930s and 1940s. And in many cases, people worked longer hours. In particular, people in the base of the economic pyramid of, you know, working two jobs is now a common theme and so on. So, we continue to work as hard as we do, yet we live in an era of unparalleled material wealth and abundance. Now, what struck me most about this essay was Keynes’s belief that this was, you know, the apotheosis of humankind. He believed this would be humankind’s most singular chief.
That’s what he called it, because we’d have solved what he described as the most pressing problem of the human race from the very beginnings of time. And in fact not just the human race of all life. And that problem that he was referring to was what economists for the problem scarcity. Sometimes they also call it the fundamental economic problem. And it is the idea that basically, we are creatures with absolutely infinite desires and limited means. This is the idea that sits the basis of our definition of economics as a science. Economics as the science looking at how we distribute and share scarce resources. But it is based on this assumption that we have infinite desires and limited means. Now, if you ask an economist, why do we have infinite desires and limited means? They will huff and puff and they’ll say, well, it’s really a function of our evolutionary history. They’ll say, basically for X many thousand years, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers and they lived constantly on the edge of starvation. Survival was something that demanded that they become very astute and focused in terms of accumulating surfaces, in terms of working, having enough food to eat one day is always just cause a trigger to start worrying about whether you’ve got food to eat the next day, or the next day after that. So, that is the economist idea of human nature.
That we have been forged out of this difficult, I suppose, pre-history into becoming really, people that are desperately focused on circuses, desperately focused on working to accumulate more and to look after ourselves more and to protect ourselves from this looming scarcity that looms. And so, their idea is that it was a real visceral, powerful scarcity. Something that made people’s bellies rumble that basically forged within us distinctive desire to work as hard as we do. And to be as focused as we do. Now, the reason this essay was particularly interesting to me at that particular time was I only read it and I only encountered it in 2013. It had been buried for a number of years. Was that by the time I read it, I had been… All right. Try and get this right. By the time I read it in 2013, I had been working as an anthropologist, and living and working among many different bushmen groups, but mainly, The Ju/'hoansi Bushmen of Namibia, who Wendy did actually a very good job pronouncing. Probably the best job of any Zoom conferencing I’ve had yet. And The Ju/'hoansi Bushmen, some of them you may be familiar with. They’re the characters who show up in the movie, “The Gods Must be Crazy”, in a sort, highly stereotyped sort of eeling form.
And of course, in many other documentaries and stories, and books and the works of Lawrence Fundebosten and others. But they are just one group amongst many different Bushmen communities. Like once were the indigenous people of all of Southern Africa. Now, when I started working with the Ju/'hoansi in 1991, this was just after the end of Namibian Independence or the beginning of Namibian Independence. And it was also a time when people were still very focused on the damage of apartheid. And my focus was really on looking at Ju/'hoansi in the context of things like farm working, in the context of how they’re coping with the transition to living in a democratic country like Namibia. And to really, how they engaged with the expanding economy as it crept in on them and took over their lives. They weren’t hunter gatherers anymore. But what I knew about, and part of the reason that I started working with them was that in the 1960s, they were the subject of a series of anthropological studies which completely transformed our ideas about human history and human advance. And these studies were conducted initially by a man called Richard Borshay Lee, a Canadian anthropologist who is then studying a PhD thesis. And in 1960, he marched off into Botswana, and into the Botswana-Namibia border area of the Kalahari.
An area that’s actually is in this photo. This is photo of a place called Tjum!kui on the Namibian side of the border. And I’m on a hunt with a friend of mine. I made him pose for the photo a little bit. He got quite annoyed of me. Richard Lee’s study was extraordinary. And part of it was, was at that time, the Ju/'hoansi there was still free to hunt and gather. Pretty much as their ancestors had for millennia before. And up until then it had been assumed that hunter gatherer lives were nasty, brutish and short. They lived constantly on the edge of starvation. That life was a constant hassel, and people lived in what was effectively, eat or be eaten world. Now, Lee went out there ostensibly, to get a better understanding of how hunter-gatherers worked to make a living. How are these people survived in such difficult circumstances? And he chose the Kalahari, in the northern Kalahari Desert as his side for it, partially because he believed that the hunter-gatherers there, the Ju/'hoansi were the best living examples. Examples of how our ancient hunting and gathering ancestors were ablue. But also because he believed it was an environment that best mimicked the kind of hardships, the visceral hardships encountered by our hunter gatherer ancestors. He then started documenting diligently what everybody ate, how much time they spent securing their food. And he was a nice fellow and the Ju/'hoansi liked him. He learnt the language quickly and got along well with them.
And they not only tolerated him and put up with him, but they actually liked him a great deal. What he discovered was that far from enduring a constant battle against starvation, the Ju/'hoansi spent on average, men spent on average, about 17 hours a week on the food quest. And women spent on average around 15 hours a week on the food quest. In addition to that, they spent a lot of time doing what you and I would call, domestic duties. Preparing fire, preparing food, preparing the homestead, brushing, you know, raking the dirt which they did around their homesteads, in order to keep it visibly clear from snakes and so on. All in all, they do possibly around, 30 to 40 hours work in a week. And that includes all household chores, which is considerably less than we do. So for example, most of us are a formal 40 hour week. And then on top of that, based on the US household income survey for example, we do about 31 hours extra a week in terms of chores, whether that’s going to work or coming from work. Whether that’s going to shop, whether that’s securing our needs, whether that’s preparing food and so on. So in other words, they work considerably less than we do. The second thing that Richard Lee established was that the principle, very founding principle of the Ju/'hoansi economy was not based on this idea of scarcity. Where we hold in the western economy, we hold in our economic structures or based on this assumption, that everything is scarce. And they’re scarce cause we have infinite desires.
And the Ju/'hoansi, and indeed many other hunter-gatherer, other hunter-gatherer societies with other anthropologists who were working with at the time, considered their environments to be generous, and to be abundant. In other words, not to be scarced. They premised their economies on the generosity of that empire. They assumed that they would always be fed. They assumed that, for want of a better word, the Gods would provide them with food. And so, they’re sometimes talked about the Baka Pygmies in the rainforest Gabon and Cameroon. Talk, for example, about the forest being a mother and father who indulges them with treats like honey food, so on and so forth. Now, hunter gatherer life wasn’t all a breeze and it’s, you know, when we talk about 15 hour work week, actually there were very tough times. There were all three evolutionary history, there were bottlenecks moment, things did badly. But the key thing is for most of the time, it was a pretty straightforward life. And people could make a living in very difficult environments because they had this highly tuned knowledge, highly tuned understanding of the spaces in which they live.
So for example, with the Ju/'hoansi, in terms of hunting, guys were with the picture, I’ve got over there. The guy is called and he’s a really phenomenal hunter. And there’s another one of our hunting party is actually just off off the screen in the picture. Their skills as hunters are extraordinary, and they do so in a landscape. It’s very tough, very difficult, and you know, a landscape where most people would easily falter die and starve. Certainly even, you know, I’ve now more or less worked out how to live there. But I think I’d struggle after a while. And for most normal people, it’s very bleak semi-arid desert landscape. If you know how, it is a landscape full of riches. Now, this next picture, very briefly, I’ll get out the way, is a gathering bag from the wet season. Actually, in a really bleak part of the Kalahari in the south place called the Onahaki. And this is the result of one hour walk with a couple of friend of mines to go and pick up. We were looking for these objects, marama beans, the ones in the middle, which are these absolutely delicious, if you open them up, they look like beans in a pod. And out comes a, almost half small fist sized bean. Now if you roast it on the fire and it is absolutely delicious. Then you’ve got various roots and tubers, potatoes and various other things.
Wild potatoes. And of course, that is a mopane worm over there. And over here we have a, it’s a root called hairy chested sand grubs, and it’s little chested. But the idea is what you can do is if you know how to get food in places like this, the foraging quest is not particularly difficult. People don’t struggle. It is not an arduous activity. There are seasons in the year, in particular, in the Kalahari towards the really early days of the wet season and the late dry season. These are particularly difficult times. These are the times when all the felt food has been used up. But nevertheless, people still get by and they get by fairly easy even. So, even in those harsh seasons, unless it’s a particularly bad year, you can in the matter of a day, get the food that you generally need to eat. Now, the result of this kind of sense, this basic belief in the abundance of the environment meant the Ju/'hoansi had what, in anthropological terms, we call, immediate return economy. Now, to put that in context, most of us think in terms of a delayed return economy. Most of the work that we do, whether it’s giving up actually now, whether it’s writing a book, whether it’s going to our job, is all future focused. We get a paycheck at the end of the month. We get money at some point. It’s the goals that we are working towards, are all future focused, whether it’s to put enough money away for our pension scheme, whether it’s to be able to put our children through university.
Everything is future focused. Ju/'hoansi tended to focus almost all their labour effort on meeting their immediate needs, their needs for that day. And when those needs were met, the day’s work was done. They did not hold themselves hostage to the future in any way, shape, or form. What they did was they focused very much on the here and the now. And it was a kind of presence, this kind of thing that people who do endless mindfulness classes in yoga aspire to. But their immediate return economy was predicated on the basis that they always believed that they would be able to meet their essential needs. Food, water, on the basis for a few hours of spontaneous effort as and when they needed. As a result of this, they ended up enjoying suitably more leisure time than most of us. And what did they do with their leisure time? They did spend an awful lot of time relaxing and talking. The Kalahari is a hot place. And, certainly and when the sun is high, you like to sit in the shade and relax, and play with the kids and take it easy. But of course they did, like with any anybody else. You know, life can get relatively boring by doing that. And this is of course why we have in the ancient world and places like Southern Africa, the mountains from everywhere are filled with wonderful examples of, for example, rock art. It wasn’t just rock art people spent their time doing, they made music, they did dance, they did all sorts of wonderful things. And on top of that, they also engaged with their day-to-day busyness, on complexities of human life.
Falling in love, getting in fights, living, being, doing. They were not hostage simply to work. In other words, in a very fundamental way, what Keynes thought of as the problem of scarcity just simply did not exist for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And so that means, that if hunter-gatherers like the Ju/'hoansi, and presumably our hunter-gatherer ancestors weren’t obsessed in scarcity as we were, then scarcity, which economists tell us, is why we are focused on work. There must be some other reason for it. So, that was really the beginning of my journey in terms of writing this particular book. Just to say, if our hunter gather our ancestors did not work as hard as the economist does, that means the problem of scarcity is something a much more recent. But it also means that our attitudes and engagement with work are something much more interesting and complicated than simply our drive to fire more stuff to solve economic problems. And when looking at this particular problem, I decided I had to look at what the idea is, what work was, as a thing in and of itself. And I also had to go back far further in history than simply our era as hunter gathers. Now, very briefly, there been a whole series of new discoveries about the evolution of our species, homosapiens, really in the last 15, 20 years. And actually in the last five years in particular. Now, when I did my PhD in the early 1990s, it was uncertain how long homosapiens had been around. Most people speculated that maybe our species had been around for perhaps a hundred thousand years. But certainly that up until around 50,000 years ago we weren’t particularly smart. So, people talked about what is often referred to as a cognitive revolution. Something where our brains suddenly all kicked in, some genetic switch was ticked and we became articulate, clever forward thinking people. Now, our thinking on that has changed considerably.
This is partially through studies in genomics. We’re now able to really unpeel the human genome, and we’re now able to look at ancient genomes that recover from ancient teeth and various other sorts. And start looking back in history. And the most surprising thing, certainly for me that has come out with it, is that it’s not pretty clear that homosapiens have been around for at the very least, 300,000 years, which is, you know, 200,000 years longer than I believe is the case 20 years ago. And I’d be still interested to see where we push those boundaries. Now, the picture I have up here is a diagram looking at gene flow effect. And what it does is it talks about some of the, it illustrates some of the earliest splits. Now, we also know for example, that and the Ju/'hoansi and the Bushmen genetic group, which is, I actually can’t see the picture, I’m too far away from it, but I think there’s red line over here. That’s their sort of break off group. But, they’ve been in southern Africa for around 300,000 years, which makes the Ju/'hoansi and the Bushmen there, that indigenous group that occupied the whole of Southern Africa all the way up to Tanzania really makes them, in some ways, the most enduring people on earth, because we know that that particular set of genetic strain stayed in that region for a very long time. But we also know that there were similar splits that came, that happened earlier and later going on that side producing the rest of the world’s population.
And that the sufficient commonality between them, we can say that everybody was a homosapien back then. So, we have a very long human history. So, to really answer these questions, start looking and understanding our relationship with work. I needed to go back even further. And the best possible place to begin a story like this is really to begin at the beginning. Now, often it’s a human belief, it’s a trait that we tend to think that, you know, only humans are the only species on earth that rarely worked. After all, it was only Adam and Eve and their miserable descendants who were banished from the Garden of Eden for committing their sin and banished to life toil in the fields for all eternity. But the truth is that all living organisms work, in a very fundamental sense of the work. Cause work ultimately, is a physical thing. It involves transfer of energy and it utilisation of energy in a very set of specific ways. Now, scientists have a very hard time defining the difference between what is life and what is non-life, what is a living organism and what is a non-living thing? Like, you know the difference between bacteria and a rock. And one of the few ways that they can make a useful distinction between objects like rocks and rivers and stars.
And things like bacteria and zebras and people, is by looking at the specific ways they use energy. The only living things, only living organisms actively go out and capture energy. in the form of and in our case, we take it in the form of food, in terms of oxygen and in the form of water. And then use that energy to organise and break down a whole series of molecules and atoms. And organise them into cells, and then organise those cells and some of the high organisms into organs. And then organise those organs into body. And then take those bodies and organise them into societies, or cities, or towns. Or herds. And so, humans and other animals all do this very basic work. Going out and seeking energy. Capturing it and using it to hold themselves into place, to reproduce, to be alive. In other words, work is part of that kind of universal compact that links us to every other living organism. From a tree to bacteria, to an elephant in the bush. But that does not mean of course that human work and animal work is all the same. Now, in terms of understanding the differences between human work and animal work, it goes into the whole debate of what is it that distinguishes humans among the animals, among the rest of creation? Now, in terms of looking at from the perspective of work, there are two things that are particularly interesting. The first is, that in evolutionary history, humans have one thing that stands out in terms of how they have shaped their adaptation over the course of 4 billion years of evolution. And in particular, over the most recent five, sorry, I keep pressing the wrong button. And in particular, over the last 5 million years.
Now, most animals when they go about doing work, they work is, in effect, shaped by their genetic inheritance. And their genetic inheritance has effectively given them skills that have slowly emerged on slow middle of evolution. And enable them to become excellent clients, excellent catches, excellent swimmers, excellent fighters. But it’s a slow process, very slow mill. And in a sense, because these particular skills and traits are baked into their bodies, baked into their beings, they’re not particularly first, they’re hostage to particular habitants. You can’t take a lion that hunts in the plain and plains and stick them in an ocean. In the same way, you can’t take a bush baby from the trees and stick it on the plains. There’s very little versatility. Human evolutionary history, on the other hand, takes a slightly different story. Human evolutionary history has been shaped by our ability to become skilled at acquiring different skills. So, while other animals hostage to their environments, we became extraordinarily versatile, extraordinarily adaptable. And this adaptability is written into our hands, our eye, forward facing eyes.
Our ability to create, our ability to engage, and most importantly of all, our ability to think, our ability to engage problems and solve them through cultural needs, through intellectual needs, through trial and error. And human history is a history of extraordinarily rapid movement in a sense. In that, being able to effectively use the software of cognition to speed up processes that otherwise would’ve happened through the hardware of slow evolution. And what this did was it made us a species capable of being purposeful. Now, when we talk about the work that other animals do, we generally describe them as being purposive. And when we say purposive, what we mean is we can ascribe a motive to their actions, we can ascribe a motive to what they are doing. But they necessarily don’t have that same motivation front of mind when they do it. They may not even have a mind. So, for example, when a trees leaves grow upwards towards capturing sunlight. And in order to capture it, transform it into glucose, they are acting purposely. They’re doing that action. But they have no awareness of it. They have no idea what the end step is. Human work, on the other hand, is purposeful.
Human work and our evolutionary history is a story of increasingly greater and more purposeful work. And this is exemplified firstly, by things like our ability to use tools. And the picture that’s behind me at the moment is a picture of a tool called an Acheulean hand axe. It is arguably the most used tool in all of human history. In fact, it was made for a period of well over a million years. And funny enough, archaeologists and paleo anthropologists are still not actually sure what it was used. These tools are generally pretty big. So, the one you’re looking at now is about probably about 30 centimetres in length. So it’s a hefty, hefty piece of stone, and it’s got sharpened edges. Clumsily sharpened edges as you’ll see. And it could be used for a variety of types. But the truth is using it as a hand axe which is what we call it. If you start smacking a chunk of wood with that, with your hand, you’re going to end up with broken fingers and bleeding hands and nothing’s going to be particularly good. So, there’s a lot of argument about exactly what it was used for. Some people argued that in fact, it was more of a Swiss army knife. And what our ancient ancestors did with this piece, these kinds of pieces of rock to shape them into that particular form, was to be a knockoff shards of them so that you end up with a sharp piece of rock, which was then used once or twice and then disposed, almost like a disposable razor.
Now, the reason I’m showing this particular hand axe is not to extol the wonders of hand axe, or indeed the mysteries of hand axe. But to make a slightly broader point about the history of work and time. And that clearly, our great ancestors’ ability to be able to use tools to mask things and their growing brains. And their ability to shortcut in a sense it’s an evolutionary process, provided them with more time. And it also enhanced that kind of purposefulness, that future focusness, that ability to conceptualise what they were doing. And so, what you end up is before our species homosapiens emerged, you end up with the emergence of what are really some astonishing examples of these hand axes. Hand axes, which are so much more beautiful and carefully made than those that were created. Most of the ones look like the one in the previous slide. But you get a few of them show up. And the two we’ve got here, one from Kathu Pan in Southern Africa, and another from Gesher Benot in Israel. And both of them are over half a million years old. And both of them are astonishingly beautiful. And when I look at these particular objects, it’s clear to me that unlike all the other ones that they were found among, and they were both found among piles of other hand axes. Other hand axes were ready to work, practical, useful, solid. These ones were objects of beauty, weather maker at the time, the energy, the efficient, and the resourcefulness to make them beautiful. One on the South African one on my right, sorry, it’s confusing with the screen, this brown one is made from banded ironstone.
And it’s a difficult stone to work and it, you know, where normal hand axe were being made with 15 or 20 well aimed strikes, this one’s a product of thousands. This one you can see the make, aggressing it make. And this was a pre-human that did this, this was not a, well, I beg your pardon, not a pre-human but a pre-homosapien. So, this is very lightly homoerectus. One of our ancestors that we dismissively throw away in our conceptual minds disappear. As with the one from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, which is even older. And for me they’re wonderful icons of again, our purposefulness. Now, our purposefulness is linked in to how we do an awful lot of our work now. And it’s linked in to, when I talked about earlier, that kind of gap between an immediate return economy and a delayed return economy. Hunter gatherers like the Ju/‘hoansi use some of their spare time to make beautiful objects, beautiful art, beautiful jewellery. And do these incredibly intricate dresses made from ostrich eggshells and so on. But this purposefulness, I believe was a product of increasing efficiency in the energy crisis. Now, our ability to be able to, and our ancestors ability to, to be able to make a living ever more efficient. And so be able to spend whatever sapless energy that they had on basically doing things that brought them meaning, pleasure, joy, satisfaction. That made their lives complete. But what they did not do was continually focus on creating services, working additional hours.
And they did not see hard work as particularly virtuous, nor did they see idleness as a sin. They saw idleness and relaxation as something worth aspiring. But then again, they were utterly confident they could make the best of what they could when they had resources at their disposal. Which raises a question, you know, if our human history has been a story of people working and becoming increasingly efficient in the food quests, they made new tools and other things. If that is the human history, then where did our particular ideas, where did the ideas that the economist has, emerge through our hunter gatherers dismal past obsession with scarcity, obsession with surfaces? Where did that come from? The answer, I think is fairly straightforward. And the answer is something far more recent than our hunting gathering past. And it comes primarily as a result of this. I’ll transition to agriculture. Really, the biggest change in the history of work, where hunter gatherers tended to view their environments as inherently prominent, inherently generous. Farming societies only ever viewed their environments as potentially providence. For an environment to be providence as a farmer, you have to work it in order to make a profit. Now, farming involved an awful lot more work than hunting and gathering.
Hunter and gatherers simply went in, effectively, picked food from the shelves, sometimes difficult in difficult circumstances. But it was a process of simply harvesting food that was already made, was created, for one of a better word, by the gods, by nature itself. Farmers took responsibility from the gods for producing their own food. And in doing so, what they did was they gave themselves the burden of work. Now, farming is a lot more work than hunting and gathering for several reasons. The first reason, is that the nature of the work the farmers do is very, very different in the times of hunting and gathering. Being a farmer involves tying yourself to a strict agricultural cycle. And it also means setting yourself in a position where the rewards for your labour are delayed. Do you remember hunter gatherers always focused on meeting only their immediate needs? A guard to gather or hunt on the day that they went on the day in order to feed themselves that day. As a farmer, you plant your seeds in spring in order that you might be able to eat bread in the new year. It is a cycle that you get tied into.
And that cycle is very intolerant of taking time off because in the cycle of growing wheat or nurturing cattle, it requires you to do certain jobs at certain times of years. There’s a time to plant, a time to weed. There’s a time to protect your crops, there’s a time to water, there’s a time to harvest, there’s a time to thresh, there’s a time to process, there’s a time to store. All these jobs get piled on you. And on top of that, you have a whole sequence of other secondary jobs that come about. Cause farming may be much more productive than hunting and gathering. But it also came with a whole bunch more risks. And one of the main reasons that farming was risky, riskier than hunting and gathering was that it was a sort of curious, was sort of like the danger of taking the apple from the tree, in a sense. Agricultural populations always tended to rise organically, more or less to match the maximum carrying capacity of the land.
And the reason was was that in all farming cultures it was encouraged for children to be born, people to make more life. The reason you made more life was because children worked in the fields alongside. Children were your workforce. In many, all basic subsistence, agricultural economies, you will see children working everywhere. And you created children cause one, you expected a lot of them to die. And two, because you would be expected, you’d be required, excuse me, this thing was falling. Falling out of my ear. And two, because there was a sense that the more hands you had available, the more productive you could be, the more work you could get done, and the more secure you’d feel. The more you’d feel less bound by any kind of scarcity. Scarcity was a real and visceral thing in farming society. So, where hunter gatherers viewed their environments as funded, farming societies was all about scarcity. Not only did you need to produce your food, but you needed that food to be able to last you an indefinite period in the future.
So, when you produced a harvest over the course of year, you had set that harvester aside, and you would use that harvest to sustain you over the course of the next year. Now, if you have two years of gathering, then scarcity becomes a very real thing. And in terms of understanding the nature of the risks that the slow embrace of agriculture brought upon us as a species, one lead look no further than, given where we are at this time of year, the plagues. 10 plagues of Egypt. Which in many ways are kind of list of perils the farming society had. And there’s no coincidence that we have in this particular picture, it’s the plague of locusts, which, and again I’ve chosen it fairly carefully. Because locusts, indeed, in agricultural society, locusts are horrendous plague. They are something that can wipe out a year’s harvest in a matter of days. And they’re one of many things that can do that. Certainly in the communities I work with in Namibia and Botswana, amongst the Ju/'hoansi farming neighbours who grew hung millet and various other things, maize. The amount of times people will lose an entire harvest in a night to baboons, to an elephant, to a plague of God knows what kind of insects. And there’s no shortage of, it’s a very real visceral problem. The Ju/'hoansi, on the other hand, viewed locust plagues as a blessing from the gods cause it was food.
And it was a huge amount of food. So, when locusts came and it was usually towards the end of the dry season, and toughest time of year, they would come like a great blessing from the sky. Of course, in farming societies there were among of many fundamental risks that could basically induce famine that made us preoccupied, focused, scarcity, and institutionalised guest. So, if we think about where all our economic institutions come from, these all evolved during the 10,000 year period up until around 1750s of the first hearings of the industrial revolution, that we were dependent primarily on agriculture. We worked the land. Now, just to put that in context, you know, it’s very easy to think of the history of the last 10,000 years as a history of continuous progress. And indeed there were. There were advances through the agricultural era. People discovered the use of wind pilots to that extent. They domesticated more animals using camels and so on and so forth. And became slightly more efficient. But in very real times, if you were to take a farmer from the Nile Valley 3,000 BC and you were to put them in Central Europe in around 1650, in a rural area, they would not find the technologies or the way of life particularly unfamiliar.
That’s because during the agricultural era there were intense limits in the amount of energy people had available with which to do work. Now, work is above all, an energy transaction. And there was also a fairly linear link relationship between the amount of work that you did and the amount of energy you got out. So unsurprisingly, most people are during the agriculture period, even in the most productive agricultural civilizations like ancient Rome, or ancient Egypt, or even pre-revolutionary France, you ended up with four out of five people, including children working the land to provide food for everybody else. And you ended up with small elites within cities who were one fifth of the population that were outside of the agriculture equations. There was a very linear, organic correspondence between how hard you worked and what kind of rewards you could expect from that. In other words, it was a sort of energy in, energy out relationship. Out of that, came many of our ideas that around the virtuousness of labour. The fact that idleness is advice, people who didn’t work considered a risk earth, below this society.
And so, many of these ideas that remain very much part of our economy today were all the product scarcity and difficulties endured during the very long agricultural era now baked into our cultures. Now, this particular correspondence between how hard you work and the amount of energy you get out began to change fundamentally, firsts of the industrial revolution. Because then primary thing behind the industrial revolution was people discovered a way of outsourcing their energy requirements effectively to fossil fuels. And being able to create machines that could do work, many orders of magnitude larger than mere men or animals, fueled by mere food. So, this is of course why we talk about in early times, we talk about horsepower. But this was an extraordinary transition, and it involved exploiting an set of energy reserves, energy stored in fossil fuels of thousands of years, millions of years and releasing that and putting it to human service effect. And the net result of this was that in our societies, produced a very distorted relationship to labour and reward. And an increasingly distorted relationship between labour and reward as we became more and more productive. The industrial revolution in many sense was a kind of rapture and continuity way our organic relationship worked. Yet, we still organise our economies very much on the basis of that.
To give you a sort of sense of how things have changed, now I mentioned a short while ago that during the agricultural era, really up until 1650, 1700, first startings of the industrial revolution, even in the most advanced agricultural appointments, eight and 10 people still work the fields. Now, 1.3% of Americans were food production and produced so much food that obesity is a far greater problem than hunger. And that we end up throwing about as much food as we eat every year. As much food that goes into our bellies, into landfill, every year. We live in a society of astonishing abundance. Yet strangely enough, we still organise our economies on the same basis of principles of scarcity that emerged during the agricultural revolution. And this really brings us to the challenge of where we are today. So, for each, over each decade since the first stirs of the industrial revolution, we’ve seen huge improvements in efficiency. So, I’ll talk about it hopefully if we have time.
And as interest in other elections was the efficiency movement which emerged in the 1930s, which my grandfather was a distinct fan of with Henry Winslow Taylor and various others. But what you had was with each technological leap forward, the amount of work that was done by human hands in the raw physical sense in terms of meeting our basic needs, diminished. And a larger number of us ended up working in spaces in what people call the services sector, ever more and more for services sector. Yet the issue is that we remain fixated and focused in the very basic principle of scarcity as if this remains basic organising function of our economy. Now, this of course would be absolutely fine. There’s no question that our particular attitudes to work bring us amazing wealth. And there’s, you know, as we haveff in arguments at the moment about whether indeed, it was the power of capital that has brought us these speedy vaccines in response to the Coronavirus. Or indeed, whether of course, it was the power of capital and big capital and our focus on scarcity and creation that enabled the coronavirus to spread in the first place. Either way, we are at a point in our history where the medicine that brought us the astonishing prosperity we enjoy now, it’s astonishing, wealth we have.
The fact that I have lights on, the fact that I’m able to address you from my home, albeit through the medium of Zoom. The fact this very prosperity, what we brought might be making a six. So, beyond the obvious problems that relate to energy use and climate change, there sequence of other economic problems that have emerged as a result of organising an economy based on huge abundance on the principles of scarcity. And amongst the most obvious of these, for example, we see in places like the United States and England, where particularly March had increasing visceral inequality. Made out largely by the fact things like the American dream, the ability that anybody can work their work to great rich is no longer really possible. Now, the far best predictor of whether you’re going to make a success in your life in places like the United States or the United Kingdom is not how hard you are prepared to work, but how much capital you are able to put towards your education or your goals or invest into your future. So, we’re at a fundamental point in our history. And my aim of my book, which came out earlier this year, was really to start exploring some of these ideas. To make context around this remarkable history of how do we make the best use of our time and our skills.
And what I’d like to do, I chatted with Wendy a little bit earlier, there is sufficient interest in it. I’ll certainly like to spend more time diving a lot deeper into some of the little sections that we’ve touched on in this very rapid zoom through human history. And hopefully, we can start looking at some of those ideas. And I realised now I’m looking at the time that I should probably call it a day there. And take some questions. And as I say, I discussed with Wendy and I’m very happy to do some other lectures in the future where we can go in far deeper detail into some of the wonderful moments in history like, transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, which raises as many questions as it has.
James, thank you very much for that fascinating presentation. As you said, there’s so much to explore and we would be delighted for you to go deeper into those issues. Now, if you would like to go onto the chat, you’ll be able to see the questions and answers, you’ll be able to see
Oh, the Q&A?
The Q&A, yeah.
Q&A and Comments:
- Yes. Okay. Okay, well, let me try. Hang on. I can’t see myself when I do it. I’m going to answer them in order if I can.
Q: The first question from Kay Miller, did Max Gluckman have any influence on your work?
A: Yes, indeed he did. And in fact, my PhD supervisor who’s far more interested in kinship, which of course is a sort of major feature of traditional anthropology. I’m more away within him, has reminded me end endlessly of the fact that I am a direct anthropological descendant of Max Gluckman. So, beyond the family connections of about South Africa, Max Gluckman was the supervisor of my supervisor’s supervisor. So, I’m part of his PhD lineage. And indeed, his work was astonishing and wonderful, and truly important in terms of breaking down the kind of mythologies that had emerged between the various peoples of Southern Africa. And in terms of humanising and making sense of people’s own cultural behaviours on their own terms.
The next question, I guess he never knew the extent of human greed. I dunno who the he is in that question. And so, I’m not going to answer that. Maybe it was made in Keynes. Possibly he did, possibly he didn’t. I didn’t talk about it today, but in the book, I spend a lot more time talking about how hunter-gatherer societies organise themselves in terms of quality and inequality, and sharing. And I have a suspicion, In fact, more than a suspicion that inequality is probably what motivates a lot of us to be greedy or feel greedy. I’ve written a few papers about that. You can find it all on the internet.
Q: Joshua Nunn, my cousin I believe. Is the mopane worm ice?
A: It depends on your taste, Joshua. You’re a actually, you’re a, if you’re still carb-free and doing a keto diet, you would probably love them. They are incredibly fatty. Depends how you cook them. I have to say, I’m not a fan. They are actually served in many places. If you go to Botswana, you go to Gaborone, the capital. And you go and sit in the President Hotel, you will be offered them as a bar snack.
Q: Monty asks the question, is it true that the Bushmen and the Kalahari are being forced to move from the natural habitat for political and economic reasons?
A: The history of the Bushmen, you know, Bushmen occupied all of Southern Africa for most of human history. Now, there are about a hundred thousand people there who identify themselves as Bushmen, all part of 14 language groups. Khoekhoegowab, Khoekhoe, Juǀʼhoan. All of them are marginalised, very few of them have access to the land. None are able to live their traditional life. And most of my adult life has been spent working primarily on land rights and labour rights issues as that affect these population groups. Hunting and gathering is possible in a handful of areas. So, that one area where I showed that photo in the early slides, that’s a place called Otjinene, and that’s in Namibia. And that is really the last place anywhere that they have a fragment of their land and are able to maintain a fragment of their traditional life. And when I say fragment, it’s there encased. And against them, outside the fences around their land, there are hungry farmers looking at that land and wanting to take it.
Q: The question from Carol. Are you saying there’s no hardship when and if the rains don’t come? Finding water can be a problem?
A: No, I’m absolutely not saying that there’s no hardship. What I’m saying is that there was indeed hardship and it’s certainly easy to think when I said people weren’t obsessed about scarcity, they certainly endured hardship. Living a hunting life as a hunter-gatherer can be tough. Long history and indeed even Ju/'hoan histories, their periods when things were very difficult, every year, three consecutive years of no rain. Food is scarce. People get hungry. People suffer. The point is that they didn’t obsess about it. And the other point is that actually the risks were considerably lower than the agricultural economies that came after them. Now again, if I was to do a longer lecture looking at the hunter-gatherer thing, we have a history in many places, in particular actually in Central Africa, Akan and Akan, and Akan, and the various what you call pygmy populations who’ve been living alongside agricultural societies for two or 3000 years. And they have continued by choice, hunting and gathering. There’s also, when you look at the history of hunter-gatherer expansion of agricultural expansion in Europe. And again, we look so do this through genetics. There’s very little evidence of admixture between hunter-gatherer populations and farming populations.
But there’s clear evidence of co-presence until eventually, the farming populations pushed the hunter-gatherer populations out. So, while agriculture expanded, because it’s focused on growth, hunter-gatherers effectively remained where they were. So, hunter-gatherers, you know, definitely it wasn’t a life, you know, people always, it’s an easy way to kind of misrepresent this argument about a different way of economic thinking as them having, it wasn’t, you know, they weren’t living at Club Med. But, you know, and having snacks served them all day. But it was not a life of tremendous hardship. It was a life that was fairly light and often full of joy. And there were periods of hardship, but those were bookended by long spells. Well actually, life was pretty reasonable, pretty good. And you know, and of course it’s difficult to try and convey this. It’s also to do with some sense of stoicism.
And how are we doing for time? One more minute. So, I’ve got the next question.
Q: If Hunter gatherers had smaller families, how did this come about? Did their family planning practises?
A: It’s very good questions, actually. There’s two functions as to why hunter gatherers had smaller families. First of all, there wasn’t this urge to produce large families. So, there wasn’t this focus on females as reproduces, mothers, although mothering was a thing. Certainly, there were a couple of other mechanisms that actually maintained family sites. The first one was a simple practical measure. Hunter-gatherers were nomadic or not nomadic, they were mobile within very specific territories. But they had to move. So, you had to be able to carry children. Now, if you have more than two small children at once though you can’t carry them 10 miles as you’re changing camp. But there is a reason which enabled them to actually maintain birth spaces, and that’s postpartum amenorrhea. Ju/'hoan kids, for example, remained on their mother’s breast for as long as the mother wished. So, it was not uncommon to see four-year-olds and five-year-olds sucking at their mother’s breast once in a while as it maintained a degree of intimacy and maintained things functioning.
But it also meant that the mother did not get easily pregnant, until they decided. So, they effectively used their children as a form of contraception. There was also a certain dynamic with the landscape. And I think it’s a really fascinating question. So, there’s a professor of Pennsylvania who had been doing some genetic work, Professor Sarah Tishkoff, who I’ve been desperate to try and persuade to try do somewhere looking at population dynamics around hunter-gatherers, going into our deep past. Because there’s also very clear evidence, the kind of great population bottlenecks that have shaped us into who most of us are now in European populations, just didn’t occur in our hunting gathering past. So, when you look through the genetic record of estimated net populations with hunter-gatherers, like the Ju/'hoansi, actually, where other global populations went through categories of clients, they remained fairly stable and fairly constant. Part of the reason they sustained themselves was that they never ostensibly grew to beyond the carrying limits of their land. Now, I suppose I should do, I dunno if I should do this. Well, quite a lot of questions. Lawrence.
Q: Is it fair to say that hunter-gatherer groups would benefit from access to drinking water supply, health, maternity facilities, contraception?
A: To put the answer very simply, yes, of course. I think in historical terms it’s a different question. You know, the legacy of contact and the expansion of the global economy is certainly a mixed thing. And I imagine most hunter gatherers, certainly most Bushmen hunter gatherers, you know, who effectively endured something of a holocaust ever since bastard showed up in the Cape. You know, they’ve been quite wiped off plant farming populations and they’re very small populations now. But the truth is that even in places like Otjinene where they still retain control of their land. You know, there’s no going back to being a life of the pure hunter gatherer. So for example, if you were to go there now and say, well, I’m going to take away the Paracetamol, people would be quite upset. So, what there is is it’s a question, you know, the reason I find it so interesting is to try and understand what are their economic values? What are their philosophical approaches we might be able to take in order to make our lives a little bit more better and deal with some of the problems that we face? And I think I should probably leave it there. Sorry for anybody else whose questions I haven’t answered. Of which there are many. But, I’m sure I’ll be able to, if we do another talk. And I think the next one I’ll focus much more tight on things like hunter gatherers, transition. And then ultimately, go to something like efficiency movement.
That would be great. Thank you. Thank you very much, James. And you know what’d be great and I would be delighted if you would consider expanding many of the ideas and the issues that you mentioned today. Maybe we can look at the questions and we can see what’s come up and see where, you know, people’s areas of interest lie.
Yes, I’d be happy to.
So just, yeah. Thanks a million. That was really fascinating, extremely interesting. And I would also like to just, it’s to explore the notion of meaning in terms of work. We can look at Marx and Durkheim and we can,
All right. It’s indeed, that is indeed the key. That is indeed the key thing. And I should say, I meant I should do a plug for the book, really before I do anything.
Absolutely. I apologise.
There’s a slide of some of the language editions that are out there. 23 of them, or actually, no. These are the ones that are out so far. So, you can read it so far in German, Polish, Dutch, English, Italian, and Spanish, I think. Oh, and Chinese. And, but you’ll soon be able to read in many other languages. But, explore all these ideas in a lot more depth. And as you said, Durkheim, Marx, and all the rest feature very heavily.
Well, actually, I apologise because I got sidetracked and was so interested in a discussion before we started the presentation that I should have said, please everybody, buy the book, “Work: A History of How we spend our Time”. We can find it on Amazon, I take it. Who’s the–
You can, you can find it. So, the publishers, I’ve got 23 different publishers. So, in the United States it’s Penguin. In the United Kingdom, it’s Bloomsbury, and then a whole bunch of different, sorry, Il Sagittario in Italy, and Penguin, a different Penguin in Spain and so on. So, but you should be able to find copies of it all over. And then many other language editions coming out over the next few months. But all with different publishers.
And the book launch, I know that it’s been very, very difficult during Covid.
Indeed.
[Wendy] Tell us a little bit about book launches.
Well, book launches have been rubbish in Covid. As I mentioned. So, we launched in the UK last summer and were unable to have any public events around it. And then this year I was meant to start the year with a tour in the United States to be followed by tours last month to Spain and then Germany where we have the launches there. And then Italy next month. But so far, what I do is I move from my desk now to the green screen behind me where I project these cheerful images. But I do hope in some places, we’ll be launching additions. And I hope we’ll be able to travel. France, for example. I hope I will be able to get to the launch tour. And it would be a great pleasure. But it’s very tough vlogging books in the Coronavirus era. So do please, if you are interested, buy it in whatever language you choose.
Well, I hope that I’ll be able to give you a big party in New York when we’re able to travel.
I’m coming to, I’m booked in for that already.
[Wendy] Great.
[James] I’m good at a party.
Good. We’re looking forward. So, I’ll just say to everybody, to all our participants, thank you very, very much for joining us. I want to say thank you to Janet Suzman for recommending you, James. And I want to say, I am delighted to be reconnected to you. As I said before, I remember you as this gorgeous little 10-year-old on your bicycle with Tim Sonic riding down Birdhaven. Is that right?
[James] That’s correct. Wingfield Avenue. Yeah.
Wingfield Avenue, exactly. Here we come. And Jenny and I’s older sister, we used to steal her car. We were naughty girls.
It was little MG, I bet.
[Wendy] Little MG, exactly. And so, we used to drive around Wingfield Avenue. Lovely, lovely to see you again. Thank you everybody. And on that note, I’m going to say, goodbye and goodnight to all of you. Thank you.
[James] Thank you very much.
[Wendy] Bye. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.