Simplification and Human History
James Scott's idea of radical simplification as a lens to analyse human history
Ecosystem simplification is the ecological hallmark of humanity and the reason for our evolutionary success.
Throughout history, human beings have simplified the environment we live in. In the words of paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, “we remodel the planet’s landscapes, simplifying them as our method of improvement”. The first such simplification was probably the use of fire to mould the landscape around us. However, the most important simplification in human history is agriculture, which, in James Scott’s words, is “a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man’s goals”.
Scott’s book ‘Seeing Like a State’ focuses on simplifications implemented by the modern state, but the concept is much more widely applicable. Scott identifies the major divide between environments where simplification works and where it does not. In the context of agriculture, for example,
the creation of a uniform, controlled farming environment is intrinsically more difficult in a tropical setting than in a temperate one.
In other words, the more complex the environment is, the more resistant it is to simplification. To borrow a term from Edward Tenner, the environment “bites back” and resists the attempt to control and simplify it which is why the “scientific agriculture that has apparently been successful in the temperate, industrializing West has so often foundered in the Third World”.
Wheat Farming in the Soviet Union vs Rice Farming in Bali
As Scott points out, even Soviet collective farms were fairly successful at growing major crops like wheat. The robustness of the grain and the relative simplicity of the environment meant that simplification was a viable strategy. Contrast this to the almost immediate failure of the same method in the rice terraces of Bali. In his book ‘Priests and Programmers’, Stephen Lansing illustrates how replacing the “unscientific” practices of the Balinese rice farmers with a “scientific” approach led to almost immediate failure. The “replacement of the water temples by bureaucratic systems of control” led to an explosion of the pest population. In other words, the system resisted simplification because the adaptive agents inimical to the human project (pests) took advantage of the stable environment created by the simplification.
Out of Africa
It is this resistance to simplification that prevented civilisation from arising in Africa. As John Reader explains,
In Africa, people were constrained. Because they had evolved there as an expression of the continent’s ecological diversity, in parallel with an infinite number of other organisms, any attempts to exploit the system to their exclusive benefit risked disaster and extinction. Their continued survival was a consequence of expedience, and of their ability to accommodate the ecological realities confronting them, including predators, parasites, and disease. The migrants who left the continent 100,000 years ago threw off the yoke.
Reader draws upon the pioneering work of William McNeill in ‘Plagues and Peoples’. In this case, the adaptive agents that took advantage of the simplified environment were our oldest antagonists - microbes. For civilisation to thrive, humanity had to move to an environment where “prevailing ecosystems were less elaborated and correspondingly less inimical to simplification by human action”.
For example, trypanosomiasis (also known as sleeping sickness) alone single-handedly prevented control within the domain of the tsetse fly. Even in the modern era, misguided colonial attempts to modernise African agriculture were thwarted by sleeping sickness. In McNeill’s words,
In central and eastern Africa, events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries connected with ill-conceived efforts by European colonial administrators to alter traditional patterns of herding and cultivation also illustrate the unexpected side effects that sometimes arise from agricultural expansions into new regions. These efforts, in fact, precipitated veritable epidemics of sleeping sickness in parts of Uganda, the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika, Rhodesia, and Nigeria; and the end result, as colonial regimes came to an end, was a land more thickly infested with death-dealing tsetse flies than before government policy set out to utilize what looked like good agricultural land more effectively.
Even when agriculture took hold, humanity paid a heavy price. Frank Livingstone has shown how the introduction of slash-and-burn agriculture in Western Africa thousands of years ago led to the proliferation of Anopheles gambiae and a dramatic increase in the intensity of malaria in the region.
By leaving Africa, humanity entered a less complex environment free of the disease-causing microorganisms that had kept it in check and more amenable to simplification and control. In other words, we became an invasive species. As McNeill explains,
temperate ecological balances proved to be much more easily disrupted by human agency…humankind’s biological dominion in temperate climes assumed a different order of magnitude from the start. As a stranger and newcomer to temperate ecological systems, humanity was in a situation like rabbits met when introduced into Australia.
Even outside Africa, the trajectory of civilisation was primarily driven by the complexity of the environment and its adaptive ability to bite back. For example, the “disease gradient” between arid/temperate climes and tropical forests explains why civilisation took hold in the Indus river valley before it did in the Ganga river valley or why Chinese civilisation took so long to penetrate the warmer and wetter Yangtze river valley.
But even in the arid and temperate environments, simplification often carried a sting in the tail. Success and the imposition of order often came at the price of increased fragility and risk of collapse. There is no better illustration of this than the experience of the early river valley civilisations, the subject of a future essay.