Page 481 - Cultures and Organizations

446 IMPLICATIONS

The cultivation of plants created different selective pressures. Farm-
ers had reasons to worry. Things could go wrong in many ways for them:
everybody knew where they lived, the farm could be raided, and stores could
be stolen. Even in the absence of human enemies, farmers had to work hard.
Plants needed care, or weeds might overgrow them, animals could eat them,
thunderstorms might wreck them, or they might dry out and die. Agricul-
tural crops led to attendant evolution among plague animals and disease
organisms. Population concentration along the Nile was an ideal condition
for pollution and diseases to evolve fast and to concentrate. Crops might be
hit by any of the ten biblical plagues that beset the Egyptian empire: water

poisoning, frogs, gnats, flies, livestock diseases, hail, fire, locusts, darkness,
and child death. Many more plagues must have occurred as well, or perhaps
caused some of the biblical ones: animal-borne human diseases, mice, rats,
fungi, viruses, bacterial diseases, and others. Agriculture caused the level
of health and average age to drop for the common person, because of the

less nutritious diets that plants provided. Certainly at first, before human
populations had begun to adopt genetic ways to cope with their new num-
bers and diets, agriculture was a curse in disguise.
In terms of culture, then, uncertainty avoidance seems to be a good
adaptation to the hazards of farming life. Besides, farmers had to collabo-
rate in monotonous, season-bound work, and they lived in much greater
numbers than hunter-gatherers or herders. This situation requires a certain
meekness, associated perhaps with larger collectivism and power distance.
Culture would also coevolve with production systems. The labor-intensive
rice terraces in Southeast Asia fi t with a long-term-oriented (fl exhumble)
culture: diligent, self-effacing care is needed to sustain the system. If raids
were endemic, a division of labor between agricultural women and fi ghting
men could ensue, with a correspondingly more masculine value system.

All in all, in terms of culture, it would seem that compared with the
days of hunting and gathering, the advent of the various forms of agricul-
ture expanded the spectrum of values that would be adaptive for human
groups. Possessions introduced an inherited hierarchy in agricultural soci-
ety. Pastoralism with its strong temptation of stealing in arid environ-
ments would lead to particularly strong needs for protecting the moral
circle. Individualism would be lower, masculinity would be higher, and
uncertainty avoidance and short-term orientation (monumentalism) would
be notably high.