Or…
Maybe they just sort of fell into it?
It's tempting to imagine that agriculture represents the path of least resistance for people trying to make a living, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Growing your own food represents the path of greatest resistance, and the more of it you grow, the greater the resistance. It's been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is an exact correlation between how hard you have to work to stay alive and how great your dependence on agriculture is. Those who grow the least also work the least, and those who grow the most also work the most. The amount of energy it takes to put three ounces of corn in a can of water on your supermarket shelf is almost beyond belief, as is the amount of time you must work in order to possess those three ounces of corn.
No, the founders of our culture didn't just fall into a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture, they had to whip themselves into it, and the whip they used was this meme: Growing all your own food is the best way to live.
Nothing less could imaginably have done this amazing trick.
Maybe they were just hungry?
A hunter-gatherer who needs 2,000 calories a day to live has to expend only 400 calories to get them, because that's the rate at which hunting and gathering pays off—1 calorie of work gets you 5 calories of food. By contrast, a farmer who needs 2,000 calories a day to live has to expend 1,000 calories to get them, because that's the rate at which farming pays off—1 calorie of work gets you 2 calories of food.
For a food-hungry person to trade hunting-gathering for farming is like a money-hungry person trading a job that pays five dollars an hour for one that pays two dollars an hour. It makes utterly no sense, and the hungrier you are, the less sense it makes.
Farming is less efficient at banishing hunger than hunting and gathering, but it unquestionably confers other benefits (most notably, providing a base for settlement and eventually civilization), and it was to secure these benefits that the founders of our culture ultimately adopted a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture. From that point, it became a matter of complete conviction among us that growing all your food is the best way to live. We had invested in that meme and in the future would protect that investment at any cost.
New World adopters of the meme
We weren't the only people in ancient times to recognize the benefits of growing all our food. Among the notable adopters of this meme in the New World were the Maya, the Olmec, the people of Teotihuacán, the Hohokam, the Anasazi, the Aztecs, and the Inca.
What's significant for our study of this most fundamental meme is that, by the time Europeans arrived in the New World at the end of the fifteenth century, only the latest of these civilizations, the Aztec and the Incan, were still clinging to it.
The Maya
The Maya probably became full-time agriculturalists not long after we did, but (like us) they didn't begin to look like civilization-builders for several thousand years. Their first great cities in Yucatán began to emerge around 2000 B.C.E., coincident with the founding of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and actually ahead of the founding of Babylonia by some two centuries.
The Maya flourished for nearly three thousand years. Then at the beginning of the ninth century of the common era, the cities of the south suddenly began to be abandoned and before long were left standing empty. The cities of the north continued to flourish for a time under the domination of the Toltec but collapsed when the Toltec themselves collapsed in the thirteenth century. Mayapán, to the west, then emerged as the last great stronghold of Maya civilization, but this remnant was itself only another two centuries away from collapse.
This is, by design, the sort of account you'd find in an ordinary encyclopedia or historical atlas. Although it begins by talking about people, it immediately becomes the tale of something else, something like a vast ocean liner steaming through time. It carries passengers, to be sure, but these are mere ballast, necessary only in the sense that without them the ship must immediately go bottom-up and sink.
The Olmec and Teotihuacán
The Olmec agriculturalists of coastal Veracruz and Tabasco built great ceremonial centers, principally at San Lorenzo and La Venta. San Lorenzo, the oldest, flourished from 1200 B.C.E.to 900 B.C.E., when (as it's said) it “was defaced and abandoned.” The very same thing happened at La Venta five centuries later. Lesser sites continued to be occupied for a time, but the destruction of La Venta marked the end of Olmec dominance in the area.
Some two hundred years later one of the great cities of the ancient world began to be built in central Mexico. Teotihuacán was destined to become the world's sixth largest city by 500 C.E. For two hundred and fifty years it flourished as the center of its own empire, then abruptly the usual happened. It “was destroyed”—burned and perhaps even “ritually” wiped out. The ruins were occupied for a time, but the city was dead.
The Hohokam and the Anasazi
The people who occupied the desert lands of southern Arizona from about the time of Christ strike us as being hard workers rather than civilization-builders. Their memorable undertakings, beginning around 700 C.E., were not cities but vast networks of irrigation ditches that enabled them to grow all their own food. Single ditches, as much as 25 feet wide and 15 deep, could extend as far as 16 miles, and one network along the Salt River connected 150 miles of ditches. The work began to be abandoned at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and within decades the workers became the Hohokam—“Those Who Vanished,” in the language of the Pima Indians of the area.
The Anasazi occupied the Four Corners region, where modern-day Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet. They flourished only briefly, beginning around 900 C.E., and built no great cities, but achieved a striking lifestyle in small towns and high-rise cliff dwellings. It was all abandoned soon after 1300.
Looking for the actors
In writing these capsule histories, I've followed the popular model for such accounts, starting in the active voice, with people doing things, and ending in the passive voice, with things being done—to “sites” or “cities” or “civilizations.” The end always comes when sites are “abandoned,” “destroyed,” “defaced,” “burned,” or “desecrated”—one never learns by whom. One is left with a vague impression of mystery, as if these things had happened in the Bermuda Triangle or the Twilight Zone.
The authors of these accounts are clearly uneasy with the truth, which is that these civilizations were all destroyed and abandoned by the very people who built them. The Maya walked away from their cities under their own steam—they weren't whisked away in flying saucers. The Olmec themselves defaced and abandoned San Lorenzo and La Venta, and Teotihuacán was torched by its own citizens. One day the ditchtenders of southern Arizona downed tools and walked away, and on another day the villagers and cliff-dwellers of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde did the same.
All these peoples did something even more outrageous that is almost never alluded to in accounts of this kind. It was bad enough that they abandoned their civilizations, but what they did next is almost unthinkable: they stopped farming. They stopped growing all their own food.
They gave up the very best way of living there is.
“Those Who Vanished”
In a very real sense, they all deserve to be called Hohokam, these strange peoples who slipped out of their magnificent robes, put aside the tools they'd used to create immortal works of art, trashed their plans for temples and pyramids, discarded literacy, mathematics, and the most advanced calendars in the world, consigned to oblivion elaborate state religions and whole political systems … and melted away into whatever landscape was at hand—tropical jungles, lush plains, or high deserts. Of course, none of them actually vanished. They just took up less conspicuous ways of making a living, either by foraging or by some mixture of foraging and farming.
But any way you cut it, they deliberately threw over what we think to be the very best lifestyle in the world for something inferior. T
hey knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway … again and again and again. Naturally there are explanations. Inexplicable behavior can't be allowed to remain inexplicable. Anthropologist Jeremy A. Sabloff notes that dozens of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the Mayan collapse, “including overuse of the soil, earthquakes, hurricanes, climatic changes, diseases, insect pests, peasant revolts, and invasions,” and the Maya are no exception. The same and other hypotheses have been advanced to explain all the other collapses. They all have something in common, as Professor Sabloff neatly concludes: “None of these explanations has proved to be totally satisfactory.”
Why none will EVER be satisfactory
No such explanation will ever be satisfactory, because we all know these things:
The soil may be depleted here, but it's not depleted everywhere.
Earthquakes and hurricanes don't last forever.
Climatic changes can be ridden out.
Diseases run their course.
Insect pests come and go.
Peasant revolts can be put down—or survived.
Invaders can be repelled—or absorbed.
It couldn't have been things like this that made these people quit, because look at us. These things are mere inconveniences compared to what we've faced—all these things, plus much worse: famines, wars of every kind, inquisitions, government by torture and assassination, endlessly rising crime, corruption, tyranny, madness, revolution, genocide, racism, social injustice, mass poverty, poisoned water, polluted air, two devastating world wars, and the prospect of nuclear holocaust, biological warfare, and extinction. We faced all that and more—and never once have been tempted to abandon our civilization.
There had to be something else at work—or missing— among these people. And indeed there was something else.
What a difference a ____ makes!
Two guys on an airplane. One falls out, then a moment later so does the other. The first guy splatters on the ground like a ripe tomato. The second lands on his feet and walks away. It's obvious that the second had something the first didn't, and what he had is also obvious: a parachute.
Two guys face a gunman. One takes a bullet in the chest and falls dead. The other takes a bullet in the chest, then calmly fires back, shooting the gunman dead. Again it's obvious that the second one had something the first didn't, and what he had is also obvious: body armor.
Two civilizations. One goes along for a while, then maybe something bad happens (or maybe not) and suddenly everyone just walks away from it. The other civilization goes along for much longer, constantly suffering every conceivable catastrophe—but no one dreams of walking away from it for even one second.
Again it's obvious that the second civilization had something the first didn't—but exactly what it had is not so obvious.
It had a meme.
For want of a meme, a civilization was lost
One can imagine how desperately the pontiffs, potentates, dynasts, princes, pendragons, princelings, rajahs, hierophants, priests, priestesses, and palace guards of all these tottering civilizations must have desired to implant in the minds of their vacillating subjects this very simple concept: Civilization must continue at ANY cost and must not be abandoned under ANY circumstance.
It goes without saying, however, that implanting alone isn't enough. To take effect, a meme must be accepted without question. You can't talk people into accepting an absurd idea like this one on the spur of the moment. They have to hear it from birth. It has to come to them from every direction and be buried in every communication, the way it is with us.
All these peoples started out believing that the best way to live is by growing all your own food. Why else would they become full-time farmers? They started out that way and went on that way for a long time. But then some very predictable things began to happen. For example, the Maya, the Olmec, and the people of Teotihuacán became rigidly stratified into wealthy, all-powerful elites and impoverished, powerless masses, who naturally did all the grunt work that made these civilizations magnificent. The masses will put up with this miserable life— we know that!—but they inevitably begin to get restless. We know that too.
When the underclass becomes restless
Our history is full of underclass insurrections, revolts, rebellions, riots, and revolutions, but not a single one has ever ended with people just walking away. This is because our citizens know that civilization must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance. So they will go berserk, will destroy everything in sight, will slaughter all the elite they can get their hands on, will burn, rape, and pillage—but they will never just walk away.
This is why the behavior of the Maya, the Olmec, and the rest is so unfathomably mysterious to our historians. For them, it seems self-evident that civilization must continue at any cost and never be abandoned under any circumstance. How, then, could the Maya, the Olmec, and the others not have known it?
But this is exactly what was missing in the minds of these peoples. When they no longer liked what they were building, they were able to walk away from it, because they didn't have the idea that it must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance.
This meme makes the same difference between them and us as the parachute makes between the two guys falling from the plane or the body armor makes between the two guys facing the gunman.
What about all the others?
There's no evidence that the Hohokam and the Anasazi had become divided into all-powerful upperclasses and powerless underclasses. But there is some evidence that the Hohokam were leaning in that direction. Platform mounds in the Mesoamerican style (built by whom if not an emerging underclass?) were beginning to show up here and there, as were leisure-class ball courts (built for whom if not an emerging upperclass?). The Anasazi experiment was the briefest of all the ones I've examined here and the least highly developed as a civilization (if it merits that name at all). Regardless, the same is true for all. When, for whatever reason, they no longer liked what they were building, they were able to walk away from it, because they didn't have the idea that it must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance.
I've mentioned (but not discussed) the other two great civilizations of the New World, the Incan and the Aztec. Their early and middle development followed lines laid down by the Maya and Olmec, but their ending was not in their own hands, since they were destroyed by invading Spanish armies in the sixteenth century. Obviously it's impossible to know how they might have gone on if left to their own devices, but my guess is that (lacking that critical meme) they would ultimately have followed the example of all the others.
The Cultural Fallacy
To us, the meme Civilization must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance seems intrinsic to the human mind—self-evident, like The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. A mind that doesn't possess that meme hardly seems human to us.
We imagine humanity was born with this meme in its head. Homo habilis knew he should be civilized but didn't have the brains to do it. Homo erectus knew he should be civilized but didn't have the skills to do it. Homo sapiens knew he should be civilized but couldn't figure out what it takes. Homo sapiens sapiens knew he should be civilized, had the brains and the skills to do it, and got down to it as soon as he figured out that agriculture is what it takes. Naturally he knew it must continue at any cost and not be abandoned under any circumstance.
What, therefore, was wrong with all these New World civilization-builders? It's hard for us to get over the idea that there was something very mysterious about them. They knew (because it's self-evident) that civilization must not be abandoned under any circumstance—but they abandoned it anyway.
This is an example of the Cultural Fallacy, which is: The memes of our culture arise from the very structure of the human mind itself, and if you don't have them, there must be something wrong with you.
Naturally this too is
a meme.
The other mystery of “Lost Civilizations”
The first mystery of the New World civilization-builders is easy to discern, because it manifests itself as something they did: they destroyed what they built. The second mystery is less easy to discern, because it only manifests itself as something they didn't do: they didn't overrun the world.
At the height of their development, the Maya occupied an area no larger than Arizona. By the time we reached the same height of development, we occupied all the Middle East and Europe and much of India and Southeast Asia. There was no one around equipped to oppose a Mayan advance north or south of their homeland in Yucatán and Guatemala, had they chosen to make it. They might have civilized the entire hemisphere in the thousands of years they had—had they chosen to do it. Oddly, mysteriously, they didn't choose to do it.
The Olmec were content to occupy a homeland smaller than Connecticut, and had the metropolis Teotihuacán been built in the center of Los Angeles, its imperial reach would have fallen well short of the city limits.
What was wrong with these people? What did they lack that we had?