The two greatest human inventions

[Grand Mal]

???? The Hunter-Gatherer life was no "Garden Of Eden", get real....
You have to speak for yourself when it comes to what civilization has done for us....
I got news for ya----EVERYONE in prehistoric times was "an employee" to nature......................you want to go back to being a near animal, be my guest

Thats what the story in Genesis was about, losing that state of innocence that primitive people have. Adam and Eve lost it when they learned about good and evil. Before that nothing was good or evil, everything just was.
When they lost the Garden they became agriculturalists. Cain was a planter, Able a herder, and we see how that worked out.
Its an allegory, a parable about mankind ceasing to live as they were intended to live. Civilization ruined mankind. It still happens, every time primitive people are encountered by civilization their lives are wrecked.
Every culture has a creation myth and that one in Genesis is one of the best.

 

[Mithrae]

???? The Hunter-Gatherer life was no "Garden Of Eden", get real....
You have to speak for yourself when it comes to what civilization has done for us....
I got news for ya----EVERYONE in prehistoric times was "an employee" to nature......................you want to go back to being a near animal, be my guest

I think @Grand Mal would have been correct for most civilizations/periods up to the last century or so. Benjamin Franklin certainly seemed to think so:

"The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appears strongly in the little success that has hitherto attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians, in their present way of living, almost all their Wants are supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty, they visit us frequently, and see the advantages that Arts, Sciences, and compact Society procure us, they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shewn any Inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts; When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger Brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.​

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"Though they have few but natural wants and those easily supplied. But with us are infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy; so that I am apt to imagine that close Societies subsisting by Labour and Arts, arose first not from choice, but from necessity: When numbers being driven by war from their hunting grounds and prevented by seas or by other nations were crowded together into some narrow Territories, which without labour would not afford them Food."​

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I'd say that the advent of labour rights, women's rights, the universal declaration of human rights, UN etc. etc., have brought us to a point where our technologies do more good than harm for most people. For now, at least.

 

[Grand Mal]

I think @Grand Mal would have been correct for most civilizations/periods up to the last century or so. Benjamin Franklin certainly seemed to think so:

"The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appears strongly in the little success that has hitherto attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians, in their present way of living, almost all their Wants are supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty, they visit us frequently, and see the advantages that Arts, Sciences, and compact Society procure us, they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shewn any Inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts; When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger Brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.​

​

"Though they have few but natural wants and those easily supplied. But with us are infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy; so that I am apt to imagine that close Societies subsisting by Labour and Arts, arose first not from choice, but from necessity: When numbers being driven by war from their hunting grounds and prevented by seas or by other nations were crowded together into some narrow Territories, which without labour would not afford them Food."​

He was a wise man, old Benjamin.

 

[Quag]

No. The two greatest innovations of humans will always be agriculture and animal husbandry.

Animals/insects do those as well so I dont think you can call them human inventions

7 Animals That Know How to Farm

A number of astonishing animals discovered agriculture long before humans even evolved as a species.

www.treehugger.com

Tarantulas and Their Pet Frogs Offer a Unique Look at Animal Friendship

Some species of frogs and tarantulas form unlikely animal friendships. The spiders and their pet frogs team up for a mutually beneficial partnership.

nerdist.com

Ant Farm: These Insect Cowboys Harvest, Herd and Milk

Ants mastered husbandry way before us - about 50 million years ago - and they still continue farming today.

modernfarmer.com

 

[Mithrae]

Nonviolent civil disobedience has largely failed to affect real change.

And yet it's twice as successful as violent domestic movements. People seem inclined to try (and fail) violent confrontation far more often than nonviolent means, but that's hardly a proof that nonviolent means are less effective.

What is the '3.5% rule' of revolutions?

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

www.bbc.com

I sometimes wonder what the world would have been like if the American independence movement, for example, had chosen to avoid violence. Slavery was outlawed throughout the British Empire in 1837-43 - before slavery had reached its peak in the American south if memory serves - so potentially America's destructive civil war could have been averted by that, by the absence of any impulse to maintain a 'balance' between slave and free states, and by the fact that would-be slavers would be defying the entire British Empire rather than the more closely-matched northern states. That would be a pretty major plus, if so! America in some form surely would have become independent eventually; Canada became a nominally independent country, a 'dominion' of Britain, in 1867 without a war... perhaps that would have happened more slowly without the American example of destructive efforts to hold a (white) colony by force, or perhaps the substantial economic weight of the American colonies by the mid 19th century would made it a foregone conclusion even without a prior example. How would America's 'manifest destiny' of westward expansion and its widespread crimes against native Americans have played out in this scenario? And how would this alternate history have impacted 20th century geopolitics, for example in the form of potentially less of a militarist culture from its birth in bloodshed, 'right to bear arms' and brutal civil war?

 

[Questerr]

And yet it's twice as successful as violent domestic movements. People seem inclined to try (and fail) violent confrontation far more often than nonviolent means, but that's hardly a proof that nonviolent means are less effective.

What is the '3.5% rule' of revolutions?

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

www.bbc.com

I sometimes wonder what the world would have been like if the American independence movement, for example, had chosen to avoid violence. Slavery was outlawed throughout the British Empire in 1837-43 - before slavery had reached its peak in the American south if memory serves - so potentially America's destructive civil war could have been averted by that, by the absence of any impulse to maintain a 'balance' between slave and free states, and by the fact that would-be slavers would be defying the entire British Empire rather than the more closely-matched northern states. That would be a pretty major plus, if so! America in some form surely would have become independent eventually; Canada became a nominally independent country, a 'dominion' of Britain, in 1867 without a war... perhaps that would have happened more slowly without the American example of destructive efforts to hold a (white) colony by force, or perhaps the substantial economic weight of the American colonies by the mid 19th century would made it a foregone conclusion even without a prior example. How would America's 'manifest destiny' of westward expansion and its widespread crimes against native Americans have played out in this scenario? And how would this alternate history have impacted 20th century geopolitics, for example in the form of potentially less of a militarist culture from its birth in bloodshed, 'right to bear arms' and brutal civil war?

The British Empire was able to easily peacefully outlaw slavery because they weren’t stupid enough to make it a cornerstone of the British economy.

 

[dmpi]

1. Language
2. Math