Jared Diamond, the bestselling author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, wrote a paper back in 1987 describing the worst mistake in the history of the human race. What is that mistake? Agriculture.

 In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

He argues the hunter-gatherer diet is better nutritionally, as agriculture tended to focus on a single crop, like potatoes. This led to deficiencies and over-reliance, which led to events like the potato famines in Ireland. Overall, he paints a rosy picture of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and almost romanticizes it. From a Marxist perspective, Diamond is enamored.

Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

He then asks a question. If agriculture is so bad for us, why did we choose it? And his answers get more interesting (or horrifying, if you are a normal human being.)

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

So what should we have done instead? Well, infanticide is a good solution to the problem.

…nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means.

And here is where Diamond’s bizarre definition of evil comes into play:

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming.

To limit growth by infanticide is reasonable. To support a larger population via farming is evil. And in other news, up is down, down is up, circles are triangles, and Congress is a fine group of people to which you would feel comfortable turning your back.

This is what passes for morality in our brave new world. Based on Diamond’s speculation about history, most people who have lived are both dependent on agriculture for their life AND victims of what agriculture has wrought. Ergo, it’s better if they had never been born at all. Somehow, I don’t think Jared Diamond would put himself on that list.

By his own admission, the progress allowed by agriculture is the very thing that allows Diamond to write academic papers and best-selling books in the first place. He’s a thin branch looking down at the trunk of his tree, shaking his head in condescension, and saying “You shouldn’t have grown so tall. You’ve jeopardized our survival. Don’t you know it’s windy up here?” Meanwhile, he will continue to enjoy the view.

God: “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth.”

Diamond and others: “Nope.”

It is no surprise that progressives like Diamond champion abortion and free contraception. Soon, they will champion infanticide itself without any rhetoric masks, giving up the pretense of the fabled “woman’s right to choose,” and just start bowing to Moloch openly in the public square. We’ve already started down that path, with one journal of medical “ethics” saying that after-birth abortion should be allowed. We already know many women celebrate their abortions. We already know people build altars to sanctify their abortions. Based on history, human sacrifice is the most natural thing in the world.

But the good news is that when the idols are taken out of the closet, perhaps they’ll be easier to tear down.

The authors of the medical “ethics” article are, of course, correct in the sense that abortion inside the fetus is no different from abortion outside the fetus. That reasoning is sound. But the authors give the car more gas when they should be slamming on the brakes, shifting into reverse, and pushing the RPM gauge into the red going the opposite direction. They are discovering where their core assumptions have led them. Again. But this time they are not stepping away in absolute horror.

Eugenics, in essence, is still alive. But instead of elites and other “very smart people” deciding who lives and who dies, we have that power passed to the parents themselves, a decentralization of evil.

I think I’d rather have agriculture.