Humans have been around for many thousands of years. Why, in the past few thousand, have we decided that...?

Question

viewing the world as though it belongs to us is a better way to live, instead of living as a part of nature like the rest of life?

We're born into this way of thinking, since our society tells us this is how humans should live.

I'm not asking what's better about our dominance view (which if anything, is a disadvantage), but what caused such a large portion of humans to completely change their ways of thinking? Was it linked to the agricultural revolution?

Answer 1

Imagine two societies, one that is very aggressive towards nature (and basically everything) and another that lives in harmony with nature (and everything). If they came into contact with each other, the aggressive society would "win" and drive the harmonious society into extinction. It's just an issue of natural selection. You may see it as a disadvantage now, but back then when it seemed like the Earth could sustain indefinite population growth, that was not the case.

Answer 2

Actually I don't think they ever did change, they started off as stone-age people and lived in caves, tried to find shelter, looked after their families, went hunting. So they were uncivilized back then and never had the branch of modern human intelligence back then. If you'd like to go into evolution, it's called natural selection. Apparently we humans are the ones with intelligence but that's only slowly evolving through time, I do have to agree with you that we think ourselves as more able than the rest of nature but then, don't we rule this Earth, who are the ones destroying the Earth at this very moment? Us. It's all us, we classify oursleves as more intelligent than nature which is true. We are more intelligent than the rest of nature, otherwise how can we destroy it? You are also right that our dominance view is a disadvantage. It really is. And yes, I think it was linked to the agricultural Revolution, we changed through time. But isn't it better living the way we are instead of like animals, though we are animals ourselves. And to tell the truth we humans have been around for millions of years, not thousands. If you talk about thousands then we've already evolved from Homo Habilis and Homo Austrolopithecus to Homo Sapiens(modern humans). ANd by that time we already did start thinking that the world belongs to us. Anyway it's true. I support you views too.

Answer 3

The agricultural revolution did infamously make man a creature of settlements. He settled down and built cities and farmed the surrounding lands for supplies. No longer did at the beat of the drum was man aroused to migrate to greener pastures.

The surviving members of the nomadic lifestyles such as the native americans were brutally killed or overthrown by the farmers in last few centuries. The bison who made possible the nomadic lifestyles were destroyed by the early settlers causing the native americans to die out, either by natural selection or through conflict with the invading agrarians.

Answer 4

I would say that it is more the industrial revolution that has changed us....once the majority of the people stopped living off the land (as we did during the agricultural days) we started relying on factories...and products that come from them...mass produced everything...
We don't live "one" with nature now because we don't have to...we have machines and computers that can create the same effects/products as nature in faster and more efficient ways...
we are also more advanced than the rest of life on this planet...we think and reason...so we figure new ways to do things...i think that's in our nature...

Answer 5

I think that it very well could be linked to agricultural evolution. Think about it. Farmers, ranchers, settlers, Indians, and such have staked claims on land for years. For the most part, land equals power equals money. I think as the years went by, people have just used the land to survive and they feel that once they have worked it- with their blood, sweat, and tears- that it is theirs by right. Things have changed since the old days. It's not about survival anymore. People think they have "conquered" the earth and it more about power and money than anything else. To their way of thinking, why just survive when they can survive and be powerful and rich?

I hope that doesn't sound silly!

Answer 6

Khard - humans didn't change their ways of thinking. HUMANS THINK and that is why they view the world as though it belongs to them. Humans are the only animals that have the ability to think. Humans are the only animals that are SELF-AWARE. Humans are the only animals that have the ABILITY to change their environment. It is the ability to think and change the environment that make Humans not live as a part of nature like the rest of life. Other animals are totally at the mercy of nature and Humans are not.

Humans stopped living as a part of nature THOUSANDS of years ago when they harnessed fire, stopped living in caves and started living in huts or tepees or houses and started GROWING their own food.

Answer 7

The change came when we started veiwing the world in the first place. There was never a period in time where humanity believed that it should just be part of nature - at the time when it was part of nature it did not think (I mean higher thought like we are doing now, rather than functional thinking eg. hunting).

All creatures are adapted from an evolutionary point of veiw to look after their own interests alone, it is simply that human are able to do it to a far greater extent now that we notice it, and because we engage in higher thought that we verbalise it and question it.

Answer 8

Yes the agricultural revolution made a difference ... the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution even more so.

However, even prehistoric hunter-gatherers did environmental damage and even wiped out whole species ... I'm afraid we have a very poor record in planet-management.

Answer 9

People have adopted a worldview that in their estimation, is in their own self interest. Further, our attitudes toward nature are all nascent in the presupositions of the European Enlightenment. For an insightful review of this cultural dynamic consider Charles Taylor's recent book entitled "A Secular Age."

Answer 10

It likely goes back farther than that. Until people had the time to sit and ponder, they were totally consumed with existing. Finding food. Making fire. Finding shelter. And they lived in small family units.
Once the units became large enough to diversify and specialize the work involved, people began to notice that they did things differently than animals did. And from that they deduced they were better than the other creatures.
At least, that's how I remember it ;-)