If necessity is the mother of invention, then why do civilized cultures call their inventions great accomplishments? They could also be seen as coping mechanisms — ways that civilizations deal with the crises their way of life engendered: overpopulation, starvation when crops failed, resource depletion, infectious disease and war.

If civilized people were inventive, it was because, in their dire crises, they had to be, and if non-civilized people didn’t use certain civilized techniques or products, it might have been because they were doing fine without them.

I first thought of this idea when I learned that agriculture might have been more of a last resort than a brilliant discovery. Anthropologist Mark Nathan Cohen wrote in the August/September 2004 Free Inquiry, “What was once considered the ‘invention’ of farming (occurring in various regions beginning 10 to 12 thousand years ago) is now more often interpreted as a result of increased demand for resources. This increase results from either denser human populations, social structures that imposed demands for extra output or climate changes that may have reduced the supply of preferred resources. This new technology was presumably forced, not invented.”

He continues, “First, most of the techniques that, in combination, make up ‘farming’ . . . were and are in fact used individually by various foraging cultures that did not practice agriculture. Second, agriculture actually seems to have been harder work than hunting or even gathering small resources.”

Indeed, as Richard Manning writes in “Against the Grain,” “Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun. Farming is not . . . “ The fundamental question was properly phrased by Colin Tudge of the London School of Economics: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adopt agriculture but why anybody took it up at all, when it is so obviously beastly.”

Most people I’ve talked with assume that life was hard and grueling before agriculture, that people regularly went hungry and that the lifespan was short because of under-nutrition. But the case seems to be the opposite. In fact, the average life span actually decreased upon the start of intensive agriculture, due to poorer quality of nutrition and frequent crop failures.

Agriculture caused a number of new problems, including population growth (because infants could be weaned earlier and overall fertility was greater), which caused a positive feedback cycle and the need for more intensive agriculture to feed more mouths.

Another significant problem caused by agriculture and living in cities was increased infectious disease. Many diseases date their first significant interaction with people to the era when people began living in close proximity in cities, using irrigation, and keeping livestock. Mark Nathan Cohen writes, “Almost all studies that attempt to reconstuct the history of infectious diseases, indicate that the burden of infection has tended to increase, rather than decrease, as human beings adopted civilized life styles.” Major dental disease also dates to the beginning of agriculture, as I learned when I researched skeletons at the National Museum of Natural History. The teeth of pre-agriculture Native Americans were worn down by their gritty diets but otherwise were healthy. In contrast, “post-contact” Native Americans had horrible cavities, gaping abscesses, and widespread tooth loss, due to their starchy diets. Medicine and dentistry are great aspects of civilization, but for the most part, they deal with problems civilization caused in the first place.

It’s not too hard to apply this paradigm to most of our great “inventions” and “accomplishments”:

* Literature and art: I like both, and they’re among the greatest achievements of civilization, they also can be seen as methods of coping with the loneliness and anomie of civilized life. It’s nice that many people chose to salve their emotional pain through art, but it would be nicer if they didn’t have so much emotional pain in the first place. Besides, many uncivilized groups had rich oral histories, stories and art forms (which are noticeably more nature-centered and upbeat than most modern literature and art).

* Science and technology: Despite (justified) claims about “understanding the universe” and “discovering things no one knows,” a big motivation in these subjects is coping more effectively with the problems and challenges of civilization, like shortages of food and natural resources. Besides, can we really say that we understand the world better than non-civilized people? We might have memorized Newton’s Laws and the Krebs Cycle from textbooks, but can we find wild plants that are safe to eat, see the Milky Way with our bare eyes or identify animal tracks? We might think non-civilized people were uneducated, but one could easily make a case that they “understood the world” better than most of us at this elite university.

* Morals and ethics are great “achievements” of civilization, but they’re also inventions to get people to be nice to strangers. In smaller, non-civilized communities, being nice to others is natural, because there’s an obvious potential for both retaliation and favors in return.

* Psychiatry and psychology could be seen as attempts to help people deal with the mental stress of living in a social environment they didn’t evolve to live in.

* Biotechnology, energy technology, genetically-modified plants and many recent inventions are attempts to deal with shortages in food and natural resources.

* We’re inventing new cancer treatments to deal with cancers, many of which are caused by tobacco, alcohol and environmental pollution.

* Would we have gone to the moon without the Cold War? Would people be so interested in space colonization (see Rahul’s column “The answers are in outer space,” May 25) if we weren’t using up the resources on earth?

* Some of the greatest incentives for invention are warfare and international conflict. Given no warfare and more inventions, I’d take no warfare.

I don’t mean to degrade the wonderful aspects of civilization, and it’s pointless to say 10,000 years too late that civilization was a bad idea. But I do think we could be humble about civilization, because while those of us reading this paper arguably have a richer life than most pre-civilized people, it’s not hard to argue that even with all of civilization’s inventions, the median pre-civilized person living in equilibrium with the environment had a happier and more fulfilled life than the median person today.

Andrea Runyan has more to say about this than she can fit into a hundred columns. E-mail her at arunyan@stanford.edu if you want to discuss the topic. To see where she got such crazy ideas, check out www.andreabooks.blogdrive.com and http://www.ishmael.com/interaction/network/readings/.