Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

The pig taboo of Judaism and Islam is usually explained one of two ways. Either it was a health rule — the ancients somehow intuited trichinosis — or it was arbitrary, a line drawn to mark a people off from its neighbors. Harris finds both unsatisfying. The health argument fails because plenty of animals people happily ate carried worse diseases, and no one banned them; nobody in the Bronze Age was diagnosing parasites. And pure arbitrariness explains nothing, because you still have to ask why this animal and not another.

His account is ecological. The pig is a creature of forest and shade; it does not sweat, cannot graze grass, and needs to wallow in water to stay cool. It thrives where there are woods and moisture and food it does not compete with humans for. The Middle East, as it dried out and deforested under growing populations, became close to the worst place on earth to raise one. A pig there had to be fed grain and shade and water that people needed for themselves — it competed directly with its own keepers.

Harris turns next to the practices that resist economic reading most fiercely: warfare and cannibalism. Surely these are about honor, bloodlust, the dark side of human nature — the very things that no ledger can touch. He is not convinced. Primitive war, he argues, is not the pointless savagery of legend but a mechanism, and like the food taboos it does real work under conditions people rarely name aloud.

Chronic small-scale warfare among tribal peoples, in his reading, functions to disperse populations and keep them from pressing too hard on a fragile environment. It creates unpopulated buffer zones between hostile groups where game can recover, and — more disturbingly — it props up the value placed on fierce sons over daughters, encouraging the neglect and selective survival that hold population growth in check. The war is not caused by aggression; the aggression is cultivated because it does something.

The final riddle brings Harris home to Europe, and to a case where his method turns openly political. The great witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries killed tens of thousands of people, mostly poor women, on charges of consorting with the devil. Why would societies in genuine crisis — war, plague, inequality, peasant revolt — spend their energy hunting imaginary night-fliers? Harris's answer is that the hunt was not a distraction from the crisis. It was a use of it.

A population furious at landlords, clergy, and princes is dangerous. A population convinced that its suffering comes from witches in the next village is not. The witch craze, in Harris's reading, redirected explosive social discontent downward and sideways, onto the powerless, and away from the people who actually controlled land and wealth. It individualized a structural catastrophe: your misery is not the system, it is your neighbor's pact with Satan. The Church and the state did not have to plan this cynically for it to serve them.

Come back to the cow in the road, chewing its scraps while a Western observer shakes his head at all that wasted beef. Harris has spent the book teaching us to distrust our own head-shaking. The cow, the forbidden pig, the endless tribal skirmish, the sacrificed captive, the burned woman — none of them yields to the explanation we reach for first, which is that other people are irrational and we are not. Each yields instead to a patient question about land, protein, labor, and who ends up better off. The strangeness dissolves; the reasons remain.