The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

In two previous books Jared Diamond has explored how a fortunate confluence of advantages allowed Europeans to be the ones who largely conquered the world ([[ASIN:0393061310 "Guns, Germs, and Steel"]]), and how societies can be driven to collapse either by over exploiting their environment or by climate change that is more rapid than they can adjust to ([[ASIN:0143117009 "Collapse"]]). Now he tackles how people lived (and in some pockets still live) before "civilization" as we know it today arose. Once again Diamond demonstrates broad knowledge and a capacity to draw features of multiple societies together into a better understanding of humans as a species.

While I admire Diamond, some of his beliefs and conclusions are open to debate, and should not be taken uncritically. Anthropology is not an exact science, and reasonable, knowledgeable people can draw different conclusions from the same facts, with no way to test and prove one or another interpretation as correct. As I will explain, there are many arguments in this book I find compelling, but others where I think Diamond reaches too far. But anyone reading this book with an open mind will learn much about our species, and be challenged to consider a new way of looking at how people lived "until yesterday".

As will be expected by readers with Diamond experience, a lot of the book happens in New Guinea, where Diamond has made many trips to study the birds (he is, among other things, an ornithologist) and has many friends. Those of us who have read his prior books recognize his affinity for the people of New Guinea. Despite some protests to the contrary, it is not hard to get the impression that Diamond really enjoys their company more than that of Americans and other westerners. At times he seems somewhat prejudiced toward their social structures, although he also appears to recognize this and tries to resist putting them on too high a pedestal. But we all have a view of the world that we can't completely escape, so it's not fair to criticize Diamond too harshly for being, well, human.

The first interesting observation of the book is that until recently, and still in some areas, people rarely if ever encountered strangers. They encountered friends and they encountered enemies. But nearly everyone they encountered came from their group or a neighboring group, be that group friendly or hostile. Travelers were rare, and couldn't count on a warm welcome. In populated areas today we pass strangers every day and think nothing of it. We walk into shops and think nothing of exchanging pleasantries with people we've never met before. We travel long distances, and expect to be welcomed upon arrival. None of this happened a few thousand years ago.

Before the dawn of agriculture there were no large scale societies, because no land could support a dense population. There were also no governments, no police forces, no courts, and no armies. People worked out their differences, or they killed each other. When a bad interaction happened, intentionally or accidentally, a customary gesture of restoration might defuse the situation. Or a cycle of tit-for-tat killings might begin, and might continue for generations.

In a modern states wars occur only intermittently and, horrible as they can be, have a limited death toll. Hunter gatherer societies were often trapped in a cycle of violence and warfare with neighboring groups vying for the same resources. They often employed true total warfare, all against all, with the losers exterminated and their land appropriated. (The women might be taken as wives. The men died in the fight and the children were killed.)

The details vary from region to region, and Diamond provides a variety of examples. But when small groups of people have to eke out subsistence from a reluctant environment, neighboring groups can be as much an enemy as carnivores and drought. He also notes the similarity to chimpanzee behavior--the seeds have not fallen so far from the tree. By one calculation chimpanzee death rates due to warfare are similar to those in hunter gatherer societies! (Another Diamond book is [[ASIN:0060845503 "The Third Chimpanzee"]], about our similarities with and our differences from our cousins the chimps and bonobos.)

He also notes that while modern societies suppress the thirst for revenge, it doesn't go away. Hunter gatherers kill their enemies as part of their life, and go on with the other parts. We train soldiers to kill, but mostly tell them not to, creating a tension not common in hunter gatherer societies.

Diamond has a lot to offer on the differences in child rearing between traditional and modern societies. He notes that most modern research is focused on WEIRD (western educated industrial rich democracies) societies. (The term and concept are not original to him.) In fact, there is a tendency to generalize what professors and students in universities believe to everyone. He thinks highly of the "allo-parenting" that occurs in hunter gatherer societies, where other adults and even older children help rear, protect, and teach younger children. He sees it as helping to develop social skills, and it probably does, but especially for the type of society those children live in. (More of this occurs in rural areas and small towns in the west than in more urban areas, such as Southern California, where both Diamond and I live.)

Yet, for all the advantages he sees in the hunter gatherer lifestyle, Diamond notes that given the choice they choose to adopt a western lifestyle. They do so because living like "us" is simply easier and less risky than being a hunter gatherer.

He discusses the theory of religion, which will offend some people and interest others. He frames the value of religion in terms of defusing anxiety and making people feel better about their situation, in particular giving meaning to what seems meaningless. Diamond notes that religion can be used to explain to believers how "thou shall not kill" can become "thou must kill" under certain circumstances as determined by authorities. A distinction can be made between killing co-believers and nonbelievers. He also discusses how the success of a religion doesn't depend on its being true, it depends on its ability to motivate adherents to conceive children and win converts. (Unsurprisingly, religions that discourage procreation end up as historical footnotes.) A big selling point of a religion is its ability to deliver a functioning society.

Toward the end of the book Diamond become a bit polemical for my taste. His penultimate chapter (ignoring the epilogue) is a pitch for multilingualism. Now I have nothing against multilingualism, and wish languages came more easily to me. But I feel he stretches his arguments too far. After somewhat poo-pooing studies that suggest various intellectual activities slow brain decay and the onset of Alzheimer's disease, he uses similar studies on bi- or multilingualism to argue their benefit. He notes that most New Guineans speak several languages while most Americans speak only one. Europeans often speak several, but he describes that as a mostly post WWII development.

But there are differences between New Guinea and the industrialized world. If you live in a group of a few dozen people speaking an unwritten language it makes a lot of sense to expend effort in learning the languages of neighboring groups. If you live in a country where millions of people speak, read, and write a written language it makes sense to learn to read, write, and do business in that language. And such languages are likely to have much larger vocabularies. In a language spoken by a small number of people who interact frequently, when a word stops being used it leaves the vocabulary. In a language spoken by millions of people over a large territory words leave the language less frequently, are picked up more frequently, and old words live on in writing. I say this not intending to disparage the learning of hunter gatherers, but rather to note that both they and we expend our energy in learning what helps us prosper in our circumstances.

Diamond becomes very polemical in his defense of dying languages. There is a balance between the loss of cultural history when a language is lost and the advantage of more people being able to communicate directly. It is one thing to eradicate a living language. Yet much of what Diamond discusses is what he calls "moribund" languages, where a few elders speak a language, but no children are learning it. But if the elders don't see a reason to teach it to the children, is the loss so great (other than in an academic sense)? Maybe here the wisdom of the people exceeds the wisdom of the professor.

He then has a chapter which is a pretty conventional discussion of the problems with the modern diet, especially excessive salt and sugar intake. Our lifestyle has changed a lot faster than our physiology, with some detrimental effects.

The epilogue has a curious section in which he quotes kids coming to the US from other cultures and criticizing our culture. It's a bit odd and gratuitous, actually, given his earlier admission that, given the choice, hunter gatherers abandon their lifestyle for a western one. He backtracks a bit from there, but I can't escape the sense that he feels the need to polish the traditional experience after revealing many of its challenges.

A fascinating book with a lot of information. But the author's heart sometimes gets in the way of his head. Very worth reading, but worth reading critically.

I was provided a copy for review by the publisher, but have ordered a copy of the finished product for my library.

Like "Edward Hopper in Vermont" reviewed earlier, Jared Diamond's new book, The World Until Yesterday, is also endowed with a series of gorgeous photographs that depict the author's themes and preoccupations. At least one of them - a photograph explaining why contemporary Westerners gravitate toward obesity while traditional societies have mostly slender inhabitants - is likely to give readers a belly aching laugh. There is a deeper lesson from this one picture, it's clear the author's aim is to create a readable document, not one that is so clogged with statistics that it becomes impenetrable.

Professor Diamond's main argument is that traditional societies and "advanced" Western ones learn from each other, absorb and assimilate the customs and cultures of each other in a way that will better serve their interests. That's why, he notes, urban American gangs don't resolve all their disputes in courts, but instead rely on traditional methods of crisis resolution with negotiation, intimidation, and war. It's also the reason members of traditional societies like the ones he observed in New Guinea now have learned to travel broadly, use computers, and wear variations of Western clothing.

The tone of the book is understated rather than preachy, and delivered in a relaxed conversational style. The author likes to let one thing stand for the whole, as when he writes that Harvard University lost a great deal of it's endowment funds during the recent financial debacle. It is well documented that many of Harvard's peer group did as well. Stanford, Notre Dame, Cornell, Princeton and many other elite institutions lost from 25 to 30 percent of their endowment funds, but rather than pound us with the details, the author elegantly lets one example stand for the whole. This gives the book an airy tone and has the effect of letting him glide over the subject matter rather than bludgeon a reader with reams of data.

While taking note of their attributes, the author takes care not to romanticize traditional societies. He singles out infanticide, for example, as a custom of traditional societies that we are gratefully rid of. At the same time, he gently admonishes those who would abolish the conventions of the modern nation state: "Alas, for all of you readers who are anarchists, you'll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you."

Even when the author explains differences in societies, a reader is likely to see similarities. Segments of New Guinea society, for example, require the payment of "sori money" or sorry money in cases of accidental death, and truth be told, this is a practice in Western civilization as well, although the term is different. We would call it "insurance". And while the barter system is no longer the basis for Western economies, it hasn't died out completely - on any given day, you can read a story in the papers about a dentist who fixed someone's teeth in exchange for having his car repaired. For every rule, an exception.

The World Until Yesterday is one of the few books I've read that describes eloquently and passionately the damage done to family relationships through Western family courts due to the toxicity of our family law system. It describes convincingly how, in the author's case, after an episode in court, a friend of his will never speak to certain of her relatives again. I can only underscore his comments, and note that because of the brutality and butchery of the family court system, I will never see or speak to my own sons again.

Throughout the book the author weaves stories of traditional languages, religions and attitudes toward food, and his arguments are at their most powerful when he discusses hypertension, salt intake, diabetes, heart failure and other non-communicable diseases that appear rooted in Western style diets. Because of its disarming and conversational simplicity, this book unleashes powerful arguments that teach without propagandizing.

What is the basic idea of this book. It's quite simple. Diamond tries to make the case that primitive peoples in their primitive societies have something valuable to teach us. He tries to make a case for the wisdom of what he calls pre-state peoples.

Diamond has been visiting New Guinea for fifty years. It's what he does. Some people ski others play golf. Diamond likes to go bird watching in the mountains of New Guinea. People who have a strong interest in their hobby often express other ideas in terms of their hobby. That's why there are so many sports references in political speech. I personally tend to see all sorts of social and political issues in terms of Italian opera. For Diamond it's New Guinea natives.

This is a very interesting book and I recommend that everyone read it. But please read something else about New Guinea too. The US State Department issues warnings to travelers about New Guinea. The main city - Port Moresby - may be the most dangerous city on earth. Men are murdered. Women are raped. Everyone is robbed and assaulted. People are cautioned to only go into the bush with care and a trusted guide. There are web sites and Wikipedia articles showing the rampant gang violence. Diamond as a long time expert can go there but you can't. You'd be killed. New Guinea is a terrible place on the human plane of existence. It seems however to be very fine on the song bird plane.

In the first half of the book he tells personal accounts of typical activities in primitive groups and contrasts them with how these events would transpire in a modern nation state like the US. The first example he gives is the story of Gideon and Malo in Chapter Two. In this story Billy, a child, runs out from behind a mini-bus into oncoming traffic. He is killed when Malo's car hits him. Malo who is just an random driver who had no connection with Billy before, immediately vacates the accident scene and goes to the nearest police station.

Diamond explains, "That's because angry bystanders are likely to drag the offending driver from his car and beat him to death on the spot, even if the accident was the pedestrian's fault".

These are highland New Guineans. Billy was a low lander. Everyone involved in this traffic accident worries about a blood feud that erupts into a tribal war between the low-landers and the highlanders. Somehow Gideon the employer of Malo is extorted to pay compensation to some people who claim to be Billy's relatives.

One of the tribal customs that Diamond cites is the practice of killing someone in retribution for some offense or if that's not convenient to just kill a relative of theirs. It doesn't seem to matter just who you kill anymore than it matters if the person was guilty or innocent. At no point in this story does anyone dispute that Billy ran out into traffic and got himself killed. Yet it is only by the thinnest margin that a general war is averted. No one says to Billy's parents - "You should teach your kids to look both ways before they cross the street". No one thinks they should put up some traffic lights or stop signs. They just engage in another round of murderous tribal feuding.

These are the people from whom we are to learn life lessons?

Diamond is obviously deep into the romance of the primitive. A more objective person would see these people as nasty pests. They remind us of the brutal primitive past from which we have emerged.

At one point Diamond mentions that there are more than a thousand separate languages in New Guinea. He mentions wistfully that 95% of these languages will die out in this century. That's supposed to be a bad thing? None of these languages are written. They contain no novels or epics. These people have no literature or science. The uttering in these languages are just crude accounts of daily events in the jungle. There are hundreds of words for the same species of tree or monkey.

It would have been bad if the world had lost Greek before the Renaissance. That would have meant that we would have lost Aristotle and Plato. There was lots of valuable content written in Greek. But what possible loss is their if we lose these obscure proto-languages used by jungle savages?

For that matter, what does it matter if we lose the Yamomano or the !Kung? None of the bands he describes is likely to last longer than this century either. Or if they survive it will only be in something like a zoo. We should prepare for their extinction by studying them. We should have books like this one and movies. They have virtually nothing to teach us but we should garner what there is because they will soon be gone.

Diamond is a very silly man. He likes to watch birds. Fine. Me too. He likes to watch forrest natives cavorting in the jungle. Whatever. Jane Goodall liked to observe chimps. Diane Fossey preferred gorillas. But those women didn't lecture us with the lessons we could learn from the apes.

Around the year 2000 there were two big best sellers that addressed differences in human accomplishment. One was Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel". The other was Lynn and Vanhanen's "The Wealth of Nations". Diamond's argument in G,G&S is recounted in this book on page 19. Lynn's argument is even simpler. He says nation's with smart people are rich.

Currently Diamond is immensely popular with the general public while Lynn is controversial with academics. But Lynn's ideas are likely to endure while Diamond's are already fading. Basically Diamond feels bad about being a member of the dominant culture on earth. He wants everyone to understand that he isn't in any way superior to the savages with whom he congregates. He's eager to demonstrate he's rich and prosperous only because of a series of accidents of history. He's got white guilt bad.

And of course he's dead wrong. He is a superior person. He's a fine writer and has produced a number of excellent books. He claimed in G,G&S that some native was more intelligent than he was. We admire humility but no one really takes him seriously. If we believed him we wouldn't buy his books.

Lynn's book on the other hand says that Koreans are smart. I have a Samsung tablet. I do not own a single electronic device created in New Guinea. Lynn is factual. Diamond is sentimental. He now wants to explain how his beloved primitives have something just as valuable as electronics. They have jungle justice.

That's the first half of the book. The second half is different. He has big chapters on health. These read like they come from a different book. He rails again salt and then against sugar. Much the same information is well known now to the literate public. There are many books that say much the same thing. Everything Diamond writes about in these chapters is more or less correct. Salt does give you high blood pressure and sugar does gives you high blood sugar. You should watch them carefully in your diet. Diamond connects these health concerns to the main theme of the book only awkwardly. He essentially writes a sermon on proper nutrition for Westerners and says New Guinea natives don't have these particular health concerns. But of course he's completely wrong. Western whites get diabetes largely because of their diet but forest people who meet up with civilization soon eat the same way and get even worse diabetes. There is a lesson to be learned here but it is not to do as the natives do. We can learn from these people in the same way we can learn from a jungle mushroom that has some useful chemical properties. The natives can be used as objects of study but that does not mean that they can actually teach us anything. They have no schools, no classrooms, no books.

Danny Kaye was wrong. In his great novelty song "Civilization"(Bongo, bongo, bongo I don't want to leave the Congo) he expressed the viewpoint that was popular in the forties that forest natives are happy. About the same time there was a song "Skokeegan" with the lyrics "Down in Africa, happy, happy Africa". Diamond is part of this older mindset. He warns against romanticizing the natives and their way of life and then does so with a vengeance. The reality is that these pre-state people want to get into the modern world but they are ill equipped to make the transition. They want the peace, order, and prosperity of the modern state. They do not want to stay in the bush and starve and be murdered. All of these tropical peoples make lousy citizens in the modern world. If they stay in their native country they join gangs a who murder and rob. If they go to a developed nation they form gangs who murder and rob.

This book is a big missed opportunity.

Sure, it's well enough written and all - Jared Diamond is a Smart Guy, after all. But in his overview of what aboriginal and traditional cultures might have to teach us modern, civilized folks, Diamond makes the enormous flaw (so typical of all those Smart Guys in the scientific-academic world) of ignoring arguably the most important aspect of any group of peoples: their inner world - their modes of perception and their states of being. These hard-to-articulate, impossible-to-objectively-study, but crucial aspects of life are often most explicitly expressed in traditional peoples' stories, rituals, dances, initiatory rites, totemic societies, and healing practices; but they are also reflected in virtually all other areas of life as well - from the way they build their houses to the way they make their tools to the way they gather, prepare, and distribute their food to the way they arrange their marriages and family lives, and on and on. The crucial point is that you cannot fully or meaningfully understand any aspect of a culture until you understand this "inner" aspect. What we can see strictly from the outside - the objective-mechanical level of life - never allows us to fully and correctly understand what we think we are seeing.

Diamond's singular focus on the objective-mechanical level is not a mere choice, as in, "Well, I didn't have time and space to write about everything, so I just picked a few topics - and perceptual modes/states of being just happened to not be one of them." No - this "choice" exactly reflects and reinforces a deep-seated and (usually) unconscious, unacknowledged cultural bias. The "missed opportunity" is precisely that of freeing ourselves from our unacknowledged biases. And isn't this one of the primary values - if not THE primary value - of studying and learning from our aboriginal-traditional kin? Only by seeing our most deeply held, unconscious biases can we learn what is truly universal in human nature versus what is specific to this or that culture. Even if we decide, in the end, that we like and want to keep our cultural biases, if we are at least open to seeing them, we can become aware how they might negatively influence and limit us - and can maybe take some steps to counter any undesirable/unintended consequences (like, say, the rampant mental illness that seems to accompany modern life, just to toss just one thing out there). But when we cannot see our biases, we have no freedom of choice. Blind biases bind us without our even knowing it.

From Diamond's book, you would think that all aboriginal and traditional peoples around the world live in the same basic perceptual mode and state of being as ourselves. And that they therefore share our same basic worldview - the worldview that has actually only very recently (relatively speaking) become prevalent even in modern, westernized (objectivistic, materialistic, mechanistic, secular) society - the worldview that tells us, "Life is a struggle for physical survival."

struggle physical survival

Each of those words is massively culturally loaded. And so, although any group of humans at any time and in any part of the world would certainly have been able to understand that there is an aspect of life that can be viewed in these terms, it is doubtful that any humans, except relatively modern, civilized ones, would have characterized life as a whole in anything even close to these terms. "Struggling for physical survival" is a modern, civilized hang-up.

Traditional lifeways - from their birthing practices right through to death - reflect and reinforce in so many ways an awareness of a much larger, more personal, innately meaningful world of experience, participation, and relationship that goes far beyond mere survival. This larger world has to be described as being both "in here" (inside our selves) and "out there" (in the outer world) because these "two" realms, which have become sharply split apart in the civilized world, still maintain their organic, holistic unity in traditional cultures. In our split between inner and outer, we modern folks cannot even begin to imagine (or remember, really - we all did know similar worlds/states of being as very young children) what this wider inner/outer universe is like - and the perceptions and states of being to which it gives rise. It is in this civilized split that the strictly "physical" aspect of the world - with its nasty, brutish struggle for survival - looms so obliteratingly large in our view.

Nonetheless, "Life is a struggle for physical survival" is the blanket assumption that Diamond starts with (although he never makes it explicit; but hey, "We all know it's true," right?). This is the lens through which he views, interprets, and evaluates every other culture on the planet. Everything that people do, then, is "good/useful" if it can ultimately be shown to directly promote physical survival/adaptation; and it is "bad/harmful" if it appears to do anything else. That is the ultimate - and only real - criteria. Never mind that larger world out there/in here and our ability to participate in it.

And so - presto-magico - Diamond comes to the conclusion, time and time again, that, although traditional cultures might have a thing or two to teach us (hey, he's an Open Minded Guy, too) that could improve our struggle for physical survival a little bit - you now, smooth out a rough edge here and there - modern civilization is really just, well, way better - objectively speaking, of course.

In other words, this is another one of those smug, self-congratulatory books cranked out by civilized academia, which, as usual, doesn't know what it doesn't know - and couldn't care less.

That's my main, general take. Below, I'll address a few specific areas - childbirth, violence, and religion - but it will all be pretty much in line with what I've said above.

Childbirth
Diamond's shockingly ignorant treatment of birthing practices is almost criminally negligent. This was where I had to really begin questioning if he had any serious intent to find areas where we could learn anything of significance from traditional peoples. He dedicates one single page to this crucial topic, makes no reference to the huge amount of research that has been done on this, and does not so much as hint at the important issues at stake. One of the four paragraphs on the topic describes a Piraha woman being left unaided to die in childbirth. Since this description constituted ¼ of his total discussion of childbirth, the implication is that this is typical of traditional childbirth. It is not (and incidentally, it is very doubtful that anyone in her culture would have been able to help the Piraha woman in question). Just for comparison, he spends far more time in other chapters on really important topics like letting us know that it's possible to die by falling out of tall trees, by getting a disease, or by not getting enough food to eat; and that it is best to avoid these and other causes of death as much as possible. Striking new insights.

Violence
Then there is the nonsense about traditional people being more violent than us - a claim made largely on the basis that their ratio of violent deaths per capita is higher than ours, when averaged out over long periods of time. Now, I'm no statistician; but it seems to me that these figures really just compare the number of violent deaths to the rate at which people successfully reproduce themselves. So sure, we civilized people are way better at re-(over)populating after we exterminate countless numbers of people in our oft-repeated acts of psychotic horror; but comparing these two numbers tells us virtually NOTHING about how "violent" people are.

How violent people are has to do with much more than statistics. It has also to do with less easily quantifiable factors - those pesky, unscientific, subjective factors. In our culture, we consider a soldier to be less violent than a school shooter, even if the soldier kills many more people. The soldier may even be considered a valiant hero. This is because of our understanding of the differing internal motivations of the two individuals. And yet we presume to compare ourselves and to say who is more violent - us or traditional peoples - based only on statistics, without any real understanding of how they conceive of violence in their own lives and worldviews.

Also, as is quite typical of scholarly books in this vein, Diamond's discussion of violence never so much as mentions the kind of violence that I may be perpetrating right now, writing this review on my Apple product, sitting at a desk and chair, and wearing clothes all of which I know are very likely to have been made using resources (energy, mineral, plant) extracted through much violence and made by people forced into near slavery who would be shot down without hesitation if they protested their oppression too seriously. Our whole way of life rests on enormous amounts of implicit, threatened, hidden, off-camera violence that will never show up in the kinds of statistics Diamond uses. In contrast, although New Guinean tribal peoples might live in some amount of fear (not that it ever seemed to stop them from traveling long distances to help Diamond with his bird-watching expeditions) - an amount probably comparable to what any of us would feel walking around a city at night - they live their lives as sovereign, free individuals to an extent that is, again, unimaginable to most civilized people. There is nothing in traditional life - not even in their versions of "slavery" - that is comparable the huge masses of civilized people living in bleak, hopeless, violent oppression and utterly meaningless wage slavery in order to keep a few of us in the first world happy and fat.

Do we even need to mention the extreme, never-before-seen violence we are inflicting on other species and the environment as a whole?

Finally on this topic, my sister, hearing about the Piraha woman, pointed out the huge numbers of people in our own American society whose pleas for medical care are ignored, and who sometimes die as a result, often after insurance companies suddenly kick them off their plans the moment they get sick - after having taken their money for years.

I have to say, I have literally read better, more in-depth discussions of this topic in the comments sections of online reviews on this webite.

Religion
Finally, even traditional religion is interpreted through the same narrow, distorting cultural lens discussed in the first part of this review. "What are the `functions' of religion?" Diamond wonders. But only a civilized mind stuck in survival mode could formulate such a question. Traditionally, there was nothing called "religion" that was separate from all other ("mundane") aspects of life. What we would label their "religions" were simply the aspects of their ways of life that kept them connected to that inner quality or mode of perception, connection, participation, and being that is meaningful and valuable precisely because it has no "function" beyond the experience itself. That this sort of "religion" also coincided with and served practical, social-economic-survival functions only shows how organically integrated all aspects of traditional life were. It wasn't "added on" because of its usefulness. And if their perceptions of the world in these states of being do not always correspond to the findings of our strictly physical sciences, but do help them to connect back to those innately valuable states of being (from which modern people have become alienated and about which we have almost no knowledge), who is to say whose view of reality is more "truthful?"

And never mind that Diamond seems unfamiliar with the basic ways in which aboriginal "religious" beliefs differ from civilized ones; in all of Diamond's attempted rationalistic explanations of traditional religion, he never once considers the possibility that, because of their different ways of life, traditional peoples might be open to perceptual modes and states of being that reveal aspects of reality no longer accessible to us. Using their unique cultural metaphors and mytho-poetic modes of expression, they may actually be describing real, valuable experiences of reality. These might be extremely significant things we could really learn from. But no - all the possible explanations Diamond considers just happen to be ones that point to the superiority of our civilized, mechanistic, objectivist (that means "bias free!") perspective and way of life. Yeay us. We're #1. As usual.

I'm updating my review on 3/19/13 to add that Morris Berman's book, Wandering God (see separate review) does a great job exploring exactly what I criticized Diamond for misleadingly not exploring: the inner state-of-being of hunter-gatherers. Berman does an excellent job of this, shows how valuable such exploration can be, and shows why it would make such a difference to what Diamond is saying.

This book is a big missed opportunity.

Sure, it's well enough written and all - Jared Diamond is a Smart Guy, after all. But in his overview of what aboriginal and traditional cultures might have to teach us modern, civilized folks, Diamond makes the enormous flaw (so typical of all those Smart Guys in the scientific-academic world) of ignoring arguably the most important aspect of any group of peoples: their inner world - their modes of perception and their states of being. These hard-to-articulate, impossible-to-objectively-study, but crucial aspects of life are often most explicitly expressed in traditional peoples' stories, rituals, dances, initiatory rites, totemic societies, and healing practices; but they are also reflected in virtually all other areas of life as well - from the way they build their houses to the way they make their tools to the way they gather, prepare, and distribute their food to the way they arrange their marriages and family lives, and on and on. The crucial point is that you cannot fully or meaningfully understand any aspect of a culture until you understand this "inner" aspect. What we can see strictly from the outside - the objective-mechanical level of life - never allows us to fully and correctly understand what we think we are seeing.

Diamond's singular focus on the objective-mechanical level is not a mere choice, as in, "Well, I didn't have time and space to write about everything, so I just picked a few topics - and perceptual modes/states of being just happened to not be one of them." No - this "choice" exactly reflects and reinforces a deep-seated and (usually) unconscious, unacknowledged cultural bias. The "missed opportunity" is precisely that of freeing ourselves from our unacknowledged biases. And isn't this one of the primary values - if not THE primary value - of studying and learning from our aboriginal-traditional kin? Only by seeing our most deeply held, unconscious biases can we learn what is truly universal in human nature versus what is specific to this or that culture. Even if we decide, in the end, that we like and want to keep our cultural biases, if we are at least open to seeing them, we can become aware how they might negatively influence and limit us - and can maybe take some steps to counter any undesirable/unintended consequences (like, say, the rampant mental illness that seems to accompany modern life, just to toss just one thing out there). But when we cannot see our biases, we have no freedom of choice. Blind biases bind us without our even knowing it.

From Diamond's book, you would think that all aboriginal and traditional peoples around the world live in the same basic perceptual mode and state of being as ourselves. And that they therefore share our same basic worldview - the worldview that has actually only very recently (relatively speaking) become prevalent even in modern, westernized (objectivistic, materialistic, mechanistic, secular) society - the worldview that tells us, "Life is a struggle for physical survival."

struggle physical survival

Each of those words is massively culturally loaded. And so, although any group of humans at any time and in any part of the world would certainly have been able to understand that there is an aspect of life that can be viewed in these terms, it is doubtful that any humans, except relatively modern, civilized ones, would have characterized life as a whole in anything even close to these terms. "Struggling for physical survival" is a modern, civilized hang-up.

Traditional lifeways - from their birthing practices right through to death - reflect and reinforce in so many ways an awareness of a much larger, more personal, innately meaningful world of experience, participation, and relationship that goes far beyond mere survival. This larger world has to be described as being both "in here" (inside our selves) and "out there" (in the outer world) because these "two" realms, which have become sharply split apart in the civilized world, still maintain their organic, holistic unity in traditional cultures. In our split between inner and outer, we modern folks cannot even begin to imagine (or remember, really - we all did know similar worlds/states of being as very young children) what this wider inner/outer universe is like - and the perceptions and states of being to which it gives rise. It is in this civilized split that the strictly "physical" aspect of the world - with its nasty, brutish struggle for survival - looms so obliteratingly large in our view.

Nonetheless, "Life is a struggle for physical survival" is the blanket assumption that Diamond starts with (although he never makes it explicit; but hey, "We all know it's true," right?). This is the lens through which he views, interprets, and evaluates every other culture on the planet. Everything that people do, then, is "good/useful" if it can ultimately be shown to directly promote physical survival/adaptation; and it is "bad/harmful" if it appears to do anything else. That is the ultimate - and only real - criteria. Never mind that larger world out there/in here and our ability to participate in it.

And so - presto-magico - Diamond comes to the conclusion, time and time again, that, although traditional cultures might have a thing or two to teach us (hey, he's an Open Minded Guy, too) that could improve our struggle for physical survival a little bit - you now, smooth out a rough edge here and there - modern civilization is really just, well, way better - objectively speaking, of course.

In other words, this is another one of those smug, self-congratulatory books cranked out by civilized academia, which, as usual, doesn't know what it doesn't know - and couldn't care less.

That's my main, general take. Below, I'll address a few specific areas - childbirth, violence, and religion - but it will all be pretty much in line with what I've said above.

Childbirth
Diamond's shockingly ignorant treatment of birthing practices is almost criminally negligent. This was where I had to really begin questioning if he had any serious intent to find areas where we could learn anything of significance from traditional peoples. He dedicates one single page to this crucial topic, makes no reference to the huge amount of research that has been done on this, and does not so much as hint at the important issues at stake. One of the four paragraphs on the topic describes a Piraha woman being left unaided to die in childbirth. Since this description constituted ¼ of his total discussion of childbirth, the implication is that this is typical of traditional childbirth. It is not (and incidentally, it is very doubtful that anyone in her culture would have been able to help the Piraha woman in question). Just for comparison, he spends far more time in other chapters on really important topics like letting us know that it's possible to die by falling out of tall trees, by getting a disease, or by not getting enough food to eat; and that it is best to avoid these and other causes of death as much as possible. Striking new insights.

Violence
Then there is the nonsense about traditional people being more violent than us - a claim made largely on the basis that their ratio of violent deaths per capita is higher than ours, when averaged out over long periods of time. Now, I'm no statistician; but it seems to me that these figures really just compare the number of violent deaths to the rate at which people successfully reproduce themselves. So sure, we civilized people are way better at re-(over)populating after we exterminate countless numbers of people in our oft-repeated acts of psychotic horror; but comparing these two numbers tells us virtually NOTHING about how "violent" people are.

How violent people are has to do with much more than statistics. It has also to do with less easily quantifiable factors - those pesky, unscientific, subjective factors. In our culture, we consider a soldier to be less violent than a school shooter, even if the soldier kills many more people. The soldier may even be considered a valiant hero. This is because of our understanding of the differing internal motivations of the two individuals. And yet we presume to compare ourselves and to say who is more violent - us or traditional peoples - based only on statistics, without any real understanding of how they conceive of violence in their own lives and worldviews.

Also, as is quite typical of scholarly books in this vein, Diamond's discussion of violence never so much as mentions the kind of violence that I may be perpetrating right now, writing this review on my Apple product, sitting at a desk and chair, and wearing clothes all of which I know are very likely to have been made using resources (energy, mineral, plant) extracted through much violence and made by people forced into near slavery who would be shot down without hesitation if they protested their oppression too seriously. Our whole way of life rests on enormous amounts of implicit, threatened, hidden, off-camera violence that will never show up in the kinds of statistics Diamond uses. In contrast, although New Guinean tribal peoples might live in some amount of fear (not that it ever seemed to stop them from traveling long distances to help Diamond with his bird-watching expeditions) - an amount probably comparable to what any of us would feel walking around a city at night - they live their lives as sovereign, free individuals to an extent that is, again, unimaginable to most civilized people. There is nothing in traditional life - not even in their versions of "slavery" - that is comparable the huge masses of civilized people living in bleak, hopeless, violent oppression and utterly meaningless wage slavery in order to keep a few of us in the first world happy and fat.

Do we even need to mention the extreme, never-before-seen violence we are inflicting on other species and the environment as a whole?

Finally on this topic, my sister, hearing about the Piraha woman, pointed out the huge numbers of people in our own American society whose pleas for medical care are ignored, and who sometimes die as a result, often after insurance companies suddenly kick them off their plans the moment they get sick - after having taken their money for years.

I have to say, I have literally read better, more in-depth discussions of this topic in the comments sections of online reviews on this webite.

Religion
Finally, even traditional religion is interpreted through the same narrow, distorting cultural lens discussed in the first part of this review. "What are the `functions' of religion?" Diamond wonders. But only a civilized mind stuck in survival mode could formulate such a question. Traditionally, there was nothing called "religion" that was separate from all other ("mundane") aspects of life. What we would label their "religions" were simply the aspects of their ways of life that kept them connected to that inner quality or mode of perception, connection, participation, and being that is meaningful and valuable precisely because it has no "function" beyond the experience itself. That this sort of "religion" also coincided with and served practical, social-economic-survival functions only shows how organically integrated all aspects of traditional life were. It wasn't "added on" because of its usefulness. And if their perceptions of the world in these states of being do not always correspond to the findings of our strictly physical sciences, but do help them to connect back to those innately valuable states of being (from which modern people have become alienated and about which we have almost no knowledge), who is to say whose view of reality is more "truthful?"

And never mind that Diamond seems unfamiliar with the basic ways in which aboriginal "religious" beliefs differ from civilized ones; in all of Diamond's attempted rationalistic explanations of traditional religion, he never once considers the possibility that, because of their different ways of life, traditional peoples might be open to perceptual modes and states of being that reveal aspects of reality no longer accessible to us. Using their unique cultural metaphors and mytho-poetic modes of expression, they may actually be describing real, valuable experiences of reality. These might be extremely significant things we could really learn from. But no - all the possible explanations Diamond considers just happen to be ones that point to the superiority of our civilized, mechanistic, objectivist (that means "bias free!") perspective and way of life. Yeay us. We're #1. As usual.

I'm updating my review on 3/19/13 to add that Morris Berman's book, Wandering God (see separate review) does a great job exploring exactly what I criticized Diamond for misleadingly not exploring: the inner state-of-being of hunter-gatherers. Berman does an excellent job of this, shows how valuable such exploration can be, and shows why it would make such a difference to what Diamond is saying.

Perhaps the positive reviews this book has received reflect Diamond's reputation as a prize-winning author and widely known lecturer, for this book does not, in my opinion, justify them. He focuses on thirty-nine "traditional societies," which he defines as bands and tribes of small-scale farmers or hunter-gatherers. They are primarily in New Guinea (where he has traveled extensively, first as bird watcher studying migrations), Australia, Africa, and a few isolated locations in South America and Alaska. He is vague about chronology and jumps from one geographic area to another.

My problem is that he offers little new information while including a very broad range of topics from cultural values to religion, raising children to treatment of the elderly, determining justice to conducting warfare, health practices and causes of disease, etc. His suggestions about what modern societies can learn from traditional societies are overtly obvious, like utilizing grandparents as caretakers of young children. Duh!!! Because his previous books include a best-seller and Pulitzer-Prize winner, perhaps critics assume this is great scholarship.

He cites dramatic examples from the writings of various anthropologists such as the Brazilian woman who dies alone on the beach in a breach birth because her tribe believed individuals should face hardships on their own, and the elderly Bolivian woman left to die alone when her tribe moved on. Were these representative of their tribe's culture as he claims or were they stories that shocked the anthropologists who wrote about them? How would an American tourist respond to a friendly group of locals at the next table at a sidewalk cafe who express the feeling they would be afraid to travel to America because it has armed guards in schools, malls, and movie theaters? They've seen it on TV and Diamond has read the accounts he describes in books, but are they representative of the culture? Readers are given no way to judge.

Perhaps the most valuable part of this book are the few primary research studies cited by geographic region in the "Suggestions for Further Reading." But be forewarned that generalized statements the author makes throughout -- like "warfare is chronic" have no footnote citations to indicate whether these are opinions or facts established by reputable research studies. Readers who would like specific references are referred to the author's website.

Judge for yourself.

Jared Diamond's past books have all been somewhat controversial but varying in popularity. Guns, Germs, and Steel was the most famous but his themes are also present in lesser known books like the Third Chimpanzee.

This is much in the same style. He has a unconventional thesis and gathers other people's research plus anecdotes to justify that thesis. The idea being explored is how modernity is inferior in some ways to more primitive societies and Jared Diamond's own theories on how to create a synthesis of the best of class.

That's the blatant agenda which mars the book, which has a great many interesting historical/anecdotal evidence which highlight how topics like justice, child-rearing, war, etc... are dealt with among different societies. Some of the lessons are applicable and practical. For example, the medical establishment is coming around to the idea that doctors should apologize directly to the patient/family when there's a bad outcome. There are fewer lawsuits and smaller settlements than if the patients feel like the doctor doesn't take responsibility. That's a good point made by Diamond in comparing modern systems to villages - the importance of acknowledging anger/loss to mitigate impact.

Sadly, the book goes off the rails when Diamond starts making his deliberate blind spots obvious. For example, children are not forbidden to climb trees by modern society - their parents don't allow it. That's from the same "constructive paranoia" that he praised when it came to his New Guinea friends. If a child climbs trees or jumps into rivers, there's a chance of death/injury. It's necessary for adults who need to hunt/forage to be able to climb trees and cross rivers. But it's a foolish thing for a child to learn to climb trees when that's not a necessary adult skill. Thus it's entirely logical for parents to prefer children not climb trees.

That's one of many examples of logical gaps when it comes to Jared Diamond's praise of native society - he fails to analyze the behavior of people in western societies the same way he applies analysis to his topic of study.

Jared Diamond himself exemplified the hypocrisy of his thesis. He witnessed native society's way of raising children, but he did not choose to raise his family that way. He does not live in an extended community with his own family members. He only spends short amounts of time in New Guinea and only as part of well-funded expeditions in a lifestyle which has little resemblance to how natives live.

In short, he has unrealistic views about the lives of the people of New Guinea the way a tourist to has unrealistic views of how great it'd be to live in Hawaii.

I would recommend people to purchase Guns, Germs, and Steel because it's worth re-reading multiple times.

I recommend people check this book out from the library and just read it once.

This book is very insightful and accessible to those who are not practitioners of an "inexact science" aka anthropology. I actually read this over my winter break from getting my PhD in the inexact science. It's thought provoking and makes indigenous studies relatable by its comparison to Western societies. I really enjoyed Diamond's discussion of economics and the justice systems from varying cultures.

Jared Diamond specializes in taking our comfortable, pre-conceived notions and upending them. In his The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse he examined the reasons why some societies succeed in becoming "modern" while others don't, and why even the most successful of societies run the risk of failure or sudden collapse. Now in The World Until Yesterday Diamond knocks the props out from under our assumptions once again by comparing "civilized" societies with their more traditional counterparts. Diamond has been thinking about these ideas for a long time. When I was teaching AP World History I enjoyed using an article he wrote for Discover Magazine back in the 1980s which argued that the development of agriculture had been a mistake, a thesis that inevitably gobsmacked my bright and talented tenth grade students into some really effective critical analyses. The World Until Yesterday reminds me of that article in its contentious and highly thoughtful arguments.

Diamond begins with one of his famous vignettes, a description of an airport in New Guinea, symbolizing the rapid changes that have overtaken that land. This is a fine entry point for Parts 1 through 4, all of which deal with multiple comparisons between traditional and modern societies, including examinations of how they maintain law and order, wage war and make peace, treat their children and the elderly, and respond to threats. I found each of these parts fascinating to read, filled with illuminating anecdotes and sober comparisons between societies that ought to have all of us questioning our most firmly held assumptions. Part 5 was the most interesting part to me, dealing with the evolution of religion, language, and dietary issues like diabetes and hypertension. And coming full circle, the Epilogue begins with Diamond's arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, a spring board for more comparisons and his final comments.

When you see Diamond's name on a book cover you know you are in for a fascinating read that will startle and at times irritate you, but you'll come away from it with a deeper appreciation for the complexities of our world and its variegated human societies. Now that we are well into the second decade of the twenty-first century such an appreciation, with an accompanying discarding of ill-conceived notions based on flawed assumptions, is essential.

Jared Diamond has written a very comprehensive and thorough book in "The World Until Yesterday". In it, he describes aspects of the cultures of different traditional societies and categorizes them into different sections, including treatment of the elderly, childrearing, religion, and health. The book is hefty at over 450 pages, and it is not light reading by any means - however, it is chockful of interesting information. If you want to know a lot of things about a lot of societies, then this book has it.

So what's the problem? It's in the way that Diamond arranges the book. It is arranged by topic area, and each section starts with general descriptions of that topic area. After that, and throughout the remainder of each chapter, Diamond provides various examples of how one or more individual traditional societies manages the issue at hand. In doing so, he talks a great deal about some societies, and not very much about others. Not surprisingly, given his affinity for New Guinea, there is a lot about the traditional societies on that island in this book.

The result of all of this are somewhat choppy chapters which are very comprehensive but not terribly cohesive. The book might have been easier to read if there had been sections on the individual societies, like the Inuit, but then it may have been difficult to compare the different societies' customs and traditions by topic. So while I found the book difficult to read at times, I am not sure that Diamond could have arranged it much differently with the same content.

Overall, the book has a lot of great information and is very interesting, if you can get past the way it is organized. The content is very high level and not for the faint of heart. The material is so detailed that I could see this book being used for a cultural anthropology course.

One last comment - Diamond does not have a great reference section in this book, and in some of the chapters I wanted to see where he got some of his information. He does have a section where he talks about his sources, but I would have preferred a simple bibliography so I could have looked up materials myself.