The World Until Yesterday

Jared Diamond “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?”  Penguin Group, 2012, 466 pp.

I previously read and posted a review by this author in November 2011:  Jared Diamond, “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  Previous to that was “Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed” posted in November of 2009.  They, and this book, are worth reading. 

In this current book Diamond compares tribal (traditional) societies to our more modern (nation-state) societies.  He establishes that the tribal societies are much more violent—even when considering all the twentieth century wars.  Nation states have devastating wars but, compared to tribal societies, they are relatively rare.  Furthermore, modern people have been taught to restrain their lust for revenge.  People in tribal societies do not share this attitude.  Without central governments, they have trouble bringing wars to an end.  The highest war-related death rates for modern societies (Russia and Germany during the 20^th century) are only a third of the average death rates of tribal societies.  Modern societies average war-related death rates that are about one-tenth as high as tribal societies--so much for Rousseau’s noble savage idea.  Yet, he finds many useful items that we can learn from them particularly in the arenas of child-rearing, the treatment of the elderly, and, surprisingly, dispute resolution.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  The author uses the term “Traditional Societies” throughout the book to mean past and present societies living in low population densities in small groups ranging from a few dozen to a few thousand people, subsisting by hunting-gathering or by farming or herding, and transformed to a limited degree by contact with large, Westernized, industrial societies. 

Pg. 7:  A reason for the interest and importance of traditional societies is that they retain features of how all of our ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years, until virtually yesterday.  The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago.  And billions of people around the world today still live in partly traditional ways.

Pg. 277:  The much longer lifespans of Western societies versus traditional societies is a very recent thing. Before effective state government began around 400 years ago to reduce the impact of famines, and especially before public health measures and then antibiotics largely overcame infectious diseases less than 200 years ago, lifespans in European and American state societies were no higher than in traditional societies.

Pg. 292:  Conspicuously rare or absent among traditional peoples are all of the diseases responsible for most deaths in the First World today: coronary artery disease and other forms of atherosclerosis, stroke and other consequences of hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, and most cancers.

Pg. 325:  Religion incurs ‘opportunity costs’: those investments of time and resources in religion that could have been devoted instead to obviously profitable activities, such as planting more crops, building dams, and feeding larger armies of conquest.  If religion didn’t being some big real benefits to offset those opportunity costs, any atheistic society that by chance arose would be likely to outcompete religious societies and take over the world.  A functional approach to define the benefits of religion might be to assert that religion was invented in order to carry out certain functions and solve certain problems, such as maintain social order, comforting anxious people, and teaching political obedience.  On the other hand, religion probably arose as a by-product of some other capacities of our ancestors and of their own animal ancestors, and those capacities had unforeseen consequences and gradually acquired ne functions as they developed.

Pg. 336:  Religion may be a by-product of our brain’s increasingly sophisticated ability to deduce cause, agency, and intent, to anticipate dangers, and thereby to formulate causal explanations of predictive value that helped us survive. For a long time there wouldn’t have been a recognized distinction between the natural and the supernatural, or between religion and the rest of life.  Over 15,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons were already sewing tailored clothing, inventing new tools, and creating superb paintings of polychrome animals and humans on the walls of the Lascaux caves.  It seems safe to assume that our ancestors have had religious beliefs for at least the 60,000-year-plus history of behaviorally modern Homo sapiens.

Pg. 343:  Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; controlled experiments and scientific methods to distinguish between random and non-random phenomena are counterintuitive and unnatural, and thus not found in traditional societies.

Pg. 353:  Archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows that life really did become harder as hunter-gatherers became farmers and assembled in larger societies.  With the transit to agriculture, the average daily number of work hours increased, nutrition deteriorated, infectious disease and body wear increased, and lifespan shortened.  Conditions deteriorated even further for urban proletariats during the Industrial Revolution, as work days lengthened, and as hygiene, health, and pleasures diminished.

Pg. 367:  Religion I difficult to define because it has changed its functions seven times as it has evolved  Of those seven functions, four were entirely absent at one stage of religion’s history, an five were still present but in decline at another stage.  

Religions Functions changing through time are:

·        Supernatural explanation

·        Defusing anxiety through ritual

·        Providing comfort about pains an death

·        Standardized organization

·        Preaching political obedience

·        Moral codes of behavior towards strangers

·        Justification of wars.