Gone native

The World Until Yesterday

What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

by Jared Diamond


When it comes to analyzing modern life, how much attention should we give to primitive cultures? Not a whole lot, but that isn’t stopping a world-famous professor from telling us we ought to be paying more attention to the backward, the ill-educated and the superstitious in Jared Diamond’s latest certain bestseller, “The World Until Yesterday.”

Diamond, a UCLA geography professor, is best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Guns, Germs and Steel,” which made the unlikely case that pure accidents of geography are the reason some peoples (like the English) came to rule the world while others (like Native Americans) were barely scratching out a subsistence.

In his new one, Diamond calls the savage tribal cultures of places like New Guinea, where irrational fears of rival groups can lead to a chain of murders and revenge killings, “traditional societies.” Does Japan not have traditions? Or France?

Even Canada probably has traditions, though I’m guessing they involve Tim Horton doughnuts and Labatt’s beer.

Every place has traditions. Diamond means “primitive,” but such a “judgmental” word would defeat the purpose: to push an enduring myth called primitivism. Pre-modern people supposedly had all the answers, and we need to consider more of their groovy simple wisdom in our exhaustingly complicated modern lives. The idea dates all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not to mention such antediluvian pagan idols as Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Today, adding a dollop of scientific observation to this intellectual error is a sure way to earn yourself extravagant speaking fees, invitations to address the TED conference and fawning treatment on talk shows. Because there’s nothing ultra-modern people like better than to submit to the scourging of being told to detox from everything they love.

Just to make sure you know which side he’s on, Diamond deploys, as a description of the world you see around you, the acronym WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. By contrast, though he acknowledges that infanticide, ravagement by infectious diseases and abandonment of old people (all of which are routine in the tribes he studies) are unfortunate, Diamond argues that “Some of the ways in which traditional societies raise their children, treat their elderly, remain healthy, talk, spend their leisure time and settle disputes — may strike you as they do me, as superior to normal practices in the First World.”

Actually, Diamond includes so many horror stories about tribal ways that the book isn’t nearly as sanguine about its subject as the subtitle implies, but then again this isn’t really a book for reading. It’s a sound-bite lode, a souvenir to go with those conferences.

Take child-rearing practices. Diamond approvingly mentions how primitive peoples refuse to give orders to children, saying, “at the risk of overgeneralizing, one could say that hunter-gatherers are fiercely egalitarian and that they don’t tell anyone, not even a child, to do anything . . . small-scale societies appear to be not nearly as convinced as we WEIRD moderns of the idea that parents are responsible for a child’s development.”

Among the Martu people of western Australia, apparently the “worst offense is to impose on a child’s will.” In a society that has a lot of open fires and sharp knives, that sounds like an excellent way to endanger a lot of young people. Recognizing this yields, for Diamond, the remarkably insipid insight that “we could maximize a child’s freedom to explore, insofar as it is safe to do so.” He had to make dozens of visits to New Guinea to figure that out?

Health? Yes, it’s true that we WEIRDos tend to die of things like diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks and cancers that are less common among the tribesmen. But in New Guinea, he notes, hardly anyone lives to be 50. I’m 46, and I’ll take that trade.

Economic exchange in the currency-free world sounds like such a nightmare of guesswork, inefficiency, emotional risk and everlasting resentment that I can only compare it to the pre-modern ritual we Westerners call “Christmas.” Many primitive cultures consider it tacky to directly exchange things of value; instead, one side gives gifts and expects something in return at a later date. Among the Adaman Islanders, says Diamond, “a local group invites one or more local groups to a feast that lasts a few days, and to which the visitors bring objects such as bows, arrows, adzes, baskets and clay. A visitor gives an object to a host, who cannot refuse the gift but is then expected to give something of equal value. If the second gift does not meet the guest’s expectations, the guest may become angry.”

“Angry”? That’s not a condition I want to witness in someone who has bows and arrows, much less adzes. (Whatever they are.) Call me WEIRD, professor, but when it comes to buying stuff, my AmEx works just fine.

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