The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Paperback – October 29, 2013

This is a wonderfully engaging book, surveying the cultural behaviors of people from all stages of social complexity. Jared Diamond has great gifts of pattern recognition and a most engaging way of explaining his observations and views. He is well known from his Pulitzer Prize winningGuns, Germs and Steel and Collapse.Diamond has worked for many years in New Guinea, where the full spectrum of cultural options can be found in a fairly concentrated geographic area. He points out that “most of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies” (p. 8-9, taken from observations of Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan).Diamond’s fascinating discussions point out that we may have much to learn from people in other societies about diverse (and sometimes markedly better) options than we find in modern Western societies for addressing property ownership; engaging in war and establishing peace; bringing up children; treating old people; responding to dangers; understanding religion; appreciating the diversity of languages; diets and chronic illnesses; and more.I particularly enjoyed Diamond’s discussions and clarifications on:•The differences between perceived proximate, immediate causes of problems and ultimate causes of problems. An example he gives is of a couple in psychotherapy, where the husband complained his wife had hit him in the face with a bottle, so that he no longer felt safe in therelationship. She responded that she was truly tired of his having affairs. He complained about her being a selfish, cold person. So often the media offer proximate explanations for world events, when the ultimate causes are far more complex.•Many complain about the impersonal nature of social services and interactions in modern societies. Diamond amply illustrates how people who live as hunters and gatherers, family or extended family units, and villages interact on much more personal bases. In such groups there are often family and friends who are available to help with childcare, food sharing, and other supports. Children grow up feeling safe because mothers keep them physically close for the first several years of their lives; breast feed them many times, day and night on demand; and there are many adults around to guide and protect them. From an early age, children learn to share and support each other. There are also varieties of adult examples for how to behave, providing children with diversities of choices for behaviors. The elderly have family close by to support them in their old age. The downside is that when someone is wronged they or their families may seek revenge, often in acts of violence. Might is right. Wars may develop out of disputes.• Larger clans, villages, cities and nations offer the advantages of individuals or institutions that are able to set rules for behaviors, and for dealing with unaccepted behaviors and through mediation or enforcement of laws and mandated consequences for disobeying them. This provides for asafer environment in terms of personal acts of violence by individuals or groups.• Diamond offers varieties of observations on understanding why humans resort to wars. He points out that warring appears to be a behavior of humans for as long as recorded history. Those who are stronger or who feel endangered will resort to wars – for conquest of land, resources, wives and slaves. From the fact that Chimpanzees (mostly adolescents and young adults) will go to war against other chimps, it appears likely that there is an innate disposition towards such violence in some primates.• What I found most interesting is Diamond’s discussion on religions. He points out that there is no generally accepted definition of religion, providing sixteen varying definitions of religion from respected sources. He summarizes these, pointing out that “The components commonly attributed to religions fall into five sets: belief in the supernatural, shared membership in a social movement, costly and visible proofs of commitment, practical rules for one’s behavior (i.e., “morality”), and belief that supernatural beings and forces can be induced (e.g. by prayer) to intervene in worldly life.” (p. 329) This is one of the most concise and helpful discussion of religion I have seen.• Diamond also provides an excellent discussion on how religion serves varieties of societal functions for maintaining social stability. Sometimes this is at the cost of granting powers to religious leaders, and sometimes to monarchs or other leaders who assume a cloak of anointedauthority as the heads of the religion in their country.This is also the one topic in the book in which I was disappointed about Diamond’s discussions. He takes the view that religions are composed of beliefs about the world, and that they came into existence out of needs of people for explanations and order in their lives.This is a very left-brained way of addressing this subject, apparently reflecting Diamond’s personal beliefs that religion is a figment of the imagination or a functional tool developed and evolving to explain and cope with transcendent aspects of life (which he identifies, somewhat disparagingly, as ‘supernatural’). There are two broad ways to address issues in cultures other than our own:• The emic approach considers that the culture being considered has valid and legitimate reasons of its own for analyzing and explaining the world they live in, and that these reasons may be correct and accurate for them.• The etic approach assumes the culture of the investigating person(s) has the accurate and valid perceptions, interpretations and explanations for the world, and that other cultures have distorted these true interpretations of the world to suit their misguided local needs and preferences.I have conducted my own investigations of published research of gifted psychics, intuitives and healers, and personal investigations in developing my own healing gifts (Benor, 2006). These have provided strong evidence that there are legitimate, real transpersonal/ spiritual phenomena reported in other societies and in substantial segments of our own, Western society. Diamond rejects these as wishful thinking, fantasies, or creations of leaders who wish to manipulate their people. While there are those who behave in manners that Diamond describes and explains, there are others, ignored and/or dismissed by Diamond, who are reporting legitimate transpersonal, supernatural phenomena.Despite these criticisms, I very highly recommend this book to anyone interested in deeper understandings of what human life is – in its fuller spectrum, and what we can learn from other societies that might enhance and improve our lives in our own 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 ("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 ("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 "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.

Awesome book. It was assigned during my cultural anthropology course along with a textbook, and I was dreading having to read both. But the moment I started this book I was sucked in. I read all the chapters out of order as they were assigned to me. He is an incredible storyteller, you feel like you are with him while he recounts his journeys. His analysis is incredibly insightful. Some sections in this book changed the way I think about humanity and life as a whole. I am an engineering student, and I did tons of extra research for my class because of how interesting this book was. I plan to reread this book in order soon.