Supplementary: The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond (2)

The central premise of this book is simple – there are tribal societies remaining in the world today that are similar to the way people lived before the rise of states (approximately) 11,000 years ago. We can learn lessons from these tribal societies that will help us live more successful, safer, longer and happier lives. So far so good – it would be surprising if we could not learn anything, even if to just thank our lucky stars we live in a world of antibiotics and flush toilets. But is what we learn original or useful? At two thirds of the way through the book (450+ pages plus notes) I have to say the jury is still out.

One of the reasons I enjoy books of this kind is that every few pages I read something that not only did I not know before, and that I find interesting, but that also makes me want to go off and read something else. A good example is Diamond’s account of war in tribal society. Diamond argues that these “wars” (and the appropriateness of the term in the first place is unconvincing) are more lethal per head of the population per year than modern society. His manipulation of statistics to make this point creaks alarmingly, and the case is unconvincing. Which is a pity, because the underlying point – that life in modern society is a lot less violent that earlier forms of society – is demonstrably the case. For me, tribal war contains a lot of “theatre”, posturing and demonstrating that you would not find in modern war. Even if we wanted to replicate this behaviour at a state level (as opposed to for example in the way gangs resolve their differences, which is much closer parallel) we could not. But the chapters on this topic still inspired me to read more on the tribal forms of warfare, and summaries of Steven Pinker’s book on the changing prominence of violence in society.

Tribal people resolve their disputes in ways that “us moderns” (as Diamond telling puts it on page 348 of the Penguin edition) could learn from, but only by some very careful cherry-picking – circumstances force tribal people to look at conflicts in a very different way from complex societies with all their apparatus of judges, police, lawyers etc. Most of these techniques can be summarised as ways of avoiding the other chap killing you, usually by running away or killing him first. Imperfect though our dispute resolution (and avoidance) processes are, I think I prefer them to that.

If you hadn’t read this book and asked yourself what aspects of tribal culture could tell us about our behaviour towards the elderly, I suspect you would attempt something about respect for their wisdom and knowledge and the tendency in the first world to consign the old to homes and then avoid visiting them. But that would be both wrong and to miss the point. Wrong, because although these things do happen from time to time, generally older people have fantastic life compared to even one or two generations earlier. They also wield considerable influence – for example the average age of Presidents of the USA on taking office is 54, not old in our terms I appreciate, but not young either. But the real point is that what we mean by old is completely different from how a tribal person would use the term. Obviously there are exceptions, but life expectancy in tribal society is around 40, almost half that of the West. Life expectancy in the West is increasing year on year, and accelerating. 54 for a tribesperson wouldn’t be unheard of, but it would undoubtedly be very old. In any event, there is no commonality between the way old people are treated in tribal society, ranging as it does from virtual gerontocracies to active killing of the old, so we can pick and choose what version we want to learn from. It was in this discussion that I expected Diamond to return to “widow strangling”, and indeed he did, in a section of the murder or killing by neglect of old people as a form of ensuring others do not die of starvation, very much in the same manner as infanticide is (he claims) widespread in tribal society. But there is very little additional commentary, just a reassertion that it was widespread until the 1950’s, with one supporting quote from Jane Goodall. I remain unconvinced that the active co-operation of the widows was as simple or common as he suggests.

Care of the young is another unsatisfying chapter. Just as with the old, children are cared for in a very wide range of ways, across the whole spectrum from swaddling for months at a time to letting them wander completely unsupervised, taking alarming risks without the capacity to learn from experiences. It is not surprising that we see children in a different light from tribal societies; our conception of what defines childhood is not fixed and changing every generation (compare the 19th century approach to childhood that had no problem is sending working class children up chimneys or down mines with the differing approaches to childcare adopted today). Can a comparison with tribal societies teach us anything about how better to raise children? If we can Diamond doesn’t present this convincingly.

Finally, thus far, there is a chapter on what Diamond terms “constructive paranoia”. He doesn’t define this term clearly, but it seems to mean little more than being careful with every day activities such as crossing the road. There is a strong hint in a reference to how his meticulous approach to every day life infuriates his friends and family that this is a personal issue, if not crusade, for him. The examples he provides where being careful was important are not very useful, to say the least, unless you habitually trek in virgin jungle. There are definitely different ways of looking at risk and probability, and I agree that we are unable to process these issues sensibly in the West (if we could we would never buy a lottery ticket). Nonetheless this felt like a frustratingly incomplete consideration of the psychology of risk.

Overall there is more than enough interesting content here to keep me reading, even if the overriding argument is far weaker than this book’s predecessor.

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

I reviewed Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel” last year and it is fair to say it made a significant impression on me. Readable but serious, refusing to duck some really challenging issues, I still find myself referring to some of the ideas and stories set out in this book. Guns Germs and Steel tried to answer the question why Western European countries were able to colonize large areas of the globe in the second millennium AD, and why other advanced civilisations were almost powerless to resist in the face of Western weaponry, bacteria, and technology. While I found many of the arguments in GG&S compelling, there were some sections that asked more questions than they answered. That’s a good thing of course; anything that gets me reading more is to be welcomed. No academic book with such a broad and controversial range of subjects can hope to tie down every issue. So the end of the Easter Island civilisation, the Viking settlements in Greenland, and the future of Australia were all subjects which I read further on and on which I retain an open mind.

Diamond’s overall thesis however was one which I found compelling, with one caveat. He argues Western dominance arose from our Guns Germs and Steel, but the development of these stemmed from an early move to city states, which in turn was caused by early advances in agriculture and domestication of livestock. He traces this to the fertile crescent in the middle east, a region that is now largely arid, and certainly not the home of super-powers. Is it simply that early civilisation arose here and spread to Europe where it took root and developed the ability to spread across the globe?

The World Until Yesterday is a natural sequel to GGS and opens with the observation that traditional hunter gatherer societies, where we lived in bands of at most a few thousand people, was an almost universal experience until relatively recently – in some case in the last few decades. He uses some striking images to make his point – for example in the introduction he surveys Port Moresby airport, and is struck by how much the Papuan New Guinean people have changed since first contact with westerners less than 100 years ago.

Diamond knows he is going to be taken on by many critical fellow academics, and in traditional style get his retaliation in first. He explains the terms he uses with care, and makes clear that generalisations can always be unpicked with individual exceptions, but still have value. He uses a measured, academic tone, writing more like a professor for a journal than a popular science writer writing for the mass market. This is not an academic paper of course ,footnotes aren’t used, not every source is identified, and there is more personal anecdote than you would usually find, but it is written to appear as such. Certainly it is carefully researched and referenced compared to many other popular science books.

This is necessary – Diamond makes claims about traditional cultures and their practices which could easily been seen as being made from a colonialist, first world perspective that fails to understand the cultural differences between the West and the traditional societies he writes about. Survival International, a group campaigning on behalf of tribal peoples http://www.survivalinternational.org/ launched a strong attack on this book when it was first published in hardback, claiming that Diamond patronises tribal peoples by saying they represent life as it was once lived by westerners, ignores the impact of the west on these peoples, and manipulating statistics to show they are more violent than the West. The full case for the prosecution can be found here http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/30/savaging-primitives-why-jared-diamond-s-the-world-until-yesterday-is-completely-wrong.html

However aware Diamond is of the risk of sensationalism, he cannot avoid it completely. An example of this that jumped out at me was his description of the gruesome practice of widow strangling. Here’s what he says, writing about the Kaulong people, a tribe of New Britain, just east of New Guinea.

“When a man died, his widow called upon her brothers to strangle her. She was not murderously strangled against her will, nor was she pressurised into this form of ritualised suicide by other members of her society. Instead she had grown up observing it as the custom, followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no brothers) to fulfil their solemn obligation to strangle her despite their natural reluctance to do so, and sat cooperatively as they did strangle her” (Page 21 of the paperback Penguin edition).

As soon as I read this I was instinctively sceptical. What is the evidence that tribal peoples killed their sisters or mothers in this fashion, and that the widows passively accepted their fate? Obviously there are parallels with the well documented Indian sub-continental practice of suttee which stubbornly persists in one form or another to this day. But however disturbing suttee may be, widow strangling with the passive participation of the widow is hard to swallow (sorry). Was this an extreme case of men enforcing their control over women, treating them as inanimate property to be disposed of on the man’s death? In this interpretation the acceptance of their fate by the women is less a case of indoctrination than a choice between the lesser of two evils – accept their fate or face a worse one, with the shame brought on your family to make things worse. Widow strangling would have been a strong disincentive to women murdering their husbands, and a way of maintaining population control in an environment where infanticide was also practiced to the same end. But did it happen? Was it an established cultural practice (the internet gives examples from other cultures including Fiji) or simply some isolated murders inflated into a cultural practice for the benefit of nosy missionaries and explorers? Something like this would be extraordinarily difficult to prove other than by weight of personal testimony, or possibly independent witness. But I can’t resist the impression that Diamond introduces this topic for more salacious reasons – look at these weird people, aren’t they brutal and unfeeling compared to us? Don’t they need our civilising influence? Strangely the reaction to Diamond’s book online has not focussed on this topic – his commentary on modern against tribal warfare has attracted much more comment for example.

I am still less than halfway through TWUY thus far, and I am sure I will have more to say. I don’t usually write reviews before completing the book, strangely enough, but this is a bit of an experiment.

Collapse by Jared Diamond, 2005

Collapse – How Societies Choose to fail or Survive

Jared Diamond (2005)

An amazing book, which may well have finally cured me of my aversion to non-fiction. I am told it has since been made into a TV programme (or series) but not one which I caught.

In brief, this is, as the title suggests, a study of how societies collapse. There are several very detailed case studies, including the Mayan civilisation in Mexico, Easter Island, the Norse settlement in Greenland, and American Indian civilisations. There are contrasted with similar civilisations that have persisted (although the reference to Iceland’s prosperity in comparison with Greenland is a bit of a sick joke post-bankruptcy in 2008/9) despite very challenging environments. The chapter on Easter Island (2) is a particularly interesting part of the book – it is argued compellingly that this extraordinarily mature and complex civilisation committed ecocide. Most of the collapsed civilisations studied here existed in marginal, challenging environments, and the sources of their collapse can be traced back to environmental destruction of one kind or another, whether it be deforestation, salinization of the soil, or soil erosion.

I wrote positively about Diamond’s earlier work, Guns, Germs and Steel in a previous entry. This book could easily have been alternatively sub-titled “Trees, Soil, and Water” given the central role these ingredients play in the survival or otherwise of civilisations. But Diamond’s choice of sub-title here, and especially that verb “choose” is both controversial and illuminating, and I keep coming back to that choice. His central thesis is clear – the survival of societies is not simply a matter of a natural rise and fall over time, but a result of the decisions and choices societies make. That’s not to say those decisions are easy or obvious, but nonetheless with the benefit of hindsight we can see how some societies prosper in almost impossible circumstances – he cites the example of the island of Tikopia in the Pacific which is less than two square miles in area, but on which people have survived for around 3,000 years – while others disappear more or less suddenly.

This is a hugely controversial topic or battleground, and of course Diamond’s cultural and academic perspectives come into play. His analysis of the massacres in Rwanda, attributing them in part to over-population, will be distressing to some, but he arrays a formidable amount of evidence to support his position.

Diamond is usually scrupulous in acknowledging when he is entering a field of potential or actual controversy – he recognises the existing debate, without hesitating to offer his own judgment or perspective. Which makes it all the more surprising that when discussing the use of infanticide as a method of population control, he does so in a quite chillingly dispassionate way, without giving the slightest nod to the possibility that there may be readers who do not accept that this was ever used in the way suggested. I have no doubt he has evidence to support his contention – presumably archaeological – but this is not cited or referenced.  


Diamond is handling some big themes here, so inevitably his work has attracted a fair amount of controversy. He anticipates some of this in his original text (so far as I can tell – the edition I read was a 2011 reprint, and there has been some revision and updating of the text). Firstly, the suggestion that native inhabitants of the Easter Islands and elsewhere could have wilfully destroyed their environment, leaving it uninhabitable, is seen by some as at best counter-intuitive, and worst simply racist. He stands accused of underplaying the role of slave traders and European illnesses in depopulating the island, where, it is claimed, indigenous peoples survived and prospered long after the largest trees were harvested. The counter thesis is that statue carving and erecting did not end with the felling of the largest trees, and the stone masons’ tools lie abandoned in the quarry not because people just walked away to participate in the collapse of the culture, but because they were attacked by slave traders.

Another controversy has centred on the puzzling question as to whether the Norse Greenlanders ate fish or not. The evidence of the animal bones in Viking rubbish studied by archaeologists suggested not, but other evidence of Viking bones themselves (and I admit I am not sure how analysing the chemical composition of people’s bones can tell you with much confidence how much fish they ate) claims that fish played an increasingly important part in people’s diets. This particular debate seems a bit of a non-issue to me and symptomatic of critics wanting to take chunks out of Diamond and taking any opportunity to do so – hence another “missing the point” article elsewhere claming that Australia’s agriculture is doing very well thank you very much. 

Diamond’s central thesis is actually very simple and in many ways unarguable. Over the course of human history some societies have prospered and survived, and others have collapsed. The survivors have certain characteristics that we can learn from, as do those which collapsed. The main learning point is that we should look after our environment, either by central Government taking the initiative (e.g. on forestry management), international co-operation (e.g. on climate change) or by “bottom-up” change initiated by local people and the choices they make e.g. lowering consumption, recycling. All of these actions will be fairly pointless if we don’t do something about population. I think we all know that population is increasing exponentially across the planet, and what we do about that is a subject that wouldn’t fit into Diamond’s analysis – he touches upon the issue but not in anything like the depth it requires. This is the Green political analysis, and it is well put, but I don’t see it as the whole answer, (of course).

Some minor complaints. At times this is a poorly edited, dull and self indulgent book, despite all the fireworks elsewhere. The opening chapter on Montana is a false start – Montana is in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, and this chapter reads as if Diamond is writing a postcard from his holiday home rather than opening an analysis of societal collapse.

Another grumble is on the absence of photographs/plates, which have been removed from this edition, presumably to save money (although £10.99 isn’t cheap for a paperback!) The references to the plates in the text have not been edited out. I found this disproportionately frustrating – each time the author reference to a plate he must have had reason to do so – the image or photograph would have illustrated a point that he doesn’t need to further elaborate. Basically it was just cheap of the publishers.

At the end of what was a bit of a marathon I feel very virtuous, having made it to the end, and what is more I want to know more – I have already followed up with various articles and Wikipedia entries – which is always a good sign.