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

by Jared Diamond

  One similarity is in the importance of enlisting allies. Just as the Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation of Dani sought allies among other confederations in fighting against the Widaia and their allies, World War II pitted two alliances against each other, whose main members were Britain, the U.S., and Russia on one side, and Germany, Italy, and Japan on the other side. Alliances are even more essential for warring traditional societies than for warring nations. Modern nations differ greatly in military technology, so that a small nation may be able to rely on superior technology and leadership rather than on more allies to win a war. (Think of the successes of Israel’s armies against far more numerous Arab alliances.) But traditional warfare tends to take place between opponents with similar technology and similar leadership, so that the side with the advantage of numbers from enlisting more allies is likely to win.

  Another similarity involves the reliance of societies of all sizes on both hand-to-hand fighting and long-range weapons. Even the small Fayu bands fighting around the Kueglers’ house had bows and arrows, while the Dani threw spears as well as killing Wejakhe and Jenokma at close quarters with spear thrusts. The range of weapons increases with a society’s increasing size and level of technology. Although Roman soldiers continued to use swords and daggers for hand-to-hand fighting, their weapons-at-a-distance included arrows, javelins, slings, and catapults with a range of up to half a mile. By the time of World War I, the German army had developed a cannon (nicknamed Big Bertha) to bombard Paris from a distance of 68 miles, while modern intercontinental ballistic missiles have ranges of up to half of the world’s circumference. But modern soldiers still have to be prepared to use a pistol or a bayonet to kill at close quarters.

  A psychological consequence of this increasing range of modern long-range weapons is that most military killing today is by “push-button” technology (bombs, artillery, and missiles), permitting soldiers to kill unseen opponents and not to have to overcome their inhibitions about killing face-to-face (Plate 37). In all traditional fighting one selects one’s target individually and sees his face, whether one is stabbing him at close quarters or shooting an arrow at him from a distance of tens of yards (Plate 36). Men in traditional societies grow up from childhood encouraged to kill, or at least knowing how to kill, but most modern state citizens grow up taught constantly that killing is bad, until after age 18 they suddenly enlist or are inducted into the army, given a gun, and ordered to aim at an enemy and shoot him. Not surprisingly, a significant fraction of soldiers in World Wars I and II—some estimates run as high as one-half—could not bring themselves to shoot an enemy whom they saw as another human being. Thus, while traditional societies lack both the moral inhibitions against killing an enemy face-to-face, and the technology necessary to bypass those inhibitions by killing unseen victims at a distance, modern state societies have tended to develop both the inhibitions and the technology necessary to bypass the inhibitions.

  As for the numerous differences between traditional and state warfare, one difference follows straight on from that discussion of the psychology of killing. Even when modern soldiers see an enemy face-to-face, the enemy is almost always a nameless person, someone whom they never met before and against whom they hold no individual grudge. In contrast, in small-scale traditional societies one recognizes and knows by name not only every member of one’s own society, but also many or most of the enemy warriors one is trying to kill—because shifting alliances and occasional intermarriages make one’s neighbors familiar as individuals. The taunts that Dani warriors shouted at each other in the battles recounted in Chapter 3 included personal insults. Readers of the Iliad will recall how opposing Greek and Trojan leaders addressed each other by name before attempting to kill each other in battle—a famous example being the speeches of Hector and Achilles to each other just before Achilles fatally wounded Hector. Personal vengeance against an individual enemy known to have killed one of your own relatives or friends plays a major role in traditional warfare, but much less of a role or none in modern state war.

  Another psychological difference involves self-sacrifice, praised in modern warfare and unknown in traditional warfare. Modern state soldiers have often been ordered, on behalf of their country, to do things highly likely to get them killed, such as charging across open ground towards barbed-wire defenses. Other soldiers decide themselves to sacrifice their lives (e.g., by throwing themselves onto a primed hand grenade) in order to save the lives of their comrades. During World War II thousands of Japanese soldiers, at first voluntarily and later under pressure, made attacks intended to be suicidal, by piloting kamikaze airplanes, rocket-powered baka gliding bombs, and kaiten human torpedoes into American warships. Such behavior requires that prospective soldiers be programmed from childhood onwards to admire dutiful obedience and sacrifice for one’s country or religion. I have never heard of such behavior in New Guinea traditional warfare: every warrior’s goal is to kill the enemy and to stay alive himself. For instance, when Wilihiman raiders caught and killed the Widaia man Huwai on May 11, 1961, Huwai’s outnumbered two companions fled without trying to save him; and when Widaia raiders in ambush caught and killed the already-injured Wilihiman boy Wejakhe on June 10, the other three outnumbered Wilihiman man and boys with Wejakhe similarly fled.

  Traditional societies and states differ as to who are their soldiers. All state armies have included full-time professional soldiers who can remain in the field for years at a time, supported by civilians who grow food for themselves and for the soldiers. Either the professionals make up the entire army (as is currently true in the U.S.), or else their ranks are augmented (mainly in time of war) by non-professional volunteers or conscripts. In contrast, all band and tribal warriors, like the Dani warriors described in Chapter 3, and all or most warriors of chiefdoms, are non-professionals. They are men normally occupied with hunting or farming or herding, who suspend those subsistence activities for periods ranging from a few hours up to a few weeks in order to fight, and then go home again because they are needed for hunting or planting or harvesting. Hence it’s impossible for traditional “armies” to remain in the field for lengthy periods. That basic reality gave a decisive advantage to European colonial soldiers in their wars of conquest against tribes and chiefdoms around the world. Some of those non-European peoples, like New Zealand’s Maori, Argentina’s Araucanian Indians, and North America’s Sioux and Apache Indians, were determined and skilled fighters who could muster large forces for short times and achieved some spectacular successes against European armies. But they were inevitably worn down and eventually defeated because they had to break off fighting in order to resume obtaining and producing food, while professional European soldiers could continue to fight.

  Modern military historians regularly comment on what strikes them as the “inefficiency” of traditional warfare: that hundreds of people can fight for an entire day, at the end of which no one or only one or two people have been killed. Part of the reason, of course, is that traditional societies lack artillery, bombs, and other weapons capable of killing many people at once. But the other reasons are related to the tribes’ non-professional army and lack of strong leadership. Traditional warriors don’t undergo group training that might enable them to be more lethal by executing complex plans or even just by coordinating their shooting. Arrows would be more effective if fired in a synchronized volley rather than one at a time: a targeted enemy can dodge an individual arrow but can’t dodge a whole flight of arrows. Nevertheless, the Dani, like most other traditional bowmen, had not practiced synchronizing their volleys. (Northwest Alaska Inuit were exceptional in that respect.) Discipline and organized formations are minimal: even if fighting units are well formed before a battle, the units quickly fall apart, and the battle degenerates into an uncoordinated melee. Traditional war leaders cannot issue orders for which the price of disobedience is court-martial. The 1966 massacre that broke apart the alliance of the Dani leader Gutelu may have resulted from Gutelu’s inability to
prevent his own hot-headed northern warriors from massacring his southern allies.

  One of the two biggest differences between traditional and state warfare involves the distinction between total war and limited war. We Americans are accustomed to thinking of total war as a new concept introduced by the northern general William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Warfare by states and large chiefdoms tends to have limited goals: to destroy the enemy’s armed forces and capacity to fight, but to spare the enemy’s land, resources, and civilian population because those are what a would-be conqueror hopes to take over. General Sherman, in his march to the sea (from the inland hub of Atlanta to the Atlantic Ocean) through the heart of the Confederacy and then north through South Carolina, became famous for his explicit policy of total war: destroying everything of possible military value, and breaking Southern morale, by taking food, burning crops, killing livestock, wrecking farm machinery, burning cotton and cotton gins, burning railroads and twisting their rails to preclude their being repaired, and burning or blowing up bridges, railroad stock, factories, mills, and buildings. Sherman’s actions resulted from a calculated philosophy of war, which he described as follows: “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it…. We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make young and old, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war…. We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible…make them so sick of war that generations would pass before they would again appeal to it.” But Sherman did not exterminate Southern civilians or kill Confederate soldiers who surrendered or were captured.

  While Sherman’s behavior was indeed exceptional by standards of state warfare, he did not invent total warfare. Instead, he practiced a mild form of what has been practiced by bands and tribes for tens of thousands of years, as documented by the skeletal remains of the massacre at Talheim described on page 134. State armies spare and take prisoners because they are able to feed them, guard them, put them to work, and prevent them from running away. Traditional “armies” do not take enemy warriors as prisoners, because they cannot do any of those things to make use of prisoners. Surrounded or defeated traditional warriors do not surrender, because they know that they would be killed anyway. The earliest historical or archaeological evidence of states taking prisoners is not until the time of Mesopotamian states of about 5,000 years ago, which solved the practical problems of getting use out of prisoners by gouging out their eyes to blind them so that they could not run away, then putting them to work at tasks that could be carried out by the sense of touch alone, such as spinning and some gardening chores. A few large, sedentary, economically specialized tribes and chiefdoms of hunter-gatherers, such as coastal Pacific Northwest Indians and Florida’s Calusa Indians, were also able routinely to enslave, maintain, and make use of captives.

  However, for societies simpler than Mesopotamian states, Pacific Northwest Indians, and the Calusa, defeated enemies were of no value alive. War’s goal among the Dani, Fore, Northwest Alaskan Inuit, Andaman Islanders, and many other tribes was to take over the enemy’s land and to exterminate the enemy of both sexes and all ages, including the dozens of Dani women and children killed in the June 4, 1966, massacre. Other traditional societies, such as the Nuer raiding the Dinka, were more selective, in that they killed Dinka men and clubbed to death Dinka babies and older women but brought home Dinka women of marriageable age to force-marry to Nuer men, and also brought home Dinka weaned children to rear as Nuer. The Yanomamo similarly spared enemy women in order to use them as mates.

  Total warfare among traditional societies also means mobilizing all men, including the Dani boys down to age six who fought in the battle of August 6, 1961. State war, however, is usually fought with proportionally tiny professional armies of adult men. Napoleon’s Grande Armée with which he invaded Russia in 1812 numbered 600,000 men and thus rates as huge by the standards of 19th-century state warfare, but that number represented under 10% of the total population of France at that time (actually even less, because some of the soldiers were non-French allies). Even within modern state armies, combat troops are generally outnumbered by support troops: the ratio is now 1 to 11 for the U.S. Army. The Dani would have been scornful of Napoleon’s and the U.S. armies’ inability to field combat troops, measured as a proportion of the society’s whole population. But the Dani would have found familiar Sherman’s behavior on his march to the sea, reminiscent of Dani behavior during the dawn raid of June 4, 1966, when they burned dozens of settlements and stole pigs.

  Ending warfare

  The remaining big difference between tribal and state warfare, after that distinction between total and limited warfare, involves the differing ease of ending war and maintaining peace. As illustrated by the Dani War of Chapter 3, wars of small-scale societies often involve cycles of revenge killings. A death suffered by side A demands that side A take vengeance by killing someone from side B, whose members now in turn demand vengeance of their own against side A. Those cycles end only when one side has been exterminated or driven out, or else when both sides are exhausted, both have suffered many deaths, and neither side foresees the likelihood of being able to exterminate or drive out the other. While analogous considerations apply to ending state warfare, states and large chiefdoms go to war with much more limited goals than do bands and tribes: at most, just to conquer all of the enemy’s territory.

  But it’s much harder for a tribe than for a state (and a large centralized chiefdom) to reach a decision to seek an end to fighting, and to negotiate a truce with the enemy—because a state has centralized decision-making and negotiators, while a tribe lacks centralized leadership and everyone has his say. It’s even harder for a tribe than for a state to maintain peace, once a truce has been negotiated. In any society, whether a tribe or a state, there will be some individuals who are dissatisfied with any peace agreement, and who want to attack some enemy for their own private reasons and to provoke a new outbreak of fighting. A state government that asserts a centralized monopoly on the use of power and force can usually restrain those hotheads; a weak tribal leader can’t. Hence tribal peaces are fragile and quickly deteriorate to yet another cycle of war.

  That difference between states and small centralized societies is a major reason why states exist at all. There has been a long-standing debate among political scientists about how states arise, and why the governed masses tolerate kings and congressmen and their bureaucrats. Full-time political leaders don’t grow their own food, but they live off of food raised by us peasants. How did our leaders convince or force us to feed them, and why do we let them remain in power? The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated, without any evidence to back up his speculations, that governments arise as the result of rational decisions by the masses who recognize that their own interests will be better served under a leader and bureaucrats. In all the cases of state formation now known to historians, no such farsighted calculation has ever been observed. Instead, states arise from chiefdoms through competition, conquest, or external pressure: the chiefdom with the most effective decision-making is better able to resist conquest or to outcompete other chiefdoms. For example, between 1807 and 1817 the dozens of separate chiefdoms of southeastern Africa’s Zulu people, traditionally warring with each other, became amalgamated into one state under one of the chiefs, named Dingiswayo, who conquered all the competing chiefs by proving more successful at figuring out how best to recruit an army, settle disputes, incorporate defeated chiefdoms, and administer his territory.

  Despite the excitement and the prestige of tribal fighting, tribespeople understand better than anyone else the misery associated with warfare, the omnipresent danger, and the pain due to the killings of loved ones. When tribal warfare is finally ended by forceful intervention by colonial governments, tribespeople regularly comment on the resulting improved quality of life that they hadn’t been able to create for themselves, because without centralized government they ha
dn’t been able to interrupt the cycles of revenge killings. Anthropologist Sterling Robbins was told by Auyana men in the New Guinea Highlands, “Life was better since the government had come because a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot. All men admitted that they were afraid when they fought. In fact, they usually looked at me as though I were a mental defective for even asking. Men admitted having nightmares in which they became isolated from others in their group during a fight and could see no way back.”

  That reaction explains the surprising ease with which small numbers of Australian patrol officers and native policemen were able to end tribal warfare in the then-territory of Papua New Guinea. They arrived at a warring village, bought a pig, shot the pig to demonstrate the power of firearms, tore down village stockades and confiscated the war shields of all warring groups in order to make it lethally dangerous for anyone to initiate war, and occasionally shot New Guineans who dared to attack them. Of course, New Guineans are pragmatic and could recognize the power of guns. But one might not have predicted how easily they would give up warfare that they had been practicing for thousands of years, when achievement in war had been praised from childhood onwards and held up as the measure of a man.