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

by Jared Diamond

  But some other hunter-gatherer child-rearing practices may fit readily into modern state societies. It’s perfectly feasible for us to transport our infants vertically upright and facing forward, rather than horizontally in a pram or vertically upright but facing backwards in a pack. We could respond quickly and consistently to an infant’s crying, practise much more extensive allo-parenting, and have far more physical contact between infants and care-givers. We could encourage self-invented play of children, rather than discourage it by constantly providing complicated so-called educational toys. We could arrange for multi-age child playgroups, rather than playgroups consisting of a uniform age cohort. We could maximize a child’s freedom to explore, insofar as it is safe to do so.

  I find myself thinking a lot about the New Guinea people with whom I have been working for the last 49 years, and about the comments of Westerners who have lived for years in hunter-gatherer societies and watched children grow up there. A recurring theme is that the other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, video games, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly telling them what to do. The adolescent identity crises that plague American teen-agers aren’t an issue for hunter-gatherer children. The Westerners who have lived with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies speculate that these admirable qualities develop because of the way in which their children are brought up: namely, with constant security and stimulation, as a result of the long nursing period, sleeping near parents for several years, far more social models available to children through allo-parenting, far more social stimulation through constant physical contact and proximity of caretakers, instant caretaker responses to a child’s crying, and the minimal amount of physical punishment.

  But our impressions of greater adult security, autonomy, and social skills in small-scale societies are just impressions: they are hard to measure and to prove. Even if these impressions are real, it’s difficult to establish that they are the result of a long nursing period, allo-parenting, and so on. At minimum, though, one can say that hunter-gatherer rearing practices that seem so foreign to us aren’t disastrous, and they don’t produce societies of obvious sociopaths. Instead, they produce individuals capable of coping with big challenges and dangers while still enjoying their lives. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill?

  The elderly Expectations about eldercare Why abandon or kill? Usefulness of old people Society’s values Society’s rules Better or worse today? What to do with older people?

  The elderly

  While I was visiting a village on the Fijian island of Viti Levu, I fell into conversation with a local man who had visited the United States and told me his impressions. There were some features of American life that he admired or envied, but others that disgusted him. Worst of all was our treatment of the elderly. In rural Fiji old people continue to live in the village where they have spent their lives, surrounded by their relatives and life-long friends. They often reside in a house of their children, who take care of them, even to the point of pre-chewing and softening food for an old parent whose teeth have been worn down to the gum-line. In the United States, though, my Fijian acquaintance was outraged that many old people are sent to retirement homes where they are visited only occasionally by their children. He burst out accusingly to me, “You throw away your old people and your own parents!”

  Among traditional societies, some accord their elderly even higher status than do Fijians, allowing the elderly to tyrannize their adult children, to control the society’s property, and even to prevent young men from marrying until their 40s. Others accord their elderly even lower status than do Americans, starving or abandoning or actively killing them. Of course, there is much individual variation within any society: I have several American friends who put their parents into a retirement home and visit them once a year or never, and another friend who published his 22nd book on his 100th birthday and celebrated the occasion in the company of all of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, whom he also saw regularly throughout the year. But the range of variation among traditional societies in their normal practices of eldercare exceeds even the range of individual variation in the United States. I don’t know any individual American whose devoted care of his aged parents goes as far as pre-chewing their food, nor any who has strangled his aged parents and been publicly commended as a good son for doing so. The lot of the elderly is widely acknowledged to be often miserable in the United States. Is there anything that we can learn from all that variation among traditional societies, both as to what we could emulate and what we should avoid?

  Before I proceed, let me deal with two objections that are often raised. One is that there isn’t a universal definition of the age at which one becomes “old”: that, too, varies among societies and with one’s personal perspective. In the United States the federal government in effect defines old age as beginning at age 65, when one becomes eligible for Social Security. When I was in my teens, I looked up to people in their late 20s as being seemingly at their peak of life and wisdom, people in their 30s as already middle-aged, and anyone from about 60 onwards as old. Now that I am 75 years old, I regard my 60s and early 70s as the peak of my own life, and old age as likely to start sometime around 85 or 90 depending on my health. In rural New Guinea, however, where relatively few people reach the age of 60, even 50-year-olds are regarded as old. I recall arriving at a village of Indonesian New Guinea where, when the local people learned that I was (then) 46 years old, they gasped out “setengah mati!,” meaning “half-dead,” and they assigned a teen-aged boy to walk constantly beside me to ensure that I would not come to grief. Hence “old age” has to be defined by the standards of the local society, not by some arbitrary universal year count.

  The other objection is related to that first objection. In countries where life expectancy is under 40, one might imagine that almost no one reaches old age as defined in the United States. Actually, in almost every New Guinea village where I have made inquiries, even if few people survive to 50 and anyone over 50 is considered a lapun (old man), I am still shown one or two people whose age can be estimated at over 70 by their memories of datable events (e.g., whether they were alive at the time of the great cyclone of 1910). They are likely to be lame, sight-impaired or blind, and dependent on relatives for food, but they nevertheless play (as we shall see) a vital role in the life of the village. Similar findings apply to other traditional peoples: Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado reconstructed genealogies of five forest-dwelling Ache Indians from Paraguay who died at the respective estimated ages of 70, 72, 75, 77, and 78, while Nancy Howell photographed a !Kung man whom she calculated to be 82 years old but who could still walk long distances when his group was moving camp, and still gathered much of his own food and built his own hut.

  How can we account for the wide variation among societies in their norms for treating the elderly? Part of the explanation, we shall see, involves variation among societies in material factors that make the elderly more or less useful to the society, and that make it more or less feasible for
younger people to support their elderly. The other part of the explanation involves variation among societies in cultural values, such as respect for the elderly, respect for privacy, emphasis on the family versus the individual, and self-reliance. These values are only partly predictable from the material factors that make old people useful or just a burden.

  Expectations about eldercare

  Let’s start off with a naive expectation about eldercare. Although the expectation is obviously incomplete, formulating it will nevertheless help us by forcing us to ask why and in what respects it breaks down. A layperson with a rosy view of life might reason: parents and their children do and should love each other. Parents devote their best efforts to their kids and make sacrifices for them. Kids respect and are grateful to the parents who raised them. Hence we expect kids throughout the world to take good care of their old parents.

  A naive evolutionary biologist might reach that same heart-warming conclusion by a different chain of reasoning. Natural selection is about passing on genes. The most direct way for people to pass on their genes is through their children. Hence natural selection should favor parents whose genes cause them to behave in ways that promote the survival and reproduction of their children. Similarly, cultural selection is about passing on learned behaviors, and parents serve as behavioral models for their children. It therefore makes sense for parents to make sacrifices for their kids, even to sacrifice their own lives, if they thereby promote the survival and reproductive success of their kids. Conversely, older parents are likely to have accumulated resources, status, knowledge, and skills that their kids haven’t yet accumulated. Kids know that it’s in their parents’ genetic and cultural interests to help their kids by passing on those resources, status, knowledge, and skills. Therefore, kids reason, it’s also in the kids’ interest to take care of their elderly parents so that the parents can continue to help them. More generally, in a society of inter-related individuals, one expects the younger generation as a whole to take care of their elders, who share culture and many genes with members of the younger generation.

  However, we know that these rosy predictions are only partly true. Yes, parents usually do take care of their children, who in turn often take care of their parents, and the younger generation as a whole often takes care of its elders. But these conclusions don’t hold for at least some kids in most societies, nor for most kids in some societies. Why not? What was wrong with our reasoning?

  Our naive error (which evolutionary biologists now avoid) was that we failed to consider conflicts of interest between generations. Parents shouldn’t always make unlimited sacrifices, kids shouldn’t always be grateful, love has its limits, and people aren’t Darwinian calculating devices that constantly evaluate optimum transmission of their genes and culture and behave accordingly. All people, including old people, want a comfortable life for themselves, not just for their kids. There often are limits to the sacrifices that parents are willing to endure for their kids. Conversely, kids often are impatient to enjoy a comfortable life. They reason, quite correctly, that the more parental resources that the parents themselves consume, the fewer resources will remain available for the kids to enjoy. Even insofar as kids do behave instinctively as Darwinian calculating devices, natural selection teaches us that kids shouldn’t always take care of their elderly parents. There are many circumstances under which kids can improve transmission of their own genes or cultures by being stingy to, abandoning, or even killing their parents.

  Why abandon or kill?

  In what sorts of society “should” (by this reasoning) and do children (and the younger generation in general) neglect, abandon, or kill their parents (and the older generation in general)? The many reported cases involve societies for which old people become a serious handicap endangering the whole group’s safety. This situation arises under two different sets of circumstances. One set applies to nomadic hunter-gatherers who must shift camp from time to time. Without beasts of burden, the nomads have to carry everything on their backs: babies, children under the age of four unable to walk at the group’s pace, weapons, tools, all other material possessions, and food and water for the journey. To add to that load old or sick people unable to walk at all is difficult or impossible.

  The other set of circumstances arises in environments, especially Arctic regions and deserts, where severe food shortages periodically occur, and where food surpluses large enough to carry the group through the period of shortage cannot be accumulated. If there isn’t enough food to keep everyone fit or just alive, the society must sacrifice its least valuable or least productive members; otherwise, everybody’s survival will be endangered.

  However, it is not the case that all nomads and Arctic and desert peoples sacrifice all of their elderly. Some groups (such as the !Kung and African Pygmies) seem more reluctant to do so than are other groups (such as the Ache, Siriono, and Inuit). Within a group, the treatment of a particular old person may depend on whether a close relative is available to care for and defend the old person.

  How are burdensome old people jettisoned? At the risk of my using language that may appear unfeeling or gruesome, there are five methods that can be arranged in a sequence of increasingly direct action. The most passive method is merely to neglect old people until they die: to ignore them, give them little food, let them starve, let them wander off, or let them die in their own filth. For example, this method has been reported among the Inuit of the Arctic, the Hopi of the North American deserts, the Witoto of tropical South America, and Aboriginal Australians.

  The next method, practised in various forms by the Lapps (Saami) of northern Scandinavia, the San of the Kalahari Desert, the Omaha and Kutenai Indians of North America, and the Ache Indians of tropical South America, is intentionally to abandon an old or sick person when the rest of the group shifts camp. A variant of this method among the Ache, reserved for old men (but not for old women, who are killed outright), is to take men out of the forest to a “white man’s road” and leave them to walk off and never be heard from again. More often, a weak person is left in a shelter or in the camp being evacuated, and provided with some firewood, food, and water, so that if the abandoned person recovers strength, he or she can try to catch up with the rest of the group.

  The anthropologist Allan Holmberg happened to be with a group of Bolivia’s Siriono Indians when such an abandonment occurred. Here is his account of what took place: “The band decided to make a move in the direction of the Rio Blanco. While they were making preparations for the journey, my attention was called to a middle-aged woman who was lying sick in her hammock, too sick to speak. I inquired of the chief what they planned to do with her. He referred me to her husband, who told me that she would be left to die because she was too ill to walk and because she was going to die anyway. Departure was scheduled for the following morning. I was on hand to observe the event. The entire band walked out of the camp without so much as a farewell to the dying woman. Even her husband departed without saying goodbye. She was left with fire, a calabash of water, her personal belongings, and nothing more. She was too sick to protest.” Holmberg himself was ill and went off to a mission station for medical treatment. When he came back to the campsite three weeks later, the woman was not there, so he followed a trail to the group’s next campsite, where he found the woman’s remains stripped to her bones by ants and vultures. “She had tried her utmost to follow the fortunes of the band, but had failed and had experienced the same fate that is accorded all Siriono whose days of utility are over.”

  A third method for disposing of the elderly, reported for the Chukchi and the Yakut of Siberia, the Crow Indians of North America, the Inuit, and the Norse, involves the older individual choosing or being encouraged to commit suicide, by jumping off a cliff, going out to sea, or seeking death in battle. The New Zealand physician and sailor David Lewis related how an aging friend of his, the navigator Tevake from the Reef Islands in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, made a formal farewell and then se
t off to sea alone on a boat journey from which he did not return and evidently did not intend to return.

  Whereas that third method constitutes unassisted suicide, the fourth method can be described either as assisted suicide or else as killing with the victim’s cooperation, e.g., by strangling, stabbing, or burying alive. Old Chukchi people who submitted to voluntary death were praised and assured that they would receive one of the best dwelling places in the next world. The wife of the victim held his head on her knees, while two men on opposite sides pulled tight a rope around his neck. Among the Kaulong people of southwestern New Britain, strangling of a widow by her brothers or son immediately after her husband’s death was routine until the 1950s. This act was an obligation that, although emotionally shattering for the executioner, was considered shameful to avoid. One Kaulong son described to Jane Goodale how his mother humiliated him into doing it: “When I hesitated, my mother stood up and spoke loudly so all could hear and said that the reason I hesitated was that I wished to have sex with her.” Sick and old people in the Banks Islands begged their friends to end their suffering by burying them alive, and the friends did so as an act of kindness: “a man at Mota buried his brother, who was in extreme weakness from influenza; but he [the survivor] heaped the earth loosely over his [the victim’s] head, and wept, and went from time to time to ask him whether he were still alive.”