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

by Jared Diamond

  Wilson’s approach involves realizing that a religion’s success in increasing its number of adherents does not depend on whether its tenets happen to be true, but instead on whether those tenets and associated practices motivate the religion’s adherents to conceive and successfully rear children, win converts, constitute a smoothly functioning society, or do all of those things. In Wilson’s words, “Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world…. Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.”

  In the case of Mormonism, its tenets and practices have been outstandingly successful at promoting demographic growth. Mormons tend to have many children. They form a strongly supportive and interdependent society offering a full and satisfying social life and incentives to work. They emphasize proselytizing; young Mormons are expected to devote up to two years of their lives to winning converts, either overseas or else near home. Mormons are expected to pay to their church an annual tithe equaling 10% of their income (in addition to paying the usual U.S. federal, state, and local taxes). These high demands for commitment of time and resources guarantee that those who choose to become or remain Mormons take their faith seriously. As for the supposed implausibility of the statements of Joseph Smith and his 11 witnesses about divine revelations via the golden plates—what, really, is the difference between those statements and the biblical accounts of divine revelations to Jesus and to Moses, except for millennia of elapsed time and our differing skepticisms derived from our different upbringings?

  What does Wilson have to say about the basic hypocrisy common among religions, in preaching noble moral principles while urging the killing of believers in other religions? Wilson’s response is that a religion’s success (or its “fitness,” to use the language of evolutionary biology) is relative and can be defined only by comparison with the successes of other religions. Whether one likes it or not, religions can increase, and often have increased, their “success” (defined as the number of their adherents) by killing or forcibly converting adherents of other religions. As Wilson writes, “Whenever I strike up a conversation about religion, I am likely to receive a litany of evils perpetrated in God’s name. In most cases, these are horrors committed by religious groups against other groups. How can I call religion adaptive in the face of such evidence? The answer is ‘easily,’ as long as we understand fitness in relative terms. It is important to stress that a behavior can be explained from an evolutionary perspective without being morally condoned.”

  Changes in religion’s functions

  Let’s finally return to my initial question about the functions and definition of religion. We now see why religion is so difficult to define: because it has changed its functions as it has evolved, just as have electric organs. In fact, it has changed functions even more than have electric organs, which have adopted only six functions, compared with the seven functions variously characterizing religions (Figure 9.1). Of those seven functions, four were entirely absent at one stage of religion’s history, and five were still present but in decline at another stage. Two functions had already appeared and were at their peak by the time of the emergence of intelligent questioning humans before 50,000 BC, and have been in steady decline in recent millennia: supernatural explanation (in steeper decline), and defusing anxiety about uncontrollable dangers through ritual (in gentler decline). The other five functions were absent (four of them) or weak (the fifth) in early intelligent humans, rose to a peak in chiefdoms and early states (three of them) or late Renaissance states (two of them), and have declined somewhat or sharply since that peak.

  Figure 9.1 Religion’s functions changing through time

  Those shifts of function make it harder to define religion than to define electric organs, because electric organs at least all share the trait of setting up detectable electric fields in the surrounding medium, whereas there is no single characteristic shared by all religions. At the risk of coming up with yet another definition to add to those of Table 9.1, I’d now propose: “Religion is a set of traits distinguishing a human social group sharing those traits from other groups not sharing those traits in identical form. Included among those shared traits is always one or more, often all three, out of three traits: supernatural explanation, defusing anxiety about uncontrollable dangers through ritual, and offering comfort for life’s pains and the prospect of death. Religions other than early ones became co-opted to promote standardized organization, political obedience, tolerance of strangers belonging to one’s own religion, and justification of wars against groups holding other religions.” That definition of mine is at least as tortured as the most tortured definitions already in Table 9.1, but I think that it corresponds to reality.

  What about religion’s future? That depends on what shape the world will be in 30 years from now. If living standards rise all around the world, then religion’s functions numbers 1 and 4–7 of Figure 9.1 will continue to decline, but functions 2 and 3 seem to me likely to persist. Religion is especially likely to continue to be espoused for claiming to offer meaning to individual lives and deaths whose meaning may seem insignificant from a scientific perspective. Even if science’s answer to the search for meaning is true, and if religion’s meaning is an illusion, many people will continue not to like science’s answer. If, on the other hand, much of the world remains mired in poverty, or if (worse yet) the world’s economy and living standards and peace deteriorate, then all functions of religion, perhaps even supernatural explanation, may undergo a resurgence. My children’s generation will experience the answers to these questions.

  CHAPTER 10

  Speaking in Many Tongues

  Multilingualism The world’s language total How languages evolve Geography of language diversity Traditional multilingualism Benefits of bilingualism Alzheimer’s disease Vanishing languages How languages disappear Are minority languages harmful? Why preserve languages? How can we protect languages?

  Multilingualism

  One evening, while I was spending a week at a mountain forest campsite with 20 New Guinea Highlanders, conversation around the campfire was going on simultaneously in several different local languages plus two lingua francas of Tok Pisin and Motu, as commonly happens when a group of New Guineans from different tribes happens to be gathered. I had already become accustomed to encountering a new language approximately every 10 or 20 miles as I walked or drove through the New Guinea Highlands. I had just come from the lowlands, where a New Guinea friend had told me how five different local languages were spoken within a few miles of his village, how he had picked up those five languages as a child just by playing with other children, and how he had learned three more languages after he began school. And so, out of curiosity that evening, I went around the campfire circle and asked each man to name each language that he “spoke,” i.e., knew well enough to converse in.

  Among those 20 New Guineans, the smallest number of languages that anyone spoke was 5. Several men spoke from 8 to 12 languages, and the champion was a man who spoke 15. Except for English, which New Guineans often learn at school by studying books, everyone had acquired all of his other languages socially without books. Just to anticipate your likely question—yes, those local languages enumerated that evening really were mutually unintelligible languages, not mere dialects. Some were tonal like Chinese, others were non-tonal, and they belonged to several different language families.

  In the United States, on the other hand, most native-born Americans are monolingual. Educated Europeans commonly know two or three languages, sometimes more, having learned in school the languages other than their mother tongue. The linguistic contrast between that New Guinea campfire and modern American or European experience illustrates widespread differences between language use in small-scale societies and in modern state societies—differences that will increase in coming decades. In our tradi
tional past, as is still true in modern New Guinea, each language had far fewer speakers than do the languages of modern states; probably a higher proportion of the population was multilingual; and second languages were learned socially beginning in childhood, rather than by formal study later in schools.

  Sadly, languages are now vanishing more rapidly than at any previous time in human history. If current trends continue, 95% of the languages handed down to us from the tens of thousands of years of history of behaviorally modern humans will be extinct or moribund by the year 2100. Half of our languages will actually have become extinct by then, most of the remainder will be dying languages spoken only by old people, and only a small minority will be “live” languages still being transmitted from parents to children. Languages are disappearing so rapidly (about one every nine days), and there are so few linguists studying them, that time is running out even to describe and record most languages before they disappear. Linguists face a race against time similar to that faced by biologists, now aware that most of the world’s plant and animal species are in danger of extinction and of disappearing even before they can be described. We do hear much anguished discussion about the accelerating disappearance of birds and frogs and other living species, as our Coca-Cola civilization spreads over the world. Much less attention has been paid to the disappearance of our languages, and to their essential role in the survival of those indigenous cultures. Each language is the vehicle for a unique way of thinking and talking, a unique literature, and a unique view of the world. Hence looming over us today is the tragedy of the impending loss of most of our cultural heritage, linked with the loss of most of our languages.

  Why are languages vanishing at such a catastrophic rate? Does it really matter? Is our current plethora of languages good or bad for the world as a whole, and for all those traditional societies still speaking languages now at risk of vanishing? Many of you readers may presently disagree with what I just said, about language loss being a tragedy. Perhaps you instead think that diverse languages promote civil war and impede education, that the world would be better off with far fewer languages, and that high language diversity is one of those features of the world of yesterday that we should be glad to be rid of—like chronic tribal warfare, infanticide, abandonment of the elderly, and frequent starvation.

  For each of us as individuals, does it do us good or harm to learn multiple languages? It certainly takes much time and effort to learn a language and become fluent in it; would we be better off devoting all that time and effort to learning more obviously useful skills? I think that the answers emerging to these questions about the value of traditional multilingualism, both to societies and to individuals, will intrigue you readers, as they intrigued me. Will this chapter convince you to bring up your next child to be bilingual, or will it instead convince you that the whole world should switch to speaking English as quickly as possible?

  The world’s language total

  Before we can tackle those big questions, let’s start with some preamble about how many languages still exist today, how they developed, and where in the world they are spoken. The known number of distinct languages still spoken or recently spoken in the modern world is around 7,000. That huge total may astonish many readers, because most of us could name only a few dozen languages, and the vast majority of languages are unfamiliar to us. Most languages are unwritten, spoken by few people, and spoken far from the industrial world. For example, all of Europe west of Russia has fewer than 100 native languages, but the African continent and the Indian subcontinent have over 1,000 native languages each, the African countries of Nigeria and Cameroon 527 and 286 languages respectively, and the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu (area less than 5,000 square miles) 110 languages. The world’s highest language diversity is on the island of New Guinea, with about 1,000 languages and an unknown but apparently large number of distinct language families crammed into an area only slightly larger than Texas.

  Of those 7,000 languages, 9 “giants,” each the primary language of 100 million or more people, account for over one-third of the world’s population. In undoubted first place is Mandarin, the primary language of at least 700 million Chinese, followed by Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese in approximately that sequence. If we relax our definition of “big languages” to mean the top 70 languages—i.e., the top 1% of all languages—then we have encompassed the primary languages of almost 80% of the world’s people.

  But most of the world’s languages are “little” languages with few speakers. If we divide the world’s nearly 7 billion people by 7,000 languages, we obtain 1 million people as the average number of speakers of a language. Because that average is distorted by the 100-million-plus speakers of just 9 giant languages, a better measure of a “typical” language is to talk about the “median” number of speakers—i.e., a language such that half of the world’s languages have more speakers, and the other half have fewer speakers. That median number is only a few thousand speakers. Hence half of the world’s languages have under a few thousand speakers, and lots of them have between only 60 and 200 speakers.

  But such discussions of numbers of languages, and numbers of language speakers, force us to confront the question that I anticipated in describing my New Guinea campfire language poll at the beginning of this chapter. What’s the difference between a distinct language and a mere dialect of another language? Speech differences between neighboring populations intergrade completely; neighbors may understand 100%, or 92%, or 75%, or 42%, or nothing at all of what each other says. The cut-off between language and dialect is often arbitrarily taken at 70% mutual intelligibility: if neighboring populations with different ways of speaking can understand over 70% of each other’s speech, then (by that definition) they’re considered just to speak different dialects of the same language, while they are considered as speaking different languages if they understand less than 70%.

  But even that simple, arbitrary, strictly linguistic definition of dialects and languages may encounter ambiguities when we try to apply it in practice. One practical difficulty is posed by dialect chains: in a string of neighboring villages ABCDEFGH, each village may understand both villages on either side, but villages A and H at opposite ends of the chain may not be able to understand each other at all. Another difficulty is that some pairs of speech communities are asymmetrical in their intelligibility: A can understand most of what B says, but B has difficulty understanding A. For instance, my Portuguese-speaking friends tell me that they can understand Spanish-speakers well, but my Spanish-speaking friends have more difficulty understanding Portuguese.

  Those are two types of problems in drawing a line between dialects and languages on strictly linguistic grounds. A bigger problem is that languages are defined as separate not just by linguistic differences, but also by political and self-defined ethnic differences. This fact is expressed in a joke that one often hears among linguists: “A language is a dialect backed up by its own army and navy.” For instance, Spanish and Italian might not pass the 70% test for being ranked as different languages rather than mere dialects: my Spanish and Italian friends tell me that they can understand most of what each other says, especially after a little practice. But, regardless of what a linguist applying this 70% test might say, every Spaniard and Italian, and everybody else, will unhesitatingly proclaim Spanish and Italian to be different languages—because they have had their own armies and navies, plus largely separate governments and school systems, for over a thousand years.

  Conversely, many European languages have strongly differentiated regional forms that the governments of their country emphatically consider mere dialects, even though speakers from the different regions can’t understand each other at all. My north German friends can’t make heads or tails of the talk of rural Bavarians, and my north Italian friends are equally at a loss in Sicily. But their national governments are adamant that those different regions should not have separate armies and navies,
and so their speech forms are labeled as dialects and don’t you dare mention a criterion of mutual intelligibility.

  Those regional differences within European countries were even greater 60 years ago, before television and internal migration began breaking down long-established “dialect” differences. For example, on my first visit to Britain in the year 1950, my parents took my sister Susan and me to visit family friends called the Grantham-Hills in their home in the small town of Beccles in East Anglia. While my parents and their friends were talking, my sister and I became bored with the adult conversation and went outside to walk around the charming old town center. After turning at several right angles that we neglected to count, we realized that we were lost, and we asked a man on the street for directions back to our friends’ house. It became obvious that the man didn’t understand our American accents, even when we spoke slowly and (we thought) distinctly. But he did recognize that we were children and lost, and he perked up when we repeated the words “Grantham-Hill, Grantham-Hill.” He responded with many sentences of directions, of which Susan and I couldn’t decipher a single word; we wouldn’t have guessed that he considered himself to be speaking English. Fortunately for us, he pointed in one direction, and we set off that way until we recognized a building near the Grantham-Hills’ house. Those former local “dialects” of Beccles and other English districts have been undergoing homogenization and shifts towards BBC English, as access to television has become universal in Britain in recent decades.