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

by Jared Diamond

  After 50 years of commuting between the U.S. and New Guinea, I’ve worked out my compromises and found my peace. Physically, I spend about 93% of my time in the U.S. and occasionally in other industrial countries, and about 7% of my time in New Guinea. Emotionally, I still spend much of my time and thoughts in New Guinea, even when I am physically in the U.S. New Guinea’s intensity would be hard to shake off even if I wanted to do so, which I don’t. Being in New Guinea is like seeing the world briefly in vivid colors, when by comparison the world elsewhere is gray.

  Advantages of the modern world

  Because most of the remainder of this chapter will be about features of traditional life from which we in the modern world can usefully learn, let’s begin by reminding ourselves of an obvious conclusion. Traditional life should not be romanticized: the modern world does offer huge advantages. It’s not the case that citizens of Westernized societies are fleeing in droves from steel tools, health, material comfort, and state-imposed peace, and are trying to return to an idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Instead, the overwhelming direction of change is that hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers who know their traditional lifestyle, but who also witness a Westernized lifestyle, are seeking to enter the modern world. Their reasons are compelling, and include such modern amenities as material goods that make life easier and more comfortable; opportunities for formal education and jobs; good health, effective medicines, doctors, and hospitals; personal security, less violence, and less danger from other people and from the environment; food security; much longer lives; and a much lower frequency of experiencing the deaths of one’s children (e.g., about two-thirds of traditional Fayu children died in childhood). Naturally, it is not true that every traditional village that modernizes, and every villager who moves to a city, succeed in obtaining these hoped-for advantages. But some do, and most villagers can see that other people enjoy these advantages, and many villagers aspire to them.

  For example, Aka Pygmy women interviewed by Bonnie Hewlett mentioned the following reasons for abandoning their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the forest to settle down as village farmers: material goods such as salt, pepper, palm oil, pots and pans, machetes, beds, and lanterns; good clothes and shoes; a healthier life; the opportunity to send one’s children to school; that it is easier to obtain plant food from fields than to gather it in the forest; and that it is easier and safer and faster to hunt animals with a gun than to make nets and extract kicking, biting, and slashing animals trapped in nets. Ache Indians interviewed by Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado named their motives for giving up life in the forest and moving to reservation settlements: to acquire a shotgun, a radio, and new clothes; to keep themselves and their children well fed and healthy; to live longer; and to have many children survive to become adults. Western material goods that my New Guinea friends value include, most notably, matches, steel axes, clothes, a soft bed, and an umbrella. (To understand the value of an umbrella, remember that rainfall in New Guinea ranges up to 500 inches per year or higher). New Guineans also value non-material benefits such as medical care, schooling for children, and the end of tribal warfare. Ishi, the Yahi Indian of Northern California who gave up his hunter-gatherer lifestyle around the age of 50 to spend his last years in San Francisco, initially admired matches and glue above all other European inventions, and with time also grew fond of houses, furniture, flush toilets, running water, electric lights, gas stoves, and railroad trains. Sabine Kuegler’s sister Judith, upon moving for a year from her family home in the New Guinea jungle to Germany, was astonished by all the different brands of chocolate bars available in a German supermarket.

  These are among the many obvious and concrete advantages of the Western lifestyle mentioned by people who have grown up among the insecurities, dangers, and discomforts of traditional societies. Other, subtler advantages are mentioned by educated New Guinea friends whose survival needs were already being met in their New Guinea village, and who admire other things about life in the United States. They cite access to information, access to a broad diversity of people, and more rights for women in the U.S. than in New Guinea. One New Guinea friend surprised me by telling me that what she most likes about life in the U.S. is its “anonymity.” She explained that anonymity means to her the freedom to step away from the social bonds that make life in New Guinea emotionally full, but also confining. To my friend, anonymity includes the freedom to be alone, to walk alone, to have privacy, to express oneself, to debate openly, to hold unconventional views, to be more immune to peer pressures, and not to have one’s every action scrutinized and discussed. It means the freedom to sit in a café on a crowded street and read a newspaper in peace, without being besieged by acquaintances asking for help with their problems. It means the freedom of Americans to advance themselves as individuals, with much less obligation to share their earnings with all their relatives than in New Guinea.

  Advantages of the traditional world

  Now, let’s hear the other side of the story. What do people who have lived both in traditional societies and in WEIRD societies value about the former and find missing in the latter?

  The most frequent and important observations involve life-long social bonds. Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions. In the smaller traditional societies (tribes and bands of just a few hundred people or fewer), no one is a stranger. While either girls or boys (in most traditional societies, girls) move from their natal group upon getting married, the move is usually over a sufficiently small distance that one can regularly visit one’s blood relatives.

  In contrast, the risk of loneliness is a chronic problem in populous industrial societies. The expression “feeling alone in a crowded room” isn’t just a literary phrase: it’s a basic reality for many Americans and Europeans living in large cities, and working among people whom they barely know. People in Western societies frequently move long distances, their children and friends also independently move long distances, and so one is likely to end up far from one’s closest relatives and childhood friends. Most people that one encounters are strangers and will remain strangers. Children routinely leave their parents’ house and set up their own household on marrying or becoming economically independent. As one American friend who spends much time in Africa summed it up, “Life in Africa is materially poor and socially/emotionally rich, while U.S. life is materially rich and socially/emotionally poor.” Other frequent observations are the greater time pressures, scheduling constraints, stress levels, and competitiveness in Western societies than in traditional societies. I emphasize once again that there are respects in which features of the traditional world persist in many parts of modern industrial societies, such as rural areas, where everyone knows everyone else and most people spend their lives near their birthplace.

  To put a personal face on these generalizations, I’ll quote some poignant observations by children of American businesspeople or missionaries who grew up in New Guinea, the Philippines, or Kenya and then moved to the United States as teen-agers and told me about their experiences:

  “American boys are macho, talk macho, and beat up other kids. Nice kids don’t do well in the U.S.”

  “After growing up with kids in New Guinea, the first thing that struck me as different about the U.S. was that kids go into their houses, close the doors, play video games, and leave their houses again to go to school. In New Guinea, we kids were constantly out of doors, playing with each other.”

  “African children are with people all of the time. We kids were indoors only to sleep. We could go into any house, knowing that we were welcome there. But American children are often not with other children. Nowadays, with the availability of video games, the problem of staying in your house by yourself is even worse in the U.S. than it was when I was growing up and there was only TV and no video games.”

  “Out in the Philippin
es, children call all adults ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle.’ We’re in and out of any house in the village. When it’s dinnertime, we eat in whoever’s house we happen to be in at that time, with other children.”

  “American children are less sociable than New Guinea children. In New Guinea, I’m used to smiling and saying hello to anyone that I pass, and to starting a conversation. But American children walk past each other or walk past strangers, don’t start a conversation, and don’t say hello. When I smile and say hello, then they respond, but they don’t initiate it themselves.”

  “In the U.S., people have to be entertained, and they don’t know how to entertain themselves.”

  “In Africa, if you need something, you make it for yourself, and as a result you know how it is put together and how it works. In the U.S., if you need something, you go buy it, and you don’t know how it is put together.”

  “American children have less creativity than New Guinea children, because everything is pre-packaged for them [Plates 17, 18]. In New Guinea, if you see an airplane and you want to have a model airplane, you make a model airplane yourself out of wood or out of sticks. You then play games with the airplane, making it swoop and making noises. My brother and I imitated the flight of an airplane in detail with our home-made airplanes. But American children just get their packaged toy airplanes and don’t imitate its flight in detail.”

  “In Africa you share things. For example, while I was in school, I acquired a red inner tube of a rubber tire. Rubber was valuable to make slingshots. For a long time, I shared pieces of my valuable red inner tube with other kids for them to make slingshots. But in the U.S., if you acquire something valuable, you keep it for yourself and you don’t share it. In addition, nobody in the U.S. would know what to do with an inner tube.”

  “The biggest adjustment I had to make on moving from New Guinea to the U.S. was my lack of freedom. Children have much more freedom in New Guinea. In the U.S. I was not allowed to climb trees. I was always climbing trees in New Guinea; I still like to climb trees. When my brother and I came back to California and moved into our house there, one of the first things we did was to climb a tree and build a tree house; other families thought that was weird. The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it’s not an ‘attractive nuisance.’ Most New Guineans don’t have pools, but even the rivers that we frequented didn’t have signs saying ‘Jump at your own risk,’ because it’s obvious. Why would I jump unless I’m prepared for the consequences? Responsibility in the U.S. has been taken from the person acting and has been placed on the owner of the land or the builder of the house. Most Americans want to blame someone other than themselves as much as possible. In New Guinea I was able to grow up, play creatively, and explore the outdoors and nature freely, with the obligatory element of risk, however well managed, that is absent from the average risk-averse American childhood. I had the richest upbringing possible, an upbringing inconceivable for Americans.”

  “A frustration here in the U.S. is the constant pressure to be working. If you’re sitting around enjoying a cup of coffee in the afternoon, you should feel guilty because it’s a wasted opportunity to be making money. But if you are one of those people that are making money instead of enjoying a cup of coffee, you don’t save that extra money you made, you just live a more expensive life so that you have to keep working more and more. The U.S. has lost its ability (for the most part) to find the balance between work and play or relaxation. In New Guinea, shops close down in the middle of the day and re-open in the late afternoon. That is extremely un-American.”

  “I was shocked at the lack of moral compass of my peers in the U.S. In a society as pluralistic as America, there can be little basis for standing on what you believe is true and right. In New Guinea, certainly truth is culturally interpreted and applied, but it is acknowledged as existing and being knowable.”

  “Kids here in the U.S., and perhaps Americans in general, are obsessed with goods. Upon our last return to California, we were impressed with the latest fads or ‘must-haves,’ in this case large flat-screen plasma TVs. What will it be six months from now?”

  “Everyone in the U.S. is in their own tight box. The African young people I knew were intensely interested in what went on in other parts of the world and were geographically literate. One of our pastimes was to quiz each other on the location of various countries, the names of world leaders, and of sports heroes. Of course they knew the names of Kenya’s national soccer champs and long-distance runners, but they were equally familiar with American, British, German, and Brazilian superstars. They had heard of the Lone Ranger, Wilt Chamberlain, and Muhammad Ali and were constantly asking me what life was like in the U.S. When I first arrived in the U.S., I expected to be asked about life in Africa but soon came to realize that very few people had much interest in anything other than what directly affected them on a day-to-day basis. Lifestyles, customs, and events elsewhere in the world were of minor interest, and I learned to stop talking about Africa. Many people in the U.S. have acquired a great many things, but they remain paupers so far as their knowledge and understanding of the rest of the world is concerned. They seem to be comfortably enclosed within their walls of carefully constructed, selective ignorance.”

  What can we learn?

  The world of yesterday shaped our genes, culture, and behavior for most of the history of behaviorally modern Homo sapiens, who arose between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. As deduced from the archaeological record, changes in lifestyle and in technology unfolded extremely slowly until they began to accelerate with the earliest origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. The oldest state governments arose, again in the Fertile Crescent, only around 5,400 years ago. That means that the ancestors of all of us alive today were still living in yesterday’s world until 11,000 years ago, and that the ancestors of many of us were still doing so much more recently. Direct contact with the outside world began only within recent generations in the most populous areas of New Guinea, and direct outside contact and state government still haven’t arrived for a few remaining groups in New Guinea and Amazonia.

  Of course, much of yesterday’s world is still with us today, even in the most densely populated areas of modern industrial societies. Life in sparsely populated rural areas of the Western world still preserves many aspects of traditional societies. Nevertheless, there are big differences between the traditional world and our modern WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) societies. Traditional peoples have been unconsciously executing thousands of experiments on how to operate a human society. We can’t repeat all those experiments intentionally under controlled conditions in order to see what happens. But we can still learn from what actually did happen.

  Some of what yesterday’s world teaches us is to be grateful for our modern societies, and not to bad-mouth them across the board. Almost all of us would say good riddance to chronic warfare, infanticide, and abandoning the elderly. We understand why small-scale societies often have to do those cruel things, or get trapped into doing them. Fortunately, though, with state governments we’re not necessarily trapped in war cycles, and with sedentary lifestyles and food surpluses we’re not forced to practise infanticide and abandonment of the elderly. We would also say good riddance to the strangling of widows, and to other cruelties that certain traditional societies practise as cultural idiosyncrasies, although nothing about their environment or subsistence forces them to do it.

  But there are other features of yesterday’s world that, instead of horrifying us, are likely to appeal to many readers of this book. Some of those features—such as not sprinkling salt on our food at the dinner table–are ones that we can easily incorporate into our individual lives, regardless of whether our whole society around us also adopts them. Other features that we admire will be harder for us to adopt individually if the society around us
doesn’t also change: it’s hard to raise our children like New Guinea children when all other children around them are being raised like modern American children. Still other decisions to adopt features of traditional societies require action by our society as a whole. Realizing that adopting admired features of yesterday’s world thus requires a mixture of individual decisions and societal decisions, what are some of the things that we can do?

  Diet and eating habits are an area in which there is a lot that we can do as individuals to help ourselves. Think again about the startling fact that virtually no traditional New Guineans die of stroke, diabetes, or heart attacks. That doesn’t mean that you have to resume tribal warfare and adopt a diet consisting 90% of sweet potatoes if you, too, want to avoid dying of those diseases. Instead, you can enjoy some of the world’ greatest cooking and live peacefully and avoid those diseases, by incorporating three enjoyable habits into your life: exercising; eating slowly and talking with friends while you eat, instead of gulping down your food by yourself; and selecting healthy foods like fresh fruits, vegetables, low-fat meat, fish, nuts, and cereals, while avoiding foods whose labels show that they’re high in salt, trans fats, and simple sugars. This is also an area where society (i.e., voters, government, and food manufacturers) can make things easier for us, by adopting healthier standards for processed foods, as Finland and other countries have been doing.

  Another thing that we can do individually or as couples, without waiting for society as a whole to change, is to raise our children bilingually or multilingually, like so many children in traditional societies. Many Americans could have done so but refrained, because they were told that hearing two languages would confuse children. We now know that, far from confusing children, it brings life-long benefits to their thinking, as well as enriching their lives. Many American couples know more than one language: each parent could speak a different language to their children and raise them as “crib bilinguals.” Immigrant couples could speak their native language to their children, instead of preventing their children from hearing the parents’ native language: the children will quickly pick up English from other children anyway. I say to all of us (myself included) who have struggled to learn languages in school or as adults, spending thousands of hours studying grammar books and memorizing vocabulary and listening to language tapes, and nevertheless ending up speaking with an accent and without fluency: you could have spared yourself all that effort, and ended up speaking fluently and without an accent, if your parents had raised you bilingually. We should think of this when we are figuring out how to raise our children and grandchildren.