villagefinance

The World Until Yesterday is interesting, but far less compelling than Diamond’s masterpiece, Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond’s goal is to learn lessons for our modern ways of being and interacting from “thousands of natural experiments in how to construct a human society”. These ‘natural experiments’ evolved in every corner of the globe before the rise of the first states about six thousand years ago. He calls these natural experiments ‘traditional’ societies.

Diamond’s focus is where his heart is – Papua New Guinea – and the book includes many personal stories. PNG includes many of the most traditional societies on earth. And modern human development there has been compressed into a shorter timeframe than almost anywhere else on earth, any time in history. Five years after the invention of electric light in America, limited colonization by the Germans began in 1884 in the northeast on the country. In the early 1930s airplane reconnaissance discovered nearly a million people living in highlands previously believed uninhabited, triggering a decade of ‘first contact’ encounters followed by trickles of missionaries, traders, teachers and government officials.

Diamond first visited PNG in the early 1960s, and has been returning ever since, giving him a front-row seat in an awe-inspiring and unimaginably complex historical and evolutionary process.

Guns, Germs and Steel was animated by a single compelling question, heard from a Papuan on a beach (“Why do you people have so much, and we have so little?”). The vector animating The World Until Yesterday is much more diffuse, and this is a problem. The book brings the best modern evidence and science to the nine topics it addresses, but these topics represent a small sub-set of the possibilities, and his inquiry into each is driven by a different vector, leaving the reader struggling to get a fix on the overall direction.

Having already asked “why do we modern-world people have so much, and why do you have so little”? Diamond might have tackled the natural follow-up question in this book: “how can you get what we have?” Unfortunately, he does not. His 4-stage framework for human development, which progresses from ‘bands’ to larger ‘tribes’, still-larger ‘chiefdoms’ and finally modern states, can’t answer this question.

Very few humans, including in PNG, now live in Diamond’s ‘traditional’ societies – instead they live in some sort of ‘transitional’ society on the path to modernization. They live – at least officially – in states. They may attend school for a few years. They live in monetizing economies, increasingly cook with store-bought oil and sugar, transfer money to their parents on mobile phones, and walk under power transmission wires to reach the inter-village market. But the chief and witch doctor hold as much – or more – sway in their lives as the state and the health clinic. They save in pre-cash stores of value, like chickens or gold. They may be more multi-lingual than their traditional ancestors, speaking several local languages as well as one or two national and international ones. And their lives are still defined by a drumbeat of food security priorities that often make schooling look decidedly more like indulgent consumption than serious investment.

These transitional worlds are also “natural experiments in how to conduct a human society”. They fuse traditional and modern cultures and ways of being. People and societies often move from traditional worlds to modern ones if they get a chance (few move the other way). But most have little choice but to stay put, surviving on the land as their ancestors did, and wrestling with the challenges that modernity throws at them.

In the process they are creating new memes that address all the trade-offs that Diamond discusses: what’s more important to me – expressing my individuality or complying with traditional expectations about how I behave – or can I have both together? Using my time productively or maintaining social relationships – or can I have both together? Cultivating my spiritual traditions or abandoning them for modern religion – or can I have both together? Defending traditional (communal) property rights or accepting modern (individual, scientific) revisions to tradition? Learning to read a modern language with a mushrooming smattering of expressions in text, or learning to speak more local languages with virtually no text at all (except a dictionary and a Bible)?

We should find all of this familiar. In America and Europe we endlessly debate the visibility of Christmas in the public square (a traditional way of being for us) and have struggled for centuries with trade-offs between traditional role expectations and human rights. And we are faced with similar challenges all the time in the modern world, embroiled in technological and social transformations. Modern culture is quite different. Relatively speaking, it values social relationships less than using time productively, and Christianity has become our spiritual ‘tradition’, which we are tempted to replace with modern (non-)religions like atheism. In our post-literate culture we struggle with the amount of time and investment we devote to the internet. Compared to people in traditional societies, we have far more resources at our disposal to leave traditions behind us, yet seem to cling to them with an innately human ferocity.

Papuans have given up more traditional expectations, and created more new balancing points for themselves, in the past century than most modern societies have done in five centuries. Diamond has been criticised for investing too much admiration in the traditional, but this criticism is misplaced. He admires the stoic and cheerful Papuan adaptation to global norms. It will take a different book to systematically categorize the challenges and opportunities, for local and modern cultures as they encounter one another, that can ease and accelerate that adaptation.