The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

Bottom Line First: Jared Diamond’s The World Before Yesterday is Ok. Diamond struck gold with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Editionwhich was better than his Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies] but here he has lost his mojo.
The World Before Yesterday may pass as a backup read to go with a better undergraduate text in a real anthropology class or as a discussion starter for non-anthropologists but otherwise I am not sure who is the best audience for this book. Diamond makes a few good points, especially towards the end when he discusses how we in the modern or as he phases it the WIERD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) world might improve our diet to avoid modern world non-contagious diseases like hypertension and diabetes. Otherwise this is a collection of more or less well documented observations about how he thinks human society used to work before the centralized state.

It is good to know that in the WEIRD world we are less likely to kill each other, no matter how industrialized and deadly modern warfare has become. Then again he was writing without considering the new cycles of killing in modern killing growing from the asymmetric warfare based on revenge killing motivated by religious hatreds. A failing in this regard is a failing to redo some of his observations by cross tabbing analysis between societies given to ancient cycles of warfare and ancient attitudes towards strangers and traders.

A personal measure of my reaction to Yesterday is the fact that I had originally read it when it was first published about 5 years ago. I hat entirely forgotten reading it and was well into re reading it when I remembered anything from the first read. That is it is mostly a forgettable book.

His advice about adopting the Paleolithic diet or the Mediterranean diet or at least the Italian habit of eating slowly may still have the support of qualified medical opinion, but as a taint of food fad about it. Certainly it is no long out of the box thinking that in the modern diet we eat too much sugar and too much processed food. Though in the case of processed food, we may just need a better set of definitions. In the case of so called organic food, a term Diamond wisely avoids, one cannot be certain what it means other than expensive.

Against the criticism from the world of anthropology that Diamond gives too much weight to differences in climate. Diamond’s argument reads like the same economics argued by the folks behind Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Look at the win loss analysis for a given type of cultural response and that is how that culture will develop, Diamond argues the math behind the cultivation of widely separate plots of land against eh obvious efficiency of working one large plot. The inefficient scattered plots pay off better in the case of crop failure and so that strategy wins.

I do not dislike The World Before Yesterday, much of Diamonds thoughts are well argued. Mostly it lacks the clarity of purpose in the two earlier works. For all of its deliberate organization and systematic class room lecture style, it rambles and seems to be at cross purposes. Pre-state subsistence societies do have something to teach modern societies. Humans can learn from predator animals and flowering plants and the stars in the sky and from almost anything. I am not sure I can recommend all of those implied books or get too excited about this one.

The thesis of this book is that civilization has happened faster than we think, in just a few thousand years, and that we are not as distant from our forefathers of the savannah as we may think. Diamond is an excellent writer who tackles big subjects and makes them clear and interesting to the general reader. "The World Until Yesterday" was not as surprising to me as "Guns, Germs and Steel" (which I also recommend) but is still an excellent book.

Jared Diamond's argument, there exist unsuitable things to the distinctive feature of human beings in our Weird (Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) societies, is clear and quite to the point. He says many small-scale societies possess some features that we could profitably incorporate into our state societies. What and how we left behind in the process of civilization.

New Guinean's remarks that they don't just go and visit someone without a purpose make me think of their harsh reality. We easily think we've acquired a relationship or friendship with someone we've just met and spent days with. This is most unlikely in the society where peace and safety is not fully assured. Blunting sensibility to danger may make us exposed in peril easily. Diamond alleges genes relate to the two big issues of adult diseases, hypertension and Type-2 diabetes, must have been advantageous to us under conditions of traditional lifestyles, but that have become lethal under conditions of the Westernized lifestyle.

Bodily punishment and bullying at school become the greatest problems in Japan. Most hunter-gatherer bands do minimal physical punishment of young children, Diamond says, while many farming societies do some punishment, and herders are especially likely to punish. It is said to be rare for hunter-gatherer games to keep score or identify a winner, whereas many Western games involve keeping score and are about winning and losing.

Bilingualism, common in the traditional societies, has advantages in solving problems in the constantly changing world with confusing information. He asserts bilingualism itself protects against Alzheimer's symptom. Modern industrial societies hasn't developed superior approaches to problems we face now. We could find some useful ideas from the huge range of traditional human experience.

This is not the best book by JD. Even it could be said that it is the worst. Too much known materiel...Too much of the same stuff, exception made here and there. Bland advice about life in modern societies taking into account tribal costumes. Etc. Nevertheless, the book can be read and even finished in part, in my case, for the sympathy I have for a writer that produced so many good books before and in part waiting the stellar part -that never comes- where the book will be redeemed. What we can learn is about writers that get tired and begins to plagiarize themselves.