This is point of inquiry from Monday, May 6th, 2013, on the show this week, Chris and Indra talked a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jared Diamond, about his new book, The World Until Yesterday. What can we learn from traditional societies? You can watch a video version of this episode by going to point of inquiry dot org.
Welcome to Point of inquiry.
I’m Chris Mooney point of inquiry is the radio show and podcast of the Center for Inquiry, a think tank advancing reason, science and secular values in public affairs. And at the grassroots.
And if you don’t already, please follow us on Twitter at point of inquiry and also on Facebook at slash point of inquiry. And this is a joint show cohosted by Indra and myself. And it’s a special occasion because we have a really amazing guest needs no introduction. Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel. He is a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he’s traveled extensively to New Guinea for much of his research and many of his observations there form the foundation for his new book, The World Until Yesterday What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies. And that’s the subject of our interview. So, Jared Diamond, welcome to Point of Inquiry.
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
We’re thrilled to have you on the show. And Chris and I both enjoyed reading your book, although each of us was interested in very different sections of it. So today our questions are going to cover a fairly broad range.
Right. So let’s let’s start with something basic. Just lay out some definitional things. Your book is about traditional small scale Hunter-Gatherer societies, and you say that’s been our dominant state until the last couple thousand years. But anthropologists have been studying those societies for a long time. Why why this book now? Can we take a better broad picture of it now than we could before maybe?
Sure. We’ve accumulated lots of knowledge about traditional societies within the last several decades. It was in the late 1950s, early 1960s, that the modern studies of the last surviving hunter gatherers had a serious scholarly level and really took off. Just as another example, the scholars went out to study traditional societies. Lots of them were young post-doctoral students who didn’t have children of their own. And eventually scholars will walk up to the fact that these studies of traditional societies didn’t pay much attention to children. And so it’s only within the last couple of decades that we’ve had studies of bringing up children in traditional societies. In short, we’ve got lots more information. And in my personal case, I can go to New Guinea for 50 years.
I find New Guinea fascinating. New Guinea has influenced my life. And that’s why I’m writing this book. Now.
So I was particularly interested in learning from traditional societies things that might inform our own choices about how we live in the modern world. As you point out in the book, throughout much of our evolution, we did exist under very different conditions, both socially and environmentally. So what would you say is the most important lesson for people to take away from your book that we can apply using traditional societies to our current lifestyle?
The most important lesson that people can take away from my book about what we can learn from traditional societies is to realize that there isn’t one. But there are lots of important lessons that we could take away because traditional societies face the same problems that modern societies do. That’s to say they have children, they bring up children. They have to deal with old people. They face dangers. They have religion. They want to stay healthy. And traditional societies are like thousands of different experiments in how to run a human society. They’re very different from us. Some of the things that they’ve come up with are things that we would never want to imitate, such as couple of New Guinea societies. I know where it’s customary that when a man dies, his widow calls upon her brothers to come strangle her. That’s not something that I recommend. But there were other things that traditional societies do do, such as bringing up children, which really influence how my wife and I brought up our own kids and which influenced my own attitude towards danger. Those are just a couple of examples.
Got it. So let’s turn to the part of the book and let’s just dove right in, that is drawn, I think clearly the most attention and also the most controversy. That’s that’s violence.
And you write that life is more dangerous. Intuitional societies, the death rates per capita are by percentage of the population are higher. And that’s because they’re fighting. You make it seem kind of constant and kind of brutal, including massacres and killing women and children.
So what why has this been so controversial?
I’m sure. Let me just begin by saying that that actually the part of the book, too, that that’s attracted the most attention is the discussions of bringing up children. Oh, really? Okay. What more discussion about child rearing, which isn’t terribly controversial, but you will see the significance and the human interest of bringing up child.
I guess I see controversy. I think it’s the most. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
But as far as violence is concerned, there’s been lots of studies by scholars of levels of violence in traditional societies. And it varies. They are peaceful. They are violent traditional societies, just as they are peaceful and violent. Modern societies. Switzerland hasn’t had a war in the last hundred forty years. Costa Rica hasn’t had a war for a long time.
And again, there are there are peaceful traditional societies. But on the average, there are now half a dozen studies that have survey the database of lots of traditional societies.
And on the average, the chance of someone meeting a violent death is higher in a traditional society than in a modern society with state government. It’s not because traditional people are evil or nasty euro, more murderous or more violent is that when you have a central government, the central government can not only declare war, but it can declare a peace and an armistice and enforce the armistice. Whereas when you have a traditional society without a centralized government and a peace agreement is reached, then a decent hotheads who are dissatisfied and they stop the war again and hard to restrain them. So although the death tolls, the body counts are much lower because there are far fewer people, you can’t kill 100000 people in one minute in a society composed 40 people. So, of course, the body counts lower. But the proportional death toll, the fraction of the population that meets a violent death is on the average, higher. And why is that controversial? For a couple of reasons. There are people who don’t like the conclusion. There are they would like to believe the traditional people are peaceful. Well, some of them are peaceful and some aren’t. And they vary. It’s also controversial because it’s not normal when an anthropologist goes out and studies a traditional society that the traditional people take them a war, not a way to watch how they kill the neighbors because they know that it’s disapproved of. So it’s not something that’s often observed. But nevertheless, the the evidence is overwhelming that the proportional death rates are up to 10 times higher in traditional societies than modern state level societies.
So are you saying that the scholars who still don’t I mean, I was Googling, you know, some people are criticizing this. I mean, are you saying that a lot of people don’t want to face this?
Yes, there are a lot of people who who don’t want to. Who don’t want, first of all, who don’t want to believe it. In some cases, for honest reasons. In other cases, they don’t want they either don’t want to believe it or they’ll say explicitly, this may be true. But if it’s true, we shouldn’t talk about it. And the reason, sadly, is. Good motives, but bad ways of carrying out those motives. There are there are plenty of people who were scholars who were concerned about the mistreatment of traditional people. And their concern is that if it comes out to traditional people, all violent, the tap will then be used as an excuse by some governments to dispossess the traditional people, Frogmore more of the land because they’re violent. Well, the real reason for not mistreating traditional people is an ethical reason that you shouldn’t mistreat any people. The reason is not that are supposedly peaceful because they’re not peaceful. And when the truth comes out that they’re not peaceful. If you said that we should treat them nicely because they’re peaceful and it comes out that they’re not peaceful. You’ve demolish the grounds for treating them well. And so that’s why while I share the goals of those who would like to see traditional people treated well, I think the policy is a terrible policy, because if you found an ethical motivation on a law or on a falsehood, the falsehood will eventually come out. And then undermines what you were asking for.
India is going to have a lot of questions. But let me just as one more on this head. How much of it’s about colonialism?
How much of it is about the fact that Europeans went around and they certainly interfered extensively in traditional societies? You know, obviously not recently as much, but certainly going back a couple hundreds of years. And people think that the legacy of that is kind of terrible. So this suggests something else, which is that things weren’t that great when they arrived.
Is that part of.
Well, the legacy of colonialism, you mean as regards violence specifically?
Well, just I think in general it’s sort of yeah, in general, both the legacy of colonialism, like the legacy of most large scale human enterprises, is a mixed legacy. On the one hand of colonialism in New Guinea, the first thing that the Australians did when they came into a previously on contact with the Earth, New Guinea is the end of tribal warfare and they ended cannibalism. One could argue about ending cannibalism, but I think it’s an unmitigated good that the end of tribal warfare on colonialism, at least in modern Australian New Guinea, involves bringing medical care and bringing education. That’s good. Much colonialism has been exploitative. Colonialism, British colonialism in India, Spanish closing colonialism in the new world is often criticized justly for for killing people in the case of Spanish new colonialism and for undermining traditional industries in India in the case of British colonialism in India. In short, it’s a mixed bag.
And if you want a simple answer to is colonialism good or bad? That’s like asking is marriage good or bad? These with the circumstances. OK.
Well, on that note, we want to remind our listeners that Gerard Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday, What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies, is available through our Web site. Point of inquiry, dot org. And I’d like to turn the conversation over to what you described as the most controversial part of the book, which is related to child rearing. And I have to say, it’s the part of the book that I found the most intriguing and at times fascinating and at times frustrating.
So I hope you don’t mind delving into that topic a little bit lively, slightly, especially as I’m the father of sons in their 20s. And so in a sense, I finished my early child rearing. But as anyone with children knows, parents of children and never through childhood. Yes.
Yeah. So it’s you know, you suggest that there are some things that we can learn from traditional societies with respect to cultural practices that are very controversial. So, for example, responding to a crying child, do we pick it up immediately? Do we make sure that it’s okay and let it cry itself out? And as you note, pediatricians and psychologists have given their expert recommendations over the decades and these recommendations have shifted dramatically. So what’s a young mother or father to do? Where do we turn for advice?
You know, you suggest that we can look at racial societies. But, you know, I think I think there’s also a question there of of how much more can we learn Fitial societies than we can from scientific studies?
OK. Interesting question from traditional societies. The studies of traditional societies are scientific studies. So really, your question is what can we learn from scientific studies of traditional societies that we can’t learn from other scientific studies? The cite, the so-called scientific studies on which the conclusions have been based. That one should or should not pick up a child when when when the child starts to cry.
This is not something that one would be permitted to do an experiment on. There certainly are not. UCLA professors who can go out and list one hundred subjects and 50 of them until the subjects. If your child starts crying, let them cry. Half an hour and others whose say if your child starts crying, come to the child immediately. So we are forced to resort to what we call natural experiments because it would be unethical to manipulate parenting. All we can do is to see what happens in societies that do or do not pick up their children quickly in small scale societies. The Hunter-Gatherer societies. It is routine among lots of these Hunter-Gatherer society that if a child, slight infant starts crying, you pick up the infant immediately. Scholars have gone out and live with pygmies and other traditional people. Note that a crying infant is picked up on the average within 10 seconds and often within three seconds. So the next question is, what does this mean? Does the child end up crying more or crying less? Again, there’s been scientific studies in these traditional societies where you pick up a child instantly. The infant spends about half as much total time crying as in a society where the infant is left to cry itself to sleep. And the reason is that while you may pick up the child more often, the child stops crying very quickly. Then the larger implication is that people who observe in traditional societies like me and scholars who observe them, we are always struck by the fact that the kids grow up precocious, least socially skilled, self-confident, without going through adolescent crises with a sense of security. Why do they have a sense of security? Well, it wouldn’t be fair to do the controlled experiments, but a speculation is that there are lots of things that go on in the society that make kids feel secure. And one of the things that makes them feel secure is getting immediately. If they start crying.
And you sort of have a similar, I think, controversial topic when you talk about breastfeeding. I don’t know if that’s something that you’ve had some pushback in, you know, from others about. But, you know, you talk about OnDemand breastfeeding, for example, in which the child is at the breast whenever the child wants to. And as you can imagine, this would be a really difficult thing for a woman who has to hold down a job to be able to do so.
In a sense, you know, when I first read that chapter, it made me feel guilty for not being able I don’t have any children, but if I did not, being able to provide that kind of care. And also frustrated because it seems to put us back into a time in which women are really relegated to just bear children and not really have another place in society. If if we have to have, you know, this kind of on demand, breastfeeding is that is the best for the baby.
Yeah. And what you raise that you raise and there is a completely valid point to NO2, important issue in understanding what one can learn from traditional societies, namely how well modern society is. Modern societies are very different from traditional societies. We can’t automatically transfer from a traditional society something that goes on the air into a modern society. And you’ve just given an excellent example. If you are a professional woman and you are trying the case in court, you would better not interrupt your speech to the jury in order to breastfeed your child on demand. There are things that work well in traditional societies that cannot be immediately transferred to a modern society. So we have to make compromises. My wife is a clinical psychologist. It was inappropriate for my wife to breastfeed on demand in front of her patients while she was she was breastfeeding. So one has to make compromises and adopt those things that fit into our society. But we can’t support things that don’t fit into our modern society.
Well, I think I want to move on at this point to one more topic that will be of particular interest to our listeners, and this is a fascinating part of the book for me, and that is religion.
So I guess I’ll start by letting you lay out. I guess you’d call it a functional approach to studying why religion exists. And you have this cool part about electric eels and why they’re able to shock people and how that or shock anything shock horses and stun them in the water. So and how that helps us understand why something like religion might exist.
Sure. What’s a why does religion exist? And let’s be clear here, if we are being listened to by a religious person who believes in a religion, to say to a religious person, why does religion exist?
It’s the stupidest question imaginable, because the person would ask you religion to exist. Because that’s true. Why do we even God? Because there really is God. And so, of course, we can believe in God.
But from another perspective, if and this is a perspective, in fact, that I introduced my book to get readers to engage with the question of the functions of religion. If one had any visitor to the Earth from the Andromeda Galaxy and the visitor from the galaxy comes to Earth and visit as one was with round space and seen billions of planets and lots of advanced creatures more advanced than humans, and then eventually comes to Earth, one of billions and billions of planets. And here are these strange creatures on Earth who have some strange practices and what are the things they have as they have this thing called human religion in which they believe that the universe was created for the benefit of them on their planet by a creature who resemble them. The visitor from the Andromeda Nebula knows that this is utter nonsense. But the visitor sees that almost all human societies have religion and the visitor knows that a practice like religion couldn’t persistent human societies unless it did some good lest, fulfill some function. So the visit asks, what are the functions of human religion? It’s in that spirit that my chapter on religion asks, Well, so why is it that virtually all human societies have invested so much in religion because of religion, didn’t bring benefits to society? Then, every now and then spontaneously, they would arise a society of atheists. And that’s the sort that society of atheists want to outcompete all those other societies with religion. If religion didn’t bring some benefits. So it’s in that spirit that my chapter on religion goes through. What? What are the functions? What are the benefits that human religion brings to society’s regard? Forgetting the possibility that might be true.
I’m getting a look from Chris that it’s my turn to ask a question. I was going to I suppose we should follow up on the religion question, but I think that one of the things that I’ve been also most, Vassili, about the book is sort of related to this ingroup outgroup. You know, people living among each other when they’re different. And of course, in traditional societies, as you suggest, there is a real kind of fear of the other in especially in societies that don’t do a lot of travel. People stay in their zones and they don’t really leave and they’re very much afraid of straight strangers. Well, you know, I grew up in Canada, and I have to admit that Canadians tend to define their culture in part by how it differs from that in the U.S., which in the grand scheme of things is very little. But one character doesn’t, I remember is that of the melting pot versus the mosaic. So in the U.S., immigrants are required to assimilate, learn English, etc., whereas in Canada we have what we like to call a mosaic. Immigrants are encouraged to retain their cultural heritage and language. It seems from your book that you suggest that this kind of mosaic viewpoint is is perhaps more beneficial in general for society. Is that an appropriate characterization?
I wouldn’t put it quite that way, but I would say some things related to that. The reality is that food throughout human history, we’ve had Mosaic’s, we’ve had nothing but those eggs until relatively recently. The first state government didn’t rise until about fifty five hundred years ago. And its state governments that impose one language and one culture on different peoples within their boundaries, within their empire. So humanity for six million years has been Mosaic’s, and it hasn’t done us any obvious harm. As an example of where Mosaic’s do us good. And this is Canadian example. The biggest single surprise that came up for me in writing my book was to learn of some recent studies in Canada in the past few years about the benefits of multilingualism. So when Canada, with its Mosaic’s, when you get multiple languages, people are likely to learn several languages and. A feared. Health problem of old age now was the old age mentioned, such as Alzheimer’s disease. People ask, what can I do to protect myself against Alzheimer’s disease? Should I play bridge? Should I play Sudoku? Should I take some pill? Well, there is no pill. There’s no evidence. Reduce Sudoku protects you against the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The only protection we know of was revealed by some recent studies in Toronto, which are the. The only protection is to be multilingual, multilingual people. Get on the average five years of protection against the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. If they’re going to get those symptoms at all. And the reason is, on reflection, the most the most constant exercise with human brain that one can have is shifting back and forth between languages. If you’re multilingual and you’re shifting between languages every time you speak or every time you hear someone, you have to ask yourself, what are the set of rules? Is that English rules? What was it? French rules that I’m using to interpret what I’m saying or or to interpret the sounds that are coming in. So language is the best exercise for the human brain, just as doing push ups and muscle machines are a good exercise for the shoulders. That’s why multilingualism or Mosaic Society brings these unexpected benefits, protections against the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
I was actually delighted to read about that work in part also because you talk about krib bilinguals. So infants who are spoken to in different languages from the mother and father are two different caregivers. And those are those infants also show even before they learn to speak. This positive effect in terms of their executive function or their ability to switch between tasks. So as a as a crib bilingual myself, I started to read that.
Yeah, it’s very interesting. For the first of all, so quick, bilinguals, as you say, is is a is an infant typically whose mother speaks one language and the father speaks another language. And so the infant from the beginning, he has both languages. The infant isn’t going to start speaking until maybe it’s eight eight months old or a year old. But even when the infant is just a few weeks old, you can test the infant’s reaction to Sands. And you can establish that the infant really does distinguish the sounds of two languages and that the infant develops improved cognitive skills of a particular type so-called executive function as a result of being equipped bilingual. When friends mind here at UCLA, fellow faculty members at UCLA, a couple of members, my department had babies within the last year and I remember one of them, a couple in which the man is English from the woman is Finnish. And they debated should should the wife speak Finnish to her baby? Well, in the United States, there’s widespread feeling that that just confuses the baby. But once once they read my book about the benefits of Krip Bilingualism, as my friend put it, my wife has become militantly. BI lingual with a deficit. My wife militantly now is speaking only Finnish to our infant in the crib, and I have another friend, the Czech American man married a Japanese Japanese woman in which the child is grown up. Bilingually having learned Japanese from the motherland and English from a father. I wish that I’d been brought up bilingual because I didn’t learn my first foreign language until I was 11 years old and was hard work. I could have done it without work if I had been raised by language.
Well, I’m going to swing back to religion, sieving, get one or two more questions in here.
What? What I found most, I guess I wasn’t expecting to find it in the religion chapter was you describe all these things at functions of religion. And one of them, you know, is to be is basically it can be used to justify violence and fighting and [Unrecognized] nationalism, dying, dying large groups together, but maybe against another group. But then you say that that’s not what it tends to be used for in these traditional societies, which you also then do describe. Another chapter we discussed already is violent. So it’s it seems like they’re not using their religion. Their religion seems more pared down and not tied to this group. Think. Am I getting that right?
You are getting it correct. Yes. On the one hand, as we discussed, the the average level of violence is, on the average, higher in traditional societies, that in societies with a centralized government. On the other hand, in societies with a centralized government, religion, at least in the past. Less so today, but still sometimes the case today. In the past, religion often played the played a role of justifying war against a neighboring people that had a different religion. And we know that some of the most ferocious fighting in the last 2000 years. Has been in the name of religion. The reason is that if you have a. Complex society. Popular society. Where you’re encountering strangers in order to have peace within your society. The government has to say has to make rules. Thou shalt thou shalt not kill. You shall not go because you’re not supposed to kill any stranger when you walk across the street, come across a stranger. But then what does the government do when the government wants to go to war after telling someone for 18 years, thou shalt not kill? And the answer is, well, that commandment about thou shall not kill applies to people with your own religion, but it doesn’t apply to those vile people with some other religion. And the government now commands you to kill those people with another religion. So that’s why religion, religions, organized religions within the last. About 5000 years have played this double edged, double faced Rove, on the one hand maintaining peace and forbidding killing within the society. But on the other hand, justifying killing towards a Abrams society.
Well, on that note, I’m afraid, very reluctantly, we need to let you go. So I’m sure you have provided a lot of fodder for our listeners and I’m sure that we’ve get a lot of comment on this show, which we look forward to. So, Jared Diamond, thank you very much for being on point of inquiry.
Yes. Thank you for your interest questions. It’s been a pleasure to talk. Thanks so much.
So, Indro, well, that that covered a lot of different things and they’re all sort of rolling around in my head.
I don’t even start, you know, in a way, I think it really kind of mirrors the density of this book. And of course, of all those other writings, I thought it was almost almost maybe laugh out loud. And I think in the beginning of the book, when he describes it as a short book about a few little things that yet it covers such a wide variety of topics, it could be used in warfare in traditional societies. That book is pretty big, at least, you know, defend yourself from bullets and arrows. Right. But, yeah, you know, I still feel, though, that we have a lot of unanswered questions, and I wish we had a chance to do part two.
What did you think?
Yeah, well, I’m I’m still I’m so surprised by the.
The discussion of religion on the point that I raise at the end, because I agree me, you’ve got these small tight-Knit societies, they’re afraid of outsiders.
And as he explains, they always seem to have something like religion in the sense of supernatural beliefs, and it’s filling a particular hole when they feel anxious. You know, so if you’re not sure how. I don’t know. Going out and hunting is going to go. Then you end up having a couple of superstitions, you know, where you make some sort of, quote, prayer or something, you know, to hope, to hope that it’ll go better and it helps soothe anxiety. So he says it’s Philip filling that function. But I’m just surprised that, you know, when when this group feels under threat, that it doesn’t end up binding them together. I guess it just it doesn’t it doesn’t fit what I’ve always thought. But that doesn’t mean I’m right. I’m just having trouble processing it.
Yeah. I mean, I think I like I am intrigued by his point that really it’s when a religion gets organized that it can be its most dangerous. I think a lot of people share that sentiment. And of course, organized religion often has very little to do with the tenets of that religion.
Right. So. Right. You know, love thy neighbor is not something that the Catholic Church seems to take literally at all times, given the way that it behaves. And a lot about the world right then.
Ocean, you know. Good.
Sorry. Yeah, but but, you know, I agree with you that often religion is a way in which we define our groups.
So by its very nature, it seems that it would provide a at least a mechanism by which you can define an out group that is worth fighting for or fighting against, I suppose.
Yeah. And he’s saying that that, you know, they’re fighting they’re fighting our groups, but some our religion doesn’t get wrapped up in it. So it’s almost as if this.
Older, let’s call it older or more basic kind of religion, is stripped of some of the things that make people most angry about it. And it just it certainly has, you know, supernatural beliefs that don’t, you know, that aren’t true. But it doesn’t seem like it’s getting getting caught up in the conflict. So that’s really an interesting take. And it’s not one that I’ve heard before.
And I think that there’s a possible confound here, though, of course, because, you know, an organized religion in which you can really fight a war implies a large population. And he’s talking about small tribes. And so maybe when small tribes live near each other, their religions actually aren’t that different. Right. You know, they probably have some similar influences. They you know, they might not be quite as different as, say, you know, large populations of countries, of people. So, you know, I don’t know I don’t know if what what he’s saying is that, you know, religion doesn’t become violent until it’s really quite well organized is true or it religion doesn’t really become violent until it really includes a very large population.
He also says or and we didn’t get to this, but he also says that in violence in traditional societies, one of the key features that you see, which is like something that we fortunately still see, if you look at like Rwanda and all the, you know, horrible massacres, as you see total dehumanization of the other side and basically describing them as less than human. They’re these beasts. They do these disgusting things. It’s good to kill them. So again.
But but religion in this account not getting wrapped up in that either.
And he does describe, you know, even in his interactions with the New Guineans in the book about how they really did see the other tribes as evil persons. I mean, he doesn’t you know, they don’t mince words about that. So, you know, I I’m still not convinced. And I think one of the things that kind of still frustrates me in general about this book is that you’re frustrated. And I think, you know, I’m really comfortable with this idea that I mean, I understand there are things we can learn from all aspects of the world. And traditional societies are one aspect of the world that can provide us with information. And I get that. But I also think that in our culture, especially in the U.S., we tend to have a glorification of what’s quote unquote natural or organic or, you know, coming from the society in which we evolved. And yet, you know, it’s only been in the last hundred years that science medicine has decreased the death rate and increased longevity and solved the vast majority of our problems. And, you know, given us the society that we live in today, we’ve we’ve the progress that we’ve made. So, you know, although I can see some benefit in looking at traditional societies, you know, I worry that how you know, how do we apply the science to that.
And that’s, I guess maybe where I need to learn more about how these anthropological studies are conducted and, you know, really to understand the science behind it, which I felt I didn’t get a lot of in the book. And maybe that was because he was trying to write to a more general audience.
But remember, he doesn’t sanitize the whole. I mean, not maybe in some areas, but the whole discussion of violence is one that is drawn this and this firestorm where all these all these, you know, sort of Rousso in people who want to think that traditional societies are more peaceful. And he he he’s not with them there. But it’s more you know, what I was struck by this didn’t come up in our conversation was the chapter on conflict resolution. Nonviolent conflict resolution, traditional societies where, you know, if you know, you get into a conflict with someone like a car accident and in our society, it’s completely, you know, the whole way of resolving it is legalistic. Who had fault? And what are they therefore penalized for? And what he explains is that in these conflicts, there’s much worse conflicts than that. You know, if somebody runs over your kid accidentally, he said they do it completely differently because because there is an acknowledgment that both sides are hurt. Both sides grieve. And both sides. Need to be whole again. So there’s an explicit attempt to address the emotional part of it to make sure that it doesn’t turn violent. Which we I mean, we don’t have and I agree with him, we don’t do that very well. And I think that these conflicts end up being sometimes pretty awful because of it. You know, marriage and divorce is another one that he talks about. So, yeah.
And I think I think part of my you know, my my my sense of frustration comes from the fact that and rightly so, he’s he’s not a person who likes to wrap things up with a neat, you know, here’s your take home message. And that’s you know, that’s fine. That’s actually how science works. You know, we we have a series of where we’re Okata with uncertainty and we try to gain information that way. But there were times definitely throughout the book where I felt a little uneasy by the undertone that, you know, here’s here’s some benefit of, say, this particular practice that applies to this traditional society. And, you know, maybe we should think about doing that in our modern world without really acknowledging that the modern world is really very, very different. And, you know, you’re doing some of these practices is not only impractical, but could have unintended consequences.
OK. But I like the crib bilingualism thing.
So I like that, too. Yeah, for sure. You know, he also he also backs up his career bilingualism with a study of bilingual children in use at UCLA. You know, he doesn’t simply say, look, the kids that grew up in these traditional societies don’t seem to have any problems. He comes back and says, and the proof of this being a good thing is that we conducted this study or they conducted the study at UCLA to show this effect.
Got it. Well, I think it’s I think it’s a fascinating book. I mean, as somebody who read Guns, Germs and Steel and thought it was the book and I know there’s a lot of people out of that experience. It’s it’s also just really cool to talk to Jared Diamond.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I just wish we could have done it for an extra hour.
All right. On that note. Yeah. Thank you for listening to this episode of Point of Inquiry to join the discussion about today’s show on the world until yesterday. Visit point of inquiry, dawg. You can also send questions and comments to feedback at point of inquiry, dot org on Twitter, at point of inquiry and on Facebook at slash point of inquiry.
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