BOOK REVIEW & DISCUSSION The World Until Yesterday

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The topic is the book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond. It's largely exactly what it says on the tin, what we can learn about human societies following the pre-historical, pre-agricultural lifestyles, and is a mix of Diamond's observations, opinions, and some scientific data.

Roughly speaking, it's divided into the following sections:

1) Territory, enemies, and allies
2) Peace, war, and other conflict
3) Treatment of the young and old
4) Danger and response to it
5) Religion, language and health

When discussing part of the book it might be helpful to specify which part you're discussing, as quite a range of things are covered.

More in a bit, unless someone else wants to start the discussion.

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Diamond discusses the possible uses of religion, and asks why religions exist. Religions typically require an outlay of time and resources from followers, resources that could be used for other purposes, particularly in marginal situations. Yet religion seems a near universal? Why? Wouldn't an atheist society have more sources to devote to survival and therefore do better than a highly religious society? Yet atheist societies do not seem to be found in hunter-gatherer, tribal, or chiefdom type societies.

He proposes that belief in the supernatural might have been a side effect of sorts arising from our pattern-identification abilities. The same mental skills that enabled our ancestors to track prey animals by footprints and other subtle signs, identify and remember the locations of many edible plants, and create stone tools from raw rock might have lead us to try to discover or create explanations for things otherwise inexplicable. It sounds as plausible as anything else I've heard proposed for an origin of religion, and more so than some theories. So belief in the supernatural would be not so much a malfunction or sign of mental disorder as a just an unintended effect of something else, just as certain optical illusions are not a sign of disease or malfunction but just due to how our visual processes work and can be "tricked".

I do think he spends a little too much time and effort trying not to offend the religious. Strictly my opinion, of course, but those determined to be offended will be no matter what he says.

Anyhow, he proposes seven "functions" of religion, and that those functions vary with the size of the society. Initially, among small hunter-gatherers and tribes, religion's primary functions are to provide an explanation for various uncontrollable natural phenomena (nowadays explained by science, even for many religious people) and defusing anxiety through ritual. The latter is basically giving people something to do when they have no control over a situation and it certainly can be comforting and reduce anxiety. I've encountered people who are largely a-religious who nonetheless find some comfort in religious rituals in times of grief or stress. Arguably, for hunter-gather's with no tech higher than knapped flint these are actually pretty useful functions, allowing them to make sense of an inexplicable world and providing comfort/reducing anxiety through the illusion that the rituals provide some control or do something useful. This latter function ties in with what I've been saying for year, that religion serves emotional needs that logic and reason do not.

A somewhat related function is providing comfort in regards to pain, suffering, and death. A lot of people find the notion of a pleasant afterlife comforting, and why wouldn't they? Of course, afterlives aren't always happy, even among pre-Christian religions, but the notion that death is not the end is reassuring to a lot of people, the notion that suffering might serve some purposes or have some rewards is likewise comforting. Again, serving emotional needs that reason and logic do not. Diamond, however, thinks that this function is either minor or absent in earlier forms of religion, which would be consistent from what I've learned of pre-Christian religions via myth. The afterlife of people like the Norse (from whom we get the word "hell"), the ancient Greeks, and various Middle-Eastern peoples wasn't really happy - often, it was pretty crappy for all but the very highest elite. For example, among the Norse only heroes fallen in war went to Valhalla and endless feasting and fighting - everyone else went to live with Hel as shades existing darkness, no sign of feasting, and at best could be described as "boring" and might well be worse than that. One of the appeals of early Christianity is that EVERYBODY had a chance to go to the Happy Place after death.

Function number four is organizing society, a function now becoming much more secular but there's no denying religion can certainly organize and motivate people to act on behalf of the group as a whole.

Number five is political obedience, seen most strongly when church and state are one and pretty much absent on the H&G and small tribe level

Numbers six and seven are sort of related in a yin-yang way - religion providing a moral code/ethics on how to treat strangers as well as serving as justifications for war.

Now, we can certainly debate the validity of Diamonds (and anyone else's) proposed functions of religion, but a system that provides explanations, reduces stress/anxiety, provides emotional comfort, organizes a society, encourage obedience to the whole, and provides behavior codes, even one that eats up resources, provides some explanation as to why religious society seem so very much more common than atheist societies up until the point when science started taking over the explanation role, we gained more control over our environment and lives due to advancing technology, started organizing with secular institutions, and developed behavioral codes unrelated to sky pixies. Following Diamond's line of reasoning, it's because of science, technology, and greater control over our lives that at least the Western world has become less religious recently, because religion isn't as needed in those areas.

I think it's also interesting, if one is to speculate on the what will happen to religion in the future, that it may continue to play some role anxiety reduction and emotional comfort, although there probably are non-religious means to achieve similar ends and those may become more prominent. Again, following his line of reasoning religion may continue to diminish in importance over time though it may not entirely fade. It is not necessarily a sign of mental illness or delusional thinking but perhaps more akin to an appendix or a genetic resistance to intestinal parasites - something much more useful in our evolutionary past but not so much so in the modern world.

[Broomstick]

Another area Diamond discusses falls loosely under territory, enemies, and allies. He asserts that, prior to the modern (meaning post-writing/post-agriculture, for the most part) people lived in very small groups and would have found it dangerous to the point of suicidal to travel very far from home. He, of course, provides numerous examples.

So much for Jean M Auel's Earth's Children series... not that anyone ever took that series terribly seriously but it was a major premise of the entire run of books that people traveled long distances through many tribal territories.

Anyhow, while his statements in regards to this topic make sense and his examples are convincing he doesn't present anything to explain how people might have moved from small groups/tribes enmeshed in a web of shifting alliances and war with their neighbors to chiefdoms having, essentially, foreign relations with other chiefdoms and more complex forms of social organization.

I also question just how universal this situation was. Although he does provide examples from other parts of the world the majority of his examples are drawn from the New Guinea highlands, still in the neolithic until the 20th Century with first contacts taking place between the two world wars. It was both densely populated for the tech level and extremely isolated. I'm not sure it translates completely to other parts of the world with sharply different conditions. I don't doubt that conflicts occurred between hunter-gather bands and for the reasons he gives (control of resources, stealing women, etc.) but I have to wonder if he gives too much weight to the violence side of things. He himself gives examples of one group giving passage to another to exploit super-abundant resources (usually with some understanding of reciprocation down the line), and reports that the New Guineans themselves weren't happy with the violence level, proven by the willingness of the tribes to give up their constant raiding and warfare with only minimal prompting by colonial/government authorities. The surviving examples of stone-tech hunter-gatherers or low-level agriculturalists we have are either thinly dispersed over highly marginal environments (the Kalahari, the high arctic, etc.) or very densely populated while very isolated populations (New Guinea highlands, some other Pacific islands). We don't have hard data on such cultures while less densely populated but in resource rich areas though we're pretty sure they existed in the Pacific Northwest in North America and in the Jomon people of Japan, both locations so resource rich that hunter-gatherers were able to adopted permanent residences, develop chiefdoms, and proto-states. We don't know how much of the violence in the New Guinea Highlands is driven by population and resource pressures vs. conflict inevitable between human groups.

Nonetheless, there is food for though here, especially in regards to how relationships change between those perceived and in-group and out-group, how strangers are coped with, and the relationships of current nation-states between each other which have some parallels with HG bands and small tribes.