The World Until Yesterday

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.

Besides multilingualism, child-rearing by traditional societies offers many other model options from which we can choose. All prospective parents should ask themselves which of the following options make sense for them: a period of on-demand nursing insofar as it’s practical, late weaning, maintaining physical contact between the infant and some adult, co-sleeping (get a firm mattress or a crib in your bedroom, and discuss it with your pediatrician!), transporting infants vertically and facing forwards, much allo-parenting, responding quickly to a child’s crying, avoiding physical punishment, giving your child freedom to explore (appropriately monitored!), multi-age playgroups (valuable for both the younger and the older children), and helping your kids learn to entertain themselves rather than stifling them with manufactured “educational toys” and video games and other pre-packaged entertainment. You may find individual adoption of some of these measures difficult if your neighborhood or local society as a whole doesn’t change: when all of the kids on the block have video games and only your house doesn’t, you may find your children wanting to spend all their time in other kids’ homes. But it’s worth thinking seriously about these choices: the independence, security, and social maturity of children in traditional societies impress all visitors who have come to know them.

Still another thing that we can do individually is to assess realistically the dangers inherent in our lifestyles, and to adopt New Guinea–style constructive paranoia selectively. My New Guinea friends figured out not to sleep underneath dead trees in the jungle, and to pay attention to seemingly innocent-looking broken sticks in the ground—even though the odds are that they could sleep for dozens of nights under a dead tree and ignore dozens of seemingly innocuous sticks without getting into trouble. But they know that, if they adopt those incautious practices hundreds of times, the odds will eventually catch up with them. For most of us Westerners, life’s major hazards aren’t dead trees or sticks in the ground, but they also aren’t terrorists, nuclear reactors, plane crashes, and the other spectacular but realistically insignificant hazards that we obsess about. Instead, accident statistics show that most of us should be constructively paranoid about cars (driven by ourselves or by other people), alcohol (consumed by ourselves or by other people), and (especially as we get older) stepladders and slipping in showers. For each of us, there are some other risks that we should also be thinking about, depending on our particular individual lifestyle.

Our religion (or lack of religion) is yet another choice that we make as individuals. Many of us go through difficult periods of life when we re-assess our religious beliefs. At such times, it’s worth remembering that our choice of religion is a broader and more complex matter than just adopting metaphysical beliefs that we’ve decided are true, or rejecting beliefs that we’ve decided are false. As I write these lines, I’m reflecting on the different choices made by three friends whom I’ve known for decades: one, a life-long Unitarian for whom her church has been a central focus of her life; the second, a life-long Jew for whom his religion and his wrestling with his relationship to Israel have been a core of his identity; and the third, a German friend raised a Catholic, living in an overwhelmingly Catholic area of Germany, who recently astonished me by converting at age 40 to Protestantism. In all three cases, my friends’ decisions to maintain or to change their religion have depended on roles of religion other than as a source of beliefs. Those various roles have waxed and waned at different times for my friends through their lifetimes, just as they have waxed and waned in different historical periods for societies over the millennia. The roles include the search for satisfying explanations of ultimate questions about the physical world; dealing with