The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond (2)

The central premise of this book is simple - there are tribal societies remaining in the world today that are similar to the way people lived before the rise of states (approximately) 11,000 years ago. We can learn lessons from these tribal societies that will help us live more successful, safer, longer and happier lives. So far so good - it would be surprising if we could not learn anything, even if to just thank our lucky stars we live in a world of antibiotics and flush toilets. But is what we learn original or useful? At two thirds of the way through the book (450+ pages plus notes) I have to say the jury is still out.

One of the reasons I enjoy books of this kind is that every few pages I read something that not only did I not know before, and that I find interesting, but that also makes me want to go off and read something else. A good example is Diamond's account of war in tribal society. Diamond argues that these "wars" (and the appropriateness of the term in the first place is unconvincing) are more lethal per head of the population per year than modern society. His manipulation of statistics to make this point creaks alarmingly, and the case is unconvincing. Which is a pity, because the underlying point - that life in modern society is a lot less violent that earlier forms of society - is demonstrably the case. For me, tribal war contains a lot of "theatre", posturing and demonstrating that you would not find in modern war. Even if we wanted to replicate this behaviour at a state level (as opposed to for example in the way gangs resolve their differences, which is much closer parallel) we could not. But the chapters on this topic still inspired me to read more on the tribal forms of warfare, and summaries of Steven Pinker's book on the changing prominence of violence in society.

Tribal people resolve their disputes in ways that "us moderns" (as Diamond telling puts it on page 348 of the Penguin edition) could learn from, but only by some very careful cherry-picking - circumstances force tribal people to look at conflicts in a very different way from complex societies with all their apparatus of judges, police, lawyers etc. Most of these techniques can be summarised as ways of avoiding the other chap killing you, usually by running away or killing him first. Imperfect though our dispute resolution (and avoidance) processes are, I think I prefer them to that.

If you hadn't read this book and asked yourself what aspects of tribal culture could tell us about our behaviour towards the elderly, I suspect you would attempt something about respect for their wisdom and knowledge and the tendency in the first world to consign the old to homes and then avoid visiting them. But that would be both wrong and to miss the point. Wrong, because although these things do happen from time to time, generally older people have fantastic life compared to even one or two generations earlier. They also wield considerable influence - for example the average age of Presidents of the USA on taking office is 54, not old in our terms I appreciate, but not young either. But the real point is that what we mean by old is completely different from how a tribal person would use the term. Obviously there are exceptions, but life expectancy in tribal society is around 40, almost half that of the West. Life expectancy in the West is increasing year on year, and accelerating. 54 for a tribesperson wouldn't be unheard of, but it would undoubtedly be very old. In any event, there is no commonality between the way old people are treated in tribal society, ranging as it does from virtual gerontocracies to active killing of the old, so we can pick and choose what version we want to learn from. It was in this discussion that I expected Diamond to return to "widow strangling", and indeed he did, in a section of the murder or killing by neglect of old people as a form of ensuring others do not die of starvation, very much in the same manner as infanticide is (he claims) widespread in tribal society. But there is very little additional commentary, just a reassertion that it was widespread until the 1950's, with one supporting quote from Jane Goodall. I remain unconvinced that the active co-operation of the widows was as simple or common as he suggests.

Care of the young is another unsatisfying chapter. Just as with the old, children are cared for in a very wide range of ways, across the whole spectrum from swaddling for months at a time to letting them wander completely unsupervised, taking alarming risks without the capacity to learn from experiences. It is not surprising that we see children in a different light from tribal societies; our conception of what defines childhood is not fixed and changing every generation (compare the 19th century approach to childhood that had no problem is sending working class children up chimneys or down mines with the differing approaches to childcare adopted today). Can a comparison with tribal societies teach us anything about how better to raise children? If we can Diamond doesn't present this convincingly.

Finally, thus far, there is a chapter on what Diamond terms "constructive paranoia". He doesn't define this term clearly, but it seems to mean little more than being careful with every day activities such as crossing the road. There is a strong hint in a reference to how his meticulous approach to every day life infuriates his friends and family that this is a personal issue, if not crusade, for him. The examples he provides where being careful was important are not very useful, to say the least, unless you habitually trek in virgin jungle. There are definitely different ways of looking at risk and probability, and I agree that we are unable to process these issues sensibly in the West (if we could we would never buy a lottery ticket). Nonetheless this felt like a frustratingly incomplete consideration of the psychology of risk.

Overall there is more than enough interesting content here to keep me reading, even if the overriding argument is far weaker than this book's predecessor.

Hamlet and The Lion King

I think it is widely accepted that the scriptwriters for the Lion King took some inspiration from Hamlet. The parallels don't run very deep, but in thinking about this I wondered whether the film provides any new ways of thinking about the play. New ways of thinking about Hamlet are pretty unlikely of course, but then again the world of Shakespearean scholarship traditionally draws little or no inspiration from Disney.

Apologies for the spoilers, but you will recall that in the film, Scar/Claudius kills Muphasa/King Hamlet, and tries, ultimately unsuccessfully, to kill Simba/Prince Hamlet at the same time. The question this suggested to me is why doesn't Claudius do the same? Granted he tries, eventually successfully, to kill Hamlet, but there is no suggestion in the opening scenes of the play that Hamlet feels his life is under imminent threat, even when he learns of his father's murder. So why didn't Claudius move swiftly to eliminate his only serious opponent for the throne of Denmark? Clearly he does not see Hamlet as an immediate threat. Hamlet is away studying in Germany when his father dies, and when he returns to the funeral Claudius has already taken steps to secure the throne. He has had himself crowned and just as importantly married Gertrude, quickly consolidating his position. Hamlet has a natural claim to the throne as the late king's only son, and although he is still a student he appears in his mid to late twenties, and is certainly old enough to take the crown.

The constitution of 13th Century Denmark is not, surprisingly, discussed in the play, and the audience is pitched into the middle of the action, so there is little time to consider the rights and wrongs of Claudius' "coup" before the ghost appears. Hamlet's distress is focused on his mother's rapid marriage to his uncle, rather than his uncle's assumption of power. So this question - why is Claudius king not Hamlet, and how long will that last before awkward questions begin to be posed - is not one that occurs to the audience.

Having concluded he represents no immediate threat, Claudius must have considered the risk of Hamlet at some point making a claim for the throne, gathering support at court and waiting for his moment. Claudius takes steps to kill Hamlet, but only once his erratic behaviour makes him fear for his own life (as opposed to his own position) and once the Mousetrap reveals that he is aware of the true cause of the old King's death. Hamlet is an inconvenience to be disposed of rather than a serious threat, and Claudius can take his time in dealing with him. Scar has no such luxury, which is in fact much closer to the reality of the natural world, where a male lion taking control of a pride will kill the cubs of the previous king of the pride.

Simply cutting Hamlet down where he stands isn't really an option for Claudius, but once the scale of the threat becomes apparent he acts quickly to dispose of the prince. So perhaps the parallels with scar are closer than they first appear.

One other issue not addressed in the play, nor indeed the film, but are suggested by the turn of events, is whether Gertrude was part of the plot to kill King Hamlet, and/or whether her relationship with Claudius pre-dates the murder. Her marriage to Claudius is unprecedentedly rapid, and suggests some kind of prior arrangement or involvement. She is not as disturbed as Claudius by the scenes in the Mousetrap, and seems genuinely puzzled by Hamlet's "madness" - the idea to call in Rosencrantz and Guildernstern to try to get to the bottom of Hamlet's melancholy is presumably hers. There's no suggestion she is complicit in the plan to kill Prince Hamlet. So she is not a convincing candidate for accomplice to murder. But she wouldn't be the first queen to stray into a brother in laws bed.

The World Until Yesterday - Jared Diamond

I reviewed Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" last year and it is fair to say it made a significant impression on me. Readable but serious, refusing to duck some really challenging issues, I still find myself referring to some of the ideas and stories set out in this book. Guns Germs and Steel tried to answer the question why Western European countries were able to colonize large areas of the globe in the second millennium AD, and why other advanced civilisations were almost powerless to resist in the face of Western weaponry, bacteria, and technology. While I found many of the arguments in GG&S compelling, there were some sections that asked more questions than they answered. That's a good thing of course; anything that gets me reading more is to be welcomed. No academic book with such a broad and controversial range of subjects can hope to tie down every issue. So the end of the Easter Island civilisation, the Viking settlements in Greenland, and the future of Australia were all subjects which I read further on and on which I retain an open mind.

Diamond's overall thesis however was one which I found compelling, with one caveat. He argues Western dominance arose from our Guns Germs and Steel, but the development of these stemmed from an early move to city states, which in turn was caused by early advances in agriculture and domestication of livestock. He traces this to the fertile crescent in the middle east, a region that is now largely arid, and certainly not the home of super-powers. Is it simply that early civilisation arose here and spread to Europe where it took root and developed the ability to spread across the globe?

The World Until Yesterday is a natural sequel to GGS and opens with the observation that traditional hunter gatherer societies, where we lived in bands of at most a few thousand people, was an almost universal experience until relatively recently - in some case in the last few decades. He uses some striking images to make his point - for example in the introduction he surveys Port Moresby airport, and is struck by how much the Papuan New Guinean people have changed since first contact with westerners less than 100 years ago.

Diamond knows he is going to be taken on by many critical fellow academics, and in traditional style get his retaliation in first. He explains the terms he uses with care, and makes clear that generalisations can always be unpicked with individual exceptions, but still have value. He uses a measured, academic tone, writing more like a professor for a journal than a popular science writer writing for the mass market. This is not an academic paper of course ,footnotes aren't used, not every source is identified, and there is more personal anecdote than you would usually find, but it is written to appear as such. Certainly it is carefully researched and referenced compared to many other popular science books.

This is necessary - Diamond makes claims about traditional cultures and their practices which could easily been seen as being made from a colonialist, first world perspective that fails to understand the cultural differences between the West and the traditional societies he writes about. Survival International, a group campaigning on behalf of tribal peoples http://www.survivalinternational.org/ launched a strong attack on this book when it was first published in hardback, claiming that Diamond patronises tribal peoples by saying they represent life as it was once lived by westerners, ignores the impact of the west on these peoples, and manipulating statistics to show they are more violent than the West. The full case for the prosecution can be found here http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/30/savaging-primitives-why-jared-diamond-s-the-world-until-yesterday-is-completely-wrong.html

However aware Diamond is of the risk of sensationalism, he cannot avoid it completely. An example of this that jumped out at me was his description of the gruesome practice of widow strangling. Here's what he says, writing about the Kaulong people, a tribe of New Britain, just east of New Guinea.

"When a man died, his widow called upon her brothers to strangle her. She was not murderously strangled against her will, nor was she pressurised into this form of ritualised suicide by other members of her society. Instead she had grown up observing it as the custom, followed the custom when she became widowed herself, strongly urged her brothers (or else her son if she had no brothers) to fulfil their solemn obligation to strangle her despite their natural reluctance to do so, and sat cooperatively as they did strangle her" (Page 21 of the paperback Penguin edition).

As soon as I read this I was instinctively sceptical. What is the evidence that tribal peoples killed their sisters or mothers in this fashion, and that the widows passively accepted their fate? Obviously there are parallels with the well documented Indian sub-continental practice of suttee which stubbornly persists in one form or another to this day. But however disturbing suttee may be, widow strangling with the passive participation of the widow is hard to swallow (sorry). Was this an extreme case of men enforcing their control over women, treating them as inanimate property to be disposed of on the man's death? In this interpretation the acceptance of their fate by the women is less a case of indoctrination than a choice between the lesser of two evils - accept their fate or face a worse one, with the shame brought on your family to make things worse. Widow strangling would have been a strong disincentive to women murdering their husbands, and a way of maintaining population control in an environment where infanticide was also practiced to the same end. But did it happen? Was it an established cultural practice (the internet gives examples from other cultures including Fiji) or simply some isolated murders inflated into a cultural practice for the benefit of nosy missionaries and explorers? Something like this would be extraordinarily difficult to prove other than by weight of personal testimony, or possibly independent witness. But I can't resist the impression that Diamond introduces this topic for more salacious reasons - look at these weird people, aren't they brutal and unfeeling compared to us? Don't they need our civilising influence? Strangely the reaction to Diamond's book online has not focussed on this topic - his commentary on modern against tribal warfare has attracted much more comment for example.

I am still less than halfway through TWUY thus far, and I am sure I will have more to say. I don't usually write reviews before completing the book, strangely enough, but this is a bit of an experiment.

The Long War - Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

This is the inevitable sequel to the Long Earth, which I reviewed last year.

In case you have forgotten, in the first novel a multiverse of parallel earths - the Long Earth - is discovered, along with the ability for humans to travel quickly and simply along a sequential series of earths. Its not quite clear how people "step", nor why a process in Book 1 which is restricted to the movement of a small amount of material can now in Book 2 be accomplished at speed in great airships.

The novel charts a series of voyages across the Long Earth in search of various goals. And there's the first of many issues - the different journeys recorded here are not clearly linked. The narrative switches between them at frequent intervals but the process of drawing them together, both thematically and in terms of their eventual outcomes, is pretty tortuous. The novel also struggles to find a theme - is it the relationship between humans and the other sentient species it discovers? (Strangely man has never evolved other than on Datum (the original earth) even though the novel is insistent that each earth is very similar to its neighbour save for small deviations, which over time lead to more significant changes (e.g. sentient dogs).) Or is it a rerun of the colonisation of North America, where the settlers gradually asserted their independence from the tax levying home country? Other weighty themes, on mortality and the uniqueness of the self are introduced but not pursued with any determination. The Long War promised in the title, a war across the parallel universes between man and trolls or settlers and state fizzles out with a shot being fired, thereby acting as a neat metaphor for the novel itself.

When you think of a typical terry Pratchett novel what do you envisage? A well developed, in fact a probably very cleverly thought out, plot, inventiveness in language, ideas, characters and plot development, well written fun to read prose, and above all else, wit. Witty turns of phrase, characters, plots. Characters that having been developed over several novels have come to have a life of their own, be it Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, or Lord Veterinari, all the way through to the minor characters such as Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler. None of which can be found here. No humour, no wit, no inventiveness, just more and more "stepping" and minor variations on the world before.

Clearly there is very little Pratchett here, or at least I hope so, and his name has been leased to build sales. Cynical but understandable. What worries me most is how many more volumes of this endlessly recyclable stuff is stored away for future publications, eventually becoming "based on an idea by". The Tolkien estate is still generating apparently new content under the JRR brand decades after his death, so I can only assume the same will happen here. Which is a pity, a real pity.

The Daylight Gate (2) - An afterthought

"When shall we three meet again" - daylight of course, it's such a nice witchy time of day isn't it?

What am I talking about? Something that has really bugged me about this novel, apart from everything else I wrote about earlier, namely the title of the novel. It tells you nothing about the subject matter, which is mildly irritating, but nothing out of the ordinary. But why daylight? In the novel there are a couple of relatively brief references to the time of day when witches' occult power is at its highest, and there is no mistaking the fact that this is intended to be a reference to twilight, the point at which day turns to night, and the creatures and spirits of the night begin to emerge. The "gate" in question is a bridge to this other world. "The Twilight Gate" as a title would have made some kind of sense, if only in the context of the novel itself.

But of course the "twilight" word has been thoroughly over-used in recent years, and pretty much franchised out to the werewolf/vampire community. So the editors of this novel must have thought to themselves, "how do we get a slice of that market without directly misleading people into thinking this is a book about teenage vampires with some kind of gate device? I know, let's use a time of day that sounds a bit like twilight but in fact is nothing to do with it!"

Now I know that doesn't make sense - if the wanted to just steal some of the teen vampire market they would have just called the novel "The Twilight Gate" and been done with it. This way they have the worst of both worlds - no direct reference to twilight and all the references that come with it, and a title that makes no sense, because daylight is the least witchy, occult, generally creepy time of day imaginable.