In this book, he holds up tribal societies as a mirror for our own lives. Through the millenniums, different tribal groups have in effect conducted a series of experiments on how to solve essential human problems. What have they discovered and what might we learn from them?
The most obvious difference between us is that pre-state tribal societies are just a lot more violent. Especially in fertile areas where land is valuable, people often can’t wander beyond closely prescribed borders. The cycle of raids and revenge-driven counterraids goes on and on.
Diamond describes a 1961 war between two tribal alliances in New Guinea. The individual battles don’t seem ferocious. Groups of 400 or 500 warriors faced off at a distance of 65 feet. They threw spears and shot arrows at each other in uncoordinated fashion. Frequently there would be an ambush and, sometimes, a massacre of women and children.
The problem is that the warfare was constant, and over time the casualties added up. Between April and September 1961, 0.14 percent of the alliances’ total population was killed in this war. Expressed as a percentage of the population killed per month, that rate, even though it represents a period of low-level hostilities in the war, rivals or exceeds the average war-related death rates suffered by China, Japan, the United States or the European countries over the century that included World Wars I and II.
Nation states occasionally engage in vast, hellacious wars, but these are rare. Most people in nation states feel qualms about killing another human being and have been taught to restrain their lust for revenge. People in many tribal societies, Diamond writes, do not share these attitudes. Without central governments, they have trouble bringing wars to an end. They live in peril. The highest war-related death rates for modern societies (Russia and Germany during the 20th century) are only a third of the average death rates of tribal societies. Modern societies average war-related death rates that are about one-tenth as high as tribal societies.
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