Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond

This book compares traditional societies (which have dominated the vast majority of human history) to state societies like the United States in order to think about the ways in which we can learn from traditional societies in the Western world. While Diamond acknowledges that we may not want to return to many aspects of traditional societies (particularly their approaches to war and strangers), we might adopt (or re-adopt) some of their practices selectively, such as bilingualism, forms of conflict resolution, and forms of child-rearing, and pay attention to other practices in order to modify our lives for the better (for example, we could cut back on the salt and sugar in our diets to reduce illnesses like hypertension and diabetes). I found the book very entertaining (although the main argument was repeated so many times in similar form that it got a little repetitive).

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