“In the U.S., people have to be entertained, and they don’t know how to entertain themselves.”
“In Africa, if you need something, you make it for yourself, and as a result you know how it is put together and how it works. In the U.S., if you need something, you go buy it, and you don’t know how it is put together.”
“American children have less creativity than New Guinea children, because everything is pre-packaged for them [Plates 17, 18]. In New Guinea, if you see an airplane and you want to have a model airplane, you make a model airplane yourself out of wood or out of sticks. You then play games with the airplane, making it swoop and making noises. My brother and I imitated the flight of an airplane in detail with our home-made airplanes. But American children just get their packaged toy airplanes and don’t imitate its flight in detail.”
“In Africa you share things. For example, while I was in school, I acquired a red inner tube of a rubber tire. Rubber was valuable to make slingshots. For a long time, I shared pieces of my valuable red inner tube with other kids for them to make slingshots. But in the U.S., if you acquire something valuable, you keep it for yourself and you don’t share it. In addition, nobody in the U.S. would know what to do with an inner tube.”
“The biggest adjustment I had to make on moving from New Guinea to the U.S. was my lack of freedom. Children have much more freedom in New Guinea. In the U.S. I was not allowed to climb trees. I was always climbing trees in New Guinea; I still like to climb trees. When my brother and I came back to California and moved into our house there, one of the first things we did was to climb a tree and build a tree house; other families thought that was weird. The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it’s not an ‘attractive nuisance.’ Most New Guineans don’t have pools, but even the rivers that we frequented didn’t have signs saying ‘Jump at your own risk,’ because it’s obvious. Why would I jump unless I’m prepared for the consequences? Responsibility in the U.S. has been taken from the person acting and has been placed on the owner of the land or the builder of the house. Most Americans want to blame someone other than themselves as much as possible. In New Guinea I was able to grow up, play creatively, and explore the outdoors and nature freely, with the obligatory element of risk, however well managed, that is absent from the average risk-averse American childhood. I had the richest upbringing possible, an upbringing inconceivable for Americans.”
“A frustration here in the U.S. is the constant pressure to be working. If you’re sitting around enjoying a cup of coffee in the afternoon, you should feel guilty because it’s a wasted opportunity to be making money. But if you are one of those people that are making money instead of enjoying a cup of coffee, you don’t save that extra money you made, you just live a more expensive life so that you have to keep working more and more. The U.S. has lost its ability (for the most part) to find the balance between work and play or relaxation. In New Guinea, shops close down in the middle of the day and re-open in the late afternoon. That is extremely un-American.”
“I was shocked at the lack of moral compass of my peers in the U.S. In a society as pluralistic as America, there can be little basis for standing on what you believe is true and right. In New Guinea, certainly truth is culturally interpreted and applied, but it is acknowledged as existing and being knowable.”
“Kids here in the U.S., and perhaps Americans in general, are obsessed with goods. Upon our last return to California, we were impressed with the latest fads or ‘must-haves,’ in this case large flat-screen plasma TVs. What will it be six months from now?”
“Everyone in the U.S. is in their own tight box. The African young people I knew were intensely interested in what went on in other parts of the world and were geographically literate. One of our pastimes was to quiz each other on the location of various countries, the names of world leaders, and of sports heroes. Of course they knew the names of Kenya’s national soccer champs and long-distance runners, but they were equally familiar with American, British, German, and Brazilian superstars. They had heard of the Lone Ranger, Wilt Chamberlain, and Muhammad Ali and were constantly asking me what life was like in the U.S. When I first arrived in the U.S., I expected to be asked about life in Africa but soon came to realize that very few people had much interest in anything other than what directly affected them on a day-to-day basis. Lifestyles, customs, and events elsewhere in 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?