Embedded even within modern industrial societies are realms where many traditional mechanisms still operate. In many rural areas of the First World, such as the Montana valley where my wife and children and I spend our annual summer vacations, many disputes are still resolved by traditional informal mechanisms rather than by going to court. Urban gangs in large cities don’t call the police to settle their disagreements but rely on traditional methods of negotiation, compensation, intimidation, and war. European friends of mine who grew up in small European villages in the 1950s described childhoods like those in a traditional New Guinea village: everybody knew everybody else in the village, everyone knew what everyone else was doing and expressed their opinions about it, people married spouses born only a mile or two distant, people spent their entire lives in or near the village except for young men away during the world war years, and disputes within the village had to be settled in a way that restored relationships or made them tolerable, because you were going to be living near that person for the rest of your life. That is, the world of yesterday wasn’t erased and replaced by a new world of today: much of yesterday is still with us. That’s another reason for wanting to understand yesterday’s world.
As we shall see in this book’s chapters, traditional societies are far more diverse in many of their cultural practices than are modern industrial societies. Within that range of diversity, many cultural norms for modern state societies are far displaced from traditional norms and lie towards the extremes of that traditional range of diversity. For example, compared to any modern industrial society, some traditional societies treat elderly people much more cruelly, while others offer elderly people much more satisfying lives; modern industrial societies are closer to the former extreme than to the latter. Yet psychologists base most of their generalizations about human nature on studies of our own narrow and atypical slice of human diversity. Among the human subjects studied in a sample of papers from the top psychology journals surveyed in the year 2008, 96% were from Westernized industrial countries (North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel), 68% were from the U.S. in particular, and up to 80% were college undergraduates enrolled in psychology courses, i.e., not even typical of their own national societies. That is, as social scientists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan express it, most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Most subjects also appear to be literally weird by the standards of world cultural variation, because they prove to be outliers in many studies of cultural phenomena that have sampled world variation more broadly. Those sampled phenomena include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, punishment, biological reasoning, spatial orientation, analytic versus holistic reasoning, moral reasoning, motivation to conform, making choices, and concept of self. Hence if we wish to generalize about human nature, we need to broaden greatly our study sample from the usual WEIRD subjects (mainly American psychology undergraduates) to the whole range of traditional societies.
While social scientists can thus surely draw conclusions of academic interest from studies of traditional societies, all the rest of us may also be able to learn things of practical interest. Traditional societies in effect represent thousands of natural experiments in how to construct a human society. They have come up with thousands of solutions to human problems, solutions different from those adopted by our own WEIRD modern societies. We shall see that some of those solutions—for instance, some of the ways in which traditional societies raise their children, treat their elderly, remain healthy, talk, spend their leisure time, and settle disputes—may strike you, as they do me, as superior to normal practices in the First World. Perhaps we could benefit by selectively adopting some of those traditional practices. Some of us already do so, with demonstrated benefits to our health and happiness. In some respects we moderns are misfits; our bodies and our practices now face conditions different from those under which they evolved, and to which they became adapted.
But we should also not go to the opposite extreme of romanticizing the past and longing for simpler times. Many traditional practices are ones that we can consider ourselves blessed to have discarded—such as infanticide, abandoning or killing elderly people, facing periodic risk of starvation, being at heightened risk from environmental dangers and infectious diseases, often seeing one’s children die, and living in constant fear of being attacked. Traditional societies may not only suggest to us some better living practices, but may also help us appreciate some advantages of our own society that we take for granted.
States
Traditional societies are more varied in their organization than are societies with state government.[3] As a starting point to help us understand unfamiliar features of traditional societies, let’s remind ourselves of the familiar features of the nation-states in which we now live.
Most modern nations have populations of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, ranging up to over a billion people each for India and China, the two most populous modern nations. Even the smallest separate modern nations, the Pacific island countries of Nauru and Tuvalu, contain over 10,000 people each. (The Vatican, with a population of only 1,000 people, is also classified as a nation, but it’s exceptional as a tiny enclave within the city of Rome, from which the Vatican imports all of its necessities.) In the past as well, states had populations ranging from tens of thousands up to millions. Those large populations already suffice to tell us how states have to feed themselves, how they have to be organized, and why they exist at all. All states feed their citizens primarily by means of food production (agriculture and herding) rather than by hunting and gathering. One can obtain far more food by growing crops or livestock on an acre of garden, field, or pasture that we have filled with the plant and animal species most useful to us, than by hunting and gathering whatever wild animal and plant species (most of them inedible) happen to live in an acre of forest. For that reason alone, no hunter-gatherer society has ever been able to feed a sufficiently dense population to support a state government. In any state, only a portion of the population—as low as 2% in modern societies with highly mechanized farms—grows the food. The rest of the population is busy doing other things (such as governing or manufacturing or trading), doesn’t grow its own food, and instead subsists off the food surpluses produced by the farmers.
The state’s large population also guarantees that most people within a state are strangers to each other. It’s impossible even for citizens of tiny Tuvalu to know all 10,000 of their fellow citizens, and China’s 1.4 billion citizens would find the challenge even more impossible. Hence states need police, laws, and codes of morality to ensure that the inevitable constant encounters between strangers don’t routinely explode into fights. That need for police and laws and moral commandments to be nice to strangers doesn’t arise in tiny societies, in which everyone knows everyone else.
Finally, once a society tops 10,000 people, it’s impossible to reach, execute, and administer decisions by having all citizens sit down for a face-to-face discussion in which everyone speaks his or her mind. Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.
3
Throughout this book, I’ll use the word “state” not only with its usual meaning of “condition” (e.g., “he was reduced to a state of poverty”), but also with its technical political meaning of a large society with centralized bureaucratic government, as described below.