The World Until Yesterday

By Jared Diamond

I was excited to read this book.  Why?   I read his books; Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse.  In this book Diamond takes the same very academic approach to enchant the reader into his reading his dissertation.  In time the reader begins to feel like a young college student listening to lecture after lecture.  Diamond faced with the PhD’s life to publish or perish, sent is lectures to his faculty to publish in a book.   Diamond then pens an introduction.  

Unlike his other books that start off with an insulting introduction, Diamond marvels you with an airport scene in New Guinea.  In the airport he describes what we modern western folks see as normal.  Then he brings the reader to appreciate that for New Guineans, relatively speaking, it was only yesterday that they were running through jungles without a clue of how an airliner, and an airport, and the entire associated infrastructure works.  This is his world before yesterday.  He describes how from 1936 until today New Guineans have crossed a bridge that took Western man a millennia to traverse.  Diamond is a professor in a California University, and has such has done a lifetime of research in New Guinea which affords a unique perspective on anthropology.    The net effect is a book chocked full of trivia blended with long winded anecdotal stories.  Unlike his previous books, the reader becomes suspicious that Jared Diamond is getting paid by the word in a very elementary dissertation on the differences in societies.  Speed reading becomes essential.

He covers many aspects of societies from rearing children to caring for the elderly and all the dynamics of society in between.  Depending on the reader, one chapter may be more intriguing than another.  In the end…you are lost for a central theme.  So I will limit my review to one piece of trivial perspective Diamond leaves on religion:  

“Virtually all known human societies have had “religion,” or something like it.  That suggests that religion fulfills some universal human need or at least springs from some part of human nature common to all of us.”  …

“Earth was dominated by a life form that call itself humans and clung to some curious ideas.  Among those ideas: that there is an all  powerful being, called God, which has a special interest in the human species rather than the millions of trillions of other species in the universe, and which humans often picture as similar to human except for being omnipotent.”

Diamond goes on in metaphor to describe an Andromedan space alien who debunks all of the superstitions of religion in the name of science.  This is a classic posture of an atheistic professor bent on the war between religion and science as though they are diametrically opposed.  However, in my opinion Diamond’s falls far short of giving any sort of academic consideration on either the subject of science or religion.  From a scientific aspect, he fails to consider the notion that ideas are synonymous with the function of thought, where thought requires energy.  He doesn’t at all explore the science of energy as it transcends from person-to-person, generation-to-generation, society-to-society.  This alone puts him on weak footing to draw any contrast on science-v-religion a subject he infers as mystical, where thought transcends through time.  Ironically if it’s mystical then it’s as an element of unknown, which science is the study of.  He totally misses the power of prayer or meditation.  At this point I closed the book…never to finish.