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DECEMBER 2012
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spent our lives being told, “Thou shalt
not kill,” and then we’re given a gun and
we are told, “Kill that person.” My wife
is a clinical psychologist, and among
her patients are vets coming back from
Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of those
who have killed are torn up for the rest
of their lives. In contrast, in tradi-
tional societies I have not personally
encountered or heard of any example
of someone who had difficulty in killing
when the occasion called for it.
HEMISPHERES:
You seem to admire the
tribal people you write about.
DIAMOND:
Many anthropologists
idealize people in traditional societies,
and want to deny that they are warlike
or suggest we shouldn’t talk about it
because it might lead to the warlike
tribal people being treated badly by
state governments. The truth is, the
behavior of traditional people runs the
whole gamut. For me, when I went
down to New Guinea, my first naive
sense was, “God, this is really exotic.”
Then, as I got to knowNew Guineans
and shared experiences with them, I
came to feel they were people like me.
They’re scared when I am and they cry
when I do. But the more time I spent
there, the more I realized there are some
big differences. Those are some of the
things that make it so fascinating to
work with traditional people.
HEMISPHERES:
But you learned things that
you apply to modern life, which is much
of what your book is about. For one thing,
attachment parenting—keeping your child
physically close—seems to work.
DIAMOND:
When we brought home the
first of our children from the hospital,
we were so delighted that we put him
in bed between us. Then he started
breathing rapidly, so we called up the
hospital; the nurse found out he was
sleeping between us, and said, “For God’s
sake, get him out of there and put him
in a crib—he’s probably overheating.”
But the fact is that almost all human
beings over the past 6 million years have
slept between their parents without
overheating. If we were to do it again,
my wife and I might ignore what the
hospital nurse told us.
HEMISPHERES:
In other ways, we shelter
our children far beyond what the rest of
the world does. In your book, you describe
a mother who allowed her 2-year-old to
play with a sharp knife and handed it back
to him when he dropped it. There’s also
a 5-year-old who walked off and joined
another tribe, and a 10-year-old who
worked with you for more than a month
without even asking his parents.
DIAMOND:
It would have astonished me
if my son said at the age of 5 that he’s
dissatisfied with me and he’s going to
THE
HEMI
Q&A:
JAREDDIAMOND
walk across Los Angeles and find some
family he likes be er. And we probably
would not let our child play next to an
open fire on the theory that he needs
to learn a painful lesson about fire. Yes,
some kids get burned and some kids
have serious accidents, but the result by
and large is that people grow up to be
self-confident and responsible.
HEMISPHERES:
Guns, Germs and Steel
was a hugely popular book, but it drew
sniper fire from your fellow academics for
simplifying complicated scientific matters.
DIAMOND:
Every day you can read a
scientist complaining that the public
doesn’t understand science, that the
federal government doesn’t invest
enough money in science and science
education, but what it comes down to is
that most scientists and academics just
don’t want to do the things that would
help the public understand science.
My professional training was on
sodium transport in the gallbladder, and
I wrote precise papers about sodium
transport in the gallbladder that got
read by the world’s five other experts
on sodium transport in the gallbladder.
But I’m interested in lots of other things
besides gallbladder sodium transport.
So when I started writing books about
all these fascinating other things, I had
to learn or go back to a style accessible
to the general reader.
Unfortunately, an occupational haz-
ard of being an academic who writes for
the general public is that you’re going
to get flak from other academics who’ve
spent their whole lives being told to
write in this precise fashion for the five
experts in their field. A theme as big
as the differences between traditional
societies and modern societies deserves
a book that is 100,000 pages long, but no
one is going to read that.
New York Times
columnist
DAVID CARR
has no gallbladder, so he probably won’t
be reading Diamond’s treatise on sodium
transport. That’s his excuse, anyway.
