Today we will go over Chapter 14; we are reading one chapter a week.
I encourage this to be slow blogging - the very opposite of "breaking". I will leave this on my hot list for a week, so comment any time during the week.
When we get near the end of GGS, I'll start a poll for the next book; I am strongly leaning towards the book Ideas: A history of thought from fire to Freud.
Ground rules: I expect vigorous discussion. But I expect civil discussion. A sign I saw in a restaurant said
Be nice or leave
In this, the last chapter in Part III, Diamond traces how and why societies evolved from small bands of a few dozen people at most to huge nation states with millions, or in a couple cases, over a billion people each.
He classifies societies (with some caveats) into bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. These vary along many dimensions, but he charts 17, which in divides into several classes: Membership, Government, Religion, Economy and Society.
The title of the chapter comes from one way in which these societies differ: Bands and tribes are egalitarian, nations are kleptocratic. One function of religion, per Diamond, is to justify kleptocracy; another is to justify, not war so much, but the suicidal or semi-suicidal attacks that are part of all war between states. That's bad stuff about states. But another function of states is to serve as a mediator of quarrels between people who do not know each other - in a band, everyone knows each other; in a tribe, and, to an extent, in a chiefdom, people often are linked by close intermediaries - there may be one degree of separation. In a state, there are the famous 'six degrees of separation'. So, how do we keep from killing each other?
Diamond also disabuses us of any lingering notion of 'gentle' tribes. The reason, he points out, that you rarely see a murder in a band or tribe is that there are so few people in it. For example, in New York City the murder rate in 2007 was 6 per 100,000 people. Even in Detroit (the city with the highest murder rate in the USA) it was 46 per 100,000. That means that a tribe of 100 people would have one murder every 20 years or so. The evidence is that in most tribes and bands, it is very much higher than that.
On the question of why societies evolved in this way, Diamond quickly disposes of several theories: Aristotle thought that the state was the natural society - but this is not so, for most of mankind's time on Earth, people have lived in bands and tribes, states are recent. Rousseau (and others of his time, including the radically different Hobbes) imagined people forming larger states by getting together and making a social contract. The problem here is that there is not a single recorded case of it happening this way. The third is the 'hydraulic theory' that larger societies came together to in large scale construction such as dams. The evidence knocks this theory out, as well. Diamond's view is a simple one: As populations grow, larger societies become necessary for the production and distribution of food, the resolution of conflict, the distribution of work, and so on. In addition, the larger populations make these things possible. One other reason large societies come together from smaller ones is the threat of war with neighbors.
Of course, nowadays, very nearly all humans live in states. But there are sub-organizations of society. Most notably, we live in villages, towns, small cities, or metropolises. So, for today's poll, I ask about where you live.