All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
Interpretation
Human societies often embrace temporary trends that may be impractical while neglecting valuable practices.
In this quote, Jared Diamond reflects on the nature of societal behavior, suggesting that as cultures evolve, they often become enamored with fleeting trends and abandon time-tested practices. This highlights the tendency of societies to prioritize novelty over utility, which can lead to questionable decisions that impact their development and progress.
In practice
During a lecture on societal evolution, this quote can illustrate the cyclical nature of cultural trends.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean β once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.
If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become an easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.
Thatβs the thing about a human life-thereβs no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.
Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor.
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