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.
Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.
The ideal of the supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause.
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?
There is an odd assumption that compassion and care are finite or that critics can be everything to everyone - commenting on everything simply because they can. That's not what cultural criticism is.
The rich in spirit help the poor in one grand brotherhood, all having the same Principle, or Father; and blessed is that man who seeth his brother's need and supplieth it, seeking his own in another's good.
Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.
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