Jared Diamond, stop promoting the myth of the Savage Savage!

Jared Diamond is one of the great science synthesizers and popularizers of our era, and he resists the biological determinism that infects so much modern theorizing about our species. That’s why I brought him to Stevens a year ago to talk about his latest book, The World Until Yesterday. But I wish Diamond would stop propagating the Myth of the Savage Savage.
In a recent Q&A in The New York Times Magazine, Diamond says: “In Weird–Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic–societies we take these things for granted that just didn’t exist anywhere in the world until a few thousand years ago. We encounter strangers, and it’s normal, and we don’t freak out and try to kill them.”
So the norm before civilization was for humans to kill strangers on sight? Really? That’s my question, not that of Times interviewer Amy Chozick. She follows up Diamond’s extraordinary comment by saying: “[The World Until Yesterday] has been criticized for saying traditional societies are very violent.”
Diamond replies: “Some people take a view of traditional society as being peaceful and gentle. But the proportional rate of violent death is much higher in traditional societies than in state-level societies, where governments assert a monopoly on force.”
Diamond is so intent on dispelling the Myth of the Peaceful Savage–the idea that before civilization all people were “peaceful and gentle”–that he has replaced it with an equally absurd idea, the Myth of the Savage Savage. According to this view, before the emergence of centralized governments backed up by professional armies, our ancestors were mired in a Hobbesian war of all against all. Other prominent proponents of this notion include the Harvard Hawks: Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and Steven LeBlanc. I call them the Harvard Hawks because they favor Hobbesian theories, not hawkish foreign policies.
Of course, some traditional societies—including horticultural ones that Diamond has studied in New Guinea–can be terribly violent. And modern WEIRD states have indeed reduced rates of interpersonal violence within their borders by establishing justice systems backed by police (although in the U.S. certain populations, such as the wealthy, benefit more from law enforcement than others).
But the Myth of the Savage flies in the face of abundant archaeological and anthropological evidence that many societies of hunter-gatherers, or foragers—the most traditional of all traditional people—have had low levels of violence, especially the organized, group violence called war.
Diamond and other defenders of the Myth of the Savage Savage also gloss over—to put it mildly—the violence of states, especially modern western ones. European nations, as they expanded around the world over the last millennium, often slaughtered and enslaved the “savages” that they encountered.
“Civilized” states have also waged wars against other states, erupted into civil wars and slaughtered their own citizens. Look at all the state-sponsored wars and genocides of the Twentieth Century, which killed hundreds of millions of people.
I urge Diamond to reconsider his views on rates of violence in traditional societies, especially those that predated civilization. He might take a look at War, Peace, and Human Nature, a collection of essays published last year by Oxford University Press and edited by anthropologist Douglas Fry.
Diamond should also read A History of Warfare by the great British military historian John Keegan. Keegan credits western societies with inventing the concept of total war, which led to the industrialized carnage of World War I and World War II and the insanity of the nuclear arms race.
I admire Keegan not only for his scholarship but also his optimism. He writes in A History of Warfare, “War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject, mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable, or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents.”
Surely Diamond and the Harvard Hawks—and all of us—can agree with Keegan that, in spite of our capacity for savagery, we also have the potential to transcend war once and for all.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the Stevens College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”