What japanese leaders do. Its a factor of unpredictability and volatility when you ad the popular passions that may grow up around particular memories and attitudes, played to by politicians, sometimes unwisely. Its another important factor of volatility. And you have these kinds of isss in the region, the same is true for korea. Issues left over from that occupation. And these things are in the living memory of the koreans and the japanese, and theyre taught in the schools. The japanese dont teach this. And that is something that i personally find deeply disturbing about the government of japan and very worrying. So when i see these conflicts over islands on top of oil deposits in the south china sea, its not clear to me whose sidej im on about this. Actually, i wanted to end, at least for me to end where we started which is ive lived in los angeles for 20 years. I read the l. A. Times long before i moved here pause their coverage of pause their coverage of iran was always terrific. So i just want to thank the l. A. Times for hosting this. And now [applause] you go up to the airport and you thank military people for their service. Youve got to thank the journalists at the l. A. Times who really have gone through some difficult, you know, some difficult times. The l. A. Times really needs to be locally owned. If we could do crowd sourcing, we could buy it ourselves. [applause] and i just really, id like the l. A. Times, and i, you know, i wish you well and tell all your colleagues, all their groupies out here really appreciate all the good stuff you do. [laughter] absolutely. Thank you. [applause] well, thats a great one to end on. These gentlemen will be at signing area seven, i believe, but check with one of these volunteers in the orange shirts if you need to have directions. And thank you very much. Thank you to the panel. Thank you. Thank you again. [applause] and now our final program from this years Los Angeles Times festival of books. Jared diamond discusses his book with pat morris, columnist for the Los Angeles Times. [inaudible conversations] this doesnt okay. Welcome to the festival of books. Nice to see everybody here today. Im sure youve been told already to silence your cell phones, so i wont do it again. Were honored today to have the incredible pat morrison and Jared Diamond here today, and therell be a question and answer period afterwards at approximately 15 minutes, and is there anything else, pat, that you would like for me to say . The signing area where it is afterwards. Okay. Thatd be a good idea too. The books are upstairs in this building if you havent figured that out already, and the signing area will be right across the street, the first street that you come to, okay . And its signing area seven. Good . Yep. And were ready to go. Thank you. Thank you. And when the questions come around, stefan ofny will be here stephanie will be here, and shell hold onto the mic for you, and i know youll have questions for Jared Diamond who is professor of geography at ucla. But, actually, the compass of his interest is much wider than that, as you know. His book, guns, germs and steel with its analysis of cultures, achieving technical superiority and why others dont, it has become an integral part of the social sciences canon, of course, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and his book collapse is not far behind. Theres a new young peoples edition of his book chimpanzee, i think its pg13, isnt that the movie equivalent of the rating . [laughter] you may wonder and he will tell us how a birdwatching professor became an eminence in the social sciences. You can look to new guinea for that. Darwin had the galapagos, Jared Diamond has new guinea as his field work and his source of study and inspiration. For its many and nuanced cultures, one in seven of the worlds languages is located there, and he draws upon this from his new book in the examples that he uses and conclusion, he reaches the world until yesterday. The idea exists into the 920s that 1920s that society was on a continuum in 1920 or so, the notion that the pop philosopher put forward the phrase that every day in every way i am Getting Better and better meant that as we looked attritional societies and cultures at traditional societies and cultures that what was is not as good as what was. This is why you were able to see poems with the line lesser breeds without the law. But at the same time during the enlightenment, so a sense of our anthropology came into a sense of tension with each other, and is sorting these things out has been the work of social scientists like Jared Diamond, and we thank him nor joining for joining us. Thank you for being here. Pat, its always a pleasure to be with you. [applause] and so somewhere between those two poles, the romanticizing of traditional cultures is what you explore. You weave back and forth using as your topic areas several different subjects including how the elderly are treated, how children are treated. So if maybe you want to first lay out how you came to this premise. So you didnt want to put it on an either or, plus or minus sort of scale, but you did want to deliver some nuances about how each of these cultures are modern western culture and some of these cultures do compare and, as it says in the book, what we can learn from them. Id say that my attitude in general is that of a realist, neither an idealist or a denigrator. You described it well, patt, in that attitudes towards traditional societies in our modern societies have fluctuated between two extremes, either regarding them as primitive roots from whom we have nothing to learn and who should be driven off or assimilated or even killed as quickly as possible. And then at the opposite extreme, the view associate with the the french philosopher russo who spoke of the noble savage and regarded traditional people as in harmony with nature, loving, and we have gone downhill. But the fact is that traditional people are people. They make mistakes, they do bad things, they do good things, and the fact is that theres a lot that we can learn that i personally have learned from my friends in new guinea. What, if you could lay out some of the nine topics that you chose to examine as how each culture deals with them. And really the underlying question of the cultural background to this. A lot of the cultures you study think in terms of the collective, and in the west we think very much in terms of the individual. And that, to me, is as large a framework to set this discussion as anything else. Thats a very good point. Yeah, in traditional societies theyre small scale; tribes, bands consist only of a few dozen to a few hundred individuals. So Everybody Knows everybody else. People dont move around except when they get married. And so you grow up, and you spend your life with the people who were your childhood friends. A benefit of that is that old people live out their years surrounded by the friends of their lifetime. And so the loneliness of old age, the disaster of American Life that growing older constitutes doesnt if traditional societies. In the United States, the average american moves every five years. So, of course, youre going to end up distant from your children and your relatives. And yet when you talk about some of the other traditions that have to do with the health of the collective versus the individual fate of the elderly, you describe circumstances which reminded me of the arctic peoples where you read stories about the elderly who just go out and sit on the ice floe knowing that the end is coming. Sometimes its worse than elderly sitting on the ice floe. There are societies in which which old people die or are killed. Sometimes theyre encouraged to go sit on the ice floe. In other cases theyre killed or abandoned. This happens in a minority of societies, but particularly nomadic societies. If youre going to move camp every day and you come to a stage in life where you can no longer walk quickly or you can no longer walk at all, its not that these are evil people. What on earth are they going to do . Theres no choice except to leave the old people. And the old people did it to their parents, and they know whats going to happen to them. But in sedentary societies the situation of older people is, as far as friendship is concerned, much more satisfying than in American Society. When you talk about the idea of a small unit of a few hundred or even 1500 people, what was that breaking point number that you write about where you have af from a traditional culture into a culture that has to have other mechanisms . Because you have so many people. You cant deal face to face with some of these transactions whether theyre commercial or religious anymore. How big a society is a society that has to make that transition . Its about the size of a high school where you know everybodys name as compared to a high school where you dont know everybodys name. Ive heard high schools the most savage place i can think of. [laughter] well, im told that High School Principals if the high school has fewer than 400 students, the principal knows everybodys name. And if the high school has a thousand students, the principal certainly does not know everybodys name. And certainly with traditional societies, up to a few hundred you dont have a chief, you dont have a king, you cant support a king, you dont need a king because you can make your decisions face to face. Once you have a couple of thousand people, youve got to have a leader because a couple of thousand people cant gather around a fire and reach a decision. The example you give at the beginning of the book, and we could apply it just as easily to this room, is that youre standing in an airport and looking at people who are complete strangers to one another even though they inhabit perhaps the same part of the world, who a hundred years ago might have been at war with one another. But in this airport they all manage to get along. They know what theyre supposed to do, what their roles and their jobs are, and they exceed accede to an authority that may not be of their choosing, but there is a selfinterest in doing what youre supposed to do at an airport. Can you detail that and how it teases out in the rest of the book . My book does begin with the scene at an airport. The main airport of pa paw, new guinea. But just to get a sense of that scene, as i look out at this audience today, the its vast majority the vast majority of you ive never seen before and, patt, you probably have not seen most of these people. And yet in the eight minutes that weve been here, i can promise you ive not made a move to kill anybody here [laughter] and ive not detected anybody making move to kill me. Thats to say we are accustomed to strangers. Were accustomed to learning from strangers, to profiting from strangers. But in traditional societies, small scale societies one count account to one doesnt account to strangers. And if you do, its frightening because if the stranger comes, the strangers probably there to steal your pig or scout out your land. So a scene like this scene here is impossible in a small, Traditional Society. And is that because well, ill back up the subject you and i were discussing on the way over. There are photographs in the book of people from new guinea in the 1930s who were seeing for the first time not only white people, but, you know, people who were completely alien and strange to them. And the photographs or the looks on these peoples faces, and i was telling Jared Diamond i think you and i could probably deal better with the arrival of space aliens than these people were able to with the arrival of white people in their midst. Ive actually had similar experiences myself. Ive never in new guinea ive, fortunately, ive never been in a situation where i was the first person, the first european that that tribe encountered. But i have been in situations where i was the first european that a child or baby encountered, and i remember one occasion when i was in a remote village in the interior of indonesian new guinea, and the adults in the village had been down to the coast, and they had seen europeans. But there was this baby being held by its mother, and when i was there, the baby was being held by mother. The baby was giggling away, laughing, and then the mother turned around, and the baby faced me. And ive never seen such a quick change of expression from laughter to utter horror. [laughter] and then the baby burst into frightened tears because the baby had never seen anything like me. [laughter] and imagine that for so many indigenous cultures of the world. Once it does get bigger than a high school, is there an inevitable course of reorganization, of values and standards and sort of social organizing principles that happens . There is, that there are inevitable things, patt, just related to size in a group of 2,000 people. Youre not going to know everybody by name. And yet if this is your village, in effect, most of the people in your village are strangers, but you dont know my name, and you have to get along with them. You cant attack people in your village, otherwise therell immediately be a brawl. So as societies get bigger, its ineffable that there will be inevitable that there will be leaders, youve got to be able to support the leaders, and you have to get along with strangers whereas in a Small Society you dont encounter strangers. And how well do some of these societies manage . And is there a difference thats based on a collective culture versus an individual culture on how well they do this . Any Small Society has to be able, by and large, to keep peace within itself. And so the ways in which small societies settle disputes are much more satisfying and reach closure, emotional closure more quickly than in the United States. Any of you here who have been involved in a civil or criminal case if youve been involved in a divorce or an inheritance dispute or just a traffic accident, if youve been in court, you know that the last thing that american courts care about is restoring peace and good feelings between the people who come in there. [laughter] f. If you go to a court, you end up angrier at the other person where its your exspouse, sister or the person involved in a car accident. And thats because the court system is concerned about maintaining a monopoly on force. What the american courts want to avoid at all pains is people getting into fights with each other. But the american courts dont care at all whether you end up on good terms with each other. And, again, all of us have had the experience that ending up in court is a recipe for being churned up with anger and hating that person for the rest of your life. Thats why theres a guy with a gun there. The bailiff. And im looking around here, but [laughter] and this, to me, seems such a very important part of the book, because in traditional societies, as you say, justice is about restoring relationships whereas so often the people we are engaged with the courts are people we dont know. So there may be no relationship to restore. And when youre talking about criminal or in many cases civil cases, its not person x versus person y, the people versus. Theres a third party and intermediary who is there to dispense disinterested justice so it doesnt turn into feuds and, you know, sort of watsons who were the backwoods feuds . Hatfields and mccoys. Thank you. Generation after generation. Theres a Disinterested Party to do that. How well does that kind of conflict resolution work in traditional cultures if its just about restoring the relationship versus the idea of dispensing justice, however aggrieved the other Party May End up in our circumstances . What youve said, patt, sums it up very well. You said theres a third party. Yes. In large societies with State Governments when theres a dispute that comes before the court, there is a third party. Theres the one side, theres the other side, theres the victim, theres the criminal, and then the third party is the state. And the state has its own interests. The states interests are to maintain peace, to assert its authority, to punish, to demonstrate that the state is in power and, therefore, youd better not break the states rules whereas in traditional societies theres no third party. There are the people involved. What counts is settling the dispute. As for your question about how does it work, the first attempt in traditional societies is to settle a dispute peacefully. And often or usually that succeeds even in case where somebody got killed accidentally. So, in fact, chapter two of my book describes a really gutwrenching case in which a friend of mine was involved when a can kid was killed accidentally by a driver. The driver didnt mean to kill the kid, but the kid ran out across the street. And in the United States, you can bet that that would be the basis of a lawsuit. But in new guinea, five days later the relatives, the parents and the relatives of the dead kid sat down for lunch with the fellow employers, employees and the employer of the driver who had killed the kid, and they cried together. My friend, who was the employer of the drive, said he had to give a speech, and he said it was the hardest speech that he had to give if his life because he was crying. He was saying i know what youre going through because i have children too. But the result is that at the end of five days, there was emotional closure. Whereas in the United States if somebody gets killed in a traffic accident, itll go before the courts, therell be a civil suit, therell be a criminal suit, and the likelihood is that youll be churned up for the rest of your life. And youre not supposed to talk to the opposite side. Thats one of the hard and fast rules. And haw talk about in the book is the idea of mediation which isnt done enough in american courts. Again, any of you have been involved with California Courts know that the California Court system does not put much money into immediatuation. We dont have lots of mediation. We dont have lots of trained mediators. And even if theres mandatory mediation, the mandatory mediation may be for one session. And if the people, if the two sides dont agree at the end of one session, then the court says the mandatory requirement has been met. But the fact is that if two people get together in a situation such as a divorce or a case where somebody has been killed, youre not going to achieve comfort withi