The question for me is how much these observations apply to peasant life in other places and at other times. I’m hesitant to generalize, since this is the first book-length work of ethnography I’ve read in the context of this project, but for me it opens questions. Is cruelty towards animals and children, and an almost slave status for women, the norm?
The modern Western notions of classifying certain behaviors as cruelty, dishonesty, abuse and so on emerged from the life of surplus, when you could afford this luxury. Morals emerge from the need to survive, or are tailored to that need, so I expect that most societies at the level of poverty similar to that of Russian peasantry look roughly the same, even in the modern times. Should be easy to look up.
There’s something to what you say, but at the same time, it sounds like you’re suggesting that the morals of the peasants in question were well-adapted to their situation. But it seems hard to imagine that e.g. frequently stealing from each other, or jealous neighbors uprooting the trees of their slightly more well-off neighbors, would have been particularly adaptive in the long run—it’s setting up for the community to stay poor and miserable indefinitely, even if it occasionally benefits individuals.
Of course there’s a sense in which the situation can be described as “adaptive” in that once things have declined to this point, any single person’s incentive may be to continue to steal from and abuse others, so adopting that strategy is the best they can do—which is adaptive in the sense that Bostrom’s dictatorless dystopia is adaptive.
Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state. Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.
So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.
I would be quite surprised if it turned out that the culture and morality adopted by these peasants really was the best possible, or even a reasonably good culture and morality to have in response to extreme poverty. At the same time, I would not be very surprised to find out that it was regardless a relatively common local optimum to hit upon, because there’s no rule saying that cultures would need to hit upon particularly good local optimums.
It sounds like you’re thinking about “adaptivity” in terms of what’s good for the group, not the individual. In a malthusian equilibrium, the world is largely zero-sum, so uprooting the trees of slightly more well-off neighbors could plausibly increase the odds of survival for one’s own offspring. It’s the next best thing to eating the neighbor’s babies, as far as evolutionary fitness goes. And over time, it’s the families with the most individual fitness which will dominate the constituency of the group.
(On the other hand, the fact that there was space to plant more apple trees indicates that the world was not perfectly zero sum; there were nonzero gains to be had from tree-planting. But the broader idea still applies: the culture can be a Nash equilibrium without being particularly good at the group level.)
It sounds like you’re thinking about “adaptivity” in terms of what’s good for the group, not the individual.
The phrase “good for the group, not the individual” feels ambiguous to me; I usually interpret it to mean something that hurts some individuals while improving the group’s chances to survive (e.g. norms that make some individuals sacrifice themselves to make the rest of the group better off). That at least wasn’t what I meant; by “more adaptive” I meant something like an approximate Pareto improvement (in the long term) for the people adopting it.
E.g. if everyone—including spouses! - is stealing from each other all the time, then it seems hard to believe that it’s advantageous for people to marry while it not being advantageous to commit to a no-theft policy at least when dealing with your spouse. Even if the village was largely zero-sum, it still seems like being able to reliably cooperate with one person would give you an advantage in trying to steal things from everyone else. Or if things are so zero-sum that it’s not even beneficial to cooperate with your spouse, why is there still an institution of marriage?
the fact that there was space to plant more apple trees indicates that the world was not perfectly zero sum; there were nonzero gains to be had from tree-planting
I would think that the fact that people are socially interacting in a village in the first place implies that the world is not perfectly zero-sum and that there are gains to be had from cooperation. If that wasn’t the case, I think the optimal strategy would be for one family to try to murder or enslave everyone else?
the culture can be a Nash equilibrium without being particularly good at the group level
I read this as indicating disagreement with my comment, but isn’t it expressing the same thought as the dictatorless dystopia example and my remark that no rule requires cultures to hit particularly good local optimums?
Maybe in given culture the idea of not stealing from your spouse is so counter-intuitive that...
most people don’t even get the idea, ever;
those who do, find it extremely difficult to convince their spouses that it is a good idea;
even those who agree, usually succumb to the temptation, because they have spent their entire life building an opposite habit.
In other words, cooperation is actually so hard, that it is almost impossible even for two people to cooperate unless their culture has already provided them some basic training in this skill.
Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.
It is a stable equilibrium, where the poverty causes the behavior, and the behavior causes the poverty. If most people changed their behavior at the same time, they might have reached a new equilibrium; but one person unilaterally changing their behavior is only going to hurt that person.
When people don’t steal from each other, the society becomes richer than when they steal from each other all the time. But if you decide that you are not going to steal anymore, but everyone else keeps stealing (from each other and from you), it will not make you richer.
The new equlibrium is not just “(most) people don’t steal”, because that would be too fragile; the thieves would have a clear advantage. It must be like “(most) people don’t steal, and the thieves get punished”. Even that is too simple, because who is going to punish the thieves? The thieves are probably going to fight back, so punishing them will be costly. So it must be like “(most) people don’t steal, and the thieves get punished, and the punishers get rewarded”, but then again, who is going to reward the punishers? And so on… Getting to the stable equilibrium is more difficult than it may seem.
When people don’t steal from each other, the society becomes richer than when they steal from each other all the time. But if you decide that you are not going to steal anymore, but everyone else keeps stealing (from each other and from you), it will not make you richer.
Only because of, and to the extent that, the ‘richer are robbed more’ part has that effect. But yes.
it seems hard to imagine that [...] jealous neighbors uprooting the trees of their slightly more well-off neighbors, would have been particularly adaptive in the long run
This is easy to imagine if you recall another bit of the text:
Semyonova notes that “the very same elder” who turned in the flour thief, “when he is guarding the landlord’s apple trees against raids by the boys hired on temporarily as shepherds, fills his pockets with apples every time he makes the rounds.”
So, if you plant apple trees, and don’t invite your neighbors to help, you are an arrogant “big shot” who deserves his apples destroyed. But if you ask your neighbors to guard your trees, in exchange for a share of the apples, then your trees will stand. This is no different than taxation really, only way more informal.
The modern Western notions of classifying certain behaviors as cruelty, dishonesty, abuse and so on emerged from the life of surplus, when you could afford this luxury. Morals emerge from the need to survive, or are tailored to that need, so I expect that most societies at the level of poverty similar to that of Russian peasantry look roughly the same, even in the modern times. Should be easy to look up.
There’s something to what you say, but at the same time, it sounds like you’re suggesting that the morals of the peasants in question were well-adapted to their situation. But it seems hard to imagine that e.g. frequently stealing from each other, or jealous neighbors uprooting the trees of their slightly more well-off neighbors, would have been particularly adaptive in the long run—it’s setting up for the community to stay poor and miserable indefinitely, even if it occasionally benefits individuals.
Of course there’s a sense in which the situation can be described as “adaptive” in that once things have declined to this point, any single person’s incentive may be to continue to steal from and abuse others, so adopting that strategy is the best they can do—which is adaptive in the sense that Bostrom’s dictatorless dystopia is adaptive.
I would be quite surprised if it turned out that the culture and morality adopted by these peasants really was the best possible, or even a reasonably good culture and morality to have in response to extreme poverty. At the same time, I would not be very surprised to find out that it was regardless a relatively common local optimum to hit upon, because there’s no rule saying that cultures would need to hit upon particularly good local optimums.
It sounds like you’re thinking about “adaptivity” in terms of what’s good for the group, not the individual. In a malthusian equilibrium, the world is largely zero-sum, so uprooting the trees of slightly more well-off neighbors could plausibly increase the odds of survival for one’s own offspring. It’s the next best thing to eating the neighbor’s babies, as far as evolutionary fitness goes. And over time, it’s the families with the most individual fitness which will dominate the constituency of the group.
(On the other hand, the fact that there was space to plant more apple trees indicates that the world was not perfectly zero sum; there were nonzero gains to be had from tree-planting. But the broader idea still applies: the culture can be a Nash equilibrium without being particularly good at the group level.)
The phrase “good for the group, not the individual” feels ambiguous to me; I usually interpret it to mean something that hurts some individuals while improving the group’s chances to survive (e.g. norms that make some individuals sacrifice themselves to make the rest of the group better off). That at least wasn’t what I meant; by “more adaptive” I meant something like an approximate Pareto improvement (in the long term) for the people adopting it.
E.g. if everyone—including spouses! - is stealing from each other all the time, then it seems hard to believe that it’s advantageous for people to marry while it not being advantageous to commit to a no-theft policy at least when dealing with your spouse. Even if the village was largely zero-sum, it still seems like being able to reliably cooperate with one person would give you an advantage in trying to steal things from everyone else. Or if things are so zero-sum that it’s not even beneficial to cooperate with your spouse, why is there still an institution of marriage?
I would think that the fact that people are socially interacting in a village in the first place implies that the world is not perfectly zero-sum and that there are gains to be had from cooperation. If that wasn’t the case, I think the optimal strategy would be for one family to try to murder or enslave everyone else?
I read this as indicating disagreement with my comment, but isn’t it expressing the same thought as the dictatorless dystopia example and my remark that no rule requires cultures to hit particularly good local optimums?
Maybe in given culture the idea of not stealing from your spouse is so counter-intuitive that...
most people don’t even get the idea, ever;
those who do, find it extremely difficult to convince their spouses that it is a good idea;
even those who agree, usually succumb to the temptation, because they have spent their entire life building an opposite habit.
In other words, cooperation is actually so hard, that it is almost impossible even for two people to cooperate unless their culture has already provided them some basic training in this skill.
Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.
The post contained material that seemed to suggest, some of the behaviors may have caused poverty.
It is a stable equilibrium, where the poverty causes the behavior, and the behavior causes the poverty. If most people changed their behavior at the same time, they might have reached a new equilibrium; but one person unilaterally changing their behavior is only going to hurt that person.
When people don’t steal from each other, the society becomes richer than when they steal from each other all the time. But if you decide that you are not going to steal anymore, but everyone else keeps stealing (from each other and from you), it will not make you richer.
The new equlibrium is not just “(most) people don’t steal”, because that would be too fragile; the thieves would have a clear advantage. It must be like “(most) people don’t steal, and the thieves get punished”. Even that is too simple, because who is going to punish the thieves? The thieves are probably going to fight back, so punishing them will be costly. So it must be like “(most) people don’t steal, and the thieves get punished, and the punishers get rewarded”, but then again, who is going to reward the punishers? And so on… Getting to the stable equilibrium is more difficult than it may seem.
Only because of, and to the extent that, the ‘richer are robbed more’ part has that effect. But yes.
This is easy to imagine if you recall another bit of the text:
So, if you plant apple trees, and don’t invite your neighbors to help, you are an arrogant “big shot” who deserves his apples destroyed. But if you ask your neighbors to guard your trees, in exchange for a share of the apples, then your trees will stand. This is no different than taxation really, only way more informal.