From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Fri Aug 23 2002 - 02:43:09 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>Mike Lorrey writes
>> Anders Sandberg wrote:
>>> Personally, I think this demand for perfection is the
>>> worst problem of most ideologies today.
>
>>On the contrary, it presupposes, at least in its classical
>>liberalism incarnation, that all people (not just a hand
>>picked few) are perfect enough, or perfectible enough with
>>some education, to act in the interest of themselves and
>>their society as co-sovereigns in a republican society.
>This has, to me, always been the greatest flaw in libertarian
>thought. Read book after book on libertarian (or minarchist)
>thought and you'll find strikingly little discussion of culture.
>Does one really believe that a primitive tribe of cannibals
>somewhere, or the Mongols used by Genghis Khan, would have been
>*capable* of participating correctly in a "republican society"?
>Indeed, can one even claim for a moment that 500,000 typical
>Japanese sequestered on another planet would or even could
>implement a libertarian society exactly the same as a similar
>group of French peasants?
Woo Hoo!
Lee, I was under the impression that you thought culture was only
wearing different clothes and eating different foods.
Now I'll revise my opinion.
Never underestimate the importance of local knowledge!
http://www.amara.com/neverunderestimate.jpg
>> It presupposes that people are perfect ENOUGH to be able
>> to handle the powers that had previously thought to only
>> be responsibly handled by a special few as Plato and
>> other cynics of human nature have argued.
>See? Once again, "all people" are being lumped together
>indistinguishably.
[...]
>It's just that many libertarians and minarchists go to
>far the other way---they assume that all peoples, all
>ethnic groups, all traditions are equal. They're not.
Careful with how you use 'equal'. I suggest stopping
at 'different'.
>I will admit to this: in almost every society, you can
>begin to evolve towards more individual responsibility.
>Just don't get impatient; be prepared to have to wait
>several generations at least for the traditions to
>develop.
Let me tell you about some work that supports your premise.
In the later 1990s a German lady named Silke Regine Stahl-Rolf made
her PhD thesis with the topic: "Kulturelle Beschräankungen im
Transformationsprozess - Eine sozial-psychologisch-kognitive Theorie
institutionellen Wandels" (Cultural Restrictions in the
Transormation Process - A Social-Psychological Cognitive Theory of
Institutional Change) from the Max Planck Institute for Research
into Economic Systems in Jena.
She studied how different societies adapt to large changes and
determined that culture and tradition are very important. In this
study she found that some societies adapt to change considerably
faster than others if a set of preconditions is already in place,
and some societies don't make the change at all because of the time
lag in the surrounding culture. As her example (in the article that
I read, published in the 1/2000 Max Planck Research Science
Magazine, titled: "Caught in the Tradition, How Cultural
Peculiarities Hamper Russian Agrarian Reforms") she studied the
failure of the Stolypin reforms in the early part of the last century.
First, she found that there exists a number of social conditions
that allow new patterns of behaviour and social values to develop.
She said that the key factors for promoting innovations are:
1) social heterogeneity
2) individualism
3) the belief in being able to influence one's own life
4) plausible representative of the new cultural ideas
5) gentle restructuring processes which do not break with the past
completely
6) failures of existing institutionss
Then she looked at Russian farm villages 100 years ago, and today,
and identified that much of the above was not in place and it
contributed to the failure of the reforms.
I quote:
"Today's economists attribute the almost complete failure of the
reforms in the countryside mainly to the poor macro-economic
framework, inadequate infrastructure and underdeveloped money and
capital markets. A major cause, however, is culture-related. Culture
often changes only very slowly and can decisively determine the
development of a country over long periods. [...] As long as it is
not understood how cultural factors influence economic action and
as long as these factors are neglected, politico-economic concepts
are doomed to failure. Stolypin's unsuccessful reforms and the
farmers' resistance to reform prevailing in Russia today are prime
examples of how politico-economic measures have failed on cultural
grounds.
Both the collectivist Russian village communes with their
traditional redistribution practices and the Soviet collective
enterprises prevented private entrepreneurship and structural
diversity. In both cases, tradition prevailed over reformative
pressure. What is more, a long history of peasant dependency and the
traumatic experience of forced collectivization in the thirties,
tying the rural population to the collective farms as second-class
citizens, have certainly not contributed to reinforcing the Russian
farmers' belief in the power of changing one's own life.
Historically speaking, Russian peasants had not known private land
ownership until Stolypin's reforms were introduced. The land, mostly
in the hands of a landlord, was collectively managed by the village
commune. However, according to Russian traditional religious belief,
God is the sole owner of land. Hence people may claim possession of
the land they use only as long as they work on or cultivate the
land. This tradition is reflected in the practice of regularly
redistributing the land to take account not only of the needs,
but also of the possibilities, of the individual families.
Against this background, it is not difficult to understand why the
Stolypin reforms found so little support with the rural population.
The reform's goals ran counter to their outlook on life and fatalism
paralyzed the population. Moreover, the officials in charge of
implementing the reforms did not enjoy the peasant's confidence.
[...] Similarly, this applies to the farmer's resistance to reform
witnessed in Russia today. Since the Stolypin reforms, the
collectivistic and egalitarian social features have rather increased
and fatalism in the countryside is still unbroken. As before the
government initiating the laws does not enjoy the population's
confidence.
At present, Russia cannot be expected to change spontaneously.
Therefore, agricultural restructuring needs to be stepped up by
organizations enjoying the rural population's confidence. One
possibility would be to have rural multipliers trained and employed
for consultation on the spot. In doing so, the intended
restructuring should, initially, not depart from existing traditions
too much. The large collective enterprises of Soviet times have
proved a drastic failure, and a return to the Russian village with
its redistribution practices is certainly no option in the age of
international agricultural markets. Smaller cooperative-oriented
enterprises would have the best chance of survival in the market.
They would be a tool to initiate urgently needs change, while taking
account of the particular ownership traditions in Russia."
-------
I tried to find some articles by Silke Regine Stahl-Rolf, besides
the MPI magazine where i read about her work, and I have not
succeeded. In the last few years, she spent some time at Columbia University
New York, and is now at the Private Universität Witten/Herdecke
working on her habilitation (second PhD, required for teaching in
Germany). The department that she is in, is very interesting and
perfectly suited to the area of her first PhD, I think.
Her present work is along these lines:
-------
"Culture and Observation in the Study of Economic Systems."
Abstract:
In recent years the concept of "culture" has been revived in order
to understand differences in the institutional set-up and
performance of economic systems. At the same time, scholars
increasingly adopt a cognitive science approach. On closer scrutiny,
however, culture is shown to be either redundant or leading into
serious paradoxes of self-reference in scientific analysis, if the
concept is related to cognitive schemes and/or informal
institutions. This is also valid in case of attempts at treating
culture as a black box by means of relying exclusively on "culture
free" data (for example, data on international trade). Therefore I
propose to define culture as a "pattern" (of cognitive schemes or
informal institutions) that is not directly accessible to
observation, but can be conceived of as emergent property of the
relation between observer and observed object, like the economic
system. Based on a detailed description of that process of
observation I sketch a specific strategy for empirical research.
Here, culture becomes an hypothesis of the scientific observer that
is based on observing the observation of culture.
-------
Amara
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -Thomas Edison
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