tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post6406338822902856167..comments2024-03-28T18:59:21.172-04:00Comments on Face to Face: Two different forms of trust: showing charity or feeling securityagnostichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-87623172409702461482013-09-16T03:42:29.333-04:002013-09-16T03:42:29.333-04:00OK, thanks for the response, haven't read them...OK, thanks for the response, haven't read them in great detail, but I do think I see better where you're going with this. <br /><br />What I think has thrown me a little was seeing the willingness to approach and offer hospitality as any kind of "trust". <br /><br />What you term as being worry free and secure about unknown other people seems more clearly like trust, whereas being willing to approach others and interact isn't driven just by giving strange individuals the "benefit of the doubt" (i.e. trust) but is driven by a cluster of qualities like the desire for social attention, desire for reciprocal benefits, confidence / overconfidence about your ability to handle an interaction if goes wrong. <br /><br />It seems simpler to me to continue to see trust and approach as two separate qualities, rather than both as two kinds of trust.<br /><br />(It would be nice to test directly whether Scandos or Meds are more willing to give a favorable interpretation or motivation to the actions of unknown individuals, as a way to test whether either of them are more willing to give strangers the benefit of the doubt, in a way that is separate from actual desire to approach, which is probably not very much to do with favorably interpreting others intentions. I might try and see if I can track down any social experiments on this.)<br /><br />Similarly, greater hospitality is not really a positive result of greater willingness to give others the benefit of the doubt, but driven by the paranoid neuroticism necessary in violent pastoralist societies, where offering an extremely loud and unambiguous signal of good intentions is necessary to placate suspicions and ensure you're on good relations with people you're suspicious of, and was unnecessary in the less violent hunting and farming culture of Sweden.<br /><br />Other than that, I think it's pretty plausible that you could be right that willingness to approach and interact could be a more useful quality in the long run to hold society together, more than secure and worry free trust.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-58790069612223608412013-09-15T23:01:58.168-04:002013-09-15T23:01:58.168-04:00Looks to be an enduring part of life. Even the Yan...Looks to be an enduring part of life. Even the Yanamamo have periods of rising and falling violence. After heavy warfare, they take a generation off to have kids.<br /><br />Not sure about hunter-gatherers being prone to waves one way and the other.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-38612588851082705372013-09-15T19:45:22.613-04:002013-09-15T19:45:22.613-04:00do you think falling-crime/reclusiveness is part o...do you think falling-crime/reclusiveness is part of an inevitable cycle? or can we escape it permanently?<br /><br />-CurtisAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-78255783575977591682013-09-15T19:18:30.914-04:002013-09-15T19:18:30.914-04:00Folks who've studied differential equations mi...Folks who've studied differential equations might think of fast-slow dynamics here.<br /><br />When the societal body gets invaded by parasites, how long does it take to effectively respond, compared to the time scale of the in-flow and reproductive rate of parasites?<br /><br />If they're on the same scale, you might not even get boom-and-bust cycles. It's like if you get dirt on your arm, and brush it off. Dirt doesn't fall onto and spread over / colonize your arm much faster than you can wipe it off. You don't go through long periods of cleanliness and long periods of dirtiness.<br /><br />Face-to-face trust leads to this kind of response -- you flick the fly away as it tries to land on your hamburger. Occasionally it scores a hit, and you get angry, but over the long haul, it keeps your food safe to eat.<br /><br />Fast-slow dynamics can lead to all manner of cyclical or oscillatory behavior. Like getting infected by pathogens. They can invade and reproduce faster than your immune system can deal with them. So your health level is not steady, but goes through phases of vigor and phases of lethargy and sickness.<br /><br />Faceless trust is like each cell in the body outsourcing the job of keeping out germs to a specialized immune system. They don't bother to inspect and possibly confront or destroy invading organisms -- the experts in the Ministry of Immunity are taking care of that.<br /><br />Also note the link back to how large the scale of organization is. Cells in the human body are part of a huge-scale organism. Division of labor.<br /><br />So to get societies away from the boom-and-bust dynamics, we'll have to shift our psychology away from faceless trust and more toward face-to-face hospitality.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-35522515363858995012013-09-15T18:57:41.509-04:002013-09-15T18:57:41.509-04:00Also worth pointing out the natural boundary on nu...Also worth pointing out the natural boundary on numbers of strangers accommodated by the two forms of trust.<br /><br />Outsourcing to bureaucracy allows an almost unbounded number to be supported -- however high up the organization can be scaled. And it can last indefinitely. (This includes religious bureaucracies as well as state and corporate ones.)<br /><br />Hospitality can only allow, I don't know, a couple of guests per host, and only for a short period of time. Give them a ride, put them up for the night, take them out for a kebab and tea, and then wish them the best on the rest of their journey.<br /><br />Faceless trust leaves you unaware of the size of the group of strangers being supported, at what expense, and for how long. You're just praying that it all ends up well.<br /><br />Face-to-face trust keeps you in touch with all those potential danger signals.<br /><br />Faceless trust, leading to large-scale support bureaucracies, looks nice at first -- so many are helped by so little personal thought, feeling, or involvement.<br /><br />But that's just a snapshot from the tranquil phase of the cycle. It's far more precarious of a social arrangement. Too many parasites will ultimately flood in, blow the whole thing up, cause supporters to withdraw their support, hunker down in isolation until they feel it's safe to start building up social capital once again.<br /><br />By keeping support institutions closer to the ground, it makes the whole system more robust to the occasional parasite. He'll be identified and kicked out immediately, and probably won't even bother trying to invade a second time. (He'll head off for a place where there's a faceless bureaucracy instead!)<br /><br />It doesn't have to be 100% face-to-face hospitality, but that's the direction things will have to move toward if we want less fragility in our social/economic/political/cultural system.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-31079481399911293002013-09-15T18:38:26.437-04:002013-09-15T18:38:26.437-04:00"the constant need for reinforcing signals of..."the constant need for reinforcing signals of "respect", like an insecurely attached and clingy person who needs constant reassurance, unlike Scandos who don't need as much palavering and performance"<br /><br />It's not about clinginess so much as reciprocation. Is everything on the up and up? If not, better worry and ask for an honest (costly) signal of reassurance.<br /><br />Look at the handling of third world immigration into Sweden vs. Italy.<br /><br />Swedes feel uncomfortable looking into anything personally, they outsource that job to a bureaucracy who they fairly worry-free and safe from.<br /><br />Then either reflecting the popular will or elite conspiracy, they start letting in any old bunch of immigrants, local crime rates shoot up, the feeling of community belonging plummets, and there goes a lot of that built-up social capital.<br /><br />If they manage to fix the problem, it will be in a reactive way, and could potentially flare up into a violent conflict to kick out the foreigners and keep new ones from coming in.<br /><br />They wouldn't need such a high-pressure reaction if they would've taken a hospitality approach in the first place. Like, we're rightly suspicious of you entering and staying in our country, and you're here as guests. So, behave according to guest-host norms, or you're out.<br /><br />Hence why Italy has no massive third-world immigration problem. Or Lebanon, or Iran, or etc. Hospitality is more stable against invasion than feel-good bureaucracy.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-28522193646883283232013-09-15T17:01:46.670-04:002013-09-15T17:01:46.670-04:00Let's move beyond the fact that much of the &q...Let's move beyond the fact that much of the "civic society" tasks are carried out under a religious umbrella, so that the net effect is unclear and may swing even farther toward pastoralists (giving to charity).<br /><br />Labor unions obviously bias things in favor of industrialized nations because they're a response to gigantic scale managerial hierarchies, workers needing to team up against such a powerful boss.<br /><br />In developing or 2nd-world countries, they bias things in favor of agricultural rather than pastoralist groups because unions are a form of collectivization, which works for agriculture but not for herding livestock. No pastoralist group has ever gone Commie. Even pastoralist Yugoslavia was market socialist. China, Vietnam, Russia, Cuban plantations, etc. -- that's where you find proto-labor union / Commie activity.<br /><br />The sports, recreation, and arts groups are more a signal of how formalized those group activities are, not how often they take place, how important they are in local life, and so on.<br /><br />"Civic society" is not so much a measure of how personally involved a person is in the lives of others in the community, but how formalized, regulated, and institutionalized these relations are. And again, a lot of it misses the huge role of religious involvement.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-43767242038032622142013-09-15T16:50:12.048-04:002013-09-15T16:50:12.048-04:00"Scandos, for one, tend to have pretty respec..."Scandos, for one, tend to have pretty respectable levels actual personal involvement in charitable institutions and groups (civic involvement). Not Anglo high, but good compared to much of the world, including compared to Med Europeans, and certainly compared to the oh so interpersonal cultures of honor people. Including charities."<br /><br />I reject the secular weighting of the "civic society" literature, although some people like Putnam are good about emphasizing the important role of religious institutions.<br /><br />Who organized all those Central America solidarity activities when the US was funding death squads during the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s? Nuns, bishops, churches, etc.<br /><br />Looking at those World Values Survey results show that they must have worded the question wrong, if hardly anybody in the Middle East and Maghreb is a member of a "church or religious organization." Maybe they took it too literally, like "no, a church is for Christians, and I'm a Muslim," or "religious organization sounds like some kind of NGO, rather than regular religious commitment and practice, so no, I guess I don't belong to one of those either."<br /><br />For a more accurate picture, here's the Pew Forum's survey of religious commitment among Muslims in various parts of the world:<br /><br />http://www.pewforum.org/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-2-religious-commitment/<br /><br />A couple reminders of how much Muslims give to charity:<br /><br />http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/22/19611201-muslims-give-more-to-charity-than-others-uk-poll-says?lite<br /><br />http://www.irinnews.org/report/95564/analysis-a-faith-based-aid-revolution-in-the-muslim-world<br /><br />The second article features lots of hand-wringing by Westernized elites about how alms go to immediate, personal needs like clothing, food, housing, orphanages, mosques, etc. -- rather than long-term sustainable development.<br /><br />But that reinforces the point about pastoralist folks wanting to see their charity go toward real, pressing needs whose effects they can appreciate, rather than remote and abstract and impersonal benefits.agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-41596074455758373242013-09-15T16:25:51.643-04:002013-09-15T16:25:51.643-04:00"Interesting reversal of the normal hbdchick-..."Interesting reversal of the normal hbdchick-ish argument, wherein Scandos are trusting of their government"<br /><br />Not a reversal, but a drawing of an important distinction. People cannot "trust" their government in the sense of charity and hospitality. They "trust" it in the sense of worry-free security.<br /><br />"and their government behaves trustworthily because they are more emotionally capable of caring for and trusting unknown others without first approaching them"<br /><br />Again this is "trust" in the worry-free security sense. They are not emotionally capable but incapable of caring for others -- hence handing responsibility over to a remote team of experts. It comes from an avoidant attachment style.<br /><br />"I don't want to deal with people, so let someone else do it -- I'll pay, of course, but I don't want to interact with or even be aware of them."<br /><br />The bureaucrats do not even act as mediators, who would keep you in touch with the effects of your paying taxes. Not like a religious charity or do-gooder NGO that shows you the clothing, food, housing, etc., that your donation has provided.<br /><br />"while the more anxious and neurotic Meds have to make the approach first and have to have constant approach and interaction to placate them and build trust and care"<br /><br />See, this is "trust" in a different sense. It's the hospitality sense -- having reason to be suspicious, but setting that aside and giving the stranger the benefit of the doubt.<br /><br />So, the difference in behavior is not that Scandinavians "trust" at a distance while Mediterraneans "trust" up close and personal -- they are not showing the same form of "trust" in the first place. The Swedes are not showing hospitality, and the Mediterraneans are not feeling worry-free security.<br /><br />"I find that it much more plausible that the Scandos have additional emotional capacity that means they don't need to approach so much, rather than that they aren't capable of approach so much"<br /><br />Well if we're invoking Occam's Razor, then emotionally blunted Scandinavians wins over the argument that they're emotional ubermenschen.<br /><br />But we don't need Occam's Razor when we have a direct test -- hitch-hiking. When called on to directly and personally approach a person in need, who goes for it and who shies away? Mediterraneans prove their faith in the stranger, while the Scandinavians are more likely to let them fend for themselves.<br /><br />(They can't use the excuse that a government bureaucrat will swoop in to save the day -- they know there's no such governmental group to take care of hitch-hikers, so they know that it's up to individual drivers to help or refuse help.)agnostichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12967177967469961883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-13685391450714163002013-09-15T12:06:14.787-04:002013-09-15T12:06:14.787-04:00By the way, I don't think that state involveme...<i>By the way, I don't think that state involvement erodes hospitality, but the other way around -- people who are uncomfortable providing hospitality find an alternate solution, creating a state bureaucracy to handle the job instead.</i><br /><br />One issue with this for me is that the Scandos, for one, tend to have pretty respectable levels actual personal involvement in charitable institutions and groups (civic involvement). Not Anglo high, but good compared to much of the world, including compared to Med Europeans, and certainly compared to the oh so interpersonal cultures of honor people. Including charities. <br /><br />e.g.<br /><br />http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/civic-societies/<br /><br />http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/civic-societies-ii/<br /><br />These only show active membership rates, which would presumably be more personal involvement than inactive or token membership rates.<br /><br />So that would be at odds with them having less desire for personal involvement, but not necessarily at odds with them being more comfortable approaching problems via groups rather than personally approaching people and representing themselves as individuals.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19346366.post-59963789491357443452013-09-15T11:46:39.161-04:002013-09-15T11:46:39.161-04:00Interesting reversal of the normal hbdchick-ish ar...Interesting reversal of the normal hbdchick-ish argument, wherein Scandos are trusting of their government, and their government behaves trustworthily because they are more emotionally capable of caring for and trusting unknown others without first approaching them, while the more anxious and neurotic Meds have to make the approach first and have to have constant approach and interaction to placate them and build trust and care (which helps explain the culture of hospitality - the constant need for reinforcing signals of "respect", like an insecurely attached and clingy person who needs constant reassurance, unlike Scandos who don't need as much palavering and performance).<br /><br />If we have to invoke Occam's Razor, I'd still jettison your argument for the above - I find that it much more plausible that the Scandos have additional emotional capacity that means they don't need to approach so much, rather than that they aren't capable of approach so much - but possibly they can both operate in a complementary fashion.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com