The persistence of bad habits
There are few issues in Farewell to Alms that I’m still chewing on. One of them is Greg Clark’s dismissal of institutional and cultural barriers to development. In particular, Clark shows how practices such as usury, initially banned by the Church, were mainstreamed through work-arounds. I find this line of thought pretty persuasive, for example, look at what Israelis do during their fallow year. Proximately cultural practices are fixed parameters, but over time they generally evolve and shift. But there was something in Clark’s argument which bothered me, he argues that the consistently worse hygiene of the English can explain their higher mortality rates vis-a-vis the Japanese, and therefore their elevated standard of living (more to go around for the fewer people left alive). Clark contrasts the efficient recycling of “night soil” and its distribution from urban areas out to farms where it could be used as fertilizer with the English practice of simply storing it within one’s house until it could be thrown away like garbage.
But why do people persist in bad hygiene for centuries when it results in greater mortality? Shouldn’t individuals who, for whatever reason, practice better hygiene slowly increase in numbers in relation to those who do not practice good hygiene? Are these habits simply not heritable? And I’m not simply wondering about hygiene here, what about practices like the Muslim ban on alcohol? From what I recall alcoholic beverages are not only good dense calorie sources, they also are less likely to carry high densities of pathogens then plain water. Muslims prided themselves on their customs of bathing and cleaning in relation to Europeans (in some areas of course bathing became dangerous because people might assume you had Muslim sympathies!), but it seems that their aversion to alcohol should have resulted in higher mortality from water born illness as well as poorer nutrition (exacerbated by Ramadan).
I’m sure some of this is explained by dynamics such as the Handicap Principle. Humans show off and do all sorts of irrational things to illustrate that “they’re the man.” Circumcision as a rite of passage for teenagers anyone? That being said, I am also curious as to the cognitive biases and social pressures which make usury inevitable (obviously a financial system spurs wealth creation) but hygiene seem less critical. Is it because usury is a concern of a small minority who are highly motivated and a simple fiat change of the law can result in a switch? In contrast, hygiene is embedded in a whole suite of mores, practices and traditions, and requires self-control and conscious forethought. Even today it is relatively difficult to get many to wash their hands after they use a restroom!
Labels: History
I’ve been toying with the simple idea that slovenliness may be an infection. It would make sense from the germ’s point-of-view to cripple the host’s defense system, namely a minimal sense of cleanliness and hygiene.
If you lived in shit, your brain would probably become “habituated” to the smell somewhat — but perhaps the germs thriving therein would also blunt your sense of smell by harming that part of the brain. I’m pretty sure it’s not protected by the brain-blood barrier, so wouldn’t be hard to do.
I’ve been toying with the simple idea that slovenliness may be an infection. It would make sense from the germ’s point-of-view to cripple the host’s defense system, namely a minimal sense of cleanliness and hygiene.
so the diff cross-culturally should some small random initial condition. from this point the penetration of the pathogens and whether they become endemic or not determines the path?
there are differences due to climate i’m assuming. much of japan is far warmer than england, so i’m assuming that hygiene is more naturally important. similarly, i recall reading that tibetans can be so filthy because the high altitude results in a mild autoclave effect which keeps the microbial level low.
It’s funny how centuries ago the Japanese were so careful to avoid contact with human waste, yet today we have Japanese pornography with its incessant coprophagia themes :)
It’s funny
you think the juxtaposition is coincidence???
It’s funny how centuries ago the Japanese were so careful to avoid contact with human waste
also, it isn’t like they avoided contact with it. rather, the practice of taking human waste from cities and using it as fertilizer obviously resulted in less ambient shit hanging around the city. the night soil enterprise was a business which ended up having nice spill over effects.
so the diff cross-culturally should some small random initial condition.
I don’t know so much about the cross-cultural diffs, but I was thinking something like Toxoplasma Gondii, which originated in South America and was transported to Europe after colonization. One of the few bugs that the New World used to fuck the Old World! Maybe there are a few others we don’t know about because their effects are subtle like that.
I’ve been toying with the simple idea that slovenliness may be an infection.
Perhaps not slovenliness by itself since it is too generalized, however, a more specific behavior like picking one’s nose could be compelled by endoparasites.
Perhaps not slovenliness by itself since it is too generalized, however, a more specific behavior like picking one’s nose could be compelled by endoparasites.
better one: bite on nails. i assume i don’t need to connect the dots here for the pre-tissue paper era?
Would this hypothesized difference show up in HLA genes?
Also, do we know of infections in animals that cause them to not clean themselves (cats not licking themselves)?
Would this hypothesized difference show up in HLA genes?
hm. there could be different polymorphisms selected for different pathogens i guess. the thing is off the top of my head the main issue from HLA is that native americans aren’t very polymorphic, which is why they can get hit really easily by a super-bug since there’s no genetic variation to buffer the impact. but i’ll look at get back to you on this.
alfred has some stuff on hla variability. i gotta do some stuff, but if someone else wants to sniff
http://alfred.med.yale.edu/
What are the facts? I would need to find a book on English sewage habits, but I don’t believe excrement in England was always just thrown away. Some of it was used to make saltpetre (a very valuable commodity), some of it was used in tanning, some of it was used as manure, and so on.
The city of Milwaukee has been “recycling” their excrement, sterilizng it, and selling it for fertilizer (under the brand name “Milorganite”) for at least the past 60 years).
The Japanese have a very old saying deriding the cultural backwardness of Koreans: “In 5000 years, Koreans have learned only two new things: to carry two buckets of shit with one stick and to eat one bucket of shit with two sticks.” The references are, of course, first, to the use of shoulder-poles to carry buckets and, second, to the ubiquitous kimchi.
Shouldn’t individuals who, for whatever reason, practice better hygiene slowly increase in numbers in relation to those who do not practice good hygiene? Possibly an example of “market failure” – if you work hard to be clean, but everyone around you is covered in filth, the benefit of your hygiene can be minimal. If you lived in Elizabethean London, sure you can bathe regularly and wash your hands, but then you have to walk through the streets that were used as an open sewer.
Besides, humans can get used to anything.
Japan before Peary had a tremendous infrastructure (government, literacy, etc.) Their isolation kept them technically backward, but they had powerful craft traditions which were quickly able to adopt Western ways. They also were undernourished even compared to the Chinese (who called them dwarfs — I’ve read that as of 1970 or so the typical Japanese was a foot taller than his grandfather), because much of Japan is uncultivable.
The rise of Japan is one of the biggest stories of the last 200 years. They were more or less up to speed in 50 years. Japan didn’t get much attention for awhile because it’s an anomaly, but that’s why it should get attention. If you want a nice universal theory, throwing out the anomalies makes it your job easier.
This has changed in recent decades, though.
I remember once reading about the early Portugese and Dutch voyages to the Orient. Apparently they were agreed on at least one thing – the strangers they’d met who impressed them most. The Japanese.
Their isolation kept them technically backward
yeah, but do note that translations of ‘dutch’ knowledge was already speeding up in the 18th century.
I remember once reading about the early Portugese and Dutch voyages to the Orient. Apparently they were agreed on at least one thing – the strangers they’d met who impressed them most. The Japanese.
read that too.
Mmhm, David B (@ 4.53 am) you’re right there, as far as I can recall the fairly lucrative but unpopular trades of “gong-farmer” and “raker” generally dealt with nightsoil and some medieval english city authorities made quite a few bob selling it to farmers. In high-density towns like Edinburgh it was pitched out of the window not out of sluttishness but to avoid the inevitable consequences of dozens of citizens jostling up and down more or less unlit spiral staircases of seven or eight storeys, carrying their buckets. IIRC the hours and manner of defenestration were strictly regulated to give pedestrians a sporting chance, and to allow the city to marshal its squads of sweepers to “cleanse the causey”, directing and sluicing as much as they could to the open sewer in the street, where the liquid component eventually found its way into small periglacial lakes to the N and S, utterly polluting them.
In the rural situation of the majority of the population the stuff was collected in a midden opposite the house door, the better to guard it from pilfering. Again I am hazy about this but such middens were a valuable commodity, and may even have featured as heritable property. Anyway, the collection and distribution of nightsoil was an important and fairly well-organized business in preindustrial britain. It was during the industrial revolution that things really, er, went down the pan, hygiene-wise.
The Portuguese had a huge influence on the Japanese, and IIRC some 43 words in Japanese are borrowings from them, including arigato from obrigado, not to mention the more important introduction of muskets.
This allowed the Japanese peasant with little or no training, to be able to hold his own against a highly skilled sword-wielding Samurai. Not only did it upset the social order, causing the Samurai to be out of work, and to seek prestige elsewhere – such as being some of the earliest entrepreneurs – it also allowed for the unification of the Japanese into one state.
Toxoplasma Gondii, which originated in South America…
IIRC, men infected with t. gondii show less concern with their appearance.
Did any mental illnesses in Europe appear or increase very fast between ~1500 and 1500?
I’ve been told that the Kshatriya, a military caste displaced by the Moghuls, also went into trade.
I’ve been told that the Kshatriya, a military caste displaced by the Moghuls, also went into trade.
kshatriyas are made pretty quickly. lower caste groups which achieved military success, like the marathas, became kshatriyas. there is a line of thinking in brahmin thought that there aren’t any real kshatriyas around anymore; the rajputs of western india for example trace their lineages back to groups like the sakas which were relatively recent arrivals (within the last 2,000 years). that being said, you’re talking about khatris and their ilk. i don’t know specifically about the overall phenomenon, but it makes sense since the khatris reside in an area that had been under total muslim domination (punjab) for a long time.
Over at Kevin Carson’s Mutualist Blog he said that usury was a distortion in the free-market created by restrictions on credit unions and I responded by pointing out some examples from Thomas Sowell of the phenomenon arising from a basically equal “state of nature”, with the attendant resentment toward those who engaged in it from those who sought it. The link I had put up was temporary, Sowell’s chapter is now hosted at my blog. Sowell doesn’t go much into evolutionary psychology, but I still found it quite enlightening.
I remember hearing many times that the Chinese and Japanese would mill away 25% of the nutritional value of wild rice by converting it into white rice. That seems pretty nutty in a Malthusian environment, so is that true? Did they have some other use for the removed husks, such as animal feed?
I’m sure they used it for animal feed or something, but it still seems wasteful.
White rice can be stored for longer periods of time than brown rice. White rice also cooks faster (meaning less firewood is needed) than brown rice. That is why the Chinese and Japanese did the milling.
Oddly, in Japan at least, brown rice took on the reputation as poor people’s rice. The only time normal folks would eat it was as a constipation cure. The milled remains from making white rice would be used for agricultural purposes as well as culinary purposes, such as Genmai Tea and certain snacks.
In other words, those who could eat only white rice probably had other vitamin sources in their diet to make up for it. The poorest ate mostly brown rice.
“Perhaps not slovenliness by itself since it is too generalized, however, a more specific behavior like picking one’s nose could be compelled by endoparasites.”
better one: bite on nails. i assume i don’t need to connect the dots here for the pre-tissue paper era?
A parasite that’s already in the human wouldn’t in most cases benefit from the behaviours you describe.
Threadworms?articleId=362
http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx
Did any mental illnesses in Europe appear or increase very fast between ~1500 and 1500?
Yes. Syphlis.
Widely thought to have come from the Americas.