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| Marie Snyder, photo supplied by her. |
I start the conversation by offering a quote from Wendell Berry, who's something of a spokesman for traditional rural values. The idea that we carry our history on our shoulders is something I know about.
I grew up on a small-holder (only 200 acres) farm that in many ways was partially based on subsistence agriculture. (That is, we raised or bartered for almost all our food and a great deal other things, like wood.) In that sort of world, your reputation was literally something you depended upon for your livelihood. This is such an important issue that I'm going to share three examples to illustrate it.
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When I was quite young I remember looking out the window during the winter and seeing a group of Amish people with teams of horses and bobsleds going into our woodlot. I asked my dad what was going on. He informed me that many years ago he'd been very sick for a long part of one winter and some members of the Amish community had undertaken to do his barn chores in exchange for being able to harvest a "reasonable" amount of wood from our bush for as long as he lived. There was no contract protecting their rights to get the wood, and no detailed language to protect us from them destroying the bush by over-logging.
Another time my father sold an old tractor-pulley operated buzz-saw to a
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| A tractor pulley buzz saw. Image from a YouTube clip. |
neighbour. The two of them dickered a bit over the price, but not the way people are used to hearing. I forget the details but it went something like this:
Dad: "You can have it for $25".
Neighbour: "No, that's too cheap. How about $100?"
Dad: "Don't be silly. It's old, it doesn't owe me anything, and, it's just taking up space. It's best that someone who can use it gets it. How about $50?"
Neighbour: "I don't want to take advantage of your good nature. How about $60?"
Dad: "If you insist, OK."
Finally, years later after I'd graduated from university I was desperate to find work (it was during that awful recession in the 1980s that was probably the hardest time to find work that has ever happened in my lifetime.) I ended up with a temporary gig picking apples. The farmer came out one day and offered me a full time job managing his farm. I was surprised.
Myself: "But I don't know anything about fruit orchards."
Farmer: "That's OK. I can teach you whatever you need to learn."
Myself: "Then why me?"
Farmer: "I've seen that you're not afraid of hard work. And I've heard about your family---you have a very good reputation in the community. My son doesn't want the farm, but my grandson does. I need someone to run the place until he's old enough to take over."
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What's going on in these three interactions? Why would someone undertake a life-long commitment without a legal contract? Or sell something by trying to talk the buyer into paying less than he wants to? Or offer a job to someone that freely admits that they don't know anything about how to do it? I'd suggest that what was at play is the reputations that individuals carry "on their shoulders" within a closely knit community.
What's a community? That's a key point of what I'm getting at. When and where I was young, it was primarily a group of people living in the same geographic location who felt a sense of obligation towards each other. That's what the three examples above are all about. My father, the Amish wood cutters, and, the fellow buying the buzz saw were working out the details of social obligation. In both cases, each of the parties was getting "value for their money" in that they negotiated what each side considered a "fair exchange". But more importantly, because each side refused to "drive a hard bargain" or take advantage of the other person's weakness, they were keeping the bonds of community strong. That was because on some level---often totally unconscious---they all realized that they depended on the sense of community to support them during "hard times".
With regard to the old farmer who offered to hire me to manage his farm, I suspect that what motivated him was an understanding---again perhaps unconscious---that I understood and was willing to participate in this sort of community supported social network. If he'd brought in someone from outside, there would be no way that this person would have understood the way people in that community did business.
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This sort of community networking didn't "just exist", it was enforced. People used gossip to share information about each other, and if someone tried to "opt out" by doing things like "driving a hard bargain" or by being a "freeloader", they paid a price. I first realized this when I bought my house and had to deal with Guelph trades people for the first time. Unfortunately, my experience as a home owner tells me
that in our community there are a wide variety of people who work on homes---some of
whom are incompetent and/or border-line criminals. Our experience on the farm was that you just hired the same guys as everyone else and you could trust them to do a good job for a fair price. I suspect the reason why is because if they ever got caught ripping someone off, their reputation would be shot and no one would never hire them again.
This sort of informal punishment would---according to "hushed" stories told by my parents---sometimes get out of hand and take an ominous turn. During a polio epidemic brought on by an anti-vaxxer fundamentalist church, I heard about a cross being burnt on the front lawn of the Pastor's home. I also heard about a police constable who was rumoured to have assaulted a local teen. Supposedly, this led to an informal parade of motor cars with people in sheets and pillow cases urging him to resign and leave town---which he did.
Please note that this village was absolutely lily-white except for the very odd First Nations family. There was absolutely no racism involved. (At least by then. There had been a very large community of escaped slaves in the 19th century---I often wonder about why they all left. Probably not entirely because of the climate. 😒 ) Having said that, it doesn't require a great deal of imagination to understand how this sort of thing can get wildly out of hand so these issues are much better handled by the legal authorities.
For better or worse, the city is much, much, much different. Guelph is big enough that trades people can be anonymous, which means that it really is up to you to figure out if you can trust someone. And if they do a bad job, they won't pay a price for doing so because there will always be some other people who haven't heard and are willing to "give them a go".
I couldn't find a solution to this problem until I discovered the Better Business Bureau's (BBB) tradesmen score card service. It is a formal system for creating the sort personal history that was served by gossip in my home town. If, for example, an electrician or plumber "pulls a fast one" on a customer, they can complain and them they get a bad rating (ie: from A+ to F). Moreover, if you look at the company name on the website you can see a "back and forth" between customers and business that you can use to get a feel for how seriously they treat complaints.
This is a formal solution to the decline of community. It's something that has been used over and over again on the Web through things like Yelp and the ratings on businesses like Ebay.
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The only real way to be able to learn "the metal" of a person is through learning about their personal history. This is what is known as "social capital". If someone has a good reputation in their community, they have a lot of it. If they have a bad reputation, then they are "socially bankrupt".
Behavioural economists are very interested in this concept because they recognize how important it is to the entire economy. Just imagine how a whole range of businesses depend on trust to be able to function. If we couldn't be sure about restaurants, no one would ever try something new because they'd be afraid of food poisoning. I often buy things from the other side of the world---I'd never do that if I thought that there was a good chance that someone would just rip me off. Obviously, being able to trust strangers is incredibly important for global trade.
China has a real problem with this, because generations of Communist control has taught ordinary citizens the many players they cannot trust: party officials, businesses in bed with these officials, the courts, the police, and, just about every other aspect of society. The government understands how much this harms both the economy and Chinese culture. In response, they have come up with a strangely Orwellian "solution". (Don't forget, they are still the Communist Party of China. 😏 )
The Social Credit System still seems to be in beta testing, but bye-and-large it operates like our credit score system---only with added criteria. This includes things like how quickly people pay their bills including taxes, whether they jerk around businesses by doing things like booking reservations without showing up, and, whether they are bad neighbours (things like eating on transit, not sorting their trash, etc.) If, on the other hand, someone does good things like donating blood, helping out with charities, etc, they can get positive scores added to their balance.
There are consequences to this sort of thing. People with low scores can find themselves denied tickets on trains and airplanes, spaces in educational facilities, denied jobs, etc. In contrast, people with high scores receive the opposite---they can go to the head of the line for medical services, good jobs, nice apartments, discounts on consumer goods, etc.
I doubt if the Chinese model is going to work very well. I certainly wouldn't recommend this specific system. But it is interesting that even a repressive, authoritarian regime like China's can see the need for some way of building social capital. (I suspect that this is an out-growth of traditional Confucian philosophy---but that's another story.)
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Let's get back to Marie Snyder and her high-school students. The reason why I'm raising this issue is because rational decisions require a certain degree of trust in the particular individual you are talking with. That's because when we work together in a group to work through problems and make decisions we need to have some understanding of how much we can trust what another person is saying.
For example, consider the case of people who "confabulate". I suspect we all know people who do this---I certainly do. These are folks who make up all sorts of crazy-ass nonsense but talk as if they know for an absolute fact that this stuff is true.
The point of this scene from the once popular sit-com Cheers is that the character Cliff (the fellow in the letter carrier uniform) is such a notorious confabulator that he can be relied upon to come up with some sort of nonsense no matter what the question. That has obviously been the basis of a bet between Norm (the guy sitting next to Cliff) and Coach (the bartender).
If communities have to make a collective decision and people like Cliff are part of the process (which, unfortunately, they usually are), it is tremendously important for people to be able to identify them so they can ignore what they have to say. That is why, for example, we award people credentials so strangers can get an idea of whether or not someone really does know what they are talking about. It is also why I have always opposed the idea that people in large national and provincial organizations should directly vote for it's leadership. It's simply impossible to form a useful opinion about someone based on a leaflet, website, or, few lines in an email.
And it is also the reason why social media has become such a "dumpster fire". The sad fact of the matter is that it is filled with Cliffs who spout all sorts of nonsense and there is no real mechanism in place to help the general public identify them so they can be safely ignored.
We really shouldn't just accept that "this is just the way it is". We have the BBB's tradesmen report card system. We also have trades licenses. We have credentials that let us know whether or not the guy designing a vaccine has a Phd in the relevant field, and, those two letters "MD" or "RN" after the names of the people giving me the shot. Engineers wear the ring. The list goes on and on. (For example, I can add "MA" after my name---for what that's worth.) And we know that print and broadcast media used to have rules that stopped them from being able to tell bold-faced lies. Why can't we come up with some sort of similar regulations that will police the Web and stop the spread of dangerous nonsense from it?
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