The question for me is how much these observations apply to peasant life in other places and at other times.
Most of this sounds a lot like my dad’s life in China in the 1970s. I don’t know about infanticide or some of the other things, but the impression I get from my dad’s stories is of a dirty, lawless village dominated by horrible people. The following is mostly based on my memories of stories my dad told me when I was younger, so I will definitely get some details wrong, but the basics are true.
Poverty
Food: Many days out of the year, my dad’s family ate nothing but rice. They raised livestock (my dad had to share his room with a pig for a while), but as far as I know they only ate meat at spring festival (and much of this was left out for the ancestors). They also ate eels and frogs that they caught in the river — where they also bathed, washed their vegetables, and dumped their chamber pots — and presumably ate vegetables when they were in season. One time my dad cooked me and my sister the ‘soup’ he used to eat when he was a kid, which was just boiled water with a bit of soy sauce.
Illness: One time when he was very young my father got a horrible fever, and people thought he might die… but his grandmother scooped water from a muddy puddle into a bowl, and showed him a bubble resting atop the water. She told him that the bubble contained his spirit, and had him drink the muddy water to heal him. (Obviously he survived.) Also, my grandfather had bronchitis for about sixty years, and one of their neighbors had a persistent cough for years on end that would drive everyone crazy.
My dad has an anecdote:
One day when I was 4 years old (1971), I fell and cut my forehead on the stone door step of my house and needed to be stitched up. My grandmother wrestled and carried me, with the help of a neighbor, to the village “clinic”, which was staffed by the one and only “barefoot doctor” in my area. A barefoot doctor was a hygiene worker sent down from an urban city to rural areas during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). The entire medical supply in the village (of more than 1,200 people) fit in a wooden box the size of a small countertop microwave. The supply did not include numbing gel or anesthesia of any kind. It took four adults to pin me down on a wooden board over two workbenches to sew up my wound.
Jealousy: This is maybe a bit different, but ever since my dad moved to the US (even when he and my mom were on foodstamps and raising a kid with no income), ~100% of his interactions with his family back in China include them asking him for money, often in the $10,000+ range. And not even for necessities, but for things like funding a new (doomed) business venture, or buying an apartment for his nephew so that his girlfriend would marry him.
Morals / cruelty / women
Cruelty to animals: At least my dad definitely didn’t see animals as worthy of compassion — they were either wild or livestock. Dogs were generally wild (I don’t know of people keeping them as pets), and it was normal to throw rocks at them to shoo them away. My dad hated his family’s pig (which smelled terrible, was loud, and ate so much that sometimes there wasn’t any left over for the humans), and even today he has no interest in pets whatsoever.
Cruelty among kids: My dad has a memorable story about chasing a rival gang of boys from a neighboring village into the village’s waste pit (i.e. a giant pile of shit). I get the sense that at least in my dad’s experience, kids were cruel to each other in general — he had maybe one friend, and he has no warm feelings towards either his older or younger brother, and most of his childhood stories involve rivalries or fights.
Cruelty among adults: Physical fights among adult men also weren’t uncommon. When the village’s harvests were pooled by the government and each family was allowed to take a share, people would fight each other for the best melons. Sometimes people fought in the street for other reasons as well.
My dad’s dad was an embezzler, and was verbally and physically abusive to both his wife and his children — he beat my dad for things such as using his writing paper to fold boats, accidentally cracking one of the chamber pots, and not going to school, at least as young as the age of five. He beat his wife all the time, and I think she often took beatings for her children, and he raped her with their children in the room.
My dad writes:
On days my mother didn’t cook enough for everyone, my father would yell at my mother for being a stingy bitch. On days my mother prepared too much food, my father would accuse my mother for being a wasteful idiot incapable of planning ahead. Sometimes my mother found her life too hard to bear and wanted / threatened to end it. She would reach for one of bottles full of pesticides on the living room floor. When fights broke out between my parents, I usually wanted to run away but almost always ended up sticking around to watch for dangerous moves. Quite a few times I had to wrestle that pesticide bottle out of my mother’s hands.
The women of my grandmother’s generation were tasked with spraying the fields with pesticides, and most of them (including my grandmother herself) consequently died young due to ovarian cancer. Also my great-grandmother had bound feet; not sure how that factors in but it’s horrifying.
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Re:
If this kind of cruelty is common, is it inherent to poverty, including the lower levels of education that necessarily accompany poverty? And if so, does increased wealth and education alone lead to a more humane society, or did the transition to more equal rights and status also require a change in morals and other ideas that is not a natural or inherent consequence of material progress?
I’m much less sure about anything here. But my dad’s family seems to have stayed pretty terrible despite the changes of the last fifty years (they now have plumbing, electricity, and plenty to wear and eat). His father never stopped being cruel, his brothers never stopped trying to guilt him into giving them money, and his younger brother’s wife divorced him for being his terrible self. Then again I guess despite their rise in material wealth, they probably still never got anything beyond a middle school education, so maybe just not a relevant example at all.
--
Hope this was helpful! Clara had already showed me some of the Semyonova stuff so I had already been thinking about this a fair amount and I’m glad to have a reason to write it up.
Super interesting. I am extremely curious if your dad has data on how things were different before and after the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Mass starvation and deliberate government disruption will fuck up a lot of social norms in ways I don’t want to overgeneralize from… but I don’t immediately see an in-living-memory event in Russia that would explain similar behavior around 1900.
But my dad’s family seems to have stayed pretty terrible despite the changes of the last fifty years
Maybe it is difficult to change your habits when you are older, but in childhood you are more flexible. The question is, how can children of terrible parents become less terrible? Not just today—the usual answer for today might be “education”—but generally, in history, how did non-terrible behavior even start, given that the first non-terrible generation was brought up by terrible parents (and terrible institutions)?
I could make up some stories myself, but I wonder what the actual answer is.
Most of this sounds a lot like my dad’s life in China in the 1970s. I don’t know about infanticide or some of the other things, but the impression I get from my dad’s stories is of a dirty, lawless village dominated by horrible people. The following is mostly based on my memories of stories my dad told me when I was younger, so I will definitely get some details wrong, but the basics are true.
Poverty
Food: Many days out of the year, my dad’s family ate nothing but rice. They raised livestock (my dad had to share his room with a pig for a while), but as far as I know they only ate meat at spring festival (and much of this was left out for the ancestors). They also ate eels and frogs that they caught in the river — where they also bathed, washed their vegetables, and dumped their chamber pots — and presumably ate vegetables when they were in season. One time my dad cooked me and my sister the ‘soup’ he used to eat when he was a kid, which was just boiled water with a bit of soy sauce.
Illness: One time when he was very young my father got a horrible fever, and people thought he might die… but his grandmother scooped water from a muddy puddle into a bowl, and showed him a bubble resting atop the water. She told him that the bubble contained his spirit, and had him drink the muddy water to heal him. (Obviously he survived.) Also, my grandfather had bronchitis for about sixty years, and one of their neighbors had a persistent cough for years on end that would drive everyone crazy.
My dad has an anecdote:
Jealousy: This is maybe a bit different, but ever since my dad moved to the US (even when he and my mom were on foodstamps and raising a kid with no income), ~100% of his interactions with his family back in China include them asking him for money, often in the $10,000+ range. And not even for necessities, but for things like funding a new (doomed) business venture, or buying an apartment for his nephew so that his girlfriend would marry him.
Morals / cruelty / women
Cruelty to animals: At least my dad definitely didn’t see animals as worthy of compassion — they were either wild or livestock. Dogs were generally wild (I don’t know of people keeping them as pets), and it was normal to throw rocks at them to shoo them away. My dad hated his family’s pig (which smelled terrible, was loud, and ate so much that sometimes there wasn’t any left over for the humans), and even today he has no interest in pets whatsoever.
Cruelty among kids: My dad has a memorable story about chasing a rival gang of boys from a neighboring village into the village’s waste pit (i.e. a giant pile of shit). I get the sense that at least in my dad’s experience, kids were cruel to each other in general — he had maybe one friend, and he has no warm feelings towards either his older or younger brother, and most of his childhood stories involve rivalries or fights.
Cruelty among adults: Physical fights among adult men also weren’t uncommon. When the village’s harvests were pooled by the government and each family was allowed to take a share, people would fight each other for the best melons. Sometimes people fought in the street for other reasons as well.
My dad’s dad was an embezzler, and was verbally and physically abusive to both his wife and his children — he beat my dad for things such as using his writing paper to fold boats, accidentally cracking one of the chamber pots, and not going to school, at least as young as the age of five. He beat his wife all the time, and I think she often took beatings for her children, and he raped her with their children in the room.
My dad writes:
The women of my grandmother’s generation were tasked with spraying the fields with pesticides, and most of them (including my grandmother herself) consequently died young due to ovarian cancer. Also my great-grandmother had bound feet; not sure how that factors in but it’s horrifying.
--
Re:
I’m much less sure about anything here. But my dad’s family seems to have stayed pretty terrible despite the changes of the last fifty years (they now have plumbing, electricity, and plenty to wear and eat). His father never stopped being cruel, his brothers never stopped trying to guilt him into giving them money, and his younger brother’s wife divorced him for being his terrible self. Then again I guess despite their rise in material wealth, they probably still never got anything beyond a middle school education, so maybe just not a relevant example at all.
--
Hope this was helpful! Clara had already showed me some of the Semyonova stuff so I had already been thinking about this a fair amount and I’m glad to have a reason to write it up.
Super interesting. I am extremely curious if your dad has data on how things were different before and after the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Mass starvation and deliberate government disruption will fuck up a lot of social norms in ways I don’t want to overgeneralize from… but I don’t immediately see an in-living-memory event in Russia that would explain similar behavior around 1900.
Maybe it is difficult to change your habits when you are older, but in childhood you are more flexible. The question is, how can children of terrible parents become less terrible? Not just today—the usual answer for today might be “education”—but generally, in history, how did non-terrible behavior even start, given that the first non-terrible generation was brought up by terrible parents (and terrible institutions)?
I could make up some stories myself, but I wonder what the actual answer is.