More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
That kind of intellectually dominated "democracy" killed well over a hundred million people in the 20th century. And the people who promoted the horribly oppressive governments that did it--the Soviet Union, Mao's People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, etc.--were among the most intellectually sophisticated and literate people on the planet.
None of this is to say that illiteracy and ignorance are good things. They're not. I'm much better off in my personal life being literate and knowledgeable. But literacy and knowledge have limits, and the people who want to dictate how entire societies should be organized and run based on their literacy and knowledge are in over their heads. Basic human instincts and intuitions, like the ones those villagers had that Luria completely missed, contain valuable information too.
This doesn't explain the difference between the collective farm workers, who were actually forced by the government to change their lives, and the villagers who were not forced to change their lives. Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
They were--they just hadn't been yet when Luria ran his experiments.
> Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.
Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.
Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion, especially since you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person?
> Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.
But that's the crucial question!
Because they hadn't had the same experience--yet.
> you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person
Not fearful, suspicious.
> that's the crucial question!
You don't think it's possible for both things to be true? That literacy caused significant cognitive changes, and that the psychological dynamic I described was in play? I don't see how those two things are mutually exclusive.
The question is, what explained the difference in behavior of the two groups with regard to Luria's questions? I don't see how suspicion is a plausible explanation for the difference. The villagers were clearly bold enough to talk to Luria, instead of avoiding him completely. They were also bold enough to refuse to entertain Luria's scenario. That could be considered a form of resistance to the Soviets, no? Given that the villagers were so bold, why would they even be afraid of entertaining the scenario in the first place? Are you claiming that they knew the answer to the question yet refused to say it? If so, why? If not, then the issue seems to be a failure of imagination rather than a matter of suspicion.
Sure. But that doesn't mean that "suspicion" always has to lead to the same behavior. "Suspicion" doesn't exist in a vacuum. You have to look at all the factors involved.
> The question is, what explained the difference in behavior of the two groups with regard to Luria's questions?
And the answer is, there were multiple factors involved, and trying to pin it down to just one is a fool's errand.
> Are you claiming that they knew the answer to the question yet refused to say it?
No, I'm saying that Luria's claim that the only reason they gave the response to the question was a cognitive difference between them and the collective farm workers who had been taught to read, is way too simplistic. And more generally, that Luria only looking at that one aspect of the situation--the possible cognitive effects of illiterate vs. literate--and ignoring all other salient differences between the two groups--like the fact that the villagers hadn't yet been forced into collective farm work by the Soviet government, while the farm workers had--is way too simplistic.
These were previously peasants still under feudal lords. Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs in order to assign every death under communism as a death caused by communism. It's not even intellectually dishonest, it's not intellectual at all.
If Stalin didn't kill enough people for you that you still feel the need to inflate the numbers, it's an indication of how many murders you're willing to excuse for your preferred system: "We only killed 50 million!"
For a salient example, see the "60,000" protestors killed in Iran. What's a few exploded schoolgirls in comparison to that?
What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.
> Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
And you think the communists taught the peasants to read for the benefit of the peasants? It is to laugh.
> This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs
I'm not ignoring them at all. Where did I say that it was perfectly okay for tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs to kill people?
Indeed, if you look at how societies under tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs are run, they basically have the same problem I described: one person, or a small elite, at the top thinks they know enough to run an entire society. But they don't. And their attempts to do it cause massive human suffering and death.