The Missing Rules – Econlib

On my (endlessly expanding) “to-read” list is Nicholas Wade’s book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations. The book seems like it can offer insight into a question I’ve been curious about for a while: What separates rules or systems that run “against human nature” in a way that is sustainable and beneficial, from those that run against human nature in a way that is fundamentally untenable?

Recently, Wade was a guest, talking about his book, on Michael Shermer’s podcast, so I gave it a listen. They discussed, among other things, the kibbutz movement—a subgroup among Jewish people who attempt to live in small-scale, communal arrangements. As part of this project, the kibbutz movement attempted to make child raising a communal activity. Children would not stay with their parents—they would live and sleep in a communal house for children, and would be reared and cared for collectively rather than by their parents. This, Wade argues, was an unsustainable conflict with human nature—in practice, parents simply aren’t willing to give up their own children and show equal care and concern for other children.

As part of the discussion, there were some other observations made about the curious effects of being raised in a kibbutz. According to Wade, we have a disposition that is genetically driven to avoid romantic involvement with siblings, for obvious reasons. And it turns out that people raised in a kibbutz rarely or never married within their own communities. Wade argued that this showed the avoidance of marrying within the community was genetically driven. Because members of the kibbutz were raised alongside each other, their base-level programming marked their peers as siblings. And, Wade said, there was never any actual explicit rule saying members of a kibbutz couldn’t marry other members. Because there was no explicit rule directing their behavior in this way, Wade said, that shows the behavior was genetically driven.

Wade may or may not be correct that kibbutz members had a genetically established instinct to avoid dating within their own kibbutz because of a sibling aversion. I’m no geneticist and I would feel wildly disingenuous pretending I had a worthwhile opinion here. Still, I think Wade is operating with a false dichotomy here. Wade is saying that if a behavior isn’t the result of explicit rules, then it is an outcome of genetic programming. But there’s a missing option here.

Explicit rules are, of course, a part of the social order, but to an even larger degree, our behavior is governed by implicit rules. These rules are never explicitly written down or declared, but we learn them and implement them in our lives nonetheless. We can easily recognize when these rules are broken, even if we can’t actually say what the rule is or where it came from. We just recognize that one simply doesn’t do that. Different societies have very different implicit rules, and those implicit rules can change over time in a way that genetic change is too slow to explain.

Here’s one implicit rule I can easily think of, even though nobody has ever told me this rule exists, and before this post I’ve never formulated it explicitly.

In most classrooms from high school onwards, seating is not assigned. Classrooms are, as far as the official rules state, open seating. Yet this official rule isn’t the real rule. The real, implicit rule is different. There is open seating, but only at first. There’s a window of time where students can go ahead and sit wherever they like—but only for a short time. Two weeks, three at the most. After that, even though “officially” the classroom has open seating, it really doesn’t anymore. Everyone has picked out “their” desk and returns to that desk for every class. And everyone knows that they will stick with that desk for the remainder of the course. If Billy has been sitting in the second desk back in the third row for the entirety of the class, but then in the tenth week I get to the classroom before him and sit there, I’ve broken a rule. When Billy walks into the classroom and sees me sitting in “his” seat, he will be taken aback, and justifiably so.

Wade erred in declaring that since the rule wasn’t explicitly stated, it must be genetically driven. To be clear, I’m not saying Wade’s conclusion was wrong. I have no idea whether kibbutz members avoiding marrying within their own community is genetically founded. It might be. But it might also be an implicit rule. By framing human behavior as though explicit rules are the only option outside of genetically driven instincts, Wade is missing out on a whole category of rules that guide at least as much—and likely more—of our behavior than the written rules.