The peasant ideal of equality recognizes a world of scarcity and
its promise is for mutual fraternal aid in struggling against
this scarcity and a just sharing of what the work produces.
Closely connected with the peasants's recognition, as a survivor,
of scarcity is his recognition of man's relative ignorance. He
may admire knowledge and the fruits of knowledge but he never
supposes that the advance of knowledge reduces the extent of the
unknown. this non-antagonistic relation between the unknown and
knowing explains why some of his knowledge is accommodated in
what, from the outside, is defined as superstition and magic.
Nothing in his experience encourages him to believe in final
causes, precisely because his experience is so wide. The unknown
can only be eliminated within the limits of a laboratory
experiment.
-- John Berger. from introduction to Into Their Labours