WEIRD
One of the entries in Scott Siskind's latest book review contest covers a book that I think is grotesquely wrong, The Weirdest People in the World by Joe Henrich. WEIRD is an acronym introduced by Henirch in an older article about why westerners are different from everyone else; it stands for Western, Educated, Individual, Rich, and Democratic. Henrich thinks that westerners, and people who have wholeheartedly adopted their worldview, think about the world very differently than anybody else ever has. In the new book he offers a theory of how that came to be that I think is completely ridiculous, so much so that I probably could not explain it myself without falling into sputtering rage. So let me pass that task on to the anonymous reviewer:
Henrich's hypothesis comes from cross-cultural psychology. The West got rich because Westerners are different. People from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies are WEIRD – the acronym comes from a previous article of his. In particular, compared to everyone else in the world and in history, modern Westerners:
This psychology might make societies richer, for fairly well-known and plausible reasons. The Weirdest People in the World (henceforth just WEIRD) sets out a causal chain from cultural change to psychological change to modern economic growth. The start of that chain is surprising: an obscure set of rules pushed by the medieval Catholic church, which banned marriage between cousins. The most important argument of the book is that these rules created WEIRD psychology.
- Are individualist, not collectivist or conformist
- Feel more guilt and less shame
- Explain people's actions by their innate dispositions, not their social role
- Reason analytically not holistically
- Follow more universal norms and less relationship-specific norms
- Are more patient
- Trust strangers more and are more honest.
How it worked: these marriage regulations served to dismantle intensive kin networks, which are the social cement of society almost everywhere else in the world. For most people in history, family hasn't just been the place where children grow up and couples spend time together. Family has been the basic human group, and there have been extensive and precise rules dictating who counts as family (or clan) and how each person should act with respect to different relatives. The Church's regulations, the Marriage and Family Programme (MFP), aimed to replace intensive kinship, and over many centuries it was more or less successful in doing that.
As to why the ban on cousin marriage might have had that effect, it's probably best to just cite the original author of this view, St. Augustine:
For affection is now given its proper place, so that men, for whom it is beneficial to live together in honourable concord, may be joined to one another by the bonds of diverse relationships: not that one man should combine many relationships in his sole person, but that those relationships should be distributed among individuals, and should thereby bind social life more effectively by involving a greater number of persons in them....
That is, rather than investing all our relationship eggs in the one basket of family, we spread them out and make the whole community stronger.
Why this is Wrong
1) The timing is terrible. The church was pushing for the end of cousin marriage in the late Roman empire, which went on collapsing just fine. It continued to push this view through the early Middle Ages, when western Europe was a pathetic backwater compared to China and the Islamic world (and not noted for an particular style of thinking). As to when church teaching had much effect on actual marriage practices, that is a hard question, but you will find a lot of people arguing for the 11th century and nobody who thinks marriage changed much in the crucial 1450-1650 period. For Henrich to be right, you have to assume that the alchemical effect of banning cousin marriage in the 4th century AD somehow reached its fruition right around 1500, when western Europe first began to make a real move forward past its medieval backwater status.
2) Western Europe's Jews participated quite extensively in the great awakening of Europe into trade, riches, and intellectual ferment, without any relationship whatsover to Catholic marriage teaching.
3) Many Protestant countries went back to allowing cousin marriage, including England, without this having any noticeable effect.
But there is another explanation we might consider for which the timing is absolutely spot on, and which involved Jews, and which was powerful in both Protestant and Catholic countries, and that is the opening of Europe to oceanic trade. I think it is blindingly obvious that what drove Europe toward world dominance was establishing itself as the center of a new world trading system.
Of course Henrich is not interested in wealth so much as in psychology; he started his research asking why westerners thought differently than other people. But to the extent that there is a western way of thinking, it did not begin with peasants. It began with urban elites, especially those involved in long-distance trade, and it spread only very slowly (if ever) to poor rural districts. If the crucial factor was the ban on cousin marriage, why did a different way of thinking not emerge all over the place?
I can also tell a story in which the opening to the world is what made European psychology different. First of all it eventually made them the most cosmopolitan culture in human history, with the most knowledge of the world and the most hunger for more knowledge. Every year new facts were learned about the world that challenged old models and assumptions. The vast geography of the new world, and the vast expense of trading across oceanic distances, drove the development of impersonal relationships through things like stock and insurance markets. To particpiate in this vast new endeavor you had to let go, at least a little, of ties to family and home town and embrace a wider sphere of interaction.
I find Henrichs wildly implausible, but that doesn't really refute his argument. What refutes it is that we already have a much better model that wonderfully fits the timing of the changes he wants to explain, and their geography, and the nature of the changes, and it has nothing at all to do with cousin marriage.
4 comments:
Geography is destiny.
Europe has more navigable rivers than any other region of the world. Europe also has the highest ratio of shoreline to land area of all the continents. Additionally, the Mediterranean and Black Seas are extremely advantageously positioned - not only providing relative ease of trade across them, but also highly favorable climatic effects, as well as extremely reliable sources of both food and luxury goods from the waters themselves.
Europe was always primed for a maritime culture - and while that's not unique to Europe, what is unique is such culture in a place that also was rich in other resources. Southeast Asia, for example, has a history almost entirely dominated and defined by maritime activities, but it is a region that is not rich in mineral resources like iron and lead, nor in chemical resources like potash; nor does it have as favorable a climate, nor as favorable a selection of available crops and animals suitable for livestock; nor does it have forests well suited to the construction of large fleets of ships capable of bluewater sailing; etc.
Europe also had the "benefit" of lacking certain resources that were highly desired, thus acting as a major impetus to expand beyond mere regional coastal sailing into sailing across the open oceans of the world, in search of valuable resources not available at home.
Southeast Asia's maritime peoples had no need to sail beyond their home region for things like spices - they were the primary global source of spices to begin with. They also didn't have a reason to go seeking precious metals - Europe's overseas expansions were at least in part driven by a silver and gold shortage in Europe, but both gold and silver were relatively available in South Asia, either locally, or through trade with nearby mainland India and China.
I very much agree that essentially all of Europe's success in the "modern" world stems from their combined ability and willingness to establish first true forms of global trade. Other regions of the world largely had no need to embark on such an endeavor, and instead they focused on their own regional affairs, and continued much as they had for centuries.
I would agree with John and Verloren on most points. I would set the timeline much earlier than John does. To me, Europe was already much more than a backwater by the eleventh or twelfth century, partly because they had mastered techniques for opening up the fertile North European Coastal Plain's agricultural potential, partly because by then western Europe was fairly far along in discovering the maritime vocation that G. rightly emphasizes. European shipping clearly dominated the Mediterranean from, arguably, 1100, with the Ottomans only mounting a comparatively brief, strictly military, and very effectively blocked challenge for some decades in the 16th century (piracy, of course, was another matter, a deeply characteristic feature of Med. life throughout the Middle Ages and beyond).
I would disagree with G. that specie shortages motivated European search for global trade. They weren't that short of silver in the Middle Ages, and were comparatively flooded with it after the Spanish American conquests. There were shortages, but these reflected less control of sources of metal than that south and east Asia drew all specie toward themselves until the mid-18century started to reverse the flow, slowly and partially at first. Of course, individual explorers/traders were always hungry to go anywhere for their personal enrichment in coin and metal.
East Asia was arguably the world center of manufacturing and commerce, more or less, until sometime in the early 19th century. But I think it's important not to overestimate Islam's global economic weight after about 900. The super-prosperity of Iraq under the early Abbasids was a relatively brief thing. Sure, Baghdad was a great metropolis around 800 "when London was a village" and all that, but Iraq hasn't known much peace since about 850. Egypt remained a great entrepot, but of course that status in part depended on Europe's status as one pole for it to serve as a go-between for.
@David- Well, if you want European commerce to be impressive by 1100 and the people who think cousin marriage really declined in the 11th century are right, that makes the timing for Henrich's theory better. But I don't see any sign that 12th century people were all that untraditional.
I did just read an article about Pakistan that says the decline of the extended family set the stage for women's status to rise.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1769913
I'm not sure I "want" European commerce to be impressive by 1100: my impression is that the scholarly consensus is that by then the Europeans held a degree of Mediterranean maritime ascendancy, perhaps most especially in the carrying trade and in military fleet action. They were important customers for Middle Eastern merchants and suppliers of certain goods. Not the center of the world, but not a backwater either.
I haven't read the review, but based on your description I feel pretty comfortable dismissing Heinrich's theory out of hand. It sounds clumsy, amateurish, reductive, over-generalized, moralistic, grandstanding, and tendentious.
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