Writing from Islamic Spain in 1068, scholar Said ibn Ahmad describes the different nations of the world. Some, like the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Indians and Jews, he writes, have clearly made a contribution to civilisation, while others, whom Ahmad describes as “barbarians,” have not. According to him, the barbarians of northern and western Europe lack “keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence” and are “overcome by ignorance and apathy, lack of discernment and stupidity.”
During the modern era, Ahmad’s northern barbarians came to dominate the world, making up for their previously poor showing with the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and constitutional democracy. How these ideas took off in a previously uninspiring cold and soggy backwater is one of the great questions in human history.
Joseph Henrich, Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, provides a plausible and thought-provoking explanation in The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. His argument is that WEIRD people—Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic—have psychological characteristics that differentiate them from most other human beings who have ever lived. These characteristics are not innate, but developed as our societies changed. As Henrich puts it, “our minds adapt, often over centuries through cultural evolution, to the institutional and technological worlds we encounter.” The split between the WEIRD and everyone else began when the medieval church started dismantling Europe’s traditional kinship institutions and, over time, led to the rise of impersonal markets, the regulation of in-group competition and the broad and mobile division of labour in urban centres: modernity, in other words. We tend to overlook the underlying psychological factors, he argues, because most modern psychology studies use WEIRD subjects. This makes these WEIRD characteristics look normal, when, in fact, WEIRD people are often at the far end of the spectrum.
Do you obey authority figures you have never met? Scoff at the thought of an independent adult child being expected to obey her parents? Think nothing of handing your money or property over to a business owned by a stranger for safekeeping? Grimace at the idea of marrying your cousin? Chances are that you’re WEIRD. Most westerners would agree with you, but most non-westerners, including hundreds of generations of your own ancestors, would not.
Henrich cites a number of studies showing measurable differences in behaviour between westerners and non-westerners. For example, should you lie to help a friend in a dispute with a stranger? Respondents in western countries overwhelmingly think not, but respondents in more traditional non-western societies are more open to the idea.
Henrich cites an illuminating anecdote from Afghan-born author Tamim Ansary. Ansary asked a man in a rural village what it had been like to vote in Afghanistan’s first election after the downfall of the Taliban. The man told Ansary that he marked the pieces of paper as the men from the city directed him to, but found the whole election unnecessary. There was no doubt as to who would represent their village in the legislature—a man called Agha-i-Sayyaf. “His family has lived here since the days of Dost Mohammed Khan and longer … did you know that my sister’s husband has a cousin who is married to Sayyaf’s sister-in-law? He’s one of our own,” the man explained to Ansary. To the Afghan villager, the election was not about choosing between competing parties or ideologies. He considered it natural to prefer a known local authority figure with whom he had ties of kinship over everyone else.
From Traditional to WEIRD
Henrich first thought of writing the book when he was teaching a course based on Jared Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond argues that world history up to about 1500 AD, including the rise of advanced civilisations in the Mediterranean and South Asia, as well as the fact that Europeans colonised the Americas and not vice versa, can be largely explained by the geographical distribution of domesticable plants and animals. Henrich wanted to find a similarly broad explanation for the developments of more recent centuries. But while Diamond looked to geography, he looked to psychology.
Humans have traditionally lived in small groups defined by kinship networks. When the Greeks and Romans encountered them, the Celtic and Germanic peoples of northern Europe still lived in such societies. They would have thought about political leadership in exactly the same way as the Afghan villager in Ansary’s story. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans, whom we think of as the founders of modern western civilisation, valued extended families and local gods far more than we do today. Henrich argues that the shift to a modern individual society was driven by the Catholic Church’s restructuring of the “oldest and most fundamental institutions” of family and religion. The church’s marriage family program (or MFP, as Henrich calls it) prohibited cousin marriage, polygamy and divorce, encouraged newly-married couples to set up their own independent households, prohibited clergy from marrying and allowed people to bequeath their property however they wished. The unintended effect of these reforms was to break down extended families as political units and create new non-family church-based networks. Henrich argues that these reforms paved the way for further non-kinship networks, such as the late Medieval universities, guilds and town councils, which, in turn, provided the foundations for science, state secularism, capitalism and constitutional government.
Why the West?
As I have written elsewhere, any explanation of western Europe’s success must include both place and time. Why did modernity arise in northern and western Europe and not elsewhere, and why did it arise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and not before? Henrich’s argument accounts for both and, as he explains, better fits the evidence than alternative theories based on genetics or wealth.
Henrich’s prose is readable and accessible, but at times The WEIRDest People in the World is dense with figures and studies. Henrich clearly aimed to be comprehensive—and it has paid off. Other writers have explored the differences in thinking between the residents of modern industrialised societies and those of traditional communities (including Jared Diamond in his 2012 The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?), while others have looked to the medieval church for the origins of the ideas of the modern west (such as Larry Siedentop in his 2015 Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism), but Henrich is more rigorous than either in his use of hard data. There is certainly more to be said on the origins of the Enlightenment and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, but The WEIRDest People in the World tells a story which holds together from start to finish.
Henrich ends by reminding us that our minds will continue to adapt and change. Future humans will struggle to understand how we think today, just as we often struggle to understand the thinking of premodern people. If his overall argument is correct, we may adapt to our changing society by becoming, if anything, even WEIRDer.
5 comments
Nice review, you’ve convinced me to buy the book.
I don’t find Jared Diamond particularly persuasive. I don’t expect Henrich will overthrow my views about what led to the modern world either. I think Jonathan Israel’s “Radical Enlightenment” gets it mostly right, because it’s the idea’s that have propagated through Western culture that were decisive. Israel traces these ideas through the Greek atomists (Epicurus in particular), the Roman poet Lucretius (“De Rerum Natura”), Machiavelli, Galileo, Bruno, Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, and beyond. (This is a partial list).
I will be curious to see how the Catholic church lent much to this endeavor, the unintended consequences of church influence outlined in the review notwithstanding. It seems to me that modernity resulted largely from exposing religious doctrine as false and greatly diminishing it’s influence.
CarlW noted on 04/01/2021 that “It seems to me that modernity resulted largely from exposing religious doctrine as false and greatly diminishing it’s influence.” One specific instance of “exposing religious doctrine as false” and “greatly diminishing its influence,” many observers would think, would consist of questioning a legalistic moral absolutism with no regard for concrete circumstances or human well-being–an absolutism that could be seen as a hangover from regarding moral rules as Divine commands. And, as I myself wrote here the other day, a good example of such rigid moral absolutism would be Immanuel Kant’s famous or notorious argument that it is always wrong to tell a lie, even to save a human life–a maxim which since World War II has been criticized innumerable times to imply that it would even have been wrong to tell a lie to protect a Jew from the Nazis (or to protect your best friend from an ax-wielding homicidal maniac angrily demanding your friend’s whereabouts). Such rigorism has often been interpreted as a subconscious psychological hangover from early religious indoctrination even in a thinker like Kant who, on the conscious level, had supposedly outgrown and discarded the theological fundamentalism of his well-known Pietist upbringing. Even most believing Christians, incidentally, have rejected Kant’s ultra-rigorism–most Christians have in fact explicitly argued that in such cases the obligation to save a human life outweighs the otherwise important obligation to tell the truth. Many devout Christians, as we all know, went to great lengths to protect Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust, often to the extent of forging Catholic or Protestant baptismal certificates for Jews, or disguising Jewish children as Catholic parochial school students. In any case. Kant might be seen as an individual who consciously thought of himself as an Enlightenment thinker in most respects, yet also still unconsciously retained psychological traces and hangovers of a rather one-sided fundamentalist religiosity. I’ve often thought myself of Kant as one of those people whose personality and attitudes suggest that there perhaps might well be some truth after all to the 1940’s and 1950’s pop-Freudian stereotype of the “anal personality” with a rigidly compulsive hyper-conscientious character structure shaped by overly strict toilet training!:=) :=)
Joseph Henrich in his study cited the question, “should you lie to help a friend in a dispute with a stranger?,” and found that “Respondents in western countries overwhelmingly think not, but respondents in more traditional non-western societies are more open to the idea.” I think the question is framed in much too broad, vague, general, and abstract way. I myself, for instance, as a Westerner, would immediately answer a resounding loud and clear “YES!!” to the question, would I tell a lie to save the life of a friend–or even of a complete stranger, or of somebody I disliked–when asked his whereabouts by a homicidal maniac or a Mafia hit-man?–and I think most Westerners would agree with me. On the other hand, I would be very, very hesitant to tell a lie to help a friend win a contest or a business deal, and again I think most Westerners would agree with me here. Of course, as many of us know, Immanuel Kant inspired a huge amount of controversy by arguing that it is always wrong to tell a lie, even to save someone’s life. Would Kant have told the truth, his critics have asked, to an SS officer asking for the whereabouts of a Jew? I myself have always personally considered Kant, as great a philosopher as he might have been, as a cold heartless self-righteous inhuman prig, for his view! In fact, I think it might even be plausibly argued that the sort of rigorous moral absolutism shown in Kant’s disapproval of telling a lie even to save a life–or by extremist Catholics who would not even allow an abortion to save a pregnant woman’s life–as a good example of a PREMODERN attitude to which the West, thankfully, began saying “good f***king riddance!!” with the Enlightenment! And if somebody were to walk into my room this afternoon and tell me she’s just built and successfuly tested a working time machine which can take me to 18th century Koenigsberg and then back home gain, I’d gladly seize the opportunity to travel back in time to Koenigsberg ca. 1784 and tell Immanuel Kant to his face what I think of his view!
You don’t know the arguments, do you? You call yourself educated? The Enlightenment legacy can be seen all around us: individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise, and on and on. All of these are bogeymen to the Left and they wish to free our society from their oppression.
The concept of “race” was birthed by the Enlightenment. Before that, there wasn’t any racism, just Christians and heathens. But the white man came up with the idea there is “objective truth” and used it to oppress peoples of color. The Enlightenment’s ontology, rooted in the new science of the 17th century, created a vision of human beings in nature which provided weapons to a new race-based ideology which would have been impossible without the Enlightenment.
The entire idea behind today’s Left-wing thought is that there is no objective truth, only differing points of view, all equally valid. For example, there is no valid genetic basis for human intelligence, there are merely different kinds of intelligence. Native Americans do poorly at intelligence tests designed for whites, but excel at tests designed to measure storytelling intelligence.
White supremacy as enabled by the Enlightenment is most commonly conceptualized as a way for lower-class whites to feel socially superior to people from other ethnic backgrounds. More important, though, white supremacy is a tried-and-tested means for upper class whites to grow their wealth and power. This thought is all over the place on the Left and I am astonished that you are not familiar with it.
What a non-sequitur.