Oh it's definitely possible to fall back down. You just take a group and isolate them and put them in an economically precarious position. Hence why isolated hill people are disparaged as "clannish."
"Educated Westerners are starting to expect each other to know Chinese and Islamic history, which are still ongoing, and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World."
Well, crap, there's another thing I'm going to have to learn.
This description of westerners as "individualistic" is self-flattering. Another descriptor might be "digestible," in that a lack of closer, tighter bonds means that westerners are more easily assimilated into the leviathan of the modern state.
If cousin marriages are less common in cities than in the sticks, as seems plausible to me prima facie, then you'd expect low "kinship intensity" to correlate with higher urbanization, the latter of which might be sufficient to explain the wealth disparity.
In figure 1, Burma seems remarkably low on this index. That might be a good test for this theory: do the Burmese have this psychology supposedly caused by low "kinship intensity"? (That they're not rich, we can chalk up to historical happenstance.)
I think you need to consider the theology behind it, when asking "Why did the Church do this?"
Most cultures (citation needed) have complex rules around who can marry whom and different ways of calculating what degree of kinship is between any two people.
So the theology of marriage is simple: husband and wife become one flesh. That being so, you wouldn't marry your sister, would you? That would be icky. And cousins can be in that grey zone of "what exactly do you consider them to be in degree of kindred?" Hindu legends which have exact terms for "uncle on mother's side, uncle on father's side, elder or younger brother" are also "is this person a cousin or a sibling?" because cousins can be considered "he is like your brother".
This is the whole argument about the exact meaning of "adelphos" and did Jesus have siblings, for instance.
So if your cousin is to be regarded as your brother, then your female cousin is to be regarded as your sister. And you wouldn't marry your sister. So working out the degrees of con sanguinuity happens, which means things like "bonking your wife's sister counts as incest" (hence the long struggle to make marriage of deceased wife's sister legal in Victorian England).
It's not so much explictly or even implicitly wanting to break intensive kinship, it's actually *extending* kinship: if your first cousin is to be regarded as your sister for marriage purposes, and your sister or brother-in-law the same, and other family members are brought within the web of relationships, you're making the family bigger. And thus the need for dispensations to marry, and here we go with Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon based on her previous marriage with his brother and was it or was it not consummated?
"Under Roman civil law, which the early canon law of the Catholic Church followed, couples were forbidden to marry if they were within four degrees of consanguinity. Around the ninth century the church raised the number of prohibited degrees to seven and changed the method by which they were calculated; instead of the former Roman practice of counting each generational link up to the common ancestor and then down again to the proposed spouse, the new method computed consanguinity only by counting back the number of generations to the common ancestor. Intermarriage was now prohibited to anyone more closely related than seventh cousins, which meant that in particular the nobility struggled to find partners to marry, the pool of non-related prospective spouses having become substantially smaller. They had to either defy the church's position or look elsewhere for eligible marriage candidates. In the Roman Catholic Church, unknowingly marrying a closely consanguineous blood relative was grounds for a declaration of nullity, but during the eleventh and twelfth centuries dispensations were granted with increasing frequency due to the thousands of persons encompassed in the prohibition at seven degrees and the hardships this posed for finding potential spouses."
Which also amuses me if WEIRD is arising out of Church canon law around marriage, and hence the rise of Protestantism and hence secular society's success, and now we're back to "hey, you wanna marry your step-mom or divorce your husband to marry your son-in-law? go right ahead!" thanks to that same Protestant individualist dissolution of ecclesiastical authority 😁
EDIT: Also this:
"Francis Fukuyama has previously argued that kin institutions might be a problem for higher-level cooperation."
Membership in the Church now extended your kin institutions to *everyone* who was one of the baptised, your 'even-Christian'; now you were *all* brothers and sisters, because "But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
So now both the familial ties of obligation and sense of mutual aid were expanded out to strangers not of your blood, but incorporated with you into one family and one body by baptism and membership of the same Church.
From the maps given above, Henrich seems to locate the MFP specifically with the Western (Latin) Church. That makes me wonder, why didn't the Eastern (Byzantine) Church have a similar MFP? After all, it was working from the same religious basis. It seems like there must have been some differentiating factor (Latin vs. Greek culture?) that was *prior* to Christianity in order to produce the difference of MFP.
So, did anyone do a review of "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which would seem to me to be the main alternative theory out there (it's a "Landslide" theory, but not one based on a single event).
After reading the review I'm still wondering 1) why the Roman Church's rules were obeyed in these regions, and 2) apparently were also followed in most of the Orthodox countries. In response to 2) I'm willing to believe WEIRD culture spread eastward into Orthodox areas, but the will of the Roman Church was thwarted often enough when its ostensible subjects wished that the promulgation of the MFP is not enough to explain 1).
"In outline the rites of death were practically anti-social… they dealt with a soul radically separated, by death-bed confession and last will, from earthly concerns and relations…. Radical individualism… was embodied in the liturgy of death. It was expressed in its most memorable invocations… “Libera me domine de morte aeterna…”... And this entailed something more than the evident fact that we die alone: it had to do with the doctrine… that the destiny of the soul was settled not at the universal Last Judgement of the Dies Irae, but at a particular judgement intervening immediately after death. More mundanely, it had to do with the invention of the will, liberating the individual from the constraints of kinship in the disposition of his soul, body and goods, to the advantage, by and large, of the clergy."
Yeah, I'm going to push back on this. The Last Rites/Extreme Unction were anti-social? Has this person not heard of the Communion of Saints? Why does he think the indulgences scandal was such a scandal, if people were not engaged in the concern for the souls of their loved ones after death?
Death is a uniquely individual experience, sure, as we go out of this world alone even if surrounded by our loved ones. But look at this 15th century altarpiece of the seven sacraments, which loops around from the left to the right. The sacraments of birth (baptism) and death (the last rites) are on opposite but facing sides. You're born and initiated into the Church, and you die in the Church. You don't die alone as some atomised individual soul floating free of all connections and ties:
"“The noble lady Aurelia had dressed in her best for the ceremony of signing her will. When Regulus arrived to witness her signature, he asked her to leave these clothes to him. Aurelia thought he was joking, but he pressed the point in all seriousness, and to cut a long story short, he forced her to open the will and leave him what she was wearing.”
With this anecdote, Pliny the Younger offered an introduction to the peculiar practice of hunting for legacies among carefully chosen prey : single, well-to-do women. He provides an interesting starting point for investigating the social position and perception during antiquity of rich and elderly women who, in late imperial Rome, bequeathed their property to men chosen outside the bonds of kinship through the legal instrument of the will, which allowed them to designate not only heirs (when they existed), but also legatees. In this extract, the narrator expresses his indignation at the persistence of Regulus, a particularly tactless upstart who with inappropriate obstinacy demands of the noble Aurelia that she leave him her most beautiful clothes. These tunics, which were probably made out of silk, were quite valuable.
2The word that contemporaries used to describe Regulus’s behavior was captatio. Originally applied to bait-fishing and snare-hunting, the term refers to the practices of legacy hunters — also known as testament hunters — who lured rich testators into their trap. References to legacy hunters first appear with great regularity in our sources beginning in the late first century BC and the first two centuries AD. Their frequency attests to the significance of the phenomenon. Yet this purely quantitative observation reveals little about why the practice emerged during this period. It also acts as a reminder of the need to be attentive to the nature of one’s sources, which in this instance are primarily literary satires. This raises the problem of the relationship between the authors’ use of literary topoi and concrete social practices shaped by juridical structures."
It wasn't just rich older women being wooed by would-be heirs, it happened with men as well. See this extract from the "Satyricon":
"We set out upon our intended journey, after this last office had been wholeheartedly performed, and, in a little while, arrived, sweating, at the top of a mountain, from which we made out, at no great distance, a town, perched upon the summit of a lofty eminence. Wanderers as we were, we had no idea what town it could be, until we learned from a caretaker that it was Crotona, a very ancient city, and once the first in Italy. When we earnestly inquired, upon learning this, what men inhabited such historic ground, and the nature of the business in which they were principally engaged, now that their wealth had been dissipated by the oft recurring wars, “My friends,” replied he, “if you are men of business, change your plans and seek out some other conservative road to a livelihood, but if you can play the part of men of great culture, always ready with a lie, you are on the straight road to riches: The study of literature is held in no estimation in that city, eloquence has no niche there, economy and decent standards of morality come into no reward of honor there; you must know that every man whom you will meet in that city belongs to one of two factions; they either ‘take-in,’ or else they are ‘taken-in.’ No one brings up children in that city, for the reason that no one who has heirs is invited to dinner or admitted to the games; such an one is deprived of all enjoyments and must lurk with the rabble. On the other hand, those who have never married a wife, or those who have no near relatives, attain to the very highest honors; in other words, they are the only ones who are considered soldierly, or the bravest of the brave, or even good. You will see a town which resembles the fields in time of pestilence,” he continued, “in which there is nothing but carcasses to be torn at and carrion crows tearing at them.”
[“They either take in or else they are taken in.”
“Captare” may be defined as to get the upper hand of someone; and “captari” means to be the dupe of someone, to be the object of interested flattery; “captator” means a succession of successful undertakings of the sort referred to above. Martial, lib. VI, 63, addresses the following verses to a certain Marianus, whose inheritance had excited the avarice of one of the intriguers:
“You know you’re being influenced,
You know the miser’s mind;
You know the miser, and you sensed
His purpose; still, you’re blind.”
Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, lib. XIV, chap. i, writes in scathing terms against the infamous practice of paying assiduous court to old people for the purpose of obtaining a legacy under their wills. “Later, childlessness conferred advantages in the shape of the greatest authority and Lower; undue influence became very insidious in its quest of wealth, and in grasping the joyous things alone, debasing the true rewards of life; and all the liberal arts operating for the greatest good were turned to the opposite purpose, and commenced to profit by sycophantic subservience alone.”
And Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. XVIII, chap. 4, remarks: “Some there are that grovel before rich men, old men or young, childless or unmarried, or even wives and children, for the purpose of so influencing their wishes and them by deft and dextrous finesse.”
That this profession of legacy hunting is not one of the lost arts is apparent even in our day, for the term “undue influence” is as common in our courts as Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “husband,” or refined cruelty, or “injunctions” restraining husbands from disposing of property, or separate maintenance, or even “heart balm” and the consequent breach of promise.]"
But while people were anxious to perform alms giving and leave land and money to the Church for works of mercy, all in the service of saving their souls, wills were also public documents, written often according to specific formulae where the soon-to-be-deceased showed off his (or her) piety and orthodoxy as a good member of the Church and so as one of the souls to be prayed for by the living survivors in their community.
Even Thomas Cromwell, when making an early will, bowed to convention:
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell: A Life
"Second, there has been frequent remark on how traditional the religious reference of Cromwell’s will appears: it opens with an unusually florid commendation of his soul to God, Our Lady and the other saints, stipulates in the end seven (substituted for three) years of chantry prayers for his soul, and makes the sort of bequests to London’s five friaries and to poor prisoners in city gaols that one expects in the wills of particularly devout late medieval folk with plenty of spare cash. There are two feasible explanations. Was it a smokescreen for the benefit of London diocesan officials? When the future of Cromwell’s son Gregory and his little daughters was at stake, amid stirrings in the City about heresy, many involving his friends, with his tolerant master perhaps not around for much longer to protect him, the last thing would be to step demonstratively out of line in matters of public religious profession. Yet it is also possible that the shock of his wife’s death disposed Cromwell to think more kindly of traditional provision for souls: he remained a widower for life, rejecting friendly promptings for an immediate remarriage. Then followed the deaths of his daughters: his hopes of a family succession hung on the life of his son Gregory, who appears to have been physically small and maybe delicate as a boy. The prayers of priests and grateful recipients of charity might seem a reasonable investment. At a dangerous time, outward traditional piety would do him no harm."
I didn't see HBD Chick mentioned in the parts I read of The Weirdest People in the World. Did I just miss his citation of all the groundbreaking work she's done on his topics?
Another very silly book that performs insane mental gymnastics to avoid the much more obvious and powerful explanation: GENETICS
Here's the thing - even if you think all of these non-genetic factors have greatly influenced society, it's crazy to suggest that they're acheived such a level of impact *without* affecting population genetics. Like really, imagine trying to posit the existence of something that influences society at a fundamental level, but also try and come up with a way of explaining how this thing or things had virtually no impact on who has kids with whom, and who has more kids and who has less kids.
The fall in crime in Europe is almost certainly caused in large part through the execution of criminals over the course of centuries - we know that *genes* associated with violent behavior became less common over this time period.
And this matters! If you believe it's all cultural and all institutional, then you'll be fooled into thinking that you can take anyone from anywhere in the world and they'll assimilate and become like existing western populations. But this doesn't happen in e.g. Europe, because these are fundamental genetic differences and much of what we call 'culture' arises from these genetic differences in the first place.
>In particular, compared to everyone else in the world and in history, modern Westerners explain people's actions by their innate dispositions, not their social role
On what planet?
The striking feature of modern westernism is precisely believing that 'innate dispositions' don't exist (except when politically convenient), and that formative environment and society are why some people are below others.
Throughout history, most people just saw different people as different. Today, westerners tie themselves in knots desperately trying to justify believing that people with recent hunter gatherer ancestry are inherently equivalent to North-East Asians who have been practicing agricultural lifestyles for thousands of years.
Aristotle and co. literally thought that personal traits aquired through life experiences were passed down to people's kids. Aside from the silliness of modern advocates of 'intergenerational trauma', this idea is anathemic to modern westerners. If a violent man fathers a child who grows up to be violent, it is because they faced disadvantage, NOT because they inherented their father's violent 'disposition'.
Come quello di Acemoglu, anche questo libro -almeno per come è presentato nella recensione- sembra una riscrittura autocelebrativa della storia a uso e consumo di un ‘occidente’ che poi, scava scava, sono gli Stati Uniti o al massimo l’anglosfera. Quando una visione sembra troppo cogente bisogna sempre porre qualche domanda scomoda per vedere se l’impianto regge. La scienza che arriva dopo il protestantesimo è un punto che mi irrita, in particolare. Di scienza ellenistica si parla? Perché negli ultimi decenni è stato ben documentato quanto la scienza moderna debba a quella antica, al punto che senza il recupero dei testi ellenistici avvenuto col rinascimento la scienza moderna non sarebbe mai nata. Ora la domanda sorge spontanea: i greci copulavano colle cugine?
1) I don’t get how Sweden, Finland and the Baltics were left out of the MFP yet seem rich and democratic? Almost like, especially for the latter, they took off as soon as Russia left, despite having (gasp) high kinship intensity. Weird, indeed.
2) Wild tangent on how the point of education is character-building, whatever that is. Would be news to the late-antique grammarians who went out of business as soon as imperial offices were no longer available. Anyway, I feel like this is more of a true education hasnt failed because it hasn’t been tried, because (I’m going to go out on a limb) education has NEVER built “character”.
3) I’m pretty sure someone would come up with the idea of abandoning retarded infants had Plato not written that idea down. We’d even have some other author be the first one to write it down in way that many people read! Might be hard to imagine if you’ve never had an original thought in your life.
I am neither an economist nor a historian. I vaguely recall reading a competing theory of the West's dominance: Primarily that the odds of having investments confiscated dropped low enough that investments became more rational than elsewhere in the world. Does anyone reading this have any data on how large a factor that was?
I find the claim that weakening kinship networks was the crucial event ultimately driving the industrial revolution implausible. There are such things as family-owned companies. Are they invariably worse innovators and/or investors than other companies?
"As far as I know, this deliberate project of blank-slate rational institutional design, also known as political philosophy, is unique to Western thought, but I'm happy for an expert on Confucius or Ibn Khaldun to correct me."
I'm not an expert on Confucius but since no one else replied to this point-- Confucius absolutely uses the same form of reasoning as your example from the Republic. However, Confucius' starting point is the structure of the family, whose relationships are used as the model and judge of effective political organization. Embodying ren (仁), a sort of proper/virtuous action/being, is something that is foundational in parallel ways for both the family and the state. "Blank-slate rational institutional design" is arguably a good way to describe the Warring States Period, when a variety of experimental political philosophies sprung up in conflict (Confucians, Mohists, Legalists, Daoists, etc). So not only is this not uniquely Western, I think Chinese history gives an even better example on a much larger scale than Western history did, about a century earlier than Plato's Republic.
Re: Confucius specifically, it's worth reading the Analects for more detail if you get a chance, but SEP has a good summary of this topic, "The Family and the State" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/#FamiStat
I quite liked the review, but it seems to me that everything the reviewer asserted is probably wrong.
First, the intellectual history isn't nearly rigorous enough. The fact that Augustine said X in the middle of his voluminous writings doesn't necessarily mean that X was the mainstream view, or that the church did X because Augustine said X. The fact is, you can find some writer at some time saying anything; you can't use that as proof that the whole of the writer's society chose to go in that direction because the writer said that. Obviously Augustine is a little bit more than just "some writer," but there's still a lot more to be filled in.
Second, the argument seems to be another argument about "why the West is rich" without actually knowing anything about any other part of the world. Apparently, westerners "all universally agreed that the point of education is character, not technical skills" - unlike, for example, those pesky Chinese? Confucius's focus was exclusively on cultivating good character. And that's just the example that I know about. I'm sure you can also find a focus on cultivating character in many other societies.
Finally, I associate the reviewer's entire argument with Weber - I know Weber focused on protestantism rather than catholicism, but the outlines of the argument seem very familiar. It seems like failing to mention Weber is a bit hole here.
But still, I liked the review as a spur to go and look at the book, so thank you.
I think part of the reason the church prohibited first cousin marriage was that they had inherited the pagan Romans' very sensible "four degrees of separation" rule. This was that marriage was forbidden between two people who in a family tree were linked by less than four "hops".
The rule wasn't perfect because it included non-consanguinous links, excluding people linked in less than four hops to a previous spouse or step parent etc, even if neither people at the ends of the link were blood-related to the would-be spouse. From a genetic standpoint that is obviously a ridiculous restriction, but I guess was just a cultural thing.
Unfortunately the UK and, possibly partly as a result, some US states have regressed in that first cousin marriages are legal. This was because after the Reformation the church's Laws of Affinity were tweaked in the 1540s so that Henry VIII could marry Catherine Howard, who was a first cousin of one of his previous wives Anne Boleyn.
It's amazing that this hasn't been rectified in all the years since, despite several further changes to the affinity list over that time, especially once the laws of genetics became better known. But it would be politically hard to achieve these days, in the UK anyway, as many recent immigrants have a tradition of first cousin marriage.
"This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it's important and relevant, it's probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should."
Is HBD Chick in the bibliography? She pretty much wrote the book on the impact of cousin marriage online for free during the first couple of decades of this century.
I have a similar question as PhilH above does on Augustine. Did Augustine emphasize that point a lot? If he did, was he going by just the quoted argument or also scripture (e.g., the epistles) and the views of predecessors like Ambrose? And if the Church did take up this suggestion in a big way, why did we have to wait for Henrich to know that the quote of Augustine went viral? Historically, was it Augustine's argument of societal cohesion that was given for the cousin marriage ban?
Relatedly, one reason kinship networks survived was the social security they supposedly provided. This suggests the questions:
(a) Could the Church do something to fill in for the social security aspect? Or did higher "state capacity" in Europe help?
(b) Did the Church view the kinship networks as a kind of "decentralization" and hence a threat to the absoluteness of its power?
> And on the other hand, the Church’s programme is not simply an institutional change that then happens to alter human psychology. Part of what it does is directly and deliberately move human psychology towards individualism! You are alone before God’s judgement.
At least two of Jesus's claims, in the book attributed to Matthew, might have influenced Augustine's and the Church's adoption of those values:
-on the infinitely positive expected value of following Jesus: "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved." (10:21-22)
-"At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven." (Matthew 22:30)
I like the part where the book says that lower cousin marriage in Italy caused the coal mining in England needed to develop a steam engine.
The ancient Greeks had a steam engine called the aeolipile. There was even a patent filed in Spain for a steam engine a few decades before the industrial revolution started in England. None of them had a fuel source that made steam power economically viable. Only the English, who had exhausted their surface coal and were mining below the water line and who desperately needed better on-site pumping than people and horses could provide, had the means and motive to develop a steam engine to the point that you could build factories and trains.
Ideas didn’t create the industrial revolution. Coal did that, midwifed by engineers working in northern England on an obscure but urgently problem. In fact, it was the other way around: the industrial revolution created ideas. It let people imagine all the possibilities of what you could do with, by yesterday’s standards, an embarrassment of riches of energy.
To explain modern wealth you don’t need to follow the WEIRDs, you need to follow the watts.
This account completely ignores a lot of things which were essential to the development of modern "western" civilization, like the development of mathematics and protoscience in ancient Greece, the search for true mechanisms of nature regardless of practical applications, competition between large number of connected states in the Middle Ages and early Modern period which provided diversity of opinions and necessity of technological progress, and also ensured that nascent progressive ideas were never squashed completely, as thinkers could always escape to more liberal places (or simply places which happened to agree with them), desacralization of nature by Christianity, and many others. Many of those were just happy accidents. Any account which tries to isolate a single explanation must fail as a complete explanation, though it may still provide a piece of the puzzle. If there was a single explanation, then the "western civilization" would not be so unique.
Ever since these book reviews began to appear on Astral I have been mystified as to what their presumed purpose is. I read book reviews to get a sense of a book’s general goal, thesis and style; as well as to hear the critic’s argument as to why she does or does not recommend the book. And in fact, I read a lot of reviews —just not here.
These book reviews (and I can’t recall an exception to this) all seem to have something entirely different in mind. I’ve attempted to read about 20 of them since they began. My over-arching experience is that they are exercises in fan-fiction (or non-fiction)—NOT book reviews.
In fact, they are so tediously detailed, replete with additional context, data, examples, musings, etc—that I have yet to complete one. Sometime around the 2000th word I usually realize that I am no closer to knowing whether or not to read the subject book—- but that I am starting to resent the reviewer’s presumption that his opinion warrants so much of my time.
I would be delighted if someone in this community would write a review that actually sees its own importance as subordinate to that of the book under review. That review might actually give me enough insight to decide whether or not to read the book—and little enough of the reviewer’s own “erudition” that I might be left wanting more instead of yearning for relief.
Given how little history seems to be taught and focused on in school, it is hard to believe that there's a general expectation among westerners to know much of it, European or otherwise.
This jars: That is how, in the early 21st century, humanity can be trying to rejig the entire world economy so as to avoid the future peril of global warming.
There is no peril of global warming. So the review falls.
This review comes off as misleading because “the church” then and there, in the Carolingian and post periods, was not the self-contained hierarchical corporate entity we know today. They were clerical affiliates of the Carolingian and post courts. Yes, as a court cleric, you would have had to make reasoned arguments. But you would be functioning as an extension of the king (or other noble’s) brain, working from their assumptions to meet their goals. So, court clerics helped autocratic elites, a kind of planner-propagandist. In this sense, it was not “the Church” implementing policy, but rather the royal or noble court as a collective.
So, yeah, to legitimate a king as “godly”, court clerics had to strategize with existing elite expectations of “godly” in mind. But to call this “serious thought” or “political philosophy” is weird. These same court clerics also seriously thought that (literally) god only answers prayers in proper Latin, and not in common post-Latin. (Did they get this idea from Islam?) In other words, They wanted god to bless their crops and help their warriors fight. So they classicized the liturgy. Did this work to win god’s favor? Doubtful. But even if it did it’s hard to distinguish from Amazonian tribesmen doing random whatever because of their spirits.
Also, elites, the guys with the horses and armor and retinues to make their views count, actually did NOT foreswear cousin marriage. I mean, the Habsburg are famous for cousin-breeding but it was common. If a suitable alliance or high-value partner came on the market, an elite would marry even his first cousin. Sometimes, they would make a small donation to a monastery to let their clergy save face.
In other words, elites did NOT accede to clerical prohibition of cousin or levirate marriage. Pretty much anyone with the capacity to resist (arms or wealth) did so. This successful resistance suggests that people collectively did NOT see cousin marriage as particularly ungodly. They were fine with it! Still, elites enforced the ban on cousin marriage on the stratum of society who was too weak to resist yet has enough to matter (not serfs). Why would they have done that if they didn’t think cousin marriage was ungodly? Well, to dissolve potential family alliances that could threaten their social control.
They had help too, in the form of inheritance battles. Say, your only biological paternal uncle dies and your cousins try to inherit. Well, if you show that you’re uncle and his wife were fifth cousins thru a god parent, you can disinherit your cousins as bastards (for their parents’ invalid marriage). Ca-Ching! Anyway, I doubt the court clerics were “seriously thinking” that banning cousin marriage would play out (1) by preferentially allowing elite family alliances or (2) thru inheritance battles.
One thing I don't see any mention of is the core of Emmanuel Todd's theory of evolution of the family systems (nuclear family, exogamous and endogamous communitarian family, stem family) which proves that nuclear, Western-style (particularly England and Northern-France style) family system is primitive in nature, and enabled Western civilisation (yes that's a deterministic, "no room for individual choice" point of view). Basically the first places where civilisation initially grew evolved out of nuclear family (the hunter-gatherer, primitive family system) into exogamous communitarian family (still the dominant system in Russia, Vietnam, China, all the paces where Communism succeeded or had a strong success), then the most highly evolved endogamous communitarian family where basically everyone marries its cousins (Arab world, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, etc).
In this analysis, the important point is that individualism and nuclear family are definitely not "modern" but absolutely "primitive".
I feel like you throw out the "long series of random events" theory a bit too easily. Sure, there are 5 continents and modernization is not required to happen. But, I think you ignore a couple of factors there:
- The West doesn't have to win *every* die roll. An important invention can come out of Asia or Africa and be imported to the west (gun powder, the compass, Arabic & Indian mathematics). The West only has to get lucky on one or two scores that breed path dependence. That is, the invention of modern capitalism and the steam engine. Getting lucky on being the first to think up those inventions sets off a fly wheel that carries The West to dominance.
- I often explain extreme coincidence in a movie to myself by saying "if it didn't happen that way then it wouldn't be interesting enough to tell a story about." I'm a fan of monster of the week type shows like Doctor Who, and of course you can say "geez its crazy that every time they land on a planet there's some evil plan/ alien invasion/ weird goings ons," but you can justify that by saying there's all sorts of normal trips that happen too, they're just not interesting enough to make an episode about. I'm sure theres a name for this kind of thinking but a quick google search isn't revealing it. Anyway, my point is if The West didn't happen to become the richest society and invent modernity and etc. etc. we wouldn't be asking the question "why is The West so rich and modern." In any system with one outcome but trillions of variables over thousands of years, every outcome is individually unlikely, but one of them still has to happen.
ETA: When I say there has to be an outcome, I don't mean someone has to invent modernity by 2023, I just mean there has to be a state of the world and power and wealth in 2023 that one could be trying to explain. Maybe that state is WW3 happened and we're all living in underground bunkers, or maybe its that there was never an industrial revolution and we're all still peasant farmers, etc.
Dunno if it`s just me, but this was so hard to read. English is not my mother tongue and I am not educated in humanities, but I don`t normally struggle as hard as I did this time. I wish everyone wrote like Orwell :(
Nice conversation bait, but both push and pull are nonsense.
Among the biggest problems:
The Central and South Meso-American cultures pretty clearly died out due to (non-human) climate change - so this is neither push or pull but environment. The Northern ones - less clear if it was climate change or disease propagated by the first European interlopers but again, not obviously push or pull situations.
China was unified very early on, was peaceful and so never was forced to compete against first waves of barbarians (yes, there were waves but they basically just took over the top layer) and later various polities based on previous barbarian waves or the "native" peoples.
China itself remained unified whereas the waves of barbarians rocked Europe regularly from late Rome to the fights with the Muslims.
A similar situation, albeit both less unified than China and less fractured than Europe, also existed for India. Again, there were (fewer) waves of barbarians but the overall political situation in India was very stable in comparison to Europe.
What about the Middle East? The Sumerians, the Babylonians etc from which emerged writing, taxes, law codes?
Coming to the present: the WEIRD nonsense is jarring. This author has clearly not traveled to other parts of the world: Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow, St. Petersburg are far and above nicer places than New York, Los Angeles, London or Paris.
Shanghai went from 0 to more miles of underground transit than any other urban polity in the entire world in ten years(!).
Tokyo is closer to the former than the latter, but Japanese and Japanese society are also far less WEIRD than they are "not WEIRD".
So classify this as a nonsense book by an ivory tower intellectual.
Beware of monocausal explanations of social phenomena. Especially very complex social phenomena. They may seduce you more than they enlighten you.
I found Henrichs first book (the secret of our success) more convincing than this one. But the review is interesting. I enjoyed that more than I enjoyed the book. Interesting reflections on causality, and the two competing narratives - of a boulder rolling down a hill triggering a landslide versus someone pushing a bike uphill, are fun metaphors.
(But perhaps there are several boulders on the move at the same time, some larger than others, plus some of them endanger the biker pushing in the other direction, and the slope of the hill may vary from place to place, including there being ditches some places and humps other places, and and....)
"That a hundred things randomly conspired to make the West Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic is not a satisfying story. Why would the die rolls keep favouring this one place? "
Where do they 'keep' favouring this one place? Wasn't it just the industrial revolution?
The biggest problem with this theory is that there is already a much better explanation, which is Euroupe's opening to oceanic trade. It was making itself the center of the new world trading system that made rich, it was exposure to new cultural and other data from all over the world that created Europe's creative openness, and it was the scale of the new trading system that required the development of new, non-family-based economic structures such as joint stock companies, stock markets, insurance markets. This also fits the timing of Europe's rise to global dominance perfectly, while Henrich's theory relies on a cause that required a thousand years to have any effect.
"As a rule, among peoples unaffected by modern civilization the prohibited degrees are more numerous than in advanced communities, the prohibitions in a great many cases referring even to all the members of the tribe or clan.
The Greenlanders, according to Egede, refrained from marrying their nearest kin, even in the third degree, considering such matches to be “unwarrantable and quite unnatural;” whilst Dr. Rink asserts that “the Eskimo disapproves of marriages between cousins.” The same is the case with the Ingaliks, the Chippewas, and, as a rule, the Indians of Oregon. The Californian Gualala account it “poison,” as they say, for a person to marry a cousin or an avuncular relation, and strictly observe in marriage the Mosaic table of prohibited affinities. “By the old custom of the Aht tribes,” Mr. Sproat remarks, “no marriage was permitted within the degree of second cousin;” and among the Mahlemuts, “cousins, however remote, do not marry.” Commonly a man and woman belonging to the same clan are prohibited from intermarrying. The Algonquins tell of cases where men, for breaking this rule, have been put to death by their nearest kinsfolk; and, among the Loucheux Indians, if a man marries within the clan, he is said to have married his sister, though there be not the slightest connection by blood between the two. In some tribes, as Mr. Frazer points out, the marriage prohibition only extends to a man’s own clan: he may marry a woman of any clan but his own. But oftener the prohibition includes several clans, in none of which is a man allowed to marry. Thus, for instance, the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois was divided into two “phratries,” or divisions intermediate between the tribe and the clan, each including four clans; the Bear, Wolf, Beaver, and Turtle clans forming one phratry, and the Deer, Snipe, Heron, and Hawk clans forming the other. Originally marriage was prohibited within the phratry, but was permitted with any of the clans of the other phratry; but the prohibition was long since removed, and a Seneca may marry a woman of any clan but his own. A like exogamous division existed among the other four tribes of the Iroquois, as also among the Creeks, Moquis, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Thlinkets, &c."
Something seems off about this explanation of the rise of individualism in the west. If banning kin marriage caused marriage ties to extend more broadly across society and thus lead to a more unified society, that sounds like an increase in collectivism to me.
I still don't get why cousin marriage would be such a big deal. From what I understand, most ancient societies were patriarchal and patrilinear.
If a woman from clan Foo married a man from clan Bar, that woman became part of clan Bar. It would certainly not result in the permanent joining of the clans Foo and Bar, but more in a temporary alliance which lasted while the woman (or perhaps any of her children) was alive. If later on clan a daughter of that union marries into clan Baz, I don't think that would establish a clan link between Foo and Baz by way of a maternal grandmother.
As long as the marriage pacts are made by the patriarchs, I don't see how forbidding the marriage of close relatives will damage the power base of the clan patriarchs too much.
I feel like this one could have benefitted from a rewrite. It feels like there are two distinct threads in this review - an actual review of the book, and a discourse on how we should think about using history in order to take better decisions in the present - and both of those are mixed together in a way that, for me, just does not work too well.
This Amazon review made me very skeptical of this book. I don't have the history background to evaluate its claims properly, but it seems to make sense, and if so it basically invalidates Heinrich's whole thesis.
The best part of the whole thing was the little front section about how our understanding of psychology is based on only studying western college students. That's the book Heinrich should have written.
One effect of not engaging in cousin marriage is, obviously, a decrease in inbreeding. Inbreeding is really bad for IQ - it's not an accident that the children of incest have lower IQ than average, and it is not a mere selection effect (stupid people being more likely to commit incest) but a direct effect of inbreeding, caused by homozygosity for recessive deleterious traits. While incest among first-degree relatives has the most dramatic effects, generations of cousin marriage can add up to a lot of genetic burden. I read an estimate that cousin marriages in Pakistan subtract 0.6 SD IQ compared to outbred marriages. Huge if true.
The ban on cousin marriage probably had immediate salutary effects on IQ and overall genetic health of the population - and the rest is history.
This brings me to another very interesting question - the optimal genetic distance for breeding in humans. Inbreeding is bad. But extreme outbreeding, such as mating with members of other species (e.g. horse and donkey, or human and Neanderthal), also creates low-fitness offspring. If these extremes of genetic distance between parents are both bad, then there must be a genetic distance that is optimal - likely to produce fitter offspring than other, more inbred or more outbred matings. I once posed a hypothesis tying optimal genetic distance and the success of Yamnaya people in conquering the world. Wild stuff, and a story too long to fit into this comment.
Overall, the review doesn't separate the views of the reviewer from that of the book clearly.
The reviewer himself espouses "Whiggish" views much more than the book itself does.
In particular, I take issue with the parts of the review that view "Western civilization" as being a continuation of Greek/Roman civilization. I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the book itself, and Islamic culture for example, has at least an equal claim to being the continuation of Graeco-Roman culture. Until the fall of Byzantium, much of the Latin West's knowledge of Graeco-Roman knowledge was mediated through Arabic sources. Both the Arabs and Germanics were barbarians outside the borders of the Roman Empire who exploded in over the middle of the 1st millennium.
Regarding political philosophy based on some set of quasi-rational principles, the Chinese tradition of competing schools exemplifies this.
The book itself notes various trends in the Roman Church starting from the late Roman empire that take some power away from the family/clan-based culture, but it's really in the post-Carolingian era that it goes into full swing.
(scroll down to 1712). Sufficient answer - no need for a cousin-theory, though I agree it may have helped – as even more likely a non-catholic work-ethic did (Max Weber). But all the innovations that took place and hold(!) in China let me doubt Henrich`s thesis. If a 1712 steam engine would have made sense there, they might well had it earlier.
Someone who writes this; “and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World”. Clearly deserves no further reading. It is clear the bias from the very beginning.
I regret that I do not like it as much as I want to. It's technically fairly well written; I didn't notice any major problems. But it has a far too high ratio of "saying that the book is amazing" to "showing that the book is amazing". And I don't feel like it ever put together a good case for what the book was trying to argue, and I can't tell whether that's because of the review or because of the book. And it feels a bit disorganized: my basic diagnosis would be "not enough drafts", and that it could use a re-write or two, perhaps coupled with making an outline in the middle. And possibly some consideration of those quotes about how editing is like killing your babies.
The book:
It's an interesting thesis: this one action by the Roman Catholic Church, led to a difference in human reproduction in a certain area, which affected the historical trajectory of the people in that area. It seems plausible to me, but that's largely because I'd run across the idea of the Hajnal line almost a decade ago on SSC, via Scott's references to HBD Chick. Plus the Russian fox breeding, although there's apparently some questions about that. In this case, it sounds like it's a more psychological effect that's being proposed - humans have a tendency to bond together with relatives, so if there's a distinct group of relatives we get one type of behavior, but if there is no distinct group, we get a different type of behavior. Which again, seems plausible.
Via comments, I'm unclear on whether the reasons for the MFP matter or not. I'm unclear on whether the basic idea of the MFP came from the Romans or not. And for myself, I think the focus on individualism is only half the story, because WEIRD societies have also produced an obsession with conformity. How does that relate? Is it really different than conformity in the rest of the world? What's going on? Alas, I don't see any answers here.
Also, worth breaking out separately: I think HBD is the elephant in the room, and any discussion that purports to explain the exceptional historical trajectory of Europe via a millennia-long breeding project, needs to grapple with said elephant. Even if it's just removing it from consideration with some Kolmogorov-complicity-esque statement such as "obviously genetics has no effect on the capacity of the human mind". I am put in mind of a bit from Steven Brust's "Agyar":
"People are down on sociology," I said, "because it was invented by people who felt someone ought to answer Marx, and there's no answer for Marx outside of religion, a field any civilized person ought to avoid."
"That's preposterous--" he began.
"What is?"
"Your contention about sociology."
"Oh. I thought you meant my contention about religion."
"What makes you think--"
"Who first popularized the term?"
"Sociology? It was coined by Comte--"
"Who popularized it?"
"I suppose it was Herbert Spencer."
"And what did he say about Marx?"
"Huh? Almost nothing, as a matter of fact."
"And what was the strange thing the dog did in the nighttime?"
I have a hypothesis about a difference between WEIRD and other cultures.
Consider the following "ethical dilemma": Your brothernhas confessed to you that he has committed a serious crime. He wants you to lie to the police on his behalf. Should you turn him in to the authorities, or help him try to get away with it?
I think that most cultures consider the answer pretty obvious, but WEIRD cultures will say "obviously you turn your brother in, you can't let him go on committing crimes" and others will say "obviously you protect him, what kind of person turns their own brother away when he needs help?"
It is strange not to mention China more. China, especially before the Ming decided that everything the Mongols had liked (i.e. progress in general) was bad and should be forbidden, had all the ingredients to make the push towards industrialisation. They did that without breaking up clans.
I think a factor in making sure progress builds on itself is, counterintuitively, a lack of state capacity (the ability of a state to get things done). Proximity to a powerful state that can make big things happen is also necessary, but crucial breakthroughs (like Protestantism or the steam engine) happen at the outskirts where the civilisational centre can't stop them or rewind the clock).
A lot of problems can be solved by having a powerful central authority ordering people to cooperate better. This is what happened when Japan was running out of trees in the 1700s. In Britain when they were low on trees people turned coal, knowing it couldn't last forever but having little other choice.
Maybe the reason state capacity was low in Britain was individualism was higher due the influence of the church, these arguments can get circular, but the single boulder at the top of the hill seems unlikely to me. The topology of the hill is at least as important.
I am late to this, great review! But I want to slightly push back on this:
> As far as I know, this deliberate project of blank-slate rational institutional design, also known as political philosophy, is unique to Western thought, but I'm happy for an expert on Confucius or Ibn Khaldun to correct me.
"Deliberate blank-slate institutional design" seems to me at the heart of Islam. Muhammad in Medina was doing in practice what Plato was doing in theory.
There was less of this in premodern China, but not nothing. Most obviously, imperial examination system was very much deliberately designed institution. If you equate deliberate institutional design with all political philosophy, then you find even more, since China produced ton of whant might be classified as political philosophy; but it was within traditionalist framework, which probably shouldn't count.
Fair enough. The predominant social structures of today are cult and Ponzi scheme-like in nature (eg. the Cult of Puritanical Productivity and the Capitalism Recruitment Problem) which in themselves resemble negative space (black holes for the physics minded). Therefore, the only paradigm that could occur under these conditions must also have these qualities and yet have anti fragile properties so as to resist attempts to fundamentally change its core properties. Think for yourself what concepts, people, and objects in the world have these qualities and you will see where the world will be over the next 1000 years.
Oh it's definitely possible to fall back down. You just take a group and isolate them and put them in an economically precarious position. Hence why isolated hill people are disparaged as "clannish."
"Educated Westerners are starting to expect each other to know Chinese and Islamic history, which are still ongoing, and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World."
Well, crap, there's another thing I'm going to have to learn.
This description of westerners as "individualistic" is self-flattering. Another descriptor might be "digestible," in that a lack of closer, tighter bonds means that westerners are more easily assimilated into the leviathan of the modern state.
If cousin marriages are less common in cities than in the sticks, as seems plausible to me prima facie, then you'd expect low "kinship intensity" to correlate with higher urbanization, the latter of which might be sufficient to explain the wealth disparity.
So inferring the implications of this theory for immigration policy is left to the reader?
In figure 1, Burma seems remarkably low on this index. That might be a good test for this theory: do the Burmese have this psychology supposedly caused by low "kinship intensity"? (That they're not rich, we can chalk up to historical happenstance.)
No hit for "Hajnal line" ? :(
I think you need to consider the theology behind it, when asking "Why did the Church do this?"
Most cultures (citation needed) have complex rules around who can marry whom and different ways of calculating what degree of kinship is between any two people.
So the theology of marriage is simple: husband and wife become one flesh. That being so, you wouldn't marry your sister, would you? That would be icky. And cousins can be in that grey zone of "what exactly do you consider them to be in degree of kindred?" Hindu legends which have exact terms for "uncle on mother's side, uncle on father's side, elder or younger brother" are also "is this person a cousin or a sibling?" because cousins can be considered "he is like your brother".
This is the whole argument about the exact meaning of "adelphos" and did Jesus have siblings, for instance.
So if your cousin is to be regarded as your brother, then your female cousin is to be regarded as your sister. And you wouldn't marry your sister. So working out the degrees of con sanguinuity happens, which means things like "bonking your wife's sister counts as incest" (hence the long struggle to make marriage of deceased wife's sister legal in Victorian England).
It's not so much explictly or even implicitly wanting to break intensive kinship, it's actually *extending* kinship: if your first cousin is to be regarded as your sister for marriage purposes, and your sister or brother-in-law the same, and other family members are brought within the web of relationships, you're making the family bigger. And thus the need for dispensations to marry, and here we go with Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon based on her previous marriage with his brother and was it or was it not consummated?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consanguinity#Christianity
"Under Roman civil law, which the early canon law of the Catholic Church followed, couples were forbidden to marry if they were within four degrees of consanguinity. Around the ninth century the church raised the number of prohibited degrees to seven and changed the method by which they were calculated; instead of the former Roman practice of counting each generational link up to the common ancestor and then down again to the proposed spouse, the new method computed consanguinity only by counting back the number of generations to the common ancestor. Intermarriage was now prohibited to anyone more closely related than seventh cousins, which meant that in particular the nobility struggled to find partners to marry, the pool of non-related prospective spouses having become substantially smaller. They had to either defy the church's position or look elsewhere for eligible marriage candidates. In the Roman Catholic Church, unknowingly marrying a closely consanguineous blood relative was grounds for a declaration of nullity, but during the eleventh and twelfth centuries dispensations were granted with increasing frequency due to the thousands of persons encompassed in the prohibition at seven degrees and the hardships this posed for finding potential spouses."
Which also amuses me if WEIRD is arising out of Church canon law around marriage, and hence the rise of Protestantism and hence secular society's success, and now we're back to "hey, you wanna marry your step-mom or divorce your husband to marry your son-in-law? go right ahead!" thanks to that same Protestant individualist dissolution of ecclesiastical authority 😁
EDIT: Also this:
"Francis Fukuyama has previously argued that kin institutions might be a problem for higher-level cooperation."
Membership in the Church now extended your kin institutions to *everyone* who was one of the baptised, your 'even-Christian'; now you were *all* brothers and sisters, because "But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, 26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
So now both the familial ties of obligation and sense of mutual aid were expanded out to strangers not of your blood, but incorporated with you into one family and one body by baptism and membership of the same Church.
From the maps given above, Henrich seems to locate the MFP specifically with the Western (Latin) Church. That makes me wonder, why didn't the Eastern (Byzantine) Church have a similar MFP? After all, it was working from the same religious basis. It seems like there must have been some differentiating factor (Latin vs. Greek culture?) that was *prior* to Christianity in order to produce the difference of MFP.
So, did anyone do a review of "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which would seem to me to be the main alternative theory out there (it's a "Landslide" theory, but not one based on a single event).
After reading the review I'm still wondering 1) why the Roman Church's rules were obeyed in these regions, and 2) apparently were also followed in most of the Orthodox countries. In response to 2) I'm willing to believe WEIRD culture spread eastward into Orthodox areas, but the will of the Roman Church was thwarted often enough when its ostensible subjects wished that the promulgation of the MFP is not enough to explain 1).
"In outline the rites of death were practically anti-social… they dealt with a soul radically separated, by death-bed confession and last will, from earthly concerns and relations…. Radical individualism… was embodied in the liturgy of death. It was expressed in its most memorable invocations… “Libera me domine de morte aeterna…”... And this entailed something more than the evident fact that we die alone: it had to do with the doctrine… that the destiny of the soul was settled not at the universal Last Judgement of the Dies Irae, but at a particular judgement intervening immediately after death. More mundanely, it had to do with the invention of the will, liberating the individual from the constraints of kinship in the disposition of his soul, body and goods, to the advantage, by and large, of the clergy."
Yeah, I'm going to push back on this. The Last Rites/Extreme Unction were anti-social? Has this person not heard of the Communion of Saints? Why does he think the indulgences scandal was such a scandal, if people were not engaged in the concern for the souls of their loved ones after death?
Death is a uniquely individual experience, sure, as we go out of this world alone even if surrounded by our loved ones. But look at this 15th century altarpiece of the seven sacraments, which loops around from the left to the right. The sacraments of birth (baptism) and death (the last rites) are on opposite but facing sides. You're born and initiated into the Church, and you die in the Church. You don't die alone as some atomised individual soul floating free of all connections and ties:
https://www.wikiart.org/en/rogier-van-der-weyden/seven-sacraments-altarpiece-1450
Here's Poussin's 17th century "Extreme Unction" and you tell me that's 'practically anti-social':
https://www.wga.hu/art/p/poussin/3a/1sacram2.jpg
Now, legacies to the Church? Yes, but this wasn't a new invention; the Roman practice of legacy hunters had been established well before then:
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_ANNA_673_0605--wealthy-women-and-legacy-hunters-in-late.htm
"“The noble lady Aurelia had dressed in her best for the ceremony of signing her will. When Regulus arrived to witness her signature, he asked her to leave these clothes to him. Aurelia thought he was joking, but he pressed the point in all seriousness, and to cut a long story short, he forced her to open the will and leave him what she was wearing.”
With this anecdote, Pliny the Younger offered an introduction to the peculiar practice of hunting for legacies among carefully chosen prey : single, well-to-do women. He provides an interesting starting point for investigating the social position and perception during antiquity of rich and elderly women who, in late imperial Rome, bequeathed their property to men chosen outside the bonds of kinship through the legal instrument of the will, which allowed them to designate not only heirs (when they existed), but also legatees. In this extract, the narrator expresses his indignation at the persistence of Regulus, a particularly tactless upstart who with inappropriate obstinacy demands of the noble Aurelia that she leave him her most beautiful clothes. These tunics, which were probably made out of silk, were quite valuable.
2The word that contemporaries used to describe Regulus’s behavior was captatio. Originally applied to bait-fishing and snare-hunting, the term refers to the practices of legacy hunters — also known as testament hunters — who lured rich testators into their trap. References to legacy hunters first appear with great regularity in our sources beginning in the late first century BC and the first two centuries AD. Their frequency attests to the significance of the phenomenon. Yet this purely quantitative observation reveals little about why the practice emerged during this period. It also acts as a reminder of the need to be attentive to the nature of one’s sources, which in this instance are primarily literary satires. This raises the problem of the relationship between the authors’ use of literary topoi and concrete social practices shaped by juridical structures."
It wasn't just rich older women being wooed by would-be heirs, it happened with men as well. See this extract from the "Satyricon":
"We set out upon our intended journey, after this last office had been wholeheartedly performed, and, in a little while, arrived, sweating, at the top of a mountain, from which we made out, at no great distance, a town, perched upon the summit of a lofty eminence. Wanderers as we were, we had no idea what town it could be, until we learned from a caretaker that it was Crotona, a very ancient city, and once the first in Italy. When we earnestly inquired, upon learning this, what men inhabited such historic ground, and the nature of the business in which they were principally engaged, now that their wealth had been dissipated by the oft recurring wars, “My friends,” replied he, “if you are men of business, change your plans and seek out some other conservative road to a livelihood, but if you can play the part of men of great culture, always ready with a lie, you are on the straight road to riches: The study of literature is held in no estimation in that city, eloquence has no niche there, economy and decent standards of morality come into no reward of honor there; you must know that every man whom you will meet in that city belongs to one of two factions; they either ‘take-in,’ or else they are ‘taken-in.’ No one brings up children in that city, for the reason that no one who has heirs is invited to dinner or admitted to the games; such an one is deprived of all enjoyments and must lurk with the rabble. On the other hand, those who have never married a wife, or those who have no near relatives, attain to the very highest honors; in other words, they are the only ones who are considered soldierly, or the bravest of the brave, or even good. You will see a town which resembles the fields in time of pestilence,” he continued, “in which there is nothing but carcasses to be torn at and carrion crows tearing at them.”
[“They either take in or else they are taken in.”
“Captare” may be defined as to get the upper hand of someone; and “captari” means to be the dupe of someone, to be the object of interested flattery; “captator” means a succession of successful undertakings of the sort referred to above. Martial, lib. VI, 63, addresses the following verses to a certain Marianus, whose inheritance had excited the avarice of one of the intriguers:
“You know you’re being influenced,
You know the miser’s mind;
You know the miser, and you sensed
His purpose; still, you’re blind.”
Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, lib. XIV, chap. i, writes in scathing terms against the infamous practice of paying assiduous court to old people for the purpose of obtaining a legacy under their wills. “Later, childlessness conferred advantages in the shape of the greatest authority and Lower; undue influence became very insidious in its quest of wealth, and in grasping the joyous things alone, debasing the true rewards of life; and all the liberal arts operating for the greatest good were turned to the opposite purpose, and commenced to profit by sycophantic subservience alone.”
And Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. XVIII, chap. 4, remarks: “Some there are that grovel before rich men, old men or young, childless or unmarried, or even wives and children, for the purpose of so influencing their wishes and them by deft and dextrous finesse.”
That this profession of legacy hunting is not one of the lost arts is apparent even in our day, for the term “undue influence” is as common in our courts as Ambrose Bierce’s definition of “husband,” or refined cruelty, or “injunctions” restraining husbands from disposing of property, or separate maintenance, or even “heart balm” and the consequent breach of promise.]"
But while people were anxious to perform alms giving and leave land and money to the Church for works of mercy, all in the service of saving their souls, wills were also public documents, written often according to specific formulae where the soon-to-be-deceased showed off his (or her) piety and orthodoxy as a good member of the Church and so as one of the souls to be prayed for by the living survivors in their community.
Even Thomas Cromwell, when making an early will, bowed to convention:
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell: A Life
"Second, there has been frequent remark on how traditional the religious reference of Cromwell’s will appears: it opens with an unusually florid commendation of his soul to God, Our Lady and the other saints, stipulates in the end seven (substituted for three) years of chantry prayers for his soul, and makes the sort of bequests to London’s five friaries and to poor prisoners in city gaols that one expects in the wills of particularly devout late medieval folk with plenty of spare cash. There are two feasible explanations. Was it a smokescreen for the benefit of London diocesan officials? When the future of Cromwell’s son Gregory and his little daughters was at stake, amid stirrings in the City about heresy, many involving his friends, with his tolerant master perhaps not around for much longer to protect him, the last thing would be to step demonstratively out of line in matters of public religious profession. Yet it is also possible that the shock of his wife’s death disposed Cromwell to think more kindly of traditional provision for souls: he remained a widower for life, rejecting friendly promptings for an immediate remarriage. Then followed the deaths of his daughters: his hopes of a family succession hung on the life of his son Gregory, who appears to have been physically small and maybe delicate as a boy. The prayers of priests and grateful recipients of charity might seem a reasonable investment. At a dangerous time, outward traditional piety would do him no harm."
(1/2)
I didn't see HBD Chick mentioned in the parts I read of The Weirdest People in the World. Did I just miss his citation of all the groundbreaking work she's done on his topics?
Another very silly book that performs insane mental gymnastics to avoid the much more obvious and powerful explanation: GENETICS
Here's the thing - even if you think all of these non-genetic factors have greatly influenced society, it's crazy to suggest that they're acheived such a level of impact *without* affecting population genetics. Like really, imagine trying to posit the existence of something that influences society at a fundamental level, but also try and come up with a way of explaining how this thing or things had virtually no impact on who has kids with whom, and who has more kids and who has less kids.
The fall in crime in Europe is almost certainly caused in large part through the execution of criminals over the course of centuries - we know that *genes* associated with violent behavior became less common over this time period.
And this matters! If you believe it's all cultural and all institutional, then you'll be fooled into thinking that you can take anyone from anywhere in the world and they'll assimilate and become like existing western populations. But this doesn't happen in e.g. Europe, because these are fundamental genetic differences and much of what we call 'culture' arises from these genetic differences in the first place.
My January 13, 2003 article
"Cousin Marriage Conundrum: An ancient Iraqi custom will foil nation-building"
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cousin-marriage-conundrum/
got HBD Chick thinking about the cultural importance of cousin marriage.
>In particular, compared to everyone else in the world and in history, modern Westerners explain people's actions by their innate dispositions, not their social role
On what planet?
The striking feature of modern westernism is precisely believing that 'innate dispositions' don't exist (except when politically convenient), and that formative environment and society are why some people are below others.
Throughout history, most people just saw different people as different. Today, westerners tie themselves in knots desperately trying to justify believing that people with recent hunter gatherer ancestry are inherently equivalent to North-East Asians who have been practicing agricultural lifestyles for thousands of years.
Aristotle and co. literally thought that personal traits aquired through life experiences were passed down to people's kids. Aside from the silliness of modern advocates of 'intergenerational trauma', this idea is anathemic to modern westerners. If a violent man fathers a child who grows up to be violent, it is because they faced disadvantage, NOT because they inherented their father's violent 'disposition'.
Come quello di Acemoglu, anche questo libro -almeno per come è presentato nella recensione- sembra una riscrittura autocelebrativa della storia a uso e consumo di un ‘occidente’ che poi, scava scava, sono gli Stati Uniti o al massimo l’anglosfera. Quando una visione sembra troppo cogente bisogna sempre porre qualche domanda scomoda per vedere se l’impianto regge. La scienza che arriva dopo il protestantesimo è un punto che mi irrita, in particolare. Di scienza ellenistica si parla? Perché negli ultimi decenni è stato ben documentato quanto la scienza moderna debba a quella antica, al punto che senza il recupero dei testi ellenistici avvenuto col rinascimento la scienza moderna non sarebbe mai nata. Ora la domanda sorge spontanea: i greci copulavano colle cugine?
1) I don’t get how Sweden, Finland and the Baltics were left out of the MFP yet seem rich and democratic? Almost like, especially for the latter, they took off as soon as Russia left, despite having (gasp) high kinship intensity. Weird, indeed.
2) Wild tangent on how the point of education is character-building, whatever that is. Would be news to the late-antique grammarians who went out of business as soon as imperial offices were no longer available. Anyway, I feel like this is more of a true education hasnt failed because it hasn’t been tried, because (I’m going to go out on a limb) education has NEVER built “character”.
3) I’m pretty sure someone would come up with the idea of abandoning retarded infants had Plato not written that idea down. We’d even have some other author be the first one to write it down in way that many people read! Might be hard to imagine if you’ve never had an original thought in your life.
I am neither an economist nor a historian. I vaguely recall reading a competing theory of the West's dominance: Primarily that the odds of having investments confiscated dropped low enough that investments became more rational than elsewhere in the world. Does anyone reading this have any data on how large a factor that was?
I find the claim that weakening kinship networks was the crucial event ultimately driving the industrial revolution implausible. There are such things as family-owned companies. Are they invariably worse innovators and/or investors than other companies?
Very interesting.
"As far as I know, this deliberate project of blank-slate rational institutional design, also known as political philosophy, is unique to Western thought, but I'm happy for an expert on Confucius or Ibn Khaldun to correct me."
I'm not an expert on Confucius but since no one else replied to this point-- Confucius absolutely uses the same form of reasoning as your example from the Republic. However, Confucius' starting point is the structure of the family, whose relationships are used as the model and judge of effective political organization. Embodying ren (仁), a sort of proper/virtuous action/being, is something that is foundational in parallel ways for both the family and the state. "Blank-slate rational institutional design" is arguably a good way to describe the Warring States Period, when a variety of experimental political philosophies sprung up in conflict (Confucians, Mohists, Legalists, Daoists, etc). So not only is this not uniquely Western, I think Chinese history gives an even better example on a much larger scale than Western history did, about a century earlier than Plato's Republic.
Re: Confucius specifically, it's worth reading the Analects for more detail if you get a chance, but SEP has a good summary of this topic, "The Family and the State" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/#FamiStat
I quite liked the review, but it seems to me that everything the reviewer asserted is probably wrong.
First, the intellectual history isn't nearly rigorous enough. The fact that Augustine said X in the middle of his voluminous writings doesn't necessarily mean that X was the mainstream view, or that the church did X because Augustine said X. The fact is, you can find some writer at some time saying anything; you can't use that as proof that the whole of the writer's society chose to go in that direction because the writer said that. Obviously Augustine is a little bit more than just "some writer," but there's still a lot more to be filled in.
Second, the argument seems to be another argument about "why the West is rich" without actually knowing anything about any other part of the world. Apparently, westerners "all universally agreed that the point of education is character, not technical skills" - unlike, for example, those pesky Chinese? Confucius's focus was exclusively on cultivating good character. And that's just the example that I know about. I'm sure you can also find a focus on cultivating character in many other societies.
Finally, I associate the reviewer's entire argument with Weber - I know Weber focused on protestantism rather than catholicism, but the outlines of the argument seem very familiar. It seems like failing to mention Weber is a bit hole here.
But still, I liked the review as a spur to go and look at the book, so thank you.
I think part of the reason the church prohibited first cousin marriage was that they had inherited the pagan Romans' very sensible "four degrees of separation" rule. This was that marriage was forbidden between two people who in a family tree were linked by less than four "hops".
The rule wasn't perfect because it included non-consanguinous links, excluding people linked in less than four hops to a previous spouse or step parent etc, even if neither people at the ends of the link were blood-related to the would-be spouse. From a genetic standpoint that is obviously a ridiculous restriction, but I guess was just a cultural thing.
Unfortunately the UK and, possibly partly as a result, some US states have regressed in that first cousin marriages are legal. This was because after the Reformation the church's Laws of Affinity were tweaked in the 1540s so that Henry VIII could marry Catherine Howard, who was a first cousin of one of his previous wives Anne Boleyn.
It's amazing that this hasn't been rectified in all the years since, despite several further changes to the affinity list over that time, especially once the laws of genetics became better known. But it would be politically hard to achieve these days, in the UK anyway, as many recent immigrants have a tradition of first cousin marriage.
"This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it's important and relevant, it's probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should."
Is HBD Chick in the bibliography? She pretty much wrote the book on the impact of cousin marriage online for free during the first couple of decades of this century.
I have a similar question as PhilH above does on Augustine. Did Augustine emphasize that point a lot? If he did, was he going by just the quoted argument or also scripture (e.g., the epistles) and the views of predecessors like Ambrose? And if the Church did take up this suggestion in a big way, why did we have to wait for Henrich to know that the quote of Augustine went viral? Historically, was it Augustine's argument of societal cohesion that was given for the cousin marriage ban?
Relatedly, one reason kinship networks survived was the social security they supposedly provided. This suggests the questions:
(a) Could the Church do something to fill in for the social security aspect? Or did higher "state capacity" in Europe help?
(b) Did the Church view the kinship networks as a kind of "decentralization" and hence a threat to the absoluteness of its power?
> And on the other hand, the Church’s programme is not simply an institutional change that then happens to alter human psychology. Part of what it does is directly and deliberately move human psychology towards individualism! You are alone before God’s judgement.
At least two of Jesus's claims, in the book attributed to Matthew, might have influenced Augustine's and the Church's adoption of those values:
-on the infinitely positive expected value of following Jesus: "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved." (10:21-22)
-"At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven." (Matthew 22:30)
--
Past SSC/ACX discussions of this book:
-https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jjupy6/book_review_the_weirdest_people_in_the_world/
-https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september/comment/2984646 (response to https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R28QL9PWWETSD6)
-https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-244/comment/9448662
I like the part where the book says that lower cousin marriage in Italy caused the coal mining in England needed to develop a steam engine.
The ancient Greeks had a steam engine called the aeolipile. There was even a patent filed in Spain for a steam engine a few decades before the industrial revolution started in England. None of them had a fuel source that made steam power economically viable. Only the English, who had exhausted their surface coal and were mining below the water line and who desperately needed better on-site pumping than people and horses could provide, had the means and motive to develop a steam engine to the point that you could build factories and trains.
Ideas didn’t create the industrial revolution. Coal did that, midwifed by engineers working in northern England on an obscure but urgently problem. In fact, it was the other way around: the industrial revolution created ideas. It let people imagine all the possibilities of what you could do with, by yesterday’s standards, an embarrassment of riches of energy.
To explain modern wealth you don’t need to follow the WEIRDs, you need to follow the watts.
This account completely ignores a lot of things which were essential to the development of modern "western" civilization, like the development of mathematics and protoscience in ancient Greece, the search for true mechanisms of nature regardless of practical applications, competition between large number of connected states in the Middle Ages and early Modern period which provided diversity of opinions and necessity of technological progress, and also ensured that nascent progressive ideas were never squashed completely, as thinkers could always escape to more liberal places (or simply places which happened to agree with them), desacralization of nature by Christianity, and many others. Many of those were just happy accidents. Any account which tries to isolate a single explanation must fail as a complete explanation, though it may still provide a piece of the puzzle. If there was a single explanation, then the "western civilization" would not be so unique.
Ever since these book reviews began to appear on Astral I have been mystified as to what their presumed purpose is. I read book reviews to get a sense of a book’s general goal, thesis and style; as well as to hear the critic’s argument as to why she does or does not recommend the book. And in fact, I read a lot of reviews —just not here.
These book reviews (and I can’t recall an exception to this) all seem to have something entirely different in mind. I’ve attempted to read about 20 of them since they began. My over-arching experience is that they are exercises in fan-fiction (or non-fiction)—NOT book reviews.
In fact, they are so tediously detailed, replete with additional context, data, examples, musings, etc—that I have yet to complete one. Sometime around the 2000th word I usually realize that I am no closer to knowing whether or not to read the subject book—- but that I am starting to resent the reviewer’s presumption that his opinion warrants so much of my time.
I would be delighted if someone in this community would write a review that actually sees its own importance as subordinate to that of the book under review. That review might actually give me enough insight to decide whether or not to read the book—and little enough of the reviewer’s own “erudition” that I might be left wanting more instead of yearning for relief.
Given how little history seems to be taught and focused on in school, it is hard to believe that there's a general expectation among westerners to know much of it, European or otherwise.
Try Haidt, be ten per cent bee.
This jars: That is how, in the early 21st century, humanity can be trying to rejig the entire world economy so as to avoid the future peril of global warming.
There is no peril of global warming. So the review falls.
As for the rest of the world, see "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy" by Robert Woodberry in American Political Science Review.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41495078
This review comes off as misleading because “the church” then and there, in the Carolingian and post periods, was not the self-contained hierarchical corporate entity we know today. They were clerical affiliates of the Carolingian and post courts. Yes, as a court cleric, you would have had to make reasoned arguments. But you would be functioning as an extension of the king (or other noble’s) brain, working from their assumptions to meet their goals. So, court clerics helped autocratic elites, a kind of planner-propagandist. In this sense, it was not “the Church” implementing policy, but rather the royal or noble court as a collective.
So, yeah, to legitimate a king as “godly”, court clerics had to strategize with existing elite expectations of “godly” in mind. But to call this “serious thought” or “political philosophy” is weird. These same court clerics also seriously thought that (literally) god only answers prayers in proper Latin, and not in common post-Latin. (Did they get this idea from Islam?) In other words, They wanted god to bless their crops and help their warriors fight. So they classicized the liturgy. Did this work to win god’s favor? Doubtful. But even if it did it’s hard to distinguish from Amazonian tribesmen doing random whatever because of their spirits.
Also, elites, the guys with the horses and armor and retinues to make their views count, actually did NOT foreswear cousin marriage. I mean, the Habsburg are famous for cousin-breeding but it was common. If a suitable alliance or high-value partner came on the market, an elite would marry even his first cousin. Sometimes, they would make a small donation to a monastery to let their clergy save face.
In other words, elites did NOT accede to clerical prohibition of cousin or levirate marriage. Pretty much anyone with the capacity to resist (arms or wealth) did so. This successful resistance suggests that people collectively did NOT see cousin marriage as particularly ungodly. They were fine with it! Still, elites enforced the ban on cousin marriage on the stratum of society who was too weak to resist yet has enough to matter (not serfs). Why would they have done that if they didn’t think cousin marriage was ungodly? Well, to dissolve potential family alliances that could threaten their social control.
They had help too, in the form of inheritance battles. Say, your only biological paternal uncle dies and your cousins try to inherit. Well, if you show that you’re uncle and his wife were fifth cousins thru a god parent, you can disinherit your cousins as bastards (for their parents’ invalid marriage). Ca-Ching! Anyway, I doubt the court clerics were “seriously thinking” that banning cousin marriage would play out (1) by preferentially allowing elite family alliances or (2) thru inheritance battles.
One thing I don't see any mention of is the core of Emmanuel Todd's theory of evolution of the family systems (nuclear family, exogamous and endogamous communitarian family, stem family) which proves that nuclear, Western-style (particularly England and Northern-France style) family system is primitive in nature, and enabled Western civilisation (yes that's a deterministic, "no room for individual choice" point of view). Basically the first places where civilisation initially grew evolved out of nuclear family (the hunter-gatherer, primitive family system) into exogamous communitarian family (still the dominant system in Russia, Vietnam, China, all the paces where Communism succeeded or had a strong success), then the most highly evolved endogamous communitarian family where basically everyone marries its cousins (Arab world, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, etc).
In this analysis, the important point is that individualism and nuclear family are definitely not "modern" but absolutely "primitive".
I feel like you throw out the "long series of random events" theory a bit too easily. Sure, there are 5 continents and modernization is not required to happen. But, I think you ignore a couple of factors there:
- The West doesn't have to win *every* die roll. An important invention can come out of Asia or Africa and be imported to the west (gun powder, the compass, Arabic & Indian mathematics). The West only has to get lucky on one or two scores that breed path dependence. That is, the invention of modern capitalism and the steam engine. Getting lucky on being the first to think up those inventions sets off a fly wheel that carries The West to dominance.
- I often explain extreme coincidence in a movie to myself by saying "if it didn't happen that way then it wouldn't be interesting enough to tell a story about." I'm a fan of monster of the week type shows like Doctor Who, and of course you can say "geez its crazy that every time they land on a planet there's some evil plan/ alien invasion/ weird goings ons," but you can justify that by saying there's all sorts of normal trips that happen too, they're just not interesting enough to make an episode about. I'm sure theres a name for this kind of thinking but a quick google search isn't revealing it. Anyway, my point is if The West didn't happen to become the richest society and invent modernity and etc. etc. we wouldn't be asking the question "why is The West so rich and modern." In any system with one outcome but trillions of variables over thousands of years, every outcome is individually unlikely, but one of them still has to happen.
ETA: When I say there has to be an outcome, I don't mean someone has to invent modernity by 2023, I just mean there has to be a state of the world and power and wealth in 2023 that one could be trying to explain. Maybe that state is WW3 happened and we're all living in underground bunkers, or maybe its that there was never an industrial revolution and we're all still peasant farmers, etc.
Dunno if it`s just me, but this was so hard to read. English is not my mother tongue and I am not educated in humanities, but I don`t normally struggle as hard as I did this time. I wish everyone wrote like Orwell :(
Nice conversation bait, but both push and pull are nonsense.
Among the biggest problems:
The Central and South Meso-American cultures pretty clearly died out due to (non-human) climate change - so this is neither push or pull but environment. The Northern ones - less clear if it was climate change or disease propagated by the first European interlopers but again, not obviously push or pull situations.
China was unified very early on, was peaceful and so never was forced to compete against first waves of barbarians (yes, there were waves but they basically just took over the top layer) and later various polities based on previous barbarian waves or the "native" peoples.
China itself remained unified whereas the waves of barbarians rocked Europe regularly from late Rome to the fights with the Muslims.
A similar situation, albeit both less unified than China and less fractured than Europe, also existed for India. Again, there were (fewer) waves of barbarians but the overall political situation in India was very stable in comparison to Europe.
What about the Middle East? The Sumerians, the Babylonians etc from which emerged writing, taxes, law codes?
Coming to the present: the WEIRD nonsense is jarring. This author has clearly not traveled to other parts of the world: Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai, Moscow, St. Petersburg are far and above nicer places than New York, Los Angeles, London or Paris.
Shanghai went from 0 to more miles of underground transit than any other urban polity in the entire world in ten years(!).
Tokyo is closer to the former than the latter, but Japanese and Japanese society are also far less WEIRD than they are "not WEIRD".
So classify this as a nonsense book by an ivory tower intellectual.
Beware of monocausal explanations of social phenomena. Especially very complex social phenomena. They may seduce you more than they enlighten you.
I found Henrichs first book (the secret of our success) more convincing than this one. But the review is interesting. I enjoyed that more than I enjoyed the book. Interesting reflections on causality, and the two competing narratives - of a boulder rolling down a hill triggering a landslide versus someone pushing a bike uphill, are fun metaphors.
(But perhaps there are several boulders on the move at the same time, some larger than others, plus some of them endanger the biker pushing in the other direction, and the slope of the hill may vary from place to place, including there being ditches some places and humps other places, and and....)
"That a hundred things randomly conspired to make the West Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic is not a satisfying story. Why would the die rolls keep favouring this one place? "
Where do they 'keep' favouring this one place? Wasn't it just the industrial revolution?
The biggest problem with this theory is that there is already a much better explanation, which is Euroupe's opening to oceanic trade. It was making itself the center of the new world trading system that made rich, it was exposure to new cultural and other data from all over the world that created Europe's creative openness, and it was the scale of the new trading system that required the development of new, non-family-based economic structures such as joint stock companies, stock markets, insurance markets. This also fits the timing of Europe's rise to global dominance perfectly, while Henrich's theory relies on a cause that required a thousand years to have any effect.
I first encountered this theory five or six years ago on a neoreactionary blog. Interesting to see it hit the mainstream.
Buying the book right now.. Thanks!
It's not simply Westerners who have complex rules around who may or may not marry, see this 1901 book on the history of marriage, chapters XIV and XV:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59386/59386-h/59386-h.htm#CHAPTER_XIV
"As a rule, among peoples unaffected by modern civilization the prohibited degrees are more numerous than in advanced communities, the prohibitions in a great many cases referring even to all the members of the tribe or clan.
The Greenlanders, according to Egede, refrained from marrying their nearest kin, even in the third degree, considering such matches to be “unwarrantable and quite unnatural;” whilst Dr. Rink asserts that “the Eskimo disapproves of marriages between cousins.” The same is the case with the Ingaliks, the Chippewas, and, as a rule, the Indians of Oregon. The Californian Gualala account it “poison,” as they say, for a person to marry a cousin or an avuncular relation, and strictly observe in marriage the Mosaic table of prohibited affinities. “By the old custom of the Aht tribes,” Mr. Sproat remarks, “no marriage was permitted within the degree of second cousin;” and among the Mahlemuts, “cousins, however remote, do not marry.” Commonly a man and woman belonging to the same clan are prohibited from intermarrying. The Algonquins tell of cases where men, for breaking this rule, have been put to death by their nearest kinsfolk; and, among the Loucheux Indians, if a man marries within the clan, he is said to have married his sister, though there be not the slightest connection by blood between the two. In some tribes, as Mr. Frazer points out, the marriage prohibition only extends to a man’s own clan: he may marry a woman of any clan but his own. But oftener the prohibition includes several clans, in none of which is a man allowed to marry. Thus, for instance, the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois was divided into two “phratries,” or divisions intermediate between the tribe and the clan, each including four clans; the Bear, Wolf, Beaver, and Turtle clans forming one phratry, and the Deer, Snipe, Heron, and Hawk clans forming the other. Originally marriage was prohibited within the phratry, but was permitted with any of the clans of the other phratry; but the prohibition was long since removed, and a Seneca may marry a woman of any clan but his own. A like exogamous division existed among the other four tribes of the Iroquois, as also among the Creeks, Moquis, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Thlinkets, &c."
Something seems off about this explanation of the rise of individualism in the west. If banning kin marriage caused marriage ties to extend more broadly across society and thus lead to a more unified society, that sounds like an increase in collectivism to me.
I still don't get why cousin marriage would be such a big deal. From what I understand, most ancient societies were patriarchal and patrilinear.
If a woman from clan Foo married a man from clan Bar, that woman became part of clan Bar. It would certainly not result in the permanent joining of the clans Foo and Bar, but more in a temporary alliance which lasted while the woman (or perhaps any of her children) was alive. If later on clan a daughter of that union marries into clan Baz, I don't think that would establish a clan link between Foo and Baz by way of a maternal grandmother.
As long as the marriage pacts are made by the patriarchs, I don't see how forbidding the marriage of close relatives will damage the power base of the clan patriarchs too much.
I feel like this one could have benefitted from a rewrite. It feels like there are two distinct threads in this review - an actual review of the book, and a discourse on how we should think about using history in order to take better decisions in the present - and both of those are mixed together in a way that, for me, just does not work too well.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R1N3HFXK8K1OEO/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B08KWP7P2T
This Amazon review made me very skeptical of this book. I don't have the history background to evaluate its claims properly, but it seems to make sense, and if so it basically invalidates Heinrich's whole thesis.
The best part of the whole thing was the little front section about how our understanding of psychology is based on only studying western college students. That's the book Heinrich should have written.
One effect of not engaging in cousin marriage is, obviously, a decrease in inbreeding. Inbreeding is really bad for IQ - it's not an accident that the children of incest have lower IQ than average, and it is not a mere selection effect (stupid people being more likely to commit incest) but a direct effect of inbreeding, caused by homozygosity for recessive deleterious traits. While incest among first-degree relatives has the most dramatic effects, generations of cousin marriage can add up to a lot of genetic burden. I read an estimate that cousin marriages in Pakistan subtract 0.6 SD IQ compared to outbred marriages. Huge if true.
The ban on cousin marriage probably had immediate salutary effects on IQ and overall genetic health of the population - and the rest is history.
This brings me to another very interesting question - the optimal genetic distance for breeding in humans. Inbreeding is bad. But extreme outbreeding, such as mating with members of other species (e.g. horse and donkey, or human and Neanderthal), also creates low-fitness offspring. If these extremes of genetic distance between parents are both bad, then there must be a genetic distance that is optimal - likely to produce fitter offspring than other, more inbred or more outbred matings. I once posed a hypothesis tying optimal genetic distance and the success of Yamnaya people in conquering the world. Wild stuff, and a story too long to fit into this comment.
Sorry but I don't particularly like this review.
Overall, the review doesn't separate the views of the reviewer from that of the book clearly.
The reviewer himself espouses "Whiggish" views much more than the book itself does.
In particular, I take issue with the parts of the review that view "Western civilization" as being a continuation of Greek/Roman civilization. I don't see it mentioned anywhere in the book itself, and Islamic culture for example, has at least an equal claim to being the continuation of Graeco-Roman culture. Until the fall of Byzantium, much of the Latin West's knowledge of Graeco-Roman knowledge was mediated through Arabic sources. Both the Arabs and Germanics were barbarians outside the borders of the Roman Empire who exploded in over the middle of the 1st millennium.
Regarding political philosophy based on some set of quasi-rational principles, the Chinese tradition of competing schools exemplifies this.
The book itself notes various trends in the Roman Church starting from the late Roman empire that take some power away from the family/clan-based culture, but it's really in the post-Carolingian era that it goes into full swing.
Is this the winner?! Well written and the book has Scott’s attention, certainly; he did a review of the first book: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/
As for the „big question: why rich“ the answer was and is industrial revolution:
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
(scroll down to 1712). Sufficient answer - no need for a cousin-theory, though I agree it may have helped – as even more likely a non-catholic work-ethic did (Max Weber). But all the innovations that took place and hold(!) in China let me doubt Henrich`s thesis. If a 1712 steam engine would have made sense there, they might well had it earlier.
Such a big topic that I'm not sure what I think of yet.
Regardless, this writing is just beautiful.
Someone who writes this; “and perhaps something about pre-Columbian America whose stories were traumatically ended by the conquest of the New World”. Clearly deserves no further reading. It is clear the bias from the very beginning.
The review:
I regret that I do not like it as much as I want to. It's technically fairly well written; I didn't notice any major problems. But it has a far too high ratio of "saying that the book is amazing" to "showing that the book is amazing". And I don't feel like it ever put together a good case for what the book was trying to argue, and I can't tell whether that's because of the review or because of the book. And it feels a bit disorganized: my basic diagnosis would be "not enough drafts", and that it could use a re-write or two, perhaps coupled with making an outline in the middle. And possibly some consideration of those quotes about how editing is like killing your babies.
The book:
It's an interesting thesis: this one action by the Roman Catholic Church, led to a difference in human reproduction in a certain area, which affected the historical trajectory of the people in that area. It seems plausible to me, but that's largely because I'd run across the idea of the Hajnal line almost a decade ago on SSC, via Scott's references to HBD Chick. Plus the Russian fox breeding, although there's apparently some questions about that. In this case, it sounds like it's a more psychological effect that's being proposed - humans have a tendency to bond together with relatives, so if there's a distinct group of relatives we get one type of behavior, but if there is no distinct group, we get a different type of behavior. Which again, seems plausible.
Via comments, I'm unclear on whether the reasons for the MFP matter or not. I'm unclear on whether the basic idea of the MFP came from the Romans or not. And for myself, I think the focus on individualism is only half the story, because WEIRD societies have also produced an obsession with conformity. How does that relate? Is it really different than conformity in the rest of the world? What's going on? Alas, I don't see any answers here.
Also, worth breaking out separately: I think HBD is the elephant in the room, and any discussion that purports to explain the exceptional historical trajectory of Europe via a millennia-long breeding project, needs to grapple with said elephant. Even if it's just removing it from consideration with some Kolmogorov-complicity-esque statement such as "obviously genetics has no effect on the capacity of the human mind". I am put in mind of a bit from Steven Brust's "Agyar":
"People are down on sociology," I said, "because it was invented by people who felt someone ought to answer Marx, and there's no answer for Marx outside of religion, a field any civilized person ought to avoid."
"That's preposterous--" he began.
"What is?"
"Your contention about sociology."
"Oh. I thought you meant my contention about religion."
"What makes you think--"
"Who first popularized the term?"
"Sociology? It was coined by Comte--"
"Who popularized it?"
"I suppose it was Herbert Spencer."
"And what did he say about Marx?"
"Huh? Almost nothing, as a matter of fact."
"And what was the strange thing the dog did in the nighttime?"
I have a hypothesis about a difference between WEIRD and other cultures.
Consider the following "ethical dilemma": Your brothernhas confessed to you that he has committed a serious crime. He wants you to lie to the police on his behalf. Should you turn him in to the authorities, or help him try to get away with it?
I think that most cultures consider the answer pretty obvious, but WEIRD cultures will say "obviously you turn your brother in, you can't let him go on committing crimes" and others will say "obviously you protect him, what kind of person turns their own brother away when he needs help?"
It is strange not to mention China more. China, especially before the Ming decided that everything the Mongols had liked (i.e. progress in general) was bad and should be forbidden, had all the ingredients to make the push towards industrialisation. They did that without breaking up clans.
I think a factor in making sure progress builds on itself is, counterintuitively, a lack of state capacity (the ability of a state to get things done). Proximity to a powerful state that can make big things happen is also necessary, but crucial breakthroughs (like Protestantism or the steam engine) happen at the outskirts where the civilisational centre can't stop them or rewind the clock).
A lot of problems can be solved by having a powerful central authority ordering people to cooperate better. This is what happened when Japan was running out of trees in the 1700s. In Britain when they were low on trees people turned coal, knowing it couldn't last forever but having little other choice.
Maybe the reason state capacity was low in Britain was individualism was higher due the influence of the church, these arguments can get circular, but the single boulder at the top of the hill seems unlikely to me. The topology of the hill is at least as important.
I am late to this, great review! But I want to slightly push back on this:
> As far as I know, this deliberate project of blank-slate rational institutional design, also known as political philosophy, is unique to Western thought, but I'm happy for an expert on Confucius or Ibn Khaldun to correct me.
"Deliberate blank-slate institutional design" seems to me at the heart of Islam. Muhammad in Medina was doing in practice what Plato was doing in theory.
There was less of this in premodern China, but not nothing. Most obviously, imperial examination system was very much deliberately designed institution. If you equate deliberate institutional design with all political philosophy, then you find even more, since China produced ton of whant might be classified as political philosophy; but it was within traditionalist framework, which probably shouldn't count.
Fair enough. The predominant social structures of today are cult and Ponzi scheme-like in nature (eg. the Cult of Puritanical Productivity and the Capitalism Recruitment Problem) which in themselves resemble negative space (black holes for the physics minded). Therefore, the only paradigm that could occur under these conditions must also have these qualities and yet have anti fragile properties so as to resist attempts to fundamentally change its core properties. Think for yourself what concepts, people, and objects in the world have these qualities and you will see where the world will be over the next 1000 years.