"The Catholic Church also can’t explain why Japan is such an outlier within Asia, scoring much WEIRDer on the World Values Survey than any other Asian country and even WEIRDer than Italy and most of Eastern Europe"
Isn't that due to the conscious Japanese decision to Westernise, if we're gonna have these gunboats turning up in our harbours, might as well copy the successful foreigners and do what they do in the hopes that we'll be as big and successful ourselves?
"The Meiji era is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization by Western powers to the new paradigm of a modern, industrialized nation state and emergent great power, influenced by Western scientific, technological, philosophical, political, legal, and aesthetic ideas. As a result of such wholesale adoption of radically different ideas, the changes to Japan were profound, and affected its social structure, internal politics, economy, military, and foreign relations."
If you turn out WEIRD because you meticulously copied the West (and then had Western values imposed on you by fiat by the occupying powers after the Second World War), and WEIRD comes out of the Catholic Church, then uh - yeah, it can explain that?
Japan is isolated by sea and much smaller than China, both geographically and in terms of population. It's easier to move a house than a village. China also famously resisted the Western ideas, to the point where the Europeans basically had to get them all hooked on opium in order to even secure a Western notion of trade.
Hong Kong, while technically an island, was never particularly "isolated" from the mainland Chinese. Cantonese and Mandarin are reasonably mutually-intelligible in their written forms, to a degree far beyond that of Japanese kanji.
I believe that's a common misconception (and I expect one deliberately fostered by the Chinese government): the supposed "written form" of Cantonese, "standard written Chinese," IS essentially Mandarin, and ACTUAL written Cantonese is completely different. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Modern_times
The West did the same gun boat diplomacy with China (sort of) but China reacted very differently than Japan, with Japan making a much more conscious attempt to imitate the West (and other regions) and adopt its advantageous traits.
I thought the root of the difference in reaction between China and Japan was the strength of the central government? There were a bunch of people in both places who didn't like that the westerners had all this advanced tech that made them powerful. In China, the government suppressed them and turned them against the westerners. But in Japan, they ended up overthrowing the shogunate and setting up a western-style government.
Far before Westernization Japan was a big outlier as well.
To Meiji Era it had extremely strong legal system, hard personal responsibility, big literacy numbers and developed financial institutions
On the other hand copying on it's own doesn't help as much - there is Russia that for the last 300 years all it does is Westernizing in very heavy-handed way
Yes, the Meiji era was important, but it was not even the main reason why Japan is so westernized today.
Remember how the WWII ended for Japan? It was essentially occupied and controled by The US, and in the process a lot of things were forcibly pushed onto them. It had much much much bigger impact that the Meiji era on the current state of things.
But we also should not overstate how big that impact was - in many ways, Japan is still a lot more collectivist that any actual WEIRD country.
It also explains why, for example, China is not similarly WEIRD, despite also having being influenced by the West in the late 19-early 20th century.
Japan copied *some* aspects of western society, but left many other things alone. For example, it still has the "koseki" 戸籍 (family register) for births, deaths, marriages, etc.; despite most of its civil and criminal law being modeled on French law. The koseki is there because traditionally when one marries, one transfers into the other family - usually a woman becomes part of her husband's family, but it's also possible for a man to become part of his wife's family (especially if there are no sons) - and takes the name of the family into which one is marrying (the current conservative government has refused to change this law, despite growing opposition to it).
If you look at the language, Chinese has a lot of carefully delineated kinship words - for example, distinguishing between maternal and paternal aunt; Japanese doesn't have these words; if anything, it has fewer kinship words than English. Having said that, there can be considerable extended family networks, especially if there are adopted children (this subject would require a fairly long discussion).
If you've lived in Japan for a while, especially if you marry into a Japanese family, you'll wake up one day and realize that almost every concept that you think is basic is somehow different in Japan - it's a kind of delayed culture shock, when you realize that the veneer of Westernization is just a veneer.
I would say that Japan is also "WEIRD", but it's "WEIRD" in a different way, and for different reasons that Europe is "WEIRD". It's quite possible that Japan independently discovered similar cultural values that lead to prosperity. (And I wonder if Korea has also done this? but I don't know enough about Korean culture to speculate.)
If you want a good book about pre-modern Japan: "Stranger in the Shogun's City" by Amy Stanley.
Yes. the family register bit is where I went "wait a minute" about those stories when supposedly Hank from New York is divorcing Wanda and they talk about taking her name off the family register 😁
It also made me wonder about the allegedly low rate of crime in Japan, because I wonder if it's simply because people don't involve the police where we in the West would (e.g. crazy mother-in-law breaks into your house and won't leave; over here we'd call the cops, but a lot of those text stories have the daughter-in-law just fleeing and the married couple trying to work out a way to trick Mom to leave). I think there is a definite sense of shame about getting the police involved in 'family matters' and societal pressure that you put up with a lot from the in-laws because they're the elder generation and you owe them obedience and filial piety. On the other hand, there's a lot of the errant husband begging the wife "please don't tell the company about my affair" because it would get them into disgrace or even demoted, while over here nobody cares, dude, so long as you're not breaking sexual harassment laws in the workplace.
Or at least that's the impression I'm getting, and I should keep in mind that these stories are going for the dramatic rather than the factual so they rachet up the tension by "oh no, what can I do if my scheming relatives swindle me out of all my money by taking my bank book and withdrawing all the cash?" I'm here going CALL. THE. COPS. THEY'RE. THIEVES. but the story wants to resolve it by a Cunning Plan where the swindlers get tricked in their turn.
I think your specifics for Europe are indeed good counterpoints and require a slightly more convoluted explanation for when the disparity became very meaningful.
For Japan, though, they were just very explicitly copying Europe after Europe had already become rich. Japan is, in my view, a very strong argument that radical cultural changes, on purpose, are entirely possible, both in the Meiji Restoration era (when they explicitly, on purpose, became more European, albeit with the goal of *preserving* imperial rule) and in the post-war era, when the American constitution imposed by force became, surprisingly quickly, a cherished piece of national identity - polls over the last decade have all retained, even now, strong support for retaining the pacifist constitution.
I have absolutely no idea why Myanmar seems distinctly less kinship based. It's worth noting a number of North American native societies also banned cousin marriage - the Haida Gwaii, for instance, were not even allowed to marry within their own clan. (Totally separately, it's worth looking into Haida art and epics - deeply underrated as an artistic tradition, in my view).
Water doesn’t inevitably drain to the lowest point in a landscape: it is possible, with great effort, to pump it to a higher point. Nonetheless, it’s reasonable to say that drainage is determined by topography, in the absence of extraordinary effort.
I think this is a good analogy; it's not binary, and the Japanese also had a very pressing reason in the form of foreign gunships to embrace the changes (and, unlike many others, did so in time; plains native Americans may have embraced mounted rifle warfare remarkably quickly, but the plagues had already done their work).
The thing is, the actual important part of Westernization wasn't the guns, it was industrialization.
The problem wasn't their lack of guns, but the lack of indigenous industry. Trading for guns is inferior to making them yourself - which is hard if you can't mine iron and refine iron ore into steel.
The Plains Indians could adopt Western weapons, but they didn't adopt western industrial practices.
Or did they?
The thing is, Westernized Native Americans could just leave the conservative tribes and just join general mainstream American society - and most of them *did*. This is part of why the reservations have so many problems - if you want to just be a normal American, you can just go off to the city and be one, and that's been the case for a very long time now (a lot of "white" Americans like myself have some Native ancestry as a result).
As such, the reality is that many Native Americans did, in fact, do exactly that "in time" - they just aren't recognized as such today, they're just people in general society.
It was a very different situation because cultural assimilation was not only possible but was in fact potentially desirable to many of them.
Native Americans who don't live on reservations make vastly more money than those who do today.
Strongly agree - on the next open thread there was discussions of what societies may have had technologies 'out of order', and there are a few examples in my view (Inuit material culture/tool sophistication, Polynesian navigation and sailing) but there seems to be a hard stop at industrialisation where that's no longer possible.
The point about on/off the rez is also relevant, and agree. I'm slightly native (no cultural connection), and my hometown was contiguous with a reservation, which I spent a lot of time on with friends. As you say, there was a very strong selection effect about who chose to stay.
Columbus didn't spring from nowhere -- neither did da Gama (also of great importance). Their voyages showed that something unique was already taking place in the West at least several decades earlier.
Not saying the book's thesis is necessarily correct, and it obviously can't really say anything about the relative performance of Asian powers, but I think the question of "Why the West Won" is largely contained in the question of "Why did the West produce Columbus and da Gama's voyages?" The arc of increasing Western dominance of world affairs never showed any signs of reversing from that point until the 20th century.
Without the Industrial Revolution, Western dominance would have been far less complete, but it's not like India was on the verge of dominating Europe when Watt built his steam engine.
Zheng He happened, his expeditions were impressive but a strategically and commercially worthless dead end, and understanding why this was so has a lot to do with Why the West Won in my estimation (I’m inclined to look to the “I” in WEIRD).
Western Europe was a single civilization, Iberian achievements always involved significant non-Iberian involvement (the Italians are well-known but the role of German and Dutch commercial/financial expertise, even in the 15th century, is often overlooked). Britain in its Golden Age ultimately built upon Iberian achievements as intense national competition was accompanied by private sharing of knowledge/expertise/technology.
It can't be just the luck of the new world being there, since Portugal was already colonising western Africa and nearly getting to India via the cape of good hope. The whole series of 15th century voyagers (of which Columbus was the culmination, or one of them) is obviously the key here. Why did the voyagers happen? Most obvious answers are Christianity (seeking converts) plus capitalism (seeking trade): "we come in search of Christians and spices". So on face value it was Western ideology that led to Western dominance. This may be false, but it would require some substantial argument as to how.
Well, for a counterargument, one might point to various Islamic "empires", which certainly had the motivations of seeking converts and seeking trade. (There's an interesting division in India, between the parts that experienced Islam via land-based conquerors, and the parts that experienced Islam via ocean-based traders.)
My personal theory is more about internal competition. Europe was fragmented and at constant war with itself, and so as it developed all this new technology, it learned how to use that technology against peer states. Whereas China, which had similar technology, only learned how to use it against "barbarians", since it was in the middle of a unified period. And Japan had a brief period of openness when it was fragmented, in the late 1500s and early 1600s, but closed down and stagnated as soon as Tokugawa unified it.
This doesn't touch on the Islamic empires or India, though, so it's not really complete.
> China had Zheng He in the 1400s, so oceangoing wasn’t unique to the West at that point.
But Zheng He sailed towards known bodies of land. He didn't look at the blank area east of Japan and go, "hm, let's go off in *this* direction and see what happens".
Western Europe started to diverge from the rest of the world around at least 1200, as we can see in urbanization rates and self-governance of cities, GDP per capita, etc., etc., even in things like the adoption of clocks. Also, declining interest rates in Western Europe are also a sure sign of low time preference (i.e. patience), itself a good indication of WEIRD psychology.
No, western Europe discovered the New World because they were more advanced than the rest in things such as sailing/navigation. They had been more advanced in other of science for longer: the Chinese didn't realize the Earth was round until the Jesuits told them otherwise. Of course, the ancient Greeks knew that well before the Catholic Church.
I don’t think it is true that England was backward in the Middle Ages. (They destroyed more of their medieval heritage in the Reformation than France, for example.)
I mean, if you look at the world, there are two major economic success stories - the West, and the Asian Tigers.
Japan is a very interesting data point because it has extremely low cousin marriage rates. If this was true historically, it would be very interesting, as it would be evidence for lack of cousin marriage being correlated with being advanced.
If the replacement of typical kinship relationships with greater social bonds was indeed correlated with a society being successful, this is exactly the sort of weird thing you'd expect to observe - you find one other random culture where it happens to have very low cousin marriage rates, and it also just happens to be the one other random culture that is super rich compared to the rest of the world?
On the other hand, there's also a patch down in Southeast Asia which also has very low cousin marriage rates - and it is quite poor, which is evidence *against* cousin marriage being the causal thing.
What differentiates the West and Japan from that area?
I notice that resistance to colonialism also matches up pretty well with low kinship intensity, since it’s Europe, Japan, & Thailand that were never colonised.
So you low kinship gives an advantage with colonialism & Europe successfully leveraged that advantage to their benefit
There’s a fun Alternate History story where Thailand & Japan’s status are reversed called Look to the West. It’s not about that but it’s fun it worked out like that
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."
It might not be that simple. There's a lot of arguing that the hill people of the US are descendants of the hill people of the marches between England and Scotland, sometimes via northern Ireland. It's at least conceivable that the ancestors of the various peoples who are now hill people (who tend to be clannish and warlike around the world) have "always" been hill people. Indeed, it would be a good study to trace the histories of all the hill peoples around the world.
"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.
It’s a pretty tenuous claim. I’m not convinced educated westerners expect each other to know that much about western history. ”History is more or less bunk.”
I really wish more authors would get on board with this norm. I just find it obnoxious when when writers today in all seriousness do a quick run down of their topic in "world history" and bounce from Greece to Rome to the Renaissance. Such nonsense. I'm always left wondering what they were up to in China and India.
History with Cy https://www.youtube.com/@HistorywithCy is a pretty good channel. As well as Mesopotamia he (voice sounds like he/his pronouns) covers the Indus, Chinese, Oxus and Egyptian civilizations. Regrettably, very few of those YT historians have a lesson plan of say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you've said. It's best to take copious notes.
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.
We value individualism and describe ourselves as individualistic. Like valuing wisdom and describing ourselves as wise. In contrast, self-deprecation is self-criticism.
This is about fungibility. Consider an individual without culture, community, family ties, religion, a sense of place, inconvenient & deeply held moral beliefs... Such an individual can be easily slotted into any open position in any large organization.
The essence of professionalism is playing your assigned role, uninfluenced by anything specific to you as a person. The consummate professional ensures the trains run on time: whether to Disneyland or to Dachau.
That doesn't follow. An individualist who pursues only his own self-interest can still work with collectivists whose interests align with his, and if THEY are motivated to act against some group, that's a reason for the individualist to do so as well.
Professionalism isn't value neutral. Many professions have ethical components they value highly. Doctors try to do no harm. Investigative journalists try to expose corruption. Hospitality professionals try to make sure people have a good time. All of these can and do sometimes fall down in practice, but the point is that they exist and are believed.
I also disagree with your point about fungibility in general. You simply assert that people in individualistic cultures have no culture or personal beliefs. I would argue the difference is that they are simply more free, both societally and psychologically, to choose which culture and beliefs to retain, adopt, or discard. To take US examples, the average liberal Californian and a conservative Texan have very different values, but people in each location who don't fit in are free to either stand out or to move somewhere with more like-minded people. The same is true of which job they choose (going back to the fit with a particular professional ethos) and who they might marry. Many individualistic cultures are quite cosmopolitan and accepting of individual differences. This seems so obvious that I'm almost embarrassed to recite it.
Family ties doesn't just mean you get on well with your parents and the like - it means if your mom breaks her leg and needs someone to care for her for a month, it's your obligation to give up anything else you might be doing - such as a job, or studying - and care for her first. If that means you get fired from your job or suspended from college because you missed finals, well tough.
This is actually an adaptive and locally rational take if you're in a society or social class where people like you often get fired a lot anyway and there's no other social safety nets available - if you break your leg, or get fired from your job, then you know someone in your kin network is going to look out for you. The fact you sometimes have to walk away from a job that would have kept you, to look out for someone else, is a quite modest "insurance premium" for being part of the kin network in the first place.
>This description of westerners as "individualistic" is self-flattering.
No, it's not. It's a valid sociometric construct, and it's not even inherently a positive concept. It can conjure up ideas of 'selfishness' and 'atomisation', whereas collectivism can be associated with connectedness and concern for the greater good.
Yup. An alternate way of phrasing the Church's MFP is as a program to attack and dilute a competing power center, in the interest of trying to centralize as much power as possible in the Church. (Now, of course, as you write in later comments, the effect is centralize power in the State and corporations.)
I guess westerners == americans in this context. When I was growing up in southern Europe ‘individualistic’ would definitely not come to mind as a way to describe people around me.
Not Americans. This book is about what happened in pre-modern times so all the talk in the comments about modern stuff is utterly irrelevant. Getting into the weeds here:-
Individualism in the context of pre-modern societies is opposed to family-collectivism, and perhaps is best illustrated by something called the European Marriage Pattern.
North and west of a line slanting across mid-Italy and through the Balkans, in premodern times (late medieval and later) people tended to marry later, and when they did marry, they moved out of their parents' household and formed their own household: the "nuclear family".
South of this line, and eastwards through Asia, women mostly married young and moved to a household headed by older adults (the parents of her husband), and often sibling families as well, those of the husband's brothers.
Southern Europe was--and partly still is--more like the Rest Of The World.
If you live north and west of the line, and the head of your family says "I think you should be a farmer", you may or may not listen. In many cases, you'd become a mason despite your parents' objections. After all, you're the head of your own household and can do as you see fit.
East of the line, you'd become a farmer. What you want isn't even a thing.
In the book, southern europe among other parts of europe are specifically mentioned and discussed in detail. For example, long occupation of parts of Iberia by Muslims weakened their WEIRDness in comparison to more northern europeans. Similar arguments are made (and very well backed up) for e.g. what is today eastern Germany or large parts of former Yugoslavia.
I can attest to the last: My parents coming from former Yugoslavia but me growing up in northern europe, I was confused for all my life. Parts of western Yugoslavia are very "WEIRD", others not. I have family from both parts, and the cultures are very close on the surface, but so distinct in detail, it is infuriatingly confusing up until I read this book and other similar ones.
Cross-cultural psychology's attempts to measure comparisons of individualistic vs. collectivist culture do show some national differences, though they typically aren't as stark as people often imagine and they don't necessarily follow the stereotypes an American might have about different groups.
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.
Perhaps, but is that the relevant measure, rather than comparing them to the median of the native population, for example?
Also, while I can see why that might have been true in the past, technology has improved to the point where immigrants can (and usually do) maintain close ties to their family back home, so I don't think individualism is selected for anymore.
I don't, and would also be interested in such studies.
I agree, but if traveling to a different country thousands of miles away is now comparable to just moving to a different city, that's still a pretty drastic change (an improvement, in my view) in connectivity, and a corresponding weakening of whatever selection pressure you're hypothesizing.
>I would guess that the median immigrant in the US is more individualistic than the median US-born person though couldn’t find any studies or polls on this either way so would be open to changing my mind if you know of any.
Why? European Americans were likely strongly selected for individualism in the first place when they moved to the US, and moving from Europe to the US is much bigger deal than moving from e.g. Mexico than the US, and moving to the US in the 18th, 19th or even early 20th century is also a much bigger deal than moving to the US than in 2023.
Genetic regression to the mean happens only once, in the first descendant generation, assuming no introduction of new genes. I don't know what the model looks like when you have new genes selected for the same trait flowing in each generation, mixing with the existing population. I would guess that you still wind up with a population meaningfully elevated above ancestral norms in the trait of interest.
The convincing exploration of Augustinus thinking is an important follow up on WEIRD. It does sketch a venue to be studied in more depth to find the answers to arguably the biggest question mark left behind by WEIRD. When it comes to the psychological processes, Norbert Elias civilizing concept and other developments covered in Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" represent important complementary insights.
That is possible, however due to return to the mean the immigrants' descendants will become just as collectivistic as their relatives back home (you can see this play out with Arab and African migrants in Europe today)
You seem to be invoking phrases like "reversion to the mean" as a kind of magic incantation to cover up shoddy reasoning. What actually happens would be more akin to the "founder effect," which is fully consistent with a modern understanding of genetics, unlike your predicted atavism.
Atavism DOES happen, but its nothing like what you describe, and is caused by mutations and some quirks of embryonic development, irrelevant to population genetics of the kind discussed here.
I think that depends on whether the immigrant actively wants to be in the new country, or merely doesn't want the problems of the old country. You don't need a lot of individualism to not want to die horribly.
Henrich or Schultz (whose papers the book is based on) shows somewhere that there is strong persistence, i.e. that WEIRD traits or lack thereof remain in the immigrant population.
In other words, immigrants bring their culture with them.
Henrich certainly doesn't say it, but the implication isn't good.
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.
Were dispensations really that hard to get? I assume from things like the Hapsburg jaw that there was a fair amount of inbreeding going on. (And the Victorian hemophilia, although that's not really the Catholic church's fault...)
And I find myself puzzled by the review's (or maybe the book's) repeatedly trying to find motives for the Church's promotion of "exogamy" (on a familial level, not a Church-wide level). If they identify marriage as a thing that can create bonds and strengthen relationships, of course it makes sense to bind all of Christendom together as one big family. That's ... kind of what a universalizing religion *does*.
Or, well, I guess Islam doesn't seem to do a good job with this in practice, even if some of the rhetoric sounds similar. So maybe it's not all that obvious?
Do you know how the Consanguinity was calculated if there were multiple paths of equal length linking two individuals? E.g., was a sibling (who on average shares ~50% of the chromosomal DNA, relative to the general population) considered closer than a half-sibling?
In the most extreme case if two persons of the same generation share not one but 2^n common ancestors from n generations ago, they will share an expected 2^-n of the DNA, while if they shared just a single ancestor will share 2^(-2n) of the DNA (again, all relative to the general population). For example, two individuals sharing all 1024 ancestors 10 generations ago will be (on average) as related as two individuals sharing one ancestor five generations ago.
I haven't the tables to hand and don't know how they calculated it, but I think definitely full siblings were considered closer than half-siblings. The novelty seems to be that the Church was insisting "no, you can't marry your half-sibling or your aunt or your cousin" in societies where that was legal or accepted.
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.
If I remember correctly, his explanation is that the Orthodox Church only banned marriage of first cousins, while at one stage the Catholic ban extended to sixth cousins!, didn't enforce it as strictly, and also didn't extend the ban to all the psuedo-relatives (godparents' children, in-laws).
Right, but why? What motivated this difference of approach? It seems that it could not have been prior religious tradition because they had that in common. So it seems that it must have been some prior West vs. East, Latin vs. Greek difference.
One explanation might be that the western church found itself taking on some of the imperial role that was left vacant when the western empire collapsed, and may have had to look for ways to stop all of its members from trying to kill each other all the time. The eastern church may not have needed to do that because the eastern empire was still around. For a while, anyway, until the Ottomans finally stomped it, and after that, I get the feeling that the Ottomans really didn't want the Christians in their territory to be a unified, cohesive bunch.
It might also have something to do with the more centralized nature of the Roman Catholic church, with the Pope, as opposed to the more decentralized nature of the various Orthodox churches. (Although that again may have something to do with what happened to Constantinople.)
It's certainly true that the Western Church took on a governmental role in a way that the Eastern Church did not. It's a bit harder to see exactly how that translates to MFP in particular. Governments in chaotic areas do not generally come up with strict rules for who can marry whom. That's the peculiar thing that needs explanation.
But the Church was a "government" that literally believed that all Christians are, at the most important level, brothers and sisters, that they are all one small part of the Body of Christ. It doesn't seem like a huge step to have the Church encourage the creation of bonds that span narrow familial groups, to bind all Christians together, to prevent what would effectively be fratricide and cancer.
Or maybe it's the thing people mentioned elsewhere, about importing Roman customs. The Romans seemed to know a thing or two about convincing disparate peoples that they were all one. **shrug** I just don't think that it's particularly strange for the Church to have done it.
That seems plausible. But if that factor were so powerful, I guess I'm not sold on why it would not have been (at least partially) present for the Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Sure, it was not as much in a governmental role, but it certainly could and did influence the government.
The key thing I'm looking for is the East-West difference.
Hajnal argues that the Latin Church, by making it more difficult to marry, wanted more people to donate their riches to the Church. The East Church was already rich with the empire.
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).
Had a similar thought. Jared Diamond tackles the same question and comes up with the theory that it's Eurasia being E<>W and the Americas being N<>S leading to more rapid advancement.
Considering that China was singlehandedly the most developed country in terms of GDP per capita up until the 18th century or so, it seems hard to come up with such a theory. Western hegemony is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The question Jared set out to answer is "Why did Europe colonize other continents, and not the other way around?" His theory is much more complicated than "Eurasia is east-west", but it all does come down to geographical advantages. Most of all, he debunks the idea that European culture was in any way inherently superior.
China had a huge national GDP because it was populous but it had a lower GDP per capita than NW Europe. The Dutch had the highest GDP per capita in the world from the Middle Ages to around 1800.
Yeah, I think there's a theory involving lower population driving mechanization and capital accumulation. Plus a theory about how Western staple grains (wheat, barley, rye, etc.) were more amenable to animal assistance and then mechanization than were Eastern staple grains (rice).
I feel that GDP can be deceptive in the case of places like China and India, which are regions with enormous populations. It's possible for some subgroups to have top-level wealth and technology, while large swaths are still involved in subsistence farming. Not that this doesn't happen everywhere, to some extent, but enough subsistence farmers will drive any average down.
It's like how China can do well on PISA test scores by only scoring its four most developed regions. If it were actually forced to take into account scores from all its regions, it wouldn't look nearly as good.
In general, I agree, but back in the day didn’t most countries have a very large proportion of subsistence farmers? It seems like it would have canceled out historically more than it does now.
This is simply untrue. China was around the same level as Europe in 1000 CE and by 1500 CE was beginning to substantially lag Europe, with Italy having approximately 2x the per-capita GDP of China.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is just not correct in most of its assertions. For example, we see Maize all over the Americas, its attempts at listing out domesticatable animals omits a number of examples (and ignores that some animals were domesticated in the Old World that were not in the New World, despite them literally being the same animals, like Caribou, and the problem of claiming that non-Eurasian animals were uniquely difficult to domesticate, even though there's no reason to think that Aurochs were any easier to domesticate than Buffalo).
It's not a great book and it gets pooh-poohed a lot.
Not directly a review of GGS, but the contest 2021 featured a review of "Plagues and People", which also discusses the debate between the authors of the two books, see Section "William H. McNeill versus Jared Diamond" here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples
Don't forget Niall Ferguson's "Civilisation: The West and the Rest" which explains Western supremacy with six factors (which is somewhere between one factor and hundreds of factors): "competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic".
I haven't read that book, but that sounds plausible to me, as a short summary of the proximate factors. But what is the explanation of how European culture acquired those factors (this would be related, I imagine, to when they did).
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).
I think you underestimate the power of the Catholic church for about a thousand years. It was the most dominate institution in Europe for long periods of time (including most wealth and most land), and that's just it's secular power. Spiritually, it was the only game in town - having legally barred all alternatives. There were long periods of time when a king could not be crowned in Western Europe without the Pope's blessing.
Possibly. I think you're overestimating the centralization of the church for most of the period we're talking about. The Bishop of Rome was a lot more symbolic for most of the nobles, including kings, and all of the peasants than his present-day reach would suggest. He had almost no real authority whatever in terms of day-to-day realities like disposition of property, conduct of clergy, and 99.9% of marriages. Even the people at the very top defied him often, while acknowledging the legitimacy of the Church as an institution that filled a lot of roles the state or other institutions hold today.
"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."
Mediaeval English law seems to have permitted some things in wills and forbidden others, for the protection of property in a civil and secular sense:
"The theory of landholding in England was still that of the feudal system, set up to guarantee effective armies at the Crown’s disposal. All land ultimately belonged to the King, and landholders were royal tenants, some directly (‘tenants-in-chief’), and others as tenants of tenants. It was all intended for a military system which had long vanished, but the law had not changed, and the Crown could exploit it. Thanks to the vagaries of landownership since the twelfth century, the category of tenant-in-chief effectively netted in anyone above the level of the humblest village landowners, and some of them too; monarchs therefore had a great deal of room to interfere in their subjects’ estates by primer seisin, the right to step in and meddle in various profitable ways on the death of a landholder.
Late medieval lawyers, happy like lawyers in every age to provide tax-avoidance schemes for those prepared to pay for them, evolved a system of trusts by which legal estate in a property was conveyed to trustees (‘feoffees’). These feoffees held estates for the benefit or ‘use’ of the real owner of the land (who was known in common law French as the cestuy que use); their existence defeated the Crown’s feudal rights. The group of feoffees to uses was renewable and hence as a body the feoffees never died; the beneficiary or cestuy que use avoided all the Crown’s rights of primer seisin. The device of the use was invaluable to stop the Crown getting its hands on a landowner who was a child (and so in ancient feudal theory too young to serve in the King’s army). The monarch could not take advantage of his profitable powers to administer the child’s lands in wardship. Equally important, uses allowed landowners to leave land in their wills to whomever they pleased; feudal law simply forbade bequests of land by will.
The existence of feoffment to uses was infuriating to those acquisitive monarchs Henry VII and Henry VIII, but it took time for the Crown to work out how to defeat the stratagems of the legal profession.
...The Crown won, albeit narrowly: the Dacre trust was declared fraudulent, by a bare majority of the judges, and that applied to all the thousands of similar family trusts then in operation. The landowners of England (and their lawyers) were aghast. Not surprisingly in the Parliament of spring 1536 they meekly voted through Crown legislation which regularized their trusts but also restored many feudal rights to the King. This Statute of Uses became one of the fundamental pieces of legislation in English land law up till 1925, not least because lawyers now applied their customary evasive genius to further variants on the use, for purposes both admirable and dubious.
The legislation also left massive questions unresolved about how land might be left by will. That issue was prominent among the grievances of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the continuing discontent of England’s nobility and gentry after the Pilgrimage’s defeat led effectively to a capitulation by the Crown on property bequests, by the passage of a further Statute of Wills in the 1540 Parliament."
So land-grabbing was not confined to the Church 😀
Think of modern Hallowe'en, the secularised and bastardised remnant of the Eve of All Saints, which led into All Saints Day and All Souls Day at the end of October and start of November. This was the social ritual element of death, where graves and tombs were visited and cleaned, prayers for the dead recited, and the rest of the folk traditions around death (ghost stories, fortune telling, magic and charms and the Otherworld of fairies and witches) were engaged in. 'Radical individualism' was not even at the races here. Eamonn Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars" has a great deal about lay religious and liturgical practices, including making of wills and what happened before, during, and after death.
(2/2, Substack you need to increase your comment length limits so I can fit it all in one!)
Oh, definitely by Henry's time, the way noble families had used the Church as a dumping ground for excess children and for building up careers of those children had, along with the way the Church was entirely woven into the life of the people all over Europe, meant that the Church in administration and practice was seen as one more way of being in the professions - and of feathering your own nest.
That's why new orders of reformists like the Franciscans and the Dominicians etc. were constantly springing up, as well as the various reform movements (which eventually exploded in Protestantism). This is why St Thomas Aquinas' family went "Okay, so you want to be a member of a religious order? Well that is certainly no problem, we can get you into the local abbey which we are the patrons of, where your uncle is abbot, and eventually you can be abbot after him, all very respectable and suitable" and why they were so shocked and opposed when he said "No, I want to be a Dominican" - one of the new, upstart, mendicant friars? Our son? 😁
I know I'm constantly banging on about recommending this book, but it honestly is really good; Thomas Cromwell's biography by Diarmaid MacCulloch. It's in part because MacCullouch is everything opposite to me: of Scottish descent but thoroughly English in upbringing and mood, upper middle-class, Anglican (but he left that due to the position on homosexuality), scholar and academic, liberal, and gay. He doesn't have the understanding of Catholicism from the inside that Eamonn Duffy does, but he generally doesn't make dogmatic statements (though he's fully steeped in that reflexive anti-Catholicism of the English that I've mentioned before). He's got the qualifications and the chops to be a bona fide historian and while I might disagree with some of his positions, I think he's excellent on the topic (he's not the kind of TV showbiz historian David Starkey is).
So the biography gives the necessary background, as well as his other work on the Reformation, and certainly by the 16th century (and well before) there were a lot of smaller monastic and religious settlements which pretty much had fallen into decay; they had the establishments of large resources left over from their founding but the numbers had decreaed, often drastically. So there was certainly a legitimate argument for shutting down a lot of them and sorting out their affairs.
Unfortunately, when this was done, it wasn't in the interests of reform (though that was the ostensible reason, and Henry may well have convinced himself it was for the sake of investigating corruption and allegations of wrong-doing and immorality, but those in charge were a mix of 'how can we extort nice fat bribes out of the abbots and mothers superior not to shut them down' and genuine fervent Reformed and Protestant conviction who wanted any excuse to do so). So it became "get the maximum value for the Crown, and some diverted into our own pockets, by closing these down, seizing the property and endowments".
There was frequent meddling by all sorts of people in getting their family members and friends into positions like priors and other offices in the monasteries, and what can only be called bribes or buying and selling of the same. Once in office, abbots, priors, mothers superior and others were engaged in a network of sending gifts to important people and doing favours in order to later call in favours. It had little to do with religion as such and was just more professional business.
Henry can't be blamed alone, because even before that, high church officials like Cardinal Wolsey had been equally as rapacious and treating the property of the Church as his own personal piggy bank. He had ambitions about founding two colleges, one in Ipswich and one in Oxford:
"The twin Cardinal Colleges would in any case stand both as chantries for his soul and places of education – education was always a theme of great importance to the former Oxford don, and one of his solaces amid the crushing burden of his royal duties. A school textbook which adapted William Lily’s grammar was published in Wolsey’s name and branded with the name of Cardinal College Ipswich; it ran into multiple editions in England and Antwerp."
The colleges would need to be paid for, and they would need endowments in order to operate. How did Wolsey get all that? By snapping up smaller monasteries and churches and diverting their resources to his vanity project:
"[Cromwell's] brief was to close a considerable number of small monasteries and nunneries, one of the more dramatic proofs of Wolsey’s willingness to exploit his powers as papal legate over the Church in England in the name of what he could claim was reform. There had been dissolutions of such small religious houses before, particularly during the long fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wars with France, when the Crown confiscated priories with mother houses across the Channel. Just as Wolsey did now, the monarchy had used the monastic estates for new religious purposes: Henry VI’s colleges at King’s Cambridge and Eton drew on such former monastic endowments, and the Cardinal’s new colleges followed followed the lead of King Henry’s lavish creations in this and in other respects, though always concerned to outdo the royal saint in fostering education and liturgical prayer. Such minor religious houses could be easily characterized by those concerned to reform the Church as being superfluous to ecclesiastical needs, too small-scale and poor to function properly.
...In his travels in west Sussex, Cromwell gained permanent gratitude from a small Augustinian house called Shulbrede by securing it a reprieve from dissolution. Here the threat came not from Wolsey’s dissolution programme but from parallel moves by the energetic and independent-minded Bishop of Chichester, Robert Sherburne. Sherburne was evidently trying to use surplus monastic resources to help finance four brand-new prebends which he had just founded for his cathedral. In 1525 he got as far as demolishing part of the church and domestic buildings at Shulbrede, no doubt intending to create a feasible prebendal house there, but desperate pleas from the monks to local gentry friends resulted in two of these gentlemen buttonholing Cromwell while on legal business in Westminster Hall. On their suggestion, he lobbied the hereditary patron of the priory, the Earl of Northumberland, via his eldest son Henry Lord Percy. As a result, Shulbrede Priory survived in its truncated premises another decade (not greatly to the edification of the monastic life in England), and gratefully voted its saviour an annuity. This was Cromwell’s earliest pension from any monastery, no doubt an eye-opener for him as a possible source of income."
So definitely the land-grabbing was not all one way 😁
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?
I heard about cousin marriage in 2002 from anthropologist Stanley Kurtz and then wrote one of my better articles about how cousin marriage bode ill for Bush Administration hopes for the upcoming Iraq invasion to prove a long term success at fixing Iraq.
But I haven't contributed much to the topic beyond that. I have the kind of male brain that realizes that family trees are important, but finds my brain isn't very good at thinking about genealogical relationships. I always end up asking my wife to explain to me who my own more distant relatives are in relation to me.
So, really, my big contribution was getting HBD Chick interested in the effects of cousin marriage. She did amazing stuff around a decade or so ago extending the basic idea vastly.
I presume that Henrich didn't cite HBD Chick not because he wanted to hog all the credit when he was second in the English-speaking world in academically elucidating these questions, but because he didn't want to get canceled for citing the dread acronym HBD.
Which, by the way, I didn't make up first. I made up the term "human biodiversity" in, IIRC, 1998 and then immediately discovered from a pre-Google search engine that anthropologist Jonathan Marks had published a book under that title in 1995. But I've come to be most closely associated with the acronym HBD.
As I've explained before, I always wanted to inspire academics to write learned tomes on ideas I've come up with. But I now realize that I've probably, on net, retarded American intellectual discourse by figuring out so many thing ahead of academia, which has helped make me extremely unpopular. So, my standing offer to all academics is to simply take my ideas and not cite me.
Hence, I'm totally fine with Henrich not citing my January 13, 2003 "American Conservative" article "Cousin Marriage Conundrum." I only did about a month's worth of work on it. It was among the best work I've done, but it was more journalism than deep scholarship.
On the other hand, Henrich not citing HBD Chick's half-decade or so of scholarship on his book's subject strikes me as uncool.
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.
*Do* we know that genes associated with violent behavior became less common during the period of execution of lotsa criminals? I don’t see how we could. But I’m very interested in the genetic contribution to violence.
The book as a whole is about differential reproduction in England leading up to the Industrial Revolution. He includes a section on just how many people were executed under the "Bloody Code", and how people got less violent & impulsive over time.
And he argues that this is due to lotsa violent people being executed before they could reproduce? Seems like there are many possible explanations. For instance, when those who had already had children were executed, the parent's death removed a violent role model from their children's lives. Killing all the really young criminals would have bought society as much as 50-60 years without that person running around doing more violence, and so reduced future violence. And of course reduced violence could be due to changing social conditions.
People who have already reproduced are capable of having more, but also back then (the Malthusian era) a child had much worse odds of growing up to reproduce without a father.
Clark doesn't argue for a genetic over cultural explanation in his book, but the difference in outcomes for children of widows vs otherwise single mothers does tell against that part of "The Nurture Assumption".
Yes, I'm familiar with that finding. Was more doubting that data from era when many criminals were executed could give much support to that finding, given the many many confounds. Also, I suppose I wonder if there are positives associated with having a bit of whatever the genetic contribution to violence is -- boldness, courage, nonconformity. I haven't hit anyone since I was a little kid (and don't even remember doing it then, though I assume I at least yanked desirable toys out of other kids' grasp), but am aware sometimes when producing a piece of work that's bold and good of a sort of "fuck
'em" element of how I feel about my work -- and wonder if that's a bit of the "violent" stuff powering me.
Henrich has a whole chapter on this. He believes that the Church's policies had an effect on culture, not genes because of the relatively short time involved and also because of some *negative* evolutionary pressures, specifically that cities and Cistercian monasteries were what he calls "genetic graveyards": since people were less likely to reproduce in these places compared to rural environments, and WEIRDer people would have been attracted to them, WEIRD genetic traits would have been selected *against*.
But there are lots of weird traits, many of them unrelated to violence. I'd imagine that people joining monasteries were more introverted, more respectful of authority and more attached to ideas about what life should be (as opposed to curious about what life is.)
You can't systematically execute criminals without having an effective criminal justice system, and an effective criminal justice system will reduce crime anyway.
If you want to tell whether crime reduction is environmental , arising directly from the rule of law, or genetic , you need an experiment where Europeans move en masse to somewhere law less....which happened when the US was colonised. The Wild West was wild.
In this context, genetics seems like basically a just so story. Were the "genetics" of England worse than Italy in 1600 but better in 1900? Did China screw up its genetics between 1000 and 1500 when it basically stagnated?
And people do get assimilated all the time. In the US, Asian and African immigrants are high performers even though their countries of origin are often lagging. To explain that, you then have to say some people from those regions have the right genetics and others have the wrong genetics, and you're back to a just so story.
"In the US, immigrant basketball players are often tall even though their countries of origin are often lagging"
If your immigration system selects for a qualification such as education, everything correlated with that trait is also selected for. Look up the heritability of educational achievement.
The other thing is that high individual performance is not the same thing as WEIRDness, and being successful is not the same thing as assimilation. In fact to a large extent their high performance is because they're not assimilated: their families are a lot less chill about them not getting perfect grades in school and becoming doctors and engineers.
> Were the "genetics" of England worse than Italy in 1600 but better in 1900?
Replace Italy with Northern Italy, and maybe?
The full-HBD explanation of history is that Rome had fantastic genes, until they started to cross-breed with imported slaves. Slaves were primarily in the capital, and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire slowed travel significantly, so the bad genes were largely concentrated in Southern Italy for the next thousand years, meaning that by 1500 Northern Italy was almost entirely still good genes. Rising overall prosperity led to increased travel, spreading the bad genes outwards through Northern Italy and into France while Britain remains relatively genetically isolated allowing Britain to dominate the 19th century. By the the mid 20th century bad genes have infiltrated Britain while the United States remains relatively pure, and by the late 20th century the US is infiltrated too and the whole world is in decline apart from Ashkenazi Jews and Han/Manchurian Chinese.
I don't necessarily believe the above explanation, but it's got something going for it.
How should I put this delicately ? This explanation does not actually have much going for it. It just reinforces my point about genetics being a just so story.
Well fair enough, but everything in this field is a Just So story, including the thesis of this particular book. Not sure how to get away from that when we only have one runthrough of history to base our theories off.
If you can do a regression across countries and get a correlation to a factor, that’s a good start. If you have an undefined cause called genetics that you can fiddle with to mean whatever is convenient for a given case study, that’s not so good.
You can just measure these things, as long as you can get genetic material from graveyards around the correct time. Build a polygenic score for trait X of interest that works reasonably well in the modern populations you want to examine, apply to genetic data from historical populations. You need a lot of people to build the polygenic score in the first place, but computing it is simple. As you go back further, your score will work less well due to changes in the underlying genetic variation, but 500 years is short enough that you should be able to get decent results. I'd be curious to try this out on say, Ionian Greeks from the Bronze Age or Old Egyptians but would take the data with a grain of salt. Early Modern Italians? Yeah, that should be fine.
For that to make sense, the original Roman "good" genes would have to be been purely altruistic "sacrifice yourself for the republic" ones. If they benefited the individuals (for example gave them 15 IQ points over the "bad" slave genes), the people with "good" genes would have run circles around the bearers of bad genes.
From what I have read on acoup.blog, it seems that Rome tended to eventually turn conquered subjects into citizens, and that the failure to continue to do so sped along its demise.
The whole narrative (originally pure, "good" gene pool of Herrenmenschen gets polluted by the genes of some Untermenschen, leading to decadence and decay) rhymes very much with the "scientific racism" theories from the previous century that I don't think it worthwhile to entertain it further.
Every human is genetically capable both to cooperate and defect. (In fact, the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis postulates that our cognitive capabilities grew in an arms race to secretly defect and detect defection more effectively.) Every human society will develop some sort of social antibodies against defection. The idea that 20th century Britain was overrun by foreign genes (which were in Europe since the Roman times but somehow never reached Britain's shores before) favoring defection against which the British had no social antibodies, which thus became dominant within a few generations (much like smallpox epidemics devastated Native Americans) is hard to take serious.
> 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.
I would assume that non-European societies also limited the reproductive success of people who used unsanctioned violence against their in-groups.
And "unsanctioned violence against the in-group" is really the key phrase here.
Consider a medieval noble male. If he truly abhors violence, he will be likely to join a monastery. If he thrives on violence, he can look forward to a career as a warrior murdering and raping foreigners for the glory of his king. Which of these two paths seems to lead to greater reproductive success?
I don't disagree with your overall point, but professional soldiers also didn't procreate very much - spending their youth away from home and often dying. I don't think foreign rape victims are having much effect on domestic genes. Not to mention, most pacifists didn't join a monastery but instead worked on a trade (including farming) and for nobles could have included anything with book learning involved.
One interesting thing is that dietary calcium is very high in Europe and while Japan is below Europe, it is way higher than most places in the world, which raises the question of how much of an effect being able to digest milk had and whether other sources of dietary calcium (like tofu) contributed significantly to these regions being prosperous.
It seems like it is a hugely advantageous trait. However, there are some other groups that developed the ability to digest milk that didn't end up doing as well in the modern era.
There's also the IQ question - it's 75% or more heritable in adulthood, and the two places with the highest IQs are Northern and Western Europe and East Asia.
But this raises the question of why the British Isles were basically barbarianville while the first civilizations arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and East Asia, and then later in the New World. The pyramids in Egypt and Ziggurats of Mesopotamia were built before the British were doing anything nearly so sophisticated, and around the time that the Romans conquered the British Isles, Native Americans were starting to build big pryamids.
The British went from "a bunch of barbarians" to "the most advanced civilization", and indeed, if you look at things, it's weird that Mesopotamia and Egypt fell way, way behind while civilization in the West kept building up further and further to the northwest.
Why do Egypt and Mesopotamia suck so much compared to the West, if intelligence was the factor? Did the British suddenly get a lot smarter? If not, why did they not have an ancient civilization comparable to Egypt?
So if Iraq can't function as a democracy because of cousin-marriage, then why can India?
Also, I'm getting sick of grand pronouncements that Iraq was always a hopeless cause. If the US had made better decisions, maybe splitting off a Kurdish state, or even just leaving troops there longer, things may have turned out better. Or maybe not, but that's not obvious.
Also, things did turn out better. Not having a genocidal dictator is, just maybe, a more important consideration than how corrupt the civil service is.
I recommend the book *Imperial Life in the Emerald City* by Rajiv Chandrasekaran for just how many entirely unforced errors were made in the attempted reconstruction of Iraq. Most significantly, the State Department had a detailed reconstruction plan and dozens of experts ready to go in Kuwait, and not only were they not allowed to start work by Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the very existence of the State Department team and plan was concealed from the people who were running the reconstruction (who were mostly totally unqualified, and often junior Republican staffers). It's possible that Iraq was a hopeless cause, but we have no way of knowing that for sure given how badly the reconstruction was handled.
Iraq didn't "fail", it's way better off than it was previously. It's not Japan, but it's not Syria, either. Going from "under Saddam Hussein" to "not under Saddam Hussein" has caused their economy to grow by 5x or more.
>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'.
Yes, it's amusing when they clearly notice things like the "cycle of intergenerational abuse," but contrive increasingly fanciful explanations. It gets better when they notice that adopted children are able to break this cycle much more often than biological ones!
I have a vague suspicion that either the reviewer or the author is doing a bit of "consensus building". As in, stating various classical-liberal-style positions as being the One True Western Viewpoint, and then silently hoping that readers will snap out of whatever passing fad they've been dallying with and go "oh, yes, of course that's right".
Either that, or it's wishful thinking.
But modern politics aside, I find the emphasis on "individualism" to be glaringly incomplete, given the "western" affinity for things like uniforms, formations, assembly lines, interchangable parts, and so forth. There's more going on than just individualism; this feels like studying the bicep while completely ignoring the tricep.
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?
"Marriage was allowed at Athens with half-sisters by the same father (Plutarch, Cim., iv; Themist., xxxii), with half-sisters by the same mother at Sparta (Philo, De Special. Leg., tr. Yonge, III, 306), and with full-sisters in Egypt (Diodorus Siculus, I, 27) and Persia, as illustrated in the well-known instances of the Ptolemies in the former, and of Cambyses in the latter, country (Herodian, III, 31)."
"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."
If you're irritated by the emphasis on "Protestant science", why repeat an old anti-Catholic polemic meme? Granted, it may have been refashioned into a fully-functional anti-Christianity meme for freethinkers and atheists, but the root assertion is incorrect.
What the Renaissance scholars went crazy for was not the Hellenistic science, but the Hellenestic occultism. Neo-Platonism had very little to do with science as we think of it.
Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin.
During the sessions at Florence of the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1445, during the failed attempts to heal the schism of the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches, Cosimo de' Medici and his intellectual circle had made acquaintance with the Neoplatonic philosopher George Gemistos Plethon, whose discourses upon Plato and the Alexandrian mystics so fascinated the humanists of Florence that they named him the second Plato.
...In the rush of enthusiasm for every rediscovery from Antiquity, he exhibited some interest in the arts of astrology (despite denigrating it in relation to divine revelation), which landed him in trouble with the Catholic Church. In 1489 he was accused of heresy before Pope Innocent VIII and was acquitted.
...De vita libri tres (Three books on life), or De triplici vita (The Book of Life), published in 1489, provides a great deal of medical and astrological advice for maintaining health and vigor, as well as espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world's ensoulment and its integration with the human soul:
There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world ... Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world, what folly! what envy! neither to know that the Whole, in which 'we live and move and have our being,' is itself alive, nor to wish this to be so.
...His medical works exerted considerable influence on Renaissance physicians such as Paracelsus, with whom he shared the perception on the unity of the microcosmos and macrocosmos, and their interactions, through somatic and psychological manifestations, with the aim to investigate their signatures to cure diseases. Those works, which were very popular at the time, dealt with astrological and alchemical concepts. Thus Ficino came under the suspicion of heresy; especially after the publication of the third book in 1489, which contained specific instructions on healthful living in a world of demons and other spirits."
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.
Another issue, I’m not sure that understanding historical development is all that relevant for understanding how development would best play out in today’s social and technological conditions.
"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”.
It may not have done in practice, but it has long been believed that the purpose of education is more than mere practical skill training. See Julian the Apostate in the 4th century banning Christian teachers:
"36. Rescript on Christian Teachers [362, After June 17, from Antioch]
I hold that a proper education results, not in laboriously acquired symmetry of phrases and language, but in a healthy condition of mind, I mean a mind that has understanding and true opinions about things good and evil, honourable and base. Therefore, when a man thinks one thing and teaches his pupils another, in my opinion he fails to educate exactly in proportion as he fails to be an honest man. And if the divergence between a man's convictions and his utterances is merely in trivial matters, that can be tolerated somehow, though it is wrong. But if in matters of the greatest importance a man has certain opinions and teaches the contrary, what is that but the conduct of hucksters, and not honest but thoroughly dissolute men in that they praise most highly the things that they believe to be most worthless, thus cheating and enticing by their praises those to whom they desire to transfer their worthless wares. Now all who profess to teach anything whatever ought to be men of upright character, and ought not to harbour in their souls opinions irreconcilable with what they publicly profess; and, above all, I believe it is necessary that those who associate with the young and teach them rhetoric should be of that upright character; for they expound the writings of the ancients, whether they be rhetoricians or grammarians, and still more if they are sophists. For these claim to teach, in addition to other things, not only the use of words, but morals also, and they assert that political philosophy is their peculiar field. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question whether this is true or not. But while I applaud them for aspiring to such high pretensions, I should applaud them still more if they did not utter falsehoods and convict themselves of thinking one thing and teaching their pupils another. What! Was it not the gods who revealed all their learning to Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Isocrates and Lysias? Did not these men think that they were consecrated, some to Hermes, others to the Muses? I think it is absurd that men who expound the works of these writers should dishonour the gods whom they used to honour. Yet, though I think this absurd, I do not say that they ought to change their opinions and then instruct the young. But I give them this choice; either not to teach what they do not think admirable, or, if they wish to teach, let them first really persuade their pupils that neither Homer nor Hesiod nor any of these writers whom they expound and have declared to be guilty of impiety, folly and error in regard to the gods, is such as they declare. For since they make a livelihood and receive pay from the works of those writers, they thereby confess that they are most shamefully greedy of gain, and that, for the sake of a few drachmae, they would put up with anything. It is true that, until now, there were many excuses for not attending the temples, and the terror that threatened on all sides absolved men for concealing the truest beliefs about the gods. But since the gods have granted us liberty, it seems to me absurd that men should teach what they do not believe to be sound. But if they believe that those whose interpreters they are and for whom they sit, so to speak, in the seat of the prophets, were wise men, let them be the first to emulate their piety towards the gods. If, however, they think that those writers were in error with respect to the most honoured gods, then let them betake themselves to the churches of the Galilaeans to expound Matthew and Luke, since you Galilaeans are obeying them when you ordain that men shall refrain from temple-worship. For my part, I wish that your ears and your tongues might be "born anew," as you would say, as regards these things in which may I ever have part, and all who think and act as is pleasing to me.
For religious and secular teachers let there be a general ordinance to this effect: Any youth who wishes to attend the schools is not excluded; nor indeed would it be reasonable to shut out from the best way boys who are still too ignorant to know which way to turn, and to overawe them into being led against their will to the beliefs of their ancestors. Though indeed it might be proper to cure these, even against their will, as one cures the insane, except that we concede indulgence to all for this sort of disease. For we ought, I think, to teach, but not punish, the demented."
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?
Sure - though the MFP link sounds doubtful. First though, as I said, this is a vague recollection. Do you happen to know if reduced confiscation actually was a large factor or not?
No idea, just that (as Mr. Doolittle points out) reduced confiscation isn't really a *competing* theory since it's compatible with and plausibly downstream of the MFP.
I'm agnostic on the idea, but the chain of thought seems clear. High trust society brought about by the lack of kinship/clan loyalty, which itself was brought about by removing cousin marriage. If every other society requires you to be loyal to your clan above outsiders, but you can only get loans from another clan, that hurts investments.
"There are such things as family-owned companies. Are they invariably worse innovators and/or investors than other companies?"
They may well be; there seems to be a trend whereby companies like to go public and hire on outsider CEOs to run the business rather than have grandson of son of founder running the thing. I am very open to correction on this!
Where you're concentrating all the family wealth in one grouping, there's little to no room for marriage outside that kinship group and bringing in (literal) new blood, new ideas, different ways of doing things.
Where there's the kind of strict "eldest son is groomed to be the president of the company and expects to inherit no matter what", you may not get the best leadership. There's a large collection of 'text' stories on Youtube that are ostensibly set in America but must be Japanese originally, and basically they're power/revenge fantasies for women 😀 A lot of them have the basic plot of "fiancé/husband only marries woman in expectation that, as her husband, he'll be made CEO/president of the family company and can live a cushy life as a rich man". A lot about being "an elite" which means "went to top university, works in high-tier company, acts like a spoiled brat because he/she thinks they are so much better than everyone else". It also gives a fascinating look into Japanese/East Asian family customs, as the plots often revolve around the mother-in-law treating the daughter-in-law like trash, and the expectation that the d-i-l will obey and serve the husband's family like a servant without question, while the husbands are often mama's boys. Things that are alien to Western views of what married life is like, like mother-in-law demanding daughter-in-law support them with money or even hand over all her salary to them (that's why I say it's revenge porn for women who may have similar dominating family dynamics going on). Western married life where the new couple are separate units and prioritise their family and needs over the parents' generation is completely different and may well be the fruits of consanguinity bans weakening such demands over time.
Noble and wealthy families do want to keep the power and wealth in their own hands and pass it from one generation to the next, but that may not be the best thing for society as a whole, never mind the family genetics.
"Where there's the kind of strict "eldest son is groomed to be the president of the company and expects to inherit no matter what", you may not get the best leadership." Neat! A private sector analog to one of the most noted failure modes of monarchy!
It (drop odds of confiscation) is my personal favourite of the competing theories, because it makes a lot of sense. Increase incentives to innovate and build wealth, see lots of innovation and wealth. The hard part is coming up with institutional arrangements that allow it. So I think it's relatively straightforward that Magna Carta and having checks placed on the power of kings played a big role in wealth generation. That, however, only pushes the question one level back? What allowed such institutional arrangements to develop and sustain in the West?
Many Thanks! One possibility re: "So I think it's relatively straightforward that Magna Carta and having checks placed on the power of kings played a big role in wealth generation." is that there is always contention between level N and level N+1 in any society, here kings and the nobility one level down. It just happened that a momentary victory of the nobility lead to them to be able to put checks on kings' power - and they just happened to choose a form of checks which happened to be favorable for wealth generation. _Part_ of it was certainly intentional. The nobility had wealth to preserve, after all. But the fact that the legal rights were chosen in such a way that they wound up being useful, in the long run, to a non-noble capitalist class could well have been an accident.
"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.
It was a good thing that the four degree rule included non-consanguinous links, because one of the intents of the rule was to prevent certain concentrations of power. Think of a Roman family -- i.e pater familias and not just his relatives, including adopted relatives, but other dependents, employees, slaves, and people connected by formal ties of patronage -- as a corporation, and the four degrees of separation rule as antitrust law.
"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?
"Could the Church do something to fill in for the social security aspect? Or did higher "state capacity" in Europe help?"
Absolutely it filled in social security! From the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus expanded the circle of those for whom we are expected to care:
"43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
So that is expanding outside of kinship which everyone understands and practices; your family, immediate and extended. Now *everyone* is in a sense your kindred, or at least your neighbour. And at the Last Supper: "34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
This gets developed in the early Church; from 1 Peter "Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins" which later Tertullian in the early 3rd century develops in his Apologia when he defends Christians and tears into the pagans:
"Though we have our treasure chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. On the monthly day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary. These gifts are, as it were, piety's deposit fund. For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God's Church, they become the nurslings of their confession. But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death. And they are angry with us, too, because we call each other brethren; for no other reason, as I think, than because among themselves names of consanguinity are assumed in mere pretence of affection."
Julian the Apostate, in the 4th century when he is trying to revive and vivify the practice of the older religion, in one letter urges a high priest to emulate in charity what the Jews and Christians do:
" For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us."
Another "Fragment of a Letter":
"Now it would perhaps have been well to say earlier from what class of men and by what method priests must be appointed; but it is quite appropriate that my remarks should end with this. I say |337 that the most upright men in every city, by preference those who show most love for the gods, and next those who show most love for their fellow men, must be appointed, whether they be poor or rich. And in this matter let there be no distinction whatever whether they are unknown or well known. For the man who by reason of his gentleness has not won notice ought not to be barred by reason of his want of fame. Even though he be poor and a man of the people, if he possess within himself these two things, love for God and love for his fellow men, let him be appointed priest. And a proof of his love for God is his inducing his own people to show reverence to the gods; a proof of his love for his fellows is his sharing cheerfully, even from a small store, with those in need, and his giving willingly thereof, and trying to do good to as many men as he is able.
We must pay especial attention to this point, and by this means effect a cure. For when it came about that the poor were neglected and overlooked by the priests, then I think the impious Galilaeans observed this fact and devoted themselves to philanthropy. And they have gained ascendancy in the worst of their deeds through the credit they win for such practices. For just as those who entice children with a cake, and by throwing it to them two or three times induce them to follow them, and then, when they are far away from their friends cast them on board a ship and sell them as slaves, and that which for the moment seemed sweet, proves to be bitter for all the rest of their lives—by the same method, I say, the Galilaeans also begin with their so-called love-feast, or hospitality, or service of tables,—for they have many ways of carrying it out and hence call it by many names,—and the result is that they have led very many into atheism.."
Julian had formerly been a Christian, though seemingly a reluctant one, and I don't think it's too far to say that he tried to engraft Christian philanthropy onto his revived paganism, urging the priests of temples to take care of the poor and strangers out of devotion to Zeus the God of Strangers, and contrasting how the Christians were luring away the people because they performed these acts of charity for all.
Wow. I knew that Christianity intended/purported/strived to fill in for social security and had read about Julian trying to adapt this into the Roman religion, but your specific quotes are new to me, and these quotes are spectacular. Thank you for sharing them.
That said, supplanting the social security of the kinship network seems to require more massive investment. Say someone has fractured a bone and can't cultivate for the next few months, some others will have to take over their field, and here is one way the kin enter the picture. To replace this, mere intention and basic struggle will not suffice, one needs something like "state capacity". It is not clear from your post whether or not the Church had this; after all, it does not seem clear to me that a modern day third world country with poor state capacity has what it takes for this.
Well, the Church is not trying to *replace* the family, it's an important constituent of society and marriage is a sacrament. You should be able to rely on your family for help. What the Church is doing is extending the idea of family: now those who have been baptised are *also* your brothers and sisters. So if you've broken your leg and can't plough the fields or take care of the crops, your family should indeed help - but so should your neighbours who are all your co-religionists and united to you in the bonds of faith. It's not an excuse to say "That person in need is no concern of mine, I only have to look after my own family".
"1. Forasmuch as each man is a part of the human race, and human nature is something social, and has for a great and natural good, the power also of friendship; on this account God willed to create all men out of one, in order that they might be held in their society not only by likeness of kind, but also by bond of kindred. Therefore the first natural bond of human society is man and wife. Nor did God create these each by himself, and join them together as alien by birth: but He created the one out of the other, setting a sign also of the power of the union in the side, whence she was drawn, was formed. For they are joined one to another side by side, who walk together, and look together whither they walk. Then follows the connection of fellowship in children, which is the one alone worthy fruit, not of the union of male and female, but of the sexual intercourse. For it were possible that there should exist in either sex, even without such intercourse, a certain friendly and true union of the one ruling, and the other obeying.
3. This we now say, that, according to this condition of being born and dying, which we know, and in which we have been created, the marriage of male and female is some good; the compact whereof divine Scripture so commends, as that neither is it allowed one put away by her husband to marry, so long as her husband lives: nor is it allowed one put away by his wife to marry another, unless she who have separated from him be dead. Therefore, concerning the good of marriage, which the Lord also confirmed in the Gospel, not only in that He forbade to put away a wife, save because of fornication, but also in that He came by invitation to a marriage, there is good ground to inquire for what reason it be a good. And this seems not to me to be merely on account of the begetting of children, but also on account of the natural society itself in a difference of sex. Otherwise it would not any longer be called marriage in the case of old persons, especially if either they had lost sons, or had given birth to none. But now in good, although aged, marriage, albeit there has withered away the glow of full age between male and female, yet there lives in full vigor the order of charity between husband and wife: because, the better they are, the earlier they have begun by mutual consent to contain from sexual intercourse with each other: not that it should be matter of necessity afterwards not to have power to do what they would, but that it should be matter of praise to have been unwilling at the first, to do what they had power to do. If therefore there be kept good faith of honor, and of services mutually due from either sex, although the members of either be languishing and almost corpse-like, yet of souls duly joined together, the chastity continues, the purer by how much it is the more proved, the safer, by how much it is the calmer. Marriages have this good also, that carnal or youthful incontinence, although it be faulty, is brought unto an honest use in the begetting of children, in order that out of the evil of lust the marriage union may bring to pass some good. Next, in that the lust of the flesh is repressed, and rages in a way more modestly, being tempered by parental affection. For there is interposed a certain gravity of glowing pleasure, when in that wherein husband and wife cleave to one another, they have in mind that they be father and mother."
So we can see him emphasising the *social* function of marriage here as well.
"Historically, was it Augustine's argument of societal cohesion that was given for the cousin marriage ban?"
I wouldn't imagine so. Augustine wrote on a lot of topics, and although he's important, he's not the only authority for decisions. I think that the reason Augustine is discussing the ban on cousin marriage is because it *already* exists, and it's sufficiently unusual in relation to the customs and practices of the time that he needs to explain *why* it's the rule in Christianity:
"In the early ages the Church accepted the collateral degrees put forward by the State as an impediment to marriage. St. Ambrose (Ep. lx in P.L., XVI, 1185) and St. Augustine (City of God XV.16) approved the law of Theodosius which forbade (c. 384) the marriage of cousins. This law was retained in the Western Church, though it was revoked (400), at least in the East, by Arcadius, for which reason, doubtless, the text of the law has been lost. The Code of Justinian permitted the marriage of first cousins (consobrini), but the Greek Church in 692 (Second Trullan Synod, can. liv) condemned such marriages, and, according to Balsamon, even those of second cousins (sobrini)."
> 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.
By this logic, the industrial revolution should have started in the middle east because that's where the oil is. I'm skeptical of this cousin- marriage hypothesis--if anything it's the printing press we have to thank for modernity--but the simple presence of coal wasn't it. There also needed to be the right economic intuitions to incentivize people to use a steam engine otherwise they would have just used the same solution that civilizations since antiquity have used to mine deep underground: forced labor. That's what the greeks and Romans did even though they had the aeolipile. The ancients certainly were capable of building automations but they always saw them mostly as novelties and not something the aristocratic intelligentsia should concern itself with.
Burning oil usefully in a boiler is much harder than coal. It involves higher heats and pressures and more precise chemistry. Managing those three factors are the key design challenges of boiler design.
But you’re absolutely right that it wasn’t the mere presence of coal; coking had been taking place since antiquity. The Romans deforested Spain to arm several legions. And the reason that Britain had run out of surface coal and was digging below the water line was that they were using coal to heat homes preferentially over peat.
But the process that started in northern England took years if not decades to produce an engine that was safe, reliable, and powerful enough to do anything other than pump water out of flooded mines. Early coal boilers were crappy; load, dirty, inefficient, and unreliable. But they were good enough at pumping that they were worth having and improving. And once they were improved it was a short hop to factories, trains, and ships. And only when creature power was entirely out of the loop could power scale up arbitrarily.
And the economic incentive to upgrade was obvious and required no government assistance. Once those early boilers had been developed coal was cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable than every other alternative. It didn’t displace labor because of a conspiracy, it displaced all prior alternatives because it’s crushingly superior.
I’m an ideas guy. I love ideas and believe in their power. But ideas can only improve efficiency so far. There’s no way a horse can ever match a car, no matter how light you make the buggy. Never mind a jet plane or a rocket. There’s lots of things that just need more power.
There are also plenty of places with lots of coal as well. Europe, even England, was already well on its way to global hegemony before the industrial revolution. Important inventions were already coming down the pipe. Fossil fuels are important yes, paradigm changing even, but England being in a place to take advantage of them required more than just the right contingency of incentives becoming available but also social arrangements. If the economy had been organized sufficiently differently, the economic incentive would not have been obvious and it might not have even been doing if it had been obvious. Social institutions could have precluded it.
Take much of the "developing" world's response to western expansion. Many of these countries recognized pretty quickly the advantages of industrialization, at least in regard to western weaponry, but a lot of countries had difficulty implementing industrialization even when they wanted to. Sometimes existing political structures resisted change because it threatened those same structures. Sometimes changes were attempted, but were only superficially realizable because the countries didn't have a sufficiently educated population to support it. In some cases, countries resisted what seem like obvious improvements for generations.
The Russian empire is a good example of some of these things. It tried to modernize several times before the revolution finally did it in, but it was always held back by its overly conservative institutions and possibly legitimate fears that the wrong kind of change might destabilize the regime. Think of the aborted Stolypin reforms.
There's a good series called "Industrial Revelations" about the English Industrial Revolution, and the first episode explains how coal came to be an important fuel source.
In the 18th the towns of the North-West of England were beginning to boom due to the cotton trade. Fabric weaving wasn't yet mechanised, so lots of workers streamed into the towns from the countryside. And those workers needed heating and cooking fuel, which was - coal.
If you owned a coal mine, you needed to get your coal transported to the towns where the demand was. And as you mined deeper, you needed to pump out the water. And some bright young spark invented the first steam engine - and away we go. Everything comes together: the industries ready to be mechanised, the transport networks of canals set up to move coal and finished goods, the coal itself, the finished goods themselves, the ports where you can transport your goods to be sold on overseas markets. All tied together by the power of steam and the improvement over time of the steam engines which then permitted factories to be set up and make use of this new wonder invention which boosted productivity and lowered price of goods.
"By this logic, the industrial revolution should have started in the middle east because that's where the oil is."
You're forgetting the element of necessity. The English *needed* a solution to the problem of "how to get the water out of the mine?" that other places did not. Having petroleum wouldn't necessitate the Middle East needing to invent the internal combustion engine; petroleum products were being used but not on that kind of 'replacement for muscle' scale because "this stuff burns and gives out light" but for moving things or getting work done, you had plenty of human and animal labour.
Petroleum wasn't much of a resource until the mid-19th century when the West was running out of whale oil and needed another source of fuel for lighting. Somebody tried distilling petroleum and there we go. It was only *because* heavy machinery had been invented and was running on coal that petroleum as first lubricants and then as fuel was used in that way, but that was at first secondary to the use of petroleum derivatives for lighting:
"Chemist James Young in 1847 noticed a natural petroleum seepage in the "old deeps" coal mine at riddings Alfreton, Derbyshire from which he distilled a light thin oil suitable for use as lamp oil, at the same time obtaining a more viscous oil suitable for lubricating machinery. In 1848, Young set up a small business refining crude oil.
Young eventually succeeded, by distilling cannel coal at low heat, in creating a fluid resembling petroleum, which when treated in the same way as the seep oil gave similar products. Young found that by slow distillation he could obtain several useful liquids from it, one of which he named "paraffine oil" because at low temperatures it congealed into a substance resembling paraffin wax.
The production of these oils and solid paraffin wax from coal formed the subject of his patent dated 17 October 1850. In 1850 Young & Meldrum and Edward William Binney entered into partnership under the title of E.W. Binney & Co. at Bathgate in West Lothian and E. Meldrum & Co. at Glasgow; their works at Bathgate were completed in 1851 and became the first truly commercial oil-works in the world with the first modern oil refinery.
The world's first oil refinery was built in 1856 by Ignacy Łukasiewicz. His achievements also included the discovery of how to distill kerosene from seep oil, the invention of the modern kerosene lamp (1853), the introduction of the first modern street lamp in Europe (1853), and the construction of the world's first modern oil "mine" (1854) at Bóbrka, near Krosno (still operational as of 2020).
The demand for petroleum as a fuel for lighting in North America and around the world quickly grew. Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is popularly considered the first modern well. Already 1858 Georg Christian Konrad Hunäus found a significant amount of petroleum while drilling for lignite 1858 in Wietze, Germany. Wietze later provided about 80% of German consumption in the Wilhelminian Era."
To build a useful steam engine you don't just need coal and demand, you need much better metallurgy and precision manufacturing techniques than had been available prior to the 1700s, and also a Boyle-level understanding of thermodynamics.
All of which is a way of saying that the Industrial Revolution didn't just spring up from a single invention, that invention was a single step along a centuries-long pathway of increasing technological sophistication.
I’m not trying to downplay the inventions. Just as technologies are merely statuary without the power to run them, power without a way to use it is just an expensive heat source.
But what I am arguing is that a society with lots of power will find ways to use it (like England, who dominated the coal era) while a society with lots of ideas won’t necessarily find a better power source (like ancient Greece and Rome, who got a lot done on human, animal, tree, and hydro power but were never near hydrocarbons). Power and technology exist in a virtuous cycle, but you need to start it from the power side.
This is a good story, but per capita income was going up prior to coal. Changes in agricultural technique and technological improvements had reduced the need for farmers relative to townsfolk prior to the industrial revolution. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution happened because we had much more freedom to work in industry than on growing food.
If we look at historical civilizations, the Egyptians - who had the highest per capita food productivity of the ancient world - also built the most impressive monuments.
It seems likely that improvements in agriculture more than anything else drove the start of it, because to industrialize, you need the people.
The Industrial Revolution was not an incremental, quantitative increase in productivity along a centuries-old trend. It was truly revolutionary, a qualitative leap, because it opened up an entire new source of energy: coal (and later other fossils, nuclear etc.). Prior to that, economies were essentially limited by photosynthesis. Yes you need people to do anything, but one of the incentives to develop the steam engine was a demand for labor that muscle (human or animal) could no longer satisfy.
The always excellent Bret Devereaux has a piece on why the industrial revolution happened in 18th century Britain specifically and could not have happened earlier or elsewhere.
People back then knew coal was a non-renewable resource, they preferred wood for fuel. But English state capacity was low and the trees weren't managed sustainably. People turned to coal in desperation, digging ever deeper.
Meanwhile in Japan the government was highly successful in enforcing strict wood harvesting rules, the tree population rebounded.
They actually had some of the key conditions for creating the steam engine, including (1) a sudden demand on coal due to a wood shortage and (2) flooding mines. China arguably was much closer to an industrial revolution than ancient Greece or Rome, despite the latter having toy steam engines. It would be fascinating to know why China didn't make the same leap as England. Did they miss a key idea? Did they always have sufficient labor to clear the mines? Given that they had cannons, it seems like they had sufficient metallurgy for those initial, primitive pressure vessels.
But equally, if ideas caused it, that is an excellent explanation why the industrial revolution started in China, one of the earliest inventors of both writing and papermaking.
>But equally, if ideas caused it, that is an excellent explanation why the industrial revolution started in China, one of the earliest inventors of both writing and papermaking.
Yea, exactly. Also gunpowder. And compass. And paper money. And civil service based examination system, incentivising widespread education.
China is the place which imho destroys many a theory of why industrial revolution happened in Europe.
Why, by that logic, it could not have happened at all! All those observations are anomalous in the face of pristine doubt.
Our observations definitely prove it wasn't fate. China had similar seeming preconditions to England without successfully making the leap of fossil fuel industrialization. Other technologies - farming, animal husbandry, writing, paper, money, and education - were developed multiple times, including often by China. But this one only once, when there were at least two opportunities.
Maybe the inference is less obvious. Maybe there are more preconditions we haven't considered. Maybe they did invent it but couldn't get the funding/approval and it was lost to history. By the time England figured out coal the world had become so interconnected by maritime navigation that it was hard to reinvent it - but not by the earlier time China could have invented it.
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.
I think this is just the style around here. The "rationalist" community that this blog arose from is very libertarian and contrarian, so it makes sense their distrust of authority would lead to "book reviews" determined not to give too much deference to the book. I agree most of the contest ones are more like "essay inspired by this book" than "book review".
I have read Scott’s as well. And I agree, his are more useful—and they inspired me to read the others’.
Your interpretation of the community as “contrarian” and “distrusting authority” seems charitable. I admire that. I would have used a less favorable description. It often seems more like a bunch of somewhat unhinged, educated people with little actual life experience showing off for each other.
Oh, for sure. I almost wrote "notoriously contrarian" but thought it a bit aggressive.
Although in a world where nearly every written thing seems to be genuflecting to some ideology, and treating the correctness of that ideology as something completely obvious to all reasonable people and requiring no argument whatsoever...it's very much a breath of fresh air to have the kind of argumentative individualism that prevails around here, I think. When it falls down is when certain quasi-religious doctrines (the fusion of utilitarianism, extreme empiricism and technological determinism that makes up the essence of so-called "rationalism") end up widely accepted, despite their absurdities and minority status in the general population, as a result of the kind of people who are drawn to vigorous debate being also drawn to those ideas (mostly computer programmers) and falsely assuming that that's because the ideas follow naturally from rigorous argument. But at least those dogmas, unlike most others, actively welcome criticism and logical scrutiny.
Obviously I agree to some large extent or I wouldn't have been hanging around since the early Codex days. But I still feel like I have to hold my nose a bit whenever I enter any thread in this community.
I agree with you. Some very interesting ideas in and around the blog but also some very uninteresting people in the comments who think they’re the next Copernicus in suggesting that Eugenics is a simple fix for the world’s problems.
I don’t know. I used to read the TLS and LRB regularly, and lots of those reviews seemed like essays on the topic of the book just like most of these (sure, they reviewed the books too but sometimes pretty briefly). (That actually kind of makes sense, because people read these publications to learn about a range of subjects and not necessarily to find books to read.) One of the potential weaknesses of these reviews is that the authors in general are not experts in the relevant fields (but this is also just a different perspective). These are also longer (generally too long, I agree) and more casually written.
I think part of the idea is to summarize enough of the book so that the reader doesn't need to read it. I think this can work with certain sorts of books, most stereotypically modern pop-sci books, but it doesn't work well for more detail-oriented books.
Also, I think it takes a very special writer to pull this kind of book review off. Scott's one. But I think too many people here try to write reviews like Scott, and fail because they don't have whatever combination of things it is that lets Scott write like Scott.
I think there have been some reviews here that meet your standards, but my memory is so poor that none come to mind right now.
The book reviews on the old SSC blog, which many contestants try to mimic, had purposes beyond summary and recommendation.
I think there was a sort of game played where Scott would use the ideas from the book as a launchpad for broader exploration. He would intertwine the book's themes with familiar concepts known to the blog readers and contextualize them within bigger questions in psychology or rationalism. The reviews extracted and summarized ideas from the book with enough depth to facilitate discussion in the comments, and the caliber of the commenters on Slate Star Codex was high. Subsequent discussions would often be interesting and provide a deeper understanding of the subject.
I recall that. I was around for most of the Codex times. I understand Scott's rationale; He was cultivating a community and his writing has been a primary catalyst for the community's shared conversations. But insofar as the book review contest is concerned, I would have assumed people were independent enough to do more than imitate Scott's style.
People do submit book reviews in a variety of styles, but because the contest is based on votes by readers of ACX, the reviews that are closer to the ACX style tend to be selected as finalists and winners. Also those that contain interesting insights, regardless of whether the insights come from the book or from the reviewer.
I've noticed this issue too, a lot of these are hard to get through. I think the problem is that the authors are mimicking Scott's verbose meandering style but Scott is an exceptionally talented writer and it works a lot less well for them than it does for him.
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.
I was thinking the same thing. I think that the demand for inclusiveness (of the history of different civilizations) is used as an excuse not to teach any history.
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.
The villagers' actions don't depend on whether there is a wolf, they depend on whether they believe there's a wolf, which is directly related to whether the boy told them that there's a wolf.
If atheism is correct and there are no gods, then I would still think religion is a useful explanation for why some people to the things they do. Because they believe, even if that belief is incorrect. And since most of us do not have direct access to universal Truth, we can't even know if their belief is incorrect.
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.
"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)."
Invaidity does not confer bastardy, and there were plenty of noble and royal bastards that did just fine because dad conferred an estate and/or a title on them. This is why Henry had to make a specific legal declaration that Mary (and later Elizabeth) were ineligible to succeed due to bastardy after he had dissolved his marriages; it couldn't just be assumed that they had no rights.
"These same court clerics also seriously thought that (literally) god only answers prayers in proper Latin, and not in common post-Latin."
I don't know about that. I do know there were problems with poorly understood and even garbled Latin for clerics, where some would end up praying for a totally opposite intention or even in nonsense. Standardising the form of Latin and teaching it would help prevent this.
EDIT: Also, there is an emphasis within Catholicism on proper form and matter. If you're going to baptise someone, you can't use Coca-Cola instead of water, and you can't simply say "I baptise you". You must use the correct formula. So insisting on using the words in classical Latin instead of post-Latin or the vernacular is all part of this. Without the right words, it does not happen.
You may call this magic or superstition as you like, but there is a reason for doing it that way.
No, you’re flattening different regimes across social class (elite, yeoman) and historical periods (800s, 1500s.) Heinrich discussed the disinheritance mechanism is his book (which the review unhelpfully and weirdly overlooks).
And I also think you’re projecting a kind of modern/elite sensibility, about a sharp natural-supernatural distinction, into the deep Middle Ages. They really did believe some crazy shit! Though, in some sense, all liturgical languages are ritualistic and magical-seeming. The more esoteric the better! Now, people would say “oh it’s proper, it’s tradition.” (Which, just pushes the question back, why is it proper, why was it maintained as tradition?). Heck, ppl still pray unironically for literally efficacious Devine intervention.
Speaking as a Catholic, we still do 😁 But what I'm trying to get across is that you are saying "they were so dumb they thought you could only pray in Latin" and I am trying to explain *why* they thought this. Words matter. You're not free to change them around. And if you're going from a Latin-speaking community to convert a foreign land, you are going to be concerned about "can I change the words to this new language?" and the decisions often were "No".
"The Libellus responsionum (Latin for "little book of answers") is a papal letter (also known as a papal rescript or decretal) written in 601 by Pope Gregory I to Augustine of Canterbury in response to several of Augustine's questions regarding the nascent church in Anglo-Saxon England.
...The Libellus consists of a series of responses (responsiones) by Gregory to "certain jurisprudential, administrative, jurisdictional, liturgical and ritual questions Augustine was confronted with as leader of the fledgling English church".[16] The numbering and order of these responses differ across the various versions of the Libellus (see below). But in the most widely known version (that reproduced in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica) there are nine responses, each of which begins by re-stating or paraphrasing Augustine's original questions. Gregory's first response addresses questions about the relationship of a bishop to his clergy and vice versa, how gifts from the laity to the church should be divided amongst the clergy, and what the tasks of a bishop were. The second response addresses why the various northern European churches of which Augustine was aware had differing customs and liturgies, and what Augustine should do when he encounters such differences. The third response was in answer to questions about the proper punishment of church robbers. The fourth and fifth responses deal with who might marry whom, including whether it was allowed for two brothers to marry two sisters, or for a man to marry his step-sister or step-mother. The sixth response addresses whether or not it was acceptable for a bishop to be consecrated without other bishops present, if the distances involved prevented other bishops from attending the ceremony. The seventh response deals with relations between the church in England and the church in Gaul. The eighth response concerns what a pregnant, newly delivered, or menstruating woman might do or not do, including whether or not she is allowed to enjoy sex with her husband and for how long after child-birth she has to wait to re-enter a church. The last response answers questions about whether or not men might have communion after experiencing a sexual dream, and whether or not priests might celebrate mass after experiencing such dreams."
"Heck, ppl still pray unironically for literally efficacious Devine intervention."
It’s true that early Anglo-Saxon kings worked with missionaries sent by Rome, if only to keep independent of Frankish-installed bishops more immediately to the south (an issue the letter alludes to). But letters don’t (and can’t) distinguish between what policies were implemented (and with what vigor) and those that were just respectfully acknowledged.
Do you have any sources for this characterization? What you seem to be claiming is that each court had its own clerics, who acted as local propagandists, and there wasn’t much of a centralized church or consistent doctrine or teaching. Also I’d like a source for the idea anyone believed prayers had to be in Latin.
For the former, Peter Heather’s book Christendom. Basically, in the 700s, clerics didn’t have the institutional or corporate semi-independence that emerged from mid1050s to early 1200s (which early universities emerged and canon law became a thing that more regular ppl started taking seriously). Arguably, clerics didn’t even have the manpower in the 700s to operate in the corporate sense. There weren’t enough of them. For the Latin thing, it’s covered in Heinrich’s book. (BTW, Prayer-literalism, even applied to the precise wording incantations, is pretty common in religious traditions, even now. So if it seems weird to you, maybe just go out more.)
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".
If we're going the evopsych route, surely nuclear-family (mother and children, father may or may not be around all the time) is for solitary animals? Humans are pack animals, like our primate cousins in bands where mothers, grandmothers, aunts and siblings are important, and the males may or may not be in that cluster.
That's more a communitarian and primitive style, surely?
Apparently innovations propagate from the center towards the periphery, be it in linguistics or family systems. Eurasia and Africa have communitarian family system holding the center, and nuclear family only remains on the very edge : the British Isles, Thailand and a few other scattered places. Therefore nuclear family must be the primitive one.
"Nuclear family" doesn't mean that there aren't kinship relationships, it describes the way people marry (with persons they aren't directly related to), where they live (in their own dwelling, not in their parents' or their in-law's), and the laws of inheritance (either equally shared or not).
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....)
Funny, I found WEIRD more convincing than SooS, but I also read at least a dozen of the papers referenced in the book. I was very skeptical at the start ("did they consider *this* potential confounder?") and got gradually more and more convinced. I am still in shock, to tell you the truth, but the sheer volume of arguments has forced me to update my priors.
I don't think the review is very good, however. It deals with something else. The book is entirely about linking a package of policies with a specific psychological profile. And I think it does the job in a very rational, logical, somewhat rigorous (for this field), quantitative (again) way.
"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 Industrial Revolution wasn't a single event, nor was it uncaused. The Industrial Revolution wouldn't have happened in Europe if Europe wasn't already way ahead of the rest of the world in a variety of supporting technologies (metallurgy, precision machinery etc).
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.
My general purpose comment on all of these sorts of debates is that if you find yourself wondering "Which of these many plausible mechanisms caused this huge historical trend?" then the answer is usually "All of them, and a bunch more too".
Nothing in history happens without being massively overdetermined. If X happened then there was a huge bunch of factors pushing for X to happen, along with a bunch of factors pushing for not-X to happen, and the factors pushing for X just happened to be slightly stronger than the factors pushing for not-X. If it had been the Far East that pulled ahead and conquered the world then you could easily list off a dozen factors that made _that_ seem like a historical inevitability too (rice!)
"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.
You could have a less unified society in which the basic unit was the extended family/clan, or a more unified society in which the basic unit was the nuclear family or even the individual. Which is more “collectivist”? 🤷♂️
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.
But the thing with cousin marriage is that the women from clan Foo are *not* marrying into clan Bar or clan Baz, precisely because the family wants to keep the dowries and wealth and inheritance within the clan.
So she's marrying her cousin, and her kids out of that marriage are going to marry her husband's brother's kids and/or her brother's kids, and so on down the line. Maybe sometimes there are marriages with clans Bar and Baz for reasons like alliances or politics; often (as we see in Hindu myths like the Ramayana) there are group marriages arranged: Sita has a svayamvar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svayamvara which is a ceremony where all the eligible suitors turn up and one is selected by means of a test or task.
Rama performs the task which no other suitor can do (stringing the bow of Shiva, and if this reminds anyone of Odyessus' homecoming well Indo-European myths have common roots) and is the chosen bridegroom. *However*, after that, Sita's father suggests to Rama's father "Hey, you have four sons and I have four daughters/nieces. Since your son Rama has married my daughter Sita, wouldn't it be even better if his brothers married my girls?"
So this is an example of brothers marrying sisters, and keeping the marriage alliances within a discrete group instead of marrying outside to different people.
See this scene from a devotional movie about Annamayya, who (after a religious conversion) decides to live an ascetic life, which means breaking off the engagement with his cousins (two sisters) but is persuaded to fulfil his obligations to the family and the state of life as a householder and marry them both:
"Growing up as a normal young man, Annamayya loves his 2 cousins Timakka & Akkalamma who thinks that they are the most beautiful creations of God.
Lord Vishnu appears in front of Annamayya in disguise and accepts a challenge from him to show someone more beautiful than his cousins - God in the form of Lord Venkateswara in a temple in his village. Upon discovering the beauty of the Lord, Annamayya is lost in a different world and ends up making a pilgrimage to Tirumala Venkateswara Temple without planning or informing his parents. ...Upon reaching Tirumala, he is enthralled by the beauty of God and settles there to write and sing hymns in praise of the Lord.
Meanwhile, Annamayya's parents get worried regarding Annamayya's whereabouts. Then, the Lord Venkateshwara, hearing the prayers of Lakkavaamba (Annamayya's mother), himself comes in the disguise of a Hunter along with his consorts and tells them that Annamayya lives in Tirumala. Then, Annamayya's parents, cousins, aunt, uncle, and his 2 friends come to Tirumala and watch him worship the Lord.
When Annamayya is asked to marry his 2 cousins, he refuses saying that his life is dedicated to the service of the Lord and marriage would become a hindrance to it. But, he is then convinced by the Lord himself who has now taken the form of a Brahmin. The Lord personally conducts the wedding of Annamayya with his cousins - Timakka and Akkalamma."
That's not the social view of "a woman from clan Foo marries a man from clan Bar". That's "the normal thing is to get married, and if you have female cousins, to marry them". That's not "well if he doesn't marry them, no matter, we can arrange different marriages with other men for them", it's "if they're rejected by their own family, nobody else will want to marry them for fear there is something wrong with them or they are unlucky or will bring ill-fortune with them".
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.
That review is dishonest. I'll give one example, but every claim is wrong one way or another.
Here is an example among many. Freeman says "[Julia] Smith does mention, p.131, that 'some bishops tried to impose an additional disqualification' namely enforcing the consanguinity laws but it seems to have been a minority practice"
Freeman mentions this in the context of claiming that the Church was largely unsuccessful influencing marriage.
But the actual quote from Julias Smith is: "In addition, some bishops tried to impose an additional disqualification—consanguinity extending all the way to a common ancestor within seven generations, way beyond the widely acceptable four-generation limit."
So what a few bishops tried to do and failed is to extend the prohibition to *seven generations*, not that they failed to impose any consanguinity laws at all, or that they had no influence on marriage! On the contrary the context in Julia Smith's book is clear that Church's policies were very consequential, even if the over-zealous bishops didn't get their way.
The fact that Freeman elided "extending all the way to a common ancestor within seven generations" to make it seem like the Church had problems imposing consanguinity laws at all should disqualify him as someone you can trust on this.
"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."
Henrich is the one who discovered that. He is the one who coined the term WEIRD specifically to bring attention to the fact that the vast majority of psychology is based on subjects who are western college students.
But the reason this is a problem is precisely because the psychological profile of westerners is different from that of non-westerners, and this has consequences. Henrich wrote the right book: where does that difference come from? He (and Schulz) found an intriguing correlation: the more a certain policy package was enforced in a particular location, the WEIRDer the people in that location are today. And the correlation holds after controlling for a host of possible confounders, and it also holds at different scales (across counties, nations, continents).
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.
Re “Western Civilisation as a continuation of agreeing/Roman” I thought it was pretty clear the reviewer was referring to that view as something he had been taught as a child (“I come from a primitive culture, in the following sense”) rather than endorsing it.
I believe "primitive" in this sense refers to how he was taught that Western history extends from the Greeks to the present as opposed to seeing a kind of global history of humanity including China, Africa etc.
Later on in the review he talks about how to get from AD 1 to the present and also how political philosophy began with Socrates in the West, while noting that he doesn't know much about Ibn Khaldun, both of which implies some kind of unique thread of continuity from Socrates to the Latin West.
(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.
"The Catholic Church also can’t explain why Japan is such an outlier within Asia, scoring much WEIRDer on the World Values Survey than any other Asian country and even WEIRDer than Italy and most of Eastern Europe"
Isn't that due to the conscious Japanese decision to Westernise, if we're gonna have these gunboats turning up in our harbours, might as well copy the successful foreigners and do what they do in the hopes that we'll be as big and successful ourselves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_era
"The Meiji era is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization by Western powers to the new paradigm of a modern, industrialized nation state and emergent great power, influenced by Western scientific, technological, philosophical, political, legal, and aesthetic ideas. As a result of such wholesale adoption of radically different ideas, the changes to Japan were profound, and affected its social structure, internal politics, economy, military, and foreign relations."
If you turn out WEIRD because you meticulously copied the West (and then had Western values imposed on you by fiat by the occupying powers after the Second World War), and WEIRD comes out of the Catholic Church, then uh - yeah, it can explain that?
Japan is isolated by sea and much smaller than China, both geographically and in terms of population. It's easier to move a house than a village. China also famously resisted the Western ideas, to the point where the Europeans basically had to get them all hooked on opium in order to even secure a Western notion of trade.
Hong Kong, while technically an island, was never particularly "isolated" from the mainland Chinese. Cantonese and Mandarin are reasonably mutually-intelligible in their written forms, to a degree far beyond that of Japanese kanji.
I believe that's a common misconception (and I expect one deliberately fostered by the Chinese government): the supposed "written form" of Cantonese, "standard written Chinese," IS essentially Mandarin, and ACTUAL written Cantonese is completely different. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Modern_times
The West did the same gun boat diplomacy with China (sort of) but China reacted very differently than Japan, with Japan making a much more conscious attempt to imitate the West (and other regions) and adopt its advantageous traits.
I thought the root of the difference in reaction between China and Japan was the strength of the central government? There were a bunch of people in both places who didn't like that the westerners had all this advanced tech that made them powerful. In China, the government suppressed them and turned them against the westerners. But in Japan, they ended up overthrowing the shogunate and setting up a western-style government.
Huh, thanks!
Far before Westernization Japan was a big outlier as well.
To Meiji Era it had extremely strong legal system, hard personal responsibility, big literacy numbers and developed financial institutions
On the other hand copying on it's own doesn't help as much - there is Russia that for the last 300 years all it does is Westernizing in very heavy-handed way
Yes, the Meiji era was important, but it was not even the main reason why Japan is so westernized today.
Remember how the WWII ended for Japan? It was essentially occupied and controled by The US, and in the process a lot of things were forcibly pushed onto them. It had much much much bigger impact that the Meiji era on the current state of things.
But we also should not overstate how big that impact was - in many ways, Japan is still a lot more collectivist that any actual WEIRD country.
It also explains why, for example, China is not similarly WEIRD, despite also having being influenced by the West in the late 19-early 20th century.
Japan copied *some* aspects of western society, but left many other things alone. For example, it still has the "koseki" 戸籍 (family register) for births, deaths, marriages, etc.; despite most of its civil and criminal law being modeled on French law. The koseki is there because traditionally when one marries, one transfers into the other family - usually a woman becomes part of her husband's family, but it's also possible for a man to become part of his wife's family (especially if there are no sons) - and takes the name of the family into which one is marrying (the current conservative government has refused to change this law, despite growing opposition to it).
If you look at the language, Chinese has a lot of carefully delineated kinship words - for example, distinguishing between maternal and paternal aunt; Japanese doesn't have these words; if anything, it has fewer kinship words than English. Having said that, there can be considerable extended family networks, especially if there are adopted children (this subject would require a fairly long discussion).
If you've lived in Japan for a while, especially if you marry into a Japanese family, you'll wake up one day and realize that almost every concept that you think is basic is somehow different in Japan - it's a kind of delayed culture shock, when you realize that the veneer of Westernization is just a veneer.
I would say that Japan is also "WEIRD", but it's "WEIRD" in a different way, and for different reasons that Europe is "WEIRD". It's quite possible that Japan independently discovered similar cultural values that lead to prosperity. (And I wonder if Korea has also done this? but I don't know enough about Korean culture to speculate.)
If you want a good book about pre-modern Japan: "Stranger in the Shogun's City" by Amy Stanley.
Yes. the family register bit is where I went "wait a minute" about those stories when supposedly Hank from New York is divorcing Wanda and they talk about taking her name off the family register 😁
It also made me wonder about the allegedly low rate of crime in Japan, because I wonder if it's simply because people don't involve the police where we in the West would (e.g. crazy mother-in-law breaks into your house and won't leave; over here we'd call the cops, but a lot of those text stories have the daughter-in-law just fleeing and the married couple trying to work out a way to trick Mom to leave). I think there is a definite sense of shame about getting the police involved in 'family matters' and societal pressure that you put up with a lot from the in-laws because they're the elder generation and you owe them obedience and filial piety. On the other hand, there's a lot of the errant husband begging the wife "please don't tell the company about my affair" because it would get them into disgrace or even demoted, while over here nobody cares, dude, so long as you're not breaking sexual harassment laws in the workplace.
Or at least that's the impression I'm getting, and I should keep in mind that these stories are going for the dramatic rather than the factual so they rachet up the tension by "oh no, what can I do if my scheming relatives swindle me out of all my money by taking my bank book and withdrawing all the cash?" I'm here going CALL. THE. COPS. THEY'RE. THIEVES. but the story wants to resolve it by a Cunning Plan where the swindlers get tricked in their turn.
I think your specifics for Europe are indeed good counterpoints and require a slightly more convoluted explanation for when the disparity became very meaningful.
For Japan, though, they were just very explicitly copying Europe after Europe had already become rich. Japan is, in my view, a very strong argument that radical cultural changes, on purpose, are entirely possible, both in the Meiji Restoration era (when they explicitly, on purpose, became more European, albeit with the goal of *preserving* imperial rule) and in the post-war era, when the American constitution imposed by force became, surprisingly quickly, a cherished piece of national identity - polls over the last decade have all retained, even now, strong support for retaining the pacifist constitution.
I have absolutely no idea why Myanmar seems distinctly less kinship based. It's worth noting a number of North American native societies also banned cousin marriage - the Haida Gwaii, for instance, were not even allowed to marry within their own clan. (Totally separately, it's worth looking into Haida art and epics - deeply underrated as an artistic tradition, in my view).
Depressing if so
Water doesn’t inevitably drain to the lowest point in a landscape: it is possible, with great effort, to pump it to a higher point. Nonetheless, it’s reasonable to say that drainage is determined by topography, in the absence of extraordinary effort.
I think this is a good analogy; it's not binary, and the Japanese also had a very pressing reason in the form of foreign gunships to embrace the changes (and, unlike many others, did so in time; plains native Americans may have embraced mounted rifle warfare remarkably quickly, but the plagues had already done their work).
The thing is, the actual important part of Westernization wasn't the guns, it was industrialization.
The problem wasn't their lack of guns, but the lack of indigenous industry. Trading for guns is inferior to making them yourself - which is hard if you can't mine iron and refine iron ore into steel.
The Plains Indians could adopt Western weapons, but they didn't adopt western industrial practices.
Or did they?
The thing is, Westernized Native Americans could just leave the conservative tribes and just join general mainstream American society - and most of them *did*. This is part of why the reservations have so many problems - if you want to just be a normal American, you can just go off to the city and be one, and that's been the case for a very long time now (a lot of "white" Americans like myself have some Native ancestry as a result).
As such, the reality is that many Native Americans did, in fact, do exactly that "in time" - they just aren't recognized as such today, they're just people in general society.
It was a very different situation because cultural assimilation was not only possible but was in fact potentially desirable to many of them.
Native Americans who don't live on reservations make vastly more money than those who do today.
Strongly agree - on the next open thread there was discussions of what societies may have had technologies 'out of order', and there are a few examples in my view (Inuit material culture/tool sophistication, Polynesian navigation and sailing) but there seems to be a hard stop at industrialisation where that's no longer possible.
The point about on/off the rez is also relevant, and agree. I'm slightly native (no cultural connection), and my hometown was contiguous with a reservation, which I spent a lot of time on with friends. As you say, there was a very strong selection effect about who chose to stay.
Columbus didn't spring from nowhere -- neither did da Gama (also of great importance). Their voyages showed that something unique was already taking place in the West at least several decades earlier.
Not saying the book's thesis is necessarily correct, and it obviously can't really say anything about the relative performance of Asian powers, but I think the question of "Why the West Won" is largely contained in the question of "Why did the West produce Columbus and da Gama's voyages?" The arc of increasing Western dominance of world affairs never showed any signs of reversing from that point until the 20th century.
Without the Industrial Revolution, Western dominance would have been far less complete, but it's not like India was on the verge of dominating Europe when Watt built his steam engine.
Zheng He happened, his expeditions were impressive but a strategically and commercially worthless dead end, and understanding why this was so has a lot to do with Why the West Won in my estimation (I’m inclined to look to the “I” in WEIRD).
Western Europe was a single civilization, Iberian achievements always involved significant non-Iberian involvement (the Italians are well-known but the role of German and Dutch commercial/financial expertise, even in the 15th century, is often overlooked). Britain in its Golden Age ultimately built upon Iberian achievements as intense national competition was accompanied by private sharing of knowledge/expertise/technology.
It can't be just the luck of the new world being there, since Portugal was already colonising western Africa and nearly getting to India via the cape of good hope. The whole series of 15th century voyagers (of which Columbus was the culmination, or one of them) is obviously the key here. Why did the voyagers happen? Most obvious answers are Christianity (seeking converts) plus capitalism (seeking trade): "we come in search of Christians and spices". So on face value it was Western ideology that led to Western dominance. This may be false, but it would require some substantial argument as to how.
Well, for a counterargument, one might point to various Islamic "empires", which certainly had the motivations of seeking converts and seeking trade. (There's an interesting division in India, between the parts that experienced Islam via land-based conquerors, and the parts that experienced Islam via ocean-based traders.)
My personal theory is more about internal competition. Europe was fragmented and at constant war with itself, and so as it developed all this new technology, it learned how to use that technology against peer states. Whereas China, which had similar technology, only learned how to use it against "barbarians", since it was in the middle of a unified period. And Japan had a brief period of openness when it was fragmented, in the late 1500s and early 1600s, but closed down and stagnated as soon as Tokugawa unified it.
This doesn't touch on the Islamic empires or India, though, so it's not really complete.
> China had Zheng He in the 1400s, so oceangoing wasn’t unique to the West at that point.
But Zheng He sailed towards known bodies of land. He didn't look at the blank area east of Japan and go, "hm, let's go off in *this* direction and see what happens".
The real failure of the Chinese was not failing to find the Americas - that's hard. It was failing to find Australia.
Western Europe started to diverge from the rest of the world around at least 1200, as we can see in urbanization rates and self-governance of cities, GDP per capita, etc., etc., even in things like the adoption of clocks. Also, declining interest rates in Western Europe are also a sure sign of low time preference (i.e. patience), itself a good indication of WEIRD psychology.
The Revival kicked off around 1100 CE. Before then, European cities simply didn't exist. Well OK Byzantium, Venice and Paris and that's about it.
No, western Europe discovered the New World because they were more advanced than the rest in things such as sailing/navigation. They had been more advanced in other of science for longer: the Chinese didn't realize the Earth was round until the Jesuits told them otherwise. Of course, the ancient Greeks knew that well before the Catholic Church.
I don’t think it is true that England was backward in the Middle Ages. (They destroyed more of their medieval heritage in the Reformation than France, for example.)
To give one example : the famous English longbows happened because England was too poor to buy / make enough crossbows, like richer polities did.
I mean, if you look at the world, there are two major economic success stories - the West, and the Asian Tigers.
Japan is a very interesting data point because it has extremely low cousin marriage rates. If this was true historically, it would be very interesting, as it would be evidence for lack of cousin marriage being correlated with being advanced.
If the replacement of typical kinship relationships with greater social bonds was indeed correlated with a society being successful, this is exactly the sort of weird thing you'd expect to observe - you find one other random culture where it happens to have very low cousin marriage rates, and it also just happens to be the one other random culture that is super rich compared to the rest of the world?
On the other hand, there's also a patch down in Southeast Asia which also has very low cousin marriage rates - and it is quite poor, which is evidence *against* cousin marriage being the causal thing.
What differentiates the West and Japan from that area?
I notice that resistance to colonialism also matches up pretty well with low kinship intensity, since it’s Europe, Japan, & Thailand that were never colonised.
So you low kinship gives an advantage with colonialism & Europe successfully leveraged that advantage to their benefit
There’s a fun Alternate History story where Thailand & Japan’s status are reversed called Look to the West. It’s not about that but it’s fun it worked out like that
This seems to track for Ethiopia as well (I'm not finding much info other than a paragraph on wikipedia, though)
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."
Another argument for WEIRDness not being genetic.
It might not be that simple. There's a lot of arguing that the hill people of the US are descendants of the hill people of the marches between England and Scotland, sometimes via northern Ireland. It's at least conceivable that the ancestors of the various peoples who are now hill people (who tend to be clannish and warlike around the world) have "always" been hill people. Indeed, it would be a good study to trace the histories of all the hill peoples around the world.
Rural PEI is settled by actual-Irish and actual-Scots, and I can assure you they are insular and clannish. Friendly about it, mind you.
"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.
It’s a pretty tenuous claim. I’m not convinced educated westerners expect each other to know that much about western history. ”History is more or less bunk.”
I really wish more authors would get on board with this norm. I just find it obnoxious when when writers today in all seriousness do a quick run down of their topic in "world history" and bounce from Greece to Rome to the Renaissance. Such nonsense. I'm always left wondering what they were up to in China and India.
History with Cy https://www.youtube.com/@HistorywithCy is a pretty good channel. As well as Mesopotamia he (voice sounds like he/his pronouns) covers the Indus, Chinese, Oxus and Egyptian civilizations. Regrettably, very few of those YT historians have a lesson plan of say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you've said. It's best to take copious notes.
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.
That would be opposite, self-deprecating.
We value individualism and describe ourselves as individualistic. Like valuing wisdom and describing ourselves as wise. In contrast, self-deprecation is self-criticism.
Lacking connections holding us in place, we are free to float wherever the current takes us.
I also don't understand why we can't have both: family ties and individual rights
This is not about individual rights.
This is about fungibility. Consider an individual without culture, community, family ties, religion, a sense of place, inconvenient & deeply held moral beliefs... Such an individual can be easily slotted into any open position in any large organization.
The essence of professionalism is playing your assigned role, uninfluenced by anything specific to you as a person. The consummate professional ensures the trains run on time: whether to Disneyland or to Dachau.
That doesn't follow. An individualist who pursues only his own self-interest can still work with collectivists whose interests align with his, and if THEY are motivated to act against some group, that's a reason for the individualist to do so as well.
Collectivism fails the instant you discover you can work less than your peers, yet still get paid the same, and can't get fired
That's where peer pressure comes in
Professionalism isn't value neutral. Many professions have ethical components they value highly. Doctors try to do no harm. Investigative journalists try to expose corruption. Hospitality professionals try to make sure people have a good time. All of these can and do sometimes fall down in practice, but the point is that they exist and are believed.
I also disagree with your point about fungibility in general. You simply assert that people in individualistic cultures have no culture or personal beliefs. I would argue the difference is that they are simply more free, both societally and psychologically, to choose which culture and beliefs to retain, adopt, or discard. To take US examples, the average liberal Californian and a conservative Texan have very different values, but people in each location who don't fit in are free to either stand out or to move somewhere with more like-minded people. The same is true of which job they choose (going back to the fit with a particular professional ethos) and who they might marry. Many individualistic cultures are quite cosmopolitan and accepting of individual differences. This seems so obvious that I'm almost embarrassed to recite it.
If its all about fungibility , why do.interviewers go.on about fit so much?
The optimal level of fungibility has not yet been achieved, so there still are people who fit better than others, I guess?
It's not individual rights.
Family ties doesn't just mean you get on well with your parents and the like - it means if your mom breaks her leg and needs someone to care for her for a month, it's your obligation to give up anything else you might be doing - such as a job, or studying - and care for her first. If that means you get fired from your job or suspended from college because you missed finals, well tough.
This is actually an adaptive and locally rational take if you're in a society or social class where people like you often get fired a lot anyway and there's no other social safety nets available - if you break your leg, or get fired from your job, then you know someone in your kin network is going to look out for you. The fact you sometimes have to walk away from a job that would have kept you, to look out for someone else, is a quite modest "insurance premium" for being part of the kin network in the first place.
>This description of westerners as "individualistic" is self-flattering.
No, it's not. It's a valid sociometric construct, and it's not even inherently a positive concept. It can conjure up ideas of 'selfishness' and 'atomisation', whereas collectivism can be associated with connectedness and concern for the greater good.
Yup. An alternate way of phrasing the Church's MFP is as a program to attack and dilute a competing power center, in the interest of trying to centralize as much power as possible in the Church. (Now, of course, as you write in later comments, the effect is centralize power in the State and corporations.)
Why shouldn't the description be self-flattering?
I guess westerners == americans in this context. When I was growing up in southern Europe ‘individualistic’ would definitely not come to mind as a way to describe people around me.
Not Americans. This book is about what happened in pre-modern times so all the talk in the comments about modern stuff is utterly irrelevant. Getting into the weeds here:-
Individualism in the context of pre-modern societies is opposed to family-collectivism, and perhaps is best illustrated by something called the European Marriage Pattern.
North and west of a line slanting across mid-Italy and through the Balkans, in premodern times (late medieval and later) people tended to marry later, and when they did marry, they moved out of their parents' household and formed their own household: the "nuclear family".
South of this line, and eastwards through Asia, women mostly married young and moved to a household headed by older adults (the parents of her husband), and often sibling families as well, those of the husband's brothers.
Southern Europe was--and partly still is--more like the Rest Of The World.
I got the Hajnal line’s mechanics, but I object to characterizing the western pattern as individualistic. This may be a mere issue of semantics
Think of it this way: you want to be a mason.
If you live north and west of the line, and the head of your family says "I think you should be a farmer", you may or may not listen. In many cases, you'd become a mason despite your parents' objections. After all, you're the head of your own household and can do as you see fit.
East of the line, you'd become a farmer. What you want isn't even a thing.
Fundamental individualism.
In the book, southern europe among other parts of europe are specifically mentioned and discussed in detail. For example, long occupation of parts of Iberia by Muslims weakened their WEIRDness in comparison to more northern europeans. Similar arguments are made (and very well backed up) for e.g. what is today eastern Germany or large parts of former Yugoslavia.
I can attest to the last: My parents coming from former Yugoslavia but me growing up in northern europe, I was confused for all my life. Parts of western Yugoslavia are very "WEIRD", others not. I have family from both parts, and the cultures are very close on the surface, but so distinct in detail, it is infuriatingly confusing up until I read this book and other similar ones.
Cross-cultural psychology's attempts to measure comparisons of individualistic vs. collectivist culture do show some national differences, though they typically aren't as stark as people often imagine and they don't necessarily follow the stereotypes an American might have about different groups.
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.
Cousin marriage is not common in rural America, regardless of jokes people might make. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-are-married-to-their-cousins/
This is both inaccurate now and in the relevant time period of pre-modern Europe.
So inferring the implications of this theory for immigration policy is left to the reader?
Perhaps, but is that the relevant measure, rather than comparing them to the median of the native population, for example?
Also, while I can see why that might have been true in the past, technology has improved to the point where immigrants can (and usually do) maintain close ties to their family back home, so I don't think individualism is selected for anymore.
I don't, and would also be interested in such studies.
I agree, but if traveling to a different country thousands of miles away is now comparable to just moving to a different city, that's still a pretty drastic change (an improvement, in my view) in connectivity, and a corresponding weakening of whatever selection pressure you're hypothesizing.
>I would guess that the median immigrant in the US is more individualistic than the median US-born person though couldn’t find any studies or polls on this either way so would be open to changing my mind if you know of any.
Why? European Americans were likely strongly selected for individualism in the first place when they moved to the US, and moving from Europe to the US is much bigger deal than moving from e.g. Mexico than the US, and moving to the US in the 18th, 19th or even early 20th century is also a much bigger deal than moving to the US than in 2023.
What is the mechanism you're imagining that causes this "regression to the mean"? Mixing with the natives or slaves?
Genetic regression to the mean happens only once, in the first descendant generation, assuming no introduction of new genes. I don't know what the model looks like when you have new genes selected for the same trait flowing in each generation, mixing with the existing population. I would guess that you still wind up with a population meaningfully elevated above ancestral norms in the trait of interest.
That doesn't apply to Africans who did not choose to come here, and count for calculating the median.
The convincing exploration of Augustinus thinking is an important follow up on WEIRD. It does sketch a venue to be studied in more depth to find the answers to arguably the biggest question mark left behind by WEIRD. When it comes to the psychological processes, Norbert Elias civilizing concept and other developments covered in Steven Pinker's "Better angels of our nature" represent important complementary insights.
There's no comparison between
* getting together with your family every week, being around to help after your grandma falls down the stairs, versus
* having a video call occasionally.
That is possible, however due to return to the mean the immigrants' descendants will become just as collectivistic as their relatives back home (you can see this play out with Arab and African migrants in Europe today)
You seem to be invoking phrases like "reversion to the mean" as a kind of magic incantation to cover up shoddy reasoning. What actually happens would be more akin to the "founder effect," which is fully consistent with a modern understanding of genetics, unlike your predicted atavism.
Atavism DOES happen, but its nothing like what you describe, and is caused by mutations and some quirks of embryonic development, irrelevant to population genetics of the kind discussed here.
I think that depends on whether the immigrant actively wants to be in the new country, or merely doesn't want the problems of the old country. You don't need a lot of individualism to not want to die horribly.
I d guess that immigrants who don't show up for work reliably because they are dealing with family crises need to get WEIRDer quickly.
Henrich or Schultz (whose papers the book is based on) shows somewhere that there is strong persistence, i.e. that WEIRD traits or lack thereof remain in the immigrant population.
In other words, immigrants bring their culture with them.
Henrich certainly doesn't say it, but the implication isn't good.
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.)
Thailand too, also not rich but known for their more successful resistance to colonialism
Which also matches them with Japan
No hit for "Hajnal line" ? :(
No Hajnal line, at least explicitly, but Hajnal himself is mentioned in the references 5 times from two papers:
Hajnal, J. (1965). European marriage patterns in perspective.
Hajnal, J. (1982). Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system.
It feels somewhat like the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
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.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinship_terminology
If everyone (or almost everyone) is your brother, no one is, and that's exactly how you'd expect ACTUAL kin institutions to be broken.
Were dispensations really that hard to get? I assume from things like the Hapsburg jaw that there was a fair amount of inbreeding going on. (And the Victorian hemophilia, although that's not really the Catholic church's fault...)
And I find myself puzzled by the review's (or maybe the book's) repeatedly trying to find motives for the Church's promotion of "exogamy" (on a familial level, not a Church-wide level). If they identify marriage as a thing that can create bonds and strengthen relationships, of course it makes sense to bind all of Christendom together as one big family. That's ... kind of what a universalizing religion *does*.
Or, well, I guess Islam doesn't seem to do a good job with this in practice, even if some of the rhetoric sounds similar. So maybe it's not all that obvious?
The book explicitly says (if I remember right) that they don’t care why the church happened upon this set of rules, just that it did.
Do you know how the Consanguinity was calculated if there were multiple paths of equal length linking two individuals? E.g., was a sibling (who on average shares ~50% of the chromosomal DNA, relative to the general population) considered closer than a half-sibling?
In the most extreme case if two persons of the same generation share not one but 2^n common ancestors from n generations ago, they will share an expected 2^-n of the DNA, while if they shared just a single ancestor will share 2^(-2n) of the DNA (again, all relative to the general population). For example, two individuals sharing all 1024 ancestors 10 generations ago will be (on average) as related as two individuals sharing one ancestor five generations ago.
I haven't the tables to hand and don't know how they calculated it, but I think definitely full siblings were considered closer than half-siblings. The novelty seems to be that the Church was insisting "no, you can't marry your half-sibling or your aunt or your cousin" in societies where that was legal or accepted.
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.
If I remember correctly, his explanation is that the Orthodox Church only banned marriage of first cousins, while at one stage the Catholic ban extended to sixth cousins!, didn't enforce it as strictly, and also didn't extend the ban to all the psuedo-relatives (godparents' children, in-laws).
Right, but why? What motivated this difference of approach? It seems that it could not have been prior religious tradition because they had that in common. So it seems that it must have been some prior West vs. East, Latin vs. Greek difference.
One explanation might be that the western church found itself taking on some of the imperial role that was left vacant when the western empire collapsed, and may have had to look for ways to stop all of its members from trying to kill each other all the time. The eastern church may not have needed to do that because the eastern empire was still around. For a while, anyway, until the Ottomans finally stomped it, and after that, I get the feeling that the Ottomans really didn't want the Christians in their territory to be a unified, cohesive bunch.
It might also have something to do with the more centralized nature of the Roman Catholic church, with the Pope, as opposed to the more decentralized nature of the various Orthodox churches. (Although that again may have something to do with what happened to Constantinople.)
It's certainly true that the Western Church took on a governmental role in a way that the Eastern Church did not. It's a bit harder to see exactly how that translates to MFP in particular. Governments in chaotic areas do not generally come up with strict rules for who can marry whom. That's the peculiar thing that needs explanation.
But the Church was a "government" that literally believed that all Christians are, at the most important level, brothers and sisters, that they are all one small part of the Body of Christ. It doesn't seem like a huge step to have the Church encourage the creation of bonds that span narrow familial groups, to bind all Christians together, to prevent what would effectively be fratricide and cancer.
Or maybe it's the thing people mentioned elsewhere, about importing Roman customs. The Romans seemed to know a thing or two about convincing disparate peoples that they were all one. **shrug** I just don't think that it's particularly strange for the Church to have done it.
That seems plausible. But if that factor were so powerful, I guess I'm not sold on why it would not have been (at least partially) present for the Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire. Sure, it was not as much in a governmental role, but it certainly could and did influence the government.
The key thing I'm looking for is the East-West difference.
Hajnal argues that the Latin Church, by making it more difficult to marry, wanted more people to donate their riches to the Church. The East Church was already rich with the empire.
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).
Had a similar thought. Jared Diamond tackles the same question and comes up with the theory that it's Eurasia being E<>W and the Americas being N<>S leading to more rapid advancement.
GGS offers a theory of `why Eurasia' but does not offer any theory as to why specifically the northwest corner of Eurasia.
Considering that China was singlehandedly the most developed country in terms of GDP per capita up until the 18th century or so, it seems hard to come up with such a theory. Western hegemony is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Well, the book under review appears to be offering precisely such a theory.
Sure, I should have said that it’s hard to come up with a valid theory. Coming up with any theory at all is not as hard.
The question Jared set out to answer is "Why did Europe colonize other continents, and not the other way around?" His theory is much more complicated than "Eurasia is east-west", but it all does come down to geographical advantages. Most of all, he debunks the idea that European culture was in any way inherently superior.
China had a huge national GDP because it was populous but it had a lower GDP per capita than NW Europe. The Dutch had the highest GDP per capita in the world from the Middle Ages to around 1800.
Yeah, I think there's a theory involving lower population driving mechanization and capital accumulation. Plus a theory about how Western staple grains (wheat, barley, rye, etc.) were more amenable to animal assistance and then mechanization than were Eastern staple grains (rice).
I'm not sure that's accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#1%E2%80%932008_(Maddison)
I feel that GDP can be deceptive in the case of places like China and India, which are regions with enormous populations. It's possible for some subgroups to have top-level wealth and technology, while large swaths are still involved in subsistence farming. Not that this doesn't happen everywhere, to some extent, but enough subsistence farmers will drive any average down.
It's like how China can do well on PISA test scores by only scoring its four most developed regions. If it were actually forced to take into account scores from all its regions, it wouldn't look nearly as good.
In general, I agree, but back in the day didn’t most countries have a very large proportion of subsistence farmers? It seems like it would have canceled out historically more than it does now.
Indeed it seems that the per capita bit was wrong.
This is simply untrue. China was around the same level as Europe in 1000 CE and by 1500 CE was beginning to substantially lag Europe, with Italy having approximately 2x the per-capita GDP of China.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is just not correct in most of its assertions. For example, we see Maize all over the Americas, its attempts at listing out domesticatable animals omits a number of examples (and ignores that some animals were domesticated in the Old World that were not in the New World, despite them literally being the same animals, like Caribou, and the problem of claiming that non-Eurasian animals were uniquely difficult to domesticate, even though there's no reason to think that Aurochs were any easier to domesticate than Buffalo).
It's not a great book and it gets pooh-poohed a lot.
Not directly a review of GGS, but the contest 2021 featured a review of "Plagues and People", which also discusses the debate between the authors of the two books, see Section "William H. McNeill versus Jared Diamond" here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples
More to read! Arrrrg! No, seriously, thanks for the link, and the review.
Don't forget Niall Ferguson's "Civilisation: The West and the Rest" which explains Western supremacy with six factors (which is somewhere between one factor and hundreds of factors): "competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic".
I haven't read that book, but that sounds plausible to me, as a short summary of the proximate factors. But what is the explanation of how European culture acquired those factors (this would be related, I imagine, to when they did).
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).
I think you underestimate the power of the Catholic church for about a thousand years. It was the most dominate institution in Europe for long periods of time (including most wealth and most land), and that's just it's secular power. Spiritually, it was the only game in town - having legally barred all alternatives. There were long periods of time when a king could not be crowned in Western Europe without the Pope's blessing.
Possibly. I think you're overestimating the centralization of the church for most of the period we're talking about. The Bishop of Rome was a lot more symbolic for most of the nobles, including kings, and all of the peasants than his present-day reach would suggest. He had almost no real authority whatever in terms of day-to-day realities like disposition of property, conduct of clergy, and 99.9% of marriages. Even the people at the very top defied him often, while acknowledging the legitimacy of the Church as an institution that filled a lot of roles the state or other institutions hold today.
"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)
Mediaeval English law seems to have permitted some things in wills and forbidden others, for the protection of property in a civil and secular sense:
"The theory of landholding in England was still that of the feudal system, set up to guarantee effective armies at the Crown’s disposal. All land ultimately belonged to the King, and landholders were royal tenants, some directly (‘tenants-in-chief’), and others as tenants of tenants. It was all intended for a military system which had long vanished, but the law had not changed, and the Crown could exploit it. Thanks to the vagaries of landownership since the twelfth century, the category of tenant-in-chief effectively netted in anyone above the level of the humblest village landowners, and some of them too; monarchs therefore had a great deal of room to interfere in their subjects’ estates by primer seisin, the right to step in and meddle in various profitable ways on the death of a landholder.
Late medieval lawyers, happy like lawyers in every age to provide tax-avoidance schemes for those prepared to pay for them, evolved a system of trusts by which legal estate in a property was conveyed to trustees (‘feoffees’). These feoffees held estates for the benefit or ‘use’ of the real owner of the land (who was known in common law French as the cestuy que use); their existence defeated the Crown’s feudal rights. The group of feoffees to uses was renewable and hence as a body the feoffees never died; the beneficiary or cestuy que use avoided all the Crown’s rights of primer seisin. The device of the use was invaluable to stop the Crown getting its hands on a landowner who was a child (and so in ancient feudal theory too young to serve in the King’s army). The monarch could not take advantage of his profitable powers to administer the child’s lands in wardship. Equally important, uses allowed landowners to leave land in their wills to whomever they pleased; feudal law simply forbade bequests of land by will.
The existence of feoffment to uses was infuriating to those acquisitive monarchs Henry VII and Henry VIII, but it took time for the Crown to work out how to defeat the stratagems of the legal profession.
...The Crown won, albeit narrowly: the Dacre trust was declared fraudulent, by a bare majority of the judges, and that applied to all the thousands of similar family trusts then in operation. The landowners of England (and their lawyers) were aghast. Not surprisingly in the Parliament of spring 1536 they meekly voted through Crown legislation which regularized their trusts but also restored many feudal rights to the King. This Statute of Uses became one of the fundamental pieces of legislation in English land law up till 1925, not least because lawyers now applied their customary evasive genius to further variants on the use, for purposes both admirable and dubious.
The legislation also left massive questions unresolved about how land might be left by will. That issue was prominent among the grievances of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the continuing discontent of England’s nobility and gentry after the Pilgrimage’s defeat led effectively to a capitulation by the Crown on property bequests, by the passage of a further Statute of Wills in the 1540 Parliament."
So land-grabbing was not confined to the Church 😀
Think of modern Hallowe'en, the secularised and bastardised remnant of the Eve of All Saints, which led into All Saints Day and All Souls Day at the end of October and start of November. This was the social ritual element of death, where graves and tombs were visited and cleaned, prayers for the dead recited, and the rest of the folk traditions around death (ghost stories, fortune telling, magic and charms and the Otherworld of fairies and witches) were engaged in. 'Radical individualism' was not even at the races here. Eamonn Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars" has a great deal about lay religious and liturgical practices, including making of wills and what happened before, during, and after death.
(2/2, Substack you need to increase your comment length limits so I can fit it all in one!)
> So land-grabbing was not confined to the Church 😀
That's the beauty of Henry VIII's "reform"! "L'église c'est moi." (maybe, I don't speak French)
Oh, definitely by Henry's time, the way noble families had used the Church as a dumping ground for excess children and for building up careers of those children had, along with the way the Church was entirely woven into the life of the people all over Europe, meant that the Church in administration and practice was seen as one more way of being in the professions - and of feathering your own nest.
That's why new orders of reformists like the Franciscans and the Dominicians etc. were constantly springing up, as well as the various reform movements (which eventually exploded in Protestantism). This is why St Thomas Aquinas' family went "Okay, so you want to be a member of a religious order? Well that is certainly no problem, we can get you into the local abbey which we are the patrons of, where your uncle is abbot, and eventually you can be abbot after him, all very respectable and suitable" and why they were so shocked and opposed when he said "No, I want to be a Dominican" - one of the new, upstart, mendicant friars? Our son? 😁
I know I'm constantly banging on about recommending this book, but it honestly is really good; Thomas Cromwell's biography by Diarmaid MacCulloch. It's in part because MacCullouch is everything opposite to me: of Scottish descent but thoroughly English in upbringing and mood, upper middle-class, Anglican (but he left that due to the position on homosexuality), scholar and academic, liberal, and gay. He doesn't have the understanding of Catholicism from the inside that Eamonn Duffy does, but he generally doesn't make dogmatic statements (though he's fully steeped in that reflexive anti-Catholicism of the English that I've mentioned before). He's got the qualifications and the chops to be a bona fide historian and while I might disagree with some of his positions, I think he's excellent on the topic (he's not the kind of TV showbiz historian David Starkey is).
So the biography gives the necessary background, as well as his other work on the Reformation, and certainly by the 16th century (and well before) there were a lot of smaller monastic and religious settlements which pretty much had fallen into decay; they had the establishments of large resources left over from their founding but the numbers had decreaed, often drastically. So there was certainly a legitimate argument for shutting down a lot of them and sorting out their affairs.
Unfortunately, when this was done, it wasn't in the interests of reform (though that was the ostensible reason, and Henry may well have convinced himself it was for the sake of investigating corruption and allegations of wrong-doing and immorality, but those in charge were a mix of 'how can we extort nice fat bribes out of the abbots and mothers superior not to shut them down' and genuine fervent Reformed and Protestant conviction who wanted any excuse to do so). So it became "get the maximum value for the Crown, and some diverted into our own pockets, by closing these down, seizing the property and endowments".
There was frequent meddling by all sorts of people in getting their family members and friends into positions like priors and other offices in the monasteries, and what can only be called bribes or buying and selling of the same. Once in office, abbots, priors, mothers superior and others were engaged in a network of sending gifts to important people and doing favours in order to later call in favours. It had little to do with religion as such and was just more professional business.
Henry can't be blamed alone, because even before that, high church officials like Cardinal Wolsey had been equally as rapacious and treating the property of the Church as his own personal piggy bank. He had ambitions about founding two colleges, one in Ipswich and one in Oxford:
"The twin Cardinal Colleges would in any case stand both as chantries for his soul and places of education – education was always a theme of great importance to the former Oxford don, and one of his solaces amid the crushing burden of his royal duties. A school textbook which adapted William Lily’s grammar was published in Wolsey’s name and branded with the name of Cardinal College Ipswich; it ran into multiple editions in England and Antwerp."
The colleges would need to be paid for, and they would need endowments in order to operate. How did Wolsey get all that? By snapping up smaller monasteries and churches and diverting their resources to his vanity project:
"[Cromwell's] brief was to close a considerable number of small monasteries and nunneries, one of the more dramatic proofs of Wolsey’s willingness to exploit his powers as papal legate over the Church in England in the name of what he could claim was reform. There had been dissolutions of such small religious houses before, particularly during the long fourteenth- and fifteenth-century wars with France, when the Crown confiscated priories with mother houses across the Channel. Just as Wolsey did now, the monarchy had used the monastic estates for new religious purposes: Henry VI’s colleges at King’s Cambridge and Eton drew on such former monastic endowments, and the Cardinal’s new colleges followed followed the lead of King Henry’s lavish creations in this and in other respects, though always concerned to outdo the royal saint in fostering education and liturgical prayer. Such minor religious houses could be easily characterized by those concerned to reform the Church as being superfluous to ecclesiastical needs, too small-scale and poor to function properly.
...In his travels in west Sussex, Cromwell gained permanent gratitude from a small Augustinian house called Shulbrede by securing it a reprieve from dissolution. Here the threat came not from Wolsey’s dissolution programme but from parallel moves by the energetic and independent-minded Bishop of Chichester, Robert Sherburne. Sherburne was evidently trying to use surplus monastic resources to help finance four brand-new prebends which he had just founded for his cathedral. In 1525 he got as far as demolishing part of the church and domestic buildings at Shulbrede, no doubt intending to create a feasible prebendal house there, but desperate pleas from the monks to local gentry friends resulted in two of these gentlemen buttonholing Cromwell while on legal business in Westminster Hall. On their suggestion, he lobbied the hereditary patron of the priory, the Earl of Northumberland, via his eldest son Henry Lord Percy. As a result, Shulbrede Priory survived in its truncated premises another decade (not greatly to the edification of the monastic life in England), and gratefully voted its saviour an annuity. This was Cromwell’s earliest pension from any monastery, no doubt an eye-opener for him as a possible source of income."
So definitely the land-grabbing was not all one way 😁
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?
Heinrich took these ideas from HBD Chick, you and other HBDers and he packaged them into a politically and academically acceptable thesis.
I heard about cousin marriage in 2002 from anthropologist Stanley Kurtz and then wrote one of my better articles about how cousin marriage bode ill for Bush Administration hopes for the upcoming Iraq invasion to prove a long term success at fixing Iraq.
But I haven't contributed much to the topic beyond that. I have the kind of male brain that realizes that family trees are important, but finds my brain isn't very good at thinking about genealogical relationships. I always end up asking my wife to explain to me who my own more distant relatives are in relation to me.
So, really, my big contribution was getting HBD Chick interested in the effects of cousin marriage. She did amazing stuff around a decade or so ago extending the basic idea vastly.
I presume that Henrich didn't cite HBD Chick not because he wanted to hog all the credit when he was second in the English-speaking world in academically elucidating these questions, but because he didn't want to get canceled for citing the dread acronym HBD.
Which, by the way, I didn't make up first. I made up the term "human biodiversity" in, IIRC, 1998 and then immediately discovered from a pre-Google search engine that anthropologist Jonathan Marks had published a book under that title in 1995. But I've come to be most closely associated with the acronym HBD.
As I've explained before, I always wanted to inspire academics to write learned tomes on ideas I've come up with. But I now realize that I've probably, on net, retarded American intellectual discourse by figuring out so many thing ahead of academia, which has helped make me extremely unpopular. So, my standing offer to all academics is to simply take my ideas and not cite me.
Hence, I'm totally fine with Henrich not citing my January 13, 2003 "American Conservative" article "Cousin Marriage Conundrum." I only did about a month's worth of work on it. It was among the best work I've done, but it was more journalism than deep scholarship.
On the other hand, Henrich not citing HBD Chick's half-decade or so of scholarship on his book's subject strikes me as uncool.
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.
*Do* we know that genes associated with violent behavior became less common during the period of execution of lotsa criminals? I don’t see how we could. But I’m very interested in the genetic contribution to violence.
Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms" gives the best argument for that.
Wutz his argument?
The book as a whole is about differential reproduction in England leading up to the Industrial Revolution. He includes a section on just how many people were executed under the "Bloody Code", and how people got less violent & impulsive over time.
And he argues that this is due to lotsa violent people being executed before they could reproduce? Seems like there are many possible explanations. For instance, when those who had already had children were executed, the parent's death removed a violent role model from their children's lives. Killing all the really young criminals would have bought society as much as 50-60 years without that person running around doing more violence, and so reduced future violence. And of course reduced violence could be due to changing social conditions.
People who have already reproduced are capable of having more, but also back then (the Malthusian era) a child had much worse odds of growing up to reproduce without a father.
Clark doesn't argue for a genetic over cultural explanation in his book, but the difference in outcomes for children of widows vs otherwise single mothers does tell against that part of "The Nurture Assumption".
We don't know.
We do know that violence is heavily genetically moderated, though - about 50%.
Yes, I'm familiar with that finding. Was more doubting that data from era when many criminals were executed could give much support to that finding, given the many many confounds. Also, I suppose I wonder if there are positives associated with having a bit of whatever the genetic contribution to violence is -- boldness, courage, nonconformity. I haven't hit anyone since I was a little kid (and don't even remember doing it then, though I assume I at least yanked desirable toys out of other kids' grasp), but am aware sometimes when producing a piece of work that's bold and good of a sort of "fuck
'em" element of how I feel about my work -- and wonder if that's a bit of the "violent" stuff powering me.
Henrich has a whole chapter on this. He believes that the Church's policies had an effect on culture, not genes because of the relatively short time involved and also because of some *negative* evolutionary pressures, specifically that cities and Cistercian monasteries were what he calls "genetic graveyards": since people were less likely to reproduce in these places compared to rural environments, and WEIRDer people would have been attracted to them, WEIRD genetic traits would have been selected *against*.
But there are lots of weird traits, many of them unrelated to violence. I'd imagine that people joining monasteries were more introverted, more respectful of authority and more attached to ideas about what life should be (as opposed to curious about what life is.)
You can't systematically execute criminals without having an effective criminal justice system, and an effective criminal justice system will reduce crime anyway.
If you want to tell whether crime reduction is environmental , arising directly from the rule of law, or genetic , you need an experiment where Europeans move en masse to somewhere law less....which happened when the US was colonised. The Wild West was wild.
Crime is known to be genetic; studies suggest propensity for crime is about 40-50% heritable.
In this context, genetics seems like basically a just so story. Were the "genetics" of England worse than Italy in 1600 but better in 1900? Did China screw up its genetics between 1000 and 1500 when it basically stagnated?
And people do get assimilated all the time. In the US, Asian and African immigrants are high performers even though their countries of origin are often lagging. To explain that, you then have to say some people from those regions have the right genetics and others have the wrong genetics, and you're back to a just so story.
"In the US, immigrant basketball players are often tall even though their countries of origin are often lagging"
If your immigration system selects for a qualification such as education, everything correlated with that trait is also selected for. Look up the heritability of educational achievement.
The other thing is that high individual performance is not the same thing as WEIRDness, and being successful is not the same thing as assimilation. In fact to a large extent their high performance is because they're not assimilated: their families are a lot less chill about them not getting perfect grades in school and becoming doctors and engineers.
> Were the "genetics" of England worse than Italy in 1600 but better in 1900?
Replace Italy with Northern Italy, and maybe?
The full-HBD explanation of history is that Rome had fantastic genes, until they started to cross-breed with imported slaves. Slaves were primarily in the capital, and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire slowed travel significantly, so the bad genes were largely concentrated in Southern Italy for the next thousand years, meaning that by 1500 Northern Italy was almost entirely still good genes. Rising overall prosperity led to increased travel, spreading the bad genes outwards through Northern Italy and into France while Britain remains relatively genetically isolated allowing Britain to dominate the 19th century. By the the mid 20th century bad genes have infiltrated Britain while the United States remains relatively pure, and by the late 20th century the US is infiltrated too and the whole world is in decline apart from Ashkenazi Jews and Han/Manchurian Chinese.
I don't necessarily believe the above explanation, but it's got something going for it.
How should I put this delicately ? This explanation does not actually have much going for it. It just reinforces my point about genetics being a just so story.
Well fair enough, but everything in this field is a Just So story, including the thesis of this particular book. Not sure how to get away from that when we only have one runthrough of history to base our theories off.
If you can do a regression across countries and get a correlation to a factor, that’s a good start. If you have an undefined cause called genetics that you can fiddle with to mean whatever is convenient for a given case study, that’s not so good.
You can just measure these things, as long as you can get genetic material from graveyards around the correct time. Build a polygenic score for trait X of interest that works reasonably well in the modern populations you want to examine, apply to genetic data from historical populations. You need a lot of people to build the polygenic score in the first place, but computing it is simple. As you go back further, your score will work less well due to changes in the underlying genetic variation, but 500 years is short enough that you should be able to get decent results. I'd be curious to try this out on say, Ionian Greeks from the Bronze Age or Old Egyptians but would take the data with a grain of salt. Early Modern Italians? Yeah, that should be fine.
For that to make sense, the original Roman "good" genes would have to be been purely altruistic "sacrifice yourself for the republic" ones. If they benefited the individuals (for example gave them 15 IQ points over the "bad" slave genes), the people with "good" genes would have run circles around the bearers of bad genes.
From what I have read on acoup.blog, it seems that Rome tended to eventually turn conquered subjects into citizens, and that the failure to continue to do so sped along its demise.
The whole narrative (originally pure, "good" gene pool of Herrenmenschen gets polluted by the genes of some Untermenschen, leading to decadence and decay) rhymes very much with the "scientific racism" theories from the previous century that I don't think it worthwhile to entertain it further.
Every human is genetically capable both to cooperate and defect. (In fact, the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis postulates that our cognitive capabilities grew in an arms race to secretly defect and detect defection more effectively.) Every human society will develop some sort of social antibodies against defection. The idea that 20th century Britain was overrun by foreign genes (which were in Europe since the Roman times but somehow never reached Britain's shores before) favoring defection against which the British had no social antibodies, which thus became dominant within a few generations (much like smallpox epidemics devastated Native Americans) is hard to take serious.
> 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.
I would assume that non-European societies also limited the reproductive success of people who used unsanctioned violence against their in-groups.
And "unsanctioned violence against the in-group" is really the key phrase here.
Consider a medieval noble male. If he truly abhors violence, he will be likely to join a monastery. If he thrives on violence, he can look forward to a career as a warrior murdering and raping foreigners for the glory of his king. Which of these two paths seems to lead to greater reproductive success?
I don't disagree with your overall point, but professional soldiers also didn't procreate very much - spending their youth away from home and often dying. I don't think foreign rape victims are having much effect on domestic genes. Not to mention, most pacifists didn't join a monastery but instead worked on a trade (including farming) and for nobles could have included anything with book learning involved.
One interesting thing is that dietary calcium is very high in Europe and while Japan is below Europe, it is way higher than most places in the world, which raises the question of how much of an effect being able to digest milk had and whether other sources of dietary calcium (like tofu) contributed significantly to these regions being prosperous.
It seems like it is a hugely advantageous trait. However, there are some other groups that developed the ability to digest milk that didn't end up doing as well in the modern era.
There's also the IQ question - it's 75% or more heritable in adulthood, and the two places with the highest IQs are Northern and Western Europe and East Asia.
But this raises the question of why the British Isles were basically barbarianville while the first civilizations arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and East Asia, and then later in the New World. The pyramids in Egypt and Ziggurats of Mesopotamia were built before the British were doing anything nearly so sophisticated, and around the time that the Romans conquered the British Isles, Native Americans were starting to build big pryamids.
The British went from "a bunch of barbarians" to "the most advanced civilization", and indeed, if you look at things, it's weird that Mesopotamia and Egypt fell way, way behind while civilization in the West kept building up further and further to the northwest.
Why do Egypt and Mesopotamia suck so much compared to the West, if intelligence was the factor? Did the British suddenly get a lot smarter? If not, why did they not have an ancient civilization comparable to Egypt?
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.
So if Iraq can't function as a democracy because of cousin-marriage, then why can India?
Also, I'm getting sick of grand pronouncements that Iraq was always a hopeless cause. If the US had made better decisions, maybe splitting off a Kurdish state, or even just leaving troops there longer, things may have turned out better. Or maybe not, but that's not obvious.
Also, things did turn out better. Not having a genocidal dictator is, just maybe, a more important consideration than how corrupt the civil service is.
good points.
I recommend the book *Imperial Life in the Emerald City* by Rajiv Chandrasekaran for just how many entirely unforced errors were made in the attempted reconstruction of Iraq. Most significantly, the State Department had a detailed reconstruction plan and dozens of experts ready to go in Kuwait, and not only were they not allowed to start work by Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the very existence of the State Department team and plan was concealed from the people who were running the reconstruction (who were mostly totally unqualified, and often junior Republican staffers). It's possible that Iraq was a hopeless cause, but we have no way of knowing that for sure given how badly the reconstruction was handled.
Iraq didn't "fail", it's way better off than it was previously. It's not Japan, but it's not Syria, either. Going from "under Saddam Hussein" to "not under Saddam Hussein" has caused their economy to grow by 5x or more.
>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'.
Yes, it's amusing when they clearly notice things like the "cycle of intergenerational abuse," but contrive increasingly fanciful explanations. It gets better when they notice that adopted children are able to break this cycle much more often than biological ones!
I have a vague suspicion that either the reviewer or the author is doing a bit of "consensus building". As in, stating various classical-liberal-style positions as being the One True Western Viewpoint, and then silently hoping that readers will snap out of whatever passing fad they've been dallying with and go "oh, yes, of course that's right".
Either that, or it's wishful thinking.
But modern politics aside, I find the emphasis on "individualism" to be glaringly incomplete, given the "western" affinity for things like uniforms, formations, assembly lines, interchangable parts, and so forth. There's more going on than just individualism; this feels like studying the bicep while completely ignoring the tricep.
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?
"Ora la domanda sorge spontanea: i greci copulavano colle cugine?"
SÌ.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04264a.htm
"Marriage was allowed at Athens with half-sisters by the same father (Plutarch, Cim., iv; Themist., xxxii), with half-sisters by the same mother at Sparta (Philo, De Special. Leg., tr. Yonge, III, 306), and with full-sisters in Egypt (Diodorus Siculus, I, 27) and Persia, as illustrated in the well-known instances of the Ptolemies in the former, and of Cambyses in the latter, country (Herodian, III, 31)."
"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."
If you're irritated by the emphasis on "Protestant science", why repeat an old anti-Catholic polemic meme? Granted, it may have been refashioned into a fully-functional anti-Christianity meme for freethinkers and atheists, but the root assertion is incorrect.
What the Renaissance scholars went crazy for was not the Hellenistic science, but the Hellenestic occultism. Neo-Platonism had very little to do with science as we think of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsilio_Ficino
Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin.
During the sessions at Florence of the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1445, during the failed attempts to heal the schism of the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches, Cosimo de' Medici and his intellectual circle had made acquaintance with the Neoplatonic philosopher George Gemistos Plethon, whose discourses upon Plato and the Alexandrian mystics so fascinated the humanists of Florence that they named him the second Plato.
...In the rush of enthusiasm for every rediscovery from Antiquity, he exhibited some interest in the arts of astrology (despite denigrating it in relation to divine revelation), which landed him in trouble with the Catholic Church. In 1489 he was accused of heresy before Pope Innocent VIII and was acquitted.
...De vita libri tres (Three books on life), or De triplici vita (The Book of Life), published in 1489, provides a great deal of medical and astrological advice for maintaining health and vigor, as well as espousing the Neoplatonist view of the world's ensoulment and its integration with the human soul:
There will be some men or other, superstitious and blind, who see life plain in even the lowest animals and the meanest plants, but do not see life in the heavens or the world ... Now if those little men grant life to the smallest particles of the world, what folly! what envy! neither to know that the Whole, in which 'we live and move and have our being,' is itself alive, nor to wish this to be so.
...His medical works exerted considerable influence on Renaissance physicians such as Paracelsus, with whom he shared the perception on the unity of the microcosmos and macrocosmos, and their interactions, through somatic and psychological manifestations, with the aim to investigate their signatures to cure diseases. Those works, which were very popular at the time, dealt with astrological and alchemical concepts. Thus Ficino came under the suspicion of heresy; especially after the publication of the third book in 1489, which contained specific instructions on healthful living in a world of demons and other spirits."
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.
Another issue, I’m not sure that understanding historical development is all that relevant for understanding how development would best play out in today’s social and technological conditions.
> I’m pretty sure someone would come up with the idea of abandoning retarded infants had Plato not written that idea down.
Yeah, Oedipus might have something to say about that.
Also, in exodus, when the leave Aaron in ditch when he becomes too old
It's like someone never realized that farmers do this to their animals **all the time**.
Ah but don’t you see someone had to write that down in an instructional manual before a farmer could have that thought bubble (sarcasm) heheh
That's why we need Alphas, to write things down for everyone else so they don't have to think. I'm so glad I'm an Alpha!
"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”.
It may not have done in practice, but it has long been believed that the purpose of education is more than mere practical skill training. See Julian the Apostate in the 4th century banning Christian teachers:
https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/julian_apostate_letters_1_trans.htm
"36. Rescript on Christian Teachers [362, After June 17, from Antioch]
I hold that a proper education results, not in laboriously acquired symmetry of phrases and language, but in a healthy condition of mind, I mean a mind that has understanding and true opinions about things good and evil, honourable and base. Therefore, when a man thinks one thing and teaches his pupils another, in my opinion he fails to educate exactly in proportion as he fails to be an honest man. And if the divergence between a man's convictions and his utterances is merely in trivial matters, that can be tolerated somehow, though it is wrong. But if in matters of the greatest importance a man has certain opinions and teaches the contrary, what is that but the conduct of hucksters, and not honest but thoroughly dissolute men in that they praise most highly the things that they believe to be most worthless, thus cheating and enticing by their praises those to whom they desire to transfer their worthless wares. Now all who profess to teach anything whatever ought to be men of upright character, and ought not to harbour in their souls opinions irreconcilable with what they publicly profess; and, above all, I believe it is necessary that those who associate with the young and teach them rhetoric should be of that upright character; for they expound the writings of the ancients, whether they be rhetoricians or grammarians, and still more if they are sophists. For these claim to teach, in addition to other things, not only the use of words, but morals also, and they assert that political philosophy is their peculiar field. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question whether this is true or not. But while I applaud them for aspiring to such high pretensions, I should applaud them still more if they did not utter falsehoods and convict themselves of thinking one thing and teaching their pupils another. What! Was it not the gods who revealed all their learning to Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Isocrates and Lysias? Did not these men think that they were consecrated, some to Hermes, others to the Muses? I think it is absurd that men who expound the works of these writers should dishonour the gods whom they used to honour. Yet, though I think this absurd, I do not say that they ought to change their opinions and then instruct the young. But I give them this choice; either not to teach what they do not think admirable, or, if they wish to teach, let them first really persuade their pupils that neither Homer nor Hesiod nor any of these writers whom they expound and have declared to be guilty of impiety, folly and error in regard to the gods, is such as they declare. For since they make a livelihood and receive pay from the works of those writers, they thereby confess that they are most shamefully greedy of gain, and that, for the sake of a few drachmae, they would put up with anything. It is true that, until now, there were many excuses for not attending the temples, and the terror that threatened on all sides absolved men for concealing the truest beliefs about the gods. But since the gods have granted us liberty, it seems to me absurd that men should teach what they do not believe to be sound. But if they believe that those whose interpreters they are and for whom they sit, so to speak, in the seat of the prophets, were wise men, let them be the first to emulate their piety towards the gods. If, however, they think that those writers were in error with respect to the most honoured gods, then let them betake themselves to the churches of the Galilaeans to expound Matthew and Luke, since you Galilaeans are obeying them when you ordain that men shall refrain from temple-worship. For my part, I wish that your ears and your tongues might be "born anew," as you would say, as regards these things in which may I ever have part, and all who think and act as is pleasing to me.
For religious and secular teachers let there be a general ordinance to this effect: Any youth who wishes to attend the schools is not excluded; nor indeed would it be reasonable to shut out from the best way boys who are still too ignorant to know which way to turn, and to overawe them into being led against their will to the beliefs of their ancestors. Though indeed it might be proper to cure these, even against their will, as one cures the insane, except that we concede indulgence to all for this sort of disease. For we ought, I think, to teach, but not punish, the demented."
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?
But that raises the question of *why* investments were less likely to be confiscated in the West.
Sure - though the MFP link sounds doubtful. First though, as I said, this is a vague recollection. Do you happen to know if reduced confiscation actually was a large factor or not?
No idea, just that (as Mr. Doolittle points out) reduced confiscation isn't really a *competing* theory since it's compatible with and plausibly downstream of the MFP.
It depends:
If the MFP was the dominant cause of reduced confiscation, then the book's theory is right.
If the Magna Carta was the dominant cause of reduced confiscation and the MFP was irrelevant to capital accumulation, then Bldysabba is right.
I'm agnostic on the idea, but the chain of thought seems clear. High trust society brought about by the lack of kinship/clan loyalty, which itself was brought about by removing cousin marriage. If every other society requires you to be loyal to your clan above outsiders, but you can only get loans from another clan, that hurts investments.
"There are such things as family-owned companies. Are they invariably worse innovators and/or investors than other companies?"
They may well be; there seems to be a trend whereby companies like to go public and hire on outsider CEOs to run the business rather than have grandson of son of founder running the thing. I am very open to correction on this!
Where you're concentrating all the family wealth in one grouping, there's little to no room for marriage outside that kinship group and bringing in (literal) new blood, new ideas, different ways of doing things.
Where there's the kind of strict "eldest son is groomed to be the president of the company and expects to inherit no matter what", you may not get the best leadership. There's a large collection of 'text' stories on Youtube that are ostensibly set in America but must be Japanese originally, and basically they're power/revenge fantasies for women 😀 A lot of them have the basic plot of "fiancé/husband only marries woman in expectation that, as her husband, he'll be made CEO/president of the family company and can live a cushy life as a rich man". A lot about being "an elite" which means "went to top university, works in high-tier company, acts like a spoiled brat because he/she thinks they are so much better than everyone else". It also gives a fascinating look into Japanese/East Asian family customs, as the plots often revolve around the mother-in-law treating the daughter-in-law like trash, and the expectation that the d-i-l will obey and serve the husband's family like a servant without question, while the husbands are often mama's boys. Things that are alien to Western views of what married life is like, like mother-in-law demanding daughter-in-law support them with money or even hand over all her salary to them (that's why I say it's revenge porn for women who may have similar dominating family dynamics going on). Western married life where the new couple are separate units and prioritise their family and needs over the parents' generation is completely different and may well be the fruits of consanguinity bans weakening such demands over time.
Noble and wealthy families do want to keep the power and wealth in their own hands and pass it from one generation to the next, but that may not be the best thing for society as a whole, never mind the family genetics.
Many Thanks! Those are all good points.
"Where there's the kind of strict "eldest son is groomed to be the president of the company and expects to inherit no matter what", you may not get the best leadership." Neat! A private sector analog to one of the most noted failure modes of monarchy!
It (drop odds of confiscation) is my personal favourite of the competing theories, because it makes a lot of sense. Increase incentives to innovate and build wealth, see lots of innovation and wealth. The hard part is coming up with institutional arrangements that allow it. So I think it's relatively straightforward that Magna Carta and having checks placed on the power of kings played a big role in wealth generation. That, however, only pushes the question one level back? What allowed such institutional arrangements to develop and sustain in the West?
Many Thanks! One possibility re: "So I think it's relatively straightforward that Magna Carta and having checks placed on the power of kings played a big role in wealth generation." is that there is always contention between level N and level N+1 in any society, here kings and the nobility one level down. It just happened that a momentary victory of the nobility lead to them to be able to put checks on kings' power - and they just happened to choose a form of checks which happened to be favorable for wealth generation. _Part_ of it was certainly intentional. The nobility had wealth to preserve, after all. But the fact that the legal rights were chosen in such a way that they wound up being useful, in the long run, to a non-noble capitalist class could well have been an accident.
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
Underrated comment
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.
Yeah, I once traced my family tree back, and there was one particular part, a few hundred years ago, that was not as big as the others. :-/
It was a good thing that the four degree rule included non-consanguinous links, because one of the intents of the rule was to prevent certain concentrations of power. Think of a Roman family -- i.e pater familias and not just his relatives, including adopted relatives, but other dependents, employees, slaves, and people connected by formal ties of patronage -- as a corporation, and the four degrees of separation rule as antitrust law.
"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?
"Could the Church do something to fill in for the social security aspect? Or did higher "state capacity" in Europe help?"
Absolutely it filled in social security! From the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus expanded the circle of those for whom we are expected to care:
"43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
So that is expanding outside of kinship which everyone understands and practices; your family, immediate and extended. Now *everyone* is in a sense your kindred, or at least your neighbour. And at the Last Supper: "34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
This gets developed in the early Church; from 1 Peter "Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins" which later Tertullian in the early 3rd century develops in his Apologia when he defends Christians and tears into the pagans:
"Though we have our treasure chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as of a religion that has its price. On the monthly day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary. These gifts are, as it were, piety's deposit fund. For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God's Church, they become the nurslings of their confession. But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death. And they are angry with us, too, because we call each other brethren; for no other reason, as I think, than because among themselves names of consanguinity are assumed in mere pretence of affection."
Julian the Apostate, in the 4th century when he is trying to revive and vivify the practice of the older religion, in one letter urges a high priest to emulate in charity what the Jews and Christians do:
" For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us."
Another "Fragment of a Letter":
"Now it would perhaps have been well to say earlier from what class of men and by what method priests must be appointed; but it is quite appropriate that my remarks should end with this. I say |337 that the most upright men in every city, by preference those who show most love for the gods, and next those who show most love for their fellow men, must be appointed, whether they be poor or rich. And in this matter let there be no distinction whatever whether they are unknown or well known. For the man who by reason of his gentleness has not won notice ought not to be barred by reason of his want of fame. Even though he be poor and a man of the people, if he possess within himself these two things, love for God and love for his fellow men, let him be appointed priest. And a proof of his love for God is his inducing his own people to show reverence to the gods; a proof of his love for his fellows is his sharing cheerfully, even from a small store, with those in need, and his giving willingly thereof, and trying to do good to as many men as he is able.
We must pay especial attention to this point, and by this means effect a cure. For when it came about that the poor were neglected and overlooked by the priests, then I think the impious Galilaeans observed this fact and devoted themselves to philanthropy. And they have gained ascendancy in the worst of their deeds through the credit they win for such practices. For just as those who entice children with a cake, and by throwing it to them two or three times induce them to follow them, and then, when they are far away from their friends cast them on board a ship and sell them as slaves, and that which for the moment seemed sweet, proves to be bitter for all the rest of their lives—by the same method, I say, the Galilaeans also begin with their so-called love-feast, or hospitality, or service of tables,—for they have many ways of carrying it out and hence call it by many names,—and the result is that they have led very many into atheism.."
Julian had formerly been a Christian, though seemingly a reluctant one, and I don't think it's too far to say that he tried to engraft Christian philanthropy onto his revived paganism, urging the priests of temples to take care of the poor and strangers out of devotion to Zeus the God of Strangers, and contrasting how the Christians were luring away the people because they performed these acts of charity for all.
Wow, the idea of "love-bombing" goes back 1650 years!
There is nothing new under the sun 😁
Wow. I knew that Christianity intended/purported/strived to fill in for social security and had read about Julian trying to adapt this into the Roman religion, but your specific quotes are new to me, and these quotes are spectacular. Thank you for sharing them.
That said, supplanting the social security of the kinship network seems to require more massive investment. Say someone has fractured a bone and can't cultivate for the next few months, some others will have to take over their field, and here is one way the kin enter the picture. To replace this, mere intention and basic struggle will not suffice, one needs something like "state capacity". It is not clear from your post whether or not the Church had this; after all, it does not seem clear to me that a modern day third world country with poor state capacity has what it takes for this.
Well, the Church is not trying to *replace* the family, it's an important constituent of society and marriage is a sacrament. You should be able to rely on your family for help. What the Church is doing is extending the idea of family: now those who have been baptised are *also* your brothers and sisters. So if you've broken your leg and can't plough the fields or take care of the crops, your family should indeed help - but so should your neighbours who are all your co-religionists and united to you in the bonds of faith. It's not an excuse to say "That person in need is no concern of mine, I only have to look after my own family".
"Did Augustine emphasize that point a lot?"
I haven't read The City of God (I know, the shame!) but Augustine did also write a pastoral letter on Marriage:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1309.htm
"1. Forasmuch as each man is a part of the human race, and human nature is something social, and has for a great and natural good, the power also of friendship; on this account God willed to create all men out of one, in order that they might be held in their society not only by likeness of kind, but also by bond of kindred. Therefore the first natural bond of human society is man and wife. Nor did God create these each by himself, and join them together as alien by birth: but He created the one out of the other, setting a sign also of the power of the union in the side, whence she was drawn, was formed. For they are joined one to another side by side, who walk together, and look together whither they walk. Then follows the connection of fellowship in children, which is the one alone worthy fruit, not of the union of male and female, but of the sexual intercourse. For it were possible that there should exist in either sex, even without such intercourse, a certain friendly and true union of the one ruling, and the other obeying.
3. This we now say, that, according to this condition of being born and dying, which we know, and in which we have been created, the marriage of male and female is some good; the compact whereof divine Scripture so commends, as that neither is it allowed one put away by her husband to marry, so long as her husband lives: nor is it allowed one put away by his wife to marry another, unless she who have separated from him be dead. Therefore, concerning the good of marriage, which the Lord also confirmed in the Gospel, not only in that He forbade to put away a wife, save because of fornication, but also in that He came by invitation to a marriage, there is good ground to inquire for what reason it be a good. And this seems not to me to be merely on account of the begetting of children, but also on account of the natural society itself in a difference of sex. Otherwise it would not any longer be called marriage in the case of old persons, especially if either they had lost sons, or had given birth to none. But now in good, although aged, marriage, albeit there has withered away the glow of full age between male and female, yet there lives in full vigor the order of charity between husband and wife: because, the better they are, the earlier they have begun by mutual consent to contain from sexual intercourse with each other: not that it should be matter of necessity afterwards not to have power to do what they would, but that it should be matter of praise to have been unwilling at the first, to do what they had power to do. If therefore there be kept good faith of honor, and of services mutually due from either sex, although the members of either be languishing and almost corpse-like, yet of souls duly joined together, the chastity continues, the purer by how much it is the more proved, the safer, by how much it is the calmer. Marriages have this good also, that carnal or youthful incontinence, although it be faulty, is brought unto an honest use in the begetting of children, in order that out of the evil of lust the marriage union may bring to pass some good. Next, in that the lust of the flesh is repressed, and rages in a way more modestly, being tempered by parental affection. For there is interposed a certain gravity of glowing pleasure, when in that wherein husband and wife cleave to one another, they have in mind that they be father and mother."
So we can see him emphasising the *social* function of marriage here as well.
"Historically, was it Augustine's argument of societal cohesion that was given for the cousin marriage ban?"
I wouldn't imagine so. Augustine wrote on a lot of topics, and although he's important, he's not the only authority for decisions. I think that the reason Augustine is discussing the ban on cousin marriage is because it *already* exists, and it's sufficiently unusual in relation to the customs and practices of the time that he needs to explain *why* it's the rule in Christianity:
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04264a.htm
"In the early ages the Church accepted the collateral degrees put forward by the State as an impediment to marriage. St. Ambrose (Ep. lx in P.L., XVI, 1185) and St. Augustine (City of God XV.16) approved the law of Theodosius which forbade (c. 384) the marriage of cousins. This law was retained in the Western Church, though it was revoked (400), at least in the East, by Arcadius, for which reason, doubtless, the text of the law has been lost. The Code of Justinian permitted the marriage of first cousins (consobrini), but the Greek Church in 692 (Second Trullan Synod, can. liv) condemned such marriages, and, according to Balsamon, even those of second cousins (sobrini)."
Thank you very much. These are very helpful information as well as quotes.
> 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.
By this logic, the industrial revolution should have started in the middle east because that's where the oil is. I'm skeptical of this cousin- marriage hypothesis--if anything it's the printing press we have to thank for modernity--but the simple presence of coal wasn't it. There also needed to be the right economic intuitions to incentivize people to use a steam engine otherwise they would have just used the same solution that civilizations since antiquity have used to mine deep underground: forced labor. That's what the greeks and Romans did even though they had the aeolipile. The ancients certainly were capable of building automations but they always saw them mostly as novelties and not something the aristocratic intelligentsia should concern itself with.
Burning oil usefully in a boiler is much harder than coal. It involves higher heats and pressures and more precise chemistry. Managing those three factors are the key design challenges of boiler design.
But you’re absolutely right that it wasn’t the mere presence of coal; coking had been taking place since antiquity. The Romans deforested Spain to arm several legions. And the reason that Britain had run out of surface coal and was digging below the water line was that they were using coal to heat homes preferentially over peat.
But the process that started in northern England took years if not decades to produce an engine that was safe, reliable, and powerful enough to do anything other than pump water out of flooded mines. Early coal boilers were crappy; load, dirty, inefficient, and unreliable. But they were good enough at pumping that they were worth having and improving. And once they were improved it was a short hop to factories, trains, and ships. And only when creature power was entirely out of the loop could power scale up arbitrarily.
And the economic incentive to upgrade was obvious and required no government assistance. Once those early boilers had been developed coal was cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable than every other alternative. It didn’t displace labor because of a conspiracy, it displaced all prior alternatives because it’s crushingly superior.
I’m an ideas guy. I love ideas and believe in their power. But ideas can only improve efficiency so far. There’s no way a horse can ever match a car, no matter how light you make the buggy. Never mind a jet plane or a rocket. There’s lots of things that just need more power.
There are also plenty of places with lots of coal as well. Europe, even England, was already well on its way to global hegemony before the industrial revolution. Important inventions were already coming down the pipe. Fossil fuels are important yes, paradigm changing even, but England being in a place to take advantage of them required more than just the right contingency of incentives becoming available but also social arrangements. If the economy had been organized sufficiently differently, the economic incentive would not have been obvious and it might not have even been doing if it had been obvious. Social institutions could have precluded it.
Take much of the "developing" world's response to western expansion. Many of these countries recognized pretty quickly the advantages of industrialization, at least in regard to western weaponry, but a lot of countries had difficulty implementing industrialization even when they wanted to. Sometimes existing political structures resisted change because it threatened those same structures. Sometimes changes were attempted, but were only superficially realizable because the countries didn't have a sufficiently educated population to support it. In some cases, countries resisted what seem like obvious improvements for generations.
The Russian empire is a good example of some of these things. It tried to modernize several times before the revolution finally did it in, but it was always held back by its overly conservative institutions and possibly legitimate fears that the wrong kind of change might destabilize the regime. Think of the aborted Stolypin reforms.
There's a good series called "Industrial Revelations" about the English Industrial Revolution, and the first episode explains how coal came to be an important fuel source.
In the 18th the towns of the North-West of England were beginning to boom due to the cotton trade. Fabric weaving wasn't yet mechanised, so lots of workers streamed into the towns from the countryside. And those workers needed heating and cooking fuel, which was - coal.
If you owned a coal mine, you needed to get your coal transported to the towns where the demand was. And as you mined deeper, you needed to pump out the water. And some bright young spark invented the first steam engine - and away we go. Everything comes together: the industries ready to be mechanised, the transport networks of canals set up to move coal and finished goods, the coal itself, the finished goods themselves, the ports where you can transport your goods to be sold on overseas markets. All tied together by the power of steam and the improvement over time of the steam engines which then permitted factories to be set up and make use of this new wonder invention which boosted productivity and lowered price of goods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VN1auzu-GI
"By this logic, the industrial revolution should have started in the middle east because that's where the oil is."
You're forgetting the element of necessity. The English *needed* a solution to the problem of "how to get the water out of the mine?" that other places did not. Having petroleum wouldn't necessitate the Middle East needing to invent the internal combustion engine; petroleum products were being used but not on that kind of 'replacement for muscle' scale because "this stuff burns and gives out light" but for moving things or getting work done, you had plenty of human and animal labour.
Petroleum wasn't much of a resource until the mid-19th century when the West was running out of whale oil and needed another source of fuel for lighting. Somebody tried distilling petroleum and there we go. It was only *because* heavy machinery had been invented and was running on coal that petroleum as first lubricants and then as fuel was used in that way, but that was at first secondary to the use of petroleum derivatives for lighting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#History
"Chemist James Young in 1847 noticed a natural petroleum seepage in the "old deeps" coal mine at riddings Alfreton, Derbyshire from which he distilled a light thin oil suitable for use as lamp oil, at the same time obtaining a more viscous oil suitable for lubricating machinery. In 1848, Young set up a small business refining crude oil.
Young eventually succeeded, by distilling cannel coal at low heat, in creating a fluid resembling petroleum, which when treated in the same way as the seep oil gave similar products. Young found that by slow distillation he could obtain several useful liquids from it, one of which he named "paraffine oil" because at low temperatures it congealed into a substance resembling paraffin wax.
The production of these oils and solid paraffin wax from coal formed the subject of his patent dated 17 October 1850. In 1850 Young & Meldrum and Edward William Binney entered into partnership under the title of E.W. Binney & Co. at Bathgate in West Lothian and E. Meldrum & Co. at Glasgow; their works at Bathgate were completed in 1851 and became the first truly commercial oil-works in the world with the first modern oil refinery.
The world's first oil refinery was built in 1856 by Ignacy Łukasiewicz. His achievements also included the discovery of how to distill kerosene from seep oil, the invention of the modern kerosene lamp (1853), the introduction of the first modern street lamp in Europe (1853), and the construction of the world's first modern oil "mine" (1854) at Bóbrka, near Krosno (still operational as of 2020).
The demand for petroleum as a fuel for lighting in North America and around the world quickly grew. Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is popularly considered the first modern well. Already 1858 Georg Christian Konrad Hunäus found a significant amount of petroleum while drilling for lignite 1858 in Wietze, Germany. Wietze later provided about 80% of German consumption in the Wilhelminian Era."
To build a useful steam engine you don't just need coal and demand, you need much better metallurgy and precision manufacturing techniques than had been available prior to the 1700s, and also a Boyle-level understanding of thermodynamics.
All of which is a way of saying that the Industrial Revolution didn't just spring up from a single invention, that invention was a single step along a centuries-long pathway of increasing technological sophistication.
I’m not trying to downplay the inventions. Just as technologies are merely statuary without the power to run them, power without a way to use it is just an expensive heat source.
But what I am arguing is that a society with lots of power will find ways to use it (like England, who dominated the coal era) while a society with lots of ideas won’t necessarily find a better power source (like ancient Greece and Rome, who got a lot done on human, animal, tree, and hydro power but were never near hydrocarbons). Power and technology exist in a virtuous cycle, but you need to start it from the power side.
This is a good story, but per capita income was going up prior to coal. Changes in agricultural technique and technological improvements had reduced the need for farmers relative to townsfolk prior to the industrial revolution. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution happened because we had much more freedom to work in industry than on growing food.
If we look at historical civilizations, the Egyptians - who had the highest per capita food productivity of the ancient world - also built the most impressive monuments.
It seems likely that improvements in agriculture more than anything else drove the start of it, because to industrialize, you need the people.
The Industrial Revolution was not an incremental, quantitative increase in productivity along a centuries-old trend. It was truly revolutionary, a qualitative leap, because it opened up an entire new source of energy: coal (and later other fossils, nuclear etc.). Prior to that, economies were essentially limited by photosynthesis. Yes you need people to do anything, but one of the incentives to develop the steam engine was a demand for labor that muscle (human or animal) could no longer satisfy.
The always excellent Bret Devereaux has a piece on why the industrial revolution happened in 18th century Britain specifically and could not have happened earlier or elsewhere.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
In short, as you said, it was a confluence of incentives that only existed in 18th century Britain, and WEIRD was not one of the factors he mentions.
This had a strong influence on my thinking when I first read it, thank you for finding it.
People back then knew coal was a non-renewable resource, they preferred wood for fuel. But English state capacity was low and the trees weren't managed sustainably. People turned to coal in desperation, digging ever deeper.
Meanwhile in Japan the government was highly successful in enforcing strict wood harvesting rules, the tree population rebounded.
Well, if coal caused it, that is an excellent explanation why industrial revolution started in China! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
They actually had some of the key conditions for creating the steam engine, including (1) a sudden demand on coal due to a wood shortage and (2) flooding mines. China arguably was much closer to an industrial revolution than ancient Greece or Rome, despite the latter having toy steam engines. It would be fascinating to know why China didn't make the same leap as England. Did they miss a key idea? Did they always have sufficient labor to clear the mines? Given that they had cannons, it seems like they had sufficient metallurgy for those initial, primitive pressure vessels.
But equally, if ideas caused it, that is an excellent explanation why the industrial revolution started in China, one of the earliest inventors of both writing and papermaking.
>But equally, if ideas caused it, that is an excellent explanation why the industrial revolution started in China, one of the earliest inventors of both writing and papermaking.
Yea, exactly. Also gunpowder. And compass. And paper money. And civil service based examination system, incentivising widespread education.
China is the place which imho destroys many a theory of why industrial revolution happened in Europe.
Why, by that logic, it could not have happened at all! All those observations are anomalous in the face of pristine doubt.
Our observations definitely prove it wasn't fate. China had similar seeming preconditions to England without successfully making the leap of fossil fuel industrialization. Other technologies - farming, animal husbandry, writing, paper, money, and education - were developed multiple times, including often by China. But this one only once, when there were at least two opportunities.
Maybe the inference is less obvious. Maybe there are more preconditions we haven't considered. Maybe they did invent it but couldn't get the funding/approval and it was lost to history. By the time England figured out coal the world had become so interconnected by maritime navigation that it was hard to reinvent it - but not by the earlier time China could have invented it.
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.
I think this is just the style around here. The "rationalist" community that this blog arose from is very libertarian and contrarian, so it makes sense their distrust of authority would lead to "book reviews" determined not to give too much deference to the book. I agree most of the contest ones are more like "essay inspired by this book" than "book review".
Have you read any of Scott's book reviews though, like https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-arabian-nights and https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ ? I think those qualify as "very entertaining summary of the book, with a few personal thoughts woven in", which is what a review should be.
I have read Scott’s as well. And I agree, his are more useful—and they inspired me to read the others’.
Your interpretation of the community as “contrarian” and “distrusting authority” seems charitable. I admire that. I would have used a less favorable description. It often seems more like a bunch of somewhat unhinged, educated people with little actual life experience showing off for each other.
Oh, for sure. I almost wrote "notoriously contrarian" but thought it a bit aggressive.
Although in a world where nearly every written thing seems to be genuflecting to some ideology, and treating the correctness of that ideology as something completely obvious to all reasonable people and requiring no argument whatsoever...it's very much a breath of fresh air to have the kind of argumentative individualism that prevails around here, I think. When it falls down is when certain quasi-religious doctrines (the fusion of utilitarianism, extreme empiricism and technological determinism that makes up the essence of so-called "rationalism") end up widely accepted, despite their absurdities and minority status in the general population, as a result of the kind of people who are drawn to vigorous debate being also drawn to those ideas (mostly computer programmers) and falsely assuming that that's because the ideas follow naturally from rigorous argument. But at least those dogmas, unlike most others, actively welcome criticism and logical scrutiny.
Obviously I agree to some large extent or I wouldn't have been hanging around since the early Codex days. But I still feel like I have to hold my nose a bit whenever I enter any thread in this community.
I agree with you. Some very interesting ideas in and around the blog but also some very uninteresting people in the comments who think they’re the next Copernicus in suggesting that Eugenics is a simple fix for the world’s problems.
I don’t know. I used to read the TLS and LRB regularly, and lots of those reviews seemed like essays on the topic of the book just like most of these (sure, they reviewed the books too but sometimes pretty briefly). (That actually kind of makes sense, because people read these publications to learn about a range of subjects and not necessarily to find books to read.) One of the potential weaknesses of these reviews is that the authors in general are not experts in the relevant fields (but this is also just a different perspective). These are also longer (generally too long, I agree) and more casually written.
Interesting. I haven’t read the LRB in the last 5 years or so… you may be right!
I think part of the idea is to summarize enough of the book so that the reader doesn't need to read it. I think this can work with certain sorts of books, most stereotypically modern pop-sci books, but it doesn't work well for more detail-oriented books.
Also, I think it takes a very special writer to pull this kind of book review off. Scott's one. But I think too many people here try to write reviews like Scott, and fail because they don't have whatever combination of things it is that lets Scott write like Scott.
I think there have been some reviews here that meet your standards, but my memory is so poor that none come to mind right now.
Lmao!! Yes. Right on most counts.
The book reviews on the old SSC blog, which many contestants try to mimic, had purposes beyond summary and recommendation.
I think there was a sort of game played where Scott would use the ideas from the book as a launchpad for broader exploration. He would intertwine the book's themes with familiar concepts known to the blog readers and contextualize them within bigger questions in psychology or rationalism. The reviews extracted and summarized ideas from the book with enough depth to facilitate discussion in the comments, and the caliber of the commenters on Slate Star Codex was high. Subsequent discussions would often be interesting and provide a deeper understanding of the subject.
I recall that. I was around for most of the Codex times. I understand Scott's rationale; He was cultivating a community and his writing has been a primary catalyst for the community's shared conversations. But insofar as the book review contest is concerned, I would have assumed people were independent enough to do more than imitate Scott's style.
People do submit book reviews in a variety of styles, but because the contest is based on votes by readers of ACX, the reviews that are closer to the ACX style tend to be selected as finalists and winners. Also those that contain interesting insights, regardless of whether the insights come from the book or from the reviewer.
I've noticed this issue too, a lot of these are hard to get through. I think the problem is that the authors are mimicking Scott's verbose meandering style but Scott is an exceptionally talented writer and it works a lot less well for them than it does for him.
I often quit Scott's stuff too. The idea of brevity being the soul of wit is utterly unknown around here.
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.
I was thinking the same thing. I think that the demand for inclusiveness (of the history of different civilizations) is used as an excuse not to teach any history.
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.
The villagers' actions don't depend on whether there is a wolf, they depend on whether they believe there's a wolf, which is directly related to whether the boy told them that there's a wolf.
If atheism is correct and there are no gods, then I would still think religion is a useful explanation for why some people to the things they do. Because they believe, even if that belief is incorrect. And since most of us do not have direct access to universal Truth, we can't even know if their belief is incorrect.
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.
"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)."
Invaidity does not confer bastardy, and there were plenty of noble and royal bastards that did just fine because dad conferred an estate and/or a title on them. This is why Henry had to make a specific legal declaration that Mary (and later Elizabeth) were ineligible to succeed due to bastardy after he had dissolved his marriages; it couldn't just be assumed that they had no rights.
"These same court clerics also seriously thought that (literally) god only answers prayers in proper Latin, and not in common post-Latin."
I don't know about that. I do know there were problems with poorly understood and even garbled Latin for clerics, where some would end up praying for a totally opposite intention or even in nonsense. Standardising the form of Latin and teaching it would help prevent this.
EDIT: Also, there is an emphasis within Catholicism on proper form and matter. If you're going to baptise someone, you can't use Coca-Cola instead of water, and you can't simply say "I baptise you". You must use the correct formula. So insisting on using the words in classical Latin instead of post-Latin or the vernacular is all part of this. Without the right words, it does not happen.
You may call this magic or superstition as you like, but there is a reason for doing it that way.
No, you’re flattening different regimes across social class (elite, yeoman) and historical periods (800s, 1500s.) Heinrich discussed the disinheritance mechanism is his book (which the review unhelpfully and weirdly overlooks).
And I also think you’re projecting a kind of modern/elite sensibility, about a sharp natural-supernatural distinction, into the deep Middle Ages. They really did believe some crazy shit! Though, in some sense, all liturgical languages are ritualistic and magical-seeming. The more esoteric the better! Now, people would say “oh it’s proper, it’s tradition.” (Which, just pushes the question back, why is it proper, why was it maintained as tradition?). Heck, ppl still pray unironically for literally efficacious Devine intervention.
"They really did believe some crazy shit!"
Speaking as a Catholic, we still do 😁 But what I'm trying to get across is that you are saying "they were so dumb they thought you could only pray in Latin" and I am trying to explain *why* they thought this. Words matter. You're not free to change them around. And if you're going from a Latin-speaking community to convert a foreign land, you are going to be concerned about "can I change the words to this new language?" and the decisions often were "No".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libellus_responsionum
"The Libellus responsionum (Latin for "little book of answers") is a papal letter (also known as a papal rescript or decretal) written in 601 by Pope Gregory I to Augustine of Canterbury in response to several of Augustine's questions regarding the nascent church in Anglo-Saxon England.
...The Libellus consists of a series of responses (responsiones) by Gregory to "certain jurisprudential, administrative, jurisdictional, liturgical and ritual questions Augustine was confronted with as leader of the fledgling English church".[16] The numbering and order of these responses differ across the various versions of the Libellus (see below). But in the most widely known version (that reproduced in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica) there are nine responses, each of which begins by re-stating or paraphrasing Augustine's original questions. Gregory's first response addresses questions about the relationship of a bishop to his clergy and vice versa, how gifts from the laity to the church should be divided amongst the clergy, and what the tasks of a bishop were. The second response addresses why the various northern European churches of which Augustine was aware had differing customs and liturgies, and what Augustine should do when he encounters such differences. The third response was in answer to questions about the proper punishment of church robbers. The fourth and fifth responses deal with who might marry whom, including whether it was allowed for two brothers to marry two sisters, or for a man to marry his step-sister or step-mother. The sixth response addresses whether or not it was acceptable for a bishop to be consecrated without other bishops present, if the distances involved prevented other bishops from attending the ceremony. The seventh response deals with relations between the church in England and the church in Gaul. The eighth response concerns what a pregnant, newly delivered, or menstruating woman might do or not do, including whether or not she is allowed to enjoy sex with her husband and for how long after child-birth she has to wait to re-enter a church. The last response answers questions about whether or not men might have communion after experiencing a sexual dream, and whether or not priests might celebrate mass after experiencing such dreams."
"Heck, ppl still pray unironically for literally efficacious Devine intervention."
Yes, I do 😀
It’s true that early Anglo-Saxon kings worked with missionaries sent by Rome, if only to keep independent of Frankish-installed bishops more immediately to the south (an issue the letter alludes to). But letters don’t (and can’t) distinguish between what policies were implemented (and with what vigor) and those that were just respectfully acknowledged.
Do you have any sources for this characterization? What you seem to be claiming is that each court had its own clerics, who acted as local propagandists, and there wasn’t much of a centralized church or consistent doctrine or teaching. Also I’d like a source for the idea anyone believed prayers had to be in Latin.
For the former, Peter Heather’s book Christendom. Basically, in the 700s, clerics didn’t have the institutional or corporate semi-independence that emerged from mid1050s to early 1200s (which early universities emerged and canon law became a thing that more regular ppl started taking seriously). Arguably, clerics didn’t even have the manpower in the 700s to operate in the corporate sense. There weren’t enough of them. For the Latin thing, it’s covered in Heinrich’s book. (BTW, Prayer-literalism, even applied to the precise wording incantations, is pretty common in religious traditions, even now. So if it seems weird to you, maybe just go out more.)
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".
If we're going the evopsych route, surely nuclear-family (mother and children, father may or may not be around all the time) is for solitary animals? Humans are pack animals, like our primate cousins in bands where mothers, grandmothers, aunts and siblings are important, and the males may or may not be in that cluster.
That's more a communitarian and primitive style, surely?
Apparently innovations propagate from the center towards the periphery, be it in linguistics or family systems. Eurasia and Africa have communitarian family system holding the center, and nuclear family only remains on the very edge : the British Isles, Thailand and a few other scattered places. Therefore nuclear family must be the primitive one.
"Nuclear family" doesn't mean that there aren't kinship relationships, it describes the way people marry (with persons they aren't directly related to), where they live (in their own dwelling, not in their parents' or their in-law's), and the laws of inheritance (either equally shared or not).
See https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=lineages-of-modernity-a-history-of-humanity-from-the-stone-age-to-homo-americanus--9781509534470
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.
> I'm sure theres a name for this kind of thinking but a quick google search isn't revealing it.
Anthropic Principle
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 :(
Same for me - this was unusually confusingly written.
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....)
Funny, I found WEIRD more convincing than SooS, but I also read at least a dozen of the papers referenced in the book. I was very skeptical at the start ("did they consider *this* potential confounder?") and got gradually more and more convinced. I am still in shock, to tell you the truth, but the sheer volume of arguments has forced me to update my priors.
I don't think the review is very good, however. It deals with something else. The book is entirely about linking a package of policies with a specific psychological profile. And I think it does the job in a very rational, logical, somewhat rigorous (for this field), quantitative (again) way.
"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 Industrial Revolution wasn't a single event, nor was it uncaused. The Industrial Revolution wouldn't have happened in Europe if Europe wasn't already way ahead of the rest of the world in a variety of supporting technologies (metallurgy, precision machinery etc).
The most important supporting technology (imo) was how society was organised - giving some credible property rights and hence incentive to innovate.
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.
My general purpose comment on all of these sorts of debates is that if you find yourself wondering "Which of these many plausible mechanisms caused this huge historical trend?" then the answer is usually "All of them, and a bunch more too".
Nothing in history happens without being massively overdetermined. If X happened then there was a huge bunch of factors pushing for X to happen, along with a bunch of factors pushing for not-X to happen, and the factors pushing for X just happened to be slightly stronger than the factors pushing for not-X. If it had been the Far East that pulled ahead and conquered the world then you could easily list off a dozen factors that made _that_ seem like a historical inevitability too (rice!)
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.
You could have a less unified society in which the basic unit was the extended family/clan, or a more unified society in which the basic unit was the nuclear family or even the individual. Which is more “collectivist”? 🤷♂️
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.
But the thing with cousin marriage is that the women from clan Foo are *not* marrying into clan Bar or clan Baz, precisely because the family wants to keep the dowries and wealth and inheritance within the clan.
So she's marrying her cousin, and her kids out of that marriage are going to marry her husband's brother's kids and/or her brother's kids, and so on down the line. Maybe sometimes there are marriages with clans Bar and Baz for reasons like alliances or politics; often (as we see in Hindu myths like the Ramayana) there are group marriages arranged: Sita has a svayamvar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svayamvara which is a ceremony where all the eligible suitors turn up and one is selected by means of a test or task.
Rama performs the task which no other suitor can do (stringing the bow of Shiva, and if this reminds anyone of Odyessus' homecoming well Indo-European myths have common roots) and is the chosen bridegroom. *However*, after that, Sita's father suggests to Rama's father "Hey, you have four sons and I have four daughters/nieces. Since your son Rama has married my daughter Sita, wouldn't it be even better if his brothers married my girls?"
So this is an example of brothers marrying sisters, and keeping the marriage alliances within a discrete group instead of marrying outside to different people.
See this scene from a devotional movie about Annamayya, who (after a religious conversion) decides to live an ascetic life, which means breaking off the engagement with his cousins (two sisters) but is persuaded to fulfil his obligations to the family and the state of life as a householder and marry them both:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30-zUFwWeCg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annamayya_(film)
"Growing up as a normal young man, Annamayya loves his 2 cousins Timakka & Akkalamma who thinks that they are the most beautiful creations of God.
Lord Vishnu appears in front of Annamayya in disguise and accepts a challenge from him to show someone more beautiful than his cousins - God in the form of Lord Venkateswara in a temple in his village. Upon discovering the beauty of the Lord, Annamayya is lost in a different world and ends up making a pilgrimage to Tirumala Venkateswara Temple without planning or informing his parents. ...Upon reaching Tirumala, he is enthralled by the beauty of God and settles there to write and sing hymns in praise of the Lord.
Meanwhile, Annamayya's parents get worried regarding Annamayya's whereabouts. Then, the Lord Venkateshwara, hearing the prayers of Lakkavaamba (Annamayya's mother), himself comes in the disguise of a Hunter along with his consorts and tells them that Annamayya lives in Tirumala. Then, Annamayya's parents, cousins, aunt, uncle, and his 2 friends come to Tirumala and watch him worship the Lord.
When Annamayya is asked to marry his 2 cousins, he refuses saying that his life is dedicated to the service of the Lord and marriage would become a hindrance to it. But, he is then convinced by the Lord himself who has now taken the form of a Brahmin. The Lord personally conducts the wedding of Annamayya with his cousins - Timakka and Akkalamma."
That's not the social view of "a woman from clan Foo marries a man from clan Bar". That's "the normal thing is to get married, and if you have female cousins, to marry them". That's not "well if he doesn't marry them, no matter, we can arrange different marriages with other men for them", it's "if they're rejected by their own family, nobody else will want to marry them for fear there is something wrong with them or they are unlucky or will bring ill-fortune with them".
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.
That review is dishonest. I'll give one example, but every claim is wrong one way or another.
Here is an example among many. Freeman says "[Julia] Smith does mention, p.131, that 'some bishops tried to impose an additional disqualification' namely enforcing the consanguinity laws but it seems to have been a minority practice"
Freeman mentions this in the context of claiming that the Church was largely unsuccessful influencing marriage.
But the actual quote from Julias Smith is: "In addition, some bishops tried to impose an additional disqualification—consanguinity extending all the way to a common ancestor within seven generations, way beyond the widely acceptable four-generation limit."
So what a few bishops tried to do and failed is to extend the prohibition to *seven generations*, not that they failed to impose any consanguinity laws at all, or that they had no influence on marriage! On the contrary the context in Julia Smith's book is clear that Church's policies were very consequential, even if the over-zealous bishops didn't get their way.
The fact that Freeman elided "extending all the way to a common ancestor within seven generations" to make it seem like the Church had problems imposing consanguinity laws at all should disqualify him as someone you can trust on this.
"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."
Henrich is the one who discovered that. He is the one who coined the term WEIRD specifically to bring attention to the fact that the vast majority of psychology is based on subjects who are western college students.
But the reason this is a problem is precisely because the psychological profile of westerners is different from that of non-westerners, and this has consequences. Henrich wrote the right book: where does that difference come from? He (and Schulz) found an intriguing correlation: the more a certain policy package was enforced in a particular location, the WEIRDer the people in that location are today. And the correlation holds after controlling for a host of possible confounders, and it also holds at different scales (across counties, nations, continents).
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.
Re “Western Civilisation as a continuation of agreeing/Roman” I thought it was pretty clear the reviewer was referring to that view as something he had been taught as a child (“I come from a primitive culture, in the following sense”) rather than endorsing it.
I believe "primitive" in this sense refers to how he was taught that Western history extends from the Greeks to the present as opposed to seeing a kind of global history of humanity including China, Africa etc.
Later on in the review he talks about how to get from AD 1 to the present and also how political philosophy began with Socrates in the West, while noting that he doesn't know much about Ibn Khaldun, both of which implies some kind of unique thread of continuity from Socrates to the Latin West.
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.