How the early Christian church gave birth to today’s WEIRD Europeans | Science | AAAS
A fascinating article from last month, published in physics.org (a science news website) and sciencemag.org about the results of a new study published in Science journal by Joseph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology of Harvard University, and a team of collaborators. (Full study here: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/files/henrich/files/sciencefull.pdf)
Its findings relate to a topic I've discussed many times before on this forum (see here: Call No Man Your Father, here: Reason is the Most Important Driver of Human Moral Progress?) that the medieval Catholic Church engaged in what many scholars regard to be history's largest-scale social engineering experiment / "negative eugenics".
Basically put, the medieval Church destroyed tribalism and heavily penalised its main vehicle - cousin marriage - through the strictest reproductive, consanguinity laws ever imposed on a population in the entirety of human history (I think it makes China's old 'one-child' policy look tame by comparison) and a new emphasis on marriage as consensual rather than arranged. This had very big ramifications as a form of social engineering, quite apart from removing some of the undesirable genetic traits that arise from inbreeding: namely, helping to lead to an unprecedentedly individualist, non-conformist society here in the West compared to other cultures.
I'm glad this area of study has got fresh research plugged into it:
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-incest-dawn-individualism.html
Western Individualism May Have Roots In The Medieval Church's Obsession With Incest
How the Medieval Catholic Church triggered rise of individualistic Western societies
In September 506 C.E., the fathers of what would later become the Roman Catholic Church gathered in southern France to draw up dozens of new laws. Some forbade clergy from visiting unrelated women. Others forbade Christians from marrying anyone more closely related than their third cousin. The authors of a sweeping new study say that last, seemingly trivial prohibition may have given birth to Western civilization as we know it.
“If the authors are right, or even in the vicinity of being right, it couldn’t be bigger,” says Stephen Stich, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who wasn’t involved in the work. “What they are offering to explain is the emergence of democratic institutions, of individualism in the West.”
The church’s early ban on incest and cousin marriage, the researchers say, weakened the tight kinship structures that had previously defined European populations, fostering new streaks of independence, nonconformity, and a willingness to work with strangers. And as the church’s influence spread, those qualities blossomed into a suite of psychological traits common today across Western industrialized nations, they argue.
“They’re looking at what created the modern Western world,” Stich says.
Centuries living under these restrictions fundamentally reshaped European societies’ kinship structure—and their psychology, the authors say. Traditional kin networks stressed the moral value of obeying one’s elders, for example. But when the church forced people to marry outside this network, traditional values broke down, allowing new ones to pop up: individualism, nonconformity, and less bias toward one’s in-group.
“These are things that don’t come to mind when you think about the influence of the Catholic Church,” Stich says, which may explain why nobody had previously connected the church’s influence with the emergence Western psychology.
“If the authors are right, or even in the vicinity of being right, it couldn’t be bigger,” says Stephen Stich, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who wasn’t involved in the work. “What they are offering to explain is the emergence of democratic institutions, of individualism in the West.”
The church’s early ban on incest and cousin marriage, the researchers say, weakened the tight kinship structures that had previously defined European populations, fostering new streaks of independence, nonconformity, and a willingness to work with strangers. And as the church’s influence spread, those qualities blossomed into a suite of psychological traits common today across Western industrialized nations, they argue.
“They’re looking at what created the modern Western world,” Stich says.
Centuries living under these restrictions fundamentally reshaped European societies’ kinship structure—and their psychology, the authors say. Traditional kin networks stressed the moral value of obeying one’s elders, for example. But when the church forced people to marry outside this network, traditional values broke down, allowing new ones to pop up: individualism, nonconformity, and less bias toward one’s in-group.
“These are things that don’t come to mind when you think about the influence of the Catholic Church,” Stich says, which may explain why nobody had previously connected the church’s influence with the emergence Western psychology.
A fascinating article from last month, published in physics.org (a science news website) and sciencemag.org about the results of a new study published in Science journal by Joseph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology of Harvard University, and a team of collaborators. (Full study here: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/files/henrich/files/sciencefull.pdf)
Its findings relate to a topic I've discussed many times before on this forum (see here: Call No Man Your Father, here: Reason is the Most Important Driver of Human Moral Progress?) that the medieval Catholic Church engaged in what many scholars regard to be history's largest-scale social engineering experiment / "negative eugenics".
Basically put, the medieval Church destroyed tribalism and heavily penalised its main vehicle - cousin marriage - through the strictest reproductive, consanguinity laws ever imposed on a population in the entirety of human history (I think it makes China's old 'one-child' policy look tame by comparison) and a new emphasis on marriage as consensual rather than arranged. This had very big ramifications as a form of social engineering, quite apart from removing some of the undesirable genetic traits that arise from inbreeding: namely, helping to lead to an unprecedentedly individualist, non-conformist society here in the West compared to other cultures.
I'm glad this area of study has got fresh research plugged into it:
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-incest-dawn-individualism.html
Western Individualism May Have Roots In The Medieval Church's Obsession With Incest
How the Medieval Catholic Church triggered rise of individualistic Western societies
Mapping the end of incest and dawn of individualism
If you're from a Western society, chances are you value individuality, independence, analytical thinking, and an openness to strangers and new ideas.
And the surprising reason for all that may very well have to do with the early Roman Catholic Church and its campaign against marriage within families, according to new research published in Science by Joseph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and a team of collaborators.
"If you're going to ask the rise-of-the-West question," said Henrich, an author of the paper, "there's this big unmentioned thing called psychology that's got to be part of the story."
About a decade ago Henrich coined the acronym WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) to describe the characteristics of cultures that embrace individualism. And those groups were weird, which is to say unusual within the rest of the modern world's substantial psychological variation [...]
Henrich and his collaborators decided to look at how social groups mold the psychology and values of members, the most important and fundamental being the family.
"There's good evidence that Europe's kinship structure was not much different from the rest of the world," said Jonathan Schulz, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and another author of the paper. But then, from the Middle Ages to 1500 A.D., the Western Church (later known as the Roman Catholic Church) started banning marriages to cousins, step-relatives, in-laws, and even spiritual-kin, better known as godparents.
Why the church grew obsessed with incest is still unknown. [...] Whatever the reasons, one thing seems clear: The Western Church's crusade coincides with a significant loosening in Europe's kin-based institutions.
Comparing exposure to the Western Church with their "kinship intensity index," which includes data on cousin marriage rates, polygyny (where a man takes multiple wives), co-residence of extended families, and other historical anthropological measures, the team identified a direct connection between the religious ban and the growth of independent, monogamous marriages among nonrelatives. According to the study, each additional 500 years under the Western Church is associated with a 91 percent further reduction in marriage rates between cousins.
"Meanwhile in Iran, in Persia, Zoroastrianism was not only promoting cousin marriage but promoting marriage between siblings," Henrich said. Although Islam outlawed polygyny extending beyond four wives, and the Eastern Orthodox Church adopted policies against incest, no institution came close to the strict, widespread policies of the Western Church.
Those policies first altered family structures and then the psychologies of members. Henrich and his colleagues think that individuals adapt cognition, emotions, perceptions, thinking styles, and motivations to fit their social networks. Kin-based institutions reward conformity, tradition, nepotism, and obedience to authority, traits that help protect assets—such as farms—from outsiders. But once familial barriers crumble, the team predicted that individualistic traits like independence, creativity, cooperation, and fairness with strangers would increase.
Using 24 psychological variables collected in surveys, experiments, and observations, they measured the global prevalence of traits that correspond or conflict with individualism. To test for willingness to help strangers, for example, they collected data on blood-donation rates across Italy, finding a correlation between high donation rates and low cousin-marriage rates. With their kinship intensity index, Schutz said, they can also predict which diplomats in New York City will or will not pay parking tickets: Those from countries with higher rates of cousin marriages are more likely to get a ticket and less likely to pay one.
And, although willingness to trust strangers, as opposed to family or neighbors, is associated with higher levels of innovation, greater national wealth, and faster economic growth, which factor causes which is not yet known.
"We're not saying that less-intensive kin-based institutions are better," said Beauchamp. "Far from it. There are trade-offs." Tight families, for example, come with inborn financial safety nets.
If you're from a Western society, chances are you value individuality, independence, analytical thinking, and an openness to strangers and new ideas.
And the surprising reason for all that may very well have to do with the early Roman Catholic Church and its campaign against marriage within families, according to new research published in Science by Joseph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and a team of collaborators.
"If you're going to ask the rise-of-the-West question," said Henrich, an author of the paper, "there's this big unmentioned thing called psychology that's got to be part of the story."
About a decade ago Henrich coined the acronym WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) to describe the characteristics of cultures that embrace individualism. And those groups were weird, which is to say unusual within the rest of the modern world's substantial psychological variation [...]
Henrich and his collaborators decided to look at how social groups mold the psychology and values of members, the most important and fundamental being the family.
"There's good evidence that Europe's kinship structure was not much different from the rest of the world," said Jonathan Schulz, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and another author of the paper. But then, from the Middle Ages to 1500 A.D., the Western Church (later known as the Roman Catholic Church) started banning marriages to cousins, step-relatives, in-laws, and even spiritual-kin, better known as godparents.
Why the church grew obsessed with incest is still unknown. [...] Whatever the reasons, one thing seems clear: The Western Church's crusade coincides with a significant loosening in Europe's kin-based institutions.
Comparing exposure to the Western Church with their "kinship intensity index," which includes data on cousin marriage rates, polygyny (where a man takes multiple wives), co-residence of extended families, and other historical anthropological measures, the team identified a direct connection between the religious ban and the growth of independent, monogamous marriages among nonrelatives. According to the study, each additional 500 years under the Western Church is associated with a 91 percent further reduction in marriage rates between cousins.
"Meanwhile in Iran, in Persia, Zoroastrianism was not only promoting cousin marriage but promoting marriage between siblings," Henrich said. Although Islam outlawed polygyny extending beyond four wives, and the Eastern Orthodox Church adopted policies against incest, no institution came close to the strict, widespread policies of the Western Church.
Those policies first altered family structures and then the psychologies of members. Henrich and his colleagues think that individuals adapt cognition, emotions, perceptions, thinking styles, and motivations to fit their social networks. Kin-based institutions reward conformity, tradition, nepotism, and obedience to authority, traits that help protect assets—such as farms—from outsiders. But once familial barriers crumble, the team predicted that individualistic traits like independence, creativity, cooperation, and fairness with strangers would increase.
Using 24 psychological variables collected in surveys, experiments, and observations, they measured the global prevalence of traits that correspond or conflict with individualism. To test for willingness to help strangers, for example, they collected data on blood-donation rates across Italy, finding a correlation between high donation rates and low cousin-marriage rates. With their kinship intensity index, Schutz said, they can also predict which diplomats in New York City will or will not pay parking tickets: Those from countries with higher rates of cousin marriages are more likely to get a ticket and less likely to pay one.
And, although willingness to trust strangers, as opposed to family or neighbors, is associated with higher levels of innovation, greater national wealth, and faster economic growth, which factor causes which is not yet known.
"We're not saying that less-intensive kin-based institutions are better," said Beauchamp. "Far from it. There are trade-offs." Tight families, for example, come with inborn financial safety nets.
Last edited: