Introduction
What’s in it for me? Discover how the Western Church’s century-old policies explain the oddities of Western civilization today.
Around the seventh century CE, the Anglo-Saxon Christian missionary St. Augustine of Canterbury wrote to Pope Gregory I, seeking urgent guidance on a series of questions that would help reshape Western civilization.
Question 1: How distant must relatives be to get married? The Pope’s answer? Marriages between first cousins or closer were strictly forbidden.
Question 2: Can a man marry his stepmother or sister-in-law? “Hell no!” replied the Pope – although probably not in those exact words.
Question 3: Can a pair of brothers marry a pair of sisters? Yes, as long as they aren’t all related by blood, declared Gregory I.
Question 4: Can a man receive communion after a sex dream? Although the Pope’s answer to this one isn’t clear, the question itself reveals just how much religious leaders were focusing on these issues.
These questions, although they may seem a bit silly now, have had profound implications on the Western world. To state the obvious, the Church is obsessed with sex – and it has been for centuries. Who can have it? Who can’t have it? When, where, how, and what for?
Harvard academic Joseph Henrich argues that this fixation on sex, marriage, and the family – and the Western Church’s policies on the subjects – explain why Western civilization is the way it is today.
We aren’t going to try to reinterpret all of Western civilization in this article to The WEIRDest People in the World. Instead, we’ll highlight some of Henrich’s most interesting and provocative claims about what makes the West so strange.
Key idea 1
Western psychology is unusual compared to most other cultures.
Societies like the US, Western Europe, and Australia are WEIRD: an acronym meaning Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. These WEIRD societies are outliers, both historically and relative to many other modern cultures – which makes them “weird” in the standard sense of the word, too. And it’s not simply the attributes of these countries that are weird, but the psychology of the people in them. WEIRD people tend to think and behave differently than those in non-WEIRD cultures.
Harvard academic Joseph Henrich argues that these differences in psychology and institutions have developed over centuries through a process of cultural evolution. Henrich makes clear that culture does evolve. It’s transmitted from generation to generation through learning. It also randomly mutates, in the sense that new practices are constantly being invented and experimented with. And, in the long run, culture is driven by natural selection: the traits that work best in a specific environment usually win out.
Before going any further, it’s worth mentioning a few things. First, Henrich is trying to explain psychological diversity – not celebrate WEIRD psychology or disparage other cultures. He specifically warns against a good vs bad dichotomy. Second, Henrich makes clear that psychological diversity is present within all societies, not just between them. Third, he argues that this psychological variation is not set in stone, but will instead continue to evolve. With these caveats in place, let’s consider some of the weird attributes of people in the West.
Although WEIRD people stand out in many ways, there are five traits that best capture the WEIRD mentality.
First, WEIRD people are individualistic. They tend to view the world through the lens of the self, putting a premium on things like individual rights and basing success on their own personal accomplishments.
Second, WEIRD people usually believe in moral principles that apply to everyone – honesty is good, cheating is bad, et cetera. This is peculiar because in many cultures, fealty to one’s family often takes precedence over such principles. But surveys show that WEIRD people are much less likely to lie to protect a family member or friend who has broken the law.
Third, WEIRD people are nonconformists. Studies reveal a much greater willingness on the part of Westerners to resist peer pressure and to ignore the opinions of elders. They also don’t consider obedience a vital quality to instill in children.
Fourth, WEIRD people tend to think analytically as opposed to holistically. Analytic thinking involves focusing on components and applying strict conditions to them. According to one measure, the top ten countries that think analytically all come from Western Europe or its colonial offshoots.
Fifth, WEIRD people are more trusting of strangers. Survey data reveals that nearly all of the countries where people are most trusting of strangers are Western nations.
We’ll get to how these attributes were formed and how they’ve assisted the rise of the West. But first, let’s take a look at the non-WEIRD cultures of the world.
Key idea 2
Non-WEIRD cultures revolve around kin-based institutions.
Now that we’ve learned how modern Westerners are WEIRD, it’s time to take a step back and focus on the way most people throughout human history have looked at the world. We’ll call this the non-WEIRD mentality.
Let’s face it: most people care more about their family members than anyone else. The technical term for this phenomenon is kin-altruism – the innate concern for close genetic relatives. In service of kin-altruism, early humans developed kin-based institutions. In other words, they built societies based around the family.
Kin-based institutions have been incredibly resilient. From hunter-gatherers up to the Roman Empire, nearly all societies were kin-based, with remarkably similar hallmarks. And, outside of the West, many kin-based institutions persist to this day. It is these kin-based institutions that cultivated the non-WEIRD mentality.
To illustrate this, let’s consider how Europeans existed prior to the influence of the Western Church. Most people lived in networks of extended families. These larger “families” – clans, tribes, or houses – were the centers of society. People in the same clan were obligated to work together, protect one another, and share resources. Ancestry and inheritance were almost always tracked through the male side of the lineage, and new couples usually moved in with the man’s parents.
As for marriage, many were arranged, with patriarchs picking spouses they felt were most suitable to the family. Marriage between relatives like cousins was common, and it was also typical for high-status men to take multiple wives.
These kin-based institutions helped foster the non-WEIRD mentality – a set of norms that worked well in early societies. Since each population was part of a larger family, and since family comes with responsibility, non-WEIRD people were typically collectivists. They focused on the welfare of the group rather than the concerns of the individual. They were also wary of strangers, since outsiders weren’t bonded by kin and therefore might pose a threat.
Since multiple generations lived under one roof, deferring to elders became customary, too, and conforming to tradition was standard protocol. Fealty to one’s family was paramount, and trumped other impersonal moral principles.
Kin-based institutions also promoted holistic thinking – looking at the big picture and seeing how parts fit into the whole, just as the individual fits into the larger notion of the family.
Taken together, these non-WEIRD views dominated humankind for millennia – until a powerful force came to disrupt it.
Key idea 3
The Western Church reshaped the family through its Marriage and Family Program.
So, if people were non-WEIRD for so much of human history, what caused them to become WEIRD? What seismic shift led to the adoption of an entirely new way of thinking?
Henrich argues that the answer lies in the Western Church – the term he uses to encompass the dominance of first the Roman Catholic Church from the fall of the Roman Empire, and then the Protestant Church following the Reformation.
The policies of the Western Church in Europe during this period – especially around marriage and the family – unintentionally set in motion the growth of the WEIRD mentality.
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, the Roman Church took hold – ushering in a series of sweeping policies surrounding sex, marriage, and inheritance. This Marriage and Family Program, or MFP, transformed Europe into the WEIRD place it is today.
For one thing, the MFP made incest taboo. Suddenly, kissing cousins wasn’t allowed! It banned marriages between close family members and in-laws, too.
It also made monogamy mandatory, and cracked down on violators by inventing the notion of “illegitimate” children – those born out of wedlock. The Church even cut these children off from any rights to inheritance. To combat arranged marriages, the Church made weddings public events with open proclamations of “I do.”
Another blow to kin-based institutions came with the Church’s posture toward inheritance. It discouraged the rich from keeping their wealth and then passing it down to the next generation. Instead, the Church wanted the rich to bequeath their fortunes to charity. The Church’s charity of choice was, of course, the Church itself. The Church accrued so much land that it controlled huge portions of Europe. This only made the Church more powerful – and the MFP more influential. Slowly but surely, kin-based institutions began to wither away, and the nuclear family was born.
Key idea 4
Making monogamy mandatory fundamentally changed Western civilization.
One tenet of the Marriage and Family Plan has been especially influential: monogamous marriage. To understand why monogamy helped reshape Western civilization, we have to first consider a few realities of polygynous marriage – when a man has multiple wives. The first is a problem of simple arithmetic. For every man with two wives, some poor guy has to go without one. As it happens, in most polygynous societies, about 20 percent of men wind up like this because there simply aren’t enough single women to go around.
This type of marriage practice, common in non-WEIRD societies throughout human history, heavily favors high-status men at the expense of low-status ones. In premodern societies across the globe, the highest status men – kings, chiefs, and great warriors – routinely took on lots of wives. For example, the Ashante and Zulu kings in Africa had more than a thousand wives each! In Han China, emperors had harems of up to 6,000 women. Even in places where elite men took no more than a few wives, there was still a glut of low-status men desperate to climb the ranks to secure a partner.
Let’s consider how polygyny influences male psychology. Men become hypercompetitive, because the evolutionary stakes are much higher. The difference between being a prince or a pauper is the difference between lots of wives – and potentially children – and none. What’s more, single men don’t just compete with other single men to find partners; they have to keep competing with married men looking for additional wives.
Monogamy, on the other hand, shifts men’s psychology by rebalancing the marriage equation. By prohibiting men from taking multiple wives, it gives all men – even low-status ones – at least a chance to marry and produce offspring. When a high-status man finds a first wife, he bows out of the dating game, giving other men a better chance.
Aside from the math, monogamy changes men’s hormones, too. Studies ranging from birds to humans reveal that monogamous males’ testosterone levels drop when they settle down and reproduce. On the other hand, polygynous fathers’ testosterone levels remain elevated. Researchers believe that interacting with their offspring makes men’s testosterone levels drop. When fathers are at home caring for their children rather than chasing more women, society is better off.
Monogamy reduces crime rates and deviant behavior, too. Married men are less likely to commit violent crimes, gamble, or abuse alcohol. To help separate cause from effect, one famous study followed a group of 500 boys through adulthood. It found that the crime rates of married men increased following a divorce, lending credence to the claim that it is the institution of marriage which tempers violence and aggression. This “domestication” of men, as Henrich puts it, has helped Western society become less violent today.
Key idea 5
The Church’s Marriage and Family Program led to a domino effect that helped build modern Western institutions.
So, in Henrich’s view, the Western Church’s Marriage and Family Plan made people WEIRD. But how did a set of rules about sex, marriage, and inheritance make Westerners educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic?
Henrich argues that the MFP had major ripple effects. For example, as incest – especially cousin marriage – became taboo, people’s behavior changed. Rather than marrying someone across the family dinner table, Europeans had to go out in search of potential mates – often to other villages and towns. This exposed them to new people, places, and ways of doing things.
As people ventured outside their kin-groups, they began establishing voluntary associations. People started marrying for love, socializing for pleasure, and trading goods, services, and ideas for mutual gain. This led to the rise of towns and cities. They were too big to be governed through informal traditions, so local governments were eventually established. Since there was no blueprint for how to operate, places had to experiment with different policies. People gravitated toward the locales that seemed to work the best. Other towns followed suit by copying what worked, or risked getting outcompeted.
Through this process, the seedlings of WEIRD psychology started to grow further. It’s vital to understand that this kind of cultural evolution is a slow, uncoordinated process that happens more by accident than design. Still, modern WEIRDness can be traced to the “accidental genius” of the Western Church.
Henrich thinks it was the budding individualism caused by the MFP that centuries later gave rise to the Enlightenment ideal of natural rights. This regard for the life, liberty, and property of the individual was eventually exalted in the American Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and became the cornerstone of Western law.
It was the Church’s incest taboo that incentivized more voluntary associations, leading to the formation of enduring Western institutions like monasteries, charter towns, and universities. Such places became epicenters of learning, commerce, and scientific inquiry – and were aided by the nonconformity and analytic thinking that came in the wake of the MFP. Martin Luther, for instance, was a monk who worked at a university in the charter town of Wittenberg, Germany.
Economic progress, too, can be explained (at least in part) by the rise in the WEIRD attributes of voluntary associations and a newfound trust in strangers. Commerce both requires trust between anonymous parties, and also helps foster a desire to be honest, fair, and trustworthy in order to attract business. Protestants also preached the importance of hard work, thrift, and delayed gratification – all of which became economic virtues.
Together, the MFP catalyzed a dramatic change in the thoughts and actions of people in the West. In doing so, it helped shape the modern world.
Final Summary
In this article to Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World, you’ve learned about the strange ways many Westerners view and behave in the world. You’ve also seen how, thanks to the Marriage and Family Program of the Western Church more than a millennium ago, the nuclear family has replaced the kin-based institutions of old. This package of policies helped reshape European psychology and led to the voluntary associations that gave rise to charter towns, universities, and economic markets. In turn, these institutions helped establish the laws, norms, and culture that dominate the West today.
