I also thought this was an amazing book. I agree that Henrich only partially addressed the East Asian question, but in my humble opinion I think he was on the right track, even if he didn't adequately explain it. I'm East Asian btw.
I think the West's earlier encounters with non-East Asian races made it clear that the West's IQ was superior and so it was concluded that it was because of IQ that the West was so successful. It's only been in the last few decades that there's been a realization that East Asian IQ is actually higher than Western IQ. This has unnerved a lot of people as IQ/intelligence has been associated with greater success in the minds of many. This has led to a lot of copium: East Asians are only testing the smartest, are cheating on the IQ test, not as creative, less variance in IQ distribution, etc. The fact is that the West triumphed over the East and I think Henrich does a masterful job of explaining the key factor why the West ended up triumphing over the East despite having a marginally lower IQ.
East Asians are the race most similar to Westerns, culturally if not genetically. There is not much cousin marriage/incest. East Asians are able to develop complex institutions based on meritocracy rather than kinship. With such similarities, a lot of scholars have wondered why the Industrial Revolution started in the western-most tip of the Eurasian landmass rather than the eastern-most tip, especially when East Asia was more advanced for most of history. I believe the reason is because Westerners were more individualistic. This greater individualism led to the development of more heterodox ideas, which due to greater labour mobility and openness to heterodox ideas spread the best and most innovative ideas throughout society and allowed for the West to rapidly advance technologically. The end result of this was that tens of thousand of Westerners with advanced military technology had more force projection than empires of tens of millions of people.
So I think Henrich was right that Westerners are uniquely individualistic which is why they have created the most successful societies ever, but I think his Marriage and Family Plan (MFP) explanation isn't the complete picture for why Westerners are so individualistic, particularly relative to East Asians.
One of the most glaring differences between the structures of Western and East Asian societies has been the unified societies in East Asia versus the many small states in Europe. Through random happenstance, Europe was never able to re-unify after the Roman Empire although attempts were made (Charlemagne - Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon - Continental System). Conversely, despite China sometimes being invaded, undergoing civil wars, and breaking up into warring states, again through random happenstance, it has always been able to re-unify. (There's probably some geographic/resource reason for the difference in trajectories of history in Europe and East Asia). A strong central state generally means safety from foreign invasion and help when there are floods/droughts/plagues, but it generally represses creativity. In Europe instead you've got these thousands of small duchies and kingdoms. As an East Asian, it sounds ridiculous to me that some of these kingdoms are small enough that you can travel by horse from one end to the other in a day, but they somehow survived for hundreds of years without some bigger neighbour swallowing them up lol. But anyways, because in Europe you've got these thousands of kingdoms, you've got thousands of different systems and the best ones will flourish and the poor ones will fade out. There's also competition and an arms-race between these thousands of kingdoms, which further incentivizes rapid technological development. These are a much better set of circumstances for individualism to flourish.
So I think the cultural differences between Westerners and the rest of the world are what have allowed them to achieve such success. (It also just so happens to be a more palatable explanation than IQ differences between races, which is why Henrich got poached from UBC to Harvard for his work instead of getting cancelled). Vis-a-vis non-East Asians these differences were due to the MFP of Westerners. East Asians generally had the MFP as well (although not from the church of course), but due to largely living in massive unified states were more collectivist versus Westerners who became more individualistic. (I think it would be an interesting study to see if Westerners were more collectivistic during the Roman Empire, and became more individualistic since then).
This also ties in with a lot of the insights you've recently come to Richard. For example, China being more collectivistic than the West by pursuing a zero-Covid policy. The collectivism also explains lower crime and greater social stability. I also believe the collectivism explains the lower fertility seen in East Asian populations.
Incidentally, I think the zero Covid policy is an unforced error but not fatal, so I wouldn't be so quick to write off East Asia yet haha. It seems to me that the modern world increasingly favours complex large-scale resource mobilization and effective state capacity, which I believe East Asia does better (for example, the chip war going on right now is basically a battle of industrial policy between China and the US), and East Asia has rightfully adopted the cultural values that made the West successful, so in my mind it still remains an open question of whether Eastern or Western society will be favoured to prosper most over the next century.
“East Asians generally had the MFP as well (although not from the church of course), but due to largely living in massive unified states were more collectivist versus Westerners who became more individualistic.”
Henrich argues that East Asia was very late to adopting the MFP. It was the Meiji Restoration in Japan and then later in China and Korea. I don’t know the history that well, but know that Chinese emperors had a lot of concubines throughout history. South Korea apparently only equalized inheritance between men and women in 1991? He writes:
“Second, their more powerful top-down orientations permitted these societies to rapidly adopt and implement key kin-based institutions copied from WEIRD societies. Japan, for example, began copying WEIRD civil institutions in the 1880s during the Meiji Restoration, including prohibitions on polygynous marriage. Similarly, as noted earlier, the Chinese Communist government initiated a program in the 1950s to abolish clans, polygyny, arranged marriages, unions between close relatives, and purely patrilineal inheritance (i.e., daughters had to receive an equal inheritance). In South Korea, the government passed a Western-style civil code in 1957 that required the consent of both grooms and brides to marry, prohibited polygynous marriage, and forbade marriage to relatives out to third cousins, through both blood and marriage. Since then, a variety of amendments have shifted South Korean society even further away from patriarchal intensive kinship. In 1991, inheritance finally became bilateral, so sons and daughters now inherit equally.”
In my previous post I argued that East Asians and Westerners have slight differences, notably collectivism vs individualism, which explains the greater success of the West over the East. Now I'll address why I think East Asians and Westerns are still largely similar and East Asians were able to achieve much of the success of the West despite East Asians not having the exact same MFP as the West.
My assertion is that East Asians and Westerners ended up independently evolving under their own unique cultural pressures, but that they reached a similar point. Namely, both societies allowed less nepotistic and less clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected for, which in turn allowed the development of complex impersonal institutions that are supra-familial, in other words the institution does not require the ties of family, tribe, clan, etc. to operate effectively and with minimal corruption. This is a higher level of development because a familial/tribal/clan institution can only get so big and often sacrifices competence and effectiveness because instead of staffing the institution with the most competent person, you're picking someone just because they're kin. It's hard to create a supra-familial institution because the natural tendency for humans is nepotism and favouring kin.
These complex supra-familial institutions developed in the West because the church, Christianity, and the MFP literally tore apart kinship ties through the marriage and inheritance rules mentioned by Henrich, which minimized the opportunity for nepotism and clannishness and allowed for less nepotistic and clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected.
The East obviously did not have the church and christianity and the MFP marriage and inheritance laws that Henrich noted came from the church and christianity. Henrich is still right that Westerners are truly unique due to the unique selective development from the church, christianity, and the MFP. Nevertheless, it could be said that the East had its own unique cultural selective pressure that allowed for less nepotistic and clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected and thus allowed for supra-familial institutions to develop. But before I get to that cultural mechanism, I want to make a few comments about the quotes of Henrich you selected. Also I want to preface, that I read the book over a year ago so I don't remember specific parts.
Like in the West, cousin marriage is very rare in East Asia so there wasn't the depression of IQ seen in regions where cousin marriage is high. Polygamy was practiced in the upper classes in East Asia, but that seems to me no different from the West where Kings were polygamous and the lower classes were monogamous because the church had a harder time limiting the behaviour of Kings. Clans are more a feature of less-developed areas. China is remarkably homogenous for such a huge land mass and with so many millions of people. The classification of 90%+ of Chinese, i.e. hundreds of millions of Chinese across all regions of China, as "Han" is politically convenient, but also close to reality as they all share similar genes. You don't see a ghettoization of genes by class or by geography in China, which you would expect if kinship ties were playing a larger part in people's decisions. There was never a caste system so the East Asian elites and lower classes share similar genes. China is also fairly homogenous across regions: It's still sometimes possible to guess whether someone is North Chinese or South Chinese, but it can be difficult, because China has been such a melting pot of genes. There are many Chinese families who can trace their family back to a particular village and still have an ancestral shrine there, but the members of their family have moved all over China and married strangers rather than being controlled by kin or clan. So although East Asia didn't have the same level of breakdown of kinship ties as the West, it still had various cultural practices that weakened kinship ties.
Okay, so what was the unique East Asian cultural pressure that allowed for less nepotistic and less clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected for, which in turn allowed the development of complex supra-familial institutions? I believe this cultural pressure was the Imperial Examination system.
It's hard to overstate how unique the Imperial Examination system in East Asia was. People today take it for granted that in the modern world standardized tests are used for university applications or jobs, but this can all be traced to the Imperial Examination system in East Asia. The development of the education system and selection of a professional civil service in Britain, France, Germany, etc. can all be directly traced to their exposure and then replication of the East Asian Imperial Examination system during the Age of Discovery not so long ago. An example of good ideas being copied.
The impact of the Imperial Examination system is also hard to overstate. In fact, it is very similar to today's environment. Think about how powerful the current university system is. For middle-class and upper-middle class families today it is inconceivable that their child will not obtain a university degree and it better be at a "good" university, or else there's the real worry that it will be hard to find a "good" job and the family risks falling down the social class ladder! For most middle-class and upper-middle class families today, university is literally being planned from the birth of their child. Parents start saving for university in a tax-advantage account upon the birth of their child. Parents agonize over whether the textured toy they gave their baby will stimulate their intellectual development. Parents carefully choose their preschools, elementary schools, and high schools that will give their child the best shot of going to the best university. Etc. All of these anxieties were very much the same under the Imperial Examination system, but even more so because it was the only way to achieve social mobility: passing the imperial exam was a class marker like having a university degree is today, and getting the "best" jobs was only possible by scoring particularly high on the imperial exam, similar to today how the "best" jobs go to those who get into an Ivy League university or get into med/law school. A huge percentage of the young population (particularly for that pre-modern time) took their shot at the imperial examination, so it had a huge cultural impact on East Asian society.
Most historians agree that the Imperial Examinations were remarkably free from nepotism and meritocratic over its 1000+ year history. The Imperial Exam came about because China was a large empire that could only be run by a large competent and professional civil service to run. (China's current borders make it the 4th biggest country in the world, multiple times larger than any European pre-modern state, and only surpassed by the modern states of Russia, Canada, and America, all of which reached their current borders only in modern times. China was a behemoth in pre-modern times) Accordingly, meritocracy was prized and nepotism was quashed as much as possible. There were various extreme measures taken to quash any nepotism, for example, having imperial exams sent to different regions to be graded so that there would be no connection between the exam taker and the exam marker. Having imperial exam answers copied out by scribes before being submitted for review so that an exam marker could not make out the identity of an exam taker based on their handwriting. The punishment for cheaters or corrupt exam officials was extremely harsh. Etc. It was also important for social stability that the imperial exams were fair and seen as fair, as it was often the only way to move up in social class. Think of it as the "Chinese Dream" equivalent to the "American Dream". If you work hard, study hard, you too can be prime minister of China one day.
In conclusion, the West and East both had cultural practices that selected for less nepotistic and clannish individuals, which allowed for the development of institutions that were supra-familial and super-charged development. The West got there through MFP and the myriad ways that re-shaped Western society. The East got there through the Imperial Examination system and the myriad ways that re-shaped Eastern society.
It is important to separate Japan: which coped by far the best with the Western challenge of all states outside the Eurosphere (Europe + settler societies), from China and its Confucian confreres of Korea and Vietnam.
In 1850, Japan’s institutional structure was remarkably similar to that of Europe in 1450. This was because Japan had always been a polity with competing political powers, so bargaining politics was entrenched, as was competition between local jurisdictions for peasants, merchants and trade. So, Japan simply had to “fast forward” European history. Hence, it could go from being a federalised medieval state in 1868 to being an industrial power by 1904.
The tendency of European Kings and rich men to have mistresses is irrelevant because they were not concubines: the children of mistresses had no legal standing. Being single-spouse societies, there were far more partnership marriages (through a common interest in their shared legitimate children) and so far more ability to make use of the capacities of elite women.
China suffered from a foreign dynasty, the pattern of dynastic decline, problems of bureaucratic government and a lack of a model of bargaining politics that could be readily “Westernised”. It also had a significantly weaker legal tradition than Japan (due to bureaucratic government and lack of pressure to entrench bargains in law).
Polygyny was also a serious issue in China. It created a non-breeding underclass that was an endless source of bandits and secret societies, so of social instability as dynasties declined.
On the other hand, a non-breeding underclass meant even stronger than normal for wet-rice-farming selection for strong executive control (which is almost entirely heritable). Something that the examination system intensified, as those with weak executive control dropped out of the breeding pool and those with very strong executive control got increased breeding opportunities, through concubines.
Kin systems with strong outbreeding taboos (e.g. no marriage within patronymics) will not produce a genetically segmented population. (Monotheism breaks down the ritual barriers between kin groups, so can lead to strong inbreeding, as Middle Eastern Islam demonstrates.) China was also too patriarchal-patrilineal to produce the South Indian system of maternal uncle-niece and first cousin marriages. Likely a survivor of matrilineal systems being supplanted by patrilineal brahmins more weakly in the South, as the backwash of the Indo-European pastoralist invasion was weaker than in the North. Which kept having wave after wave of invading patrilineal pastoralists.
Since the Chinese imperial state, from the Song dynasty on, was almost entirely a meritocratic command-and-control structure, it promoted clans as a form of social-self-government that permitted economising on administrative effort as there was strong constraint against expanding the command-and-control bureaucracy. Hence, by 1830, you could have one imperial magistrate (plus small staff) administering a county of 100,000 people.
I believe your remarks on the long term impacts of political fragmentation in the West, as opposed to political centralization in the East, are well developed in Walter Scheidel's book "Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity".
You write off IQ variance but it seems a plausible explanation to me. The developments in physics weren’t generated by the average IQ white guy.
As for cheating on the tests etc, it’s a fact that Asian students spend much more time studying each day than whites, and they perform better on tests, at least through highschool. Studying is a good thing… and scores obviously go up with this. However, I wonder how the cross cultural scores would compare if you controlled for study time.
Further, a Korean friend told me that the culture in South Korea is such that students work incredibly hard up through highschool in order to get into a good uni and they then coast from that point on. He says uni is when USA students begin to surpass the Koreans.
Finally, I work in a technical research field in industry and the top performers in the companies I’ve worked in have consistently almost all been white men. There are plenty of loser white guys around too.
I’m left thinking the variance hypothesis has some merit, Asian IQ is inflated by intense early study but this is not maintained to adult hood, and finally that the Asian program of intense early study really is focused on performing well on tests, which is an issue altogether different from developing new ideas.
The problem I have with the hypothesis that there is reduced IQ variance among East Asians is that it's never been proven and no one seems to have come up with a reason for why East Asians would have reduced IQ variance relative to other races. It seems like people have just worked backwards, noticing (rightfully in my opinion) that there are less extreme cases of success among East Asians despite their higher IQ's (ex. Nobel prizes, CEOs, etc.) and concluded that it must be because there is less IQ variance. I think there's a much simpler explanation. IQ is important and and has conclusively been shown to improve life outcomes in every imaginable way, but there's been findings that personality traits can also play a part in an individual's success. In other words, two individuals might have similar IQs, but one may achieve much greater success due to their personality traits. For example, our host, Richard, has remarked in an earlier post that most people tend to be too agreeable. I believe that those who have achieved extreme, extreme success often tend to be fairly disagreeable. Stereotypically, which is probably largely accurate, East Asians are more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic, which actually gets to the results you've mentioned. Being agreeable, conscientious, and less neurotic helps you to be pretty successful and is a lower-variance strategy, but to achieve extreme success you likely need to be disagreeable; conscientiousness maybe doesn't matter as much because you won't be in the technical weeds; and neurotic. So I kind of agree that there is less variance among East Asians relative to Westerners (including in extreme success), but I think it's not due to IQ but cultural/personality factors.
The whole point of IQ or g-loaded tests is that preparation can't help much. That's why it's been so hard to close the IQ gap between races despite heavy government investment and intervention. No test is perfectly g-loaded and some test prep definitely helps, but diminishing returns set in very quickly. East Asians study more and I would argue that increases their GPA, but doesn't cause the White-East Asian gap on IQ, SAT, etc. standardized tests.
Your Korean friend is correct about the university system in East Asia. Although I've heard that the Ivy League is similar. Very hard to get in, but impossible to flunk out. Once you get into the Ivy League, unless you want to go to grad school after (Med school/Law school) and so need high grades (but even then, the Ivy League is notorious for grade inflation), you should be networking with your classmates, trying out your interests, and doing interesting things rather than grinding for a higher GPA.
One other point that you didn't bring up, but which I've seen thrown around so I'll just address it, is that East Asians mature faster than Whites and that's why they do well in high school and university on standardized tests relative to Whites, but at the end of their careers haven't achieved the extreme success that their IQ would suggest. This is demonstrably false as studies have shown that in terms of sexual maturation, brain development, etc. the continuum from earliest to latest maturation is: Black < White < East Asian. East Asians are actually at a disadvantage competing against same-age peers that are Black or White because of their slower development. Again, I think the observation of less extreme success from East Asians at the end of their careers does not mean that the IQ test is wrong in some way, but that there are other factors other than IQ, such as personality/culture, that also contribute to success.
IQ is important and is wrongfully being suppressed, but I think that this has led those in dissident circles (like us, who discuss IQ openly) to now overly fetishize IQ and not also look at other factors that also contribute to success, like culture/personality traits.
I dislike this utilization of the term "proven", but it is common to see smaller standard dev. in raw test scores. Here is a rather casual, but easy-to-understand calculation from 1982.
An aside, but ive always thought personality differences could help explain greater male IQ variance as well: e.g. men are more aggressive and competitive than women, and therefore perhaps more likely to be encouraged by success and discouraged by failure, leading to greater extremes in male intellectual development and performance. Anyway.
the one stat I’ve seen about variance had to do with Jewish population and their prevalence among those with iq > x. In the right tail they heavily dominate. Don’t have a ref for this on hand and it might be wrong.
Also, I just 100% don’t believe at all that studying doesn’t help much for sat scores etc. given this belief of mine, the fact that Asian students in their youth study 2 hours per night vs 1 hour for whites explains the vast majority (possibly all) of the score difference imho.
I agree on the culture stuff and idea that asians are more pro social etc.
I don't think it has to be either-or. During Japan's Meiji Restoration, Japanese people took a lot of Western influence and grew so powerful that it beat Russia in a war in 1907, then proceeded to invade mainland Asia in the 1930s, easily crushing resistance. You can create an advanced society by blending Confucian-style social dynamics with the knowledge and technology of a globalized world.
"I think it would be an interesting study to see if Westerners were more collectivistic during the Roman Empire, and became more individualistic since then."
This question is one of the themes of J. Campbell's book The Masks of Gods (Occidental Mythology) and his following books in the series. His analysis, from religious and anthropological evidence, is that there has been a European culture region, going back to neolithic times, which has been unusually individualistic in its respect for individual judgement and independent excellence. He spends some time, not on Roman culture, but rather Ancient Greek culture which he finds revolutionary for the time in its respect for the individual in law, honor of individual human reasoning, and rational individual striving towards realization of the good life.
Dr. Campbell's analysis, doesn't focus on cultural/genetic factors that fostered the growth of individuality in the West, but it does suggest that there have been a multitude of factors that have interacted through time to make Western culture individualistic.
could one of the geographic reasons be that europe has much more coastline than china? seafaring both 1) exposes one more to genuinely diverse ideas and hence more exposed to heterodox ideas and 2) makes unified rule more difficult (so that there can be kingdoms traversed by horseback in a day bc those kingdoms are less easily conquered as a result of access to the sea)
Dorn's Geography of Science makes the case that while many cultures developed math and science, in every location except Greece they were in the service of "hydraulic kingdoms," basically STEM was used to control floods and irrigation everywhere else. Greece was both in contact with many cultures in the Mediterranean but also gave birth to speculative reason in part because of the independent city states becoming wealthy through trade with no deference to a hydraulic kingdom to dominate them.
Yes maybe, but that hardly explains why you can't marry your dead wife's sister. Or maybe that was more to stop husbands doing away with their wives once they realised how hot the wife's younger sister was.
I haven't read Henrich's book; the thing in your review that makes me instantly suspicious is the claim that the combination "incest taboo + monogamy" was a creation of the early Church. In pre-Christian Rome, both of these were the norm as well. It was a monogamous society, and while the incest taboo wasn't taken nearly as far as it was in early Christianity - by the 1st century first cousin marriages were permitted, though rare - marriages were largely exogamous in a way that was not directly connected to blood, since people (or at least freeborn people) were expected to marry outside their "clan" (gens). This precluded marriages to even distant relations on one's father's side, although it was possible to marry closer relatives on one's mother's side, since clan membership was patrilineal, and hence (by definition) one's mother came from a different clan. (The best thing I know on this is in Italian: Gennaro Franciosi's Clan gentilizio e strutture monogamiche. ) Of other things on Henrich's list in the table you provide, the Romans also had inheritance by testament and individual ownership, though they did have adoption.
Of course, one might note that Rome itself had some moderate success in spreading its influence ...
. I also want to know the best arguments the church had for this emphasis in their church laws. Natural law/evolution seems to be a circular argument. The church develops science as we know it by the growing recognition that “it’s not them, it’s is”, them being witches Jews etc, and that abusing those people is not going to solve our problems. I’d like to see a link but nothing presents itself.
My guru Rene Girard suggested that men seeking a mate from far away was not an incest taboo, but an effort to avoid community tension and jealousy. I wonder if the Christians discovered a similar social advantage rather than biological.
The Church also made divorce impossible (annulments mean you were never married in first place because of some defect of the process, it's not a divorce)
Yes, though that article itself acknowledges that Egypt was unusual within the Roman empire.
It's probably also worth noting that Sabine Huebner in a major article published not long after the piece you link to (Journal of Roman Studies 2007 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/20430570) argued that the "incestuous" marriages recorded in the papyri were rarely between blood relations, but were in fact almost all between adopted siblings. Huebner's argument has not by any means been universally accepted, but she makes a strong case that is worth taking seriously.
You say the ancient christians couldn't have foreseen what would happen, but I believe the ancient Romans also banned cousin marriage explicitly to prevent political clans and familial dynasties. The early christians in NW Europe imported this idea for the same reason.
This happened by means of early christian scholars possessing knowledge on old roman law, and migrating north. They passed that knowledge on and dressed it in christian ideas of universal brotherhood and loving everyone equally regardless as to your family connection.
I suppose you are still right that they didn't foresee the huge consequences millennia later, but there is a continuity between what happened and what they were consciously trying to do: break down family units so that powerful family units would not form and destabilize society
I don't buy the argument that Christianity created Western individualism. You could argue that it created institutions and enforced codes that reward individualistic behavior, sure, but why did it create such institutions in the first place? Why did the people in charge of the church feel such a strong need to bring these things into being? Competition with other religions doesn't explain this in my opinion. In nowhere on earth was there more intense religious competition that in the Middle East, yet not a single Middle Eastern religion produced something like the pro-individualistic attitude of Western Christianity, not even Middle Eastern Christianity itself. Western individualism predates the church, which merely helped reinforce individualistic attitudes long in place among the people of northwestern Europe. The idea that clergymen could arbitrarily force an idea and a way of life upon millions of believers, across such a wide swath of territory, strikes me as implausible. Religious teachings have to gel somewhat with what people already believe to gain some traction, otherwise they'll face levels of friction impossible to overcome, not even by the most fanatical of authorities. Religion is shaped by people's values, and is largely a reflection of their mental dispositions. Besides, I would like to mention that if Christianity really did explain western individualism, then you would expect the places that converted first to be the most individualistic, while those that converted last to be the least so. In reality, of course, it's the other way around, with Scandinavia and northern Europe being far more individualistic than the rest of Europe.
“people at the deepest level consider intelligence to be the most important trait in determining the value of an individual or group”
This is true, in my experience. I used to work at a university, and even among colleagues with graduate degrees and doctorates the idea that IQ tests are “biased” is extremely common. Intelligence differences between groups on average have huge implications for human civilization and even ostensibly intelligent people either don’t realize it, purposely ignore it, or can’t understand the strength of the evidence supporting it.
Smart people’s refusal to accept things simply because they don’t want them to be true is going to get humanity in trouble. My feeling is that this impulse is the seed for the Fermian “great filter”.
Can you expand upon your last sentence on how this impulse is the seed for the Fermian “great filter”? Do you mean that since intelligence is a taboo topic among the most intelligent, dysgenics is allowed to continue unabated, thus leading to a cycle of civilization from the eugenic high to the dysgenic low?
Apologies for not being clearer. I think it comes down to two things: dysgenics on the one hand as you describe, but also a feedback loop of bad information acting as a barrier to progress.
Their enhanced capacity to work with abstract models and do rational analysis defo seems to have given Western Europeans an adaptive edge that led to their empires. Seems clear.
But now we seem to face issues relating to "over-rationalism" - dissociation from the body, leading to obsessive identification with personal perspectives, leading to culture war and a terror of anyone ever getting psychologically triggered.
So maybe what made us powerful will finally bring us down.
> While the former field of research [IQ] as used to make cross-national comparisons has been roundly criticized and debated, PISA provides a rich database that seeks to be representative of each country’s student body.
PISA tests teenagers on skills/knowledge taught in schools. Doesn't this mean that, in poorer countries with failing educational systems, it's only partly measuring general cognitive ability and partly measuring the quality of the schools the subjects attended?
> Earlier in their history, European languages had terms for things like “mother’s sister” or “male cousin on my dad’s side” instead of just saying “aunt” or “cousin.” Such distinctions matter in societies in which clans and extended family relations are important and descent is traced through either the male or female line alone, and so these kinds of words are still used in modern languages such as Arabic. They would disappear across Europe, first in the Romance languages like French and Italian around 700, and then German and English by around 1100…
To add another datum: this is only partly true in Polish. The words for 'uncle' ('stryj' is paternal, 'wujek' is maternal) and 'nephew/niece' ('bratanek/bratanica' (depending on gender) is one's brother's child, 'siostrzeniec/siostrzenica' is one's sister's child; these are derived from 'brat' (brother) and 'siostra' (sister)) specify whether the relation is through a male or female relative, but the words for 'aunt' ('ciocia'), 'grandparent' ('dziadek/babcia'), and 'cousin' ('kuzyn/kuzynka'; this last word was borrowed from French but the others I've mentioned were inherited from Proto-Slavic) don't. Since the people of Poland mostly converted to Catholicism from the 10th to the 12th century AD, I would expect that a consistent influence of the Christian MFP on kinship terms would have had a similar effect on the Slavic languages as on the Romance languages by the present time.
We don’t have good measures of “quality of schools” other than how students perform in them. It’s pretty easy to predict what the “good” and “bad” schools tend to be from the student body, whether within or across countries.
"bans on cousin marriage would have led to improved health and cognitive ability" IIRC you can fix inbreeding depression with one generation of outbreeding.
I would read the rest of this post if the author could explain how this is possible: "the Synod of Elvira in 305-306 AD decreeing that a man could not take communion if he married his dead sister’s wife".
How is it that in 305 AD his dead sister had a wife?
If you look at the marriages of the major monarchs of Europe - e.g., kings of France, England, Habsburgs - from the 12th century onwards, well over 50% of the marriages violate the incest taboos. The popes usually gave dispensations for various reasons, almost all political or financial. Law and practice had very little to do with one another, at least at this lofty status level.
The property-owning peasant and bourgeois craftsman has exactly the same incentive as the king to skirt the incest taboos: marry your cousin living next door, combine your inherited properties, get richer. I'd like to see some studies of what people actually did, in contrast to what the canon lawyers said they should do, and I expect that data for such studies are there.
I agree about the neglect of genetics as an explanation, though. That is absolutely standard in academia these days. "Oh of course genetics has lots of influence and might account for some of this" and then crickets, because they don't want that answer to be true.
The extraordinary success of East Asians in the US indicates that Eastern genes and Western culture are quite compatible. Why has Western culture not been more successful in East Asia?
I also thought this was an amazing book. I agree that Henrich only partially addressed the East Asian question, but in my humble opinion I think he was on the right track, even if he didn't adequately explain it. I'm East Asian btw.
I think the West's earlier encounters with non-East Asian races made it clear that the West's IQ was superior and so it was concluded that it was because of IQ that the West was so successful. It's only been in the last few decades that there's been a realization that East Asian IQ is actually higher than Western IQ. This has unnerved a lot of people as IQ/intelligence has been associated with greater success in the minds of many. This has led to a lot of copium: East Asians are only testing the smartest, are cheating on the IQ test, not as creative, less variance in IQ distribution, etc. The fact is that the West triumphed over the East and I think Henrich does a masterful job of explaining the key factor why the West ended up triumphing over the East despite having a marginally lower IQ.
East Asians are the race most similar to Westerns, culturally if not genetically. There is not much cousin marriage/incest. East Asians are able to develop complex institutions based on meritocracy rather than kinship. With such similarities, a lot of scholars have wondered why the Industrial Revolution started in the western-most tip of the Eurasian landmass rather than the eastern-most tip, especially when East Asia was more advanced for most of history. I believe the reason is because Westerners were more individualistic. This greater individualism led to the development of more heterodox ideas, which due to greater labour mobility and openness to heterodox ideas spread the best and most innovative ideas throughout society and allowed for the West to rapidly advance technologically. The end result of this was that tens of thousand of Westerners with advanced military technology had more force projection than empires of tens of millions of people.
So I think Henrich was right that Westerners are uniquely individualistic which is why they have created the most successful societies ever, but I think his Marriage and Family Plan (MFP) explanation isn't the complete picture for why Westerners are so individualistic, particularly relative to East Asians.
One of the most glaring differences between the structures of Western and East Asian societies has been the unified societies in East Asia versus the many small states in Europe. Through random happenstance, Europe was never able to re-unify after the Roman Empire although attempts were made (Charlemagne - Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon - Continental System). Conversely, despite China sometimes being invaded, undergoing civil wars, and breaking up into warring states, again through random happenstance, it has always been able to re-unify. (There's probably some geographic/resource reason for the difference in trajectories of history in Europe and East Asia). A strong central state generally means safety from foreign invasion and help when there are floods/droughts/plagues, but it generally represses creativity. In Europe instead you've got these thousands of small duchies and kingdoms. As an East Asian, it sounds ridiculous to me that some of these kingdoms are small enough that you can travel by horse from one end to the other in a day, but they somehow survived for hundreds of years without some bigger neighbour swallowing them up lol. But anyways, because in Europe you've got these thousands of kingdoms, you've got thousands of different systems and the best ones will flourish and the poor ones will fade out. There's also competition and an arms-race between these thousands of kingdoms, which further incentivizes rapid technological development. These are a much better set of circumstances for individualism to flourish.
So I think the cultural differences between Westerners and the rest of the world are what have allowed them to achieve such success. (It also just so happens to be a more palatable explanation than IQ differences between races, which is why Henrich got poached from UBC to Harvard for his work instead of getting cancelled). Vis-a-vis non-East Asians these differences were due to the MFP of Westerners. East Asians generally had the MFP as well (although not from the church of course), but due to largely living in massive unified states were more collectivist versus Westerners who became more individualistic. (I think it would be an interesting study to see if Westerners were more collectivistic during the Roman Empire, and became more individualistic since then).
This also ties in with a lot of the insights you've recently come to Richard. For example, China being more collectivistic than the West by pursuing a zero-Covid policy. The collectivism also explains lower crime and greater social stability. I also believe the collectivism explains the lower fertility seen in East Asian populations.
Incidentally, I think the zero Covid policy is an unforced error but not fatal, so I wouldn't be so quick to write off East Asia yet haha. It seems to me that the modern world increasingly favours complex large-scale resource mobilization and effective state capacity, which I believe East Asia does better (for example, the chip war going on right now is basically a battle of industrial policy between China and the US), and East Asia has rightfully adopted the cultural values that made the West successful, so in my mind it still remains an open question of whether Eastern or Western society will be favoured to prosper most over the next century.
“East Asians generally had the MFP as well (although not from the church of course), but due to largely living in massive unified states were more collectivist versus Westerners who became more individualistic.”
Henrich argues that East Asia was very late to adopting the MFP. It was the Meiji Restoration in Japan and then later in China and Korea. I don’t know the history that well, but know that Chinese emperors had a lot of concubines throughout history. South Korea apparently only equalized inheritance between men and women in 1991? He writes:
“Second, their more powerful top-down orientations permitted these societies to rapidly adopt and implement key kin-based institutions copied from WEIRD societies. Japan, for example, began copying WEIRD civil institutions in the 1880s during the Meiji Restoration, including prohibitions on polygynous marriage. Similarly, as noted earlier, the Chinese Communist government initiated a program in the 1950s to abolish clans, polygyny, arranged marriages, unions between close relatives, and purely patrilineal inheritance (i.e., daughters had to receive an equal inheritance). In South Korea, the government passed a Western-style civil code in 1957 that required the consent of both grooms and brides to marry, prohibited polygynous marriage, and forbade marriage to relatives out to third cousins, through both blood and marriage. Since then, a variety of amendments have shifted South Korean society even further away from patriarchal intensive kinship. In 1991, inheritance finally became bilateral, so sons and daughters now inherit equally.”
In my previous post I argued that East Asians and Westerners have slight differences, notably collectivism vs individualism, which explains the greater success of the West over the East. Now I'll address why I think East Asians and Westerns are still largely similar and East Asians were able to achieve much of the success of the West despite East Asians not having the exact same MFP as the West.
My assertion is that East Asians and Westerners ended up independently evolving under their own unique cultural pressures, but that they reached a similar point. Namely, both societies allowed less nepotistic and less clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected for, which in turn allowed the development of complex impersonal institutions that are supra-familial, in other words the institution does not require the ties of family, tribe, clan, etc. to operate effectively and with minimal corruption. This is a higher level of development because a familial/tribal/clan institution can only get so big and often sacrifices competence and effectiveness because instead of staffing the institution with the most competent person, you're picking someone just because they're kin. It's hard to create a supra-familial institution because the natural tendency for humans is nepotism and favouring kin.
These complex supra-familial institutions developed in the West because the church, Christianity, and the MFP literally tore apart kinship ties through the marriage and inheritance rules mentioned by Henrich, which minimized the opportunity for nepotism and clannishness and allowed for less nepotistic and clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected.
The East obviously did not have the church and christianity and the MFP marriage and inheritance laws that Henrich noted came from the church and christianity. Henrich is still right that Westerners are truly unique due to the unique selective development from the church, christianity, and the MFP. Nevertheless, it could be said that the East had its own unique cultural selective pressure that allowed for less nepotistic and clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected and thus allowed for supra-familial institutions to develop. But before I get to that cultural mechanism, I want to make a few comments about the quotes of Henrich you selected. Also I want to preface, that I read the book over a year ago so I don't remember specific parts.
Like in the West, cousin marriage is very rare in East Asia so there wasn't the depression of IQ seen in regions where cousin marriage is high. Polygamy was practiced in the upper classes in East Asia, but that seems to me no different from the West where Kings were polygamous and the lower classes were monogamous because the church had a harder time limiting the behaviour of Kings. Clans are more a feature of less-developed areas. China is remarkably homogenous for such a huge land mass and with so many millions of people. The classification of 90%+ of Chinese, i.e. hundreds of millions of Chinese across all regions of China, as "Han" is politically convenient, but also close to reality as they all share similar genes. You don't see a ghettoization of genes by class or by geography in China, which you would expect if kinship ties were playing a larger part in people's decisions. There was never a caste system so the East Asian elites and lower classes share similar genes. China is also fairly homogenous across regions: It's still sometimes possible to guess whether someone is North Chinese or South Chinese, but it can be difficult, because China has been such a melting pot of genes. There are many Chinese families who can trace their family back to a particular village and still have an ancestral shrine there, but the members of their family have moved all over China and married strangers rather than being controlled by kin or clan. So although East Asia didn't have the same level of breakdown of kinship ties as the West, it still had various cultural practices that weakened kinship ties.
Okay, so what was the unique East Asian cultural pressure that allowed for less nepotistic and less clannish individuals to flourish and thus be selected for, which in turn allowed the development of complex supra-familial institutions? I believe this cultural pressure was the Imperial Examination system.
It's hard to overstate how unique the Imperial Examination system in East Asia was. People today take it for granted that in the modern world standardized tests are used for university applications or jobs, but this can all be traced to the Imperial Examination system in East Asia. The development of the education system and selection of a professional civil service in Britain, France, Germany, etc. can all be directly traced to their exposure and then replication of the East Asian Imperial Examination system during the Age of Discovery not so long ago. An example of good ideas being copied.
The impact of the Imperial Examination system is also hard to overstate. In fact, it is very similar to today's environment. Think about how powerful the current university system is. For middle-class and upper-middle class families today it is inconceivable that their child will not obtain a university degree and it better be at a "good" university, or else there's the real worry that it will be hard to find a "good" job and the family risks falling down the social class ladder! For most middle-class and upper-middle class families today, university is literally being planned from the birth of their child. Parents start saving for university in a tax-advantage account upon the birth of their child. Parents agonize over whether the textured toy they gave their baby will stimulate their intellectual development. Parents carefully choose their preschools, elementary schools, and high schools that will give their child the best shot of going to the best university. Etc. All of these anxieties were very much the same under the Imperial Examination system, but even more so because it was the only way to achieve social mobility: passing the imperial exam was a class marker like having a university degree is today, and getting the "best" jobs was only possible by scoring particularly high on the imperial exam, similar to today how the "best" jobs go to those who get into an Ivy League university or get into med/law school. A huge percentage of the young population (particularly for that pre-modern time) took their shot at the imperial examination, so it had a huge cultural impact on East Asian society.
Most historians agree that the Imperial Examinations were remarkably free from nepotism and meritocratic over its 1000+ year history. The Imperial Exam came about because China was a large empire that could only be run by a large competent and professional civil service to run. (China's current borders make it the 4th biggest country in the world, multiple times larger than any European pre-modern state, and only surpassed by the modern states of Russia, Canada, and America, all of which reached their current borders only in modern times. China was a behemoth in pre-modern times) Accordingly, meritocracy was prized and nepotism was quashed as much as possible. There were various extreme measures taken to quash any nepotism, for example, having imperial exams sent to different regions to be graded so that there would be no connection between the exam taker and the exam marker. Having imperial exam answers copied out by scribes before being submitted for review so that an exam marker could not make out the identity of an exam taker based on their handwriting. The punishment for cheaters or corrupt exam officials was extremely harsh. Etc. It was also important for social stability that the imperial exams were fair and seen as fair, as it was often the only way to move up in social class. Think of it as the "Chinese Dream" equivalent to the "American Dream". If you work hard, study hard, you too can be prime minister of China one day.
In conclusion, the West and East both had cultural practices that selected for less nepotistic and clannish individuals, which allowed for the development of institutions that were supra-familial and super-charged development. The West got there through MFP and the myriad ways that re-shaped Western society. The East got there through the Imperial Examination system and the myriad ways that re-shaped Eastern society.
It is important to separate Japan: which coped by far the best with the Western challenge of all states outside the Eurosphere (Europe + settler societies), from China and its Confucian confreres of Korea and Vietnam.
In 1850, Japan’s institutional structure was remarkably similar to that of Europe in 1450. This was because Japan had always been a polity with competing political powers, so bargaining politics was entrenched, as was competition between local jurisdictions for peasants, merchants and trade. So, Japan simply had to “fast forward” European history. Hence, it could go from being a federalised medieval state in 1868 to being an industrial power by 1904.
The tendency of European Kings and rich men to have mistresses is irrelevant because they were not concubines: the children of mistresses had no legal standing. Being single-spouse societies, there were far more partnership marriages (through a common interest in their shared legitimate children) and so far more ability to make use of the capacities of elite women.
China suffered from a foreign dynasty, the pattern of dynastic decline, problems of bureaucratic government and a lack of a model of bargaining politics that could be readily “Westernised”. It also had a significantly weaker legal tradition than Japan (due to bureaucratic government and lack of pressure to entrench bargains in law).
Polygyny was also a serious issue in China. It created a non-breeding underclass that was an endless source of bandits and secret societies, so of social instability as dynasties declined.
On the other hand, a non-breeding underclass meant even stronger than normal for wet-rice-farming selection for strong executive control (which is almost entirely heritable). Something that the examination system intensified, as those with weak executive control dropped out of the breeding pool and those with very strong executive control got increased breeding opportunities, through concubines.
Kin systems with strong outbreeding taboos (e.g. no marriage within patronymics) will not produce a genetically segmented population. (Monotheism breaks down the ritual barriers between kin groups, so can lead to strong inbreeding, as Middle Eastern Islam demonstrates.) China was also too patriarchal-patrilineal to produce the South Indian system of maternal uncle-niece and first cousin marriages. Likely a survivor of matrilineal systems being supplanted by patrilineal brahmins more weakly in the South, as the backwash of the Indo-European pastoralist invasion was weaker than in the North. Which kept having wave after wave of invading patrilineal pastoralists.
Since the Chinese imperial state, from the Song dynasty on, was almost entirely a meritocratic command-and-control structure, it promoted clans as a form of social-self-government that permitted economising on administrative effort as there was strong constraint against expanding the command-and-control bureaucracy. Hence, by 1830, you could have one imperial magistrate (plus small staff) administering a county of 100,000 people.
A very useful analysis of the economic implications of polygyny is here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/polygamy-the-commodification-of-women-and-underdevelopment/46B0CC134576212650F64E167C8451DE
I believe your remarks on the long term impacts of political fragmentation in the West, as opposed to political centralization in the East, are well developed in Walter Scheidel's book "Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity".
You write off IQ variance but it seems a plausible explanation to me. The developments in physics weren’t generated by the average IQ white guy.
As for cheating on the tests etc, it’s a fact that Asian students spend much more time studying each day than whites, and they perform better on tests, at least through highschool. Studying is a good thing… and scores obviously go up with this. However, I wonder how the cross cultural scores would compare if you controlled for study time.
Further, a Korean friend told me that the culture in South Korea is such that students work incredibly hard up through highschool in order to get into a good uni and they then coast from that point on. He says uni is when USA students begin to surpass the Koreans.
Finally, I work in a technical research field in industry and the top performers in the companies I’ve worked in have consistently almost all been white men. There are plenty of loser white guys around too.
I’m left thinking the variance hypothesis has some merit, Asian IQ is inflated by intense early study but this is not maintained to adult hood, and finally that the Asian program of intense early study really is focused on performing well on tests, which is an issue altogether different from developing new ideas.
The problem I have with the hypothesis that there is reduced IQ variance among East Asians is that it's never been proven and no one seems to have come up with a reason for why East Asians would have reduced IQ variance relative to other races. It seems like people have just worked backwards, noticing (rightfully in my opinion) that there are less extreme cases of success among East Asians despite their higher IQ's (ex. Nobel prizes, CEOs, etc.) and concluded that it must be because there is less IQ variance. I think there's a much simpler explanation. IQ is important and and has conclusively been shown to improve life outcomes in every imaginable way, but there's been findings that personality traits can also play a part in an individual's success. In other words, two individuals might have similar IQs, but one may achieve much greater success due to their personality traits. For example, our host, Richard, has remarked in an earlier post that most people tend to be too agreeable. I believe that those who have achieved extreme, extreme success often tend to be fairly disagreeable. Stereotypically, which is probably largely accurate, East Asians are more agreeable, more conscientious, and less neurotic, which actually gets to the results you've mentioned. Being agreeable, conscientious, and less neurotic helps you to be pretty successful and is a lower-variance strategy, but to achieve extreme success you likely need to be disagreeable; conscientiousness maybe doesn't matter as much because you won't be in the technical weeds; and neurotic. So I kind of agree that there is less variance among East Asians relative to Westerners (including in extreme success), but I think it's not due to IQ but cultural/personality factors.
The whole point of IQ or g-loaded tests is that preparation can't help much. That's why it's been so hard to close the IQ gap between races despite heavy government investment and intervention. No test is perfectly g-loaded and some test prep definitely helps, but diminishing returns set in very quickly. East Asians study more and I would argue that increases their GPA, but doesn't cause the White-East Asian gap on IQ, SAT, etc. standardized tests.
Your Korean friend is correct about the university system in East Asia. Although I've heard that the Ivy League is similar. Very hard to get in, but impossible to flunk out. Once you get into the Ivy League, unless you want to go to grad school after (Med school/Law school) and so need high grades (but even then, the Ivy League is notorious for grade inflation), you should be networking with your classmates, trying out your interests, and doing interesting things rather than grinding for a higher GPA.
One other point that you didn't bring up, but which I've seen thrown around so I'll just address it, is that East Asians mature faster than Whites and that's why they do well in high school and university on standardized tests relative to Whites, but at the end of their careers haven't achieved the extreme success that their IQ would suggest. This is demonstrably false as studies have shown that in terms of sexual maturation, brain development, etc. the continuum from earliest to latest maturation is: Black < White < East Asian. East Asians are actually at a disadvantage competing against same-age peers that are Black or White because of their slower development. Again, I think the observation of less extreme success from East Asians at the end of their careers does not mean that the IQ test is wrong in some way, but that there are other factors other than IQ, such as personality/culture, that also contribute to success.
IQ is important and is wrongfully being suppressed, but I think that this has led those in dissident circles (like us, who discuss IQ openly) to now overly fetishize IQ and not also look at other factors that also contribute to success, like culture/personality traits.
"never been proven".
I dislike this utilization of the term "proven", but it is common to see smaller standard dev. in raw test scores. Here is a rather casual, but easy-to-understand calculation from 1982.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/301738a0.pdf
An aside, but ive always thought personality differences could help explain greater male IQ variance as well: e.g. men are more aggressive and competitive than women, and therefore perhaps more likely to be encouraged by success and discouraged by failure, leading to greater extremes in male intellectual development and performance. Anyway.
the one stat I’ve seen about variance had to do with Jewish population and their prevalence among those with iq > x. In the right tail they heavily dominate. Don’t have a ref for this on hand and it might be wrong.
Also, I just 100% don’t believe at all that studying doesn’t help much for sat scores etc. given this belief of mine, the fact that Asian students in their youth study 2 hours per night vs 1 hour for whites explains the vast majority (possibly all) of the score difference imho.
I agree on the culture stuff and idea that asians are more pro social etc.
I don't think it has to be either-or. During Japan's Meiji Restoration, Japanese people took a lot of Western influence and grew so powerful that it beat Russia in a war in 1907, then proceeded to invade mainland Asia in the 1930s, easily crushing resistance. You can create an advanced society by blending Confucian-style social dynamics with the knowledge and technology of a globalized world.
"I think it would be an interesting study to see if Westerners were more collectivistic during the Roman Empire, and became more individualistic since then."
This question is one of the themes of J. Campbell's book The Masks of Gods (Occidental Mythology) and his following books in the series. His analysis, from religious and anthropological evidence, is that there has been a European culture region, going back to neolithic times, which has been unusually individualistic in its respect for individual judgement and independent excellence. He spends some time, not on Roman culture, but rather Ancient Greek culture which he finds revolutionary for the time in its respect for the individual in law, honor of individual human reasoning, and rational individual striving towards realization of the good life.
Dr. Campbell's analysis, doesn't focus on cultural/genetic factors that fostered the growth of individuality in the West, but it does suggest that there have been a multitude of factors that have interacted through time to make Western culture individualistic.
could one of the geographic reasons be that europe has much more coastline than china? seafaring both 1) exposes one more to genuinely diverse ideas and hence more exposed to heterodox ideas and 2) makes unified rule more difficult (so that there can be kingdoms traversed by horseback in a day bc those kingdoms are less easily conquered as a result of access to the sea)
Dorn's Geography of Science makes the case that while many cultures developed math and science, in every location except Greece they were in the service of "hydraulic kingdoms," basically STEM was used to control floods and irrigation everywhere else. Greece was both in contact with many cultures in the Mediterranean but also gave birth to speculative reason in part because of the independent city states becoming wealthy through trade with no deference to a hydraulic kingdom to dominate them.
https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Science-Professor-Harold-Dorn/dp/0801841518
Some high members of the church might have known about the harm of incest to children because of their knowledge of animal breeding.
Yes maybe, but that hardly explains why you can't marry your dead wife's sister. Or maybe that was more to stop husbands doing away with their wives once they realised how hot the wife's younger sister was.
I haven't read Henrich's book; the thing in your review that makes me instantly suspicious is the claim that the combination "incest taboo + monogamy" was a creation of the early Church. In pre-Christian Rome, both of these were the norm as well. It was a monogamous society, and while the incest taboo wasn't taken nearly as far as it was in early Christianity - by the 1st century first cousin marriages were permitted, though rare - marriages were largely exogamous in a way that was not directly connected to blood, since people (or at least freeborn people) were expected to marry outside their "clan" (gens). This precluded marriages to even distant relations on one's father's side, although it was possible to marry closer relatives on one's mother's side, since clan membership was patrilineal, and hence (by definition) one's mother came from a different clan. (The best thing I know on this is in Italian: Gennaro Franciosi's Clan gentilizio e strutture monogamiche. ) Of other things on Henrich's list in the table you provide, the Romans also had inheritance by testament and individual ownership, though they did have adoption.
Of course, one might note that Rome itself had some moderate success in spreading its influence ...
. I also want to know the best arguments the church had for this emphasis in their church laws. Natural law/evolution seems to be a circular argument. The church develops science as we know it by the growing recognition that “it’s not them, it’s is”, them being witches Jews etc, and that abusing those people is not going to solve our problems. I’d like to see a link but nothing presents itself.
My guru Rene Girard suggested that men seeking a mate from far away was not an incest taboo, but an effort to avoid community tension and jealousy. I wonder if the Christians discovered a similar social advantage rather than biological.
There was a lot of incest in the second biggest city of the Roman Empire, Alexandria.
And it's info from surviving documents, like papyri
https://www.academia.edu/205164/Incest_Laws_and_Absent_Taboos_in_Roman_Egypt
The Church also made divorce impossible (annulments mean you were never married in first place because of some defect of the process, it's not a divorce)
Yes, though that article itself acknowledges that Egypt was unusual within the Roman empire.
It's probably also worth noting that Sabine Huebner in a major article published not long after the piece you link to (Journal of Roman Studies 2007 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/20430570) argued that the "incestuous" marriages recorded in the papyri were rarely between blood relations, but were in fact almost all between adopted siblings. Huebner's argument has not by any means been universally accepted, but she makes a strong case that is worth taking seriously.
You say the ancient christians couldn't have foreseen what would happen, but I believe the ancient Romans also banned cousin marriage explicitly to prevent political clans and familial dynasties. The early christians in NW Europe imported this idea for the same reason.
This happened by means of early christian scholars possessing knowledge on old roman law, and migrating north. They passed that knowledge on and dressed it in christian ideas of universal brotherhood and loving everyone equally regardless as to your family connection.
I suppose you are still right that they didn't foresee the huge consequences millennia later, but there is a continuity between what happened and what they were consciously trying to do: break down family units so that powerful family units would not form and destabilize society
I don't buy the argument that Christianity created Western individualism. You could argue that it created institutions and enforced codes that reward individualistic behavior, sure, but why did it create such institutions in the first place? Why did the people in charge of the church feel such a strong need to bring these things into being? Competition with other religions doesn't explain this in my opinion. In nowhere on earth was there more intense religious competition that in the Middle East, yet not a single Middle Eastern religion produced something like the pro-individualistic attitude of Western Christianity, not even Middle Eastern Christianity itself. Western individualism predates the church, which merely helped reinforce individualistic attitudes long in place among the people of northwestern Europe. The idea that clergymen could arbitrarily force an idea and a way of life upon millions of believers, across such a wide swath of territory, strikes me as implausible. Religious teachings have to gel somewhat with what people already believe to gain some traction, otherwise they'll face levels of friction impossible to overcome, not even by the most fanatical of authorities. Religion is shaped by people's values, and is largely a reflection of their mental dispositions. Besides, I would like to mention that if Christianity really did explain western individualism, then you would expect the places that converted first to be the most individualistic, while those that converted last to be the least so. In reality, of course, it's the other way around, with Scandinavia and northern Europe being far more individualistic than the rest of Europe.
“people at the deepest level consider intelligence to be the most important trait in determining the value of an individual or group”
This is true, in my experience. I used to work at a university, and even among colleagues with graduate degrees and doctorates the idea that IQ tests are “biased” is extremely common. Intelligence differences between groups on average have huge implications for human civilization and even ostensibly intelligent people either don’t realize it, purposely ignore it, or can’t understand the strength of the evidence supporting it.
Smart people’s refusal to accept things simply because they don’t want them to be true is going to get humanity in trouble. My feeling is that this impulse is the seed for the Fermian “great filter”.
Can you expand upon your last sentence on how this impulse is the seed for the Fermian “great filter”? Do you mean that since intelligence is a taboo topic among the most intelligent, dysgenics is allowed to continue unabated, thus leading to a cycle of civilization from the eugenic high to the dysgenic low?
Apologies for not being clearer. I think it comes down to two things: dysgenics on the one hand as you describe, but also a feedback loop of bad information acting as a barrier to progress.
Their enhanced capacity to work with abstract models and do rational analysis defo seems to have given Western Europeans an adaptive edge that led to their empires. Seems clear.
But now we seem to face issues relating to "over-rationalism" - dissociation from the body, leading to obsessive identification with personal perspectives, leading to culture war and a terror of anyone ever getting psychologically triggered.
So maybe what made us powerful will finally bring us down.
> While the former field of research [IQ] as used to make cross-national comparisons has been roundly criticized and debated, PISA provides a rich database that seeks to be representative of each country’s student body.
PISA tests teenagers on skills/knowledge taught in schools. Doesn't this mean that, in poorer countries with failing educational systems, it's only partly measuring general cognitive ability and partly measuring the quality of the schools the subjects attended?
> Earlier in their history, European languages had terms for things like “mother’s sister” or “male cousin on my dad’s side” instead of just saying “aunt” or “cousin.” Such distinctions matter in societies in which clans and extended family relations are important and descent is traced through either the male or female line alone, and so these kinds of words are still used in modern languages such as Arabic. They would disappear across Europe, first in the Romance languages like French and Italian around 700, and then German and English by around 1100…
To add another datum: this is only partly true in Polish. The words for 'uncle' ('stryj' is paternal, 'wujek' is maternal) and 'nephew/niece' ('bratanek/bratanica' (depending on gender) is one's brother's child, 'siostrzeniec/siostrzenica' is one's sister's child; these are derived from 'brat' (brother) and 'siostra' (sister)) specify whether the relation is through a male or female relative, but the words for 'aunt' ('ciocia'), 'grandparent' ('dziadek/babcia'), and 'cousin' ('kuzyn/kuzynka'; this last word was borrowed from French but the others I've mentioned were inherited from Proto-Slavic) don't. Since the people of Poland mostly converted to Catholicism from the 10th to the 12th century AD, I would expect that a consistent influence of the Christian MFP on kinship terms would have had a similar effect on the Slavic languages as on the Romance languages by the present time.
We don’t have good measures of “quality of schools” other than how students perform in them. It’s pretty easy to predict what the “good” and “bad” schools tend to be from the student body, whether within or across countries.
"bans on cousin marriage would have led to improved health and cognitive ability" IIRC you can fix inbreeding depression with one generation of outbreeding.
I would read the rest of this post if the author could explain how this is possible: "the Synod of Elvira in 305-306 AD decreeing that a man could not take communion if he married his dead sister’s wife".
How is it that in 305 AD his dead sister had a wife?
Factually wrong about Yiddish. Not a single case of having special words for sub-categories of relatives which aren't present in English
The point is not about Yiddish today but in the Middle Ages.
Before the Renaissance there aren't any Yiddish texts, just some German inscriptions which use Hebrew letters.
Well, Henrich’s source for this is
Anderson, R. T. (1956). Changing Kinship in Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 29.
I don’t have access to it. Maybe you should email him.
Thanks
The Bovo Bukh was written in the early 16th century, which bespeaks the existence of Yiddish (spoken or written) in the late middle ages.
What's the one-word English term for מחותּן or מחותּנתטע?
If you look at the marriages of the major monarchs of Europe - e.g., kings of France, England, Habsburgs - from the 12th century onwards, well over 50% of the marriages violate the incest taboos. The popes usually gave dispensations for various reasons, almost all political or financial. Law and practice had very little to do with one another, at least at this lofty status level.
Henrich says that aristocrats (along with the poorest and more remote) were less bound by the Church’s prohibitions than the masses.
The property-owning peasant and bourgeois craftsman has exactly the same incentive as the king to skirt the incest taboos: marry your cousin living next door, combine your inherited properties, get richer. I'd like to see some studies of what people actually did, in contrast to what the canon lawyers said they should do, and I expect that data for such studies are there.
I think you might enjoy Weber’s Vocation Lectures. Some stuff is outdated / irrelevant now, but they are excellent.
I agree about the neglect of genetics as an explanation, though. That is absolutely standard in academia these days. "Oh of course genetics has lots of influence and might account for some of this" and then crickets, because they don't want that answer to be true.
The claims which seemed suspect and cherry-picked to you all looked like two-step processes to me, explaining why they might in fact be defensible.
The extraordinary success of East Asians in the US indicates that Eastern genes and Western culture are quite compatible. Why has Western culture not been more successful in East Asia?