Thoughts on Joseph Henrich’s “The WEIRDest People in the World”

[Update added 10-5-21]

I’m reading Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous - or rather listening to it on Audible. I mentioned this book as part of The Return of Civilization, as one of a suite of recent works that seem like they “admit the uniqueness and advanced development of Western Civilization … but neglect the central role of Christian principles in its development”.  After listening to most of the book I think my assessment is sort of right, but also sort of unfair. The acronym WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, and also calls out his thesis that people from this type of culture (my culture) are exceptional, or at least different from the rest of the world, both in terms of location (West vs. non-West) and time (Modern-West vs non-Modern-West).

The best thing about this book (other than the cool acronym in the title, of course) is the cornucopia of psychological and behavioral data from different places and societies around the world. This comparative cultural data makes it very clear that there is a distinct “West,” and that people from Western culture think and behave in different (WEIRD) ways compared to non-Westerners. WEIRD people have a more pro-social psychology, including for example having more trust, value fairness, and have much more internalized (guilt-based instead of shame-based) morality. These differences, after centuries of incubation, result in much greater extent of collaboration and dramatic improvement in overall prosperity. The book is very convincing on this point. 

The worst thing about this book is the reliance in several places on heavy doses of evolutionary psychology to tie up all the loose ends in a convenient narrative. For example, I skipped a lot of Chapter 4 when Henrich was “explaining” the origins of religion. Throughout the book he often comes back to evolutionary psychology narratives to connect the dots in the data. Evolutionary psychology is great for telling unfalsifiable stories that make sense from a certain point of view (atheistic materialism), but there are other plausible narratives to explain the facts if one can accept the existence of a God that cares about people. Since there is no way to test the evolutionary psychology claims and the narrative goes against my worldview I tend to ignore it. 

Three other points of interest to me:

1. On Christianity's causative role in the development of the West

Henrich is very clear that there is a direct causative link between the Christian church and the development of WEIRD pro-social characteristics that led to the overall success and prosperity of the West. So I consider that my assertion that he “neglect[s] the central role of Christian principles in its development” was unfair. However, Henrich tries to straddle both sides of the fence by attributing the beneficial effect of the church not to Christianity per se but to the Medieval Catholic church’s incidental (and corrupt, by his account) re-ordering of family structures to ban cousin marriage, polygamy, and Levirate marriage, and strengthen incest taboos (the “marriage and family program”, or “MFP”), particularly starting with Pope Gregory I (although a figure in the book shows much earlier origins of the MFP). The argument is that by demolishing the traditional kin-based clan structures, the Church opened the door for impersonal market-based society that fostered trust, incentivized rational approaches to decision-making, incentivized a strong work ethic, etc., which led to the success of the West. So while my prior assessment was maybe unfair… it was not fully wrong. 

The interesting thing is that Henrich actually does in several places mention that Christian morality was important too, but claims morality wouldn’t have had the impact it did without the incidental demolition of kin-based social structures, which he suggests (without much evidence) were the norm before Pope Gregory I began his MFP. My problem with putting all the emphasis on Gregory I and subsequent papal actions in carrying out the MFP is that, as Henrich points out early in the book, clan-based structures do a lot of work for kinship societies. If you suddenly take the clan out of a typical kinship society, you would get a disaster, not the West. It is much more likely in my opinion that Christian morality and universality (we are children of Heavenly Father) had already made the clan structures obsolete. It’s likely that in the core of Christendom the kinship-based society had already disappeared in practice, and that what Henrich calls the MFP was already the unwritten cultural norm in Christian areas before outright bans were implemented. In fact, cousin marriage, Levirate marriage, and uncle-niece marriage were banned in Rome in the 4th century AD, hundreds of years before Gregory I, indicating that a cultural shift away from a kinship-based society was occurring very early under Christianity. What Gregory I did and subsequent popes carried forward was more likely just a standardization and codification of the existing morality of the church in the core regions, as well as bringing the periphery (backwater places like England) into line. So in my view, it’s more likely that all the ingredients for Westernization and WEIRD psychology were already inherent in Christian religion and morality and weren't just some accident of history.

On the other hand, given today's antipathy to religion among educated academic types (Henrich's target audience), it is possible that his editorial decision to sidestep the actual religion thing and blame the benefits of Christianity on an accident was actually the best way for Henrich to spread abroad the message of Christianity's societal benefits while also maintaining his academic reputation and make him a bunch of money on book sales. The world is not ready for Arnold Toynbee, after all. I suspect Henrich really is a true believing non-religious person, but if my Straussian hypothetical was correct I don’t think the book would look any different.

2. A complete rejection of the postmodernist approach to historical analysis  

The critical theory / postmodernist approach to historical analysis says 1) avoid comparing outcomes across cultures, because each culture should be evaluated based on its own norms and values, 2) avoid forming causative links from one event to the next across long spans of time because history tends toward discontinuity rather than continuity, and 3) Western culture (embodied by capitalism and Christianity) is the oppressor and this oppression should be critiqued using anecdotes and stories to highlight its failings. 

I am happy to report that Henrich ignored all of this nonsense. He used huge amounts of data across cultures and across large spans of time to construct a rational cultural and historical analysis, and the results put market-based competition in a very good light, and linked the West’s relative success directly to Christianity, while still being open about some of the flaws in modern Western culture and psychology. So… yay! Hopefully this is part of a trend of more rationality and less postmodernism in the future of the social sciences.

In addition, The WEIRDest People is a rejection of the Marxist approach to historical analysis in which only material aspects matter. What I most appreciated from my formative reading of Carrol Quigley and Arnold Toynbee is the concept that beliefs, religions, myths, and cultural attitudes all matter, and in fact shape or limit the progression of a society or civilization. Henrich puts the shaping of the mind by these factors under the category of "psychology," and shows clearly that “psychology” determines (and is also in part determined by) the long-run outcomes of the society. Maybe that should be obvious to everyone, but that idea is flatly rejected by Marxist analysis and actually struck me as a revelation, so clearly it wasn't obvious to me a few years ago. 

3. On kinship structures and long-term societal outcomes

When I read Carroll Quigley’s 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, I was surprised to see his argument that Mediterranean areas like Spain and Sicily had different cultures and economic outcomes than most of the West because the Muslim occupation prevented centuries of the sort of development that happened under Christianity for the rest of Western Europe, while establishing Islamic cultural patterns. He also concludes that much of Latin America therefore had less of the Western work ethic and prosperity compared with North America because they were colonized by Spain, which was less Christianized than England and France. He referred to this Islamic influence as the “Pakistani-Peruvian axis.” Quigley also went into detail about how these cultural differences manifested themselves in different family structures - with the clan-based family structures of the “Pakistani-Peruvian axis” holding them back. I was skeptical of these claims and I figured Quigley was just being a bit uncharitable. But to my even greater surprise, both of these claims are in fact affirmed in The WEIRDest People. Spain and Southern Italy have less Western psychological profiles, and there is a strong correlation between European psychological profiles and the date of Christianization of a locality, based on the date of the establishment of a bishopric. And of course, like Quigley, Henrich also makes a big deal about how clan-based social structures limit societal progress over the long run. I’m not sure whether Henrich read Quigley in formulating his hypotheses, whether they arrived at the same ideas independently, or whether this has been a more commonly held belief that is just now being tested.

In conclusion, I criticized Henrich for not going the full Arnold Toynbee and praising Christianity itself for the success of the West, but in doing so I feel kind of like Eric Vogelin in a past generation criticizing Arnold Toynbee for not going the full St. Augustine and spiritually embracing Christianity itself. Maybe I should just be happy with the progress and be grateful for the mostly rational approach and the density of insights that Henrich provides. 

[Update 10-5-2021]

In the last week I twice came across early 21st century French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson, whose theory in his 1932 work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion is very relevant to Henrich’s data around “open” and “closed” or kinship-based societies. 

First, I encountered this Bergson quote from Arnold Toynbee’s a study of history: 

We still feel a natural love for our relations and our neighbours, whereas love of Humanity is a cultivated taste. We reach the former direct, the latter only at second hand, for it is through God alone that Religion leads Man to love the Human Race.

Then Tyler Cowen linked to this Tablet article highlighting Bergson’s ideas in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.  I haven’t read the primary reference, but the main idea seems to be that functional societies require some kind of order and structure, and this requires a certain morality or defined set of roles and relationships. This usually requires a “closed”society to prevent individuals from second-guessing their roles and to prevent new people or ideas from throwing a wrench into the works. Bergson says this closed society is as natural to human beings as an anthill is to ants. If I understand correctly, religion for Bergson acts like an internal regulating mechanism that allows individuals to think freely and be open to new people and ideas while still maintaining their connectedness to the society. Only in the context of a religious framework can an open, liberal, rational society be sustainable. In light of Henrich’s data, I would need to qualify Bergson’s conclusions - clearly not all religions serve this function, but Christianity might. This hypothesis also fits with Henrich’s discussion of guilt vs shame and internal vs external morality (ie Christianity provides an internal morality motivated by guilt, whereas in most other cultures norms and taboos are more often externally regulated via shame). Overall I much prefer Bergson’s framework for how Christianity makes societies WEIRD than Henrich’s MFP proposal.

Bergson apparently noted that the openness or closedness is not a permanent state of society but situational or perhaps cyclical. Maybe we can take that as a warning for our day. 

The Tablet article also notes that Bergson’s 1932 The Two Sources of Morality and Reason quickly fell out of fashion as Hegelian and Marxist thought took center stage in the France in the mid 20th century, similar to how Toynbee’s approach to history fell out of fashion in the mind 20th century, which I wrote about here.