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.
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 ...
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”.
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.
"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.
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.
Some high members of the church might have known about the harm of incest to children because of their knowledge of animal breeding.
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 ...
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”.
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.
"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
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.
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?