The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich (Review 1)
The Aesthetics of Historical Causality
By M.N.
Historians and philosophers have developed many all-encompassing theories of history. Vico with cyclical history, Hegel with the march to freedom, and Marx with historical materialism have all played the game. These systems come with a variety of characteristics and axes—materialist vs idealist, cyclical vs linear, etc. They can be intoxicating, enchanting, and seem to explain pretty much everything. They can also change the world. Hegel was the towering philosophical figure of his age and Marx created the axis around which international politics ran for much of the 20th century.
As far as I can tell, this style of history has been out of favor for the last half century or so. Of course, this assertion comes with the caveat that I am not a historian. It seems that historians have generally investigated a more focused set of issues in recent decades and emphasized the complexity and peculiarities rather than the grand narratives of history (although such accounts have certainly not disappeared). It is easy to imagine that this is driven by the increasing availability of information sources and the general drive to more specialization in the academy. I also suspect it is part of the general retreat from the grand narratives of the 19th and 20th century. Many of them turned out to drive agendas that reinforced racism and colonialism. If you have a historiography that suggests all of history is moving towards European dominance, it can justify a lot of nasty stuff.
However, it is hard to escape the feeling that history has big drivers and is not just “one damned thing after another”. Didn’t the terrain of Greece have something to do with its fragmented political situation and development of an early form of democracy? Didn’t the wide plains of the interior of Eurasia lend themselves to vast confederacies of horse riding warriors that shaped the history of Europe and Asia in somewhat predictable ways? Didn’t the natural fertility of the Nile almost guarantee a great civilization of some type or another? It is hard to argue that these effects would not have come to somewhat similar outcomes under many different starting conditions.
The historical event I would personally most like to understand is the industrial revolution. It is the reason I live in comfort and expect my children to do the same (isolating catastrophic risks). It is an unparalleled event that wrenched humanity onto an entirely different course.
This leaves the question of why the industrial revolution started in Europe in the 18th century and not in some other place and time. Song dynasty China was making large amounts of high quality iron in the 13th century. This built upon a civilization that had invented many of the inputs into the industrial revolution (e.g., paper, gunpowder). It would seem that China had many of the conditions for an industrial revolution 500 years before Europe, but it did not happen. Why?
Many reasons have been suggested for the timing, location, and existence of the industrial revolution: geography, demography, culture, technology, European economic structure (e.g., capitalism and private property rights), colonialism, surface coal deposits, and more.
Some of these seem to have compelling logic. For instance, there is a long standing suggestion that the geography of Europe makes it harder for large empires to persist while China’s geography (e.g., East-West running rivers) made it inevitable a large, stable empire would arise there. In this account, the constant infighting and competition between the European states drove them to greater innovation while the stable Chinese system undercut innovation.
Maybe? By the time you get into the 16th and 17th centuries you certainly see Europe innovating furiously in technology and tactics. However, you saw much less of that earlier when Europe had the same geography. Also, Europe did host a pretty large Empire in Rome for hundreds of years and there were lots of periods when China was not unified. It is not hard to believe that geography played some role in the political evolution of the two regions but the scale and mechanism are less clear.
Other ideas seem to be insufficient as currently constructed. For instance, were there really unique types of capitalism and private property rights in the West? This is by no means a straightforward claim as there were property rights in China as well. Was Europe’s version really that different? If so, why? It feels unsatisfying to say that this was the key cause but be left unable to describe how it came about or how it led to later events.
In The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Joseph Henrich has his own take on the question of what made Europe different and what drove the industrial revolution. He has a cause and it is unexpected. The path to modernity was set by the obsession of the Catholic church with the prevention of sex between cousins.
I find this explanation delightful on every level. It has a clear and compelling mechanism. It has huge ramifications that touch everything about Europe and, at least partially, explain the reformation, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the Renaissance, the atomization of western society, and the fact that the West contains a disproportionate share of the world’s top universities. The impacts are endless and it is a fun game to come up with new ways that the changes wrought by priests obsessing over cousins having sex shaped this or that institution in Europe.
Why did the Black Death lead to greater freedom and economic opportunity in Western Europe and greater repression in Eastern Europe? Because priests obsessed with controlling who slept with whom changed the relative power and ability of peasants to relocate and expand their rights in a depopulated landscape. Why did the Europeans develop calculus? Because Newton and Leibniz’s ancestors couldn’t marry their third cousins which set off the republic of letters that led to the incentives that created the brilliant minds that invented modern mathematics. Who knew not having sex could be so much fun! Ok,I am not yet describing the mechanism so my glee may seem a bit unmotivated. Bear with me.
This explanation also has a level of surprise and unexpectedness that makes it satisfying. Who would have thought this, of all things, would have sealed the rise of Europe as the dominant military and economic power in the world for hundreds of years and thereby creating the modern world.
Before I go into how it all works, let’s look at what makes a great historical explanation.
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Before Henrich, the most satisfying historical explanation I had ever come across was Jared Diamond’s classic Guns, Germs and Steel. This book answered the obvious question “why didn’t the Aztecs invade Madrid”. How did it come about that the Europeans had the wherewithal to project force across the globe, bringing deadly microbes that devastated the Americas. There are two questions here–why was the technology of the Europeans so much farther along and why were their germs so much deadlier.
On the technology front, the Aztecs lacked many of the advances that Cortez enjoyed. They were just starting to master bronze technology and had not yet turned those materials into effective weapons. They had more in common with the Akkadians in terms of technology than the Spanish. Of course, most technologically critical was the capability to cross the ocean. Without it, there would have been no invasion.
Invaders from Europe exposed native Americans to measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, malaria, and whooping cough among others. This had a devastating effect with some areas losing over 95% of their population. The Americas may have contributed some disease back to Europe but it was certainly far less devastating.
Why did the Spanish have the guns, germs and steel that the Aztecs didn’t? Jared Diamond gives a very simple and compelling answer to this disparity—biogeography. Due to the geography of Eurasia/Africa on the one hand and the Americas on the other, one side had vastly more biological resources to draw on.
The key biogeographical differences rested on two pillars. The first was the huge advantage that Eurasia/Africa had in terms of domesticable plants and animals. While the Americas had potatoes and corn, these were outweighed by Euraisia/Africa’s wheat, rice, barley and rye.
Even more strikingly, the Americas had almost no domesticable animals. They were basically stuck with llamas, guinea pigs, turkeys, and dogs while the Eurasian/African complex had horses, pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, dogs, pigeons, camels etc. This imbalance gave the people of Eurasian/African a massive advantage in terms of food production and storage, energy production, and transportation.
A second biogeographical fact driving the differences for the two areas was the East/West axis of Eurasia vs the North/South axis of the Americas. This meant that once a species like wheat was domesticated, it could spread rapidly along the East/West axis because the conditions would be similar in terms of light, rainfall and temperature for thousands of miles. However, when corn was domesticated, it was a long and complicated process to move it North and South as everything needed to be re-optimized for the different light and temperatures every few hundred miles.
For me, these differences can easily explain the gulf in technological advancement between the two areas. The Americas drew a much worse hand in terms of biological resources. It had nothing to do with the people themselves or with their culture. All the usual explanations, especially the racially motivated ones, just fall away in the face of these brutal biogeographical facts.
As for the incredibly tragic disease burden that Europeans imposed on the indigenous people of the Americas, it stemmed from the same source. Most of the terrible diseases that the Europeans brought had been transmitted from their domestic animals. They lived very closely with their animals and these diseases had made the jump to humans in the centuries and millennia before contact. They likely had devastating, but now mostly forgotten effects, on those Eurasian/African populations. However, over time many of these diseases coevolved into childhood illnesses. Almost all children would get them and have a mild illness. They would then be protected in adulthood. When they were released on unexposed populations, it was one of the great tragedies of history.
And that’s it. With a few simple casual drivers, you can explain the relative histories of the two regions, the tragic events of first contact, the subsequent evolution of the Columbian exchange, and the next few centuries of European military and economic dominance.
This is a satisfying explanation. It is simple, clear and seems to explain all the relevant facts. For instance, it does not explain everything. It is silent on why different subregions of Eurasia/Africa took different paths in the second half of the second millennium. This is, of course, a feature and not a bug. Something that explains everything is not really giving you much explanatory power.
It also fits my priors that all populations are the same in terms of ability and thus differential outcomes must come from external forces or randomness. Finally, it just feels “right”. It is the kind of explanation I want for such an important event.
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The book contest winner from last year, Erik Hoel, took a stab explaining the sapient paradox in his review of The Dawn of Everything. The paradox asks why it took so long for agricultural civilizations to arise after modern cognitive capabilities developed as early as 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. As far as we know, people didn’t develop anything that looks like large scale societies until 10,000 BC.
One standard answer has to do with the ice age. People couldn’t create complex societies until they had agriculture because they needed the caloric density to fuel them. That couldn’t happen until the ice age ended. The retreat of the ice sheets sounded a starting gun and humanity began the long climb to bronze age civilization from there.
I have never found this explanation satisfying. Humans are such clever creatures, especially in groups, and so much of the earth was not covered by ice sheets during the last ice age, that it just seems odd no one figured it out. I am always entertained by alternative hypotheses. There are many ideas including the notion that modern human cognition only more recently evolved. I put less weight on this one given what you see of human artifacts from before 10,000 BC.
Hoel had a different answer that revolves around humans getting caught in a social stasis trap driven by gossip. He points out that, without formal power structures, all there would have been in early communities was raw social power. It would have been a dystopian hellscape in which you were constantly worried about your status in the group and what others were saying about you. This state began as soon as modern cognitive capabilities related to language evolved. The power and fear of gossip froze societies into small scale bands until, at some point, some broke out. He uses the image of crabs in a bucket. When one tries to crawl out of the bucket, the others pull it back down. It is a pretty nasty equilibrium state.
Hoel relates the breakout from this trap to the move beyond Dunbar’s number (the number of people you can have personal relationships with–usually said to be around 150). Once you get beyond this number in a group, you need to have other processes and structures that allow you to relate to people you don’t know well. This is why small companies don’t need all the formal structures of large companies. In a 15-person company, everyone knows everyone and they know what everyone is doing and contributing. When you have a 500-person company, you need processes and procedures to allow people from different parts of the organization, who may have never met, to work together.
However, I have a nit, mostly aesthetic, with this explanation. It is framed as the forerunner of today’s issue with social media. I generally do not like historical explanations that emphasize the current conditions. Why? They are just a little too neat. Given the complexity of the world and the length of human history, what are the chances that the right explanation for a distant event just happens to line up with something going on now?
Of course, there are reasonable objections to this view. The fact that an issue has recently become relevant may be the reason we can see the issue in the past. We did not see it before because we didn’t live in a state of pure social power until we got social media. Thus, this kind of explanation was invisible to us.
This may be true, but it suggests we are missing many of the actual issues that don’t have current resonance. People from different times and places can be profoundly different in ways that can be hard to grasp. This, by the way, is a key theme in The Weirdest People. Henrich mounts an attack on the many concepts that we take as standard for all humans. For instance, he challenges the idea that all humans can be categorized by concepts like introversion and extroversion or placed on a neuroticism scale.
This was a surprise to me as the Big 5 personality scale, which these metrics are a part of, is considered very well established. However, Henrich makes a case that in different kinds of societies these personal attributes may not make sense as the roles that they are attached to in WEIRD groups simply don’t exist in some places and times (e.g., extroversion vs. introversion simply doesn’t make sense in a small scale society where people almost never meet strangers).
If concepts like the Big 5 personality traits don’t generalize, then people in different societies can be very different indeed. If people can be very different psychologically, then it is likely that many of the “right” explanations for events will be non-intuitive to us. We will not have the mental machinery to easily understand what people in the past thought about and how they made decisions. The “true” explanation should often feel strange.
Beyond this more obvious consideration, I balk at the gossip account because I find it boring. I already spend too much time, along with everyone else, wringing my hands about the problems of social media. I don’t want to contaminate history as well. Of course, this would appear to be a purely aesthetic reaction and potentially a poor guide to the truth.
In that spirit, let me give an alternative view to Hoel around the sapient paradox. I am building this idea based on the ideas put forth by Richard Wrangham in his book The Goodness Paradox. There, Wrangham suggests that humans self-domesticated once they had language. Why? Because they quickly found that they could use language to coordinate group murder.
In a chimp troop, there is a shocking level of violence. High status group members often beat, bite, and claw lower ranked members. One of the marks of a male chimp becoming an adult is delivering a nasty beating to his own mother. The alpha male sits atop the hierarchy and uses violence and intimidation to take disproportionate resources.
There are coalitions, but they are limited without language. They are restricted to a few individuals, and they can’t really plan to work together. Given that, a dominant alpha can survive indefinitely because the others struggle to coordinate against him. Once humans evolved rudimentary language, it would have been possible to quickly understand that a group could coordinate to kill anyone they saw fit.
Wrangham’s hypothesis is that this new ability, unlocked by language, led to the winnowing out of the most aggressive males. Even the strongest and most aggressive men could be killed by a group of other humans. Once this began, it would have favored humans that could get along better with others. Wrangham adduces evidence about how much more capable humans are of controlling themselves around other humans compared to chimps or even the much less violent bonobos.
Humans would have entered a state of self-domestication where generation after generation the most aggressive males were somewhat less represented in the gene pool. This would have led to genetic changes so that more males could live together somewhat peacefully, and societies could grow beyond very small bands.
Thus, another way to think about the sapient paradox is to consider that perhaps it took 40,000 years to remove the most aggressive males to the point that society could move forward. Until populations could be domesticated to the level where larger aggregates were possible, larger scale civilizations could not arise.
This effect of selection for lack of aggression has been seen many times in evolution. It seems often to proceed through a process of freezing adults with juvenile features. In fact, experiments in Russia were able to use this effect to develop much less aggressive silver foxes in about forty generations of breeding. Basically, the adult animals start to look and, more importantly, act more like pups. In that case, researchers selected the least aggressive animals to breed. Could humans have done this to themselves and could it have led to the long lag between the rise of cognitively modern humans and large societies?
Well, we have established a motive in lowering the risk of violence and theft by alpha males. We have established means with a group of humans banding together to commit lethal violence. Can we establish opportunity? Could this have worked in the time given?
I think so. There would have been about 2,000 generations of humans between the rise of modern cognitive capabilities and the rise of large societies. Given that scientists were able to domesticate silver foxes in forty generations, there is more than enough time for this process to happen. Why, then, did it take so long for humans to domesticate themselves? Probably because the selective pressure was only partial. In the silver fox case, the scientist ensured that only the least aggressive foxes bred in every generation. For humans, it might not have been nearly so stringent a filter. Many aggressive males may have passed their genes on in each generation. However, if slightly fewer did because they were murdered, the effect would work well—just over a longer timescale.
It is hard to know whether this mechanism explains the sapient paradox or whether it contributed at all. However, I do find it more aesthetically pleasing and satisfying than many other explanations. First, it seems less related to current concerns. Second, it seems more grounded in the physical realities of the situation. That is, one feared gossip because it could end with a group of your fellow community members killing you. It also is less intuitive than the gossip version. There is a certain surprise that our ancestors might have been so cold blooded as to kill their community members repeatedly over thousands of years. That little bit of surprise makes it more pleasurable (to me).
Beyond this genetic explanation for loss of aggression, the same ratchet (the threat of coordinated violence from groups of humans towards others inside the band) could have created many cultural evolutionary effects. This is a common idea in anthropology where it has been called, “the tyranny of the cousins”. For instance, in many current hunter gatherer societies there is a profound effort to maintain equality. If a hunter makes a great kill, the rest of the group, including his own family, strive to talk down the achievement and keep him in his place. This makes sense if the goal of the group is to prevent the rise of an alpha.
Of course, none of these rationales are knockout blows to other explanations. The gossip account is, in many ways, another facet of what I am discussing. The reasons I favor the domestication account appear, at least partially, to be just matters of taste. At a minimum, this is a somewhat questionable rationale for deciding the truth. This raises the question of what it even means to give a well supported explanation for the causes of an historical event.
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Having looked at a couple of my favorite historical explanations, let’s try to look at one less successful attempt (at least to me). The Narrow Corridor: States Societies and the Fate of Liberty by Acemoglu and Robinson is a recent book that addresses the longstanding question of why some countries are more successful economically than others. The answer they give rests on having the right balance between bottom-up power from society balanced with top down control from central authorities. They call centralized state power the Leviathan in reference to Thomas Hobbes. From The Narrow Corridor:
A very different type of Leviathan, a shackled one, emerges when there is a balance between its power and society’s capacity to control it. This is the Leviathan that can resolve conflicts fairly, provide public services and economic opportunities, and prevent dominance, laying down the basic foundations of liberty. This is the Leviathan that people, believing that they can control it, trust and cooperate with and allow to increase its capacity. This is the Leviathan that also promotes liberty by breaking down the various cages of norms tightly regulating behavior in society. But in a fundamental sense this is not a Hobbesian Leviathan. Its defining feature is its shackles: it does not have Hobbes’s sea monster’s dominance over society; it does not have the capability to ignore or silence people when they try to influence political decision making. It stands not above but alongside society.
They point to Europe as having the goldilocks situation of strong top down control from the legacy of the Roman empire with strong bottom up societal power from the legacy of the Germanic tribes. They cycle through large parts of the rest of the world and show that, outside of a few successful areas in Asia (e.g., Korea, Japan), the narrow corridor could not be achieved due to too much weakness or too much power in either top down control or bottom up capability.
Each story seems credible, but I find the overall picture somewhat unsatisfying as a good historical explanation although it might be a useful framework for evaluating the status of various societies. It does not seem to drive sharp distinctions. Europe, between Rome and the Germanic tribes, does not seem that unusual in the dimensions advanced by this model.
Why didn’t Ethiopia and East Africa lead the way? Ethiopia has a history of strong states and empires coupled with strong tribal groupings. Is this not similar for many parts of the Ottoman Empire? India?
All these places had long periods under empire coupled with strong social groupings separate from that central control. Yet they did not undergo the industrial revolution, and most are not now counted among the most economically developed nations today. This doesn’t feel like the casual driver for the economic differences they are talking about.
Another way to look at it is through counterfactuals. Guns, Germs and Steel immediately invites you to consider a counterfactual world where the Americas had wheat, rice, horse, cattle, pigs, sheep and goats while Eurasia didn’t and the where the Americas were twisted so its major geographic axis is laid East to West instead of North to South. In that case, I find it very easy to imagine that Aztec ships would have appeared off the coast of Spain, Aztec armies would have trod the streets of Madrid, and Aztec priests would have taught Europeans Nauhatl. In fact, it seems almost inevitable.
The Narrow Corridor just seems to fail that test. What is the counterfactual? No Roman Empire? No German tribes? It is hard to play those scenarios through like you can with Diamond. Because of this, it just doesn’t feel beautiful or complete.
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I can’t help but worry my aesthetics may be leading me astray on counterfactuals. A good counterfactual makes me feel I have gotten to the bottom of the issue. Somehow, I have discovered a real turning point in history, perhaps the only possible driver of its kind for this event.
This can’t be right. What it even means to be a cause is unclear. It has been debated since the time of Aristotle and the topic is deeply intertwined with the eternal debate topic of “free will”.
I am not going to get into that here. From a pragmatic point of view, I tend to think in the terms laid out in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow. In that book, Perrow points out how large disruptive events are usually driven by the interaction of many smaller “causes”. These smaller incidents interact in unexpected ways that lead to the event in question. It is hard to pick out one or two causes. Rather, there are many things happening in complicated patterns.
It seems likely that the causes of the industrial revolution are at least as complex as the factors that made up the Three Mile Island disaster. This model also calls into question a simplistic use of counterfactuals. You may be able to remove or change one element of a situation and get a different outcome, but this is unlikely to be the only cause of the event. More likely you have a necessary but insufficient driver that only works in the presence of many other conditions or causes.
Thus, the right explanation for any historical event is likely to be complex with many pieces interacting in unexpected ways. How do you find them?
All the standard tools apply. You carefully consider the evidence, update priors, explore second order thinking, and try to guard against motivated reasoning. All of those are helpful in the industrial revolution case but only take you so far. For instance, the evidence is vast and, as a non-specialist, I can only evaluate so much given my time and lack of expertise.
I have a series of these preferences that I can’t really justify fully but I use in selecting favored historical narratives over and over again. As previously described, I prefer accounts that explain large amounts of disparate phenomena but not everything. I prefer explanations that form interesting narratives. That is, they sound good at cocktail parties. I prefer explanations that conform to materialism. I prefer explanations that have a mathematical or, at least, semi-quantitative, feel to them. Forces that could, in principle, be quantified. I prefer explanations, as I have already discussed, that are not too “on the nose” with current events. I prefer explanations that are not too mechanical. Explanations that are too mathematically regular make me nervous. As a natural scientist, complex phenomena, like history, just are never that regular or simple.
I am skeptical of explanations that have the patina of scientific rigor without the ability to generate the right kind of data. As someone involved in the design and execution of many clinical trials, I hold a very high bar for observational work and a distrust of poorly done (e.g., underpowered, fuzzy endpoints) randomized, controlled studies. I am not very excited by most psychological explanations that cite dozens of small, underpowered studies. I have many of these kinds of preferences.
When I step back, I am not sure these are good guides to the truth. But they are some of the things I use to determine which explanations I find beautiful and therefore more likely true in historical narratives.
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Now we come to The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Heinrich. To me, this is the most revelatory and important history book since Guns Germs and Steel. It gives by far the most satisfying account of the rise of the modern world that I have ever seen.
Henrich writes from the perspective of an anthropologist interested in human psychology.
He was part of the group that identified and popularized the idea that much of what was taken as bedrock human psychology was really an artifact of looking at WEIRD people for psychology studies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). WEIRD people are psychologically outliers in many ways, and he wants us to embrace the incredibly varied ways people have thought and lived throughout time. What he is really interested in is how humans come to be so varied and different and how this has driven history.
Henrich starts by challenging the idea that the correct unit of analysis for humans is the individual person. He makes the case that individual human brains are quite weak (a point made at greater length in his previous book, The Secret of Our Success). The evidence he adduces for this includes accounts of early modern and modern explorers who, even when equipped with the best their civilizations had to offer, could not survive in environments that indigenous people found quite conducive. He has a short story about a man named William Buckley who, after being mistaken for a resurrected member of a tribe, lived with Australian Aboriginal people for almost 30 years. This leads to one of the key questions for Henrich. From The Weirdest People in the World:
Buckley’s experience in Aboriginal Australia highlights two central questions for understanding human nature. First, Buckley and the other fugitives utterly failed to survive by hunting and gathering despite starting with about four days’ worth of supplies and entering one of Australia’s most bountiful ecologies. They couldn’t find enough food, start fires, build shelters, or make the necessary spears, nets, or canoes. That is, these men couldn’t survive as hunter-gatherers on a continent where humans had lived as foragers for nearly 60,000 years. Why not? Since our species has spent most of the last two million years living as hunter-gatherers, one might think that the one thing our big primate brains should be good at is surviving by hunting and gathering. If they didn’t evolve to make us better at hunting and gathering, then what did our big brains evolve for?
The second point he makes is that societies are very complex and require skill to navigate. From The Weirdest People in the World:
The second important question highlighted by Buckley’s experience arises from the social world he encountered. After falling in with his Aboriginal family, he hardly mentions hunger, thirst, or the other deprivations that dominate the first part of his story. Instead, the action shifts to a world structured by social norms that organize people into clans and tribes, threaded into interdependent webs of culturally-prescribed obligations and responsibilities. Social norms prescribed arranged marriages, encouraged men to marry multiple wives, and effectively placed half of the local population under an incest taboo. Alongside marital ties, psychologically-potent rituals helped solidify the bonds within and between clans and tribes. However, despite these social bonds, violent intergroup conflict remained a constant threat and a major cause of death. In this world, people’s survival depended heavily on the size and solidarity of their social groups. But, where did all these clans, marriage groups, rituals, and tribes come from?
Thus, our big brains allow us to learn from others and construct societies. This allows us to take advantage of local conditions to survive and create and navigate complex human social worlds including competition against other human groups. In this process, our brains are radically altered. Thus, the correct unit of analysis for humans is generally groups of humans. They only start to make sense as part of societies.
Given this, he has a more limited view of what in our evolved psychology is hardwired compared to most evolutionary psychologists. For Henrich, we have a few basic instincts (e.g., incest aversion, pair-bonding, kin preference) that are truly biological. This forms a relatively thin stratum that is built on by cultural evolution into many different forms. From The Weirdest People in the World:
While cultural evolution can create an immense range of arbitrary norms, related to, for example, sex, rituals, and dress (e.g., wearing neckties), not all social norms are equally likely to evolve or remain stable. When the first social norms began to emerge, we were apes that had long possessed an endowment of social instincts about mating, parenting, social status, and alliance formation. The impact of cultural evolution, which was likely already up and running to some degree, would have only built on our primate psychology by sharpening and reinforcing our instincts for helping close relatives, caring for offspring, bonding with mates, and avoiding inbreeding (incest). Emerging norms would have tended to anchor on and extend these instincts. Tethered to more solid psychological moorings, such norms would have tended to outlast more arbitrary, free-floating alternatives. This psychological tethering explains why our most fundamental institutions are rooted in kinship.
This interplay of a relatively small number of truly biologically hardwired instincts with an enormous capability for cultural learning, which itself alters biology, gives a nice framework for explaining the complexity of humans we see around the world and through time. People can be very different in different times and places but with some commonalities that come through repeatedly (e.g., kin preference).
The way of living that started in Europe in late antiquity led to people who are psychologically very different from most other populations. However, Henrich is at pains to point out that WEIRD people are still on a spectrum and some of their traits have been shared by other people in other times. He spends a lot of time enumerating all of the ways WEIRD people are different from most other populations on the planet—past and present. This highlights how powerfully culture can shape how we think and makes a case for a much higher degree of motivational, attentional and cognitive plasticity than commonly assumed. He comments in the case of literacy. From The Weirdest People in the World:
Psychological changes induced by culture can shape all manner of subsequent events by influencing what people pay attention to, how they make decisions, which institutions they prefer, and how much they innovate. In this case, by driving up literacy, culture induced more analytic thinking and longer memories while spurring formal schooling, book production, and knowledge dissemination. Thus, sola scriptura likely energized innovation and laid the groundwork for standardizing laws, broadening the voting franchise, and establishing constitutional governments.
He needs one more piece to build his system—intergroup competition. Cultures compete in a variety of dimensions, and, in an unplanned way, some cultures spread while others wither. From The Weirdest People in the World:
However, social norms are put to the test when groups with different norms compete. Norms that favor success in competition with other groups tend to survive and spread. Such intergroup competition can occur through violent conflict, as Buckley experienced, but it can also occur when less successful groups copy the practices and beliefs of more successful groups or when more prosperous groups simply grow faster, through higher fertility, lower mortality, or greater net immigration. These and related forms of intergroup competition create a countervailing force that can favor group-beneficial norms over other cultural evolutionary pushes and pulls. Further, by mixing and matching different social norms, these processes can gradually assemble and spread increasingly effective, cooperative institutions.
This is Henrich’s model. Humans are built to copy one another, preserve knowledge, and navigate the social world—not to be individually brilliant. Through somewhat random processes, different groups of humans develop highly varied cultures which are anchored in a small set of hardwired instincts. These cultures can have profound effects on the cognition of thier members. Groups compete, both directly and indirectly, and some cultures spread faster than others.
This is a complete package for explaining cultures, human psychological variation, and historical change. However, it is a very different one from the standard historical toolkit I am used to.
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Let’s see how Henrich applies this toolkit to explain one of the most consequential events in human history, the industrial revolution. The core concept is that the Western (Catholic) church was concerned with who married whom and advanced a marriage and family program (MFP) to address it. This was successful and had radical implications that completely altered the psychology of Europeans. This led to the peculiar thinking processes and patterns that drove the renaissance, the enlightenment, the rise of modern states (e.g., modern democracies), and the industrial revolution.
The MFP contained a number of key features. Among the most salient were enacting prohibitions around marrying near relatives (e.g., cousins), banning polygamous marriage, blocking affinal marriages (marrying the sibling of a dead spouse), enforcing public consent of both parties to a marriage, allowing marriage only between Christians, ensuring the ability to direct where property went after one’s death, pushing newly married couples to set up their own households, and resisting adoption. Why should this cultural package have led to the industrial revolution?
Let’s start by setting the stage for the psychology that the MFP altered. Henrich advances a view of history that starts in pre-agricultural times. In this world, there was a good degree of equality between people and pair bonding was generally done outside the local group (i.e., either men or women would marry and join another hunter gatherer band depending on the local culture). There was not much property to worry about so this did not come into consideration in setting the rules around marriage and reproduction.
However, once agriculture started, the situation changed. Prime agricultural land and infrastructure were the keys to survival and wealth. Over a long period of time and under group selection, many societies converged on a system where great emphasis was placed on keeping everything “in the family”. This made cousin marriage common. That way, the resources of an extended family could be retained in the family. When a spouse died, the remaining spouse would often marry the brother or sister of the dead person to also stabilize property rights. That is, if two families had agreed to a marriage with the idea that future generations would have access to both family’s resources, then this affinal marriage pattern (marrying your dead spouse’s sibling) made sense because it preserved these property interests.
This led to some common features in pre-MFP agriculturalist psychology. From The Weirdest People in the World:
… after the origins of sedentary agriculture, the need to control territory in the face of fierce intergroup competition drove the intensification of kin-based institutions, leading to the norm clusters that organize clans, cousin marriage, corporate ownership, patrilocal residence, segmentary lineages, and ancestor worship. As societies scaled up, the most successful political institutions remained heavily entwined with kinship. Even after the emergence of premodern states, with their military forces and tax-collecting bureaucracies, kin-based institutions still dominated life among both the elite and the lower strata. All of this means that some of the contemporary psychological variation we observe can be traced, through a variety of pathways, back to the ecological, climatic, and biogeographic factors that influenced the emergence of kin-based institutions and states.
Versions of this cultural package appeared wherever intensive agricultural lifestyles were present. However, when the church started the MFP, things in Europe began to change. Calling it a program is a bit misleading. This was a centuries long effort that seemed to spring from a genuine belief in how sexuality and reproduction should be pursued. It evolved over time to the point where even sixth cousin marriages were banned in many places.
This undermined the ability of families to ensure that people’s lives revolved around kin networks. Since families could no longer ensure that all property and resources were directed by the larger family group, the larger family group waned in power. Also, the idea that newly married couples were to move away from their parents also weakened the direct control of the larger family.
The claim is that over centuries this pattern profoundly changed the psychology of Europeans. Instead of being intensely clannish, they started to have a higher degree of trust across society based on non-family ties (e.g., guilds and other voluntary associations). They became much more individualistic given that their success was no longer so tied to the family.
This set off a process that led to extreme changes in European psychology. From The Weirdest People in the World:
These changes would have favored a psychology that was more individualistic, analytically-oriented, guilt-ridden, and intention-focused (in judging others) but less bound by tradition, elder authority, and general conformity. The elimination of polygynous marriage and the tightening of constraints on male sexuality may also have inhibited male status-seeking and competition, which would have suppressed zero-sum thinking, impatience, and risk-seeking. The social and psychological changes driven by the breakdown of intensive kinship opened the door to rising urbanization, expanding impersonal markets, and competing voluntary associations like charter towns, guilds, and universities. By facilitating and enforcing impersonal interactions in various ways, urban centers and commercial markets further stimulated impersonal prosociality and impartial rule-following while incentivizing personal attributes like patience, positive-sum thinking, self-regulation, and time thrift. By producing a growing division of labor, within which an expanding class of individuals could select their occupations and social niches, these new social environments may have fostered more differentiated personality profiles—expanding eventually into the WEIRD-5—and strengthened people’s inclinations to think in dispositional ways about other individuals and groups. The quiet fermentation of these psychological and social changes influenced the formation of governments, laws, religious faiths, and economic institutions in the latter half of the Middle Ages and beyond. Creating laws, for example, that focus on individuals and their properties (“rights”) just makes sense if one lives in communities with weak family ties, substantial relational mobility, and a developing individualistic psychology that parses the world in dispositional ways (“she’s trustworthy”). By contrast, if one lives in a community where relational ties are central and people are primarily judged by their social and family connections, building law and government around individual rights doesn’t seem like common sense. It doesn’t “fit” people’s psychological inclinations.
Henrich spends large chunks of the book establishing that these differences are real and pointing out how they might have arisen from his casual drivers (e.g., bans on cousin marriage).
It is also worth noting that this process also had reinforcement loops. The MFP allowed the church to vastly increase its wealth and it ended up owning 25-50% of the arable land in some kingdoms. Kings were able to weaken potential internal rivals for their thrones as a consequence of this program. It is hard for rival houses to build alliances against you if they are limited in who they can marry to cement their position.
Henrich uses these psychological alterations to trace through the changes in the broader weft of European society and how that led, inexorably, to the industrial revolution. From the book The Weirdest People in the World:
Psychological developments such as greater impersonal trust, less conformity, broader literacy, and greater independence would have opened the flow of ideas, beliefs, values, and practices among individuals and communities within Europe. At the same time, the proliferation of voluntary associations and rising urbanization, especially the growth of free cities, would have expanded the collective brain by bringing diverse individuals together and aligning their interests. In fact, four voluntary associations-charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, and universities-all contributed to broadening the flow of knowledge and technology around Europe. At an individual level, people's desire to come up with new ideas and improved techniques-to uniquely distinguish themselves-would have interacted synergistically with rising levels of patience, time thrift, analytic thinking, overconfidence, and positive-sum thinking (optimism). When viewed in the context of these social, psychological, and institutional changes, which accumulated gradually over a millennium, Europe's technological and economic acceleration seems a lot less puzzling.
This psychological ratchet gets run for a 1000+ years and results in populations so psychologically different that things like the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, specialization of roles, and modern, parliamentary democracy just fall out.
I find it extremely clever and compelling. In some ways it comports with my aesthetic commitments very well. It is a grand narrative that explains so much but not everything. It is unexpected and intricate. It maintains the point that humans are born the same and that their experiences change them (i.e., nothing special about Europeans—just the play of chance around how one sect of Christianity took over the West and, unthinkingly, started down a path that led to the modern world).
It also comports with my materialist inclinations. I usually don’t like psychological explanations because they feel too squishy for me (e.g., the West just believes more in freedom seems like a completely inadequate explanation for anything). Henrich does a wonderful job of closing that gap. He establishes a specific mechanism for changing psychology and then shows how that led to material changes in the world.
I find it extremely pleasing that the industrial revolution just seems like a natural extension of this approach. It reminds me of the mathematical program method championed by Alexander Grothendieck. In this approach, one builds a mathematical structure that envelops the proof topic. In the end, the proof just falls out of the new edifice that has been built. It just feels right at that point with an air of comfortable inevitability and deep understanding.
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Of course, I have to consider where Henrich’s arguments may be weakest. Henrich relies heavily on two techniques that have proven to be problematic in other arenas. The first is the use of small-scale psychological studies to establish the large psychological variations among populations. Experiments of this type have been the primary driver for the replication crisis in psychology. Many of the worst offenders were priming studies and, thankfully, he does not use many of those types of experiments as evidence here. However, the challenges of small sample size and ambiguous endpoints still loom.
The second approach is observational work where he and his colleagues attempt to correlate economic growth or some other factor to variables like the length of exposure to the churches MFP. These types of experiments have proven to be fairly unreliable for settling disputes in medicine. They can be good hypothesis generators, but lack the ability of randomized control trials to provide clear evidence for the truth. As dispositive evidence, they make me nervous.
But when I reflect on it, even this is an aesthetic sensibility issue. Henrich advances much more data than is usually given in a historical account. It just happens to be of a type (small scale psychological studies and observational work) and in a style (in good Gladwellian fashion, bouncing back and forth between the studies and his grand narrative) that raises my hackles. There is some reasonable set of priors about this sort of thing, but, in the end, there is a certain aesthetic I have come to like and this doesn’t really follow it.
What is strange about this is that Henrich adduces far more evidence for his thesis than Jared Diamond does in Guns, Germs and Steel. Beyond that, in the hierarchy of evidence types, it is hard to argue that Henrich has worse evidence than Diamond. After all, Diamond is mostly just telling a story and pointing out some biogeographical facts along the way. However, I fell in love with Diamond’s thesis from the moment I started his book. With Henrich, I had to reread it to really get comfortable with it. Once I did, it ascended into the pantheon for me.
This is curious. In some way, the amount and type of evidence Henrich advances makes his thesis less credible to me. It is cases like this that have made me more aware of my aesthetic preferences when I consider various arguments. In this case, a hurried reading would have left me cold even though, upon reflection, I think the argument is quite strong.
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So that’s it. My current prior for the overall arc of human history starts with chimpanzee-like creatures that, probably due to subtle differences in their environment, branched into different lineages. One of them picked up protolanguage after some millions of years and it was off to the races. Over tens of thousands of years after the development of modern cognition, humanity remained in a generally hunter gatherer state and did not form larger societies. This may have been caused by the ice age or because the species was self domesticating through group murder of the most aggressive males. Once this was done, humans slowly took up agriculture. It proved to be a dominant cultural package in the more fertile parts of the globe and relatively quickly full bronze age civilizations emerged in Eurasia/Africa. That process took a few thousand years longer in the Americas because of a poor biogeographical draw (lack of domesticable animals and plants and in the North/South axis of the continent). In late antiquity in Europe the Western Church took up a marriage and family program that completely altered how people lived. In doing so, it inadvertently undermined the intensive kin based relations that had dominated much of the agricultural civilizations that had existed to that point. From there, it was just a hop skip and a jump to modern society.
There are large holes in this narrative and it will, undoubtedly, be updated with new data. Most glaringly, I have not addressed the revolution that ancient DNA has caused in our historical understanding. This is mostly because it is happening so fast that it is hard to keep up with it and integrate it into a complete narrative. However, in the end I expect it to have a profound effect.
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I am grateful to Henrich and the entire anthropological academic tradition he represents. I was mostly ignorant of this area and now I see it as one of the most critical ways to understand the broad sweep of human events. It also gives great insight into the range of human psychological states which is far greater than I had supposed.
We need more of these ways of understanding. I had been limited to two major paradigms for understanding history—classical narratives based on political history and archeology, and economics. Unfortunately, both have significant limitations. I had a pretty good grasp on the limitations of narrative history, but, until recently, I think I was far too impressed with the economic approach. Although fruitful, it is ultimately a poor guide to much of history—especially earlier history. Behavioral economics has tried to patch some of these difficulties but, given Henrich’s results on psychological variation, it is likely to be inadequate.
I look forward to learning more from the cultural anthropologists and seeing how they and others integrate our rapidly expanding genetic and archeological understanding into a more complete and accurate story of how we got to where we are.