How the Church made us ‘WEIRD’

By helping to weaken the clan system, Catholicism helped to pave the way for individual freedoms , writes David Quinn

Western societies are ‘WEIRD’, that is to say, compared with almost everyone else who has ever lived, and is still alive today, we are much more individualistic and, in a certain way, non-conformist. Counter-intuitively, the Church helped to make us this way, but not in the manner you made expect, that is, by making us rebel against it.

WEIRD

‘WEIRD’ is an acronym for ‘Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Developed’. It was coined by Joseph Henrich, a professor in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Weirdest People in the World: How the West become psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, which was published last year to mainly extremely positive reviews.

Prof. Henrich is not a religious believer, but his book nonetheless gives huge credit to religion for helping to knit societies together and to the Catholic Church in particular for helping to make people in the West so individualistic compared with most people raised in other cultures.

To cut a long story short, it is basically the thesis of Prof. Henrich and his team that over the course of several centuries, the Church helped to weaken the clan systems of much of Europe, and that this had colossal effects the Church itself often didn’t anticipate.

Basically, for the great bulk of human history, and in much of the world to this day, people belonged, or belong, in clans, which can be big or small, powerful or weak.

You are defined by the clan you belong to, and it shapes your life. You do not define yourself as an individual, you do not belong to clans voluntarily. You are born into them and you remain in them for life. The clan will look after you, but you also owe extremely strong duties to it and you must know your place and your role within it.

One of your jobs is to help uphold the good name and honour of the clan. If you bring shame on the clan, you will be severely punished, and possibly even killed. Crimes against fellow clan members can be punished more severely than those against non-clan members because the duties you owe to fellow clan members are so strong.

Arranged marriages are commonplace. In-clan alliances are strengthened, and so are alliances with other clans. Royal families have done this since time immemorial, and in the West, still did so until relatively recent times. Queen Victoria’s children were famously married off to various powerful European royal houses in order to bring them closer together. What royal families did was writ large, what the most humble also commonly did.

You were also expected to help your fellow clan or tribe members if you got into a position of influence. It would have been regarded as very strange, even treacherous, not to do this. How could you not help your own? In the West we now typically condemn this as cronyism or corruption.

Prof. Henrich says that the slow weakening of the clans over time had huge effects on Western psychology, making us ‘WEIRD’, or more individualistic”

The arranged marriages were very frequently cousin marriages. How could they not be? If you were marrying someone in your clan, you were certainly related to them.

Prof. Henrich’s thesis is that the Church eventually disrupted a lot of this through its campaign and prohibitions against cousin-marriages. He calls this the Church’s ‘Marriage and Family Programme’, or MFP.

The Catholic Church at one point even forbade you marrying your seventh cousin, never mind close ones. Prof. Henrich and his team note that the more powerful the Church was in a given area, and the more closely aligned a bishopric was with Rome’s agenda, the more successful was its MFP.

He observes, for example, that the clan system persisted longer in Ireland because it took longer for the MFP, that is, the prohibitions against cousin marriage, to reach our shores. Looking at the evidence, he says it wasn’t as successful in southern Italy either.

Royal families and the nobility generally would also be granted plenty of dispensations because it was seen as important that royal families would cement alliances for the sake of peace. That’s why cousin marriage in royal families was so common.

Prof. Henrich says that the slow weakening of the clans over time had huge effects on Western psychology, making us ‘WEIRD’, or more individualistic.

Crucially, if we no longer had the clans to rely on, then we had to form other organisations that we could fall back on when in need.

But these organisations were voluntary, like the medieval guilds. We had to belong to a clan, but we didn’t have to belong to a guild in the same way.

Within the clans, the rules of behaviour were dictated by where we belonged in the clan and what our relationship was to others, especially senior members, like your father, who could have power of life or death over you.

Impersonal

But members of a guild would often not be related, so they had to come up with new rules not based on relationships, and those rules were far less relational, and more impersonal and objective.

They also gave rise to rudimentary forms of democratic participation because governing positions were often elected. You didn’t get a particular position simply because you were the oldest male, although the nobility obviously remained powerful.

The more voluntary society became, and the less clan-based, the more individualistic it became as well. More and more stress was placed on individual freedom, personal choice, and representative governance, eventually up to the top positions in society.

Of course, a big problem is that the West has now become too individualistic, but that’s a story to return to some other time”

Most people today probably believe that the Church was the great enemy of personal freedom through Western history. But Prof. Henrich’s point is that by helping to weaken the clan system, it also helped to pave the way for those very freedoms, even if it hadn’t fully intended to.

Other writers have also shown how Christianity laid the foundations for Western individualism, but Prof. Henrich comes at the topic from an original angle, and even if he himself didn’t mean it, his book amounts to an excellent riposte to those who believe the Church’s influence on history has been only, or mostly, negative.

Of course, a big problem is that the West has now become too individualistic, but that’s a story to return to some other time.