Thursday, March 28

The Catholic Church changed the psychology of Europe. Unwittingly sparked an era of technological innovation


The innovation technological has propelled humanity to a place hard to believe just a few hundred years ago. And the reason is not entirely clear: humanity was stagnant for millennia, with very slow technological advances and significant potholes. However, in the last 500 years advances have skyrocketed and with them well-being.

I recently got my hands on a sociology book called The Weirdest People in the World. It explains the evolution of psychology in the West, which he says is what fueled this surge in technological innovation. And behind this psychological change is the Catholic Church.

Westerners are WEIRD (weird)

Westerners throughout the book call us WEIRD, that is, rare (in English) but also the acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (translated: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic). I have not found the book translated into Spanish.

The book is written by Joseph Henrich, a professor anthropologist in the department of evolutionary human biology at Harvard University, which gives him some authority over the data he presents. That and the 70 pages of bibliography, as well as many graphs that summarize a multitude of scientific studies on psychology.

Henrich begins by explaining how it is the psychology of societies WEIRD. What was thought in the 20th century to be human psychology in general (since all psychological studies were done with students from Western universities) turned out to be a very specific psychology. In fact, it is quite rare in general terms, both geographically (this is only the case in western and westernized societies) and historically (these differences begin to be seen after the year 1500).

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Classically the human being lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. Everything inside the tribe was family, and everything outside was enemies. This did not change when agriculture arrived, but these relations were even stricter, creating very rigid clans. It is logical, everyone had to be very coordinated so that the agriculture worked well and the members could eat.

In these kinds of clan or tribal societies, which still exist in the non-Western world, cohesion is very important. They are a type of society where dishonor is more important than guilt and where the partner is helped above all else (for example, a clan member who has committed a crime would never be exposed).

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In WEIRD societies, family cohesion is weaker. We have more confidence in strangers and socially penalize those who break the rules. Guilt is stronger than dishonor, and we highly value intention. In fact, our penal codes clearly distinguish in a crime whether or not there was an intention to commit a crime, while in more traditional societies, not so much.

Henrich shows multiple examples of studies where the psychological differences between societies that are more WEIRD than those that are less WEIRD are clearly seen. In the end we are talking about a spectrum, it is not all black and white. But anglo saxon countriesalong with the Netherlands, are the most likely to have this type of behavior that we assume to be normal but that really, from a historical perspective, according to the author, are quite rare (hence the acronym).

The origins of the WEIRD society

But why did this type of psychology emerge in the West? Henrich points to a key actor: the Catholic Church. When Christianity emerged there were different sects, but one prevailed over the rest, which established its center of power in Rome. And from there and throughout more than a millennium, beginning in the year 305, they decided to break the family ties of the clans in order to impose their power. In societies based on clans or extended family, the power is held by the patriarch of the clan. And externally influencing its members is very complicated.

The Church decided to break those ties to power to influence on people directly. This caused certain practices to be prohibited, such as marriages between relatives, collective inheritances or sororate or levirate (practice where when a person dies, the widow or widower must marry the sister or brother of the deceased).

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The Church came to prohibit the marriage of sixth cousins, making it very difficult to maintain the clan structure, since the members of these clans had to go out to find a partner. Henrich explains that by breaking down these structures and fostering nuclear families, without an extended family, the creation of relationships with strangers was facilitated, thus fostering a specific psychology, WEIRD.

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One way for Henrich to buttress this theory is that the areas that had the longest influence of the Catholic Church have more WEIRD psychology. Southern Italy and Spain, which had a Muslim presence for quite some time, have less WEIRD psychology than Northern Europe. This can be contradictory, since, although it is true that certain areas had a lot of Muslim influence, others lived from very early on under the Catholic Church. Much more than northern Europe, where Christianization was as late as the year 1,000. However, it does seem clear that Northern Europe is more WEIRD.

Abderramán III, the Cordovan caliph, red-haired and of Basque blood from whom Vox has removed a statue

In the book you can see several graphs where you can see the correlation of the strongest traits of WEIRD psychology with a lower concentration of marriages between cousins ​​and second cousins, the latter being quite decisive in the influence of the Catholic Church (the prohibition of marriage between quite distant relatives remained in force in the Catholic Church until 1917 and between second cousins ​​until 1983).

Henrich also explains that the Protestant revolution deepened WEIRD psychology even more, since it promoted literacy and this promoted some psychological changes that had been taking place in the previous millennium. The paradox is that the Protestant revolution was precisely to free itself from the yoke of the Catholic Church. Was it really the influence of the Church that created WEIRD psychology or was it the resistance of populations to its power? Henrich does not finish delving into this topic.

The consequences of the new psychology

Therefore, in the West we have a different psychology than before and theorizes, with many arguments, that it was the Catholic Church that caused these changes unintentionally, because what it wanted was to break existing power structures. But how could these psychological changes drive things as diverse as technological innovation or trade?

There is a quote from Said Ibn Ahman, a Muslim who lived in Toledo, who in 1068 established a division of the world into two groups: the civilized and the barbarians. Among the civilized were the Indians, the Jews, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans (Byzantines). Then, among the barbarians he established two layers: the top one, with Turks and Chinese, and the bottom ones: the “black barbarians” from southern Africa and the “white barbarians” from northern Europe. Yet 500 years later these “white barbarians“They created enough technology to reach America, publish books in series, and lay the foundation for industrial revolutions.

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First Iron

Henrich argues that this is all because of WEIRD psychology. In the year 1500 the Catholic Church had been breaking up the clans where it had influence for more than 1000 years. And people were forced to collaborate with other strangers in order to survive. This fueled trade, the creation of guilds, and the growth of cities.

This process was gradual but you can see that in Europe the cities grew much faster than in other parts of the world. Cities and groups of people have been shown to foster the exchange of ideas and innovation. Although this again brings us a contradiction: prior to this time the most important cities were not in the Christian world (Mesopotamia, China or even Muslim Toledo) and there was no such marked scientific innovation.

Henrich explains that there was an emergence of new civil institutions (since people were not linked to a rigid clan), and this promoted democracy as associations of equals had to be managed in some way. In fact there are examples, even during the Middle Ages, of democracy in the governance of guilds, associations and even cities.

This brief summary that I propose here is much more developed in the book, which argues with data, graphs and studies in a very detailed way everything that it exposes. It is really recommended, although there may be some points with not so clear relationships of cause and effect that are debatable.


The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Image: Alexander Nachev

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