The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020) is the title of a highly interesting book by Joseph Henrich. The central hypothesis is that Western institutions, like the mediaeval Christian church made Europe WEIRD, i.e. Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic by reducing endogamy and thus loosening the traditional clannish kinship ties that typically led to nepotism. Henrich notes time and again how the only other people who show typical WEIRD traits are hunter-gatherers:
Mobile hunter-gatherers, who possess extensive (not intensive) kin-based institutions, are field independent. Consistent with this, anthropologists have long argued that, compared to farmers and herders who have more intensive kin-based institutions, hunter-gatherers emphasize values that focus on independence, achievement, and self-reliance while deemphasizing obedience, conformity, and deference to authority.
I have argued that it wasn’t those institutions themselves, but the people behind the changes who were hunter-gatherer types (also called intuitives or visionaries in the Myers-Briggs inventory).
Henrich has most likely overstated the importance of the institutions he thinks are responsible for making the west WEIRD. A Guardian reviewer criticises exactly that:
I confess that when reading these pages I couldn’t help remembering that Donald Trump gave his son-in-law responsibility for Middle East peace, and that Boris Johnson has made his brother a lord. [...] Historians will find plenty to dispute here. Scholars of the medieval era will point out that the effects of the church’s “marriage and family programme” (the “MFP”, as Henrich inevitably terms it) were wildly uneven across time and space. Historians of the early modern era will note that the Protestant church was far less hostile to cousin marriage than its Catholic rival. (The Reformation received a crucial boost from Henry VIII’s determination to marry his former wife’s cousin.) Modern historians will argue that cousin marriage increased across many European societies in the 17th and 18th centuries before it was stigmatised again in the 19th century. They might also recall that, despite a consummately “weird” enthusiasm for innovation, both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein married their first cousins. Historians of the world beyond Europe will find a thousand exceptions to Henrich’s confident stereotyping of non-“weird” societies as hopelessly retarded by kinship and its developmental dead-ends. (The Guardian)
While I agree with the reviewer that Henrich overestimated the influence of the church's marriage and family programme, the reviewer seems to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Well, it’s true that Einstein and Darwin did marry their first cousins and people can’t be much WEIRDer than Einstein and Darwin, both of who are typed INTP in MBTI, so the examples were well-chosen. However, they represent only two examples, plus one has to consider that they were hardly considered “hot guys” by their female contemporaries and didn’t have many candidates to choose from. Basically nerds, Elon Musks, sans billions and his reputation as a tech genius.
The Guardian couldn’t be more wrong and Henrich couldn’t be more right. It is amazing how much more like hunter-gatherer societies than early farmer or herder societies the WEIRD (and certainly not wild) West ist. My guess is that even Herich hasn’t become fully aware of that. Let’s see according to Henrich the West is:
- Less nepotistic (clannish)
- More egalitarian (democratic)
- More affluent
- Freer and less conformist
than traditional societies.
Now, let’s turn to reproductive biology. In the West people have
- Later marriage
- Fewer offspring
- And are freer to divorce
than in traditional farmer/herder societies. Even in hunter-gatherer societies that have arranged marriages, women are free to leave a marriage at any time if they are unhappy. What’s more, women also decide if they want to have a baby or not (infanticide). This is basically a pro-choice attitude and a very strong one at that.
These points may seem banal as we have gotten used this:
The basic paradox here is that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) would predict affluent people to have more offspring than poorer people, what we see is that, at least on a global scale, the reverse is true. Most people don’t get the central tenets of EP because what we see does not conform with what we see: the (biological) meaning of all (including human) life is to reproduce. Therefore, higher affluence should translate into more offspring. This counter-trend should therefore not be dismissed light-heartedly.
What we saw in the transition from foraging to farming was an approximate doubling of female fertility. Hunter-gatherers do not only reproduce more rarely (around every 4 years vs 2 years for farmers), but they actively kill offspring in case the survival of an existing child should be threatened.
So, not only our social institutions have become more egalitarian, universalist, less nepotistic and exogamous like hunter-gatherers, but basically our reproductive behaviour despite a trend towards earlier puberty, probably fuelled by abundant food. You may object that the trend of having later offspring is really caused by an increase in educational years. This is perfectly true, however, more education is again a product of WEIRDization (the E in WEIRD). While in traditional farmer-herder societies teenagers typically know all they need to know and are often considered adults or tasked with adult work, in hunter-gatherers it is typically the older hunters who are most successful, not the younger and fitter hunters. What’s more, children aren’t expected to do any work and teenagers typically don’t hunt before age 18.
Now, I ask you once more, is the west more like traditional farmer/herder societies or more farmer-herder societies? We have so accustomed to our cultural norms that we are blind to see how WEIRD the following absence of characteristics is:
A society without slavery? A Roman citizen would certainly have considered that WEIRD, just like in those WEIRD savages we call foragers nowadays, but certainly no advanced civilization could exist without slavery, right?
What about the Rich part in WEIRD? Well, as Henrich notes, universalism opened trust and trade. Something he left out: there are NO POOR people in hunter-gatherers. Few people still believe in the capitalist mantra of everyone getting richer when the rich do. I consider it much more likely that hunter-gatherer types made everyone better with institutions such as universal welfare. To many people it may come as a surprise that rich tech entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Elon Musk are in favour of universal basic income. I am not, because I know they are WEIRD.
We are WEIRD yes, and it’s a good thing. Let’s hope we’ll remain WEIRD, many signs are showing in the other directions, unfortunately.
So, how is the West way weirder than the average society anthropologists have studied? We are less nepotistic, more meritocratic, less endogamous, more curious, and we are even more mobile than traditional farming societies.
For more on the hunter-gatherer neurotribe idea check out my book
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B0836LW5QV/
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