How Europe Became Civilized

I mentioned the theory that Europeans advanced ahead of the rest of the world a millennium ago, based on evolving improved IQ genes. It appears that other factors were also at work.

This new podcast gives some theories of a distinguished Harvard professor:

Joseph Henrich – The Church Accidentally Triggered Industrial Revolution

Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence. Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years. I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious. How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error? Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,000 years because we outsourced cultural evolution to a larger collective brain? The most interesting part of the podcast is Henrich’s explanation of how the Catholic Church unintentionally instigated the Industrial Revolution through the dismantling of intensive kinship systems in medieval Europe.

His theory says that Europe developed a collective IQ that allowed great advancement on many fronts. He actually has a lot of empirical evidence for the details of his theory.

He explains:

Well, so my story is that the rise of 45:28 the Industrial Revolution in Europe has to do with the consolidation of Europe’s collective brain. And one of the things that requires is trust in strangers, 45:36 and at least the beginnings of moral universalism. And it’s that moral universalism that eventually causes the British to say, “We’ve got to stop 45:44 with the slave trade thing.” It’s a moral decision that they made because it’s no longer consistent 45:49 with the changing moral values over time. Right, right. Okay, so we’ve been dancing around the thesis of your book following The Secret, which is The Weirdest People in the World. 46:00 And before we really jump into it, maybe you can give me a summary of what the thesis there is. 

46:06 Yeah. So the first observation is that there’s a great deal of global psychological variation 46:11 around the world. So European, American, Australian populations tend to be highly 46:17 individualistic. They’re inclined towards analytic thinking over holistic thinking. They have a lot of impersonal prosociality, so trust in strangers. They’re against conformity, 46:27 willingness to cooperate with strangers. So the question is, how can we explain the global variation in these features of psychology? And towards the end of the book, 46:35 I actually connect these features of the psychology to economic differences, including the Industrial Revolution that happened in Europe, which reshapes the world. And the 46:45 story is that the key event is the spread of a particular form of Christianity into Europe, 46:51 where the Catholic Church- what becomes the Catholic Church- systematically dismantles the intensive kinship systems in Europe, leading to small monogamous nuclear families. 47:00 And this transformation leads to the creation of new institutions. So by the high Middle Ages, you get the rise of guilds, which are voluntary groups of craftsmen and self-help societies, 47:09 because people don’t have their families to rely on. People begin moving around. There’s occupational sorting into different occupations. You get urbanization rising. Charter towns are 47:19 on the rise. Universities pop up. New kinds of monasteries pop up. And then Europe begins 47:24 to urbanize, and you get new kinds of law that are based around the individual. Contract law. 47:30 And then eventually this leads to a lot more innovation because ideas are flowing around Europe and then eventually the Industrial Revolution. So that’s the argument in a nutshell. 47:38 Can you explain again what exactly the Church did which led to the kin-based existing system breaking down? Yeah. So the Church outlaws polygyny, 47:49 and so that stops elite males from having multiple wives and concubines and whatnot, and creating kind of a giant family through that. It outlaws cousin marriage going all the way out to sixth 47:59 cousins at some point, and that included spiritual kin and other kinds of non-genetic relatives as 48:06 well as the cousins. It frees up inheritance, so it has inheritance by testimony rather than normal 48:12 patrilineal inheritance. And a simple example here is in most societies, you inherit access 48:18 to land corporately, which means you and your brothers and stuff all own the land. And it might 48:24 be your uncle is actually in charge of the land, your father’s brother. And so you can’t sell it, you can’t move it around, and you’re also tied to it. It’s where your ancestors are buried, 48:32 and so there’s this big importance of land. So the Church allows people to give land to the Church, 48:37 the Church becomes the largest landowner in Europe, because you can do it by testament. 48:43 So those are just some of the examples of the ways it transforms the family structure, and eventually you get these monogamous nuclear families which are basically unheard of around the world, at 48:52 least if you look at the anthropological record. And you can really see this when you can compare, individuals can move to European cities as individuals or nuclear families. In China when 49:01 you move to the city, you maintain contacts with the folks back home in the village, and people flow back and forth and you get these little enclaves of different clans and stuff in 49:11 the cities, the connections. And this is really important because your ancestors, and there’s rituals that have to be done back in the home community. But Christianity 49:19 does away with all those ancestor rituals.

In short, his evidence is that Christianity was crucial, although perhaps not for the reasons you might guess.

The host calls it "accidental" because there is no proof that the Church had the foresight to understand the long-term implications of its policies. I would not use that term, as they were very deliberate Church that it went to a lot of trouble to enforce.

If Henrich is correct, then the Medieval Catholic Church was acting for the good of humanity in a way that no one is doing today. We do not even have the legal and political frameworks for such actions today. Anyone making such arguments would be laughed at.

These issues should get a lot more attention. If we can determine what made Western Civilization great, then we should celebrate that, and learn from it so we can make it greater.