WEIRD societies and the law of unintended consequences

[redbird]

Here's a paper arguing that the Catholic church's intense* concern with incest, eventually defined broadly enough to include distant cousins and "spiritual kin," explains large parts of WEIRD** culture and psychology: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6466/eaau5141

The correlations, and maybe causality, seems to be that changing the rules on who could marry weakened kinship ties, and that in turn reduced conformity and obedience to elders, and increased individualism and "impersonal prosociality," which seems to mean the tendency to trust and try to help strangers as well as family and friends.

This jumped out at me as "unintended consequences" because the short article in *Science* talked about the Catholic Church's "Marriage and family program," with the implication that this was the result of a deliberate, unified policy--but that phrasing but that turns out to be the authors' coinage for long-term policies against marriages to create alliances between families, and then discouraging second, third, and even sixth cousin marriages and arranged marriages, and encouraging or requiring newly married couples to set up their own households.

Whatever the intentions of the people who created those policies, I'm confident that their goals did not include increasing individualism and independence, while reducing conformity and obedience.

* compared to most other cultures and religions, including other forms of Christianity

**a great acronym, for "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic"

Comments

[cjsmith]

Whatever the intentions of the people who created those policies, I'm confident that their goals did not include increasing individualism and independence, while reducing conformity and obedience.

I confess I snorted out loud. Hats off to you. :)

[oursin]

Speaking as a historian with a very vague memory of the days when I did medieval/early modern history, I seem to recollect a thriving trade in dispensations and work-arounds for marrying within the 'forbidden degrees'. (How else does one explain the Hapsburg jaw?)

There were also different marriage patterns in different parts of Europe... e.g. the North-Western formation of nuclear family households, with marriage taking place relatively late when partners had established themselves in their trade/inherited the farm/earned a nice little dowry in service/etc.

I suspect this is yet another instance where nobody asked actual historians, but I may be doing them a disservice.

[cynthia1960]

I think a reality check running this by historians would have helped.

[adrian_turtle]

Gosh. Here I was all along thinking it was celibate clergy.

I share your admiration for the acronym, and Oursin's side-eye for the tendency of a certain flavor of hotshot geek to explain patterns without looking at existing research.

[oursin]

Okay, the whole 'it was Protestantism that was responsible!' argument (see Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism etc) was I recollect already being nuanced/contested in the Upper Palaeolithic when I was a baby historian, but this apparently just skips over, um, centuries of historians thinking about these things.

Lo, It Was All More Complicated.

[redbird]

The citations include some history and cultural anthropology, going back to the 1940s (at least, I skimmed the bibliography). Part of what the authors are saying is that it wasn't Protestantism so much as Catholicism (starting in 500 CE). I think there's value in quantifying the effects; sometimes the data don't match what we've been taught as narratives.

[oursin]

Oh, I think the strong version of Protestantism led to Capitalism has long since faded anyway.

ETA Some of that historiography (and some of the anthropology) looks a bit dated, ahem, and Goody is, I think, a Catholic historian of the family... It's sort of general introductory text-type things. I'm sceptical.