WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic) means no kin-groups
An individualist social psychology can arise when families are not embedded in larger kin-groups.
This an expansion of a comment I made here.
I have been interested in Islamic history and civilisation for decades. I have come to notice two persistent errors by commentators and—to a lesser extent—scholars in their commentary on Islam. These are errors that Europeans and East-Coast Americans are particularly prone to.
Error number one is treating “Arab Conquest” Islam—the area of Islam conquered by the Rashidun (632-661) and Umayyad (661-750) Caliphates in the first, and greatest, surge of Islamic conquests—as if it is synonymous with Islam as a whole. There is rather more to Islam than this “Greater Middle East”. Lots of Muslims live outside the region from Morocco to Pakistan. The error of confusing that part for the whole is perhaps particularly obvious to an Australian, with Indonesia (282m) and Malaysia (35m) just to our North, and Bangladesh (175m) and India (203m Muslims) as Indian Ocean neighbours.
Even as great a scholar of Islam as Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) can be tripped up by this. His claim that Islam had no ruling queens is almost true of the Arab world—there were precisely three, all Shia: two Yemeni queens—Asma Bint Shihab al-Sulayhiyya (r.1047-1087) and Arwa al-Sulayhi (r.1067-1138)1—plus a Fatimid caliphal (de facto) regent. The claim of no ruling queens in Islam is absolutely not true of South Asian Islam, Eurasian Steppe Islam or Malay and Islander Islam. The Sultanate of Aceh, for instance, had a sequence of four ruling Sultanas from 1641 to 1699.
Error number two is forgetting about kin-groups. Most societies are significantly organised via kin-groups. The exceptions are: Christian-based or derived societies; riverine SE Asia; and various islands and archipelagoes.
Kin-groups—lineages of varying size and namings, such as tribe or clan—are very important to the social structure of the Greater Middle East. That first great wave of Arab Conquest was done by Arab (pastoralist) tribes. Both the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates were effectively tribal confederacies. Saudi Arabia is dominated by two lineages: the al-Saud, the royal lineage who provide political leadership, and the al ash-Sheik, the lineage who dominate religious leadership.
Sociologically, one can divide Islam into four regions based on whether kin-groups are significant or not and whether cousin-marriage is significant or not.
Cousin marriage significant | Cousin marriage minimal
Kin-groups significant: Greater Middle East | Eurasian Steppe Islam
Kin-groups weak or absent: (Rest of) South Asian Islam | Malay, Islander Islam
There is also minority Islam. Forms of Islam who are either are nowhere a majority, or are only so in very limited areas: such as Alevis, Ismailis, Ahmadis, Ibadis.
What might be called “problematic” Islam is dominated by Greater Middle East Islam. There are local Muslim insurgencies and ethnic tensions elsewhere (notably the Moro conflicts in Mindanao; the insurgency in southern Thailand; the Rohingya in Myanmar). Nevertheless, the Greater Middle East produces the highest number of jihadis—both locally and in its emigre communities. Migrants from there produce rape/sexual predation gangs that one is not supposed to notice are overwhelmingly Muslim. Dutch and Danish figures show migrants from this region are net drains on the fisc.
The Greater Middle East is the region within Islam that produces the most wars and violence. It is where polygyny is still most widely practiced, which decreases the status of women and increases the level of violence. It is also the least democratic region of Islam. Where other regions of Islam are converging towards the level of democracy of the rest of world, Greater Middle East Islam remains dramatically less democratic than the world average. All this plus oil too means it is in the news the most, so it is not surprising it tends to dominate how folk think of Islam.
There is a reason that Western commentators and scholars miss the significance of kin-groups. Christianity actively suppressed kin-groups. The Christian suppression of kin-groups built on Classical origins. Kin-groups were suppressed within the Greek city-states and the Roman Republic. They were then further suppressed in the medieval period across manorial Europe by the Latin Church in cooperation with rulers and manor-holders—who were almost everyone who mattered, including nobles and rulers.
Kin-groups colonise institutions and organisations, such as the Church itself and a ruler’s instruments of rule. Popes and princes come and go, the kin-group is forever. Identification with one’s kin-group is even more intense if there is a lot of cousin marriage within the kin-group (so-called parallel cousin marriage).
It was very much in the interest of Popes, princes and manor-holders to suppress kin-groups, to eliminate these alternative sources of authority and loyalty. This was successfully done across manorial Europe.
The only places that this suppression of kin-groups failed were in the Celtic fringe and the Balkan uplands. That is, pastoralist areas where manors were absent and local power-holders’ power and authority came from kin-groups. Pastoralists develop strong patrilineal kin-groups, as it is a great advantage in defending animal herds to have teams of warriors who grew up together.
A tension one can see in the Arthurian tales is between the Celts—who were still operating strong kin-group ties—and the Germanics, who put chosen, that is personally sworn, loyalty front-and-centre. The greatest symbol of such chosen loyalty being the Roundtable itself.
So, if you are European, or Euro-American—apart from some Celtic and Balkan clans—kin-groups are a thousand years, two thousand years, or more, in your cultural past. They are forgotten, so not considered. The Hobbesian state of nature, where folk are fearful, atomised individuals, makes no sense to anyone who comes from a kin-group society. Such support and protection is precisely what one’s kin-group is for.
Mechanisms of suppression
A key thing that makes the WEIRD (Western Education Industrialised Rich Democratic) socio-psychologically distinctive from other cultures is precisely that their societies have abandoned kin-groups. Much of what was distinctive about the doctrines of the Latin Church—particularly those elements thin on, lacking, or even contradicting, biblical warrant—were the doctrines that acted to suppress kin-groups. In particular, by stripping kin-groups of control over marriage and assets.
The Church insisted on testamentary rights—that is, that folk have wills and have the right to dispose of their property as they wish. This included widows having that right.
This both increased the chance of donations to the Church and broke up kin-group control over assets. Mutual consent for marriage—and very restrictive incest rules that dispersed marriage patterns—broke up kin-group control over marriage. This, along with single-spouse marriage and law as human, sanctified the Roman (farming) social synthesis, just as Islam sanctified the Arab (oasis) pastoralist social synthesis.
That Christianity grew up in the very lawful Roman Empire meant it took the view law was human, was not based on revelation and was ultimately controlled by secular authorities (“render unto Caesar”). This made it quite different from the other Abrahamic or Mosaic monotheisms—Judaism and Islam, with their concepts of God’s law based on revelation and controlled by religious scholars.
Yes, in medieval Christendom, canon law came to be applied to things such as marriage, but only when secular rulers delegated various areas of law to the Church. It was convenient for a landholding elite to have the same marriage rules—the same rules about which children were legitimate or not—across jurisdictions. The Church was the only body that could provide such common rules. When secular rulers and states withdrew that delegation, they were using an authority that Christianity always acknowledged they had.
The rules that operated against kin-groups were developed very early in the medieval period. Indeed, the Fourth Lateran Council (1213-14) weakened the bans on incest, though they still remained highly restrictive. By that time, kin-groups had already been suppressed across manorial Europe.
The Latin Church was thus building on the suppression of kin groups in the Greek polis and Roman Republic. It was the same underlying issue—destroying an alternative, and divisive, source of authority and loyalty.
Even today, much of the appeal of Christianity in Africa—especially Pentecostalism—is that their congregations provide an alternative support mechanism to, and a refuge from, the demands of kin-groups.
Consequences
Suppressing kin-groups had various effects, including promoting a much more individualist social-psychology and culture. It also meant that medieval Christendom put non-kin cooperation—the thing that makes us an ultra-social species, the thing we do better than any other species—“on steroids”.
The competitive jurisdictions of medieval Christendom developed very robust and diverse mechanisms of cooperation to replace kin-groups—including, for instance, self-governing mercantile cities—and increasingly capable states. States that, when armed with the printing press, the compass and gunpowder, proceeded to settle Siberia, the Americas and the Antipodes and conquer most of coastal (and later inland) Africa, most the world’s inhabitable islands and archipelagoes, and much of Asia.
The overwhelming majority of such conquest were done by minor expeditionary forces. This was very different from previous empires, where imperial conquest required allocation of one’s main military forces. It also meant the overseas territories were much more peripheral to the imperial metropoles, and much more distinctively administered, than in previous empires.
The long-term economic growth literature has been increasingly revealing that culture and institutions matter for the long-term performance of societies. Getting rid of kin-groups profoundly changed both.
Those migrants who are the most culturally distinct from the WEIRD West—in large part because their societies are still largely organised around kin groups—and the least prone to integrate (because they are so clannish, including in their marriage patterns, which reinforces the cultural distance) have also regularly proved to be costly, rather than beneficial, migrants to their new societies.2 The tendency of Western scholarship to seriously under-estimate the significance of kin-groups—and to treat people as interchangeable widgets—is continuing to impose costs on Western societies.
References
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 117, No. 4 (Nov., 2002), 1231-1294. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=290824
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Crown Business, 2012.
Jan van den Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, ‘Borderless Welfare State - The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances,’ 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371951423_Borderless_Welfare_State_-_The_Consequences_of_Immigration_for_Public_Finances
Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, Oxford Paperbacks, 1991.
Eric Chaney, ‘Democratic Change in the Arab World, Past and Present,’ Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2012, 363-414. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2012a_Chaney.pdf
Ricardo Duchesne, ‘Europeans Have Always Been WEIRD: Critical Reflections on Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People,’ Mankind Quarterly, 2022, 62.4, 712-763. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361495054_Europeans_Have_Always_Been_WEIRD_Critical_Reflections_on_Joseph_Henrich's_The_WEIRDest_People
European Commission, Projecting The Net Fiscal Impact Of Immigration In The EU, EU Science Hub, 2020. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/projecting-net-fiscal-impact-immigration-eu_en
M.F. Hansen, M.L. Schultz-Nielsen,& T. Tranæs, ‘The fiscal impact of immigration to welfare states of the Scandinavian type,’ Journal of Population Economics 30, 925–952 (2017), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-017-0636-1
Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan, ‘The weirdest people in the world?,’ Behavioral And Brain Sciences, (2010), 33:2/3. https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf
Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.
Peter McLoughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, New English Review Press, 2016.
Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Michael Mitteraur, Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of its Special Path, trans. Gerard Chapple, University of Chicago Press, [2003] 2010.
Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.
Jonathan F. Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan P. Beauchamp and Joseph Henrich, ‘The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation,’ Science, 2019, 366 (6466), eaau5141. https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SchulzHenrichetalTheChurchIntensiveKinshipGlobaPsychologicalVariation2019.pdf
Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment
Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom, Picador, 2014.
They were co-rulers from 1067 to 1087. That meant the Yemeni kingdom had 91 years of female rule, from 1047 to 1138.
Chinese society has long been organised around kin groups. These were suppressed under Maoism but have come strongly back since 1978. The significant overlap in cultural traits with folk of European heritage—including high rates of intermarriage with them—have made East Asians highly successful migrants. Chinese society also has a long history of generating substitute kin-groups, such as tongs, triads and sects. Sufi orders (tariqa) within Islam can also operate as substitute kin-groups, though they are often led by a hereditary lineage.
Until this practice is outlawed in all Western societies, we will continue to have groups who wall themselves off from assimilation and cause every kind of civilizational problem for the WEIRD countries. Unfortunately, we have weak leadership and people who scream racism without understanding the actual problem. Thank you for your work on this.
Robert Nisbet has a pair of books relevant to this, The Quest for Community and Twilight of Authority. One downside to all of this is it set the stage for the growth of the nation-state - which in passing you note the competitive jurisdictions but not the near-constant state of warfare that existed amongst them. Far more Hobbesian (under Sovereign rulership) than his erroneous state of nature. Nisbet posits (in TQfC) that it was exactly that warfare that motivated the development of the nation-state as it is the most fertile soil for growing power.
I don't think the individualist social psychology can be traced to the Church per se, but more to the half of Europe that fell under the sway of the Reformation. The contrast between North and South America, where the two branches of Christianity hold sway in the formation of the social character was well explored in Peter Berger's The Capitalist Revolution.
I'd also be inclined to say that the unification effect of the Church was a byproduct of it's rampant proselytization of pagan Europe in the early medieval, and thus it held greater authority than any local civic system. That laid the foundation upon which subsequent civic institutions could grow - including governments (which would all bear a striking resemblance). Oddly enough, the one area where this was least true was Ireland, which due to its isolation developed a rather independent Catholic tradition until Henry had the Church's (i.e. Papal) blessing to bring it into conformity. Later the Jansenites would find refuge there.