“Policy Tensor writes,”
[IF] Henrich is right, Todd must be wrong about the archaic character of the Western nuclear family. Examination of the evidence shows that Todd is right and Henrich is wrong. The reason is simple — we can rule out the Henrich hypothesis. The alternate hypothesis is that the Church’s war against cousin marriage was directed at the nobles, who did indeed practice it in a manner that isolated them from the dominant family system of their societies. Just as socialism could spread easily over the exogamous communitarian anthropological base and found itself blocked on its boundaries and Islam likewise for the endogamous communitarian base, the Church’s influence may have been greatest in exogamous anthropological terrain. In other words, the alternate hypothesis inverts the causal arrow between family systems and the Church’s influence. The correlation between them is explained by a causal vector pointing in the reverse direction — the exogamous anthropological base explains the extent of medieval Christendom.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This is not lowering by very much my probability that Henrich is right.
Thanks for linking to that. I have read through it a few times but typically lose interest about 2/3ds of the way through, without reading every word carefully.
I can’t say anything insightful, except that the article helped to convince me that family structure really does matter.
If I do have any useful insight, it’s essentially this.
Hypothesis: A lot social scientists don’t really know much about the issue, and certainly not enough. They don’t even think about it much.
A Corollary : The educated American public has probably not thought about the issue very much. They may tend to assume that that “hyper individualism” of NW Europe is the default state, or the climax state, or the telos–the arrangement that the world is drifting toward.
The educated American public is wrong, but it hasn’t really become clear to them. For people who never leave hyper-individualistic societies and are simply minding their own business, it doesn’t really seem to matter.
One in a while they might get a wakeup call. Transforming Iraq into a society like those in NW Europe is hard, for example. The Arab “tribes” matter, to be frank, and cannot simply be dispensed with through a blackboard exercise or by assuming that they don’t actually provide anything useful.
= – = – = – =
Intuitively I get other flash of insight–what is the scarce resource, in the overall scheme of things? Is it the same everywhere? Have all parts of the planet historically been equally short on arable farmland, security against marauding outsiders, and fertile women? I tend to doubt that. I would like to see a more explicit analysis of that. But generally it’s a research literature that’s beyond me.
P.S.: Just trying to write a comment so at least this post generated one comment.
P.S.: Communist subversion to me looks more like a random event. The version that started out in Imperial Russia (oddly enough) lost steam before it reached NW Europe and the lands of the Carolingian Empire. Communist subversion is most effective when a state, and society, is not forewarned against it.