I review The WEIRDest People in the World, by Joseph Henrich.
The latest book by Joseph Henrich is the most ambitious analysis of social behavior that I have ever read. It attempts to cover essentially all human history and the entire spectrum of different societies, using the full range of disciplines of social science. To offer a review is difficult, and to attempt a summary is impossible.
I strongly recommend both the review and the book. The book made Tyler Cowen’s list of best non-fiction books of 2020.
“The book made Tyler Cowen’s list of best non-fiction books of 2020.”
Is that a pro or a con? I honestly don’t trust any of his thoughts, so I’m thinking con.
However, I look forward to reading ASK’s review.
Perhaps in this androgynous age, marriage sounds like the explanation for everything. However, if we go back a few generations when masculine males were a majority of their kind, we can find more solid explanations rooted in less abstract theorizing. Lord Kames undoubtedly remains the final authority for explaining Western European culture. He succinctly sums up the explanation for our current mess in Sketches of the History of Man:
“Long experience has at the fame time made it evident, that a nation seldom gains by war; and that agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, are the only solid foundations of power and grandeur. These arts accordingly have become the chief objects of European governments, and the only rational causes of war. Among the warlike nations of Greece and Italy, how would it have sounded, that their effeminate descendants would employ soldiers by profession to fight their battles. And yet this is unavoidable in every country where arts and manufactures flourish; which, requiring little exercise, tend to enervate the body, and of course the mind. Gain, at the fame time, being the sole object of industry, advances selfishness to be the ruling passion, and brings on a timid anxiety about property and self-preservation.”
Hence the supine posture of Western establishment before their master General Secretary Xi and his social credit system profiteering tech titan surrogates. Hence the urgency for establishment elites of both left and right to coalesce around an anti-working class white agenda and to foment race hate to keep the virile lower classes divided and ineffectual.
Individualism is dead, with education credentials signifying nothing more than conformism. Hypergamy is unthinkable today and one must go back to say Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders to get an authentic account of attempted cross-class intermarriage. Society is strained and unstable. Its collapse will create opportunities for masculinity to resurrect itself. Jorge Amado’s The Violent Land offers a peek at what life will be like at the new frontiers that will arise as the high tech mirage crumbles. Learn practical skills is about all one can do now.
There are herders known as “professors” and “administrators” who reward obedience, conformity, and deference to authority as chief among the virtues. That’s what it means to be educated.
Likewise the scolds on Twitter and TV look at their fellow citizens as children to be corrected and shepherded towards obedience.
These herders think people are sheep who need to be taught, and can’t be trusted to reach the answer that’s been selected for them. They believe that this mass of helpless creatures, unaided, can’t achieve things for themselves. And these teachers get furious when individual men and women prove disloyal to whatever clan or tribe they’re expected to conform to.
So that second word, Educated, is an increasingly awkward fit. It’s precisely our educators who tell us that there are no individuals, just irresponsible non-conformists who are to blame, and wicked, for spreading disease and heresy among the community. What Karen says is that the rule of law needs to take a back seat to the greater good of unity and community safety. Karen says independence is selfishness.
Working out a cost-benefit analysis of official policy is something the enforcers of conformity disapprove of. What are the costs and benefits, for example, of piling up a huge fuel load of deadwood on the forest floor? Is that a better or worse policy than increasing the price of electricity as a solution to forest fires? What are the benefits of house arrest for people with undiagnosed cancers? That kind of analysis is said to be heartless and reckless.
I’m over half way through it at the moment. Definitely recommend it. I’m sure some of its propositions will be knocked down, some modified, but well worth the read.
Very important book.
culture affects psychology
Fine short review, except a very disconcerting use of “PC”.
Not Politically Correct (nor Pers. Comp.!), but instead Psychological / Cultural in reference to traits under study. What makes a trait P vs C?
Why not Culture / Psychological? CP would be less confusing.
(If you meant to elide your PC into the more standard Poli Correct PC, without noting it, I think that’s weak.)
Most reviews focus, as do you and probably the book itself, on the Catholic Church breaking up the marriages with cousins. Leading to less kinship clans and norms, with more individualism.
Your review does mention the increasing problem of unmarried men, but doesn’t mention what I think is most important, seen from MR:
I’ll make the case that monogamous marriage norms — which push upstream against our polygynous biases and the strong preferences of elite men — create a range of social and psychological effects that give the societies that possess them a big edge in competition against other groups.”
Tyler quotes from the book a few months ago https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/05/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world.html
It’s not clear in your review whether you’re quoting Hanson or Henrich (who agree on some things, but not on all)
monogamous marriage suppresses men’s competitiveness, risk-taking, and revenge-seeking,
I’m sure pre-marriage future fathers have much more risk-taking than married fathers.
I’ve now seen a few reviews of the book.
Longest from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/
“Westerners are hyper-individualistic and hyper-mobile, whereas just about everyone else in the world was and still is enmeshed in family and more likely to stay put. Westerners obsess more about personal accomplishments and success than about meeting family obligations (which is not to say that other cultures don’t prize accomplishment, just that it comes with the package of family obligations).”
“WEIRD people have a bad habit of universalizing from their own particularities. They think everyone thinks the way they do, ”
Roger Scruton criticizes both Liberalism and Socialism for its abstract universalism, contrary to most cultures that are specific and concrete. Not surprisingly, most HEE WEIRD folk, including Libertarians, are quite big on universalism of whatever system they’re big believers in.
Henrich of Harvard became academically famous for this idea around 2010.
https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf
This was part of the huge failure to replicate experiments, especially simple psych tests common among college students. Other cultures have different, and often very different results, as well as different results from each other. But for many such results, the biggest outsiders were us WEIRD folk.
That’s why folks with any kind of genes from any other country can come to America, become culturally individualistic, and join the WEIRD ones. (I can never become a Slovak…)
My favorite review was the 2017 update (on 2013):
https://psmag.com/social-justice/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135
This gave some examples of different thinking.
they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic.
It’s cultural, not genetic. That’s a huge relief.
Also now relevant is that Black Lives Matter seems an attempt to reject being WEIRD.