There are those who rave about Ayn Rand, there are those who worship at the altar of Leo Strauss, there are those who still think that Samuel P. Huntington was onto something, and they will all be coked up together at Liz Truss’s British CPAC, to which her three immediate predecessors should be invited to explain why they had had her in the Cabinet. But then there are the ones that just never quite caught on, being too much even for those boys. One might say, too weird.
Many of the most clannish cultures, for good or ill, have been profoundly Catholic, while several of the most notable scientists, including Darwin and Einstein, have been married to their cousins. The Middle America in which the phenomenon of the nuclear family was first identified was aggressively anti-Catholic, a trend that is reasserting itself within the Trump coalition, and was quite open to cousin marriage, as may yet also reassert itself. See also Britain in its industrial and imperial heyday. And so on. Back in 2020, this was the initial response of a professional historian, Nicholas Guyatt:
Why did Europe play such an outsized role in human history? A generation ago, the geographer Jared Diamond offered an elegant answer in his book Guns, Germs and Steel: Europeans weren’t smarter than non-Europeans, but geography and natural resources propelled Europe’s development in particular directions. Harvard professor Joseph Henrich is a fan of Diamond but his new book takes a different approach. Henrich was trained as an anthropologist but now describes himself as a “cultural evolutionist”. In the same way that Darwin’s theory explains how life follows pathways of adaptation via natural selection, cultural evolution proposes that human cultures develop and transmit deep understandings and values across generations. There are many pathways of cultural evolution, Henrich contends, and no single human culture. To better understand the world and Europe’s influence on it, we need to recognise that European culture is, in Henrich’s key acronym, “weird”: western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic.
Henrich insists that “weird” values are culturally determined and specific rather than universal or natural. Specific doesn’t mean bad. As the book’s subtitle suggests, he credits the “firmware” of “weird” cultural evolution for many of the modern world’s core values: meritocracy, representative government, trust, innovation, even patience and restraint. These were the products not simply of Europe’s distinctive and highly unusual milieu, but of a narrow force many of us have forgotten: the prescriptions and hangups of the Christian church.
No historian would deny Christianity’s central role in the development of European society. But Henrich thinks that the church’s views on marriage and family life changed everything. He notes that Christianity was, from the middle ages at least, unusually hostile towards marriage between cousins. This produced a profound change in social organisation with sweeping effects on European culture. Kinship, a term that has always fascinated anthropologists, plays a key role in the book: it directs communities inwards, and makes them either apathetic or hostile towards those outside their particular clan.
Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe between AD1000 and 1500, even as clan-based societies persisted across the rest of the planet. Within Europe, where prohibitions on cousin marriage forced people to marry beyond their families, “weird” culture became more receptive to strangers. Monasteries, universities, trading guilds, courts, stock markets, legislatures, coffee houses, newspapers – along with enterprise, trust and mobility – took root in the soil of “intergroup prosociality” created by the church’s edicts on marriage.Beyond Europe, non-“weird” people shared resources and a strong sense of local community but missed out on the forms of social dynamism and openness that supercharged Europe’s development.
Historians will find plenty to dispute here. Scholars of the medieval era will point out that the effects of the church’s “marriage and family programme” (the “MFP”, as Henrich inevitably terms it) were wildly uneven across time and space. Historians of the early modern era will note that the Protestant church was far less hostile to cousin marriage than its Catholic rival. (The Reformation received a crucial boost from Henry VIII’s determination to marry his former wife’s cousin.) Modern historians will argue that cousin marriage increased across many European societies in the 17th and 18th centuries before it was stigmatised again in the 19th century. They might also recall that, despite a consummately “weird” enthusiasm for innovation, both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein married their first cousins. Historians of the world beyond Europe will find a thousand exceptions to Henrich’s confident stereotyping of non-“weird” societies as hopelessly retarded by kinship and its developmental dead-ends.
A casual reader may wonder how a book about the efflorescence of European culture could say next to nothing about racism, imperialism and environmental catastrophe – the undertow of individualism, market economics and representative government in Europe. “I’m not highlighting the very real and pervasive horrors of slavery, racism, plunder and genocide,” Henrich concedes in his final chapter. “There are plenty of books on those subjects.” But the omission is corrosive to his argument: not only because he presents “prosperity” and “innovation” rather than genocide and expropriation as the avatars of “weird” culture, but because Europeans failed to demonstrate “impersonal prosociality” when they ventured beyond Europe. If anything, empire’s violence and devastation suggests that the kinship thinking supposedly purged by Christianity re-emerged in Europeans’ new theories of race. White people were happy to dismiss the talent and futures of hundreds of millions of non-European people in the pursuit of financial gain, and to do so across centuries.
The Weirdest People seems grimly acclimatised to the darker aspects of our political present. Beyond Henrich’s claim that the world’s cultures developed on separate evolutionary pathways, an assertion that seems doggedly inattentive to the interpenetration of cultures and ideas across human history, he argues that “disparate societies” produce “a rich array of diverse cultural psychologies” marking out populations across generations, if not centuries. Deploying a battery of studies based on contemporary evidence – surveys of IBM employees in different countries, say, or the unpaid New York parking tickets of UN diplomats – Henrich suggests that corruption, impatience and even aggression are more common in non-“weird” cultures than in western society.
We shouldn’t blame non-“weird” individuals who fetishise revenge or indulge in nepotism, he implies: they’re burdened by centuries of kinship logic that sees little value in transparency and trust beyond one’s clan. Instead Henrich’s study chides western policymakers who take a unitary view of human nature when they promote democracy or the rule of law in the global south. Unless “weird” politicians and planners can reset the “firmware” of non-“weird” cultures, he warns, those societies can no more escape their cultural norms than we can ours.
I confess that when reading these pages I couldn’t help remembering that Donald Trump gave his son-in-law responsibility for Middle East peace, and that Boris Johnson has made his brother a lord. But cultural evolutionists trade in centuries and populations, so these distracting exceptions can presumably be drowned in an ocean of data.
What about non-European people who have settled in “weird” societies? Across virtually every sphere of human knowledge over the centuries, immigrants have carried ideas and practices that have fertilised cross-cultural thinking. This process seems mostly invisible to Henrich. Declining the opportunity to discuss the forms of syncretism and assimilation that define immigrant experience, he offers (tenuous) evidence that non-“weird” thinking endures among migrants across continents and generations. Citing high rates of cousin marriage among second-generation Pakistani immigrants to Britain, and lower levels of political activism among second-generation immigrants of colour across Europe, Henrich concludes that even growing up in a “weird” society can’t expunge the “dark matter” of one’s cultural-psychological lineage.
It was “weird” intellectuals who crafted the pseudo-science of race in the 18th century, and who spliced it with evolutionary theories to create new arguments about civilisation and white supremacy in the 19th. Henrich might wince at the suggestion that The Weirdest People in the World endorses social Darwinism, but in its emphasis on the supposedly discrete nature of culture and on the virtues of “weird” thinking and progress it comes uncomfortably close to doing just that.
And last year, once the thesis had had a chance to bed in, this was the verdict of postliberal royalty, Sebastian Milbank:
Are you WEIRD? If you have a Bachelor’s degree, speak English, and only see your cousins at Christmas, the answer is almost certainly yes, or so goes an argument forwarded by Joseph Henrich, author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
WEIRD stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic” and is used to describe a particular psychological “template” typical of modern Westerners. Drawing on historical and psychological research, Henrich argues that unlike most people in the world and premodernity, we are “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles”.
A familiar, accurate and, to my eyes, not especially flattering portrait of modern Western man, archetypally plonked in front of the TV in his pants, scrolling through his phone and waiting for his pizza to arrive. But according to Henrich, these traits are the key to Western exceptionalism, the source of the scientific and industrial revolutions, not to mention modern democracy and human rights.
His bold thesis is that WEIRD psychology emerged in the middle ages, driven by the Catholic Church’s suppression of clannish kinship networks, and the emergence of nuclear families and a mobile workforce in Western Europe. These high trust societies with weaker family bonds led to greater innovation, equality before the law, meritocracy and democratic decision-making. Not only does the WEIRD hypothesis seem to unlock the secret of Western success, it also appears to explain the difficulties experienced by many non-Western, non-WEIRD societies in adopting modern institutions. Whereas WEIRD Westerners are trusting and non-conformist, much of the Global South remains deferential to family and tradition, but untrusting of strangers and abstract institutions.
✹
Published in 2020, the book has come at just the right time to explain everything from the failure of the War on Terror to the difficulties of integrating asylum seekers. It’s quickly been seized on by a number of intellectual tendencies as a way of articulating the distinctiveness of the West, but outside of the conservative “family, faith and flag” narrative.
For libertarians and classical liberals, increasingly a disaffected wing of the right, suspicious of Islam, and angry at the “censorious left”, it’s a comforting narrative. It offers a conservative realism about the likelihood of rapid global democratisation and local integration of migrants, combined with an ultimate optimism about the triumph of Western ideas and institutions.
Yet it’s also gained traction amongst more trenchant nationalists and ethno-nationalists. Some, Le Pen style, have pivoted to defining liberalism as a distinct “national” cultural tradition peculiar to Western countries, one that must be defended by sometimes illiberal means. Others, going still further, see WEIRD psychology as aligned with racial phenotypes, a model of society that can only be enjoyed by the genetically gifted, a perspective Henrich himself rejects.
All of this reflects the strange ferment of the contemporary populist right, in which an increasingly civilisational sense is combined with an inability to agree on how Western civilisation is to be defined. All of this is happening at a time of radical globalisation, in which Silicon Valley has an outsize role in shaping public discourse online, both directly and indirectly. The populist right is caught between this civilisational instinct, which directs it to a more symbolic and spiritual reality, and an impulse towards an amoral, hard-edged materialism and rationalism.
The payout of this contradiction is typically a nostalgia for yesterday’s liberalism, and a patriotism on behalf of decadence. Western individualism and libertinism are recast as a civilisational strength by this rationalist Right, which seeks to rigorously patrol the walls of our permissive paradise.
This is reflective of a new demographic of right-winger. Alienated from a progressive-dominated academy, especially in the humanities, many of them are STEM graduates, and a number of them work in the valley. They are young men typically aged 20–40. Their earnings vary, but many are in professional jobs, yet struggle to save, buy a house or get a girlfriend. They are likely to be active online. They are self-educated, especially in history, literature and philosophy. They listen to podcasts, they read books, almost all of it popular non-fiction.
Their political instincts vary widely from freewheeling libertarianism, all the way to Trumpian or Faragian populism. They’re attracted to material and genetic explanations for criminality and life chances and technological solutions to climate change. They are generally free speech absolutists, and even those who are relatively centrist consume irreverent, offensive and politically incorrect content.
Henrich is of an earlier generation, but he’s exactly the kind of author that appeals to the rationalist right. He writes the sort of ambitious global narratives that historians in the academy disdain, and combines a degree in anthropology with one in engineering. The bias towards mechanistic modes of thinking is everywhere in the book. The “circuitry” of our brains has been “rewired”. When discussing religion Henrich explains that “cultural evolution will seek out back doors in our minds by locating glitches in our psychological firewalls”. Our belief systems are “cognitive bugs” which can be adapted into “potent social technologies”.
It shouldn’t take too much deep reflection to see the inherent limitations and problems that pertain to describing a biological organ (a human brain) as a faultily wired circuit board. Nor should we single out Henrich here.
There is a general cultural forgetting of the West’s actual intellectual tradition. An often arrogant, inward-looking and self-serving academic class are terrible evangelists for it, using their superior education to obfuscate their subject areas and deconstruct inherited wisdom. Meanwhile rationalist writers, often acting with both admirable humility and ambition, are infinitely more appealing, even though their approach is often hopelessly amateurish and partial.
What is being missed out? Henrich is a gifted scholar, and he makes powerful, even intuitive use of psychological research. But it is obvious he has no significant grasp of philosophy or intellectual history, and fails to appreciate its significance. Embracing evolutionary psychology, he de-emphasises agency, posing cultural change as the product of random features passing through a Darwinian filter. According to Henrich, no Western society “set out” to be WEIRD; rather, by an accident of history, organisations and cultures with WEIRD traits emerge, and outcompete groups that lack them.
As a result, the conscious evolution of ideas is largely ignored, along with the full range of perspectives on “WEIRD” ideas. Every hoary progressive myth of the 19th century, from Weber’s Protestant work ethic to the Whig view of history is resurrected, without any awareness of why they were killed off in the first place. The popularity of these “naive” narrative works is a symptom of a culture that lacks a core canon of knowledge, and fails to produce well-rounded thinkers.
For anyone with a serious grasp of medieval or early modern history, the idea that Western society was then defined by “individualism” and hostility to inherited tradition comes as a considerable surprise. Again, one gets the sense of what Henrich is getting at — that a distinct psychology with more emphasis on the individual and willingness to embrace new ideas is emerging — but as with the mechanistic brain, false ideas are being imported by using imprecise, poorly chosen terms.
The power of the WEIRD hypothesis is that it’s undoubtedly picking up on something real. The psychological research is impressive. The argument that Western culture has a unique psychology, not universalisable to every group, is an important insight. And the idea that this distinctiveness can be traced to the Middle Ages and Latin Christendom is certainly persuasive. But the gaps, once you notice them, are glaring.
Forget, for a moment, the inadequacy of “individualism”, however nascent, as an explanation of 14th or 17th century European difference. Let’s consider an unquestionably modern European example. 20th century Europeans should, by his argument, be very WEIRD indeed, yet much of the early 20th century was consumed by the rise of radically collectivist states, from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany.
In the opening pages of The Weirdest People in the World, Henrich not only singles out Germany, but analyses literacy rates based on historic Protestant affiliation, showing an extremely strong correlation. One could just as easily link electoral support for the Nazi party with those same patterns of Protestant populations. Why did the WEIRD Lutherans flock to a movement that suspended all individual rights and sought to exterminate the stranger, whilst “clannish” German Catholics were more likely to vote for democracy and toleration?
Why, for that matter do groups at the extreme end of a shift towards individualism end up, across Europe, supporting totalitarian communist or fascist parties and governments?
✹
It’s a mystery that Henrich never addresses, and indeed there is a great deal about the modern world that radically complicates his thesis. The mores of our contemporary English-speaking world (individualism, consumerism and so on), and its signal achievements (economic growth, democracy, toleration, etc.) are assumed as the pinnacle of evolutionary history, and are imposed retrospectively on radically different historical societies.
What he fails to consider is that radical individualism might be, in historical terms, an extremely recent development, really only emerging in the 1960s, and reaching its peak within the past two decades. Likewise, for all his thorough research in many areas, there is much missing when it comes to recent psychological developments.
Whilst he correctly identifies the uniqueness of Western voluntary associations, and the unusually high levels of trust in Western societies, he is entirely unable to account for both of these trends going into reverse over past decades. In Britain, the number of young adults with one or fewer close friends went from 7 per cent to almost 20 per cent between 2012 and 2021, a trend repeated in America.
Trust in institutions has declined across the West for decades, and the freedom of children to roam and play — an excellent proxy for interpersonal trust — has collapsed in the same period. Shrinking levels of criminality, another supposed unique feature of WEIRD cultures, went into reverse in America during the 1960s to 1980s, at the peak of the dissolution of traditional norms.
All of this points to what the rationalist Right is missing — what really makes us WEIRD, historically, is not individualism, but corporatism. The great historic shift from incestuous clannishness to nuclear families and the rule of law involved not a narrowing of the mental horizon to individual interest, but rather a radical expansion of affections and duties.
Henrich is contradictory on this point, constantly stressing the “declining importance of relationships”, whilst celebrating the proliferation of voluntary associations. The contradiction emerges because of his attempt to reconcile modern individualism with the historically successful psychology of the West. He misses the obvious, or perhaps just the unthinkable.
What Henrich and his followers are picking up on is an increasingly hobbled, psychologically crippled West, working with only half of its brain, out of touch with its own identity. The promise of perpetual prosperity and security, linked by a wonderfully closed circuit to our self-indulgent individualism, is a lie already collapsing all around us.
The true WEIRDness of the West rests not in a narrow individualist mindset — a kind of civilisational autism — but rather in our genius for reconciling holistic and analytic, group and individual, tradition and novelty. From the ancient polis, in which individual glory was reconciled with civic belonging, to the Christian humanism that located the dignity of man in self-sacrificial love, our civilisation achieved an equilibrium between the extremes of collectivism and individualism.
When that balance is lost, the dream of the Christian West, with its extraordinary material power and massive social organisation, can fast become a nightmare, whether that’s the horrors of totalitarianism or the soul-crushing isolation of contemporary atomisation. If the rationalist right want to be truly civilisational thinkers, they must accept that the West today is not weirdly wonderful, but grotesquely disfigured.
