Sind wir WEIRD? Prof. Joseph Henrich “How the West …”

“How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous”

My summary: Here in the West most of us are no more guided by our hunting group or clan, but by the family, and ultimatly, today, just by ourselves, as individuals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/books/review/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-joseph-henrich.html meint:
   According to Joseph Henrich’s book, it was the advent of Protestantism, aided by the invention of the printing press, that brought along the spread of literacy and altered the workings of our brains.
   The centerpiece of Henrich’s theory is the role played by what he calls the Roman Catholic Church’s Marriage and Family Program, featuring prohibitions of polygamy, divorce, marriage to first cousins, and even to such distant blood relatives as sixth cousins, while discouraging adoption and arranged marriages and the strict norms of inheritance that prevailed in extended families, clans and tribes. “The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in ‘figuring out’ how to dismantle kin-based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/ meint:
   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). Westerners identify more as members of voluntary social groups—dentists, artists, Republicans, Democrats, supporters of a Green Party—than of extended clans.
   The Catholic Church changed all that. As of late antiquity, Europeans still lived in tribes, like most of the rest of the world. But the Church dismantled these kin-based societies with what Henrich calls its “Marriage and Family Program,” or MFP. The MFP was really an anti-marriage and anti-family program.
   Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe.
   By the time Protestantism came along, people had already internalized an individualist worldview. Henrich calls Protestantism “the WEIRDest religion,” and says it gave a “booster shot” to the process set in motion by the Catholic Church.
   … “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.

https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/der-westen-mit-einer-neuen-psychologie-eroberte-er-die-welt-ld.1581437
   Die Westeuropäer setzten sich in aller Welt durch, weil sie anders denken, fühlen und handeln als die anderen Menschen. Was er zehn Jahre lang erforschte, erklärt er in einem faszinierenden Buch, rigoros durchargumentiert, aber auch für Laien leicht lesbar und verständlich: «Wie der Westen psychologisch eigenartig und ökonomisch erfolgreich wurde».
   Die katholische Kirche setzte im Hochmittelalter die Kernfamilie durch – das führte zu einer neuartigen Persönlichkeitsstruktur.
   In ihren Kernfamilien auf sich allein gestellt, bildeten die Menschen eine individualistischere, weniger konformistische Persönlichkeit aus und lernten, Fremden zu vertrauen, sich mit ihnen auszutauschen und mit ihnen zusammenzuarbeiten.
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/ehe-und-erben-joseph-henrich-erklaert-den-aufstieg-des-westens-ld.1440752
   Die Menschen in industriellen Gesellschaften verhalten sich überall gleich, Jäger und Sammler oder Hirten aber ganz unterschiedlich.
   Zum einen die Annahme, dass die Menschen rational handeln. Dabei leiten uns alle möglichen Glaubenssysteme, nicht nur die Religionen oder die Magie, sondern zum Beispiel auch das Vertrauen in unsere Regierung, obwohl es die empirische Evidenz nicht unbedingt rechtfertigt. Zum anderen die Annahme, dass die Menschen nur egoistisch denken. Es gibt inzwischen mehr als genug Belege dafür, dass wir nicht nur im Eigeninteresse handeln, sondern als soziale Wesen vor allem aufgrund von internalisierten Motiven und Normen. Insgesamt verhalten wir uns also im realen Leben schlicht nicht so, wie es ein Ökonom vom Homo oeconomicus erwartet. Aber was ich hier sage, gilt in der Ökonomie wohl immer noch als Ketzerei.

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Paket an meine Frau. Passt doch, der Selbstbezug als Glücksbringer.