CIVILIZATION IS THE WAR ON NATURE:

The WEIRDest People in the World, a new book by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, suggests that both parties in this debate are onto something, even as it casts the entire conversation in a different light.

Specifically, Part II of the book (Chapters 5-8) demonstrates that what is often referred to as the "traditional" family is, in fact, anything but. Looking worldwide, historically through the present, the family structure that people in the U.S. and Western Europe take for granted is actually highly peculiar -- a product of a centuries-long campaign by the Western Church to dismantle kindreds, clans, tribes and other competing structures of allegiance and authority, and to reorient society around the Church instead.

Central to this endeavor was what the author calls the Western Church's Marriage and Family Program (MFP). Critically, many aspects of this program had a tenuous relationship with scripture or Christianity per se.

Indeed, many of the prescriptions and proscriptions of the West Church's MFP were extra-Biblical. The Tanakh, for instance, allows for plural marriage, cousin marriage, divorce, and concubinage. Although these practices were all rendered taboo in the Western Church's MFP, the Eastern Orthodox Church (and many other interpretations of Christianity) did not have as stringent or unusual rules regarding sex, marriage, and family structure -- instead continuing to tolerate many of these practices that were explicitly permitted and regulated in the Scriptures.

These differences proved extraordinarily consequential.

Over time, Henrich argues, the Western Church's MFP ended up reshaping the culture and psychology of the people under its domain, leading to significant differences between denizens of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries as compared to virtually everyone else -- including other places where Christianity was dominant, but the Western Church's MFP was not.

If one looks at the areas where the Western Church was able to implement its MFP from the time it was developed through the Protestant Reformation, the places that had longer exposure to the MFP, and where it was more stringently enforced, are more characteristically WEIRD today than places that have shorter or less intense exposure. This is true not just across contemporary countries, but within them as well.

Henrich then illustrates how the Protestant Reformation, and later the Enlightenment, were both products and accelerators of the WEIRD revolution in culture and thought kicked off by the Western Church's MFP.

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