Joseph Henrich - The WEIRDest People In The World (Allan Lane, 2020) *****

If you did not know, but W.E.I.R.D in the title stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich & Democratic". It's the kind of bias that we find in pscyhological studies. Henrich is the chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He explores how Western culture developed differently than other cultures, with diverging responses and perspectives on things, but he goes a step further too: by evidence from anthropology, economics, history, religion, law and psychology, he gives a sweeping picture of why the West has become what it is today, how it has evolved, and become dominant across the globe. 

One of the more eye-catching analyses are his statistics on the Catholic church's prohibition of first cousin marriages in Europe as of the fourth Century. This resulted in a seismic shift in village growth, and horizontal mobility. Men had to move to other places in order to find a wife. This led to a more individualistic approach instead of a collective one. It meant that other values became dominant, that commercial exchanges and rational arguments became more important than kinship and generational ownership. That hierarchy of clan elders was replaced by more citizen representation. This simple fact, also led over the longer term to the diminished power of the Church itself on society. Even today, countries with the highest kinship values are often the ones with the lowest levels of democracy. This holds even true in countries like Italy, where high cousing marriages in some provinces in the 20th Century still have effects in lower election participation in the 21st Centruy. Participatory and representative forms of government are the result of societal changes that abolished first cousin marriages. It seems far-fetched at first hearing, yet the evidence and the statistics that Henrich presents are solid and compelling. 

This evolution changed society over centuries and led to the intellectual, technological and political progress we have witnessed in the West. Henrich describes and explains this change. He does not judge or pontificate that the West is best. 

Obviously all this has its effects on policy, and how to address the differences in culture for people living within the same country. Migrations and subcultures require different approaches, and in international politics one has to be aware that what works in some countries, will not necessarily work in others. This is obvious, but Henrich offers us the insights and some of the tools needed to be aware of it and to work with it. 

The book is an eye-opener, and entirely original in its broad scope and synthesis of so many disciplines.