Dakota Beacon

As far back as I can remember, the ins-and-outs of history and civilization held an exceptional fascination for me. Even as a kid, curiosity motivated me to read. The “whys and wherefores” inspired by the “big picture" of human interactions and cultural relationships. These questions piqued my interest in a way I still find peculiar. Without explanation, I just go with the flow and read widely.

Of the many books in my library, I often revisit such volumes as “A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century” by John Burrow. Another favorite, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order” by Sanuel P. Huntington, also intrigues me.

Aroused by the same sense of curiosity, my latest acquisition, “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous” by Joseph Henrich, promises to further whet my appetite. For starters, WEIRD people include a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, i.e., WEIRD. In the eyes of the progressive left, such people lend themselves to slurs and branding as “racist” or “bigoted” or “homophobic.” More accurately, they are psychologically peculiar in a non-threatening way. Anthropologist Henrich chairs the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University (yes, THAT Harvard) where his research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making, and culture.

Full disclosure: I have not fully digested my new acquisition cover-to-cover. I have read enough, however, to offer a quick evaluation. (HOW to read a book is equally as important as actually READING the book.) My evaluation may arouse interest in like-minded readers.

Over time, Westerners became more educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic than any other society in the past 500 years. Consequently, Westerners think differently about the world from everyone else. Henrich recounts the “big history” of how psychology and culture shaped the peculiar Western mind. (I found this mildly reminiscent of the 1951-1964 TV documentary series “The Big Picture.”) This mind, in turn, shaped the modern world. In a tangible way, his book explains how and why we in the West understand the world in ways the rest of the world does not. He has written an explanation provocative enough with major historical illustrations but logically stimulating enough to keep him from being “cancelled” in the academic community. Good for him!

Western societies are psychologically odd relative to the rest of humanity. As humans, our culture, biology, and psychology are always intertwined. Henrich does a good job explaining the choices behind why some societies developed in some ways while others did not. From the Middle Ages onward, we have produced and inhabited a WEIRD world that we assume implicitly to be the natural order of things.

Henrich appears to make good on his effort to explain just how different we Westerners are and why the West rules. His work produced an interesting melding of cultural evolution and social psychology yielding an identifiable class of WEIRDos.

How did we get the way we are as a society? In Henrich’s word: Christianity. So goes his argument. Some may consider this a grossly simplistic summation, but there it is. If anyone has a problem with the idea that the United States was established on a Christian foundation, then they will have a real problem with Henrich’s premise.

As the church’s influence grew, she undermined old kinships insisting on a new way of “doing family.” No more marrying close relatives, no more polygamy, no more divorce. One man, one wife, for life. That, he shows, is weird. Henrich maintains that the ripple effect of these family changes -- culturally, economically, educationally, geographically, psychologically – cannot be overestimated. Henrich argues that the church’s teaching on marriage and family life steered societies which gave rise to our western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures.

Important to any quick read of a book is the table of contents and especially the footnotes (76 pages), the bibliography (71 pages), and the index (26 pages). Whether a person agrees or disagrees with his conclusions, Henrich certainly has done his homework!

No single book on a given subject will satisfy every reader. Nor will it exhaust all information on that given topic. Even so, Henrich’s 680-page book not only presents a broad swath of information, but that information validates some pretty WEIRD people!

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).