Charles Freeman, author of The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (and in the UK, The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500 – AD 1700), sent me a long email critiquing Joe Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Freeman is a bit concerned about the adulation for Henrich’s work when he believes it is fundamentally flawed.

Why? Read his review on Amazon, it’s titled “2.0 out of 5 stars Henrich’s central argument and its offshoots are not supported by historical fact.” Read the whole thing.

All that said, I do want to put in a word for Henrich and his ambition. Lots of people on Twitter and elsewhere have pointed out “did you notice this whopper on page x! The guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about!?!?” Of course, he’ll make errors, The WEIRDest People in the World, and Henrich’s current research program, is broad, interdisciplinary, and it “breaks things.” This isn’t to excuse sloppiness, errors should be fixed. But when you take big risks, it is to be expected that picayune errors will slip in.

Nevertheless, what Freeman alludes to is not a small error. It’s a deep philosophical chasm, and the issues he brings up bothered me too. How truly effective was the ideology promoted by the Western Christian Church? Quite often there is one thing that is promoted officially, amongst elites, and another thing that is practiced. Freeman points out the reality that most people entered into common-law marriages, and that the religious authorities and government only took an interest in elite high-status marriages due to matters of property. Even when it comes to the elite exceptions and workarounds were common. Ideals were there to be broken.

There needs to be more exploration of the details of Henrich’s conjectures, though I think Freeman is too hard on him. After all, elite emulation is a real practice, and Greg Clark’s work (amongst others) shows that elite overproduction means that the ancestors of modern people may mostly be elites of the past.

Addendum: Some of Freeman’s questions are going to be answered soon. For example:  “How many people did actually marry their cousins in pre-Christian society? How does one define a cousin marriage as against a non-cousin marriage? How could one find and assess the evidence when most marriage/ cohabitation arrangements were unrecorded and then map, as Henrich does the decline in percentages of cousin marriages in Europe?” The Krause group at Max Planck is crushing through a lot of Late Antique DNA, and will answer these cousins in regards to endogamy definitively.