Episode 8: Joseph Henrich – Is Christianity Weird?

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Jared  

Welcome to this episode of Faith for Normal People and today we’re asking the question: Is Christianity Weird?

Pete  

Is it? We’re gonna find out, by talking to our guest, Dr. Joseph Henrich. He is the Ruth Moore professor of biological anthropology—which is very heady—in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, and he is the author of a few books. The most relevant one is, “The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar, and Particularly Preposterous.”

Jared

Not preposterous, prosperous.

Pete  

Oh…

Jared  

They’re preposterous in their own way.

Pete  

That’s right, you know what?

Jared  

And also prosperous. 

Pete  

I was reading my own cultural location into the title of the book—folks, you don’t know what that means right now but you will in a few minutes—But anyway, we’re working off of the acronym “W.E.I.R.D.”

Jared  

Exactly. And then don’t forget to stay tuned for a Quiet Time at the end of the episode. It’s a segment where Pete and I, we reflect on the episode and how this conversation has impacted us or intersects with other things we’ve been thinking about in our life of faith.

Joe  

Jared  

Well, welcome to the podcast, Joe, it’s great to have you. I’m very excited to have you on. 

Joe  

Good to be with you. 

Jared  

We want to start with this concept that you have that really is at the forefront of your latest book, “W.E.I.R.D.” So, can you explain what you mean by that acronym and why it matters? Kind of paint us the picture of the work behind this word W.E.I.R.D.

Joe  

Yeah, so W.E.I.R.D. is an acronym that stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.” And I coined this acronym, along with two colleagues in social psychology, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan. And when I first moved to the University of British Columbia in 2005, I was coming from an anthropology department where I was a cultural anthropologist. And I started working—I was brought into a psychology department and an economics department and started interacting with people in different disciplines—and independently, Steve, Ara, and I had each converged to a finding of noticing that in the domains of psychology that we studied—and I was studying something I call impersonal prosociality—that not only was there more variation around the world than psychologists and economists had accounted for, but that the populations most commonly studied by researchers doing experiments were unusual in a global perspective. 

And so Steve and Ara had found that in their lines of work, Ara was doing things on analytic thinking, for example, and Steve Heine, was working on self-concept and individualism and things like that. So, we began to do a review of the literature, which we published in 2010, in a paper called “The Weirdest People in the World.” Interestingly, we had the title of the paper, “The Weirdest People in the World,” before we came up with the acronym. And we were looking for a term to label the populations most commonly studied by psychologists and economists, and so we turned this word “weird” into an acronym. But it’s really meant as a consciousness raising device, to remind researchers, and policymakers, and others, that much of what we think of as normal, quote, “human psychology” is actually the psychology of one particular population at one slice in time.

Jared  

Okay, well, then, can we go a little bit further with that, in that even when we talk about “normal,” you know, what I’m hearing you say is, for a lot of us, we grow up—especially, I can’t speak for other cultural contexts, which is kind of the point—but for us growing up in America in the 20th century, we’ve grown up with a lot of things, even studies, like studies in psychology or in medicine and in technology and these things with a, I don’t know, an avatar or a profile of the normal or the average person. And what I’m hearing you say is, you’re trying to help people become aware that—that’s not necessarily the case, if you’re from one of these western, educated, independent, rich, democratic contexts, that is itself its own context. It’s not, there’s not a normal profile. Or maybe you can say that in a different way of how when you talk about awareness, what you mean by that?

Joe  

Yeah, well, what I mean by awareness is that, I think it’s an inclination of many researchers, and probably people in general, to assume that the psychologies that they’re recording among their population is readily generalizable to humans, as a species, and what a growing body of evidence shows is that, you know, our minds really adapt to the institutions and languages and technologies that we grow up with. So, we should think of psychology as something that is changing over historical time more like language or something like that, rather than something fixed. 

So even something like personality. So psychologists will tell you that there’s a five factor personality structure. This is like conscientiousness, introversion, extroversion. Well, recent evidence is showing that that’s actually a product of adapting to diverse socio-ecologies. So, ecologies where there’s lots of different occupations, you can become a librarian or a used car salesman, that pull out different aspects of our personality, different social niches, different social groups. So, even something as basic that psychologists thought was so fundamental and replicable, turns out to just be something that’s peculiar to the modern world. I know this applies, actually, not just to psychology, but to things in medicine. So, for example, there are societies in the world that have no acne. And societies vary on how good their olfaction system is. W.E.I.R.D. people have flat feet, because we grow up in a world with shoes. So, it affects all kinds of things.

Pete  

Yeah. Well, you know, correct me if I’m wrong here, Joe, but it seems like, you know, the assumption that the West is normal, that W.E.I.R.D. is the norm, it sounds almost like a variation of maybe, you know, colonizing of Western personality types imposing that on the rest of the world.

Joe  

Yeah, I mean, you know, you can see that in things like eating disorders. So, lots of places in the world didn’t have any eating disorders and then when Western media gets there, and there’s an intrusion of Western culture, then suddenly eating disorders.

Jared  

Well, maybe we can take a turn here, because I think this idea—and again, I’m kind of wrapping my arms around it here, even as we talk—that maybe these things that we have grown up thinking are inherent to human nature, but it turns out, aren’t inherent to human nature, but have been shaped by these, you know, historical events and you say, at one point, a “historical events, cultural heritage, taboos that stretch back centuries, or even millennia.” So, how we think, feel, and reason isn’t universally human, but it’s impacted by all these historical factors, I want to maybe take a second and talk about one example that you talk about from the medieval period, because it also relates to the church and how the church has influenced the West in some important ways. So, can you talk about that, and maybe we can talk about other ways the church has influenced this W.E.I.R.Dness or this western world?

Joe  

Sure. So just to give listeners a sense of what we’re talking about, so, some of the features of psychology that, I think, have their roots in changes made by what became the Roman Catholic Church are individualism, like how we think about ourselves, overconfidence, emphasis on shame versus guilt, as well as things like analytic versus holistic thinking, so more analytic thinking, a universal morality that emphasizes intentions and other internal mental states. I mentioned the personality structure, an emphasis on time and time psychology, a concern with punctuality would be a couple more features. 

And in trying to understand that, I think one of the key events—it wasn’t really an event, it was a process—but starting in late antiquity, one branch of Christianity that, as I said, eventually becomes the Roman Catholic Church—the Western church, it was called at the time—began to impose a series of prohibitions surrounding marriage in the family that gradually over centuries began to break down European kinship structures into monogamous nuclear families. This is actually another example of weirdness, most people probably think the monogamous nuclear family is the most common or the universal, or the way families are supposed to be. It’s actually highly unusual, from an anthropological perspective, to find societies that lacked polygyny, don’t have cousin marriage, lack clans in which the basic unit is the monogamous nuclear family. And that’s actually—I mean, myself, I’m here, building on work by historians and others—it was really the church that initiated that process. 

And then what the book’s about is the sort of downstream consequences of that, how it results in other institutions and affects aspects of people’s psychology. So, the bans on cousin marriage are most famous, these incest taboos that get extended from brothers and sisters where there are virtual-universal to first-cousins, second-cousins, all the way up to sixth cousins at one point.

Pete  

Yeah, that’s very contrary. I’m thinking now of people listening to this episode and how common it is, at least in American Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, to think of the nuclear family as designed by God.

Jared  

And sort of stretches back, historically, from, quote, “the beginning.”

Pete  

To the very beginning. That’s how it’s always been.

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

And, first of all, that’s not the way it is, biblically. Because they’re, like, all over each other. [Laughs] There’s no nuclear family but more of a kinship structure, actually, Jared, you know, in the ancient Greece. But it’s interesting to me because, you know, we are affected by our culture, as you’ve been saying, and we tend to impose that and think that’s the norm, which is largely the point of what we’re talking about. That’s just a bad idea.

Joe  

I mean, I think the point you’re making is a fascinating one, because it’s not only—so, if you look at the Old Testament, I mean, that is a great example of a society that has an intensive kinship system, right? Polygyny, levirate marriage, clans, tribes, you know, it has basically all the usual elements we think of as intensive kinship. So when Saint Augustine and the church began making these rules—I mean, by church tradition, Jesus was the product of a cross cousin marriage. So, but then, when the church begins making these rules, they’re actually pushing upstream against what would seem to be the prohibitions, or what was seemed to be endorsed, at least implicitly by large sections of the Old Testament and some in the New.

Pete  

So, are you saying, do you trace this back to Augustine specifically, or just generally his time?

Joe  

Generally his time. He waxes more eloquent on it than others but of course, that’s true of many things that he waxes on. So, yeah, he actually says at one point that the bans on cousin marriage are useful because they compel people to make broader social connections. So he kind of sees what’s going on to some degree.

Jared  

So then there’s a direct correlation between these prohibitions around, kind of, marriage and family to… Can you maybe draw, how do sociologists make the connection between the prohibitions themselves to these traits generations later around being less inclined to conform, more individualistic, and so on?

Pete  

Joe  

Yeah, so that’s important. And mostly people don’t make that connection, so that, I don’t know, I don’t want to say it’s original to the book. But that’s something where the book makes a contribution that I don’t think is often made. So, historians have spotted this change in the family but—and psychologists think about psychology, but most people don’t do both. So, the idea is, is that the changes in the family structure alter the world people face. So, the way I like to explain this is imagine two ends of this continuum. One is a world where you’re born into complex kinship networks, most of your relationships are inherited, you have lots of responsibilities to other kinds of relatives, those relationships specify how you’re supposed to behave, there’s a big emphasis on conformity because you’ve got to conform to those different relationships. 

You’ll behave differently in different relationships because as anthropologists have pointed out, some cousin relationships are called joking relationships. I’ve studied these in Fiji and you know, it’s very much a kind of prankster relationship, especially with same-sex cousins in which you’re playing jokes on each other, it’s super relaxed. Whereas to an older brother, you might have a very deferential, you can never contradict them in public, you know, it’s a relationship of respect. So, you’re kind of trying to navigate that world. This creates an emphasis on shame and conformity, so those two things are going to go together as a consequence. And trust is going to be based on having connections through those social networks. So if you have to make a new business relationship, for example, you’re going to want to do it with someone who you’re already connected to. So you might not know them, but your cousin knows them or your brother knows them, or somebody knows them, at least multiple connections are better. 

Meanwhile, on the other side, if you’re in a world with small families that aren’t well linked together, you’ve got to cultivate dispositional attributes. So, you might want people to think you’re smart, honest, trustworthy, punctual, all these sorts of dispositions that make you valuable as, think of it as a market. So, now you’re in a market for possible relationship partners, for spouses, for friends, and for business partners. And so, you know, you’re cultivating a different thing, it has to be these dispositional, or cross-contextual traits, like honesty, that are going to apply to all these different kinds of relationships. And that- You’re going to have- You’re going to cultivate guilt, because that’s going to help you do the things like say, go to the gym, or do your homework or things like that, that are going to allow you to cultivate these traits, they’re going to make you valuable and better able to navigate this world, this individualistic world where you don’t have many pre-built relationships.

Pete  

I feel somewhat exposed here. 

Pete  

And I’m thinking of people on Tinder. You know? That’s a very W.E.I.R.D.—in our sense of the word—thing, you know?

Jared  

Pete  

Very individualistic, selling yourself to other people instead of having kinship associations and things like that. So. My goodness, we’re screwed up, Joe.

Joe  

Well, yeah, I mean—

Pete  

Aren’t we?

Joe  

—think about something like arranged marriages or, I mean, even if it’s not arranged completely by your parents, it’s usually really important what the relationship is. Do the in-laws get along? Most kinship systems have special terms for in-laws that the word in law actually means “in canon law,” right? So, you know, she’s your mother or sister in canon law, which means no sex or marriage with her. So, yeah, so it’s just this totally different world where it’s not relationships-based. And you know, these kinds of dating apps, you know, it’s all it’s all about, like the special traits that might make you, you know, attractive to someone.

Jared  

Right. It’s so fascinating how you extrapolate from—yeah, they are connected in the sense that, with your starting place is this nuclear family then you’re incentivized to develop certain dispositions or traits, that then would, I think, be passed down generation to generation and lead to more cultural characteristics. And I’m wondering how do you help people become more aware of these kinds of connections, because I think it’s very common for people not to be able to recognize that they are a part of a context, to this sort of contextual consciousness where we grow up thinking the way we’ve done it is the normal way that most people have experienced the world. 

And this can be innocent for a lot of people. But even kind of what Pete mentioned earlier, it can also have a lot of impact for people on a political level, if we are assuming that God has ordained and it has always been this nuclear family piece. “Why do you think that was?” “Because that’s how I was raised and everyone around me also thought that way. And that was sort of what was taught to me.” How do you start to help people get outside of that, and start to have this awareness that they are too in a context?

Joe  

Well, I mean, the way I’ve always tried to do—well, there’s kind of like two or three methods, depending on how you think about it. One would be if people can travel and experience places very different and get to know people who think about the world differently. So, that’s the value of travel, it’s the value of sort of study abroad programs where you go somewhere. As an anthropologist, of course, I’ve spent a lot of time in Amazonia and the South Pacific. But short of that, I mean, art, like, reading novels where you’re in the shoes of a character growing up in an African village can really change things, or a woman growing up in Afghanistan can help you see the world through the eyes of someone who’s very different from you.

Pete  

You know, Joe, can we back up a little bit because something that just—I’ve never ever thought about this before and I went to seminary—just the impact of that thousand-year period, the medieval period, roughly 500 to 1500. We touched on that, could you wax a little bit more on the factors there—Just the factors to help us understand the impact of this period on what Western culture? 

Joe  

Yeah, so I mean, one of the things that people don’t realize is that, you know, they think of missionaries as something that occurs after 1500 when the Spanish show up in the Aztec empire, or they might not realize that missions continue today. So, North American missionaries can be found all over Amazonia, I would bump into them from time to time in my own travels. But if you go back in time, Rome was sending missions to Kent, in England, right? So, the English were being missionized by Catholics coming in from the south. And so the church is then trying to impose its practices, which included its marriage and family practices, as well as religious beliefs and it’s impressing the locals, because there’s literacy and fancier technology and whatnot. So, the church is spreading, and then what’s spreading along with it are these marriage and family practices. 

And one of the things we’ve done in our work is, we needed a kind of marker for the diffusion of the church. So, we created a database in which each new bishopric is located with GPS coordinates, and then a date and this allows us to look at how the spread of the church tracks with contemporary psychological variation. And so we can show that places that had more and longer centuries under the church, as measured by the presence of a bishopric are “weirder” today in terms of individualism, conformity, and sort of trust and fairness with strangers. So, that’s showing that this medieval thousand year period had a big impact. And the longer you were under the church, you can see differences even amongst contemporary Europeans. I mean, that’s kind of my picture of it. 

But crucially, it’s not just the church because when people are into these monogamous nuclear families, they have a bit more individualistic psychology. Normally, the way humans would deal with things like, how do we deal with the old people, or the orphans, or people who get injured, their kinship systems supply the social security nets. But without that, people began to form voluntary institutions. So, many people might be familiar with medieval guilds. But the first guilds started as mutual self-help groups, where people would band together and basically make a pact before God to help each other in the event of injury and old age and whatnot. And so, that forms a guild and eventually, you know, they become bakers and masons and things like that. But so those are your earliest impersonal institutions, along with these charter towns that are popping up where people are joining as individual citizens rather than clans and you know, the Francs and things like that, individuals and then you know, the towns are competing to attract more, better merchants better smiths, things like that.

Pete  

I mean, there was a notion of citizenship—you know, the Roman Empire, Paul talks about this, you know, in one of his letters at least. But I’m still wondering—again, I want to understand this, because these are very new concepts to me. We’re talking about the influence of the medieval period on modern Western life and how we look at things and how we analyze how we feel, how we think, how we reason. But what is it that led the church in its early centuries to, let’s say, abandon a kinship model and to go in a different direction? That’s probably a multi-layered answer, but I really want to try to understand that for myself.

Joe  

Well, people like answers with intentionality. It’s actually a part of W.E.I.R.D. psychological bias. But I would invite readers to consider a different perspective. And we call this a cultural evolutionary perspective. Instead of zooming in and asking you—we can ask that and I’ll get to it—why did the church do this? But it’s important to zoom out and see there are all these different religions, some of them Christian, some of them not, sort of in this general geographic area. So, if you go over to Zoroastrianism, and what’s modern day Iran now and Persia, they were promoting cousin marriage, and even brother-sister marriage at the elite levels. If you go to Islam, which came later than others, but, you know, it constrains polygyny to just four wives. Demands are equal and then it imposes this thing that actually had a big impact. This inheritance rule that says daughters inherit half of what sons inherit, which if you’re a landowning farming population, that’s very impactful, because it means every time you marry your daughter off, part of your land goes with her. And that could be an explanation for why so many Islamic societies have patrilateral parallel cousin marriage, so you marry a daughter off to your father’s brother’s son. 

Pete  

Ah.

Joe  

But meanwhile, it’s really…You know, the Coptic Christians were marrying their cousins for a long time and the same thing with Syrian Chaldean Catholics. But, so, it’s this one branch of Christianity, which developed this unusual program with a kind of weaker version in the Orthodox Church. And so, people believed that it would do bad things, that God wanted people to do this. So, like when plagues would hit cities, it would be ascribed by some religious leaders to the problem of incest, by which they mean people marrying their cousins. So, we’ve got to stamp out this and that’s why there was council after council that would, you know, reaffirm these taboos against incestuous marriage. 

So, one way to think of it is that religions can prescribe all kinds of different things and what sorts it out is what the long term consequences are of these different rules. One of the examples I give when I’m trying to persuade my economist friends, usually, that religions are powerful ways to get people to do stuff, is if you look at the religious revival in the early 19th century, which, you know, which gives us the Hutterites and Mormons and whatnot. It also gives us the Shakers, and the Shakers have prohibitions on sex. So, they can only grow by in-migration and whatnot. So, it’s powerful enough to prevent people from having sex, it can do a lot of things.

Jared  

Okay, well, you mentioned this impact—I want to turn it around, because that’s kind of been the historical impact of how the medieval church has impacted Western culture, which is fascinating and we could keep talking about that. But there’s another study you did—and I’m gonna say this quote, and I’m just gonna see if…Ask you to unpack it—but you argue that “appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecology.” So, that’s a lot of big words. But I think it’s really important if we kind of bring it up to modern day and how culture impacts our view and practices toward God or the gods. Can you just unpack what that statement means and how it impacts kind of our current situation and context?

Joe  

I think that what I probably had in mind was that a lot of times whatever kind of the local social norms are of the time get attributed to, you know, if they get divine force, then they’re more likely to be adhered to and obeyed. So, well, if we’re really positive this is a good thing, God must think it’s a good thing too. And so, then if God thinks it’s a good thing, then that’s another motivating force. And so one of the things we’ve done research around the world on is looking at people’s belief in powerful moralizing God and how that affects their behavior towards strangers. And what we find is that people who believe more strongly in a powerful punishing God, who, you know, is willing to, say, punish you for not being fair towards strangers, leads people to be more fair in economic decisions where they actually pay a cost for these kinds of decisions. So, this is just another example of how religion can powerfully motivate people to behave in particular ways.

Jared  

Well, I want to maybe rewind and have you say that again, because I think that’s actually counterintuitive to some conversations that I would be a part of. Again, not with people who’ve done the research, which is why it’s interesting to me that what I heard you say is, in the doing the research, cultures or people groups that have a punishing God, who sort of will punish you if you aren’t in these moral ways kind or whatever it is, so having the punishing God leads people to be more kind in that way. How does that—It seems counterintuitive to a line of thinking that would say, “Well, cultures reflect the kind of God they have. So, if they kind of have these real punishing autocratic deities, that leads to people being more punishing and autocratic and if you have a kind and loving, gentle, forgiving God, it leads to more kind and loving and gentle people. Is there a connection between those?

Joe  

I don’t think that—Those may sound at odds, but I don’t think they have to be at odds. So we know from lots of studies that people all around the world respond to their concerns, that whatever the norms are. That, you know, if they’re going to be punished for them, they’re more likely to adhere to the norms. So, if you enlist God as a—you know, for a long time, humans have been concerned about being punished for violating norms. I’ve argued, and others have argued, that we have a norm psychology, which is kind of assessing, you know, how strong this norm is, what’s the, you know, am I going to get punished for it? If you add divine punishment to that, then that adds a little bit of extra that makes that norm more sticky and more likely to be obeyed too. Now that could also affect people’s willingness to punish, although research in the United States suggests that it’s almost, you know, they’ve done studies where you have both God punishing and government punishing, and at least there seems to be a hydraulic relationship there. So, people who think God is going to do the punishing don’t want government to do it and vice versa. I don’t know whether that’s peculiar to the US, or some more general thing, but those results are out there. But, lots of different datasets show this relationship between the punishing God and this kind of pro-social behavior.

Jared  

And when you say it “generally reflects prominent features of the local social ecologies,” can you say more about that? Because it sounds like, what I was hearing you say is, we sort of have a moral cultural norm and over time—maybe even not over time, but it seems to me maybe that would happen over time—the God, the image of that God, whether it’s, you know, Christian God, whatever the gods are, eventually kind of adopt those norms and endorse them and then become kind of the protector or overseer of those norms. And that just sort of changes with culture that we can see this happening when we study different cultures and how the people interact with the deities in that location. Is that a fair way of saying that?

Joe  

Yeah, I mean, the kind of thing I had in mind is what we talked about earlier is that, you know, lots of Christians believe that the monogamous nuclear family is endorsed by God. But that’s just something that got made up at some point recently.

Pete  

Yeah. 

Jared  

And can we see that I guess—that’s a great example. And then we just see many, many other examples of this in other cultures with other deities, that these things that we put on to God often will simply reflect the cultural norms of the adherence of that religious practice.

Joe  

Yeah, I mean, I think I don’t have other examples at the ready. I think that actually the marriage taboos, the incest taboos, were probably another example. Because like, as you mentioned, you can’t find—you know, if you go to the Bible, you’re going to not end up with any evidence. So, if you’re using sacred scripture as your source—but then people clearly believe that God wanted them to adhere to these incest taboos.

Pete  

The thought that keeps floating in my mind is a quote that I think is attributed to Mark Twain. You know, “In the beginning, God created man in His own image. And like, gentlemen, we’ve been returning the favor ever since.” We’re constantly creating God in the image of our—not just our personalities, but how just our whole systems of living our cultures, and we don’t even really know we’re doing it. It’s just something that it’s sort of like inescapably human. But then when you have, you know, W.E.I.R.D. which is, I’m gonna guess, you know, largely white and male—unless I’m wrong with that, but that seems to be the power behind it—and you export this, not even necessarily in missionary activity, but just in how you view the world as a whole and you have the power, it seems oddly unreligious [Chuckles] in the best sense of the word. We’re just imposing things on other people. And I think what you’re reminding us of here, Joe, is to know where we came from and why we say some of the things we say and think the things we think.

Jared  

Yeah, I may turn that into a question, if I can, of with that in mind, what are the practical implications of people either not being or being aware of their own contexts and how that’s been shaped by very practical things in the history of that culture?

Joe  

I mean, I think it’s interesting, just intrinsically, there’s lots of practical ways in which this comes down. So for example, if you’re designing public policy, and, you know, you’re thinking about, “how do we do economic development?” Well, you might have this idea that we can just transport institutions from societies that are relatively richer to societies that are relatively poorer and maybe those institutions will generate more economic growth. Something like, you know, can we transport democracy to Afghanistan? So if you look at my book, which was published before the US fled Afghanistan, I make the point that the social structure and the high rates of cousin marriage over 50%, the intense clans, the Taliban, is basically a pashtun organization. And the pashtun have a segmentary lineage system with an intense code of honor, and these high rates of cousin marriage. And it just leads to a psychology that’s incompatible with democracy. So it’s a bad plan [Chuckles] to try to transplant democracy, you need—if that’s your goal, and I’m not even saying it shouldn’t be your goal, but if that is your policy, you’ve got to have a much more cultural evolutionary approach and, you know, the same thing is true if you want to improve gender inequality. 

Gender inequality is built into the kinship structure if you have arranged marriage. You know, the Taliban are all married to three women, right? If you build that into the system, you end up with a larger age gap between husbands and wives, you end up with building in a fundamental gender inequality into the society. So, you would need—if you wanted to do that, and I’m not suggesting, again, that’s a good idea—but if you wanted to do it, you need to begin by rewiring the family. You’d want to get people to have monogamous nuclear families, essentially. And then you’d have a chance at getting these other institutions, these higher level institutions to work. But people start at the wrong place. They think if we descend the higher institutions down, then we will change the lower institutions and that can happen. So, for example, it’s happening in the world today, with, you know, the spreading of economic growth in urban areas where there’s, you know, international companies set up factories and whatnot, people can move to these places and then be disengaged from the kinship system, and then become semi-independent. So, there is definitely a two way street but for something like national level governments, it’s harder to see how that proceeds incrementally.

Pete  

Pete  

So, you know, the acronym that we’ve been dealing with here, “W.E.I.R.D.,” I’m sensing that you’re not making a value judgment, you’re making an observation?

Joe  

Yeah, I mean, I tried to really emphasize that, in fact, throughout the book, I actually, sort of, you know, the acronym is W.E.I.R.D. right? So, it’s supposed to, it’s supposed to be like a kind of mirror. So, you know, if you look at the little subject headings—I kind of hide secret messages in the subject headings—things like “missing the forest” will be one of the subject headings and that’s about analytic thinking. And when you’re an analytic thinker, you tend to focus on the properties of focal objects, and you ignore context and you ignore relationships or, you know, you tend to ignore them. So, you miss the forest, you know, you’re so focused on the tree and you miss the forest. Right? So, the most creative groups tend to have a mix of analytic thinkers and holistic thinkers.

Pete  

Yeah. So analytic and holistic thinking have a place, right? I mean, we’re not pooh-poohing analytical thinking. Right? It’s been a good thing. But I… Again, not putting words in your mouth. But the issue is whether, you know, we prize that as the normal way, or the only way, or the best way of thinking, then we’ll ignore things like, you had the illustration of, you know, you have a dog, and a rabbit, and a carrot. And where do you put the rabbit? Do you join the rabbit to the dog? Or do you join the rabbit to the carrot? And holistic thinkers, I think, will join the rabbit to the carrot and analytical thinkers—because we think in terms of groups and categories—who put the rabbit together with the dog. There’s value in that, right? But the problem is in, I guess, absolutizing that way of thinking.

Joe  

Yeah, I tried to emphasize that. One thing that’s interesting, if you ask people, you know, you kind of explain the problem to them and you ask them to give the normatively correct answer, you know, Americans will say—or Canadians, I think the research was done there—will say that the analytical answer is normatively correct and Ara Norenzayan and Emma Buckthal did it in, I think, Hong Kong, and they said that the holistic answer is the more correct answer, normatively. So, people just have different intuitions about what the “correct” answer is. And I think that the cool thing is that the empirical research on the creativity of groups suggests that, you know, you need both analytic thinkers and holistic thinkers. And that leads to better overall problem solving, because you have some individuals that are focusing on all the relationships between the parts and keeping their eye on the big picture, thinking about the long term, and you have some people who are lasering in on the details, and trying to find specific properties and absolute categories, which can be really useful sometimes and sometimes lead you astray.

Jared  

Yeah. And that, I think, that’s what it touches on for me is, it seems to be a call for diversity that when we totalize things it for instance, in what you just said, if you totalize the analytical way of thinking you’re going to label a holistic thinker as wrong. And so it’s going to be this is the right way to do it and this is the wrong way to do it. So, if you’re different from me, you’re doing it the wrong way. Which is an entire frame of thinking that devalues diversity. Diversity is actually just a lot of wrong ways of doing something, we actually need to all think the same way, which is the analytic way. So, this idea that recognizing that there are limitations—you know, the way that you’ve had the secret messages in the headers—like there’s limitations to the W.E.I.R.D. way of being in the world. It promotes this diversity and I think that’s the practical value of all of this, is when we can situate ourselves into a context, we realize our context and way of thinking also has limitations, because it was shaped in a particular way and it gets rid of the right-wrong and just recognizes it’s different, there’re strengths and weaknesses. And the way to maximize the strengths is to have as many voices at the table that think differently than us as we can. But I think that’s a scary way of thinking for people.

Pete  

Oh yeah. Especially if your religion is rooted in, essentially, analytical thinking, which is the Western problem, right?

Jared  

But I think it’s hard to have this diversity without first contextualizing your own situation, because you will tend to, I think—and this may be a question to you if you’ve seen this—But without this kind of contextual thinking, I just think it’s hard to value diversity.

Joe  

Well, what—So, yeah, the book ends, the penultimate chapter tries to say, “Well, let’s take everything we’ve discussed about the changes in the social structure, and the shifts in psychology towards individualism and trust in strangers, and see if that can give us any purchase on understanding the industrial revolution.” So, this explosion of technologies and economic growth that really begins in the English Midlands around 1750, but then eventually expands to Europe and is, kind of, what we think of as globalization today is a continuation of the Industrial Revolution. So, I make the case that that occurs in part for a bunch of interrelated reasons, but it’s basically the opening of the flow of ideas amongst minds. The more you trust strangers, the more you’re willing to interact with them, the more you have movement of people from different areas, you have less conformity, things like that, that’s going to generate this collective brain, as I call it, and propel faster innovation. 

Jared  

Yeah, well, and as we maybe wrap up our time, I did want to give a second here to talk about, particularly if you have any comments or thoughts—again, no pressure—but how does all of this impact how our context impacts faith commitments? And I don’t know if you have any kind of final thinking, but I think a lot of people, our listeners are wrestling with: what does it mean moving forward now, to have this awareness of, “Oh, a lot of the things that I thought were rooted in this universal normative, right-wrong relationship with the world, turns out to be contextual, or accidental.” And so it can be a disorienting process, especially around faith commitment. So, I don’t know if you have anything to say, as you’ve done your research, or thought through this, that might help reorient people in a positive direction.

Joe  

You know, my book prior to this one is called “The Secret of Our Success,” and it’s about the emergence of humans as a species. And the central idea in the book is that the success of humans is due to the fact that we can learn from others. And that early in our human evolutionary history, we began learning from others. And then that leads to this idea that I mentioned before the collective brain where you have this accumulating body of know-how and ways of interacting with the world, where one generation learns from the previous, improves a little bit and soon you have this interaction between genes and culture. And the book makes the case that a lot of the features of human psychology and our physiology as well, were driven by the interaction between genes and culture. 

But really, at the core of that, is what I call faith, in the sense that, it’s putting a lot of stock in what you learn from prior generations and from those around you, from elders and whatnot. So, really, part of what makes us human is, and so successful as humans, is our willingness to put faith in the practices of the previous generation. But of course, that can, you know, blind us when other people have been exposed to different elders, and different products of this cumulative culture, which is sort of gradually adapting us to the world over long periods of time in ways that we can only see. So, I just think it’s worth thinking about us as cultural creatures.

Jared  

Right. I think that’s actually a wonderful way to end our time as we think about learning from others and allowing that to shape—again, this doesn’t have to be a terrifying thing, but can be a way to move us forward and think creatively about how—because at the end of the day, what I appreciate about your research and these things is as we follow the science and the methodologies and the processes, we’re getting knowledge, we’re getting information, and we have to learn to adapt to the information and the knowledge that we’re receiving. And to paint it as such a wonderful kind of central element of what it means for us to be successful as a species, that we can do that and move the ball forward, I think is a great way to end. So, thank you so much, Joe, for coming on and sharing all of this with us. 

Joe  

Thanks a lot guys!

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time. 

Pete  

With Pete and Jared. 

So, yeah, I mean, Jared, this episode… It made me think, and it’s gonna make me think, I think, for a while, but what I really appreciated, from a personal point of view, is how Joe was, you know, through research and using language and academic speak, which is beautiful, helping put to language, things that I think I’ve been intuiting in one way or another, probably ever since I started teaching seminary with an international population. Where they had questions for me that I thought were just bad questions. But I realized years later, I was like, “Oh, no, they’re, they’re speaking out of their context in the same way that I speak out of mine.” And my insistence—I never would say this to them—but inside, my insistence, like, my job is to get them to ask different questions that I value, right. And I sort of get what’s happening there and it’s not a decision I ever made. It’s just the water that I swim in. But, you know, I’m trying to become more aware of my surroundings here. And this just crystallizes a lot of these issues for me.

Jared  

Yeah, I love the research behind this, because, in a lot of ways, it you know, it does validate in some way,—and this is debatable, for sure—but you know, the work of folks that I’ve read for a while, like Michel Foucault, or Jacques Derrida, they’ve been saying the same kind of thing, at a more philosophical level, since the 70s, which is showing how things that we feel are immovable and inevitable. They are a product of human nature, are actually the product of culture and context.

Pete  

And the evolving of cultures.

Pete  

Yeah.

Jared  

Right and how cultures evolve-

Jared  

And it’s not- I appreciated, it’s not the “we can point to the one spark that led to all this,” it’s the warp and woof, it’s the ebb and flow of culture, and how it evolves. And then this thing that the church decided to do has these wide reaching implications that evolve out from—may seem disconnected from—but ultimately form, not just tangential practices, but the very way that we reason and think about the world.

Pete  

Right, without processing that overtly, it’s just baked in, so to speak. And you know, one of the things from talking with Joe, we touched on the Bible and things like that, but—again, this is something that biblical scholars have been saying for several hundred years—the Bible has a cultural historical context, and that shapes how they talk about absolutely everything. And that’s something that, you know, if I were to say that in, let’s say, polite Evangelical or Fundamentalist company, I think the general response would be, “Well, yeah…” But I mean, for me, it’s like, “No, really. [Laughs] Really deep down,” right? The categories for engaging with reality and for their articulation of God, these things are not just dropped down from heaven—and even their concept of something dropping down from heaven is itself culturally determined, right? So, it’s like, you can’t get away from the humanity of it all.

Jared  

And I’m glad that we talked about marriage, because I think that is one of the most relevant ways that this kind of thinking comes against other types of thinking. And what I mean by that is, if you can’t understand what Joe was talking about, that our views of things like marriage, the institution of marriage, aren’t somehow baked into the fabric of the universe and the way that we’re thinking about it in 21st century America is the only morally correct way to think about marriage. If you can’t get away from that, then there’s not really a lot of room for conversation about what’s happening in the Bible, because that is not what the Bible says about marriage. What we do, then, is we extrapolate or we ground our political views in a view of marriage, and then we absolutize that view of marriage, through the authority of the Bible, the selective use of the it’s not only harmful—I mean, I’m on the pragmatist, so a lot of times I’m thinking, “Well, whatever is helpful, great.” But it’s not only harmful, it’s just not correct. 

Pete  

Jared  

It just isn’t how the Bible presents marriage. And anyone—just to your point about polite Evangelicals—I don’t know even an Evangelicals scholar that wouldn’t admit that there are a lot of different kinds of marriage than what we have today, exhibited in the Bible and not condemned,

Pete  

Right. I mean-

Pete  

Right. I mean, there certainly isn’t the notion of a nuclear family, I know people get a lot of mileage out of “a man shall leave his mother alone leave her home, but the two shall become one.” That’s a good idea that could be a much later Israelite sentiment, if that’s written by the priestly source—not to get too nerdy here. But when you see the behaviors of people in the Bible, its notions of marriage are, first of all, the more kinship based, “Hey, yeah, Jacob? Why don’t you go up north and marry your cousin or something?” And we don’t do that. Because we’ve inherited from medieval Christianity, as Joe pointed out, certain taboos, right? And what To, like sixth level of cousins, you don’t marry them, either, you know, and—but in the ancient world, there were cultural reasons. I mean, just to me, it just puts real skin and bones on some of these discussions, because it has to do with land, it has to do with protection of property, and you stick together, you know, you sit together with your clan, and we don’t have clans at all really. Well, some of us have extended families, but we don’t marry into them.

Pete  

At least I don’t think so.

Jared  

I was just going to say we don’t even think… I don’t know if we, in the West, in America, in the 21st century, would even understand what it means to be a clan.

Pete  

Yes.

Jared  

Because there’s so many implications that we have not inherited to be able to even think that way. Well, one thing I wanted to just say before we sign off here, is the personal investment I have in this topic. And you can hear it in the series I did on the Bible for Normal People called “The Making of the Modern Mindset,” which is,  I think it’s so incredibly important. We’re taught, as we grew up as Christians, to think about the context of the Bible that we are taught that, whether we do it or not, I don’t know, I don’t think people do it. But I think we have… We need, also, to remember that we have to study our own context. And so we aren’t just studying the context of the Bible, we’re studying our own context and when we do that, it helps us to relate to it as it should be related to which is, it is our context, it is what we have to work with. But it is also provisional, and it is not the totality of reality. And it brings a level of humility. And that’s, for me, the number one thing I got out of this episode is a reminder that we have to be humble about our approach to everything.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

Because even our very way of thinking as individuals, rather than, you know, analytic, rather than holistic.

Pete  

Jared  

Even that is shaped, it’s accidental. It’s not human nature, it’s not better, it’s not how God intended it to be. Because I think we have this view, at least I did growing up, that I have certain traits that I inherited, that says, like analytical thinking is better than, you know, we could say holistic in the way that he does, but I would also say emotion, like non-emotion is better than emotion. And then the goal is to be as non emotional as you can be, therefore, it’s bad to be emotional. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

And therefore, we judge people who act out of emotion or who have emotion, and I am superior because I don’t, and it sets up an entire cultural framework of good and bad, and who’s in and who’s out, who belongs, who gets to be leaders, and who doesn’t, all from this mistake that we’ve totalized one particular culture and made it the norm.

Pete  

Yeah. You know, “The Making of the Modern Mind,” where you focused on philosophers, right?

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

And philosophical thinking. And, of course, that is itself a product of much older cultural realities, you know, what he called them “social ecologies,” or something like that.

Jared  

Pete  

You know, that’s a great phrase. But, you know, these things are so interconnected and—I never really thought about tracing the stuff back to a tousand years before the modern mind ever came around.

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

You know, and it’s- I just find that, you know, he used the metaphor of evolution to describe things, like a gradual changing, and shifting, and developing, and adapting to things that didn’t just come out of nowhere. And I think so often we have the caricature that everything was pretty much fine until, I don’t know, Kant came along or, you know, pick your right favorite person to beat up on you know?

Jared  

Right.

Pete  

But it’s not that easy. You know, it isn’t like a period ended another period began the next day. It’s like, there’s a gliding notion of just going along here and understanding our current location, I think, is actually very hard intellectual work. I think it’s really difficult to know, why do we have the presuppositions we have? You know, and what has always frustrated me—you mentioned something similar before—what’s always frustrated me with, let’s say, conservative Protestant Christianity is our own assumptions don’t have to be examined because we know that pretty much right.

Jared  

Right. 

Pete  

Everybody else’s absolutely, you know so, there’s never an internal critique of that. And, if anything, I’ve been steeped in internal critique, seriously, even before I went to seminary when I was 25. That’s just how I’m wired.

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

And so I resonate with these things, because it’s helping me critique myself more. But the critique is also, it’s liberating, because he gets to let go of a lot of stuff, but it’s also… I would like to be right, you know? Who wouldn’t, right? 

Pete  

But it just doesn’t work that way. And I can understand that that’s challenging for people because it’s, you know, the foundation of how they view themselves and the world. It’s relative. It’s not absolute. Right. 

Jared  

Right. 

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

And I guess it’s very important, in fact, it’s not just important, I think it’s absolutely necessary to have a theology that incorporates this. That doesn’t doesn’t hold it at bay, but that says, “No, this is the way of theology as well.” 

Jared  

Pete  

You know? And of course, there are implications for that, but it’s a hard pill to swallow. I understand. But it’s one that I think we’ve been swallowing for quite a long time and we’re swallowing it still, but for others, it’s probably pretty new.

Jared  

Yeah. All right. Till next time. 

Pete  

See you, folks. 

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give. 

Pete  

And, if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join.  

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.  

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.