4 Крылья, ноги и хвосты

Любопытная книга) по поводу католичества интересное мнение, почему автору протестантское меньше нравится?

Как раз на днях читала про сложности абортов в Ирландии, там сравнивали Северную Ирландию с Англией и там где сильнее католицизм, там меньше прав у женщин.

В 2012 году с 31-летней стоматологом Савитой Халаппанавар произошел несчастный случай: у нее начался выкидыш на семнадцати неделях беременности. Она приехала в университетский госпиталь Голуэй с полурожденным плодом, вышедшим из матки во влагалище. Она попросила сделать ей аборт – и получила отказ. Доктора сказали, что ничего нельзя поделать, пока сердце плода не остановится. Одна из акушерок заметила ей и ее мужу, что «Ирландия – католическая страна».
По прошествии трех дней, когда состояние Савиты ухудшилось, медицинская бригада в конце концов диагностировала у нее сепсис – заражение крови – и согласилась дать ей мизопростол для прерывания беременности. Она родила до введения препарата. В 01:09 ночи, через четыре дня, она умерла от сердечного приступа, вызванного заражением крови.

Правда в 2018 году отменили поправку, которая приравнивала жизнь плода и матери

А читала

и

Прекрасная рецензия! А первое упоминание фамилии автора в рецензии - это "опечатка по Фрейду" или художественный приём?

И, кстати, я немного не понял как в одном "психологическом наборе" сочетаются с одной стороны - индивидуализм, а с другой - игры с положительной суммой и обобщённая просоциальность? Или я как-то иначе, чем автор, понимаю эту социальность?

Почитала ещё рецензий, поняла, что этот Вася – профан, поэтому оставлю его в недочитанных всё же :)

Charles Freeman
2.0 out of 5 stars
Henrich's central argument and its offshoots are not supported by historical fact.
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2020
Oden Galor's The Journey of Humanity destroys the central thesis of Henrich's book.
Western Europe had had a long history before the Christians came. The Roman empire from 300 BC enabled a prosperous trade and economy to become established across the Mediterranean. It was an empire of cities, Rome itself may have had a million inhabitants, and city life, temples, baths and sophisticated living, including literacy among the elite, was widespread throughout the western Roman provinces. Roman law, which protected individual rights, was a major achievement. Individual farmers , smallholders, villa owners, underpinned property rights. The collapse of the Western empire in the fifth century was total and similar levels of prosperity may not have been reached in Europe before 1500, some say 1800. Post-Roman Europe was ethnically diverse, original Romanised populations, incoming Germanic tribes settled among them (including Anglo-Saxon England), communities such as the Irish who had never experienced Rome. The extension of Christianity took centuries to take effect, a thousand years between Christianisation in France and in Lithuania.

There is very little of this in Henrich’s book which begins as late as 400 AD. He starts, however, with an analysis of attitudes among different global communities. He concludes that individuals in Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic,( i.e. WEIRD) societies are morally and cognitively superior. Isn’t classifying a country by attributes of its people , as Henrich does, simplistic? Is there a typical Indian or a typical (WEIRD) Englishman ( I know of many who are not!) ? Swedes (traditionally conformist), Italians, Irish, Americans, Australians (which Australians, only European ones?) are ALL apparently WEIRDS! The question Henrich proposes to answer is how the WEIRDS have been made this way.

Most historians, such as Galor (above), date the rise of the west to after 1800 but Henrich claims that Catholic marriage laws, which prohibited marriages between even distant cousins, led over centuries (from 400 AD onwards) to a more individualistic society. This explains the economic and cultural dominance of the west. As the author puts it, p.179, ‘In the medieval world of scattered farms, intimate villages, and small towns, these prohibitions would have FORCED people to reach out, far and wide, to find Christian strangers from other communities, often in different tribal or ethnic groups.’ Apparently the Church had complete control over marriages from after AD 400, everyone insisted in formal marriage ceremonies in church and prospective husbands and wives had to travel outside their own ethnic and tribal groups to find mates elsewhere. This 'demolished' kinship groups so throughly that EVERYONE somehow became WEIRD, highly individualistic personalities in a way that they had not been before.

None of this argument is supported by historical evidence. The Romans (prominent c. 300 BC to 450 AD) banned cousin marriages to the fourth degree of consanguinity and held land in individual plots so making a nonsense of his claim (p.315) that in 400 AD 'Europe was just like everywhere else in the world' with intensive kinship and communal landholding. But there were sophisticated ancient civilizations with minds of their own - in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Greece and Rome- before AD 400! After the fall of Rome, there are centuries without central authority -the Church was not powerful enough to enforce its own laws until c.1200 and the Carolingian empire was short lived. Julia Smith's Europe After Rome ( AD 500-1000), pp. 125-135, discusses the many different types of sexual relationships under Roman, Germanic and Irish law before AD1000. Marriage by consent among partners alone was possible (and inevitably unrecorded). Smith does mention, p.131, that 'some bishops tried [sic] to impose an additional disqualification' namely enforcing the consanguinity laws but it seems to have been a minority practice, probably only among the more mobile nobility, and certainly not universally enforced as Henrich claims that it was. Generally marriages took place WITHIN communities (as they did until c.1900 in rural areas). In the fifteenth century in Tuscany a study of 700 dowries showed that rural men in Tuscany married rural brides and urban men (e.g. Florentines) urban brides (and marriages outside their immediate community were rare). The men tended to stay within their family households (with older generations) and the local brides moved in with them, so little mobility. Far from kinship being sidelined, the Florentines traced their genealogies back generations and EXTENDED kinship links to unrelated families for greater security.

Henrich’ s argument does not work. How could a farm labourer walk off on his day off to find another mate elsewhere? My late father-in-law, a GP, was still sorting out the medical problems of village inbreeding in the 1950s!

Henrich vastly overestimates the impact of Church law. The Church passed a number of laws restricting marriage between cousins (he lists them pp.168-171) but, as seen, most marriages took place according to local custom. In her book The Rise of Magic in Early Modern Europe, Valerie Flint explained how many pagan practices continued for centuries. Marriages remained outside the reach of the Church certainly until the thirteenth century . Yet Henrich already has communities broken up by Church marriage laws by1200 . On the final page (595) of his magisterial volume on the Church and medieval sex, James Brundage notes " The failure of medieval efforts to eradicate fornication, concubinage, premarital cohabitation, adultery and sodomy through legal prescriptions, even when these prescriptions were backed by serious enforcement efforts, is rather sobering". The Church just could not control sex! In the authoritative Cambridge History of Christianity, 'Early Medieval Christianities c. 600-c.1100' leading medievalist John Van Engen, notes, p.637, that as late as 1100 'In daily practice women's lives hinged as much upon local custom and expectations as upon anything the church said or wanted.' See also the works on medieval sexuality by Ruth Mazo Karras, especially Unmarriages-Women, Men and Sexual unions in the Middle Ages (2012), where she shows how many non-marital relationships existed.

Henrich makes a lot of developments correlating with the existence of the Church. But after the banning of all pagan cults in 390, the Church was the ONLY religious institution in town and survived as such. Its existence (like cold winters) obviously CORRELATED with ANY developments in European society. Henrich claims, without evidence, that it CAUSED these developments but historians provide perfectly good other explanations!

Henrich has an extensive section on the decline of cousin marriages from AD400 but the Romans had already forbidden it to the fourth degree of consanguinity ( the classical scholar Brent Shaw found no cousin marriages among 33 Roman aristocratic marriages). Most marriage/ cohabitation arrangements were unrecorded so how can Henrich map the decline in percentages of cousin marriages in Europe so precisely, that, p.226, 'each century of Western Church exposure cuts the rate of cousin marriage by nearly 60 per cent'? (Historians would love to know how Henrich does it!)

How do Italians (always Catholic) and Swedes, first pagan, eventually Christian, then Protestant, equally become WEIRD, despite ethnic, language and geographical barriers? Henrich does not appear to know of the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Europe, still obvious even today. Europe is a geographical space within which there are diverse cultures who have often been in conflict with each other as the many wars show. Yet Henrich talks of ‘Europe’s collective brain’ by the twelfth century (p.451) which got more collective with time.e.g. p.460, ‘’The primary thrusters that accelerated innovation during the Industrial Revolution were fuelled by the expanding size and interconnectedness of Europe’s collective brain.” But patterns of industrialisation varied so widely and many areas of Europe never industrialised. (It depended on natural resources: mines depended on coal deposits, water mills on rushing water) Why was island Britain the first to industrialise and other European nations not? The working classes and the mine owners certainly did not share a collective brain as the workers were sucked into economic subservience. Was there a decline in the individuality of WEIRDness then? (The classic book on the loss of freedom by the working class is E.P.Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.,1963.)

Henrich suggests that WEIRD psychology becomes passed on through cultural evolution. How does this actually work in societies which are so diverse? How do illiterate farm labourers with children working from aged ten acquire WEIRD psychology and then pass it on to their children, generation after generation? I leave it to the psychologists and social scientists to sort this one out. Is it merely a collective cultural phenomenon, somehow passed on by societies, whether agricultural, industrial, urban, or otherwise over many centuries, through war, plague and famine?

On p.191, Henrich suggests that ‘relational freedoms spurred residential mobility, as individuals and nuclear families relocated to new lands and growing urban communities’. Where is the evidence for this? There has been an immense amount of work analysing the social and economic reasons for the revival of an urban economy but Henrich, a non-historian, suggests uniquely that it was due to (unproved) ‘relational [ e.g. marriage] freedoms’. It was partly surpluses in agricultural production and population which allowed urbanisation to take place , not changing cohabitation arrangements. (I would refer him to Wim Blockmans’ excellent ‘Urbanisation in the European Middle Ages. Phases of Openness and Occlusion’, an authoritative survey easily found online by a leading medieval historian.)

Basic training for historians includes a suspicion of monocausal solutions (especially when sources are so limited as they are for medieval Europe). Yet Henrich ploughs on! So p. 321: ‘Summarising our progress; the breakdown of kinship-based institutions [evidence?] opened the door to urbanisation and the formation of free cities and charter towns which began developing greater self-governance. Often dominated by merchants, urban growth generated rising levels of merchant integration and - we can infer [sic]- higher levels of impersonal trust, fairness and cooperation’. This is speculative. Roman Europe was filled with politically lively cities. Why were Damascus, Cairo , Baghdad much larger cities than any in Europe? Did they have a break-up of kinship groups? The medieval cities of northern Italy were riven with factional conflict. Many came under one family rule after 1300 so making the chart on p.315, which suggests a continuous rise in 'representative government', misleading. In fact that chart is nonsense - urban life in Roman cities was very lively, not zero, and 'representative governments' first appear in Italy c.1100 and developed their identity in opposition to church power rather than being caused by it.

Henrich’s history is imaginary. As Europe had already been prosperous with a sophisticated legal system under the Romans, conventional historians suggest:a) the relatively fertile land which allowed a surplus to support cities and the population to create them b) the continuing influence of the classical past, especially as transmitted though the Arabs, which stimulated intellectual life. It provided Roman law as well as important texts on politics for emerging cities. c) the revival of trade in the Mediterranean (again partly thanks to trade with the Arabs) which stimulated urbanisation, Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and, fundamental to all this for the later period, d) the European discovery of the Americas. Where Christianity did have an impact was the sense it gave of cultural superiority which led to colonialism and exploitation of other 'lesser' societies.

To conclude: Henrich, P.350. ‘In the wake of the Church’s demolition of intensive kinship, people became increasingly individualistic, independent, self-focused, nonconformist, and relationally mobile.’ (What, all of them and also part of a collective brain??)
a) There is little evidence that the Church actually demolished ‘intensive kinship’. How do you define kinship across the varied populations of Europe, let alone measure ‘intense’ or ‘less intense’ kinship in societies in pre-modern times when there is virtually no evidence about social relationships ? Kinship groups can have imprecise boundaries and it is often difficult to know who thought they were kin to whom. We would love to know more about forms of kinship in post -Roman Europe but unless we have genealogical records of generations it is very difficult.
b) The vast majority of the European population was stuck with backbreaking work on the land until 1750 (and work in the emerging factories and mines was probably worse-see the harrowing descriptions of coal mining in Zola's Germinal) and did not have the energy or opportunity to be ‘independent and self-focused’. By his own definition of WEIRD, Henrich creates a psychology of the individual which only a small elite could enjoy before the twentieth century ( and so one could argue (simplistically) that it was equally the result of secularisation!!)

As a historian of European culture, I really do struggle with the concept of 'the European collective brain' -across such an ethnically diverse continent and so many competing cities? And how do the devastating European wars and centuries old rivalries between so-called WEIRD communities relate to this ‘brain'? As to individualism with the majority working on the land or, later, in factories and coal mines, nonconformism was out, subservience was in!! (The R in WEIRD comes, as many studies have shown, from global trade since 1800, the destruction of prosperous colonial economies such as India, a subservient working class on land and factories.)

It is extraordinary that the author did not read some basic introductions to post-Roman and medieval Europe, such as those by Christopher Wickham* or Julia Smith, or consulted colleagues in the medieval history department at Harvard (or the experts on post 1800 Europeans economies). You can produce as many charts you like but explanations must fit with the historical evidence. Henrich seems to know nothing of the complexities and antagonisms of European history.

There is virtually nothing on the economic background of this Utopian Europe. Perhaps people were so busy searching for mates , dissolving their intensive kinship groups, moving house to the cities and working on building up their WEIRD individualistic but collective brains not to have time to make a living. The crops just grew and self-harvested and cloth wove itself. Life for the vast majority of European was rooted in poverty, famine and plague, yet Henrich seems to assume that populations AS A WHOLE became WEIRD.

I bought this book in good faith, after the many adulatory reviews, as it overlaps with much of my own work as a historian . There has been a vast amount of sophisticated work by historians on the period between AD 400 and AD 1800. There is no evidence that the Church had the power to define sexual relationships (medieval peoples just got on with it as they had always done throughout history) and to destroy kinship groups so his whole argument collapses. Fundamentally Henrich fails to understand the many constraints, religious, economic and social, which meant that the majority of Europeans were stuck in the communities where they were born and had to live subservient lives in order to create wealth for a minority.

Is it necessary to go back to medieval times to find WEIRDness especially when that leaves one with immense problems of the genetic/cultural transmission of psychological traits over centuries? The attributes of WEIRDness for the majority (industry, education, democracy, wealth) would seem to have appeared only recently. Most of his charts are recent surveys and Roman/medieval ones, eg. p. 315 on 'representative government', hopelessly misleading and fail to support his argument. What form of logic is it to argue (in some strange way, p.315) that the ‘estimated probability’ of representative government in pre-Christian urban Europe is 'zero' and leave it at that without checking further to find very lively Roman urban politics (search 'Pompeii politics')?!

If Protestantism was the game changer 450 years ago that Henrich alleges, is WEIRDness less developed in permanently Catholic nations, Italy, Spain, France, the Habsburg empire,Ireland , Bavaria, Poland, etc. And what are the implications of this?

On Table 1.9, holistic/analytical minds, there are thirty countries, among them the United States, but only a total sample of 3334 individuals, an average of 110 people per country. This is scientifically meaningless and surely should not have been used as evidence.

If, as Henrich argues, Australia and the US are WEIRD where do their native ethnic minorities fit into this?

If Weirdness led to European science and the Enlightenment, what drove Greek and Arabic science and philosophy?

If Romanised areas of Europe were already free of intensive kinship and the medieval Church could not control sex lives anyway, would not the Black Death, industrialisation and the many devastating European wars ( so much for the European collective brain!) be the cause of psychological changes? ( I doubt it but they are better explanations for psychological change than anything Henrich can offer.)

Are the children of one WEirD and one non-WEIRD couples, WEIRD or not? Probably the strong kinship links of non-WEIRDs would predominate in parental upbringing.

If the US is a WEIRD society, are supporters of Trump and supporters of Biden equally WEIRD?

P.S. I apologise for the length of this review - from a historian's point of view, the proposed narrative fails at every stage but has been accepted without any question. Why do none of the hundred or so books on the medieval Church and society on my shelves mention changes in medieval society as a result of marriage laws? Because most people got on with their sex lives and cohabitation arrangements without reference to the Church!

Most people in WEIRD communities lead regimented lives. They have to earn a living and, if professionals, maintain high standards. That is why health, education, and legal services are good. The numbers who are genuinely free, innovators are very few. (How many do you know?)

You really need to THINK about the claims in this book. Henrich comes dangerously near to asserting that the west is morally superior to other cultures. There is so much evidence for other causes of western prosperity/education/democracy ( the main attributes of WEIRD) only SINCE1800 which depend on western domination of other peoples/cultures.

Social scientists and cultural psychologists love this book. Historians will mostly ignore it. It is fascinating to find supposedly WEIRD, hence analytical, reviewers accepting Henrich's views on medieval marriage without question! Goes to show how isolated some academic disciplines are from each other!!

* What a pity Henrich did not read Chris Wickham's magisterial 'Framing the Early Middle Ages, Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800' OUP,2005, a groundbreaking work . Wickham concludes (p.825) : ' The early middle ages has always resisted synthesis: single generalisations about the motors of its development have always foundered.' A valid warning for Henrich's thesis of the impact of marriage laws.
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LecceseColo
2.0 out of 5 stars
A textbook snoozer
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2022
My sociology book was ok when I was a college sophmore. That was then. The author has something to say that could.have been summarized in a TedX rather than this chart laden tome.