I'm not sure what's supposed to be "new" about this theory. The idea that the ancient Church's prohibition on cousin marriage might have incented cooperation across clan lines is not novel in itself.
It's a game-changing paradigm when you put it in perspective to most other contemporary non-Western societies where kinship, long-term friendships and intergenerational family obligations are forming the fabric of society.
In the west, individuals are much more autonomous and that enables more effective social associations where people are gathering in groups based on their levels of competence, interests and views.
Of course the idea has plenty of merit; I'm just saying that social scientists have been aware of it for a long time, and it's a bit strange to describe it as "new". See e.g. [0] which is cited in the wiki article on cousin marriage.
[0] Woodley, Michael A.; Edward Bell (2013). "Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations". Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 44 (2): 263–280. doi:10.1177/0022022112443855. S2CID 145714074.
I think perhaps "new" to the mainstream specifically. While book is ~700 pages, about ~200 of that is end notes and the bibliography: the author [1] is simply collecting all the most recent findings in one place and putting forward a thesis to the public that seems to have a bit of a consensus in academia.
That sounds nice and all, except "kinship, long-term friendships and intergenerational family obligations" is still forming the fabric of western societies and up to as late as the 1960's (and even later), most people were not freely able to "gather in groups based on their levels of competence, interests and views".
Western liberalism and individual freedom is really a very recent development. Just 100 years ago, people were being forced to work on ships, in factories, on farms, in wars and 3-4 generations living in one home was normal. Just 60 years ago, many people were heavily discriminated against and had little freedom.
Imo, these "more effective social associations" just lead to an increase in mental problems and perhaps ultimately, to the unraveling of such societies. Long term *ships are good, the focus on hyper efficiency just means more and more people are being left behind, and groups simply have no idea what other groups are thinking or how to work with them.
See all the antimaskers, antivaxxers, authoritarian supporters. All dismissed as stupid/irrelevant and considered a minority by the other side. And vice versa. The reality is different, but there's such a disconnect that no one knows how to fix this.
>Just 100 years ago, people were being forced to work on ships, in factories, on farms,
You know those jobs are still necessary, right? Still exist? People are just as forced into them now as they were in 1920 especially outside the developed world. You're complaining that life in antiquity was hard and attributing it to a failure of society.
What if it's just the nature of reality that life is hard, brutish, and short, and the slice of modernity we've enjoyed briefly for the last half century has been a reprieve offered by liberalism?
Also how do you even bundle anti maskers and authoritarians in one sentence? Anti maskers aren't telling people not to go to church or visit their families, or to die alone. The authoritarians are on the other side, like Mr Andrew Cuomo. He's the one literally persecuting Jews in New York for practicing their beliefs in a way that is politically unfashionable due to a disease with a 99.9% survival rate.
You might disagree with them but anti maskers are anti authoritarian. They are literally fighting authority.
It's not much of a consolation, but "forced" back then meant "no other options" (except death). People were Shanghaied onto ships, forced to work for someone else for little to no pay, or because they simply had debts, and they had no state-mandated rights.
Lots of people have sacrificed their lives to give us a better one. I'm only from an ex-USSR country, and I've never been to countries worse off, but from what I read, workers rights have taken hold pretty much everywhere.
The anti-maskers/pro-authoritarians part was in reply to "people are gathering in groups based on their levels of competence, interests and views".
Yes, everyone gathers in their own groups with narrow views, and they don't have to live or even communicate with people who have different views. So they don't even try to understand the opposing point of view. It's automatically just them "being dumb", "just wrong" or "fake news" or whatever.
It might make for more effective social associations in the short term, but I don't see how it's sustainable in the long term. It's the same exact type of divide that exists between the wealthy and the rest.
Indeed, the pre-1960s working class was in a much less privileged position, but liberalism was still important among those at the higher end of the social ladder – the intellectual, scientific, entrepreneurial and political elites. A child from a wealthy upper-class family whose father owned a cotton factory would first receive high quality education, and then would, for example, become a credible scientist or an engineer.
Post-WW2, the working class was largely replaced by a well-off middle class, and that created other problems in itself.
People on the higher end of the ladder have always been more liberal, thanks to the education and free time they had. Irrespective of religion, unlike what the article insinuates.
Indeed, we do owe our modern lives to the privileged people who nonetheless chose to fight for the commoner, raising everyone's living standards.
Repeated inbreeding within the 4th degree of kinship[1] is observably dysgenic too. A society's breeding mores have genetic as well as cultural effects. In fact the two are so closely intertwined I don't believe they can be practicably separated.
[1] Degrees are counted by how many nodes in the tree have to be traversed upward to reach the nearest common direct ancestor. For example siblings are second degree since the two siblings share a common ancestor. An uncle and nephew would be 3rd degree, first cousins 4th degree, and so on.
Of course it does. British Pakistanis are 13 times more likely to have children with genetic disorders than the general population. And everyone knows why is that.
It's weird how human behavior mirrors scientific basis without pre-existing knowledge. It seems Roman Law required, exactly, 4 degrees of familial separation.
"Roman civil law prohibited marriages within four degrees of consanguinity[44] but had no degrees of affinity with regards to marriage."
> It's a game-changing paradigm when you put it in perspective to most other contemporary non-Western societies where kinship, long-term friendships and intergenerational family obligations are forming the fabric of society.
"most other contemporary non-Western societies?" You are a rare anthropologist to make this assertion. Both endogamy and exogamy are common across the globe, and have been for millennia.
I think so, yes. Polygamy creates structures where high status men have multiple wives, and low status men don't get any wives at all. Those low status men then get frustrated and destabilize societies by causing war etc. See: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/19/...
I that includes a very narrow form of polygamy. In particular, that men are the only ones allowed to take multiple partners. In a form of polygamy where everyone gets to take multiple partners it is exactly the opposite. Everyone is always available to form bonds with whom they want. This notion of being "taken" in marriage is what breaks polygamy.
That ignores the reality of reproduction with a woman giving birth to a child of only one male. There is very little reason for one man to raise the child of another man in such a situation where multiple new partners are available without any obligations.
The traditional form of polygamy comes from the natural forces of nature, not oppression.
> There is very little reason for one man to raise the child of another man in such a situation where multiple new partners are available without any obligations
...or even own child, especially if there is a pension system and centralised care system.
I did not use the word oppression. Personally I think it is more lack of imagination.
Given the current state of technology, it is fairly easy to know who is the father of a kid.
Personally, I do not feel the drive to polygamy, in particular because I think it is very emotionally demanding of all the participants and ultimately exhausting and unstable.
I don't know what the "natural forces of nature" are, but of course many, many animal species do not establish monogamous relationships and they still manage to surivive.
It's an upside down logic to think that low status men cause war. Yes, they do have more incentives to go to war, there is a correlation, but this doesn't mean it's the cause. I'd bet that in every such situation the root cause of war is the hunger of power of the top leadership. They could deliberately impose even worse imbalance and use the "hate force" of low status men as a destructive energy in a war. This is what Russia does nowadays, I believe.
I wasn't really thinking about single men destabilizing a society. Just an idea that mixing genes up more in children may be good for that society, and that anything that reduces this mixing may be unhelpful to a society.
I see both monogamy and preventing cosanguinity as examples of actions that could increase this mixing.
How does monogamy increase the mixing of genes? Surely polyamory (everyone having multiple partners, not just men) mixes genes more? And doesn't monogamy also reduce the pressure of natural selection?
I'm suggesting that monogamy increases mixing compared to the alternative types of society that have been tried, in particular to ones where only high status males have children.
Maybe we do need to move to adopt polyamory, the evidence from online dating suggests we are reverting instead to default primate behaviour.
I believe HN User "motogpjimbo"'s point was that it's very likely that groups like ISIS are started by high status men. And now that he got me to contemplate the matter, I think he may be correct. I think it is the high status men and women who generally start the wars, and the low status people who are forced to fight the wars. I think this is how things generally work.
Sure, but probably not led, funded or conceptualised by them. Anyone who is able to accumulate enough power to start a war wouldn't normally be considered a low status male.
Interviews with ISIS fighters struck me strongly with that impression. One man in particular -- in Europe he had been a nobody, but in the Islamic State he had status... and his experience was that this status was absolutely worth killing for.
High status individuals might have more power than low status individuals, but the collection of low status individuals is large. Men without anything to lose and no potential to improve their lives legally are very dangerous, whether you give them weapons or whether you don't. The high status men only channel this force and use it for their own gains.
But you are right, I should have mentioned that high status men contribute to wars as well.
Re incels, it depends on the definition of the term whether they can be regarded as such. I think that the term is most commonly used to refer to a specific group of men in western society which by and large is still monogamic, so it's not very comparable to a mostly polygamic society and the effects it has. I think most men or women who identify as incel can find someone if they really want to, they might just not live up to their standards. I mean, here in the west there is no effect which removes far more women from the dating pool than men :).
In most societies, males are typically sent out to war because males can easily have more children than females since they don't have go go through a period of pregnancy, so a society that sacrifices its males on high risk high reward activities can rebuild faster than if it sacrificed females instead. This is why typically you see male soldiers, raiders, and explorers.
But as a result, more warlike societies tend to have less males in the population than females because the males keep getting sent out to die. Remaining females now have less potential mates to choose from, so polygamy becomes socially acceptable to ensure more people get a share of the economic rewards those surviving males bring back.
So you could easily flip this around and say that it's not polygamy that causes war. Rather, war causes polygamy, and polygamy is a reward for the few male "winners" that survive to bring home the loot because now they have less genetic competition.
This model of warfare reducing the proportion of males could also explain why most societies have tended to be patrachical. Scarce males means each males has more bargaining power. In return for the economic loot they bring back, they could demand more say in the household than their counterpart or counterparts. Stretch this population imbalance over a few centuries and you get a patrachical society.
1. I would not discount physical strength, males would win every pre-modern conflict.
2. Also consider the alpha/provider split. Welfare state and sexual liberation result in a polygamic marriage, where collective taxpayer is the "husband" and single mothers are "wives".
Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.”
Larry Siedentop's 'Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism' takes a different slant on this topic.
To quote from a review: he argues that 'liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity and that it is Christian moral beliefs that are the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.'.
This is basically what the book discussed in the article also argues: specifically the (Catholic) Church's “Marriage and Family Program” (MFP) forced a move away from tribal/clan thinking that most human societies start with and continue with.
It's why there are very few "honour killings" in more Westernized societies: non-WEIRD cultures need to restore the family's reputation from the actions of an individual. While in WEIRD cultures it is only the individual's reputation that suffers, not the parents'/relatives'.
We are heading to New era of communism. We are walking with masks on our face to believe, that these masonic one world order leaders gonna save us. Left or Right, it doesn't matter both playing same end game.
As good obedient citizen we are, we judge people who dare to questioning the direction of our world.
Believe in Google twitter and Facebook, they censoring opinions to protect you from anybody who is not aligned with the agenda.
HN shadow ban again my account. So much of been innovative and open for ideas.
I'm not sure anyone every took this seriously. Here in Anglo-Saxon Essex, my uncle married his (1st) cousin in a Catholic ceremony some time around 1980...
44 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 98.6 ms ] threadIn the west, individuals are much more autonomous and that enables more effective social associations where people are gathering in groups based on their levels of competence, interests and views.
[0] Woodley, Michael A.; Edward Bell (2013). "Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations". Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 44 (2): 263–280. doi:10.1177/0022022112443855. S2CID 145714074.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Henrich
Western liberalism and individual freedom is really a very recent development. Just 100 years ago, people were being forced to work on ships, in factories, on farms, in wars and 3-4 generations living in one home was normal. Just 60 years ago, many people were heavily discriminated against and had little freedom.
Imo, these "more effective social associations" just lead to an increase in mental problems and perhaps ultimately, to the unraveling of such societies. Long term *ships are good, the focus on hyper efficiency just means more and more people are being left behind, and groups simply have no idea what other groups are thinking or how to work with them.
See all the antimaskers, antivaxxers, authoritarian supporters. All dismissed as stupid/irrelevant and considered a minority by the other side. And vice versa. The reality is different, but there's such a disconnect that no one knows how to fix this.
You know those jobs are still necessary, right? Still exist? People are just as forced into them now as they were in 1920 especially outside the developed world. You're complaining that life in antiquity was hard and attributing it to a failure of society.
What if it's just the nature of reality that life is hard, brutish, and short, and the slice of modernity we've enjoyed briefly for the last half century has been a reprieve offered by liberalism?
Also how do you even bundle anti maskers and authoritarians in one sentence? Anti maskers aren't telling people not to go to church or visit their families, or to die alone. The authoritarians are on the other side, like Mr Andrew Cuomo. He's the one literally persecuting Jews in New York for practicing their beliefs in a way that is politically unfashionable due to a disease with a 99.9% survival rate.
You might disagree with them but anti maskers are anti authoritarian. They are literally fighting authority.
Lots of people have sacrificed their lives to give us a better one. I'm only from an ex-USSR country, and I've never been to countries worse off, but from what I read, workers rights have taken hold pretty much everywhere.
The anti-maskers/pro-authoritarians part was in reply to "people are gathering in groups based on their levels of competence, interests and views".
Yes, everyone gathers in their own groups with narrow views, and they don't have to live or even communicate with people who have different views. So they don't even try to understand the opposing point of view. It's automatically just them "being dumb", "just wrong" or "fake news" or whatever.
It might make for more effective social associations in the short term, but I don't see how it's sustainable in the long term. It's the same exact type of divide that exists between the wealthy and the rest.
Post-WW2, the working class was largely replaced by a well-off middle class, and that created other problems in itself.
Indeed, we do owe our modern lives to the privileged people who nonetheless chose to fight for the commoner, raising everyone's living standards.
[1] Degrees are counted by how many nodes in the tree have to be traversed upward to reach the nearest common direct ancestor. For example siblings are second degree since the two siblings share a common ancestor. An uncle and nephew would be 3rd degree, first cousins 4th degree, and so on.
* https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/inbreeding-and...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middle_...
This must have some serious negative effect on the societies there, especially when done for 50 consecutive generations.
https://www.muslimcouncilofamerica.org/cousin-marriage-among...
"Roman civil law prohibited marriages within four degrees of consanguinity[44] but had no degrees of affinity with regards to marriage."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest#Antiquity (Top of third to last paragraph in section)
"most other contemporary non-Western societies?" You are a rare anthropologist to make this assertion. Both endogamy and exogamy are common across the globe, and have been for millennia.
I think this book excerpt overstates the case.
The traditional form of polygamy comes from the natural forces of nature, not oppression.
...or even own child, especially if there is a pension system and centralised care system.
Given the current state of technology, it is fairly easy to know who is the father of a kid.
Personally, I do not feel the drive to polygamy, in particular because I think it is very emotionally demanding of all the participants and ultimately exhausting and unstable.
I don't know what the "natural forces of nature" are, but of course many, many animal species do not establish monogamous relationships and they still manage to surivive.
I see both monogamy and preventing cosanguinity as examples of actions that could increase this mixing.
Maybe we do need to move to adopt polyamory, the evidence from online dating suggests we are reverting instead to default primate behaviour.
Incel anger is a real thing, but incels are not building warships or running munitions factories.
But you are right, I should have mentioned that high status men contribute to wars as well.
Re incels, it depends on the definition of the term whether they can be regarded as such. I think that the term is most commonly used to refer to a specific group of men in western society which by and large is still monogamic, so it's not very comparable to a mostly polygamic society and the effects it has. I think most men or women who identify as incel can find someone if they really want to, they might just not live up to their standards. I mean, here in the west there is no effect which removes far more women from the dating pool than men :).
In most societies, males are typically sent out to war because males can easily have more children than females since they don't have go go through a period of pregnancy, so a society that sacrifices its males on high risk high reward activities can rebuild faster than if it sacrificed females instead. This is why typically you see male soldiers, raiders, and explorers.
But as a result, more warlike societies tend to have less males in the population than females because the males keep getting sent out to die. Remaining females now have less potential mates to choose from, so polygamy becomes socially acceptable to ensure more people get a share of the economic rewards those surviving males bring back.
So you could easily flip this around and say that it's not polygamy that causes war. Rather, war causes polygamy, and polygamy is a reward for the few male "winners" that survive to bring home the loot because now they have less genetic competition.
This model of warfare reducing the proportion of males could also explain why most societies have tended to be patrachical. Scarce males means each males has more bargaining power. In return for the economic loot they bring back, they could demand more say in the household than their counterpart or counterparts. Stretch this population imbalance over a few centuries and you get a patrachical society.
2. Also consider the alpha/provider split. Welfare state and sexual liberation result in a polygamic marriage, where collective taxpayer is the "husband" and single mothers are "wives".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Henrich
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51710349-the-weirdest-pe...
It's why there are very few "honour killings" in more Westernized societies: non-WEIRD cultures need to restore the family's reputation from the actions of an individual. While in WEIRD cultures it is only the individual's reputation that suffers, not the parents'/relatives'.
As good obedient citizen we are, we judge people who dare to questioning the direction of our world.
Believe in Google twitter and Facebook, they censoring opinions to protect you from anybody who is not aligned with the agenda.
HN shadow ban again my account. So much of been innovative and open for ideas.