The Weirdest People in the World - Book Review Part 3

 

 The News So Far

So far, Joseph Henrich says that western people are very unusual. 

Of course this comes as a big shock to many of them who arrogantly assume they live in the stratosphere of human existence and that everyone is - or should be - like them. 

But compared to the majority world, and the majority of people who have ever lived they really do occupy the extreme end of most  behavioural spectrums. They are WEIRD - not a term intended by Henrich to bring them down, by the way, though at first sight it may seem that way.

WEIRD stands for:

W estern

E ducated

I ndustrial

R ich

D emocratic

And the reason, suggests Joseph, is that they can read. And they can read because of the Reformation....1500s onwards.

I don't believe that's all there is to it, because in the very first chapter of his book, which he calls "Weird Psychology" Henrich begins to list all the features of Weird people....

...and some of them sound very much like the fruit of the Gospel.

What are Weird People actually like?

What then is so unusual about westerners? Are you ready? Some of these attributes are positive, some are clearly not.

Henrich is always, by the way, comparing Weird people with majority world people.

Here goes:

"Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we Weird people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves - our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations - over our relationships and social roles." (page 21)

We are very individualistic. One indicator of this is the way Weird people focus on guilt while majority world people focus on shame. Guilt is something internal. We set personal standards and aspirations for ourselves and when we don't meet them we feel guilty. These standards and aspirations are really important to us. By contrast, the priorities in the majority world are relationships. And so their primary negative feeling is shame - they have let others down.

Another way our individualism is manifested is the way we answer the question, "I am......" Weird people answer it with personal qualities or achievements. I am a mechanic, I am curious, and so on. Majority world people answer the question with "I am the daughter of", "I come from the tribe of" or "I do this role in society". 

There are some positive traits Weird people exhibit. Weird people, lacking deep social ties tend not to give family members jobs, while nepotism is rife across the majority world. Weird people tend to be more friendly across the full range of their relationships, while majority world folks tend to be friendly to those in their social groupings or tribe but cold to those outside (see Hutu and Tutsi). 

Weird people are obsessed with what they think about themselves, their self-esteem, while majority world people are concerned about other-esteem, how they are viewed by others.

I'm just listing all this stuff.

Weird people don't care what others think about them, they're not prepared to conform to a group, majority world people care a great deal what others think about them and tend to conform. Weird people are prepared to wait for a future reward if its better than a present one, majority world people prefer the here and now, making Weird people appear more patient. Weird people obey rules better than majority world people. Weird people are prepared to risk a friendship if it means the difference between telling the truth and loyalty. Majority world folks are prepared to lie in court to protect a friend. Weird people trust strangers more than majority world folks. Weird people tend to make more judgements about the inner intentions or motives of people. Weird people think analytically rather than their holistic majority world pals.

See the list below for a fuller analysis.

Some Reflections

Joseph Henrich - I've read the conclusion! - is going to say that reading plus some Catholic family rules are responsible for all this Weirdness, but lets remember that an unbelieving scholar is spiritually blind, so we should listen to his facts but not follow his conclusions.

It seems to me that not literacy, but high literacy, may be the cause of some of the traits listed above, in particular analytical thinking. Anyone who has studied a subject for a few years on the trot in a western college will have developed an analytical mind. These kinds of minds, because they break problems down into constituent parts, find big picture holistic thinking difficult.

But there are positive traits among weird folks that I would suggest owe themselves much more to the widespread impact of the Gospel spreading out from the Reformation, than from the simple act of reading.

If Weird people really are more reliable across the whole spectrum of their relationships (faithful), prepared to face up to friends when they want them to lie (honest), struggle with personal failure (which causes guilt), more obedient to rules (law-abiding), trust strangers (trusting) and are prepared to wait (patient), well these qualities look much more like the fruit of the Spirit. Not directly in the lives of western unbelievers, of course, but the spin-off of Gospel lives lived in the west. 

The negative weird traits listed above,  such as obsession with self, rank individualism, our inability to see holistically (because of the worship of high education which turns minds into analytically narrow-minded computers), our neglect of communal ties and our resistance  to conform; all these I see as step-children of the so-called Enlightenment (a lexical oxymoron if ever there was one).

Jesus once told a parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” (Matthew 13)

The church which started with the Twelve has become the largest tree in the  garden and it blesses non-tree life such as the birds.

In this parable Jesus teaches that the influence of the church goes far and deep into the structures of the society where Christians are found to live.

Surely it is this truth Henrich is charting, albeit unwittingly? Christians have let their light shine and that light has lit up Weird cultures who have then been blessed with "Christian" graces?

We'll have to see...

The Wierdest People in the World - Book Review Part 2

 

 

The Profound influence of Reading

So everything psychology knows is skewed towards a tiny proportion of the world's present and historic population. So most of psychology is either plain wrong, or profoundly imbalanced. (Review, Part 1)

As a believer did you wonder why, when you read psychology texts, you sensed you were so often reading jibberish? Well, now you know. 

OK, so the world has to rewrite all its text books on psychology. 

(Oh the glorious advantage of revelation, where standing above the transient so-called-knowledge of a passing world, God, the one who created us in the first place, sees and knows all things and has authored final and ultimate truth in the Scriptures. What the Bible teaches about mankind is true for all time, set against the lies of the academy.)

Anyway, why is the West so weird? 

Here is Henrich's first reason: we can read. It turns out that the act of reading actually changes the brain itself and has many knock-on effects on the rest of our thinking.

Psychological studies were all conducted on highly literate university students - that's why those findings are so way out. Lots of people in the world today are illiterate (at least 10%) and many many more are poorly literate. Very few are highly literate. And widely literate societies are a new and unusual thing.

So what does literacy do to our minds? Although he doesn't say this, my guess is that what he describes are the effects of high literacy, not simple literacy.

Says Henrich, among various physical and neurological effects reading increases our ability to remember, but reduces our ability to identify faces and narrows the way we think from more all-life holistic thinking to more analytic processing (page 3-4). 

This last effect is perhaps the most important: literacy (or at least, or especially high literacy) narrows our vision of the world.

The effect of the Reformation

One can easily chart the rise of literacy in the West. It starts to rise in the 1500s, so guess what caused it? 

The Reformation.

The Catholic church was quite happy for folks to languish in illiteracy for then they could not read the Bible and discover the errors of priests and popes. But Evangelicals like Luther knew that the only way to be saved was through God's Word, and so he wanted people to learn to read the Bible.

Instead of relying on a Latin Bible no-one could read Luther translated the Bible into German for the ordinary lads and lasses on the street. And he encouraged them to learn how to read.

And so literacy - as well as the Gospel - spread out from Wittenberg!

You can even draw a nerdy coloured map to show that the degree of literacy was proportional to how close a city was to Wittenberg - the closer the more literate, the further away, the less literate!

Since salvation is for everyone, the Reformation encouraged both boys and girls to read. (Note the difference with respect to what we hear is happening in Afghanistan today. I say 'what we hear is happening' because western media with its own shibboleths can be wildly imbalanced). 

All this is documented in Henrich's book. 

The Catholics, out of envy and a competitive spirit, then also introduced schooling, but never to the degree of the Reformers. The literacy differences between the two movements are very stark.

When the Gospel was taken to the world by the Reformers, guess what? They took with them literacy. Missionaries translated the Bible into the languages of the peoples and encouraged them to read.

Since western people could read, when industrial possibilities came about, guess what? There were lots of literate farmers able to work the machines and ramp up industry to what we call revolutions. 

Enough for one blog, but we're only up to page 17.

Conclusions

The gospel of Jesus Christ has wide-ranging effects. 

Christians encourage reading. Because we are 'people of a book', because God has spoken primarily in Scripture (he also 'speaks' through creation), to fully share the Gospel we must encourage people to read. Hence the vital and amazing work of Bible translators such as the Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Christians encourage both men and women to read the Bible. With regard to salvation, in Christ there is no male nor female. So Christian mission encourages both men and women to read.

So far, so good, or so it seems. What's to argue with or complain about?

Here's my initial guess at where things may go wrong.

Literacy is one thing. High literacy is another. To teach people to read is a noble endeavour. But since most of the big-name reformers were scholars who were highly literate themselves, they, unwittingly pushed not only literacy, but high literacy.

Unwittingly they expected of their followers not only the ability to read the Scriptures but to engage in the highly theoretical gymnastics of their theoretical - and so often secondary - doctrinal arguments. 

Instead of teaching the people to follow Christ simply, they wanted them to understand and get passionate about detailed doctrinal squabbles of their day, many of which, in turn, were generated by the highly scholastic education they themselves had experienced (or endured). Remember the more literate you are the more analytical your brain becomes and the less you are able to see the big picture, the less you are able to see life holistically.

This is my guess, so far.

The problem is not literacy, but some of the unhelpful side-effects of high literacy. 

The other reformation

There was of course another reformation. Running parallel to the one we have all heard of. A group of evangelical Christians saw much further than Luther and Zwingli. They saw that the local church community should be a loving Acts-like fellowship. Doctrine was the biggest concern of the cerebral big-shot reformers. True life was the passion of the anabaptist reformers. (If only they had worked together!).

But here's why I mention them. By and large the anabaptist reformers were ordinary literate folks, whereas the big-name reformers were all highly literate scholar types. 

Perhaps that is why the magisterial reformers (the name given to the big shot reformers who used the power of the local magistrates to push through reform) were so analytically and doctrinally focussed. And perhaps with their literacy but not high literacy, that is why the anabaptists saw the Gospel more holistically.

Let's see!

If you want to read a brief account of the noble but forgotten Anabaptists, you can do so here: LOST REFORMERS

The Wierdest People in the World - Book Review Part 1

 

            

 Westerners are W.E.I.R.D.!

Having been brought up in the East (Pakistan) and spent many years in close friendship with South Asians, I have always felt an outsider in the West, though technically I am a Yank.

In other words I have always felt a bit weird.

But now - and it is official! - it's not me who is weird, it's the West that is Weird, and at last I have found the explanation of why westerners, rather than me, are the weird ones!

The phenomenal and global "triumph of the West", you see, obscures a fact: the way western folk act and think is truly unusual compared to all the other cultures of the world across time and place.

That is the verdict of Joseph Henrich. 

WEIRD stands for:

W estern

E ducated

I ndustrial

R ich

D emocratic

Most cultures who have ever existed and most cultures that exist today are not Weird and do not think or behave like we do. (There you go, I have included myself in the wild weird west).

Understanding this may prove very helpful to believers, for perhaps large doses of Western Evangelicalism have been unwittingly shaped by this wierdness.

I plan to review the contents of this (too long, 680 pages, why can't people write books 100 pages long?) book over the coming weeks, as I read it myself. My single purpose is to explore how evangelicalism has been / may have been unduly shaped by our culture. 

So that we can repent.

Sometimes it really helps to be an outsider

The author found himself appointed teacher of a subject he'd never studied himself! Unusual appointment! This immediately meant that he did not think the way everyone around him did. Rather than this being a drawback it proved to be a great advantage because he was able to see things with fresh eyes.

This is what the prophets of old were enabled by God to do spiritually. They stood outside the established religion of their day, looked in and by divine revelation were able to see what no-one else could see.

Not saying Henrich is a prophet, but his unusual book owes much to his status as an outsider. 

As he got to work, he began to ask the no-one-else-has-asked question. "Of all the studies of people made by ye scholars how many of them have been on WEIRD people and how many of them have been on people from the rest of the - majority - world?"

In other words, Have the conclusions psychologists have made about human beings in general  been based on studies made of just one tiny group of the globe's population? 

Answer - yikes! - 96% of all studies (and hence conclusions) were based on questionaires from western (hence WEIRD) people!

"almost everything we - scientists - knew about human psychology derived from populations that seemed to be rather unusual" (page xiii)

First Conclusions

That's enough of a bombshell for one blog. We'll discover next time how exactly westerners are weird.

Westerners need to humble themselves, that's the first conclusion we should draw out. In our unbelievable arrogance we think that our generalised conclusions about mankind are true - when we have failed to take into account most of the world's noble peoples. (We have, for an example, the unbelievable audacity to think that democracy is the only way to run a country and imagine we are being noble by exporting it / imposing it - by force if necessary - to/on other countries. If a vast 'democratic' nation can only come up with a Biden or Trump as presidential candidates, there is surely something massively wrong with our prized 'democracy.' Democracy is just one way to run a country, certainly not the only or even the best.)

Second, we should adopt a very healthy scepticism to all the findings of psychology, and all the treatments of the same. Their findings have been based on a very small portion of the world's wonderfully varied population and hence their treatments are likely to be weird and unreliable.

Third, it would be good to know, as a Bible believing evangelical, how deeply our Christianity, our belief and practice,  - true no doubt - has been shaped by our weirdness as much as it has been shaped by Scripture.

True growth always involves a Nehemiahic clearing away of the rubble before we can build for the glory of God.

Fourth, I've always been intrigued as to why the greatest church growth across the world today is among charismatic-pentecostal churches. Perhaps the educated weirdness of the West automatically filters out the supernatural elements of true New Testament Christianity. 

But perhaps where peoples and nations are blessed with ordinariness rather than weirdness, no such filter hinders the work of the Holy Spirit?