![]() ![]() "These are things that don't come to mind when you think about the influence of the Catholic Church," Stich says, which may explain why nobody had previously connected the church's influence with the emergence Western psychology. But when the church forced people to marry outside this network, traditional values broke down, allowing new ones to pop up: individualism, nonconformity, and less bias toward one's in-group. Traditional kin networks stressed the moral value of obeying one's elders, for example. "That part of a wedding where the officiant asks, ‘Does anybody here have any objections?' goes back to the church asking, ‘Does anybody here know if these people are cousins?'" Henrich says.Ĭenturies living under these restrictions fundamentally reshaped European societies' kinship structure-and their psychology, the authors say. The new regulations prohibited people from marrying their first and second cousins and banned the practice of levirate marriage, in which a widow must marry her dead husband's brother. Lesser prohibitions against incest were already swirling around Europe when the church fathers formalized their marriage and family program. Historians aren't sure why, although some religious thinkers of the time connected incest with the spread of the plague. Cousin marriages were even actively promoted in some societies because they kept wealth concentrated in powerful families.īut sometime around the sixth century C.E., the early church started to formulate strict marriage rules and become "obsessed" with incest, Henrich says. Growing crops and protecting land required cooperation, and marrying cousins was an easy way to get it, explains Harvard University anthropologist and study co-author Joseph Henrich. "They're looking at what created the modern Western world," Stich says.īefore the Middle Ages, Europe was similar to other agrarian societies around the world: Extended kin networks were the glue that held everything together. And as the church's influence spread, those qualities blossomed into a suite of psychological traits common today across Western industrialized nations, they argue. The church's early ban on incest and cousin marriage, the researchers say, weakened the tight kinship structures that had previously defined European populations, fostering new streaks of independence, nonconformity, and a willingness to work with strangers. "What they are offering to explain is the emergence of democratic institutions, of individualism in the West." "If the authors are right, or even in the vicinity of being right, it couldn't be bigger," says Stephen Stich, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who wasn't involved in the work. The authors of a sweeping new study say that last, seemingly trivial prohibition may have given birth to Western civilization as we know it. Others forbade Christians from marrying anyone more closely related than their third cousin. Some forbade clergy from visiting unrelated women. In September 506 C.E., the fathers of what would later become the Roman Catholic Church gathered in southern France to draw up dozens of new laws. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |