Thread by @mccormick_ted

OK, so others have said a lot about this, but my own comment was a bit glib. Let me say a more, not from the perspective of a medievalist but at least that of a historian of pre-modern Europe.

sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/h…

1. It is, of course, important to distinguish between the study and the reporting on the study. My comments at this point are based on the latter.

However, the latter is what most people will see and what will guide their impressions. It matters.

2. The problem begins with this: "The authors of a sweeping new study say that last, seemingly trivial prohibition [on marriage within specific degrees of consanguinity] may have given birth to Western civilization as we know it."

3. What's the problem? Let me answer the question with a question: what's "Western Civilization as we know it"?

Apparently, it's this: "What they are offering to explain is the emergence of democratic institutions, of individualism in the West.”

4. So, "if they're right", a decision at a church council in the 6th century explains democracy and individualism in The West. Let me ask a few more questions at this point.

When/where did democracy happen?
When/where did *individualism* happen?
What are the links?

5. Why are we assuming that a ban on marriage is a likely cause of these things?

What other conditions, causes, factors might be relevant?

How, most importantly, does this improve on our current accounts of these things?

6. The ban "weakened the tight kinship structures that had previously defined European populations, fostering new streaks of independence, nonconformity, and a willingness to work with strangers."

We don't know what evidence is offered of the effects, much less of the cause.

7. Too late for that! We're off and running: "And as the church’s influence spread, those qualities blossomed into a suite of psychological traits common today across Western industrialized nations, they argue."

A word on sources would be nice.

8. But we just get the thesis restated: "Traditional kin networks stressed the moral value of obeying one’s elders... But when the church forced people to marry outside this network, traditional values broke down, allowing new ones to pop up: individualism, nonconformity...."

9. Then: "Working under the assumption that more time spent under church rule would ingrain those values more deeply, the researchers compared psychological and kinship traits of modern populations with the time their ancestors spent under Roman Catholic rule."

10. What is "Roman Catholic rule"? Is a year under Roman Catholic rule in 17th-century Spain the same as a year under it in 14th-century Venice? What about 7th-century Gaul? 19th-century Ireland?

Why assume this is the only factor shaping individuality? Or even marriage choice?

11. More importantly, for these and for so many other questions one might ask: is there any historical research supporting these assumptions?

Going with my gut, I'm going to guess the answer to my questions about interpretation is going to be a sea of d-

12. "The researchers built a vast database from historical records of church exposure in every nation on Earth, beginning in the first century and ending in 1500 C.E., when European society had become nearly fully Christianized."

Huh. Wonder why historians never did that.

13. "Next, they consulted anthropological data to assign a kinship intensity score to each of the world’s major ethnolinguistic groups. This score was based on historical rates of cousin marriage, polygamy, and other factors."

Now perhaps this is an artefact of the reporting...

14. But this *seems* like building the conclusions into the methodological assumptions.

We assign a lower kinship intensity score to groups that avoid cousin marriage. But the claim that less cousin marriage means less intense kinship ties was one of the conclusions, no?

15. And how about measuring those values? "they drew on dozens of studies that used established psychological measures such as the World Values Survey to determine modern population-level scores for traits such as individualism, creativity, nonconformity, obedience," etc. ...

16. "Two of the more unorthodox measures of obedience and outgroup trust, for example, were unpaid parking tickets issued to United Nations diplomats and participation in blood donation drives."

Again, *huh*. We're hanging the historical origins of Western Civilization on this?

17. The data assembled, "they found that the longer a population spent under the rule of the Roman Catholic Church, the lower its kinship intensity score, meaning lower rates of cousin marriage and polygamy and looser familial and clan structures. ..."

18. "And as kinship intensity drops off in their data, a certain suite of traits grows stronger, including individualism, nonconformity, and willingness to trust and help strangers".

Still no word on any other factors that might conceivably explain these effects.

19. Never mind. "This constellation of traits lines up with the dominant psychological profile of people living in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries—... labeled WEIRD societies."

Well, "lining up" is as good as causing, no? Why split hairs?

20. Better yet: "The traits identified in the study may also have paved the way for democratic governance. 'You need a civic society to sustain democracy, and what we look at in our paper is, I believe, a precursor for such a civic society,' says co-author Jonathan Schulz".

21. Put another way: I *believe* this study shows me something (declining kinship ties) that looks like the *precursor* for something else (civic society) that I hypothesize is *necessary* for something yet else (democracy).

Is this historical explanation, or logic chopping?

22. One thing it isn't: it isn't engaged with any of the many extant explorations of the origins of the things that we are told this one factor now, alone apparently, explains.

Now, perhaps reducing everything to one cause seems tidier. It isn't.

23. It isn't, because it leaves us with *everything else that happened around these issues and developments over two thousand years* not only not explained -- left out of account, on the cutting room floor as it were -- but suddenly meaningless.

24. Now, *unlike* scientific hypotheses, historical records and sources don't obligingly vanish when you decide they're not needed.

They hang around, so many reminders that if your aim was explaining the *past*, rather than modelling the nth version of the present, you failed.

25. The final comment quoted in the piece sums up in just four words the distance between those two goals: "It does make sense."

So did magic, once upon a time.

*a bit more, that is