WEIRD, Kinship, the Queen, the Harfoots of Middle Earth

If you call me weird, I will say, “Thank you very much; it actually means “magical.” I may go on to cite the word’s use in Macbeth, and you may think or say, “point proven.”

The WEIRD I mean here is a five letter acronym coined by Joseph Henrich for his 2020 book “The WEIRDest People in the World.” It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.

Henrich’s book sets out to explain why certain countries in the West became WEIRD before other countries. According to Henrich, the familial organization we have today is an accidental anomaly. The most natural and time-honored way human society organizes itself is into groups of kinfolk, featuring marriage among cousins and kin, creating self-perpetuating communities tightly bound together by place and blood.

This was the arrangement around the world and for thousands of years until the Catholic Church disrupted it by declaring that marriage among cousins, even distant ones, was against Church doctrine and was strictly forbidden. Why they did so initially is not known, but, like the happy accident of Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin when he left his lab in a mess or the chocolate and peanut butter-eating colliders who invented Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, this new Church taboo had far reaching consequences.

Forbidden to marry cousins and other kin, Catholics had to leave their communities to seek marriage partners elsewhere. And so the West became less insular and more individualistic, and its productivity in all fields of human endeavor soared. Of course, the gains were unequal among classes and individuals, and it was the Church who volunteered to take care of those left behind. The Church was given land and money to accomplish this, so it grew rich and powerful, thus self-reinforcing the Church’s constraints on cousin and kinship marriage. As well, the rulers of the WEIRD benefitted as the power and wealth of their kingdoms increased. That’s what was gained, but the support and comfort of the community of extended kinship was lost.

WEIRD loneliness and lack of community has been a hot topic among sociologists for quite some time, from Emile Durkheim’s 19th century alienation theory of “anomie” to Robert Putnam’s 2000 book “Bowling Alone” to countless columns about how to regain lost community by writers like David Brooks.

We, the 21st century WEIRD, sitting atop our individualized society, have benefitted materially, but are we happier? Has the remarkable progress in the areas expressed by Henrich’s clever acronym been worth it?  An unanswerable question as you’d have to know how the West would have evolved without the Church’s accidental disruption.

I’ve been writing in very stark, if not simplistic terms. Either a society organized by kinship or siloed into nuclear families/individuals. In truth, there are limitless shades of nuance. Many people, perhaps even most, enjoy various forms of extended community, not just through family, but through friends or religious organizations or tightly knit neighborhoods.

But there is something different about family. When kinship is involved, the call to duty, the call to help, is heard at a pitch that not only sounds in your ears but that also pierces your heart. It’s both obligation and instinctual fulfilment. And if the request for help from a kin is unreasonable or beyond our power to perform or, still worse, from a kin who we believe has behaved in a fashion that makes the idea of helping them obnoxious to our values, it still stings deeper to deny them help than if the request came from elsewhere.

My own family is increasing so the idea of kinship is on my mind. My daughter is soon expecting our first grandchild and my son became engaged this week. We are tightly and happily bound together with the extended family of my son-in-law and I have good reason to expect and welcome that the same will continue to develop with the family of my soon to be daughter-in-law. It helps that we all live in Manhattan and share backgrounds that have far more similarities than differences. My father and two brothers and their families live close by and my own in-laws are going “against traffic” and moving from Florida, back to Manhattan. (They’re moving for family, but they’d be happy if you assumed it was to deliver a metaphorical poke in the eye of Ron DeSantis.)

I will never enjoy a kinship society as in days of old, where we all lived around some village square and tilled a common field. (I’d be a uniquely bad “tiller!”). But I can see the possibility of having an extended and thick web of mutual support and deep affection among what would amount to quite a few people connected by marriage and shared grandchildren, nieces and nephews. I’d consider myself very fortunate to have that in my life, enjoying the fruits of WEIRDness while still having a meaningful and extended familial community.

As for Queen Elizabeth, I believe the outpouring of affection for her has much to do with her success at having created a feeling of kinship between her and the WEIRD British people. What a superpower she wielded to engender this singular strand of community with so many tens and tens of millions. And like so many good things people get used to, it is most poignantly evident only after it is gone.

Finally, this post was partly inspired by watching the prequel to the Lord of the Rings (loving it so far) which features The Harfoots, ancestors of the Hobbits. The Harfoots are tiny in stature and cute and cuddly. For a thousand years, they have formed a tightly knit, nomadic, and subsistence tribe traveling together, avoiding danger through camouflage and keeping to their leader’s chosen path. Theirs is still a Hobbesian existence where the weak and infirm get left behind, presumably to die. That’s not necessary for the far mightier and richer Elves and Dwarves who also stick together, seeking the good life in community and tradition.

But it is the characters who tend to be iconoclastically WEIRD who move the action and the plot along. These rebels venture outside their community, for noble reasons, but also because they are built differently. These are the characters we emotionally bond with, because we recognize them as modern individuals. Like modern heroes, they succumb to the desire “to seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield.”

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