DGerman TV viewers, please help: How did Mario Adorf as an adhesive manufacturer in the cult series “Kir Royal” say so beautifully – to Baby Schimmerlos, the journalist character of the series: “I’ll shit you with my money. Then you are my servant, and I will do what I want with you.” Without having a clue, the author of this article dared to read a thick, very thick book from the Suhrkamp science department, and now it is whispering for 900 pages non-stop: “I’ll fuck you up with my text.” Because the text in this book does what the reader wants with it.
It is by no means that the author Joseph Henrich, an American anthropologist who also counts psychology and evolutionary biology among his research fields, has nothing to say. On the contrary: Henrich writes in this pleasantly down-to-earth, American style that is not at all ordinary, like a mixture of mental trainer and speaker, in which the stop and pause buttons no longer work. It moves in the field of bestsellers by Yuval Noah Harari and David Graeber, who have re-posed evolutionary and anthropological questions about human history with verve and thus made them popular.
Questions like: Why are we monogamous? How are science, law and the market economy related to the ban on cousin marriage?
Henrich, who teaches at Harvard, focuses these questions on the psychological constitution of western societies. In the American original, he calls the people of western civilization “the WEIRDest people of the world”. “WEIRD” is an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic”, and at the same time a play on words, means English weird but strange, strange, weird. As an ethnologist, Henrich learned that Western behavior patterns and norms are considered very strange in large parts of the world.
For example, Westerners have little or no sympathy for nepotism, corruption, clans, and arranged marriages. Westerners are also worse at remembering faces than other people in the world. And, studies also show that Westerners love analytical thinking, individualism, freedom, they value institutions of separation of powers and the rule of law. They prefer the market economy to the clique economy. It remains to be seen whether this is so unequivocally correct. No normal reader can get to the bottom of the countless studies that Henrich reports on in his book.
The West’s special path began early
The bulk of the book is a mega parcours through the evolution of western civilization with the main question: When and how did the West’s special path begin? Already in late antiquity, with early Christianity, Henrich argues and lists pages and pages of synod resolutions with which the “marriage and family program” of the church (often called “EFP” in the abbreviation-loving book) prohibited large-scale marriages between relatives and monogamy, testamentary inheritances and property installed.
In the Christian sphere of influence, so goes Henrich’s central thesis, tribal forms of society, i.e. clans and tribes, already declined in the first millennium. Centuries before any modern statehood, the “victory of impersonal prosociality” took place in Europe. This term describes societies in which personal, i.e. family and family relationships, are pushed back in favor of a community in which guilt reigns instead of shame. The determination of guilt takes place through moral theology, later also through the law.
![24.03.2015., Zagreb,Croatia - Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli historian and the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He lectures at the Department of History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Photo: Sanjin Strukic/PIXSELL [ Rechtehinweis: picture alliance ]](https://img.welt.de/img/politik/mobile182417178/3992502647-ci102l-w1024/Yuval-Noah-Harari-Croatia.jpg)
In general, societies shaped by Christianity shift their trust that living together works, from the level of family and clan ties historically to others, ultimately only “imagined communities”: It begins with monasteries, continues from the year 1000 with cities and their guilds , guilds, universities – it is characteristic of all these institutions that they regulate and regulate competition between individuals and psychologically strengthen the individual himself, which promotes innovation, joy of discovery, and performance.
Protestantism and market mentality
With Henrich, who describes the strange West without even beginning to integrate postcolonial perspectives, it ultimately boils down to Max Weber’s well-known thesis: Protestantism helps the market mentality, Henrich speaks of a “booster injection”. He himself is reminiscent of a doctor who, without being asked, gives you hundreds of anthropological, psychological and other secondary findings during the vaccination consultation. It has a lot more to say in its 700 pages (plus 200 pages of appendices and notes) than a more audience-friendly non-fiction book would have to say. He is well aware of his own weakness: “When I opened the intellectual floodgates, a whole, unstoppable torrent the length of a book erupted from me.”
The fact that Henrich repeatedly writes in an anecdotal, personal and thus approachable way does not solve the problem of the lack of focus. This book is a crammed, no, overflowing container. One can love and celebrate such works, because even just hoarding and accumulating knowledge creates chambers of curiosities that have become books. But they are not really readable books.
Joseph Henrich: The strangest people in the world. Translated from the English by Frank Lachmann and Jan-Erik Strasser. Suhrkamp, 918 pages, 34 euros