A key impetus was the wealth acquisition maneuvers of the Catholic Church: It was easier to extract a fortune from an individual (under the pretext of contributing to the poor), than from a family full of kin each vying for a part of the family estate.
The Catholic Church figured out how to use promises in the afterlife to its economic advantage. And used it to dismantle kin-based institutions.
In the process of doing so, it won the competition with other religions.
In-laws was a Catholic Church invention designed to expand the deterrence value of incest laws and thereby further diminish the chances of more family heirs. The church mandated that sex and marriage could not occur with in-laws. The word "in-laws," is a Catholic invention that means "in canon law."
Manipulation of the MFP inheritance rules and laws led to the Church becoming the largest landowner in Europe at the same time that it decimated kin-based institutions, and won the religious arms race.
Another impetus was the breakup of the Feudal system itself into manorial estates, and eventually into single family households, where serfs could hire themselves out, and eventually move from the lord's estate, to an apprenticeship, and on to marriage and the setting up of a homestead owning land themselves. The mobility of labor, put free labor in open competition with slave labor, effectively ending the feudal system.
Psychological Differences, Families and the Church
The psychological changes induced by shift in the organization of families and social networks help us understand why the newly forming institutions developed in certain ways.
New monastic orders, guilds, towns and universities increasingly built their laws, principles, norms and rules in ways that focused on the individual, often endowing each member with abstract rights, privileges, obligations and duties to the organization.
Europe and Asia
WEIRD families in Europe were bilateral nuclear monogamous arrangements, based on love and personal decisions. Kinship ties were weak, few and far between. There were no uncle-niece or cousin marriages, and only bilateral households.
So, how did WEIRD kinship become so unusual?
After Rome was defeated, and feudalism was broken up, the roots of WEIRD families could be seen clearly in the energetically promoted policies of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church's genius was dismantling the kin-based institutions while catalyzing its own expansion through an expanded package of church doctrines, prohibitions, and prescriptions such as changing the rules of marriages through the MFP, by adding new rules to incest taboos, mandating sexual habits and practices, and keeping tight reins on family relationships and inheritances.
With the Catholic Church far out front, Christianity had won the religious arms race by a country mile. And all this took place on the eve of the industrial revolution.
But the question the author posed at the end of chapter five was: Did these things influence our motivations, perceptions, emotions, thinking styles, and self-concepts, i.e., our psychology, in any significant ways?
The evidence that he lays out shows that the answer is a resounding yes: It has a resounding effect on shaping the way we think, our self-concepts, our attitudes towards individualism and impersonal trust, our conformist behavior, obedience to authority, adherence to traditions, and the formation of intentionality in our moral judgments including shame and guilt.
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