The Arabic edition of “The WEIRDest People in the World” that was published last month is still on my mind. The man who translated it to Arabic, Dr. Hamza Al-Muzaini, is a well-known academic who has published 12 books and translated 17, five of them by Noam Chomsky. Its author, Dr. Joseph Henrich is professor at Harvard University. It is an enormous work of 900 pages, full of information and thought-provoking ideas.
The author's biography reveals an erudite scholar of varied interests. He began as a test engineer for aerospace systems, then studied anthropology, economics, sociology, and psychology, and conducted field research that led to a fundamental change in "game theory," one of the basic theories in the study of human behavior. I may return to that subject another time. But I want to keep the promise I made in last week's article: to explain why I object to an implicit view that I believed I could see between the lines of this book and of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
I said then that both books put forward a hypothesis whose gist is that Protestant doctrine played an influential role in the emergence of capitalism, for Weber, and of rational choice and contractual relations, for Henrich. I argued that this hypothesis, together with the marriage system of the Catholic Church as Henrich saw it, is not supported by conclusive evidence; it may rather have been the deciding factor among many options. I also said that if it were a decisive factor, we would see its results replicated across different experiences. That has not happened in reality, and I gave examples.
I believe that major social phenomena, such as those the two books discuss, are not produced by a single factor. That factor may be very influential, but its effect does not withstand countervailing factors over a long period, as in the examples Weber and Henrich give.
From its first proclamation in 1517, Protestantism made a historic breakthrough in understanding the relationship between religion and the world, especially the religious value of worldly work. But the transformations European societies underwent, Protestant ones included, did not mature until the early eighteenth century. They were preceded by the flourishing of the sciences and the dissolution of the aura of sanctity surrounding ruling elites, a result of the many religious wars and the heavy losses they left behind. That is a long span of time.
There are, in addition, examples that cannot be passed over without reflection. One is the rapid rise of German power in the Nazi era, when science and industry flourished as never before in history, within a very short period between Hitler's accession to power in 1933 and his fall in 1945. We know that the driving force of this surge was the dream of national supremacy of the German race, not religion or anything else. We may also recall Japan and its rise in the twenty years following its surrender in 1945, when it overtook industrially and economically most of its competitors and all of its neighbors. By the end of the twentieth century, its production of science and technology had reached levels rivaling even the United States, which had occupied it and forced its surrender. We know that the driving force of Japan's rise was the will of the Japanese, elite and public alike, to escape the humiliation and brokenness of military defeat. And Japan, of course, was neither Protestant nor Christian at all.
It is also worth reflecting that Catholic Italy and France saw an industrial surge in the early nineteenth century, and both are today advanced in science and technology. That weakens Weber's argument.
The sum of my view here is that religion, any religion, can act as the bond that binds a society to a particular cause: a scientific renaissance, victory in war, or the creation of wealth. Any other ideology can play the same role, such as nationalism, racial supremacy, or utopias. But its success in transforming the cultural fabric deeply, and in launching an almost permanent social dynamism, depends on the presence of other factors, the most important of which, I believe, is what the philosophy of interpretation calls the community's "historical horizon," and the correspondence between that call and the components of this horizon. But that is a subject for another time.
