Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition
Page 11
This contrasts strongly with non-Western societies. “Whereas in industrial Western societies the emotional relationship between man and wife is primary, it is not the pivot of social structure in the majority of societies.”[249] Indeed, this is a general point of contrast between Eastern and Western stratified societies.[250] The idealization of romantic love as the basis of monogamous marriage has also periodically characterized Western secular intellectual movements, such as the Stoics of late antiquity and nineteenth‑century Romanticism.[251] It is not that love and affection between mates do not exist in other societies; it is just that there is greater emphasis on this in Western societies, to the point that it is a prime condition for marriage. And it is not that considerations of wealth and social status are unimportant in Western societies; it is only that romantic love and personal attraction became necessary conditions for choosing an appropriate partner, eventually even among the aristocracy.
The practice of taking in unrelated servants merits considerable attention because a simple economic explanation seems inadequate. Between thirty and forty percent of the youth in pre-industrial England were in service, the largest single occupational group until the twentieth century.[252] The practice of taking in servants went beyond simply providing for one’s needs by bringing in outsiders. People would sometimes have their children go to work as servants elsewhere while at the same time taking in unrelated servants.[253] It was not just the children of the poor and landless who became servants; even large-scale, successful farmers sent their children to be servants elsewhere. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries individuals often took in servants early in their marriage, before their own children could help out, and then passed their children on as servants to others when they were older and there was more than enough help.[254]
This suggests a deeply ingrained cultural practice which resulted in a high level of non-kinship-based reciprocity. The practice also bespeaks a relative lack of ethnocentrism, because people are taking in non-relatives as household members even when relatives are available. These pre-industrial societies were not organized around extended kinship, and it is easy to see that they are pre-adapted to the industrial revolution and the modern world generally. In the rest of Eurasia, there was a much stronger strong tendency for households to consist of kin.[255]
It is intriguing that hunter-gatherer societies living in harsh climates often have very elaborate systems of reciprocity aimed at sharing resources such as meat. I suspect that the system of non-kinship-based reciprocity so typical of pre-industrial northwest Europe as seen in the practice of taking in unrelated servants was another relic of a prolonged evolution in harsh northern climates.
Whereas Hartman and others emphasize late marriage as the key feature of Western families,[256] perhaps because of a heightened concern for feminist issues, an evolutionary analysis would also emphasizes the cutting off from the wider kinship group, while seeing late marriage as a consequence of an individualist marriage regime featuring individual choice of marriage partner in a context where married partners were required to set up an economically viable independent household. In an individualist marriage regime, individuals are to a much greater extent enmeshed with non-relatives and forced to make their own plans for the future, including their own retirement. Couples had to have an expectation of economic viability, which, depending on economic conditions, may not have been possible until prospective partners were well into their twenties. It was common that a substantial number were never being able to marry. As noted, unmarried people, especially women, were uncommon in traditional societies with collectivist marriage patterns.
However, this cutting off from extended kinship would also naturally lead to a higher position for women than in a patrilocal multifamily household dominated by older males and secondarily by mothers-in-law. The long-term historical trend in northwest Europe was that conjugal marriage in the absence of extended kinship ties resulted in convergence of men’s and women’s lives, as spouses became partners, and less preference for sons over daughters.[257]
In what follows, the contrasting types of family will be labeled individualist and collectivist, with the understanding that there are gradations between these types. These range from the intensive collectivism typical of the Middle East and much of the non-European world, to the moderate collectivism of much of southern Europe, to what might be termed “moderate individualism” characteristic of the German lands and many parts of Britain, to the extreme individualism found in Scandinavia.
Descriptive Data on Family Patterns in
Northwestern and Southern Europe
Chapters 2 and 3 emphasize that both Indo-European culture and the hunter-gatherer culture of northwestern Europe had strong strands of individualism. The general thesis here is that the invading Indo-European groups, already substantially predisposed toward individualism themselves (i.e., aristocratic individualism), encountered peoples who were also predisposed toward individualism, albeit of a different type (egalitarian individualism stemming from their hunter-gatherer past in the north of Europe). On the other hand, the south of Europe, settled originally by farmers originating in the Middle East, retained its moderate collectivism into the present despite the influences of the main groups shaping European history—quite possibly due to genetic tendencies inherited from their Middle Eastern ancestors.[258]
The relative strength of extended kinship ties is thus central to this analysis. Patrick Heady divides European kinship patterns into three categories, strong (Croatia, Russia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Spain—here labeled “moderate collectivism”), weak (France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland—“moderate individualism”), and very weak (Sweden, Denmark—“strong individualism”), running in a cline from southeast to northwest.[259] Families in the moderate collectivism area tend to live near their parents (often residing in the same house), marry people from the same area, help each other more (including financial aid), and have stronger distinctions between male and female roles. Heady labels this pattern “parentally anchored and locally involved,” the extreme opposite being “origin free and locally detached.”
Sweden is characterized by the weakest family system. Indeed, Maria Iacovu and Alexandra Skew provide a sharp contrast between the most extreme family forms in Europe, noting that in Scandinavia there is “almost a complete absence of the extended family.”[260]
The Scandinavian countries are characterized by small households (particularly single-adult and lone-parent households), early residential independence for young people and extended residential independence for elderly people; cohabitation as an alternative to marriage; and an almost complete absence of the extended family. At the other end, the Southern European countries are characterised by relatively low levels of non-marital cohabitation, by extended co-residence between parents and their adult children, and by elderly people with their adult offspring; this, together with a much lower incidence of lone-parent families, make for much larger household sizes.
Thus the fundamental cline in family patterns places the most extreme forms of individualism in the far northwest. This categorization system is essentially a more fine-grained version of the well-known Hajnal line which separates European family types into only two categories, east and west of a line between St. Petersburg and Trieste.[261]
Characteristics of the Moderately Individualist
Family System of Northwest Europe
Hartman emphasizes that the nuclear family resulted in people having to plan their own lives. Women, for example, would avoid pregnancy before marriage by not having sex. (Despite late marriage, illegitimacy was “extremely low.”[262]) This implied a long period of voluntary sexual restraint prior to marriage—likely resulting in selection against those, especially women,[263] who had sex outside marriage, although courts typically stood ready to force marriages for women with a child born out of wedlock in order to avoid having them becoming public charges. The low level of illegitimacy in a situation whe
re people had significant freedom to plan their own lives implies a strong role for (and likely eugenic selection for) the personality trait of effortful control of impulses (i.e., Conscientiousness; see Chapter 8).[264] Such eugenic pressures would not exist in a collectivist society where early marriage was the rule and there were strong external controls on female behavior, such as the purdah.
An important aspect of planning was individual consent to marriage, a characteristic of Western marriage at least since the Middle Ages and likely primordially. Individual consent is expected to result in individuals weighing more heavily the personal characteristics of a prospective mate. One effect of this is greater age parity in marriage partners. Relative age parity of spouses combined with a late age of marriage are markers of the Western European system of marriage.[265]
Within the simple household system, marriage became much less a matter of political alliance between and within kinship groups, or a purely economic affair, or simply an aspect of sexual competition (which resulted in concubinage and polygyny throughout much of the non-European world). Rather it was based on interpersonal attraction, including traits like Conscientiousness, intelligence, interpersonal warmth and affection, and physical appearance (including traits related to fertility, such as female waist-hip ratio which has been related to women’s health, fecundity, and cognitive ability[266]). Affection within marriage became a cultural norm with the rise of the simple household. The Western phenomenon of courtship (unique among the cultures of Eurasia and Africa) provided a period in which prospective mates could assess personal compatibility; in Malthus’ terms, an opportunity was given for both sexes for “finding out kindred disposition, and of forming those strong and lasting attachments without which the married state is generally more productive of misery than of happiness.”[267]
Thus nuclear families meant a greater reliance on individual planning and effort. Whereas social roles, marriage partner (often first cousins), and age of women’s marriage are largely pre-determined in collectivist cultures, in the individualist areas of Europe, men and women were free to choose a marriage partner, and they had to decide when to get married, the latter decision normatively made only after securing a viable economic niche. At least by the fourteenth century in England, most people worked for wages paid by non-relatives, and in general children were “expected to leave home, accumulate their own wealth, choose their own marriage partners and locate and occupy their own economic niche.”[268] There was widespread ownership of land. Even “unfree tenant families by the late medieval era in northwestern Europe had long had effective control over the land they worked. While lords retained ultimate jurisdiction, families kept the land from one generation to the next, making their own arrangements for passing it on to heirs. … Despite legal developments in Western Europe denying inheritance rights to unfree peasants and setting out more individualized notions of property, manorial courts and the church long upheld older custom.”[269] Oldest sons inherited land, but younger sons and daughters received moveable goods.
Dating the Origins of the Individualist Family
Almost alone among barbarians, [the Germans] are content with one wife, except a very few among them, and these not from sensuality, but because their noble birth procures for them many offers of alliance. … Lest the woman should think herself to stand apart from aspirations after noble deeds and from the perils of war, she is reminded by the ceremony which inaugurates marriage that she is her husband’s partner in toil and danger, destined to suffer and to dare with him alike both in peace and in war. The yoked oxen, the harnessed steed, the gift of arms, proclaim this fact.”[270]
Separate households “dominate northwestern Europe as far back as medieval records go.”[271] In other words, this pattern may be primordial among the peoples of northwest Europe—which fits well with the present perspective that the roots of these patterns lie in the evolutionary/biological realm. As Peter Laslett notes, “the further we go back, so it appears at the moment, the more elusive the origins of the interrelated characteristics of the Western family. As of the present state of knowledge, we cannot say when ‘the West’ diverged from the other parts of Europe.”[272] Hartman, writing in 2004, maintains that this comment “still holds.”[273] Further, there is no evidence that the northwest European family pattern is part of a historical progression or that different aspects of the northwest European family pattern or the pattern itself represent a developmental continuum.
Importantly, David Herlihy notes that Tacitus had remarked that late marriage was common among the Germanic tribes (i.e., long before the Frankish Empire of early Middle Ages) and speculates that this pattern then became the norm after the fall of the Roman Empire—obviously congruent with the evolutionary/biological scenario proposed here. Searching for medieval contextual influences as the sole explanation of the late-marriage pattern of northwest Europe seems misguided, given the tendencies toward individualism in both Indo-European (Chapter 2) and northern hunter-gatherer (Chapter 3) culture.
Further, there is some indication that nuclear families were the norm in the western Roman Empire:
On the basis of the tombstone inscriptions we have come to the conclusion that for the populations putting up tombstones throughout the western provinces the nuclear family was the primary focus of certain types of familial obligation. Grandparents, uncles and other extended family members appear too infrequently as commemorators for us to believe that they were regarded as part of the core family unit.[274]
Tombstone inscriptions indicate that nuclear family inscriptions constitute about 75–90 percent of the total, with little variation chronologically, geographically, or by social class:
The facts that (i) extended family members, especially the paternal avus [uncle], are absolutely few in number in funerary dedications, that (2) paternal grandfathers are relatively few in comparison with the number alive and able to participate in the dedication, and that (3) the paternal avus is not even the most common type in commemorations involving grandparents—all these facts point away from the patriarchal family being a common reality in the population of the western empire erecting tombstones.[275]
Other evidence indicates that the basic family was the mother-father-child triad; among the elite, sons commonly set up their own households rather than remain in their father’s domicile. “On the basis of our evidence, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that the continuity of the nuclear family goes back much further in time and that it was characteristic of many regions of western Europe as early as the Roman Empire.”[276]
Another marker of the individualist family is exogamy rather than marrying close kin as is typical in collectivist societies. Exogamy was the rule in western Europe even in Roman times:
There is strong evidence for continuity of the general practice of exogamy in the western Roman empire from the pre-Christian period (first three centuries after Christ) to the era of the establishment of Christianity as the state religion; endogamous marriage was rare, if it occurred at all. Despite legal rules permitting cousin marriage in the pagan era, parallel and cross-cousin marriages were rare among aristocrats, as were parallel-cousin marriages among modest inhabitants of the western empire. Consequently, the Christian ban on marriages within the sixth degree of kinship had little impact. The dispersed pattern of property holding offered pagan aristocrats no incentive to marry within the family to protect consolidated estates; their financial interests were met by marriage within the same class. … The Church’s ban on endogamy should not be interpreted as part of an effort to disrupt transmission of property within the family: no such effort was necessary because for centuries pagan aristocrats had been using the will to disperse their wealth widely. The Church need only have replaced the emperor as the principal institutional beneficiary of these wills in order to enrich itself.[277] …
In sum, when the Church moved to formalise an extended incest prohibition in the fourth century, it was not acting to disrupt a widespread practice of close-kin
endogamy in the western Roman empire. In fact, Augustine, in his discussion in the City of God concerning the recent extension of the incest rule, clearly indicates the opposite. He states categorically that marriage between cousins always had been raro per mores (‘rare in customary practice’), well before the imposition of the new prohibitions.[278]
Finally, the practice of partible inheritance included daughters, with daughters receiving a full share of the patrimony, as revealed by laws on intestate succession.[279] This is further evidence that the patrilineal extended family based on kinship and endogamous marriage was not at all characteristic of Roman society in Western Europe.
Disadvantages of the Individualist Family
If one supposes that the complete dominance of the collectivist, early-marriage pattern in a very wide variety of cultures around the world is an adaptive response or at least a natural consequence of plow agriculture, why should northwest Europe be an exception? At the outset it is important to note that the late-marriage regime of northwest Europe doesn’t really make sense as the ideal form of marriage for an agricultural society—it is a “risky system of postponed marriage.”[280]