Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

by Kevin MacDonald

  Assuming an evolved basis for northwest European family structure, the proposal that the late-marriage regime is risky implies a lack of fit between this family structure and the context of the early Middle Ages. Lack of fit between novel environments and genetic tendencies is a common phenomenon noted by evolutionists. Genetic proclivities change relatively slowly, resulting in evolutionary inertia, so that organisms may be poorly adapted to their new environments. For example, it has been proposed that some sex differences, such as that boys are more prone to externalizing psychiatric disorders than girls, are the result of sexual selection for these traits in our evolutionary past.[281] The externalization of psychiatric disorders includes conduct disorder, oppositional/defiant disorder, risk-taking, aggression, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Such tendencies are a poor fit with contemporary society characterized by educational systems where children are required to inhibit their impulses, sit still and pay attention for long periods, with the result that girls perform better than boys throughout the educational system, from kindergarten through college. People with externalizing disorders are much more likely not only to fail in the educational system but to be incarcerated and have downward social mobility.

  In the present case, genetically based tendencies toward the late-marriage regime would be expected to change only slowly as a result of selection pressures toward the non-risky, collectivist family patterns of the rest of the Eurasian world, thus resulting in a poor fit. In the event, however, the evidence reviewed here indicates that the late-marriage regime survived this lack of fit during the medieval period and essentially created the modern world.

  The risks of the late-marriage pattern are obvious. The long premarital period prior to marriage, particularly when women often worked outside the home and households typically included non-relatives, meant that women were more likely to have illegitimate pregnancies with minimal paternal support for the child. Sexual assault and out-of-wedlock pregnancies (the latter a cause for shame and ostracism in traditional Western societies) were more likely where young people went into service in households of non-relatives. Late marriage also would be linked to lowered lifetime fertility and less reliable production of heirs.[282]

  Moreover, the individualist marriage pattern is also not ideal for supporting people in old age, since older people were expected to make their own arrangements for retirement, whereas in collectivist cultures it was understood that parents would continue to live on the family property. In northwest Europe, contracts stipulating separate living quarters for parents or at least a separate room with a private entrance were common.[283] If the older generation had used its power, as they did in collectivist cultures (where parents had a right to continue to live on the family property), they would have likely developed a better system to ensure their interests in old age.

  Moreover, Richard M. Smith claims that the very different patterns seen in the north and south of Europe “remained geographically differentiated over millennia.”[284] If we assume that the northwest European pattern has a number of critical disadvantages for those practicing it compared to the collectivist model, and if the moderately collectivist pattern persisted in much of Western Christendom in the south and east of Europe, and if the northwest European individualist pattern can be found at the very origins of record keeping, then it must be considered a strong possibility that the northwest European pattern has its roots in prehistory.

  I conclude that the individualist family pattern is unlikely to be freely chosen because of incentives provided by lords, as discussed in the following. This is compatible with a theory that European individualism results from the evolutionary prehistory of these groups and results in a misfit with medieval environments compared to collectivist family structure.

  Contextual Influences Proposed as Causing Moderate

  Individualism.

  Hartman follows Michael Mitterauer in proposing to account for the unique family pattern in northwest Europe as due to the manorial system which developed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The classic manorial system appeared during the Carolingian period “in the heartland of the Frankish Empire.”[285] The key word here is “heartland” of the Empire, centered in Austrasia in what is now northern France and Germany, established by 481; most of modern-day France was added by the conquests of Clovis in the early sixth century, and the remainder by 536. Charlemagne’s conquests in the late eighth century included Saxony and Bavaria, both part of the northwest European family pattern. Thus, despite being part of the Frankish Empire for longer than Saxony and Bavaria, southern European family structure and patterns of land-ownership, notably including France southwest of a geographical line stretching from Saint Malo to Geneva, continued to diverge strongly from northwestern Europe (see map below).

  Mitterauer claims that the manorial system was “fundamentally novel.”[286] Whereas in much of southern Europe land ownership remained centered on kinship groups, the classic manorial system was bipartite: the lord’s manor and peasant plots. Peasants owned or leased their plots but had service and corvée obligations. It was a quasi-family arrangement, implying “various social rights and duties extending far beyond economic cooperation.[287] Indeed, the term familia was used to refer to the system as a whole, indicating “the high priority given to social relationships within the manorial system.”

  A key difference from Roman times is the relative lack of slaves: There were “traces” of the old Roman villa rustica system,[288] which was far more dependent on slaves (servi casati), and there were also coloni who were free but tied to the land and obligated to provide services. The move away from slavery to having peasants own or lease the land benefited lords because they had fewer obligations than toward slaves; peasants gained because they farmed their own land, and were therefore incentivized, but of course, they still had obligations to the lord. Gradually, services were replaced by rents, and in-kind rents were transformed into payments of money.[289]

  The distinction between those who were essentially slaves and those who were free but with labor obligations is also found in the manorial areas of medieval central England. Manorialization occurred in open-field areas interspersed with “large, compact villages.”[290] Individual holdings were in scattered strips with nearly equal acreage “class by class.” As on the Continent in manorialized areas, peasants tied to the manor were either classed as slaves or as free but having heavy labor obligations to a lord, villeinage[291] or socage[292] respectively. Villeins normally bequeathed their holdings to a son.

  The manorial system featuring single-family inheritance of land is at odds with tribal ownership of land based on clan and kinship. The point of the family was to carry out the tasks that needed performing rather than to serve as “the coresidency of a descent community based on everyone’s being related.”[293] The basic unit was the a simple household consisting of wife, husband and children and, as is typical of such families, kinship was traced in both the maternal and paternal line (bilateral kinship), whereas patrilineal kinship (kinship reckoned mainly through the father) predominates in collectivist cultures.

  The critical proposal of Mitterauer’s causal model is that with the decline of the Roman Empire and consequent depopulation and lack of slaves, landowners had to compete to find people willing to work their land; so they began offering them considerable autonomy, including the ability to pass land on to heirs. As David Herlihy noted, “the slave economy of antiquity was giving away to an agriculture based, at least in part, on incentives.”[294] Records indicate that this shift coincided with the shift to a later age of marriage which Herlihy proposes is adaptive because it lengthened generation time and thus made three- or four-generation households less likely. However, given the disadvantages of late marriage noted above, it is difficult to see why lengthening the generation time would be adaptive in northwest Europe but not in the south and east of Europe, much less in other areas dominated by the collectivist pattern.

  In order
to be an adequate explanation of European uniqueness, conditions such as depopulation must have been unique to northwest Europe. Hartman proposes that northwest Europe was the only area on the entire Eurasian continent with depopulated, underdeveloped land, therefore providing the context in which lords provided incentives such as individual inheritance of land.[295] Under these circumstances, individuals may have wanted to postpone daughters’ marriages in order to have them work longer on the family land.

  However, in response, it seems unlikely that no other area in Eurasia over a 2000-year span had become depopulated due to factors such as war, pestilence, or famine. For example, famines accompanied by depopulation and unused arable land and scarcity of labor occurred in the pre-colonial and early colonial eras in India. The famine of 1768–1770, e.g., resulted in loss of one third of the population of Bengal, and landowners responded by offering incentives such as reduced rent. An historian of India, Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, writes that “the scarcity of tenants completely transposed the relationship of landlord and tenant in Bengal;”[296] but this did not result in the development of individualist family structures. Kenneth Pomeranz similarly notes that “warfare, plague, depression and depopulation” in seventeenth-century China did not alter the fundamentally clan-based social structure.[297]

  Moreover, land was inherited in the collectivist cultures of southern and eastern Europe as well, the only difference being that in these areas it remained within the extended patriline rather than being ceded to individual heirs. One must explain why laborers would be attracted to individualist inheritance practices rather than to inheritance by a kinship group—i.e., the phenomenon presupposes the individualist tendencies that need explaining.

  Further, contrary to Hartman’s contention, the moderately collectivist cultures of southern Europe utilized women’s labor as well, so it is difficult to see how families in northwest Europe benefited from having daughters marrying late. After all, although it is true that a daughter’s work would be lost to her family if she married at a young age, her natal family would also receive daughters-in-law who would then begin working for their new families, as described below for medieval Montaillou in the south of France. And marrying off daughters early avoids all the risk factors associated with late marriage noted above. I conclude that these cannot be the deciding features.

  Hartman claims that these risk factors would have been mitigated by “a new capacity for sustained productivity [that] would have reduced pressures for women’s early marriage as a means to ensure heirs and workers.”[298] But sustained productivity was also achieved in early marriage cultures under circumstances that better ensured heirs and workers.

  Hartman also notes that “exposure of their daughters to sexual assaults would not, initially anyway, have been the problem it would become with the emergence of life-cycle service.”[299] But then, one wonders why normative life-cycle service in the homes of non-relatives ever developed. Rather than rely on extended kin, families in northwest Europe employed non-relatives, a practice that, according to Hartman “slowly developed into life-cycle service.”[300] This means that even prior to when life-cycle service became a norm, families were not organized around extended kinship groups—despite the ability of collectivist systems to supply labor needs, as seen by their prevalence throughout the rest of the world. Thus one must explain why employing non-relatives and life-cycle service in the households of non-relatives developed at all in northwest Europe given that, from an evolutionary point of view, non-relatives have less confluence of interest with their employer than relatives, not to mention the greater vulnerability of females to unwanted pregnancies and sexual assault in the employ of non-relatives.

  The idea that simply providing incentives for people working the land would give rise to individualism also runs up against data showing that collectivist cultures, particularly in the Middle East, are highly resistant to assimilation of Western individualist norms.[301] Middle Eastern cultures were dominated for centuries by Greek and Roman conquerors, but this had no influence on the collectivist, clan-based, extended kinship social organization that remains typical of the area today. Cousin marriage, an excellent marker of these tendencies because it shows a preference for endogamy within a male kinship lineage (patrilineage), originated in Middle Eastern prehistory and continues into the present era despite centuries of domination by Western powers.[302] In view of the recent surge of Middle Eastern Muslim immigration to Europe, this incapacity for assimilation to Western norms is likely to represent a long-term problem for the West.

  Moderate Collectivism in Southern Europe

  versus Moderate Individualism in Northwest

  Europe

  Joint families in which brothers and their spouses and children living in the same household are typical of southern Europe. Life-cycle service in the households of non-relatives was not characteristic of medieval Montaillou in southern France, as described in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s classic study.[303] If a daughter left in marriage, she would be replaced by an in-marrying daughter-in-law, thus compensating for the loss of the daughter’s labor.[304] Marriage was endogamous within the village, which, in conjunction with arranged marriages, ensured that property remained in the patriline. Age at marriage was early, at puberty, with substantially older men in their mid- to late-twenties. This contrasts with the late-marriage pattern where it was difficult to keep property in the male line because generations were more separated in age, automatically limiting the number of potential male heirs and increasing the likelihood that a widow would inherit the property.

  Placing the southern French town of Montaillou in context, it has long been known that there are major differences within France corresponding to the division between the Germanic peoples who predominated northeast of “the eternal line” which connects Saint Malo and Geneva and the rest of France.[305] The northeast developed large-scale agriculture capable of feeding the growing towns and cities prior to the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century. It was supported by a large array of skilled craftsmen in the towns, and a large class of mid-level ploughmen who “owned horses, copper bowls, glass goblets and often shoes; their children had fat cheeks and broad shoulders, and their babies wore tiny shoes. None of these children had the swollen bellies of the rachitics of the Third World.”[306] The northeast thus became the center of French industrialization and world trade.

  Southwest of the St. Malo-Geneva line, however, “rural life became completely de-urbanized. Western and southwestern France became ‘wild’ with dispersed habitation, by virtue of an antithesis that had long been familiar: poor peasants scattered throughout the countryside, rustic and uncivilized to a degree, living ... among their fields and meadows in isolation, outside the community of others.”[307] This area was never fully manorialized despite being under Frankish control since early in the sixth century. “Vassalage and the seigneurie appear fully developed only in the big-village, open-field country between the Loire and the borders of Flanders.”[308] This fits with the proposal that the Germanic peoples of the north created a manorial culture long predating the medieval period—a culture that was not exportable to non-Germanic areas despite militarily dominating these areas.

  The northeast also differed from the southwest in literacy rates: in the early nineteenth century while literacy rates for France as a whole were approximately 50 percent, the rate in the northeast was close to 100 percent, and differences occurred at least from the seventeenth century. Moreover, there was a pronounced difference in stature, with the northeasterners being taller by almost two centimeters in an eighteenth-century sample of military recruits. Ladurie notes that the difference in the entire population was probably larger, because the army would not accept many of the shorter men from the southwest. Finally, in addition to these differences mentioned by Ladurie, Peter Laslett and other family historians have noted that the trend toward the economically independent nuclear family was more prominent in the north, while there was a tendency
toward joint families as one moves to the south.[309]

  In colonial Salem, Massachusetts the moderate individualist pattern typical of areas northeast of the St. Malo-Geneva line prevailed. Whereas in southern France and much of southern Europe all women married, in Salem unmarried women were common (even after the skewed sex ratio due to higher male childhood mortality had dissipated). Women were under less supervision and more vulnerable to rape in Salem—another drawback of the individualist pattern noted above. In Salem, men’s and women’s lives increasingly converged and women had higher status than in southern Europe. In Montaillou, people lived in completely different “sexual universes.” In Salem there was “an intense focus on planning for the future,” and inheriting land became less and less important as the capitalist economy accelerated, and men pursued identities in the professions and in business within a contractual social order.[310] Whereas in Montaillou, men’s lives were determined by decisions made within the clan involving the only two possible vocations (shepherding or farming), in Salem men entered into the economy by interacting with non-relatives, with over 50 possible occupations.[311] Women in Salem also had work opportunities outside the home (midwife, school teacher, etc.), but this was not the case in Montaillou.

  In Salem, women became “deputy husbands,” often doing “men’s work” and taking a partnership role in family decisions and economic undertakings (e.g., managing family businesses). Men relied more on their wives than on their male kin, and in general sex differences were relatively blurred compared to Montaillou. Marriage was more egalitarian in Salem, with more of a “shared division of power between husbands and wives.”[312] And corresponding to greater egalitarianism between the sexes, there was less blatant misogyny in Salem, whereas in Montaillou open misogyny and wife beating were common. Whereas in Montaillou women without a clan to protect them were preyed upon, in Salem women had some legal protection even from husbands, and they could run away and seek a divorce. Women assumed substantial responsibility for their own chastity—necessary because women interacted with more non-relatives than in Montaillou.[313]