When confronted by an overwhelming convergence among all stratified societies combined with a possible point of divergence, the temptation is to argue that the divergence is illusory and date it to a much later period when there was a clear ecological difference between Western and non‑Western societies (e.g., industrialization), as some theorists have done.[382] However, there is no reason to suppose that high levels of convergence among all traditional stratified societies of the world could not be accompanied by an important point of divergence in the case of Western societies. A thesis of this chapter is that, viewed in cross-cultural perspective, the Catholic Church is a unique institution that has had important influence on the course of Western history. This influence was directed at altering Western culture away from extended kinship networks and other collectivist institutions, motivated ultimately by the desire to extend its own power. However, although the Church promoted individualism and doubtless influenced Western culture in that direction, this influence built on individualistic tendencies that long predated Christianity and were due ultimately to ethnic tendencies toward individualism unique to European peoples (Chapters 1–4).
Although the perspective developed here emphasizes ethnicity as a critical variable, culture is also important, and quite clearly the influence of the Church must be seen as a cultural influence. In particular, beginning in the ancient world, the ideologies associated with Christianity had a profound effect on the West. Here I begin by sketching a theoretical framework based on evolutionary psychology for understanding how ideologies can have an impact on history, i.e., how idealist influences on history are possible.
Implicit and Explicit Processing: How Ideology Motivates Behavior
Such a view is based on psychological research indicating two very different types of psychological processing: implicit and explicit (also discussed in Chapter 8). These modes may be contrasted on a number of dimensions.[383] Implicit processing is automatic, effortless, relatively fast, and involves parallel processing of large amounts of information; it characterizes the modules described by evolutionary psychologists and focuses on mechanisms that respond in a reflexive manner to particular environments (e.g., the eye blink reflex in response to light; sexual desire in response to sexual imagery). Explicit processing is conscious, controllable, effortful, relatively slow, and involves serial processing of relatively small amounts of information. Explicit processing is involved in the operation of the mechanisms of general intelligence[384] as well as in controlling emotional states and behavioral tendencies.[385] It is also central to conceptualizing ideologies and how they can motivate behavior.
Religious beliefs are able to motivate behavior because of the ability of explicit representations of religious thoughts (e.g., the traditional Catholic teaching of eternal punishment in Hell as a result of mortal sin) to control sub-cortical modular mechanisms (e.g., sexual desire). In other words, the affective states and action tendencies mediated by implicit processing are controllable by higher brain centers located in the cortex.[386] For example, people are able to effortfully suppress sexual thoughts, even though there is a strong evolutionary basis for males in particular becoming aroused by sexual imagery.[387] Thus, under experimental conditions, male subjects who were instructed to distance themselves from sexually arousing imagery were able to suppress their sexual arousal.[388] Imagine that instead of a psychologist giving instructions, people were subjected to religious ideas that such thoughts were sinful and would be punished by God.
Ideologies such as the Christian ideology of the sinfulness of sexual thoughts are a particularly important form of explicit processing that may result in top-down control over behavior. That is, explicit construals of the world may motivate behavior.[389] For example, explicit construals of costs and benefits of religiously relevant actions mediated by human language and the ability of humans to create explicit representations of events may influence individuals to avoid religiously proscribed food or refrain from fornication or adultery in the belief that such actions would lead to punishments in the afterlife.
Ideologies, including religious ideologies, characterize a significant number of people and motivate their behavior in a top-down manner—i.e., the higher cognitive functions involving explicit processing located primarily in the prefrontal cortex are able to control the more primitive (modular, reflexive) parts of the brain such as structures underlying sexual desire. Ideologies are coherent sets of beliefs.[390] These explicitly held beliefs are able to exert a control function over behavior and evolved predispositions.
There is no reason to suppose that ideologies are necessarily adaptive.[391] Ideologies often characterize the vast majority of people who belong to voluntary subgroups within a society (e.g., a particular religious sect). Moreover, ideologies are often intimately intertwined with various social controls—rationalizing the controls but also benefitting from the power of social controls to enforce ideological conformity in schools or in religious institutions. The next section illustrates these themes as applied to regulating monogamy in Western Europe.
Ideology and Social Controls Supporting
Monogamy in Western Europe
My background is in evolutionary biology, and one of the first questions that struck me when I was exposed to the evolutionary theory of sex was to wonder why Western cultures tend toward monogamy. The evolutionary theory of sex is quite simple: Females must invest greatly in reproduction—pregnancy, lactation, and often childcare—require an extraordinary amount of time. As a result, the reproduction of females is highly limited. Even under the best of conditions women could have, say, twenty children. But the act of reproduction is cheap for men. As a result, males benefit from multiple mates, and it is expected that males with wealth and power would use their wealth and power to secure as many mates as possible. In short, intensive polygyny by wealthy, powerful males is an optimal male strategy, i.e., it is behavior that optimizes individual male reproductive success under most conditions.
This theory is well supported. There are strong associations between wealth and reproductive success in traditional societies from around the world. Wealthy, powerful males are able to control very large numbers of females. The elite males of all of the traditional civilizations around the world, including those of China, India, Muslim societies, the New World civilizations, ancient Egypt, and ancient Israel, often had hundreds and even thousands of concubines. The Emperor of China had thousands of concubines, and the Sultan of Morocco is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having 888 children. In sub-Saharan Africa with its relatively low level of economic production, women were generally able to rear children without male provisioning, and the result was low-level polygyny in which males competed to control as many women as possible. In all of these societies, the children from these relationships were legitimate. They could inherit property and were not scorned by the public.
To be sure, there are other societies where monogamy is the norm. It is common to distinguish ecologically imposed monogamy from socially imposed monogamy. In general, ecologically imposed monogamy is found in societies that have been forced to adapt to very harsh ecological conditions such as deserts and extreme cold because economic production is quite limited.[392] Under such harsh conditions, males can’t control the surplus value created by other males (in Marxist terms), as elites often did in agricultural societies where agricultural labor enabled lavish lifestyles of the powerful. As a result, in harsh environments, it would be impossible for males to control additional females beyond what they can support via their own efforts, and their investment would therefore perforce be directed to the children of one woman. Moreover, under harsh conditions a woman would be unable to rear children by herself but would require provisioning from a male.
If these conditions persisted for an evolutionarily significant time, one might expect to find that the population would develop a strong tendency toward monogamy. In fact, as argued in Chapter 3, there is likely a genetic basis for Western mono
gamy resulting from evolution for a significantly long period in the harsh ecological conditions of northern Europe during the last Ice Age. This would ensure a psychological tendency toward monogamy even in the face of altered ecological conditions.
However, the genetic basis for monogamy never resulted in what ecologists term “obligate monogamy” in which a species is genetically channeled into a narrow reproductive niche. Many males in the West, like males in other societies, clearly retained a taste for sexual variety and even power over women (as noted below, Henry I of England [early twelfth century] had 20–25 illegitimate children).
Thus, despite genetic tendencies toward monogamy, one would expect that elite males in the West would pursue non-monogamous relationships. However, as summarized below, the historical record indicates that the sexual behavior of elite males came under the purview of the Church, and it energetically regulated the marriage and reproductive behavior of these men. In some historical eras it also policed the sexual behavior of its own personnel so that celibacy became the norm. To the extent that the Church was successful, Western monogamy would be an example of what Richard Alexander termed “socially imposed monogamy” to refer to situations where monogamy occurs even in the absence of harsh ecological conditions.[393]
Whereas all of the other economically advanced cultures of the world have been typified by polygyny by successful males, Western societies beginning with the ancient Greeks and Romans and extending up to the present have had a powerful tendency toward monogamy.[394] Thus the Catholic Church cannot be seen as originating monogamy, but, as indicated in the following, it did have a central role in maintaining monogamy at least through the Middle Ages.
The Catholic Church was the heir to Roman civilization where monogamy was ingrained in law and custom, and during the Middle Ages it took it upon itself to impose monogamy on the emerging European aristocracy.[395] Relatively low-level polygyny (in comparison to other societies based on intensive agriculture such as China, India, the Middle East, and Meso-America) did exist in Europe, and during the Middle Ages it became the object of conflict between the Church and the aristocracy. The Church was “the most influential and important governmental institution [of Europe] during the medieval period,” and a major aspect of this power over the secular aristocracy involved the regulation of sex and reproduction.[396]
The result was that the same rules of sexual conduct were imposed on both rich and poor. The program of the Church “required above all that laymen, especially the most powerful among them, should submit to the authority of the Church and allow it to supervise their morals, especially their sexual morals. It was by this means, through marriage, that the aristocracy could be kept under control. All matrimonial problems had to be submitted to and resolved by the Church alone.”[397]
Reconciling the behavior of the Church with evolutionary psychology requires comment. During at least some periods (see below) the Church was led by celibate men who sought power over the aristocracy. An evolutionist expects political power to be translated into reproductive success, but although that did occur in some eras, it was certainly not during the High Middle Ages. The desire for power is a human universal but, like all human desires, it need not be linked with reproductive success. Similarly, people desire sex, but engaging in sex does not necessarily lead to having lots of children even though Mother Nature designed it that way. And in the case of the Church, much of its power during the High Middle Ages (~1000 to ~1250)—the peak of its power—derived from the popular image that it was staffed by men who had eschewed reproduction.
In other words, the power of the Church ultimately relied on acceptance of a religious ideology which, as discussed below, was likely attractive in large part because the people most responsible for propagating it—the prelates and monks—were perceived as altruistic, not self-interested. The medieval Church successfully conveyed the image that it was not concerned with controlling women or having a high level of reproductive success. However, this had by no means always been the case. Critically important was the papal revolution of the eleventh century.
The Papal Revolution: Establishing the Image of
the Church as an Altruistic Institution
An evolutionary perspective views self-interest as a fundamental principle. Altruists by definition are at a reproductive disadvantage within their groups, giving more to others than they receive in return. To be sure, groups can structure themselves so that people are indoctrinated or forced to conform to group interests via social controls—the fundamental insight of cultural group selection.[398] But even in such a case, it is assumed that the default condition is self-interest—self-interest that needs to be controlled and channeled in the interests of the group.
Reams of psychological research vindicate the fundamental importance of self-interest. Apart from close relatives (particularly children), reciprocity is the fundamental norm of human interactions.[399] People thus do not expect others to behave in an altruistic manner, generously giving of themselves with no expectation of tangible reward. Thus it is not surprising that when people do behave altruistically, they are given high praise and are rewarded with an enhanced reputation.
Acclaim in the media and in one’s face-to-face world certainly has psychological rewards rooted in our evolutionary biology: humans naturally desire social approval. Those applauding such behavior implicitly realize that self-sacrificing behavior goes against natural tendencies, and in general, these altruists are not behaving in a manner that optimizes biological fitness.[400] In any case, as noted below, after the papal revolution, parents—many of them wealthy—often disapproved of their child’s decision to join a religious order, presumably because, like most parents, they wanted grandchildren.
Similarly, the power and influence of the Church during the High Middle Ages was immeasurably aided by an image of reproductive altruism. However, prior to reviewing these data, some background information is in order.
The collapse of the Carolingian Empire in 888 left a vacuum of central authority, presenting new challenges for the Church. It responded by attempting to be a unifying, centralizing force itself, but this was difficult because during the Carolingian period, the Church had become compromised by secular elites—the pope a “mere plaything of local aristocratic families.”[401] In West Francia (i.e., proto-France), bishops were being appointed by secular military elites; these bishops and abbots then gave away Church properties to the followers of those elites; Church offices were often purchased (simony), and clergy were often married or kept concubines, violating the practice of celibacy. Writing of the French Church in 742, Saint Boniface complained to the pope about “so-called deacons who have spent their lives since boyhood in debauchery, adultery, and every kind of filthiness, who entered the diaconate with this reputation, and who now, while they have four or five concubines in their beds, still read the gospel.”[402]
What followed was extremely important for the subsequent influence of Christianity on the West. One can imagine that if secular military elites continued to control the clergy within their domains, there would have been a continuation of basic Indo-European social organization in which the Church and society at large were dominated by an aristocratic military elite.
However, seeing its power and influence on the wane because of political fractionation resulting from the end of the Carolingian Empire and because of perceived corruption and subservience to the aristocracy, the Church responded by reforming itself and aggressively claiming sovereignty over secular authorities. This was facilitated by the public image (and substantial reality) that the Church during the High Middle Ages was a reproductively altruistic institution. An important harbinger of things to come was the action of Pope Nicholas I (a key contributor to idea of papal supremacy) in the mid-ninth century to prevent the attempt by Lothar, king of Lorraine, to divorce his childless wife and marry a woman with whom he had children—a practice that would have been entirely legitimate in pre-Christian Germanic society
.
Larry Siedentop proposes that three things were necessary for the papal revolution: an elite that had successfully reformed itself (thereby credibly presenting an altruistic image, so essential for public support), a credible claim of papal supremacy, and a well-developed body of canon law. Beginning in 1073, the papacy devolved to “monkish popes”— popes with a monastic background.[403] Papal councils became more frequent, papal legates more numerous, and papal correspondence more extensive. The Church developed a relatively sophisticated legal system that was far more predictable and organized than secular legal systems of the period. The huge amount of litigation strengthened its claims to supreme legislative and judicial authority.
The monasteries (most importantly, Cluny in the early tenth century) took the lead in reform at a time when the episcopacy was corrupt. Cluny restored the prestige of monasticism “as a truly Christian life.”[404] As in previous eras, the model of monasticism was most successful in propagating an emotionally compelling image of the Church, stimulating “a remarkable outburst of lay piety.”
As indicated by the example of King Lothar, a central aspect of the papal revolution was the Church’s stand on marriage: consent between spouses, no divorce, elaborate rules against consanguineous marriages (which had the effect of lessening the power of extended kinship relations, as aristocratic families were forced to look far afield for mates), and less power for the paterfamilias. Essentially, the Church was choosing marriage as a key battleground in its effort to increase its power over secular rulers, presumably because issues of marriage and sexuality lent themselves to moral and religious strictures. By interpreting marriage as a sacrament and thus within its proper purview, the Church had an important weapon for extending its power over secular elites.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 15