[341] Tacitus, Germania, 25.
[342] Homans, “The Frisians in East Anglia,” 180.
[343] Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change, 47.
[344] Hartman, The Household and Making of History, 117.
[345] Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324, 19.
[346] Daniel R. Curtis and Michelle Compianano, “Medieval Land Reclamation and the Creation of New Societies: Comparing Holland the Po Valley, c.800–c.1500,” Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014): 93–108, 98–99, 102.
[347] Homans, “The Frisians in East Anglia,” 159
[348] Homans, “The Rural Sociology of Medieval England,” 147.
[349] Ibid., 148.
[350] Homans, “The Frisians in East Anglia,” 180.
[351] Homans, “The Rural Sociology of Medieval England,”149.
[352] Ibid., 149.
[353] Homans (Ibid.) suggests that the continuing division of land via partible inheritance may be a factor in the Peasants’ Revolt and in the rise of the textile industry, since people unable to make do on small plots sought ways out of their predicament. Partible inheritance would also promote a market in land because people would be willing to sell when their holdings were not viable.
[354] Ibid., 148.
[355] As noted above, a disadvantage of the individualist family pattern is a lower rate of natural increase.
[356] Homans, “The Frisians in East Anglia,” 169; Homans notes that areas under Danelaw also had a relatively high percentage of freemen (170).
[357] Ladurie, Montaillou, 19.
[358] See Mathieson et al., “Genome-Wide Patterns of Selection in 230 Ancient Europeans.” Nature 528 (2015): 499–503.
[359] Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to European Kinship.”
[360] Lars Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism: The Swedish Theory of Love and Its Lutheran Imprint,” in Between the State and the Eucharist: Free Church Theology in Conversation with William T. Kavanaugh, Joel Halldorf and Fredrik Wenell (eds.) (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014): 13–38, 21–22.
[361] Ibid., 33.
[362] Ibid., 27.
[363] Ibid.
[364] Ibid, 26.
[365] Ibid., 26–27.
[366] Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1967), 4–5.
[367] Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism,” 32–33.
[368] Erik Gustaf Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” in Björn Hasselgren (ed.), Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer, trans. Peter C. Hogg (Stockholm: Timbro Förlag, 2017): 125–306, 142.
[369] Lars Magnusson, “Erik Gustaf Geijer—An Introduction,” in Björn Hasselgren (ed.) Freedom in Sweden: Selected works of Erik Gustaf Geijer, trans. Peter C. Hogg (Stockholm: Timbro Förlag, 2017): 13–60, 26; emphasis in original.
[370] Erik Gustaf Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” 139; emphasis in original.
[371] Ibid., 138.
[372] Ibid.; emphasis in original.
[373] Ibid., 140.
[374] Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” 155.
[375] Hans-Peter Hasenfratz, Barbarian Rites, trans. Michael Moynihan (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011; original German edition, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Verlag Herder, 1992), 49.
This contrast between the “Odinic rulers” and the previous priestly regime is consistent with Marija Gimbutas’s controversial theory that the Indo-Europeans introduced a warlike, male-dominated culture, replacing previously existing, more female-centric cultures.
The following is speculative, but it’s interesting that a theme of Norse mythology was a primeval battle between the Aesir and the Vanir, the former seemingly referring to the Indo-European conquerors with their highly militarized culture (with gods such as Odin and Thor), and the latter possibly referring to the previously resident hunter-gatherer culture discussed in Ch. 3. The main god of the Vanir was Freya, a goddess associated with magic and compatible with the idea that priests were the original rulers in Scandinavia and that the culture was much more influenced by women than the highly patriarchal culture of the Indo-European conquerors.
As noted in Ch. 3, this culture was quite sophisticated and supported a large population. They may well have been able to put up a formidable defense against the invaders; after all, as also noted in Ch. 3, the hunter-gathering cultures of Scandinavia held off the advance of agriculture by the farming culture of the Middle Eastern-derived farmers for 2000–3000 years. I suggest that the mythology ultimately refers to real battles that are lost to prehistory. According to the mythology, the Aesir used typical military tactics, while the Vanir used magic, and the two sides ultimately arrived at a modus vivendi. It’s therefore tempting to explain the relatively egalitarian thrust of Scandinavian cultures compared to other Germanic peoples as emanating from this cultural fusion.
Marija Gimbutas, Bronze Age Cultures in Eastern and Central Europe (The Hague: De Gruyter Noulton, 1965).
[376] Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism,” 132–133.
[377] Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, “Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State, Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olav Wallenstein (eds.) (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010): 11–22, 14–16. One might note that Sweden’s extreme individualism is a disastrously poor match with Middle Eastern collectivism and the Muslim religion which Sweden is nevertheless energetically importing.
[378] Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to an Aspect of European Kinship.”
[379] Berggren and Trägårdh, “Pippi Longstocking,” 17.
[380] Ibid., 19.
[381] Ibid., 20.
[382] See Kevin MacDonald, “The Establishment and Maintenance of Socially Imposed Monogamy in Western Europe,” Politics and the Life Sciences 14 (1995): 3–23; Kevin MacDonald, “Focusing on the Group: Further Issues Related to Western Monogamy,” Politics and the Life Sciences 14 (1995): 38–46.
[383] See, e.g.: David C. Geary, The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005); Kevin MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing and the Regulation of Human Evolved Predispositions,” Psychological Review 115, no. 4 (2008), 1012–1031; Keith Stanovich, Who is rational? Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999); Keith Stanovich The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[384] Dan Chiappe and Kevin MacDonald, “The Evolution of Domain-General Mechanisms in Intelligence and Learning,” Journal of General Psychology 132, no. 1 (2005), 5–40.
[385] MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing, and the Regulation of Human Evolved Predispositions.”
[386] Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy,” Politics and Culture (Issue, #1, April, 2010), unpaginated; see also Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture,” Evolutionary Psychology 7, no. 2 (2009), 208–233.
[387] See review in MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing, and the Regulation of Human Evolved Predispositions.”
[388] Mario Beauregard, Johanne Lévesque, and Pierre Bourgouin, “Neural Correlates of Conscious Self-Regulation of Emotion,” Journal of Neuroscience 21, no. 18 (2001): 1–6.
[389] Alan G. Sanfey, Reid Hastie, Mary K. Colvin, and Jordan Grafman, “Phineas Gauged: Decision-Making and the Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Neuropsychologia 41 (2003): 1218–1229.
[390] John Gerring, “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis,” Political Research Quarterly 50 (1997): 957–994; Kathleen Knight, “Transformations of the Concept of Ideology in the Twentieth Century,” American Political Science Review 100 (2006): 619–625.
[391] Ma
cDonald, “Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture.”
[392] Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); for ethnographic examples, see Mark V. Flinn and Bobbi S. Low, “Resource Distribution, Social Competition, and Mating Patterns in Human Societies,” in Daniel I. Rubenstein and Richard W. Wrangham (eds.), Ecological Aspects of Social Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986): 217–243; Kevin MacDonald, “Production, Social Controls and Ideology: Toward a Sociobiology of the Phenotype,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 6 (1983): 297–317.
[393] Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs.
[394] See Kevin MacDonald, “Mechanisms of Sexual Egalitarianism in Western Europe,” Ethology and Sociobiology 11 (1990):195–238; see also Conclusion of this chapter.
[395] The following is based on MacDonald, “The Establishment and Maintenance of Socially Imposed Monogamy in Western Europe.”
[396] Walter Ullman, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages: A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical to Lay Power, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1970), 1.
[397] Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 162.
[398] MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture.”
[399] Research on altruistic punishment, reviewed in the section of Ch. 3 on the behavior of WEIRD people, may be thought to be an exception. But here, people are motivated to punish selfish others even at a cost to self—i.e., they are motivated to punish people who are seen as not behaving in a reciprocal manner.
[400] Acclaim in the media would contribute to a good reputation and that would certainly be an asset. But I fail to see how it can result in tangible benefits for most people. For example, a small percentage of White Americans and a larger percentage of Hollywood celebrities have adopted impoverished children from other races rather than have children of their own. Such people are advertising that they are “good people,” and their behavior is typically acclaimed in the media and in society at large—discussed in Chapter 8 as resulting from the Left seizing the moral high ground. But, unless such behavior actually enables having other biologically related children, helping biological relatives, etc., I fail to see how it is biologically adaptive; even financial rewards would seem to be illusory for most.
[401] Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 179.
[402] Quoted in John E. Lynch, “Marriage and Celibacy of the Clergy: The Discipline of the Western Church: An Historical-Canonical Synopsis,” Jurist 23 (1972):14-38, 33.
[403] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual.
[404] Ibid., 186.
[405] Ibid., 192.
[406] Ibid., 282.
[407] Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101.
[408] The mendicant friars were bound by a vow of poverty and dedicated to an ascetic way of life; they renounced property and focused on preaching to the public, living off donations from their listeners.
[409] C. H. Lawrence, The Friars: The Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on Western Culture (London: Longman, 1994), 126.
[410] Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe From the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, 103.
[411] Ibid., 101.
[412] Inner quote from G. Miccoli, “Monks,” in Jacques LeGoff (ed.), Medieval Callings, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): 37–74, 57.
Entire quote from MacDonald, “The Establishment and Maintenance of Monogamy in Western Europe, 9.
[413] Tellenbach 1993, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, 105.
[414] Ibid., 103.
[415] Miccoli, “Monks,” 57.
[416] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 204, 206.
[417] Ibid., 218.
[418] Ibid., 231.
[419] Ibid.
[420] Ibid., 221.
[421] Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Emergence of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 2nd ed.: Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2004), Chaps. 3 and 4; James Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community, 2nd ed. (New York: Hermon Press, 1976).
[422] Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Policy in the Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969); Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews; MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents.
[423] The roots of the Church’s collectivism may be traced to the late Roman Empire when it became the official religion of the Empire beginning with Constantine. During this period the Church actively sought to lessen Jewish power by, e.g., encouraging laws against Jews owning Christian slaves—a project that required high levels of internal discipline and influence on the government. Christian ideology essentially became a blueprint for an anti-Jewish group strategy.
MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 3.
[424] Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 349.
[425] Ronald A. Marchant, The Church Under the Law: Justice, Administration and Discipline in the Diocese of York 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 224.
[426] David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 157.
[427] See section titled “As noted in Ch. 4, E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989; orig. published: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1981).
[428] E.g., Patricia Ebrey, “Concubines in Sung China,” Journal of Family History 11 (1986):1–24.
[429] E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
[430] Ibid.
[431] Ibid., 439; see also Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective”; MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England.
[432] James Foreman-Peck and Peng Zhou, “Late Marriage as a Contributor to the Industrial Revolution in England, The Long Run (blog of the Economics History Society) (February 13, 2018).
https://ehsthelongrun.net/2018/02/13/late-marriage-as-a-contributor-to-the-industrial-revolution-in-england/
[433] Patricia Draper and Henry Harpending, “A Sociobiological Perspective on Human Reproductive Strategies,” in Kevin MacDonald (ed.), Sociobiological Perspectives on Human Development (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1988): 340–372.
[434] Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord, Too Many Women? (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983).
[435] Robert Trivers, Social Evolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
[436] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual.
[437] Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 61.
[438] See Ch. 2 and Appendix to Ch. 2 on the Roman Republic.
[439] Ibid., 79.
[440] Ibid., 80.
[441] Ibid., 82.
[442] Ibid., 83.
[443] Ibid., 88.
[444] It is interesting that St. Augustine was motivated to say that the demise of the older deities was not responsible for Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, “arguing that all human institutions were subject to decay and disaster” (Ibid., 89). Would a robust aristocratic society have been better able to defend itself?
[445] Siedentop, Invent
ing the Individual, 89.
[446] In the early Church, bishops and presbyters were chosen by “general consent,” but this was not the case when the Church became wedded to the Empire (Ibid., 93).
[447] Ibid., 98–99.
[448] Ibid., 102.
[449] Ibid., 104.
[450] Ibid.
[451] Ibid., 105.
[452] Ibid., 107. As Siedentop notes, this doctrine can be seen in Kant’s moral philosophy in the late eighteenth century; as noted in Ch. 8, maintaining a reputation as a morally upright person is of vital importance in the contemporary world.
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