Joseph Henrich
speaker
1,282 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 25 May
Joseph Henrich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Sure, sure.
So, I mean, that all the what you're talking about is just the idea that culture has imbued institutions and various practices with a logic that we might not understand.
So it's not calling for never changing the institutions.
It's saying, make sure you figure out the logic and the costs and benefits.
So I've been I was an expert witness in in Canada for the Attorney General of British Columbia asked the Supreme Court of British Columbia questions.
whether the statutes against polygyny were legal.
And so my job is just to inform the court that polygyny has this unfortunate effect of the elite and high status males tend to get a disproportionate share of the wives.
And that creates this pool of low status unmarried men.
Now you can decide what you want to do with that, but you need to understand the kind of underlying social dynamics that you're going to unleash if you legalize or decriminalize polygyny.
Right.
That's right.
And it actually benefited the church because it released people's responsibilities to their families and allowed them to migrate in and join the church and more heavily invest in the church.
And these later prohibitions against priests marrying and stuff was all an effort to get greater investment in the church because you weren't torn between, you know, helping your son and then investing in the church.
Yeah, I mean, in the record, I've never been able to find much evidence that they were thinking about the destruction of kinship ties.
There is a great quote from St.
Augustine where he talks about the benefits of forcing people to marry more distantly.
But, you know, this is something that was debated repeatedly in church councils all across Europe.
Yeah.
And, yeah, it doesn't seem to pop up very often.
I think so, although it's hard to know.
Showing 801–820 of 1,282 · page 41 of 65
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