Joseph Henrich

So rather than arranged marriages, you had to find your own mates, friends, business partners,

all these sorts of things.

And it led to the proliferation of these voluntary associations.

Yeah, a few different things.

So the one thing the church did, it had to step forward almost immediately on this, is to take care of orphans and widows.

Because normally they were sort of just slotted right into the kinship system, and there were norms that took care of them.

What the church did meant that there was really no one to care for orphans and widows.

So the church began to take them in, and they became core members of the church in that sense.

Mm-hmm.

These voluntary associations that people would join were also mutual self-help groups.

So you would all mutually agree to help each other out if you were injured or had a period of unemployment or in your old age and whatnot.

And then eventually, after the beginning of Protestantism, when the Church is not doing this in places like England, after Henry VIII gets rid of all the Catholic institutions—

Queen Elizabeth initiates the Poor Laws of 1600, and this is beginning to lay an official secular social safety net under people who might need it.

That's right.

But a lot of it is also unintended consequences.

So the church, of course, was doing this because they believe that this is how God wanted it.

And so when plagues would hit, the church would explain the plague as a consequence of there being too much incest, by which they meant too much cousin marriage.

And the breakdown of these families into monogamous nuclear families inadvertently led to the rise of these voluntary associations, which gave us the many charter towns of Europe, universities, new kinds of monasteries, and these mutual self-help associations, which eventually become occupational guilds.

So many of those things become some of the core institutions of Western society.

Yeah, so when you look at the anthropological data on this, so anthropologists have put together something called the Ethnographic Atlas, which is over 1,200 diverse societies that have been studied in ethnographic detail.