In “The Failed Empire”, I have argued that the medieval papacy is responsible for the failure of Europe to reach political unity under German leadership in the medieval period. I did not deny that the “the enduring absence of hegemonic empire” and the “competitive fragmentation of power” had positive effects, as Walter Scheidel claimed in Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton UP, 2019). Scheidel’s 600-page demonstration failed to convince me, but even if true, his thesis does not contradict mine in any way. It is just a different vantage point. From the vantage point of today’s world geopolitics, there is no denying that Europe is a total failure and cannot even begin to compare or compete with the new “civilizational states”, to use Christopher Coker’s category. That the papacy is to praise or to blame for it is hardly in question.

Here I will argue that the medieval papacy is responsible for the creation of the modern Western individual, that rootless man obsessed by his own salvation, identity, and self-realization. I will not deny that Western individualism has produced an exceptional harvest of geniuses in all fields of human culture, and unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of creativity. That, I think, is undeniable. And perhaps it was worth it. I will simply argue that the pathological—and contagious—stage that Western individualism has reached today is the end-result of a program of de-socialization written by the Roman papacy. To borrow from Joseph Henrich’s remarkable book, The WEIRDest People in the World, to which I will return: “by undermining intensive kinship, the Church’s marriage and family policies gradually released individuals from the responsibilities, obligations, and benefits of their clans and houses.” Over many generations, this social engineering wired our uniquely individualistic psychology.

It may sound counter-intuitive to blame Christianity for the loss of kinship bonds, since practicing Christians are today the defenders of family values in the West. That is because of the paradox that Christianity is both revolutionary and conservative. It was revolutionary at the beginning, and conservative at the end. All established religions are conservative, that is their main social function. But Western Christianity’s conservatism is about preserving what little kinship structure it didn’t destroy in its revolutionary stage: the nuclear family, the last step before complete social disintegration.

The theory here presented differs from the one blaming Christianity for the cancelation of the White race, whose most radical proponent was the late Revilo Oliver (1908-1994). He wrote in Christianity and the Survival of the West:

Throughout the world, Aryans are showing unmistakable symptoms of either imbecility or a latent death-wish. … The most likely primary cause, in my opinion, is Christianity, a religion that is the negation of life, and is a kind of racial “AIDS,” which, over two millennia, progressively sapped and finally destroyed our race’s immune system, i.e., its consciousness of its racial identity.

I have two disagreements with that theory. First, I think the focus on “racial identity”—or the lack of it—is misdirected. The organic cohesion of a society starts at the level of the extended family or clan, and only if social bonds are undermined at that level over a long period of time does racial identity—or what Ludwig Gumplowicz more elegantly called the “syngenic feeling,” that instinctual familiarity with those that resemble us—ultimately collapses. Immune-deficiency hits the social organism on the family level, not the racial level. Defending the dignity and the rights of White people is a worthy political cause, but racial identity is a very poor social glue by itself. What we need in order to build back our immune system, I think, is to reclaim what Western Christianity specifically destroyed: “intensive kinship” (Henrich’s term).

Secondly, Christianity did not result in the same breakdown of kinship in the East and in the West. There was a qualitative leap in the West, during what Robert I. Moore has called “the First European Revolution” (c. 970-1215). In a far-reaching project of remolding society, the papacy drove a persistent and multi-directional assault on the kin-based social structures of Romano-Germanic populations, which Greco-Slavic populations did not endure to the same degree.

This is not to say that the Eastern Church was particularly friendly to kinship. In theory, Christianity is inherently individualistic and depreciative of blood ties: only Jesus’s blood saves, and salvation is for the individual alone. But the take-over of the Roman Church by the Cluniac monkish party, unparalleled in Orthodoxy, means that the phenomenon described by Louis Dumont, the normative effect of the outworldly individual forsaking lineage and family, was more acute in the Roman Catholic tradition. Blood has been uniquely watered down by Catholic baptism. This explains why intensive kinship has resisted better in Eastern Europe, especially in South Slavic lands, where, “in the nineteenth century, zadrugas [extended families] comprising more than 80 people were observed. This was not the rule, of course, but domestic groups of 20 to 30 members were not uncommon at that time.”

But isn’t Protestantism more individualistic than Catholicism? It certainly is. Modern individualism owes much to the Lutherans and even more to the Calvinists. But Protestant individualism could only take root in a social and psychological soil already fed by Catholic individualism for centuries. The increment in individualism from Orthodoxy through Catholicism to Protestantism would require a special study. I will here only focus on the policy of the medieval papacy against blood ties, and its long-term consequences.

Throughout Eurasia and the Middle East, our pre-Christian ancestors lived in clan-based societies. In addition to the sources I mention in “Bring out your dead!” on that topic, I recommend Guillaume Durocher’s recent book The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece. To quote from his reading of Homeric anthropology:

Among the aristocratic ruling class Homer is dealing with, kinship is the basic foundation for identity and solidarity, and therefore of both personal and political action. Strangers are synonymous with uncertainty and potential violence. Kinship in contrast entails inherited resemblance and shared pride in and duties towards one’s lineage. Among kin, there is the possibility of security. That security, however, only exists by the strength of the family father, his domestic authority, and his willingness to use violence against hostile aliens. … For Homer, identity and purpose is found in one’s lineage. One acts for the sake of one’s ancestors and one’s descendants.

Like Greek society, Roman society was structured around the patrilineal clan, or gens. Kinship was also the grass-root organizing principle among Germans and Britons. The whole Indo-European world was based on extended structures of kinship. Every man was conscious of his own individuality of course (theories on “the discovery of the individual” are just literary theories in disguise), but the value given to the individual was subordinated to the value of the community (the opposite of what now defines modernity).

Marriage was, naturally, the keystone of the social edifice. It was never a matter of two persons getting married, but of two lineages contracting a blood alliance by marrying their children—who may or may not have taken much part in the decision.

In pre-Christian Europe, marriage inside the clan was common, as a way to maintain the corporate property of the clan land, where clan ancestors were buried. Marrying in-laws after the death of one’s spouse was also common, even expected.

Although in both Roman and Germanic societies, monogamy was the rule, there was no ban against divorce or second spouses, especially in case of infertility or in order to get a male heir.

An alternative heirship strategy was adoption, generally within the clan. This was facilitated by the widespread practice of fosterage, that is, the sending of children to be cared for by maternal or paternal uncles until they reached adulthood (it was especially common in Briton and Irish societies).

This complex interconnection of the living was organized around the vertical axis of the veneration of the dead, which united communities religiously from the family level through the clan level to the city or national level. It was so essential that clans who had not known common ancestor, had to invent one in other to seal alliances.

The Roman curia banned these practices, and in doing so destroyed the traditional clan-based structure of European society. Social anthropologist Jack Goody has documented this systematic assault on kinship in The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge UP, 1983), and more recently in The European Family: an historico-anthropological essay (Blackwell, 2000). Harvard professor Joseph Henrich has followed his lead in The WEIRDest People in the World. Since Henrich is neither a historian nor a social anthropologist but a professor of human evolutionary biology, I will rely directly on Goody and other sources for the next section, before coming back to the more original parts of Heinrich’s book.

In his seminal book The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, French historian Georges Duby has documented the take-over of the institution of marriage by the Western Church, working from the top to the bottom of society. It really started in the tenth-century. “In northern France in the ninth century, marriage was still something in which priests were not closely involved. There is no mention of nuptial benedictions in the texts, except in the case of queens, where it was still only one element in the ritual of coronation.” It was not until the Council of Verona in 1184 that marriage was officially made a sacrament.

But the Church had long before started legislating about marriage, deciding which unions were valid, and which offsprings were legitimate. As Goody shows: “By insinuating itself into the very fabric of domestic life, of heirship and marriage, the Church gained great control over the grass roots of the society itself.” The new rules included the following:

• The authority of parents and close kins over the marriage of younger persons was diminished. The Church disapproved of arranged marriages, and allowed spouses to get married without their parents’s approval.


• Divorce and remarriage were made nearly impossible, leaving no solution of heirship for infertile marriages. Marriage could be contracted by mutual consent alone, but not broken even by mutual consent.


• Strict monogamy was enforced, and the taking of second wives or concubines condemned.


• Marriage to in-laws after the death of a spouse, as common in Europe as in the Middle East, was declared incestuous: in canon law, your husband’s brother became like your real brother.


• Marriage to spiritual kins (godfather or godmother) was also tabooed, whether they were blood relatives or not.


• Adoption, widely practiced in the Roman world as a strategy of heirship, became severely limited. Canon law effectively bound all forms of inheritance directly to the genealogical line of descent.


• Most importantly, marriage to blood relatives was prohibited, and the prohibition was gradually extended up to the seventh degree. This essentially tabooed marriage between those who shared one or more of their 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, making marriage virtually impossible in your own village, in theory at least, and, in practice, providing the Church with a means of pressure on aristocratic families.


• To the list must be added the condemnation of all manners of ancestor veneration, now assimilated to necromancy and the worship of devils. The ritual memoria of ancestors, the key to the spiritual unity of families and clans, was more intensely repressed in the West under the influence of Augustine, while it managed to survive to some degree in Eastern Orthodoxy (particularly in the Serbian Slava). I have addressed this in “Bring out your dead!”

The gradual enforcement of these laws transformed society profoundly. The lofty purpose was to break up clan, tribal and national identities, in order to unite all Christians into one big loving family, each person being uprooted from the lineage of original sin and engrafted (or “born again”) into Christ by baptism.

But there was also an economic incentive. As Jack Goody puts it: “Prohibit close marriage, discourage adoption, condemn polygyny, concubinage, divorce and remarriage, and 40 per cent of families will be left with no immediate male heirs.” As ownership became privatized, testators were free to bequeath whatever they wished to clerical institutions (sometimes to “the saint” buried there), and the alienation of property for the benefit of the Church was greatly facilitated. The strategy was occasionally made explicit:

Salvianus, a fifth-century Bishop of Marseilles, explains that all man’s worldly goods come to him from God and to God they should return. While it was permissible to make an exception for one’s own children, that was not true for any collateral or fictional heirs. Indeed he refers to adopted children as “children of perjury”, cheating God (or his church) of what was rightfully his. This statement makes it quite clear why the institution should be banned, in the interests of the Church and of spirituality. The confrontation with past practices is very explicit and had and enormous influence on the future; even if there were a few exceptions later on, the ban was largely complied with throughout Christendom over the centuries.

Naturally, rich people were specially in need of salvation, since it is more difficult for them to go to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. They could solve their problem by giving their wealth to the Church. There was no lack of saintly models for them to emulate. Consider the case of saint Paulinus of Nola, a Roman aristocrat who in 394 decided to follow Jesus’s advice and gain “treasures in heaven” for himself by giving away all his family fortune. Few noblemen followed saint Paulinus’s example completely. Most preferred to remain rich all their lives, and unburden their soul only at the threshold of death, but not to the point of disinheriting their children. In his foundation chart of the Abbey of Cluny, the Duke of Aquitaine declared that he acted “to provide for my own safety” and “for the gain of my soul,” since “the providence of God has so provided for certain rich men that, by means of their transitory possessions, if they use them well, they may be able to merit everlasting rewards.”

By merchandising salvation, the Church became the biggest land-owner in Europe. “At the end of the twelfth century,” writes Robert Moore, “the churches held perhaps one-third of the cultivated land or northern France, and probably about half as much in southern France and Italy.” Unlike every other property, Church property (held by any clerical institution like bishoprics or monasteries) was inalienable: at the Council of Lyon of 1274, Gregory IX prohibited donation, sale, exchange (permutatio) and perpetual lease (emphyteusis) of Church property. Inalienability means that the Church is a corporate body who is not subject to death—exactly what clans tried to be before Christianity declared that only individuals and the Church were eternal beings.

The enforcement of celibacy within the Church by the Gregorian reformers contributed to making Church property inalienable, as historian Henry Charles Lea explained in his Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church (1867):

The Church was daily receiving vast accessions of property from the pious zeal of its wealthy members, the death-bed repentance of despairing sinners, and the munificence of emperors and prefects, while the efforts to procure the inalienability of its possessions dates from an early period. Its acquisitions, both real and personal, were of course exposed to much greater risk of dilapidation when the ecclesiastics in charge of its widely scattered riches had families for whose provision a natural parental anxiety might be expected to over-ride the sense of duty in discharging the trust confided to them. The simplest mode of averting the danger might therefore seem to be to relieve the churchman of the cases of paternity, and, by cutting asunder all the ties of the family and kindred, to bind them completely and forever to the church and to that alone. This motive … was openly acknowledged in later times, and it no doubt served as an argument of weight in the minds of those who urged and secured the adoption of the canon.

In truth, the most zealot popes and cardinals were not the most exemplary. Far from being detached from family ties, they had replaced occasional simony with institutional nepotism. For the vast majority of Roman baronial families, write Sandro Carocci and Marco Vendittelli, “the driving force, the determining factor of family greatness must … be rightly sought in the nepotism of a relative elected to the Sacred College, or to the pontifical dignity.” Innocent III (1198-1216) built the fortune of the Conti family, and it is to the “brutal nepotism of Boniface VIII (1294-1303)” that the Caetani family owed its meteoric rise. “In the lucrative art of accumulating benefices, the relatives of popes and cardinals naturally excelled.”

I now come back to Joseph Henrich’s acclaimed book, The WEIRDest People in the World (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020), which, to my surprise, I found extremely rich, with an abundance of studies documenting the causal links between religious history, kinship intensity and psychology. As you may know, Henrich made up the acronym WEIRD to stand for “White, European, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”, and to underscore at the same time that, despite their tendency to think of themselves as the norm, Westerners are the exception, standing in average at one end of the holism-individualism scale:

Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, we WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. We focus on ourselves—our attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over our relationships and social roles. We aim to be “ourselves” across contexts and see inconsistencies in others as hypocrisy rather than flexibility. … We see ourselves as unique beings, not as nodes in a social network that stretches out through space and back in time.

Our unique psychology is the product of our unique cultural history. And recent research shows that “you can’t separate ‘culture’ from ‘psychology’ or ‘psychology’ from ‘biology,’ because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think.” Not just what we think, but how we think and feel about the world and ourselves. No cultural factor has more profound and persistent effects on our collective psyche than the structure of kin groups:

The nature of kin-based institutions affects how we think about ourselves, our relationships, our motivations, and our emotions. By embedding individuals within dense, interdependent, and inherited webs of social connections, intensive kinship norms regulate people’s behavior in subtle and powerful ways. These norms motivate individuals to closely monitor themselves and members of their own group to make sure that everyone stays in line. They also often endow elders with substantial authority over junior members. Successfully navigating these kinds of social environments favors conformity to peers, deference to traditional authorities, sensitivity to shame, and an orientation toward the collective (e.g., the clan) over oneself.

Henrich provides measurable evidence of how “the Church’s dismantling of intensive kinship in medieval Europe inadvertently pushed Europeans, and later populations on other continents, toward a WEIRDer psychology.” Studies conducted by Henrich’s own research team and by others show a striking persistency in this causation: “The longer a population was exposed to the Western Church, the weaker its families and WEIRDer its psychological patterns are today.” The most significant effect is a shift from “interpersonal” to “impersonal prosociality”:

impersonal prosociality is about fairness principles, impartiality, honesty, and conditional cooperation in situations and contexts where interpersonal connections and in-group membership are deemed unnecessary or even irrelevant. In worlds dominated by impersonal contexts, people depend on anonymous markets, insurance, courts, and other impersonal institutions instead of large relational networks and personal ties. Impersonal markets can thus have dual effects on our social psychology. They simultaneously reduce our interpersonal prosociality within our in-groups and increase our impersonal prosociality with acquaintances and strangers.

Paradoxically, the breakdown of Catholic hegemony in modern times accelerated Europe’s mental transformation toward more individualism, by enhancing the sacred value of the individual. Protestantism acted like “a booster shot for many of the WEIRD psychological patterns,” as it emphasized that “all people have a calling—a freely chosen occupation or vocation—that uniquely fits their special attributes and endowments.” Studies confirm that “Protestants are more focused than Catholics on people’s internal states, beliefs, feelings, and dispositions.”

Among the factors that contributed to the breakdown of intensive kinship, Heinrich insists on the Church’s enforcement of extreme norms of exogamy:

just consider that someone looking for a spouse in the 11th century would have had to theoretically exclude on average 2,730 cousins and potentially 10,000 total relatives as candidates, including the children, parents, and surviving spouses of all those cousins. In the modern world, with bustling cities of millions, we could easily handle such prohibitions. But, in the medieval world of scattered farms, intimate villages, and small towns, these prohibitions would have forced people to reach out, far and wide, to find Christian strangers from other communities, often in different tribal or ethnic groups. These effects were, I suspect, felt most strongly in the middle economic strata, among those successful enough to be noticed by the Church but not powerful enough to use bribery or other influence to circumvent the rules. So, the MFP [the Church’s Marriage and Family Program] likely first dissolved intensive kinship from the middle outward. The elites of Europe would be the last holdouts, as the MFP silently and systematically reorganized the social structure beneath them.

Comparative studies show that each century of Western Church exposure cuts the rate of cousin marriage by nearly 60 percent, and according to a study made in Italian provinces in 1995, “the lower the prevalence of cousin marriage in a province, the higher the rate of voluntary blood donations to strangers” (a strong indicator of impersonal prosociality). “People from countries with higher rates of cousin marriage reveal a more holistic thinking style.”

It is easy to understand, by the way, why Islamic communities, by contrast to Christian ones, are more holistic and interpersonal. As Thomas Glick sums it up in Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: “Islam provided a framework which legitimated tribal values and gave them religious significance; Christianity tended to work in the opposite direction, toward the development of inter-personal, rather than inter-group bonds.” Marriages between first-degree cousins are still very common within Islam. Everyone in Europe can see that Arab and Muslim communities are still very much kin-based, and deeply contemptuous of our individualistic values. And everyone can feel the growing confidence they get from their solid cohesion, looking at us as miserable individuals floating in an undifferentiated liquid of decadence.

Joseph Henrich has the merit of challenging Western ethnocentrism and pointing to the “weirdness” of our value-system. But although he expresses no sympathy for the Catholic Church, he has a mostly positive appraisal of the kind of individualism it has produced. He doesn’t dwell on its heavy cost, for both the West and the Rest. By weakening kinship solidarity, he argues, the Church created needs and opportunities for new forms of solidarity, cooperation and partnership: “The very idea that a person can act freely, independently of their clans, kindreds, or lineages, to make socially isolated agreements (contracts) presupposes an unusually individualistic world of impersonal exchange.” “Overall, the spontaneous formation and proliferation of voluntary organizations capable of self-governance and self-regulation—as illustrated by charter towns, monasteries, guilds, and universities—is one of the hallmarks of European populations in the second millennium.”

Loosening family loyalties also led to new concepts of government: “people began to ponder notions of individual rights, personal freedoms, the rule of law, and the protection of private property.” This is encapsulated in the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Here Henrich comments:

from the perspective of most human communities, the notion that each person has inherent rights or privileges disconnected from their social relationships or heritage is not self-evident. And from a scientific perspective, no “rights” have yet been detected hiding in our DNA or elsewhere. This idea sells because it appeals to a particular cultural psychology.

To say it more bluntly, this abstract idea is totally disconnected from anthropological reality, and the particular cultural psychology that supports it is dangerously delusional. Not to mention the blatant hypocrisy of writing such a profession of faith while depriving native Americans of their natural rights to their ancestral land, and importing African slaves to support White men’s pursuit of happiness. The United States were founded in a lie that is coming back to haunt them.

What shall we compare the Weird West to? To a piece of ground yielding a miraculous harvest that left its anthropological soil barren and toxic? Or perhaps to a doped athlete or artist who now has to pay for his success with his health. There is no question that the almost superhuman boost in energy and creativity that the West got from its Christian-inspired individualism did come with a heavy price. We have been high, but we are now starting to experience the withdrawal symptoms. And possibly the irreversible brain damage. Anthropological reality (otherwise known as human nature) is catching up. We have constructed a new world, but now discover that it has deconstructed us as human beings.

But is it really fair to blame Christianity for the terminal stage of our individualism? No. Christianity never encouraged the confusion of male and female, for example (although it never explained the difference between a male soul and a female soul, which might have been helpful). Our sickness is caused by the attacks of a foreign, non-Christian elite. I have written more on that topic than on any other. But that’s why we need our immune system. The natural immune system of a healthy society has never been “racial identity,” but genealogical identity, which has both a vertical dimension (lineage) and a horizontal dimension (kinship). And in all fairness, Western Christianity, or more precisely the medieval papacy, is to blame for destroying that immune system, both vertically and horizontally, deliberately and systematically.

Let’s think of the Christian Question as the reverse side of the Jewish Question, if you like: How Christianity has watered down our blood instinct and eroded our kin-based social structure, and thereby made us utterly vulnerable to the manipulation and domination of the most intensively kin-based people. Unless we Westerners humbly reflect on this question, we will continue to pave the way to hell for our children, in the name of Jesus or Democracy. Intensive kinship, I suggest, is the only way to survival. How? I’m better in theory than in practice, so I’ll leave that question to others. But one thing is certain: marriage was, is, and always will be the keystone of the social edifice.

Oh, and by the way, be as Catholic as you want, if it helps your family and your clan. It helped the Kennedys, the most heroic family in American history. “Joseph P. Kennedy created one great thing in his life, and that was his family,” wrote Laurence Leamer in Sons of Camelot. “Joe taught that blood ruled and that they must trust each other and venture out into a dangerous world full of betrayals and uncertainty, always returning to the sanctuary of family.

Notes

Christopher Coker, The Rise of the Civilizational State, Polity, 2019.

Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People on the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020, p. 161.

David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake,” March 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/

Robert I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215, Basil Blackwell, 2000 .

Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 23-59.

Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 29.

Guillaume Durocher, The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece, Kindle Direct publishing, 2021, p. 41.

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (1864), which I quote in my article “Bring out your dead!”, https://www.unz.com/article/bring-out-your-dead/

“How the Church Preempted the Marriage Market”, in Robert Ekelund, Jr., Robert Hébart, Robert Tollison, Gary Anderson, and Audrey Davidson, Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm, Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 85-112. There is nothing original in that text, so I just borrowed its title.

Georges Duby, The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, Pantheon Books, 1981, pp. 19, 34-35.

Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge UP, 1983, p. 45

Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, op. cit., p. 44.

Jack Goody, The European Family: an historico-anthropological essay, Blackwell, 2000, p. 35.

https://media.bloomsbury.com/rep/files/Primary%20Source%203.4%20-%20Cluny.pdf

Moore, The First European Revolution, op. cit., p. 12.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12466a.htm

Henry Charles Lea, An Historial Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibary in the Christian Church, 1867, pp. 64-65, quoted by Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, op. cit., p. 81.

Sandro Carocci and Marco Vendittelli, « Société et économie », in André Vauchez, dir., Rome au Moyen Âge, Éditions du Cerf, 2021, pp. 127-188.

Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the World, op. cit., p. 21.

Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the World, op. cit., p. 16.

Ibid., p. 198.

Ibid., p. 193.

Ibid., p. 252.

Ibid., p. 299.

Ibid., p. 418.

Ibid., p. 415.

Ibid., p. 420.

Ibid., p. 179.

Ibid., p. 226.

Ibid., p. 240.

Ibid., p. 222.

Thomas Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages, Princeton UP, 1979, pp. 141-142.

Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the World, op. cit., p. 427.

Ibid., p. 355.

Ibid., p. 320.

Ibid., p. 400.

Laurence Leamer, Sons of Camelot: The Fate of an American Dynasty, HarperCollins, 2005.