and others, two of whom are colleagues of Tyler at GMU. Caitlin McDermott-Murphy provides coverage.
Comparing exposure to the Western Church with their “kinship intensity index,” which includes data on cousin marriage rates, polygyny (where a man takes multiple wives), co-residence of extended families, and other historical anthropological measures, the team identified a direct connection between the religious ban and the growth of independent, monogamous marriages among nonrelatives. According to the study, each additional 500 years under the Western Church is associated with a 91 percent further reduction in marriage rates between cousins.
“Meanwhile in Iran, in Persia, Zoroastrianism was not only promoting cousin marriage but promoting marriage between siblings,” Henrich said. Although Islam outlawed polygyny extending beyond four wives, and the Eastern Orthodox Church adopted policies against incest, no institution came close to the strict, widespread policies of the Western Church.
The authors adopt a “not that there is anything wrong with that” attitude toward cousin marriage. Whether that protects them from being sent to the Correctional Institution for Dangerous White Supremacists (where Charles Murray is held, among others) is an open question.
Ok…I will bite on Charles Murray…
What was the purpose of writing the Bell Curve? The book’s theme is poor people are low IQ and low make stupid decisions. And I will leave race hereditary IQ scores as evidence that IQ is mostly hereditary. Draw conclusion at who should be the losers in society.
My simple take is Charles Murray wanted good middle class America to stop feeling guilty about past treatment of African-Americans and let the urban inner cities completely fail. (Of course, I do find ironic many inner cities were already turning away from crime in 1994.)
And because of this theme, I complete ignore Murray’s Coming Apart because now I see the realities of the Bell Curve working against WWC and why should I care now compared to 1994? (Of course he believes in local community religious action but how does this work in the modern economy.)
I believe Murray’s stated reason is to steer us away from policies that assume everyone is equally smart (also talented, conscientious, etc), because these are bound to fail at improving the lives of those who fall on the lower ends of these metrics (all of which have been associated with success in our modern society).
A segment of the progressive left agrees with Murray’s thesis, whether they like to admit it or not. How else would you explain increasing calls that meritocracy and math are racist.
It’s unclear to me if you read the book.
Murray’s proposals (public and private) are straightforward in the book. There is even a chapter called “Living Together”.
I wouldn’t characterize what’s written there as you’ve described. The closest corollary might be “the state can’t achieve certain objectives you have for the poor, so you should stop trying to achieve them (especially when those efforts seem to hurt more than help).”
That’s a far cry from “give up on the inner cities and let them completely fail.”
Most of Murray’s thrust is that well off private individuals should:
1) Care more about the poor
2) Care in a way that is effective, even if it isn’t as pleasant for the person doing the caring
In general I think Murray’s opinion is that people in his class abrogated their responsibility to the left half of The Bell Curve and outsourced guilt over that to government programs. Murray wants to repeal the government programs and have people of his class get down into the muck with the commoners.
There are some lines where he advocates “giving up” on certain poor. Such as wanting to back off mass low skill immigration or wanting to curtail some of the benefits that low income single mothers receive. But these aren’t terribly controversial, and were in fact extremely popular across the spectrum in the 1990s when the book was published. Both parties competed pretty hard against illegal immigration in the 1990s, and things like welfare reform got passed that (whatever your opinion of it) made some of those single mothers go to work for their benefits.
Even then, it’s not as if Murray was against doing personal private charity in third world countries or with single mothers. So maybe “giving up” is a bit harsh, and more like “the state should ‘give up’ relative what it’s doing now, at least some”.
That is both interesting and weird, in the lower-case sense. I am sceptical that this kinship effect due to new marriage policies that were widespread around 1500 are more causative and durable than say primogeniture inheritance policy starting around 1000, or the giant economic revolutions starting with the rise of medieval commercial city-states (Italian maritime republics and the Hanseatic League), followed by the upheaval of 1492/1498, followed by the Industrial Revolution, and finally our post world war era. To claim that the marriage and family policy differences between the Orthodox and Catholic churches at 1500 are more significant than the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the navigation innovations of Columbus and de Gamma at that same time seems a stretch to me. An intriguing stretch, but a stretch nonetheless.
Didn’t Freud have something to say here?