What does it mean to be pro-family?

It's a WEIRD world out there

Credit: Hanna-Barbera

Note: My previous post went up as scheduled, but I later learned that it seems to not have gone out to some or potentially all of the email list. I don’t know why that happened. In any case, you can read it here.

Last week, I wrote about a growing push against the concept of the family. It’s an idea known as “family abolition” and, though a very niche thing, also seems to be bubbling up again into the mainstream¹.

But it also raises a question: If there are folks who are anti-family, what exactly does it mean to be pro-family²?

To help answer that question, I’ll turn to a concept known as “WEIRD psychology.” Harvard evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich published a (fantastic) 500+ page book³ on this topic in 2020, but the gist for our purposes here is that "WEIRD” stands for “western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.” The concept is a way to understand how the West is psychologically distinct, and why it has managed to be so prosperous. WEIRD cultures include the US, Canada, the UK, etc. They tend to be highly individualistic, and people in WEIRD societies are generally loyal to principles, such as fairness and equality. They (we) value meritocracy, but look down on things like nepotism.

Alternatively, non-WEIRD cultures tend to place more value on relationships than on the principles many Westerners prioritize. Also not coincidentally, non-WEIRD cultures tend to be both less individualistic and to thrive in places that retain stronger family structures (clans, tribes, etc.).

Henrich has an interesting passage where he asks readers to fill in the blank in the sentence “I am ________.” WEIRD Westerners like myself often fill the blank with words that describe their personality, work, or interests (“I am curious,” “I am a surgeon,” “I am a kayaker”). But non-WEIRD people will fill in the blank with descriptions of their relationships, for example “I am Josh’s dad”⁴. This gets at the psychological gulf between these two world views, and how one is focused on the individual while the other is focused on the group.

To further help illustrate the difference, here are a couple of hypothetical scenarios⁵:

1. A family member knocks on your door and admits committing a crime. Do you lie to police and prosecutors to protect this person, or do you turn them in and/or testify against them?

2. You’re nearing the end of life and have managed to amass enough wealth to leave something behind. Is it nobler to bequeath your estate to your family, or to a charity, university, etc.?

For many of us in the English-speaking West, the answers to these questions are probably so painfully obvious that even asking them sounds suspicious. Of course you don’t protect criminals, even if they’re close to you. And while many folks don’t mind leaving their kids a nest egg, it’s even more noble to give your resources to a charitable organization that serves the greater good. You can see this attitude in the laudatory media coverage of rich people like Warren Buffett and MacKenzie Scott, who have promised to give away large sums of money, and in the comparatively critical coverage of their less philanthropic billionaire counterparts. These attitudes about crime and inheritance epitomize WEIRD psychology.

But non-WEIRD cultures view these types of scenarios differently. Here’s Henrich:

[In non-WEIRD cultures], “the ‘right’ answer is to help your friend. People aren’t trying to distinguish themselves as relentlessly honest individuals governed by impartial principles. Instead, they are deeply loyal to their friends and want to cement enduring relationships, even if this involves illegal actions. In these places, being nepotistic is often the morally correct thing to do. By contrast, in WEIRD societies, many people think badly of those who weight family and friends over impartial principles and anonymous criteria like qualifications, merit, or effort”⁶.

I know there is going to be a tendency for some of us in the West to see this as evidence that our worldview is somehow “better” than that of other places. But I hope we can avoid that impulse for just a second. Keep in mind that people in non-WEIRD societies still have a sense of morality and right and wrong. It’s just different from the prevailing view in places like the US. And it’s historically more common. As Henrich points out⁷, most humans have not lived in WEIRD societies.

So what does this have to do with being pro-family?

Well, the WEIRD worldview has been great for the West’s economy, for sustaining the rule of law, for cultivating democracy, etc.

But it is not great for relationships. Henrich goes on to note that WEIRD people are “bad friends”⁸, have “weaker family ties”⁹ and are perpetually “shopping for better relationships, which may or may not endure”¹⁰. We achieved prosperity, but paid for it with our relationships.

So in that sense, to be pro-family is to lean somewhat away from WEIRDness. That doesn’t mean harboring our criminal relatives of course, or giving up on charitable causes. There’s a spectrum. But it does mean tempering individualism with a greater emphasis on relationships.

How might that look in practice?

One of the most fascinating parts of Henrich’s book is how he traces the origins of WEIRDness, and really the entire modern world, to policies the Catholic Church¹¹ rolled out in the medieval era¹². I’ve previously written about this, but the gist is that at the dawn of the Middle Ages Europe was dominated by extended family groups (tribes and clans). Then gradually, the church whittled away at those structures until we got to the individualistic, WEIRD West of today. One example of this process was when the church urged people to bequeath it their estates. This weakened ties between family members and over time contributed to the then-novel-but-now-normal idea that a family is a group of people connected by emotional bonds, rather than economic ones.

So, there’s an example of something that fed into the WEIRD mindset, and which was not a pro-family policy. The church did plenty of good (and bad) with the money¹³ it collected, but the practice did ultimately divert resources from families to a different institution.

That’s ancient history at this point, but this practice still exists. For example my college, like most colleges, calls alumni and asks for donations, including large sums from those alumni’s wills. This money does a lot of good. I personally received scholarships from this pool of funds. But is it a pro-family practice? Well, it looks a lot like the medieval policies that were designed to weaken the family. It’s diverting funds from families to a large institution. It’s the epitome of a WEIRD thing to do. So while it may be a good practice, it doesn’t look like a particularly pro-family practice. It looks like the opposite.

As I’ve read more about WEIRD psychology, I’ve started reevaluating how I look at various institutions to try to understand what they’re asking of me and if that comes at a price to my family, as well as what philosophical assumptions they make about relationships. It’s a balancing act, but a eye opening one.

This is all a long winded way of saying that being pro-family requires looking deeply at how we prioritize relationships relative to other activities such as work, school, religion, recreation, etc. It’s asking what something means for family resources such as time and money. Most of us live in a WEIRD world and we’re not going to change that. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to reclaim a little bit of the non-WEIRD outlook where relationships are of paramount importance.

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1. As I wrote in my last post, families aren’t at risk of actually being abolished. But I bring it up because the more time we spend debating basic ideas like whether or not the family is good the less time there is to discuss things that are actually doable. In rhetoric, there’s an idea know as “stasis,” which basically means the mental space a person in a policy debate occupies. So, if one person wants to discuss solutions to climate change but another person doesn’t believe climate change exists, they can’t have a meaningful conversation because their underlying assumptions are so radically different. Family abolition knocks the conversation about families back to the most basic stasis by asking if they should exist at all. Most people, though, are willing to grant that point and have long since moved into a different stasis.

2. I know that being “pro-family” is a highly politicized idea. But I want to sidestep the political debates of the current moment because for the most part they all take place within the same WEIRD framework. Take the decades-long debate about who gets to marry whom. In the end, every side seems to agree that marriage is an individual choice and is meant to be emotionally enriching — which is a very WEIRD idea. By contrast, a non-WEIRD attitude on this topic might see marriage not as a matter of individual fulfillment, but rather as a relationship to enrich and advance the family community. The ultimate non-WEIRD take on marriage is arranged marriage, which is not a position any WEIRD people are arguing for.

3. The book is called The WEIRDest People in the World. It’s a fascinating and eye-opening read and I can’t recommend it enough.

4. The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. 2020. Page 24

5. I’m drawing again from Henrich’s book here, but boiling down long discussions into a couple of quick points.

6. The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. 2020. Page 27

7. The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. 2020. Page 27

8. The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. 2020. Page 44

9. The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. 2020. Page 30

10. The WEIRDest People in the World. Joseph Henrich. 2020. Page 28

11. This is not to pick on the Catholic Church. Later churches ran with this idea and Henrich has a whole section on Protestantism in his book. But in the early Middle Ages, the Catholics were basically the only show in town. It’s also worth noting that while I am not Catholic myself, I have great fondness for the Catholic Church. I’m well aware that it is not perfect, but despite its flaws I find much to like in Catholicism.

12. Religion is a recurring topic in The WEIRDest People in the World, but the pivotal role the Catholic Church played in the story is explored in depth in chapter six. It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t some sort of conspiracy theory; the Catholic Church did weaken families, but it was a gradual process that took hundreds of years.

13. The church funded monasteries that advanced Western scholarship. It built many of the most impressive buildings ever erected. It laid the groundwork for the modern world.