LEI: Buck, you’re weird.
BUCK: Gee, Lei, why would you interrupt my breakfast with a comment like that?
LEI: What did you order?
BUCK: The usual — two scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee and orange juice.
LEI: You’re just making my point.
BUCK: Really now. What did you think I ordered, dim sum?
LEI: Dim sum! Oh no, I forgot my chopsticks. I wonder whether their jasmine tea is green, black or white.
BUCK: Don’t get your hopes up. Here, have a seat. What’s that book you’re reading?
LEI: “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” It’s based on anthropology, economics, history and psychology.
BUCK: Who wrote it?
LEI: Harvard professor Joseph Henrich. He’s an anthropologist but describes himself as a “cultural evolutionist.” He thinks culture — ideas, beliefs and values — develops over hundreds of years and gets transmitted across generations.
BUCK: You mean like Darwin and natural selection, only for information in the mind.
LEI: Right, Buck.
BUCK: Next thing you know college students won’t be taking just “biology;” they’ll be studying “human evolutionary biology.”
LEI: Henrich is chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. He studies “evolutionary approaches” to psychology, decision-making and culture.
BUCK: That’s weird.
LEI: Wait, Buck. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. How does that sound for you?
BUCK: Four out of five ain’t bad.
BUCK: Is it a new book?
LEI: No, I missed it when it first came out in 2020. I was distracted by the COVID panic, I guess.
BUCK: So do you like it?
LEI: I’m just skipping through to see what Henrich says about China — you know, trying to figure out why the East didn’t become psychologically peculiar or particularly prosperous. But, mostly, it’s helping me understand how weird you are.
BUCK: I’m weird.
LEI: Yep. For one thing, you’re a Catholic, right?
BUCK: Amen to that.
LEI: Well, the book says a big advantage for the West was Catholic Church edicts on marriage that disrupted “kin-based” societies in Europe.
BUCK: What does that mean?
LEI: Well, for one, it means marrying a cousin, something the Roman Catholic Church banned in the Middle Ages.
BUCK: Wait, didn’t Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Saddam Hussein and Jerry Lee Lewis marry their cousins?
LEI: Yep, but no Catholics there, Buck.
BUCK: I see.
LEI: Henrich argues that the church largely destroyed kinship within Europe even as “clan-based societies” persisted in other parts of the globe — you know, like China. The result, Henrich says, was that the West adopted more analytical, scientific and individualistic ways of thinking.
BUCK: So being open-minded to strangers and marrying outside of family broadened Europeans’ horizons and created a more dynamic, innovative and creative culture?
LEI: Yes, and that led the West to the Industrial Revolution and prosperity — or so Henrich argues. To be honest, I find this idea weird. What do you think?
BUCK: I think we became so prosperous because the nuns taught us how to raise money at bingo games.
LEI: Buck Ryan.
BUCK: In the U.S. you can marry a second cousin, no problem. About half the states permit marriage between first cousins, but with some limitations.
LEI: What about North Carolina’s marriage law?
BUCK: According to the North Carolina Judicial Branch website, “The parties cannot be more closely related than first cousins, and cannot be double first cousins (for instance, the children of two sisters who married two brothers).”
BUCK: How about in China: Can you marry your cousin?
LEI: No, at least not for the last 40 years. The People’s Republic of China Marriage Law banned all marriages to cousins in 1980.
BUCK: So it wasn’t a big deal before that, eh?
LEI: In the old days, it was quite normal for people to marry their kins. There’s a phrase in Chinese that translates to “add kinship to kins, or be doubly related.” One of the Four Great Classic Novels in Chinese literature, “Dream of the Red Chamber (1791),” involves a love story between cousins.
BUCK: What about way back, like in the Middle Ages?
LEI: Throughout different times in Chinese history, the laws about marrying cousins got changed back and forth, with most of the time forbidden and about only more than a hundred years allowed.
BUCK: Ah-ha! Now you know why China fell so far behind the mighty Europe — no influence of the Catholic Church.
LEI: Well, I certainly hope God forgives all those atheists.
BUCK: Seriously, Lei.
LEI: Seriously, Buck, that’s crazy talk. Five of our most powerful dynasties — the Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming — prospered during the Middle Ages. Remember China used to be the world’s biggest economy. We hit a peak when the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) accounted for 58% of the world’s GDP.
BUCK: How could that be?
LEI: During the Middle Ages we revolutionized agriculture, shipbuilding and porcelain; we increased commerce with the use of paper money, and we invented movable type for printing, the compass for navigation, mechanical clocks and gunpowder.
BUCK: Sounds like Henrich might be a little too Eurocentric for his own good.
LEI: He’s certainly not without his critics. Even Henrich admits in his last chapter that he left out a few factors in his analysis.
BUCK: Like what?
LEI: “The very real and pervasive horrors of slavery, racism, plunder and genocide.”
BUCK: Nothing like plunder to increase one’s chances for prosperity.
LEI: No kidding. China endured imperialism for six centuries of colonialism by those enlightened Europeans right up until Portugal turned over Macau to us in 1999.
BUCK: Anything in the book ring true?
LEI: Henrich cites the research of Richard Nisbett, a social psychology professor at Michigan. He wrote a book 20 years ago titled, “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why.”
BUCK: So what does “differently” mean?
LEI: Henrich puts it bluntly: “In China, people … explicitly distrust strangers, foreigners and new acquaintances.” Chinese like me are more likely to emphasize family connections and allegiances in trying to understand which people to trust.
BUCK: Gwan-she, right?
LEI: Yes, guanxi. It refers to having personal trust and a strong relationship with someone. Relationships are everything in China. The book says WEIRD people like you will focus more on personal attributes and intentions in deciding on which people to trust.
BUCK: What’s your own theory?
LEI: I think there’s a big difference between the people in Boston, or Harvard’s neighborhood, and the people of Chatham County, for example. If you’re from a maritime civilization that prospers on exploration and expansion, then you’re more likely to trust strangers than if you grew up in an agricultural setting that focuses on working on one’s land and building families. In that way, people in rural China and rural North Carolina are a lot the same.
BUCK: With all due respect, Lei, I think the Chinese are weird. I have a brain teaser for you. Ready?
LEI: Ready.
BUCK: So I’m a visiting professor at a new journalism school at Jilin University in northeast China, near the North Korean border. A Chinese journalism prof invites me to meet her mentor. She brings along a young man she introduces as an outstanding student. He’s going to be our translator because his English is much better than hers. Now for the brain teaser: Who is the young man really?
LEI: I give up.
BUCK: It’s her younger brother. I found out later.
LEI: Makes sense to me.
BUCK: Really?
LEI: Yep. She would never discuss family in a professional setting like that. It’s too personal.
BUCK: You’re kidding.
LEI: Unless you were going into business together. Then she would want to know everything about you, Buck, including how much money you make, your religious beliefs and even your Chinese astrological sign. Those extremely personal inquiries that make Westerners uneasy are a kind of compliment — you’re one of us, not one of them.
BUCK: That’s strange.
LEI: Strange to you, maybe. But not to me.
BUCK: Lei, you’re weird.
About the authors: Buck Ryan, a University of Kentucky journalism professor, and Lei Jiao, an English lecturer at Wuhan University of Technology, Hubei Province, China, collaborate on articles to advance cross-cultural understanding. In December, they published a two-part series on climate change and energy:
https://www.chathamnewsrecord.com/stories/a-crash-on-highway-to-climate-hell,15148
https://www.chathamnewsrecord.com/stories/ncs-energy-seesaw,15216