The idea of being WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), isn't new. There are of cause many causes behind any culture, based on assumptions that then play out in the everyday life and thinking. This book sets out to explain our culture and to get under the ideas we assume to find out what they are based on.
Earlier this year I read Person of Interest, which sets out to do the same thing by looking at the areas of art, education and science. While that wasn't a bad book on the topics, I found this one covering more ground in shorter or more readable chapters. This book looks at the values the West take for granted such as equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom and progress. These topics are looked at in this order, and also kinda follow our historical timeline from the first century up to today (or George Floyd).
Throughout the book, there is huge contrast drawn between the Roman world of the first century before Christianity and then the world after Christianity. Something happened to the way people thought, valued and behaved with the rise of those pesky Christians who followed this Jesus guy, and it changed the world.
Today we just assume these values are self-evident and all people from all places from all time held to them, but that is simply not true. Human rights that we take at face value are not something we can measure, see or weigh. They are not inside every person that we can cut open and see them next to the spleen. In the Roman world, it was just a fact and really obvious to anyone with eyes, that some people were built for hard labour and born in poor families, and some people were born in powerful families and were destined to rule. Gladiators fought and died for entertainment and men moderated their sexual appetite by visiting brothels (therefore being modest).
It was the Christians who had a different view of people, that no matter the social standing or gender, they had instinct value and worth. This changed everything. Society had to undergo a restructure because of this. I learned that by the 4th century slaverly was being condemned quite vocally by bishops, by the 9th century it had disappeared in northern Europe, the 11th century in Italy and France and the 12th century in England. Yes, it did come back in America and England, but again it was shut down by the Christians who held certain views on what a person is, which are not self-evident when looking at any other continent over this period.
Science was also a thing that didn't come out of other cultures. It also didn't come out of a vacuum. The "dark ages" were not absent from science. The Greeks had their own way of thinking and after Christianity came, they went about deconstructing their views on how they assumed the world workd and reconstructed their thinking under the assumptions that God created everything in an ordered fashion and that we had minds able to understand the world around us. We do forget that the scientific principle of Ockham's razor comes from a guy in the 14th century, a good 200 years before the enlightenment. And, like any good scientific progress, ideas form the enlightenment have been and are being overturned today as new discoveries are made, which all still fit within the framework Christianity (and even Judaism) provided.
I could go on with other facts I learned, but I will simply say that I really enjoyed this book. It is highly readable and full of citations and quotes from Twitter and academic studies. The tone is also pretty neutral and evenhanded. It addresses the slave trade, the crusades, Galileo vs the catholic church and other common objects you may hear around the traps.
The audiences addressed in this book are those who don't know much about Christianity, those who have "done their time" and now have given up on the faith and those who are already convinced. I think those who fall into any of these groups would come away with more food for thought.
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