“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world. It wasn’t that people invented these institutions first and then they began to think about the world differently. Rather, this was a kind of evolving process where people began to think about the world a little bit differently because their families had been transformed, so they tended to adopt different kinds of laws and think about new kinds of laws to account for this. As European societies became increasingly dominated by monogamous nuclear families in the High Middle Ages, for instance, the laws being created centered increasingly on the individual and on their intentions, rights, and obligations as separate from their kin groups. Those laws then shaped the world that they subsequently grew up in even more, and you had this kind of coevolution between our psychology on one hand and our social norms and institutions on the other.”
That’s in the Harvard Gazette from September 2020! The book was covered in the New York Times and Psychology Today. So what’s with the innuendo?
Neighborhood dogs are barking for some reason!