Joe Henrich: Is Western society 'weird'?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
The debate between nature and nurture is as old as the hills - is genetics or cultural conditioning the key to understanding human evolution? We speak to Joseph Henrich, a Harvard professor whose fascination with human evolution and anthropology has brought him to a radical conclusion. He says Western societies preoccupied with the individual not the collective are weird, and the cultural power of the West has skewed our view of what is normal. How much do we humans really have in common?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is an academic and thinker whose work crosses many boundaries, involving anthropology, biology, genetics, history and sociology. For Harvard Professor Joseph Henrich, the most recent product of his extraordinary breadth of study, is a groundbreaking book, the weirdest people in the world. It's called. Weird, |
| 0:23.7 | it should be said, stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. His proposition is |
| 0:31.6 | that weird societies, with their evolving preoccupation with the individual rather than the collective are outliers. |
| 0:40.4 | People in most of the rest of the world inherit and live by very different cultural values and |
| 0:45.9 | norms. Why does this matter? Well, it means that what many in the West easily assumed to be |
| 0:52.1 | universal values are no such thing. And it may be that weird |
| 0:56.7 | societies have much to learn from peoples with a very different cultural inheritance. At the heart of |
| 1:02.9 | all of this is that very simple age-old question that fascinates all humans, what most shapes who we are, |
| 1:14.8 | nature or nurture? And how much do we really have in common? |
| 1:20.4 | Well, Joseph Henrich joins me now from Harvard University. Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:21.5 | Oh, it's good to be with you. |
| 1:30.3 | You are now in the middle of a heated debate about human evolution. Now, I'm used to thinking about evolution in terms of genetics, Darwin, survival of the fittest. You seem to put your focus not so much on |
| 1:38.8 | biology, much more on cultural conditioning, nurture. Am I right? Yeah, I mean, one of the unique things about |
| 1:48.0 | our species is that more than any other species, we're dependent on acquiring large bodies of |
| 1:53.9 | information from those around us, from the societies we grow up in. And in fact, our brains have |
| 1:58.8 | evolved to be able to take in and learn how to process |
| 2:01.8 | information. So our motivations, preferences, emotions, heuristics, all of these things we can |
| 2:06.9 | acquire in order to adapt to the cultural technologies and languages and institutions that we have to |
| 2:12.8 | confront in the world. So we're very much a cultural species. Right. And you have written a book |
| 2:17.4 | which has caused many |
| 2:18.3 | waves. Now, there's an acronym at the center of it, weird, which stands for Western, educated, |
| 2:24.7 | industrialized, rich and democratic societies. And you seem to be saying that, let's say we, |
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