Missives from Samsara

This quote from Edward Luce’s recent biography Zbig (about foreign policy guru Zbigniew Brzezinkski) strikes me because it humanizes the pope, a figure revered worldwide and often seen as uniquely above everyday concerns. Zbig, as he was known, was a Polish American foreign policy expert and academic. He had befriended Karol Jozef Wojtyla in the 1970s, the man who would become Pope John Paul II, as a result of their both being prominent Poles. Once he was the pope, he and Zbig communicated regularly, as friends do. To me, this anecdote illustrates that John Paul II was a friend before he became pope–and remained a friend afterward. I think many of us have had daydreams in which we are all powerful and are able to use our unique influence to help our friends and family. I certainly wonder what the church employee who took the call from the Vatican must have thought!

As I write this, we have an American pope, who followed the first pontiff from Latin America. However, when John Paul II became pope in 1978 he was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, and of course, the first Polish pope. At the time Zbig was serving as president Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. The odds that Zbig, having risen to his high station, had also befriended a Polish priest that would become the leader of the Catholic church is also quite stunning and serendipitous.

Interestingly, the biography also reveals that Zbig was never a devout Catholic. Indeed, he was cremated and his ashes returned by his family to the earth. No cross, tombstone, or memorial marks his grave–a humble end for a man who once shaped global history (and was often not very humble) and who had a powerful friend who could do his wife a kind favor; one that we’d all love to do for our friends had we the power to do it.

Dr. Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist who teaches at Harvard. I am reading a book of his about WEIRD people; that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic people. For years scientists did their experiments on mostly WEIRD populations and came to conclusions they assumed were true for all of humanity. We now know that WEIRD people are actually a bit weird, and don’t represent the rest of the world in many important ways.

In this book, Henrich explains how the WEIRD roots arose and changed us in ‘the west’ (and later elsewhere as western ideas came to dominate many parts of the world, like in Japan for instance). A huge factor was the Christian Church and its policies. For one, the Church enforced and changed how Europeans thought of marriage. Specifically, the Church established monogamy as the norm and outlawed previously widespread types of marriage such as cousin marriage and polygyny. In societies that allow polygyny, high status men wind up with multiple wives, even harems. However, it also had the effect of making it hard for many low status men in society to find mates.

The quote noted below gets at one of the major positives of this change. Men without wives, Henrich demonstrates, tend to have more testosterone in their systems more often, changing their behavior in many antisocial ways. The flip side is that once men are married, testosterone tends to diminish, leading to generally more caring and mellow dudes. In other words, the rise of monogamy in Europe led, in part, to less less sexual violence, less crime in general, and more trust by men of other men.

This historic development makes me reflect on how many other “givens” in our culture might be the result of centuries-old institutions shaping behavior in ways we hardly notice. If something as personal as marriage norms can be engineered—and can ripple out to influence crime rates, trust, and cooperation—then what other aspects of our daily lives are quietly products of history rather than universal human nature? Even though I remain deeply skeptical of organized religion, I can see how this particular historical turn produced social benefits we still feel today. It’s a reminder that traditions are not simply inherited. Rather, they are crafted, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident, and always worth re-examining.