Catholicism and modern individualism

Further to two recent posts, one about Steven Pinker's view that the Enlightenment is the source of science, reason and progress, and another about Tom Holland's view of the modern west as being very much the legacy of Christendom, I came across this interesting article.

A growing body of research suggests that populations around the globe vary substantially along several important psychological dimensions and that populations characterized as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual. People from these societies tend to be more individualistic, independent, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity and in-group loyalty. Although these patterns are now well documented, few efforts have sought to explain them. Here, we propose that the Western Church (i.e., the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) transformed European kinship structures during the Middle Ages and that this transformation was a key factor behind a shift towards a WEIRDer psychology.

By breaking down extended kin-based institutions and encouraging a nuclear family structure, the Church encouraged more individualistic behaviour.

This also ties in with Larry Siedentop's brilliant Inventing the Individual; the Origins of Western Liberalism which makes a very powerful argument along similar lines, i.e. that the moral revolution unleashed by Christianity sewed the seeds of modern individualism as we know it.

This idea of the Catholic Church as a cultivator of individualism is rather refreshing when one has come to take for granted the more popular idea that the church inculcated authoritarianism and generally frustrated human freedom, i.e. the kind of idea that Pinker would promulgate.

There is also an irony to this; the individualism that the Church unleashed basically went rogue and now thrives independently of any religious objectives.

This highlights two different types of causation; physical and logical. Speaking logically, i.e. the language of necessity, if I was to suggest that you needed Christianity to be have individualism, such an argument would be difficult to sustain.  There are many argument for individual freedom that do not rest on religious foundation. The writings of Kant and Rawls immediately spring to mind as examples. Rawls appealed to hypothetical metaphysical state of nature (i.e. veil of ignorance) in making his case - that this is also a secularised version of the Christian soul doesn't mean it relies on the   actual existence of souls to be valid.

Speaking in terms of physical causation, i.e. the language of historic contingency, it is extremely hard to see how modern individualism could have emerged without Christianity. Without the church's concern with individual souls, conscience and will, the conceptual space for the notion of individual flourishing would not even have existed.

These arguments are a reminder that in criticising modern individualism, Catholics should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and remember that individual freedom remains inextricably linked to the faith. Christians should be wary ceding individual freedom as a principle to liberals and being seduced by anti-individual movements on the right.