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SHAFFER: Your chapter “How Christianity Undermines the Family” is provocatively titled and sort of microcosmic for your whole thesis. Can you tell us about it?
FUKUYAMA: You can’t have modern politics if society is based on the biological principles of supporting friends and family. That’s the natural mode of human sociability. We’re naturally inclined to take care of family and exchange favors with friends. Human beings will interact in that manner without anyone telling them to behave that way because it’s biologically grounded.
In all human societies, social order at one stage depended on extended kinship — people living in tribes where people traced ancestry to a common ancestor that may be three, four, or five generations dead. This was no less true of Europeans than it was of the Chinese, or Arabs, or Africans, or anyone else in the world. All the Germanic barbarians organized themselves tribally after overrunning the Roman Empire.
One of the broad questions I’ve addressed in the book is how did these different societies make an exit out of kinship-based social organization into a modern-based state, with impersonal, centralized administration? Europe in that respect was quite exceptional, because that happened early, and it happened through the agency of the Catholic Church, which changed the rules of inheritance for kin- groups. It forbade divorce, it forbade concubinage, and it forbade cousin marriages within three or four degrees of relatedness. All of these were practices in tribal societies that kept property within an extended kin-group. In the Arab world in many places they still encourage cross-cousin marriage, where you marry your first cousin and the two families get to keep property within this narrow circle.
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