> "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up". Devil's advocate: this actually may have more to do with culture generally than re

> "I don't want to live in place with lots of Muslims, they mess things up". Devil's advocate: this actually may have more to do with culture generally than religion specifically. Muslim countries may still have more clan-based / tribal social structures: > Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance. He rests his grand theory of cultural difference on an inescapable fact of the human condition: kinship, one of our species’ “oldest and most fundamental institutions.” Though based on primal instincts— pair-bonding, kin altruism—kinship is a social construct, shaped by rules that dictate whom people can marry, how many spouses they can have, whether they define relatedness narrowly or broadly. Throughout most of human history, certain conditions prevailed: Marriage was generally family-adjacent—Henrich’s term is “cousin marriage”—which thickened the bonds among kin. Unilateral lineage (usually through the father) also solidified clans, facilitating the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of property. Higher-order institutions—governments and armies as well as religions—evolved from kin-based institutions. As families scaled up into tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms, they didn’t break from the past; they layered new, more complex societies on top of older forms of relatedness, marriage, and lineage. Long story short, in Henrich’s view, the distinctive flavor of each culture can be traced back to its earlier kinship institutions. […] > Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year. * https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-henrich-weird-people/615496/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/joseph-... * https://archive.li/e7DJX https://archive.li/e7DJX * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor... Look at the rates of (non-paid) blood donations, cousin marriage, and corruption, and you'll see high correlations: * https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Blood-donation-rates-per-thousand-population-From_fig3_44798117 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Blood-donation-rates-per... * https://vividmaps.com/global-rates-of-consanguineous/ https://vividmaps.com/global-rates-of-consanguineous/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index Eastern versus western regions of Turkey is interesting: * https://vividmaps.com/cousin-marriage/ https://vividmaps.com/cousin-marriage/