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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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