When did Europe pull ahead?

 

Medieval market – Nicole Oresme (15th century) (Wikicommons)

 

In terms of GDP per capita growth, northwest Europe began to surpass the rest of the world during the 14th century: before the conquest of the Americas, the invention of printing, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Protestant Reformation.

 

 

In a recent post, Steve Sailer asks why the European world pulled ahead of the non-European world between 1000 and 1500 AD:

 

[…] much of the non-European world entered a sort of cultural recession well before Europeans directly interfered with them. If you look at, say, Charles Murray’s 2003 book Human Achievement, several major non-European civilizations appear to have lost momentum in making progress in the arts and sciences over roughly the time period of 1000 or maybe 1250 to 1500. (Sailer 2022)

 

For Steve, the reason was the collapse of the Mongol Empire during the 14th century. That century was indeed a turning point for Europe, particularly for England and Holland:

 

These North Sea economies experienced sustained GDP per capita growth for six straight centuries. The North Sea begins to diverge from the rest of Europe long before the 'West' begins its more famous split from 'the rest.'

 

[...] we can pin point the beginning of this 'little divergence' with greater detail. In 1348 Holland's GDP per capita was $876. England's was $777. In less than 60 years time Holland's jumps to $1,245 and England's to 1090. The North Sea's revolutionary divergence started at this time. (Greer 2013b)

 

This process began before the European conquest of the Americas, the invention of printing, the creation of modern finance institutions, the Atlantic slave trade, or the Protestant Reformation. None of these can be proper explanations for this "little divergence." (Greer 2013a; see also Thompson 2012 and Hbd *chick 2013).

 

The divergence began within a part of Europe that was much less affected by the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire. Moreover, if we compare southern Europe with North Africa during the same period, we see the same divergence that we see more generally between Christian Europe and the rest of the world. Yet North Africa was never conquered by the Mongols.

 

It looks like internal causes were responsible for the divergence between Christian Europe and the rest of the world. Those causes seem to have their point of origin in northwest Europe during the long period from 500 to 1500 AD. In that region, the Western Church consolidated a pre-existing pattern of small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, thus strengthening a mindset of individualism and impersonal sociality (Frost 2020; Schulz et al. 2019). Then, from 1000 AD onward, the Western Church strove to pacify social relations (Frost and Harpending 2015). Those two factors—an individualistic mindset operating in a pacified social environment—allowed the market economy to expand into all areas of life and eventually replace kinship as the main organizing principle of society (Frost 2020; Macfarlane 1978; Weber 1930).

 

The expansion of the market economy went hand in hand with the expansion of the middle class. In England, this class began to expand in the twelfth century and would gradually replace the lower classes through downward mobility. By the 1800s, its lineages accounted for most of the English population. English society thus became more middle class in its values: "Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving" (Clark 2007, p. 166). The same process took place elsewhere in Western Europe and more generally throughout Europe to varying degrees and over different timescales (Frost 2019, p. 176).

 

In sum, between 500 and 1500 AD the Western Church created a system of social reproduction that would have far-reaching demographic, behavioral, and economic consequences. To understand that system, one must understand not only the Bible but also the writings of early and medieval Christianity, as well as the pagan Germanic elements it incorporated (Russell 1994). Finally, one must understand the preceding system, and its failings.

 

The pre-Christian world: demographic and cognitive decline

 

Ancient DNA from Greece suggests that mean cognitive ability began to decline at some point during Classical Antiquity (Woodley of Menie et al. 2019). A similar decline probably happened throughout the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East of that time.

There were three main causes:

 

·         A decline in fertility and family formation, particularly among the upper classes (Caldwell 2004; Hopkins 1965; Roetzel 2000, p. 234);

·         A corresponding increase in female hypergamy, often by freed slaves, which reduced the reproductive importance of upper-class women (Perry 2013);

·         An increase in the slave population, particularly foreign slaves (Harris 1999). This ongoing influx disrupted the process of local cognitive evolution. Even if there had been demographic overflow from the upper classes, that overflow could not have replaced the lower classes, since those classes were being replaced from external sources.

 

Christianity and Islam both tried to correct the ruinous demographic state of the ancient world. Islam succeeded in reversing negative population growth but failed to restart cognitive evolution. In some ways, it made such evolution more difficult. Islam increased female hypergamy by permitting male polygamy, thus further reducing the reproductive importance of upper-class women (van den Berghe 1960). Foreign slaves were also imported on a larger-scale than in antiquity, thus further disrupting local cognitive evolution (Lewis 1990). Finally, the upper classes tended to congregate in urban areas, where the death rate was higher.

 

Before the 20th century, population growth had been sluggish in the Muslim world. Wherever Muslims coexisted with Christians, the latter community was often the one that grew at a faster pace. This was the case in the Balkans:

 

By the end of the eighteenth century the Muslim population had entered a period of comparative economic and moral decline. Several explanations have been offered for this development. Certainly the fact that the Muslim population provided the soldiers contributed to its ultimate weakening. Their concentration in towns also made them more susceptible to the ravages of plague and other diseases. Turkish customs, particularly the practice of polygamy, played a part. This process of decay was clearly illustrated in the eighteenth century in the changing demography of the Balkan towns where Christian and national elements formed an increasingly larger proportion of the population (Jelavich and Jelavich, 1977, pp. 6-7)

 

Christianity, especially Western Christianity, succeeded not only in promoting population growth but also in restarting cognitive evolution, specifically by supporting the formation of monogamous families, by discouraging slavery, at least during the long period from 500 to 1500 AD, and eventually by creating the peace, order, and stability that allowed the middle class to expand and become dominant. The rise of Christian Europe actually began before its expansion into the Americas and Asia. The latter was, in fact, a consequence of the former.

 

References

 

Caldwell, J.C. (2004). Fertility control in the classical world: Was there an ancient fertility transition?  Journal of Population Research 21:1. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03032208  

 

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press: Princeton.

 

Frost, P. (2019). The Original Industrial Revolution. Did Cold Winters Select for Cognitive Ability? Psych 1(1): 166-181. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010012

 

Frost, P. (2020). The large society problem in Northwest Europe and East Asia. Advances in Anthropology 10(3): 214-134. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2020.103012   

 

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification. Evolutionary Psychology 13(1): 230-243. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F147470491501300114

 

Greer, T. (2013a). The Rise of the West: Asking the Right Questions. July 7, The Scholar's Stage. https://scholars-stage.org/the-rise-of-the-west-asking-the-right-questions/

Greer, T. (2013b). Another look at the 'Rise of the West' - but with better numbers. November 20, The Scholar's Stage. https://scholars-stage.org/another-look-at-the-rise-of-the-west-but-with-better-numbers/

Harris, W. (1999). Demography, Geography and the Sources of Roman Slaves. Journal of Roman Studies 89, 62-75. https://doi.org/10.2307/300734  

 

Hbd *chick (2013). Going Dutch, November 29. https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/going-dutch/

 

Hopkins, K. (1965). Contraception in the Roman Empire. Comparative Studies in Society and History 8(1): 124-151. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500003935  

 

Jelavich, C. and B. Jelavich. (1977). The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

 

Lewis, B. (1990). Race and Slavery in the Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Macfarlane, A. (1978). The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition. Oxford: Blackwell.

 

Perry, M.J. (2013). Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman. Cambridge University Press.

 

Roetzel, C.J. (2000). Sex and the single god: celibacy as social deviancy in the Roman period. In: S.G. Wilson and M. Desjardins (eds). Text and Artefact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity. Essays in Honour of Peter Richardson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press (pp. 231-248).

 

Russell, J.C. (1994). The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Sailer, S. (2022). Why was much of the non-European world stagnating well before 1492? The Unz Review, May 10 https://www.unz.com/isteve/why-was-much-of-the-non-european-world-stagnating-well-before-1492/#new_comments  

 

Schulz, J.F., D. Bahrami-Rad, J.P. Beauchamp, and J. Henrich. (2019). The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science 366(707), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau5141  

 

Thompson, D. (2012). The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years: Part II, The Atlantic, June 20, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/the-economic-history-of-the-world-after-jesus-in-4-slides/258762/  

 

Van den Berghe, P.L. (1960). Hypergamy, Hypergenation, and Miscegenation. Human Relations 13(1):83-91. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F001872676001300106   

 

Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

 

Woodley of Menie, M.A., J. Delhez, M. Peñaherrera-Aguirre, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2019). Cognitive archeogenetics of ancient and modern Greeks. London Conference on Intelligence. https://www.altcensored.com/watch?v=UES_tpDxz9A  

Religion as a force for natural selection

Buddhist temple, Singapore (Wikicommons – Cattan2011). In Buddhism, family is valued over self, but not strangers over family. Christianity goes farther: strangers are valued over self and family.

Originally, and even today in much of the world, social and economic activity is organized mostly by small groups of related individuals. As a result, a society cannot realize its full potential as it grows larger and encompasses people who are less related to each other. This is the “large society problem.” It has been alleviated by making kinship less important and, conversely, by encouraging forms of sociality that include everyone, and not just close kin. Northwest Europeans and East Asians have gone the farthest down that path.

In a large society, a social norm is less situational and more universal; it transcends the situation and its actors. The same applies to norm-breaking. To break a norm is to offend not only a particular person but also a general principle. In time, the principle may be sanctified, thus becoming even more inviolable. Offenders incur the wrath of the entire community, and not just the victim's family (Berman, 1974). Eventually, these reified norms coalesce into "religion."

Religion is key to the cultural environment of large societies and forces humans to adapt to it, just as they had to adapt to the natural environment of small societies. Unlike the natural environment, however, religion is a human creation. We have conceived an idealized vision of what humans should do, and this vision has rewarded those who do right and punished those who do wrong. In short, we have given religion the powers of natural selection. 

This point is made by the authors of a recent study:

Cultural evolution research on religion has highlighted the role religions play in enforcing large-scale cooperation [...]. Religious beliefs that expand what gods know and care about beyond local concerns and the local group, and increase gods' ability to punish rule breakers, may have contributed to sustaining cooperation at larger scales [...]. These beliefs create the perception that one's bad actions will be punished supernaturally, even if undetected by others, and can expand the circle of cooperation to anonymous strangers. Religions that lay out rules for cooperative behavior, and systems to enforce that cooperation, may create more stable and successful groups [...], perhaps increasing the ability of these groups and their religious beliefs to survive and spread. (Willard et al. 2020)

Thus, over time, there has thus been selection for individuals who respond to religion and willingly comply with its norms. Twin studies show that religiosity is 25 to 45% heritable. As is always the case, the non-heritable component includes everything else, like errors in understanding the question and collecting the data. We therefore have a substantial propensity to learn and obey social norms.

This propensity doesn't act alone. A growing child will develop it to a greater extent in a religious environment than in a non-religious one. The kind of religion also makes a difference.

Christianity encourages altruism

Gene-religion interaction has been shown at the gene DRD4. People are made more susceptible to social norms by the 2R allele or the 7R allele and less susceptible by the 4R allele (Sasaki et al., 2013). Furthermore, this susceptibility interacts with religion in the development of altruism. Using American and East Asian participants, Sasaki et al. (2013) found that 2R and 7R carriers were more altruistic than non-carriers if previously primed by the task of making a sentence from religious-sounding words. Priming had no effect on non-carriers.

These findings were partially replicated by Jiang et al. (2015). Among Singaporeans of Chinese descent, 2R carriers were more altruistic than non-carriers among male Christians, while being the same as non-carriers among women, Taoists, and Buddhists. The authors argue that men have more room for improvement because women start off caring more about others. The authors further suggest that Christianity better supports altruism by offering fellowship, comprehensible texts, and regular activities. Thus, if people are already more susceptible to social norms, they will become more altruistic if their environment is Christian. If, however, their environment is non-Christian, they will be no more altruistic than anyone else.

Because Christianity is better at developing this innate potential, and because this potential differs from one individual to another, altruism will vary much more among Christians than among non-Christians. A Christian society will have far more "super altruists" as a proportion of its population. This can be advantageous. Such people were once priests, pastors, nuns, philanthropists and the like. Before the rise of the welfare state, they provided valuable "collective goods," like education, moral guidance, and care for the sick and elderly. But what happens when a Christian society becomes post-Christian? For a while, there will still be lots of super altruists, but they will no longer be priests or pastors. They will become social justice warriors.

Taoism and Buddhism encourages veneration of ancestors and support for one’s in-group

Willard et al. (2020) studied how different religions affect prosocial behavior among Singaporeans of Chinese descent. Certain religious beliefs seemed to be key:

A moral afterlife

Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity all share a belief that good deeds will be rewarded and evil deeds punished in an afterlife. When cued to think about the afterlife, participants from all three religions expressed a greater willingness to assist strangers.

Veneration of ancestors

Veneration of ancestors is an older stage of religious belief. It began in small societies but can be used to make large societies more workable, as long as everyone shares some common ancestry—or at least a belief in common ancestry.

Participants from all three religions believed that ancestors should be venerated, but this belief was supported much more by Buddhism and Taoism than by Christianity. When participants were cued to think about ancestor veneration, the Buddhists and Taoists expressed a greater willingness to assist their family and their in-group than did participants in the control condition. This effect was absent in the Christians: in fact, they became more willing to assist strangers:

When cued to think about moralized afterlife beliefs, Buddhists showed larger increases across almost all questions than Christians in what they believed was the normative amount to give. This effect is driven by Buddhists claiming weaker norms of giving than Christians in the neutral conditions on many of the questions. Though the moralized afterlife prime produced a greater change here, it brings both groups up to relatively similar normative amounts [...]. The ancestor condition generated weaker prosocial effects for Buddhists and Taoists on allocations to strangers than for Christians. In fact, the Christians showed a stronger effect here than anticipated, and the effects of the ancestor condition were stronger than those of the moralized afterlife condition on all questions. (Willard et al. 2020)

Conclusion

Religion encourages selflessness, but to varying degrees and to varying levels. In Buddhism and Taoism, family is valued over self, but not strangers over family. Christianity goes farther; strangers are valued over self and family. The Christian religion is thus more useful in large societies whose members don’t even pretend to share common ancestry.

References

Berman, H. J. (1974). The Interaction of Law and Religion. Nashville, Abingdon Press.

http://www.socialtheology.com/docs/berman-law-and-religion-000074.pdf

Bouchard, T.J. Jr., (2004). Genetic influence on human psychological traits: A survey. Current Directions in Psychological Science 13: 148-151.

http://www.stafforini.com/docs/bouchard_-_genetic_influence_on_human_psychological_traits.pdf

Jiang, Y., R. Bachner-Melman, S.H. Chew, and R.P. Ebstein. (2015). Dopamine D4 receptor gene and religious affiliation correlate with dictator game altruism in males and not females: evidence for gender-sensitive gene × culture interaction. Frontiers in Neuroscience 24 September.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2015.00338/full

Lewis, G.J. and T.C. Bates. (2013). Common genetic influences underpin religiosity, community integration, and existential uncertainty. Journal of Research in Personality 47: 398-405.

http://timbates.wdfiles.com/local--files/cv/Lewis%20%26%20Bates%202013%20%28JRP%29%20Common%20genetic%20influencesunderpin%20religiosity%2Ccommunity%20integration%2Cand%20existential%20uncertainty.pdf

Sasaki, J.Y., H.S. Kim, T. Mojaverian, L.D.S Kelley, I.Y. Park, and S. Janušonis. (2013). Religion priming differentially increases prosocial behavior among variants of the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8(2): 209-215.

https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/kim/heejung/sasakietalscan.pdf

Willard, A.K., A. Baimel, H. Turpin, J. Jong, and H. Whitehouse. (2020). Rewarding the good and punishing the bad: The role of karma and afterlife beliefs in shaping moral norms. Evolution and Human Behavior in press.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513820300805?dgcid=raven_sd_aip_email 

Weird people

Weird people. Northwest Europeans are more individualistic, less loyal to kin, and more trusting of strangers. (Wikicommons)



Northwest Europeans are WEIRD ... as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. These traits are in turn associated with certain behavioral and psychological characteristics: "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" (Schulz et al. 2019).

In a recent study, Schulz et al. (2019) argue that WEIRDness is a heritage of Western Christianity: the branch of the Christian faith that gradually evolved into Roman Catholicism and, later, Protestantism: "we propose that the Western Church's transformation of European kinship, by promoting small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality."

Social relations are indeed different north and west of a line running approximately from Trieste to St. Petersburg, Everyone is single for at least part of adulthood, and many stay single their entire lives. In addition, households often have non-kin members, and children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households (Hajnal, 1965; ICA, 2013; Laslett, 1977). This is the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP), and there is an extensive literature on it going back to work by John Hajnal.


Was the Western Church a cause or an effect?

Schulz et al. (2019) stress the role of the Western Church in creating the WEMP, particularly by banning consanguineous marriages. The ban came about because "the Church had become obsessed with incest."

That isn't the whole story. Even before Christianity, Roman Civil Law forbade marriages within four degrees of consanguinity. The number was increased from four to seven in 732 by Pope Gregory III, but in this he was following similar bans among the newly converted Germanic peoples. The mid-seventh century Visigothic Code proclaimed that "it shall not be lawful to defile the blood of such as are related even to the sixth degree, either by marriage or otherwise" (McCann 2010, p. 57). In the early ninth century, the Church changed its way of calculating degrees of kinship by adopting the Germanic system. Under the old Roman system, first cousins were considered fourth degree; the Germanic system made them second degree. This change had the effect of doubling the number of ineligible marriage partners (McCann 2010, pp. 57-58).

Schulz et al. (2019, p. 2) assume that the WEMP postdates these prohibitions against cousin marriage: "by 1500 CE (and centuries earlier in some regions), much of Europe was characterized by a virtually unique configuration of weak (nonintensive) kinship marked by monogamous nuclear households, bilateral descent, late marriage, and neolocal residence." 

Actually, no one really knows when this pattern arose. As we go farther back in time, we have less demographic data to work with, but the same pattern still appears in the little we do have. In thirteenth-century Lincolnshire before the Black Death, households were already nuclear and a late age of first marriage was the norm, being 24 for the woman and 32 for the man (Hallam 1985, p. 66). In ninth-century France, two surveys show that households were small and nuclear among married people and that 12 to 16% of the adult population were unmarried (Hallam 1985, p. 56). A third survey shows that both men and women were marrying in their mid to late twenties; (Seccombe 1992, p. 94). Admittedly, the earliest data are limited to France, hence the authors' caveat "centuries earlier in some regions," but France was hardly an outlier in the demographic evolution of northwest Europe.

Earlier demographic data are too fragmentary to produce firm conclusions. Furthermore, the data usually concern elite males who typically took much younger brides. Nonetheless, in the general population we see some evidence of first marriages at late ages. The first-century Roman historian Tacitus wrote about the Germanic tribes: "Late comes love to the young men, and their first manhood is not enfeebled; nor for the girls is there any hot-house forcing; they pass their youth in the same way as the boys" (Tacitus Germania 20). Julius Caesar made the same observation: 

Those who have remained chaste for the longest time, receive the greatest commendation among their people: they think that by this the growth is promoted, by this the physical powers are increased and the sinews are strengthened. And to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts; of which matter there is no concealment, because they bathe promiscuously in the rivers and [only] use skins or small cloaks of deers' hides, a large portion of the body being in consequence naked. (Caesar De Bello Gallico 6: 21)

The direction of causality may thus run in the other direction. The WEMP does not exist because the Western Church diverged from the Eastern Church on the issue of consanguineous marriage. Rather, this divergence arose because the Western Church was assimilating the behavioral norms of its newly converted peoples, including the WEMP. By the eighth century, those peoples were dominant within the Western Church and able to push Christian practice in certain directions, particularly postponement of marriage and marriage outside the kin group (Frost 2017). The tail began to wag the dog.


Sources of inspiration?

Schulz et al. (2019) seem to have been inspired by earlier work by Steven Heine and Joseph Henrich (who is one of the co-authors). Curiously, no references are made to the literature on the WEMP, not even to the work by John Hajnal. Less curiously, they pass over the more speculative work by myself, hbd chick, and Kevin MacDonald (Frost 2011; Frost 2017; hbd chick 2011; hbd chick 2012; hbd chick 2014; MacDonald 1990; MacDonald 2011). To the best of my knowledge, Kevin was the first to notice an apparent relationship between northwest Europeans, Western Christianity, and certain psychological and behavioral characteristics. This is evident in his 1990 article and even more so in his 2011 one:

The nuclear family, freed from extended kinship obligations, is the basis of Western social organization. It is unique relative to other culture areas. This pattern is particularly noticeable in the Northwest of Europe rather than the Pontic steppe region. As one goes from the Northwest of Europe to the Southeast, there is an increase in joint family structure, with brothers living together with parents, grandparents and children. Family historian John Hajnal discovered the "Hajnal line" that separates Western Europe from Eastern Europe, the former characterized by nuclear family structure, relatively late marriage and large numbers of unmarried in economically difficult times, the latter by joint family structure and relatively early and universal marriage.

I suspect Schulz et al. (2019) had read material by all three of us. I base my suspicion partly on their use of certain terms and expressions and partly on their references, particularly the curious reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss as an authority on kinship. An American anthropologist would normally cite Lewis Henry Morgan or Robin Fox. I like to cite Lévi-Strauss partly because I was trained at a French-language university and partly because he was, in a sense, my academic grandfather, being the dissertation supervisor of my dissertation supervisor.  He was also the first to come up with the concept of gene-culture coevolution, but that fact is poorly known even among francophone anthropologists.

Anyway, does it matter? The important thing is to put new ideas into circulation.


References

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe. Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.
http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf 

Frost, P. (2011). The Western European Marriage Pattern. Evo and Proud. November 12 http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2011/11/western-european-marriage-pattern.html 

Hajnal, J. (1965). European marriage patterns in perspective: essays in historical demography. In D.V. Glass and D.E. Eversley (eds). Population in History. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, pp. 101-143.

Hallam, H.E. (1985). Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252-1478. Population Studies 39(1): 55-69.

hbd chick (2014). Big summary post on the Hajnal Line. October 3
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/

hbd chick (2012). Behind the Hajnal Line. January 16
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/behind-the-hajnal-line/  

hbd chick (2011). The Hajnal Line. June 30
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/the-hajnal-line/  

ICA (2013). Research Themes - Marriage Patterns, Institutions for Collective Action http://www.collective-action.info/_THE_MarriagePatterns_EMP

Laslett, P. (1977). Characteristics of the Western family considered over time. Journal of Family History 2(2): 89-115.

MacDonald, K. (2011). Going against the Tide: Ricardo Duchesne's Intellectual Defence of the West. The Occidental Quarterly 11(3): 1-22.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/duchesne-review.pdf 

MacDonald, K. (1990). Mechanisms of sexual egalitarianism in Western Europe. Ethology and Sociobiology 11: 195-238.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/E&S1990.pdf

McCann, C.A. (2010). Transgressing the Boundaries of Holiness: Sexual Deviance in the Early Medieval Penitential Handbooks of Ireland, England and France 500-1000. Theses. 76.  Seton Hall University https://scholarship.shu.edu/theses/76 

Schulz, J.F., D. Bahrami-Rad, J.P. Beauchamp, and J. Henrich. (2019). The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science 366(707): 1-12. 
https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SchulzHenrichetalTheChurchIntensiveKinshipGlobaPsychologicalVariation2019.pdf

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London: Verso.

Why universal human rights aren't universal

Jean Piaget (1896-1980). A renowned Swiss psychologist, he argued that moral development is linked to cognitive development.

Are intelligence and morality interlinked? This was what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget concluded from his studies of child development. With increasing age, children develop not only intellectually but also morally, growing out of infantile self-centredness and into adult decentered-ness:

According to Piaget, moral development — the ability to judge ethical problems in an impartial and unbiased way — relies on prior cognitive development. Indeed, cognitive and moral development are structurally similar. In both is acquired a well-founded, reasonable structure. As Jean Piaget (1948/1932, p. 404) stated: "Parallelism exists between moral and intellectual development: ... Logic is the morality of thought just as morality is the logic of action." And this parallelism is based on the cognitive nature of morality, e.g. to behave ethically one has to take the perspective of third parties. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 32)

This view has become popular and is even central to much of present-day thinking. If people are better educated, they will presumably become not only smarter but also more empathic and, thus, more considerate of their fellow humans. This view, as popular as it is, doesn't seem quite true. Many of us have known people who are intelligent and yet lacking in empathy. We call them psychopaths. Usually, they're explained away as aberrations. They're sick, aren't they? In reality, the line between 'normal' and 'psychopath' is arbitrary—like most mental traits, the capacity for empathy is distributed continuously along a bell curve. Lots of seemingly normal people have little empathy.

Nor does Piaget's view seem true if we look farther afield. Many moral systems attach little importance to empathy. Indeed, of all the world religions, Christianity seems unique in advocating the moral duty not only to help others but also to feel their pain, even when they aren't fellow Christians. Yes, most Christians fail to meet this standard of universal selflessness, but other religions don't set the bar so high. 

Indeed, the ideal of universal selflessness isn’t at all universal. It developed essentially within a single cultural context, the Christian world:

In Judaism and Christianity, "God created man in his own image" (Gen1:27 ESV). Humans being the image of God, "God-likeness", implies treating humans in a respectful way. Of course, at first blush, history reveals large discrepancies between the message of Christianity and the actual behavior of Christians. However, this does not mean that such behavior was consistent with the Christian message, and in many cases it was criticized by prominent Christians at the time. The Christian message had a corrective function. For instance, the inhumane treatment of American Indians by Spanish colonists was criticized by the Dominican priest Bartholomé de Las Casas (as mentioned above). The abolitionist movement was organized by Protestants and led by the Evangelical Christian William Wilberforce. The horrors of war were mitigated by charities such as the Red Cross, which was founded by the evangelical Christian, Henry Dunant. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 34)

The Muslim world imported as many slaves as did the Christian world, yet a Muslim abolitionist movement never arose, and the trade was ultimately abolished worldwide through the intervention of Christian nations, particularly Great Britain. Today, the slave trade has left no legacy of guilt among Muslims, while it definitely has in those nations that strove to bring it to an end.

This apparent paradox has led Heiner Rindermann—a well-known psychologist in HBD circles—to challenge the Piagetian idea that moral development is linked to intellectual development. These two mental traits are distinct and have followed their own trajectories in different moral traditions.

To prove his point, he teamed up with sociologist Noah Carl to study how respect for human rights is related, cross-culturally, to cognitive ability and religion. They found a stronger relationship with religion than with cognitive ability. Specifically, the percentage of Christians in a society had a stronger positive impact (r = .62) on respect for human rights (Rindermann and Carl 2018) than did educational level (r = .54) or cognitive ability (r = .50 to .51).

One can quibble about the methodology. The study defines human rights largely as the right to make choices on one's own, regardless of existing social norms. Freedom of religion, for instance, is defined as the freedom not only to practice one's religion but also to convert to another. As the authors themselves note, this is not a legitimate freedom in much of the world, unless one is converting to the majority religion. Freedom doesn’t mean that a minority is free to become the majority.

Nonetheless, there does seem to be a correlation between Christianity and respect for human rights as long as we define the latter, at least in part, as maximization of personal choice and autonomy. 

Is Christianity confounded with European ancestry?

Correlation isn't causation. Couldn't Christianity be a proxy for "European-ness"? Indeed, most Christians are at least partly of European ancestry, and even more live in societies founded and still largely run by people of European origin.

To control for this confounding factor, one could compare Christian and non-Christian societies within a region where European ancestry is minimal. Sub-Saharan Africa comes to mind. Even in South Africa, the European minority is down to the single digits.

Rindermann and Carl (2018, p. 60) did make that comparison:

Within sub-Saharan Africa [...] the percentage of Christians is still positively (but weakly) related to human rights (r = .10; N = 48), and the percentage of Muslims is still negatively (but weakly) related to human rights (r = -.12).

Those correlations are indeed weak. Moreover, the one between Christianity and respect for human rights is largely due to the relatively stable societies of southern Africa, i.e., South Africa itself, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Those societies enjoy a judicial and administrative legacy that may not last much longer, given recent events and the example of Zimbabwe.

To be honest, I feel little in common with fellow Christians like Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe. Ironically, both of them have a better claim to being Christian than I do, since I refused to be confirmed after attending my confirmation classes.

Is European ancestry confounded with a genetically influenced trait?

If European ancestry is a confounding factor, could it be a proxy for some unknown genetically influenced trait? Rindermann and Carl tried to answer this question by estimating the average "skin brightness" of each country.

Skin brightness is more highly correlated with human rights than is cranial capacity (r = .25 vs. .18). Of course, skin color itself is unlikely to exert any effect; it constitutes a marker for evolutionary pressures that may be associated with culture. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 53)

This is, I suspect, a reference to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and his belief that humans had to become more intelligent as they spread into harsher northern climates: "those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization" Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, Section 92.

Rindermann and Carl seem to be assuming that European skin became white solely as an adaptation to the northern natural environment. They also seem to be assuming that moral development is linked to cognitive development—the very hypothesis they want to test.

A better genetic marker would be the long allele for the 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter gene. It's less frequent in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures, the latter being the cultures of western and northern Europe—the same cultures that value so much the rights of the individual (Chiao and Blizinsky 2010). In a study of American toddlers, carriers of the short allele were more likely to imitate the way other people behaved (Schroeder et al. 2016).

The study provides additional evidence for the view that Christianity, in itself, doesn't explain why Europeans, and especially northwest Europeans, see all individuals as being endowed with the same rights. Of the three branches of Christianity, Protestantism has the strongest correlation with respect for human rights (r = .48), followed by Catholicism (r = .42), and finally Orthodoxy (r = -.07) (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 52). This suggests that Christianity changed as its geocenter progressively moved from the Middle East to southern Europe and then to northwest Europe, along the way becoming more focused on the individual and on individual responsibility. 

Within Christianity, Protestantism stresses conscience, individual guilt, internal control, autonomy and self-responsibility (Weber, 2008/1904). All these traits are conducive for liberty, the rule of law, democracy and human rights (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 34)

[...] in Protestant countries, trust is higher, corruption is lower and levels of social and economic freedom are higher (Delhey & Newton, 2005; Harrison, 2013). People tend to be more self-controlled, having internalized social rules, meaning that harsh and violent control by the state is not needed. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 37)

The two authors are aware of the Hajnal Line and its relationship to a suite of psychological and behavioral traits. In societies north and west of a line running approximately from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social relations have long shown a certain pattern:

- men and women marry relatively late

- many people never marry

- children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households

- households often have non-kin members

This is the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP). Everyone is single for at least part of adulthood, many stay single their entire lives, and a significant proportion of households have members not belonging to the immediate family or even to kin. In short, an individual is less fettered by the bonds of kinship even within his or her household (Frost 2017).

This led to late marriage, high rates of childlessness (of about half of the cohort), more rights for women, and large investments in education. Going further than Hajnal himself did, it arguably also enhanced delay of gratification, self-control (especially of sexuality), conscientiousness, frugality, industry and cognitive ability. The causes of this marriage pattern can be traced to Roman, Germanic and Christian traditions, to the interests of the church, and to the interests of landlords and guilds. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 39)

The above view is also the one held by *hbd chick, i.e., the WEMP developed after the introduction of Christianity and was, at least in part, a consequence of medieval Christian practices and institutions. Yet there is good evidence for the existence of the WEMP as early as ninth-century France and fragmentary evidence even earlier (Frost 2017). I have argued that the arrow of causality points in the other direction: a pre-existing mindset in northwest Europe was carried over into Christianity, much like the Christmas tree and other pagan traditions. Later, as the center of Christendom moved west and north, this mindset gained importance within Western Christianity and pushed it more and more toward the idea of individual salvation and an individual relationship with God. 

The northwest European mindset is characterized essentially by four interrelated mental traits:

Independent social orientation - independence of the self from others, including stronger motivation toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy and emphasis on personal happiness rather than social happiness. 

Universal rule adherence - capacity to obey universal and absolute moral rules, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational morality based on kinship. These rules are enforced by monitoring not only others but also oneself. Rule-breakers may be branded as morally worthless and expelled.

Affective empathy - capacity to experience the emotional states of other people in order to prevent harm and to provide help if needed. Help is conditional on the other person being judged morally worthy.

Guilt proneness - capacity to self-monitor thoughts and behavior for rule adherence in order to self-judge and, if necessary, to self-punish.

Conclusion

Are universal human rights truly universal? If we look at cultures across space and time, we find that the notion of human rights was nonexistent in most cultures and historical periods. Not until the 18th and 19th centuries did some countries codify this notion in law, although it clearly has antecedents that go farther back, at least to the formulation of canon law by the Catholic Church and perhaps farther. Northwest Europeans seem to have long been predisposed to think in terms of individual rights and universal moral rules.

Since the early 19th century, we in the West have tried to impose these rights on the entire world, initially through the suppression of the slave trade and then through the efforts of missionaries and colonial authorities to ban certain practices, like the custom of sati in India. Such efforts became an integral part of Western imperialism and "the white man's burden."

Although this burden has since been taken up by truly international bodies, like the U.N., the notion of universal human rights still reflects a Western view of people as atomized individuals who mainly seek to maximize their wealth, happiness, and personal autonomy. This is not how most humans view the purpose of existence. For that matter, this view was not originally held by northwest Europeans, whose understanding of moral universalism has steadily radicalized and expanded in scope over time.

References

Chiao, J.Y. and Blizinsky, K.D. (2010). Culture-gene coevolution of individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277: 529-537.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1681/529.short

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Rindermann, H. and N. Carl. (2018). Human rights: Why countries differ, Comparative Sociology 17: 29-69.

Schopenhauer, A. (1974)[1851]. Parerga and Paralipomena, English translation by E. F. J. Payne, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2 volumes.

Schroeder, K.B., Asherson, P., Blake, P.R., Fenstermacher, S.K., and Saudino, K.J. (2016). Variant at serotonin transporter gene predicts increased imitation in toddlers: relevance to the human capacity for cumulative culture. Biology Letters 12(4).

http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc4881356

A pauper's death

 

The Pauper, 1894-1895, Theodor Kittelsen. This and other works by Kittelsen have appeared on Norwegian black metal albums

 

Black metal is a musical subgenre that grew out of death metal and, more broadly, heavy metal. In general, it pushes certain aspects of this genre to even farther extremes: fast tempos, shrieking vocals, and violent stage acts. Black metal bands can be found almost anywhere—Europe, North America, East Asia, even Indonesia and Israel.

In one country, however, it has developed differently, taking violence off-stage and into the political arena. That country is Norway. In the early to mid-1990s, black metallists launched a wave of arson attacks on churches, including one dating from the 12th century. By 1996 there had been 50 church burnings, with similar attacks spreading to Sweden.

Those convicted showed no remorse, and lack of remorse still prevails among many in the black metal scene:

Many, such as Infernus and Gaahl of Gorgoroth, continue to praise the church burnings, with the latter saying "there should have been more of them, and there will be more of them". Others, such as Necrobutcher and Kjetil Manheim of Mayhem and Abbath of Immortal, see the church burnings as having been futile. Manheim claimed that many arsons were "just people trying to gain acceptance" within the black metal scene. Watain vocalist Erik Danielsson respected the attacks, but said of those responsible: "the only Christianity they defeated was the last piece of Christianity within themselves. Which is a very good beginning, of course". (Wikipedia, 2015b)

Why this hostility to Christianity? And why is it more extreme in Norway? These questions are raised in a review of black metal around the world:

Individualistic and anti-Christian rhetoric is common across the American death metal scene, and metal bands worldwide look to native traditions as a means to combat cultural hegemony [...], yet nothing on the scale of the crimes in Norway has occurred elsewhere. (Wallach et al., 2011, p. 198)

One reason is the role of organized religion in Norwegian life. Although there are other denominations, the Church of Norway is the leading one and receives State support. Despite recent legislation in 2012 to weaken this relationship with the State, all clergy remain civil servants, the central and regional church administrations remain part of the state administration, all municipalities must support the Church of Norway's activities, and municipal authorities are still represented in its local bodies (Wikipedia, 2015a)

As either a partner or a rival of the government, the Church of Norway has helped to make public policy: first, the postwar expansion of the welfare state and, later, the boycotts against South Africa. Now, it is leading the push for large-scale non-European/non-Christian immigration, which began in the early 1990s through the "sanctuary movement." By 1993, as many as 140 congregations were housing 650 Albanians from Kosovo. By reframing immigration in moral terms, the Church made it that much harder to place limits on it, since morality is normally perceived in absolute terms, e.g., murder is always wrong, and not wrong within limits (Lippert and Rehaag, 2013, pp. 126-129).

After a lull, this movement is once more on the upswing:

As the group of unreturnable refugees in Norway has risen over recent years, churches have again become places for public appeals for these groups, through hunger strikes, tents camped as protest at the walls of central churches, and asylum marches following old pilgrimage paths. (Lippert and Rehaag, 2013, p.129).

The Church of Norway is now working with Lutherans elsewhere in Northern Europe to facilitate immigration from Africa and the Middle East. At a meeting this year in Trondheim, the Lutheran World Federation pushed for three measures: expansion of Italy's Mare Nostrum initiative to the entire Mediterranean; creation of "safe passage" corridors for migrants; and "just distribution" of migrants within Europe (Anon, 2015).

Norway is not the only country where churches have been promoting African and Muslim immigration, but church involvement is especially pivotal there and in Scandinavia as a whole. Because immigration was very limited until recent decades, it is legitimized much more by Christian universalism than by a pre-existing tradition of immigration, as in the United States, Canada, and France. A second reason is the relative dominance of one State-supported church and the unthinking adherence of most Scandinavians, even atheists, to the Lutheran tradition. Thus, in comparison to other predominantly Christian societies, they can more quickly reach a policy consensus, or have one imposed on them.

When a stage act leaves the stage

This was the social context that radicalized Norway's black metal scene, causing it to go beyond the fake violence of stage performances. Wallach et al. (2011, p. 196) argue that the acts of arson had their roots in "disaffection and alienation from the dominant society," which many musicians tried to channel into "an extended campaign to return Norway to an idealized pagan past through acts of destruction."

That campaign failed. It foundered on the movement's nihilism and contempt for ordinary men and women. "Extreme metal in general does not lend itself well to inciting social change beyond its own scene, since the lyrics are frequently indecipherable and the musical characteristics are often confounding to the uninitiated listener" (Wallach et al., 2011, p. 196). Moreover, as a haven for disaffected people, the metal scene tended to attract loners, exhibitionists, and other misfits. Though perhaps better at seeing through the lies of mainstream society, they lacked the social skills to win the mainstream over to their point of view.

There were of course other reasons why they failed to win over the mainstream. The burning of historic churches antagonized Norwegians in general, including traditionalists and even many black metallists, thus making it easier for the police to crack down and sentence key individuals to lengthy prison terms. Commercial success caused others to become apolitical: "many black metal musicians are now attempting to focus on their actual music and do not want that to be overshadowed by social and political activism" (Wallach et al.,2011, p. 196).

Today, the black metal scene exists mostly as a weird subgenre:

Isolated acts of vandalism still occur, and some in the scene, like Gaahl of Gorgoroth, still engage in violence. Yet the incendiary rhetoric frequently leveled at Western urban society, multiculturalism, and Christianity has not produced the uprising and pagan resurgence that some in the scene claim to desire. (Wallach et al., p. 196)

And Breivik?

It would be tempting to see the church burnings as a prelude to Anders Breivik and the 2011 Norway attacks. Yet, by his own account, Breivik was never into black metal, preferring hip-hop instead. In his manifesto, he disparaged the Oslo metal scene as quiet and law-abiding, an indication that the church burnings had limited support even within that subculture.

[...] As for the right wing community at that time, it was simple. They loved metal and we loved hip-hop. Being into the very small right wing community or the larger mainstream rock community meant Goth girls and hard rock. I disliked both. The big irony was that they; Edward and his friends, were a lot more "normal" than us during this period. They were peaceful while we were violent. They followed the law and rules while we broke the law and ignored the rules again and again. At the same time, the hip-hop community was cheered by the media, praised as the pinnacle of tolerance among the new generation, while THEY were condemned for their political views, systematically harassed and beaten by non-white gangs, extremist Marxist gangs (Blitz etc) and the police. (Berwick, 2011)

During this time of his life, he saw young Muslim men as role models and looked down on "ethnic Norwegians" as sissies:

If I ever got in to trouble I expected my friends to back me up 100% without submitting or running away, as I would for them. Very few ethnic Norwegians shared these principles. They would either "sissy out", allow themselves to be subdued or run away when facing a threat. [...] The majority of people who shared these principles of pride was the Muslim youths and the occasional skinhead.

In time, Breivik became disenchanted, eventually leaving the hip-hop milieu after a personal incident. The more he associated with Muslims and antifas, the more his respect for them became a simple matter of "necessity":

In Oslo, as an ethnic Norwegian youth aged 14-18 you were restricted if you didn't have affiliations to the Muslim gangs. Your travel was restricted to your own neighbourhoods in Oslo West and certain central points in the city. Unless you had Muslim contacts you could easily be subject to harassment, beatings and robbery. Our alliances with the Muslim gangs were strictly seen as a necessity for us, at least for me. We, however, due to our alliances had the freedom of movement.

In short, there is no reason to believe that the black metal scene helped to push Breivik toward his terror attacks. The only elements common to both are Norway itself, its policy of demographic change, and the weak hold of mainstream culture on marginal individuals.

Conclusion

Aside from a few frozen islands and a brief claim to part of Greenland, Norway never had a colonial empire. Nor was it ever involved in the slave trade. Yet, today, the average Norwegian feels more guilt over having white skin and more deference toward dark-skinned people than do citizens of most European countries, including former colonial powers. This is a relatively recent development, being postwar and mostly post-1960—a time when Norway and other Scandinavian countries were striving to assimilate modern Western values, including antiracism.

Scandinavians have been very good at internalizing and acting out those values. They are like model students who have learned to outdo their teachers. This partly reflects—ironically—their cultural homogeneity and their ability to reach consensus and act collectively with little foot-dragging.

This also reflects certain profound psychological traits that characterize Northwest Europeans in general, with Scandinavians forming the epicenter. To the north and west of the Hajnal line, Europeans have long had weaker kinship ties and correspondingly stronger individualism. This social environment has in turn favored a greater emphasis on absolute, universally applicable rules, combined with a stronger desire to expel rule breakers. This system of morality differs from the relativistic, kin-based morality that prevails elsewhere in the world, where right and wrong are more a matter of whose side you are on ... and who does what to whom.

Moral universalism and moral absolutism have brought many benefits. They have enabled Northwest Europeans to free themselves from the limitations of kinship and build large high-trust societies that leave greater room for the individual. But such societies have an Achilles heel. They are vulnerable to people who play by a different rule book, be they native deviants who practice "selfishness for me and selflessness for thee" or immigrants from low-trust, kin-based societies ... in short, the majority of humans on this planet.

In the past, this was no problem because Norway received few immigrants and because rule breakers of any origin were ruthlessly ostracized. Over the past half-century, however, Norwegians have been persuaded that the supreme rule is Thou shalt not be racist. It follows, therefore, that racists are supreme offenders who must be expelled from society, like witches and heretics of another age. A psychological mechanism that once enabled Norwegian society to perpetuate itself has been reprogrammed to ensure its self-liquidation.

That outcome is not far off. In a country of five million or so, it doesn't take long to elect a new people. Even remote Arctic communities like Narvik are starting to look like a cross between Mogadishu and Karachi. Will Norwegians stop before it’s too late?

Stopping means dismantling the moral consensus that has legitimized this massive demographic change. But how? Violence simply confirms the judgment that racism is evil. This is what happened after the church burnings and the attacks of 2011. A moral consensus can be dismantled only by moral means ...by denouncing it openly and nonviolently.

That won't be easy. No one wants to be a "bad" person, and in a conformist society like Norway a rule-breaker is “bad” no matter how stupid the rule may seem. As long as the rule is affirmed and never challenged, people will obey and make others obey. Only when enough people challenge it—openly and defiantly—will the moral consensus weaken and collapse. To get from here to there will be difficult but it can be done. Rules of sexual morality were deconstructed. Why not antiracism?

Finally, Norwegians should remember the cost of being "good." A "good" member of a death cult will die just as surely as a "bad" member. And that is exactly what antiracism has become for Norway. A death cult.

References 

Anon. (2015). Europe's Lutherans pledge increased efforts to welcome refugees, The Lutheran World Federation, May 19

https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/europe%E2%80%99s-lutherans-pledge-increased-efforts-welcome-refugees 

Berwick [Breivik], A. (2011). A European Declaration of Independence.

https://publicintelligence.net/anders-behring-breiviks-complete-manifesto-2083-a-european-declaration-of-independence/ 

Lippert, R.K., and S. Rehaag. (2013). Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Movements, Routledge

https://books.google.ca/books?id=LBAmltBXyUYC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Wallach, J., H.M. Berger, P.D. Greene. (2011). Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World, Duke University Press.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=1WgxKHHr-2kC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Wikipedia (2015a). Church of Norway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Norway#Current_issues 

Wikipedia (2015b). Early Norwegian black metal scene

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Norwegian_black_metal_scene