Kinship is the organizing principle of small human societies, and this is as far as cultural evolution has gone in much of the world. Peter Frost notes that there are two paths toward higher civilization:
Cultural evolution has gone farther in two parts of the world: Northwest Europe and East Asia. The outcomes are rather similar — peaceful, orderly societies encompassing large numbers of people — but they have come about differently. Northwest Europeans could pursue this trajectory because they already had relatively weak kinship when they began to develop larger and more complex societies in the 12th century. There was a pre-existing tendency to live outside kinship structures, as seen in the Western European Marriage Pattern: men and women married relatively late and many never married; children usually left the family household to form new households; and many individuals circulated among non-related households, typically young people sent out as servants (Hajnal, 1965; Hallam, 1985; Hartman, 2004; Seccombe, 1992). This weak kinship environment was made possible by three mental adaptations: greater capacity for involuntary guilt and empathy; greater receptiveness to absolute moral norms, as opposed to relativistic ones based on kinship; and stronger desire to punish, exclude, and even kill violators of these norms (Frost, 2014a; Frost, 2014b).
When the Dark Ages came to an end, Northwest Europeans were well positioned to exploit the possibility of creating a larger and more complex social environment. Their mental makeup “pre-adapted” them for a trajectory of increasingly radical change: strengthening of Church and State, expansion of Christian guilt culture, pacification of social relations, and reorganization of these relations independently of kinship to create new forms of social organization (market economy, nation state, ideological regime, etc.).
East Asians have followed a different trajectory to a similar end, relying less on internal means of behavior control (guilt, empathy) and more on external means (shaming, family discipline, community surveillance, notions of moral duty). The main difference is in the relationship between self and society. Whereas a greater sense of self has helped Northwest Europeans to transcend the limitations of kinship and, thus, build larger societies, East Asians have relied on a lesser sense of self to create a web of interdependence that extends beyond close kin. There is a stronger tendency toward holistic attention, emphasis on social (versus personal) happiness, and suspension of self-interest. Conversely, there is a weaker tendency toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy (Kitayama et al., 2014).
This trajectory may have been particularly favored by rice farming, which requires community planning of water use and community construction of irrigation networks. Even when neighboring districts are compared in China, individualism seems to be much weaker where rice is grown than where wheat is grown. This pattern holds up even in urban residents who have never actually lived on a farm and whose connection to rice farming is only genealogical (Talhelm et al., 2014).