Do Health Problems Drive Cultural Changes Relating to Civil Society?

The Economist this week has an article that suggests that communities that live in conditions in which communicable diseases are a major threat are likely to develop cultural traits that keep people from gathering frequently in large groups.

Their hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. They therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.....

The two researchers also looked at anthropological data on how much people in “traditional” (ie, non-urban) societies move around in different parts of the world. They found that in more religiously diverse (and more disease-ridden) places people move shorter distances than in healthier, religiously monotonous societies. The implication is that religious diversity causes people to keep themselves to themselves, and thus makes it harder for them to catch germs from infidels.

Of course, correlation is not causation. But religion is not the only cultural phenomenon that stops groups of people from mixing. Language has the same effect, and in another, as yet unpublished study Mr Fincher and Dr Thornhill found a similar relationship there too. Moreover, their search of the literature turned up work which suggests that xenophobia is linked psychologically with fear of disease (the dirty foreigner…). Perhaps, then, the underlying reason why there is so much hostility between ethnic groups is nothing to do with the groups themselves, but instead with the diseases they may bring.

Comment: I suppose that, if the hypothesis is true, it ought to have a corollary. Over the course of history many diseases have spread from their original point of origin to other regions, most dramatically during the Columbian Exchange. So one might expect there have been cultural changes that fragmented social groups during history, and that those changes might have occurred more rapidly during periods of introduction of new diseases. On the other hand, the introduction of modern public health practices has decreased the threats of communicable diseases, and so the more fully the public health practices have penetrated a society, the less pressure there might be to keep people apart. Of course, at the same time that modern public health measures are being disseminated, so too are populations growing and so too is growing urbanization increasing contact rates. It will be interesting to see how this works out, and what implications one can draw for the growth of civil society. JAD