Why Our Cultural Values Feel Universal (Part 2)

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In Part One of this article, I explored how Europe’s particular historical pathway shaped WEIRD psychology and how its values and assumptions became globally influential. Part Two turns to China and Malaysia to explore how different historical conditions produced different cultural solutions.

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HOW OTHER SOCIETIES RESPONDED TO THE SAME INITIAL CHALLENGES The impact of colonialism has been so profound that it is almost impossible to look at the world today without that lens.  Many authors are currently looking at how colonialism shaped the evolution of societies across the world, but often this is looked at from an economic or political perspective after they regained independence.

Living in Asia for the past 30 years, and through my work as a museum guide and intercultural facilitator, I have encountered alternative worldviews that are coherent systems in their own right. This is beautifully explored in my friend Welyne Jeffrey Jehom’s recently published book, Enriching Iban Pua Kumbu ⁹. She questions the heavily Western assumptions embedded in the conceptual “toolkit” researchers are encouraged to use. A similar bias remains present in global organisations. Many of the people I work with find themselves navigating between a WEIRD-shaped education and professional environment and their own cultural inheritance.

We have to admit that we live in mostly WEIRD times now,  but that was not always the case, and the wheel keeps turning. Giving the same depth of historical narrative to non-Western approaches as Henrich gives to WEIRD psychology would help us understand how other cultures drove their own co-evolution of psychology, institutions, and technologies, enabling them to achieve remarkable reach and influence and what eventually led to the erosion of their dominance.  It would provide intercultural educators with useful narratives and frameworks to help people see their own biases and the process that made them who they are today.

Becoming a volunteer guide at museums in Malaysia and Indonesia has broadened my world. No single civilisation holds the centre permanently. The Islamic world was once the planet's most sophisticated knowledge economy. China was producing technologies Europe would not develop independently for centuries.

WEIRD dominance is real — but it is historically recent.   Walk through the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, and you will find European ceramics from the 17th to 19th centuries made in the Netherlands, France, Spain, and England —all attempting to reproduce Chinese and Islamic ceramics. At the moment Europe was beginning its global expansion, its elites were looking East with admiration and envy. Europe was learning from, imitating, and adapting Eastern technologies and artistic traditions¹⁰. The irony is that China is often criticised today for practices Europe once used itself.

What I am curious to explore, through the lens of Henrich, is how other societies developed different solutions to similar challenges of survival, stability and collaboration  — and how those solutions continue to influence the way people think, relate, and organise themselves today.

So what happens when we look beyond Europe? Let's turn to two parts of the world that have shaped my own thinking.

Let's start with China — a civilisation that has been solving Henrich's foundational challenges at a scale that still astonishes. For me, the most useful place to begin is with the historical conditions that shaped its institutions and social order.

Where medieval Europe evolved amid fragmentation and competing authorities, China faced a different challenge entirely: scale.

Unified under the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE, China governed territories and populations that far exceeded those of most European kingdoms of the same era. The central challenge was not fragmentation, but coherence: how to maintain order across a vast and diverse civilisation over long periods of time.

China's answer was not a Church standing apart from the state, but a powerful imperial system supported by Confucian ideals. Confucian philosophy emerged during the turmoil of the Warring States period around the fifth century BCE. Like many influential philosophies, it emerged in response to crisis. Confucius was fundamentally concerned with one question: how can social harmony be maintained in a world vulnerable to disorder?

His answer differed from the individual-centred traditions that would later emerge in the West. Rather than seeing people primarily as autonomous individuals, Confucian thought understood them through relationships — parent and child, ruler and subject, elder and younger, teacher and student. This is sometimes dismissed as hierarchy. Hierarchy certainly existed, but so did reciprocal obligations. A ruler owed benevolence. A parent owed care. Authority carried ethical responsibility.

Confucianism did not become influential simply because Confucius taught it. For centuries it competed with other philosophical traditions, including Daoism, Mohism, and Legalism.¹¹ Its lasting impact came when successive dynasties adopted Confucian ideas as a framework for governance and education. Through the examination system, these ideas became embedded in institutions, family aspirations, and everyday life. In Henrich's terms, it was not the philosophy alone that mattered, but the way institutions helped reproduce it across generations.

Among the ideas that became embedded in this Confucian political and moral framework was the Mandate of Heaven. Unlike the European doctrine of divine right, the Mandate was conditional. A ruler who governed unjustly could lose legitimacy. Famine, rebellion, or social disorder could be interpreted as signs that Heaven had withdrawn its approval. Political authority therefore rested not only on power, but also on the expectation of competent and moral governance.

These ideas became embedded in institutions. Beginning in early forms during the Han Dynasty and becoming increasingly sophisticated over time, the imperial examination system selected officials through mastery of classical learning. By modern standards, it was far from perfect: access to education was unequal, women were excluded, and orthodoxy was often reinforced.

Yet historically it represented one of the world's most ambitious attempts to build an administrative class that was not entirely dependent on hereditary aristocracy.

The examination system shaped more than government. It shaped family life itself. Education became not merely a path to personal advancement, but a moral obligation and a source of family honour. Across generations, families organised enormous sacrifices around learning and educational success.

Here the parallel with Henrich becomes visible. Institutions and psychology coevolved. Confucian values shaped education. Education shaped officials. Officials reinforced Confucian norms. Families raised children to succeed within that system. Over centuries, a self-reinforcing cycle emerged.

The result was not a civilisation lacking innovation or diversity, but one that cultivated different strengths. Where Europe's historical trajectory encouraged greater individual autonomy, decentralisation, and impersonal institutions, China's experience encouraged relational obligation, educational achievement, bureaucratic continuity, and the pursuit of social harmony.

Neither pathway was accidental. Each emerged from different historical challenges. And each left a lasting imprint on how people understand authority, responsibility, and what good governance looks like.

These institutions did more than maintain order. For long periods of history, they helped make China one of the world's most prosperous, technologically advanced, and influential civilisations. China was often the world's largest economy, a major source of technological innovation, the centre of extensive trade networks, and a destination for scholars, merchants, and knowledge seekers from across Asia.

Just as Henrich argues that Europe's institutions created advantages that contributed to its global rise, China's institutions generated strengths of their own — enabling large-scale governance, cultural integration, economic development, and international exchange on a remarkable scale.

I am aware that I am looking at China through a very narrow lens — and that what shaped Chinese culture and psychology over two millennia is incomparably more complex. Geography, ecology, trade, religion, warfare, migration, and countless other forces all played their part.

My purpose is simply to show that when we apply Henrich's lens beyond Europe, a coherent story emerges. China developed solutions that fit the specific challenges it faced. The outcome was different from Europe's path because it emerged from different historical conditions.

This is also a reminder that no civilisation holds the centre forever. The solutions that help a civilisation thrive in one era may become constraints when conditions change. The same forces that once helped China thrive eventually struggled to adapt to a rapidly changing world. If China illustrates the power of civilisational continuity, Southeast Asia illustrates something genuinely different: the capacity for cultural layering, adaptive coexistence, and the management of extraordinary diversity as a civilisational project in itself.

This is also the hardest section of this essay to write with confidence. The historical record for this region, particularly before the fifteenth century, is significantly thinner than for China or Europe. Much of what we know was filtered through the accounts of foreign traders, colonial administrators, and European scholars asking different questions from different positions. Contemporary Malaysian historians — among them Khoo Kay Kim and Farish Noor — have spent decades rebuilding this narrative from within, reading against the colonial grain. What follows draws on their scholarship, on Henrich's own framework applied as honestly as I can to a region he does not fully engage, and on my twenty-five years living and working in Malaysia.

The societies of the Malay Archipelago faced a fundamentally different challenge from those of China or Europe. The question was not how to govern a vast territory through a unified bureaucratic system, nor how to manage competing centres of political and religious authority. It was more immediate: how do you sustain cooperation and coexistence across communities that speak different languages, practise different religions, and carry entirely different cultural logics — often within the same port, the same market, the same stretch of coastline?

The institutional answer was not unification but accommodation. What made a ruler powerful here was not territorial control but the depth of his relationships — the number of followers who chose to give him their allegiance and his demonstrated capacity to take care of them. Malay kingship operated on a logic of reciprocity: authority was relational and conditional rather than divinely mandated or bureaucratically codified.

The most vivid expression of this logic is the Malaccan Sultanate at its fifteenth-century height. More than eighty languages were spoken within its port. The Sultanate's approach was not to integrate diverse communities into a single cultural model but to ensure each could maintain its own language, religious practice, and internal social order while participating in shared commercial norms.

This was deliberate policy, not accidental tolerance — and it was commercially rational. Malacca thrived because it made itself the safest and most hospitable port in the region. As Syed Hussein Alatas documented, there was at this time a flourishing indigenous trading civilisation across the archipelago, actively incorporating and adapting ideas from India, China, Persia, and Arabia — long before European contact reshaped the picture.

Under British colonial rule, Chinese workers arrived to work in the tin mines and Indian workers in the rubber plantations. Rather than integration, the governing logic was parallel coexistence — each community permitted to maintain its own language, schools, and institutions alongside the others. The result was a society structured around communities living alongside one another without being asked or helped to become one. The colonial period did not plant the seeds of plural coexistence — it simply changed the conditions under which that coexistence had to be sustained.

The orientation toward harmony that characterises much of Malaysian public culture is not mere politeness. When communities with genuinely different religious frameworks, logics, worldviews, and historical experiences share the same political space, ensuring peaceful coexistence and collective growth requires subtle and constant management of difference.

The communication patterns that follow are equally purposeful. Indirectness, contextual layering, careful attention to face — these are instruments for preserving relationships across difference in a society where relationships between communities are always potentially fragile. I remember an Indian client, who, after many years in the USA, was frustrated by what he saw as unnecessarily long emails in Malaysia. What he missed was that the context was the message — carrying the relational information needed to build trust and ensure clarity. His message may have looked efficient. It was not effective.

If Henrich is right, then the psychological patterns visible in Malaysia today are the long inheritance of a society that learnt to sustain cooperation across difference rather than enforce assimilation.

Where Europe's historical trajectory encouraged greater individual autonomy, decentralisation, and impersonal institutions, and China's experience encouraged relational obligation, educational achievement, and bureaucratic continuity, Malaysia developed something else: a deep capacity for accommodation. From centuries of managed diversity emerged a people skilled at reading context, switching fluidly between languages and thinking patterns, and building the relational conditions that allow things to happen. Where the WEIRD tradition optimised for speed, standardisation, and universal rules, Malaysia learnt to optimise for fit — the patient, situational intelligence of a society that has always known that one approach rarely works for everyone.

CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR WORLD AND FOR INTERCULTURAL PRACTICE

Today, WEIRD dominance is already being contested—economically, politically, and psychologically. Non-Western perspectives are becoming increasingly influential in global governance, business, and public discourse. The world is becoming more multipolar, and with that comes a greater diversity of assumptions about what constitutes good leadership, effective institutions, and a well-functioning society.

If Henrich is right, then culture and psychology are not fixed. They emerge through long processes of adaptation between people, institutions, and the challenges they face.

Understanding those processes matters because it helps us see that many behaviours, values, and ways of thinking that appear self-evident to us are, in fact, culturally shaped.

The deeper our understanding of this relationship between culture, institutions and psychology, the easier it becomes to broaden our worldview, appreciate alternative perspectives, and engage with difference with curiosity rather than judgement. In doing so, we strengthen what Henrich calls our collective brain—the shared pool of knowledge, experience, and insight that allows societies to learn, innovate, and thrive.

Writing this article reinforced my conviction that cultural difference is not random.

Every society faces the same fundamental challenges — how to organise cooperation, transmit knowledge, govern collective life. What differs is which challenge felt most urgent and the historical conditions in which societies addressed them, the institutions those conditions produced, and the psychology those institutions shaped over generations.

Henrich explains this process for Europe with precision and depth. Looking at China and Malaysia shows how the same process can produce very different outcomes. True intercultural agility requires us to consider many different perspectives—and to recognise that cultural learning never ends.

For intercultural educators, this carries a particular responsibility. It is not enough to describe cultural differences. We must help people understand where those differences come from, why they make sense within their own contexts, and how they continue to shape behaviour today. By making these insights accessible and relevant, we can help reduce the costs of ignorance and ethnocentrism while creating greater capacity for dialogue, cooperation, and learning across cultures.

Perhaps, then, the ability to navigate cultures is ultimately the ability to live with ambiguity — or as Joseph Shaules puts it, the capacity to hold what is similar and what is different at the same time.

Acknowledgements

This article was inspired in part by my participation in the Japan Intercultural Institute (JII) Masterclass and Book Club. I am particularly grateful to Joseph Shaules and Ishita Ray for creating a space where curiosity, reflection, and meaningful dialogue about culture can flourish. Their work, insights, and encouragement helped shape many of the questions explored in this essay.

Note on the Use of AI

This article was written with the support of artificial intelligence tools, including ChatGPT and Claude. The ideas, arguments, interpretations, and conclusions are my own. I used AI as a thinking partner to challenge my assumptions, provide critical feedback, improve clarity, strengthen structure, and refine the writing. Any errors, omissions, or interpretations remain entirely my responsibility.

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Footnotes:

⁹ In the introduction to Enriching Iban Pua Kumbu(2016), Welyne Jeffrey Jehom challenges the tendency to treat Western scientific knowledge as the unqualified standard against which “Indigenous knowledge” is defined. Drawing on the Iban weaving tradition, she presents Indigenous knowledge as a coherent system that is collective, context-specific, adaptive and embedded in relationships, identity, spirituality, memory and the natural environment. The book raises a broader question central to this article: whose knowledge, and whose definition of progress, is treated as universal?

¹⁰ As Sébastien Pautet shows in Le mystère de la porcelaine bleue: Quand la France des Lumières espionnait la Chine des Qing (2024), porcelain was one example of a broader European effort to learn from Qing China. Jesuit missionaries transmitted knowledge of Chinese technologies, manufacturing techniques, agriculture, and administration back to Europe, illustrating how societies have long advanced through observation, imitation, and adaptation.

¹¹ If you want to deep dive into the history of Chinese philosophy,   the most complete work on the subject is  A History of Chinese Philosophy, Volume 1: The Period of the Philosopher by Feng Youlan, first published in Chinese in the 1930s and translated by Derk Bodde