Slowly, and in fits and starts, our focus had been juddering from duty to the clan towards individual competence and success. This changed our psychology, rewriting the cultural coding of our game-playing brains, turning us into new sorts of humans. We were more independent, more self-focussed, more outward-looking, more interested in personal excellence, less conformist and less in awe of tradition, ancestry, duty and authority. In short, we were no longer the kind of people prepared to be bullied, threatened, bribed and insulted by a corrupt and status-drunk Church. By the sixteenth century
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