Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
The W.E.I.R.D.est PEople in the world - Joseph Henrich
It's getting harder to find books that give you that feeling of finding an ancient city while digging around in your backyard, but, lucky me, yahtzee!
Henrich set out to explain why the WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) societies grew the psychological build they did, and how it bled into the global understanding of the mind. 70% of almost all explanations on behavior came from university undergrads in few countries, and our literacy (dwindling as it recently seems) exemplifies nurture's biological influence.
It starts farther back, but since the catholic church banned cousin marrying in 692, pure bred other weirdness. The church had a big impact on WEIRDness as much as literacy.
Martin Luther, famous for pounding protestantism into christian creed with his 95 theses, protested to stop catholic officials from allowing parishioners to buy down dead relative's sins for passage into heaven via indulgence certificates.
Because common catholics were 99% illiterate at the time (pre-gutenberg press), Luther's reformation had a deep push for developing a personal relationship with god, something made possible by reading scripture for themselves. Since that population, even the illiterate ones, weren't versed in ancient latin either, though, the bible had to be translated to german, which Luther did, preaching literacy and schooling.
Over the next few centuries, the rise of literacy grew with protestantism, explicitly compared with catholics. Even into the 20th century, there's a direct line between literacy and countries higher in protestantism than catholicism. Literacy and schooling readied an educated workforce, spurring economic development and fueling the 2nd industrial revolution.
Besides shaping the church through culture, protestantism also laid the foundation for universal, state-funded schooling by promoting the idea that it was the government’s responsibility to educate its people, a blueprint later used by the US.
This is but a partial look inside a mountain of factors contributing to what the modern west owes its prosperity to, but it's still enlightening, and not just because what happened did pre european enlightenment.