J.D. Unwin’s Sex and Culture attempted to sociologically examine the relationship between a society’s sexual regulations and its cultural vitality. He based his analysis on 80 primitive tribes and several historical civilizations, proposing that a correlation between sublimation and advance existed.
Unwin categorized civilizations into four levels of cultural development:
1. Zoistic: Societies with minimal regulation, characterized by little to no social advancement.
2. Mana: Societies with some control, resulting in the development of magical or ritualistic traditions.
3. Rational: Societies that maintain strict monogamy, leading to complex social organizations, literature, and technology.
4. Deistic: The highest level, where sexual restraint is combined with a belief in a transcendent, moral order.
His assertion was that once a society abandons strict sexual norms in favor of sexual license and immorality, the “expansive energy” of that society begins to decline. He argued that as the progression accelerates, that advancement decays.
While his critics rightly argued that Unwin’s work suffered serious flaws, in a more general sense one cannot help but look around these days and see there is something to his idea.
Whether analyzing benefits of trading immediate gratification for long-term investment; or reading the late Stanley Jaki’s perspective on “stillborn” worldview histories lacking the linear, rational, and contingent creation necessary for modern science to emerge and flourish; or studying the advancement of a civilization operating largely in a Christian worldview and morality that did possess such; the observable outcomes of a subsequent post-Christian societal decay; etc.: there are indicators.
I may digress but consider the example of Aristotle (384–322 BC) teaching that the speed at which objects fall to earth is proportionate to their weight: that a stone twice as heavy as another will fall twice as fast. A visit to one of the nearby cliffs would have allowed Aristotle to falsify his own proposition but he never thought to do that. It wasn’t until Bishop Albertus Magnus (1205-1280 AD) subjected the idea to observational testing that the error was discovered.
So much of Greco-Roman paganism was empirical, being sets of abstract assertions that disregard or do not imply observable consequences. But Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent creator and the universe as a rational, lawful environment awaiting human comprehension. While academic discourse often takes a hostile stance toward Christianized Western civilization these days, a more objective study of the Christian worldview in European history yields much greater insight.
Lucille Brouillet pondered this in chapter one of What’s the Use of All This Thinking? after leaving her work as a lexicologist with Merriam-Webster to teach in Cleveland Ohio where she wrote of the Greek achievement being constrained to this universe and the past while the work of a moral creator God in Christ opens the door to a glorious future, an eternal and virtuous “fountain of youth” if you will.
J.D. Unwin viewed the structure of the traditional family operating within the scope of their biological sex as the best chance for civilizational advancement. How would he assess the consequences of a human society that encourages the crossover of sexual roles and behaviors between biological sexes? What would he predict regarding the resulting loss of social homogeneity and the potential for civilizational decay?
If alive today, what would early 20th-century social evolutionist and rationalist J. D. Unwin’s forecast be with respect to this 21st-century generation’s postmodern ideas on sex and culture?
For example, what would Unwin write of the postmodern assertion that there are list, color, and ego genders which can be permuted thru venngender theory to produce thirty-two quintillion eight hundred eighty-six quadrillion fifty trillion theoretical genders (so far) and how society should expend it’s time and effort ostracizing people for “misgendering” while using the government to punish them?
Perhaps he would stand up and say, “I told you so” and hand out copies of the The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson. Well, that’s a tale for another time.
References:
Internet Archive (Unwin, J. D. (1934). Sex and Culture.): https://archive.org/details/b20442580
Unwin, J. D. (1934). Sex and culture. Oxford University Press.
Jaki, S. L. (1974). Science and creation: From eternal cycles to an oscillating universe. Scottish Academic Press.
Brouillet, L. (2024). What’s the Use of All This Thinking? Lulu.com.
Hans Christian Andersen. (2007). The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. W. W. Norton & Company.
Meechan, M. (2017). How Many Genders Are There?. In YouTube.
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