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When people consider what’s wrong with the world there are three schools of thought. The first, which I’ve mentioned frequently, and the one championed by Steven Pinker in his books, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, is that there’s nothing wrong with the world, that things are as great as they’ve ever been and almost certainly just going to keep getting better. The other two schools of thought are not quite so optimistic, some people feel that there certainly might be problems with the world but mostly it’s things we’re aware of and if we could just get our act together, nothing we can’t solve. Other people don’t think that there might be something wrong with the world, they think that there is definitely something wrong. And furthermore that we might not even be aware of how bad those problems are, and those we do have a handle on are proving to be largely intractable.
From what I can observe the vast majority of people fall into one of the latter two camps. And I sincerely hope that all of them turn out to be wrong and Pinker turns out to be right, but as you may have gathered I don’t think he is, and I don’t think they are.
If you’re like me and in the something is definitely wrong camp, the next obvious step is to figure out what that something is. This is the whole point of the discipline of eschatology, at least as I practice it, and there are of course numerous candidates, everything from runaway environmental damage, to the looming threat of an eventual nuclear war, to a breakdown of culture and morality. And it seems only prudent to examine each and every candidate in as much detail as possible, in order that the true illness at the heart of modernity (assuming there’s only one, there could easily be more than one) might be diagnosed and treated as soon as possible. Before the condition is terminal. I understand that this is a profound oversimplification of what this process looks like, if it’s even possible, but regardless of the difficulties involved in correcting the ills of the world, the process can’t even begin without identifying the problem in the first place.
The book Sex and Culture by J. D. Unwin, written in 1934 while Unwin was a professor at Cambridge, is one theory of what the problem might be, and one that, so far as I can tell, has not gotten a lot of attention. This is almost certainly because Unwin’s claim is entirely at odds with modern thinking, what is that claim you ask?
That a culture is successful to the extent that it restricts pre-nuptial sex.
I assume that most people can immediately grasp why such a claim has been almost entirely ignored. If not, imagine any current professor getting up and attempting to present this as a topic up for debate at any university or college. And yet, as I pointed out, if we care about the health of society, and we’re not convinced that everything is going smoothly, we really should examine all possible threats, even the ones most people find horribly old-fashioned and retrograde. (In fact, I would argue, especially those threats.)
I said the claim was almost entirely ignored, fortunately Kirk Durston wrote a post about it, which brought Sex and Culture to my attention and convinced me to read it. Though, on doing so, I discovered another reason why the book was largely forgotten. It is not an easy read, and I don’t think I would recommend that you try. The majority of the book is an exacting and detailed examination of the traditions and behavior of 80 different “uncivilized” cultures. So detailed that even I skimmed some of the chapters.
Given all of this, I imagine you’re unlikely to read it, so it’s up to me to tell you what it’s about. Though I would also strongly recommend Durston’s post in addition to mine.
For my part, I’m going to start by asking, “Why do nearly all cultures have traditions and taboos around sex?” From a straight evolutionary perspective you might imagine that other than some incest prohibitions to prevent genetic issues, that more sex would equal more babies and that greater reproduction confers an obvious benefit to survival. And yet over and over again, regardless of the society we find taboos around sex. With, historically, the strictest taboos being found in the largest civilizations. Why is that? Unwin wondered the same thing, and Sex and Culture is his answer. It’s obvious from the book that the first step he took was to make an exhaustive study of all the anthropological reports he could get his hands on. I’m sure that quite a bit of newer information has come out since then, but based on what was included in the book it’s hard for me to imagine that he overlooked much of anything that was known at the time.
(As a side note, I didn’t realize until I linked to Unwin’s entry on Wikipedia for this post, but the book was published only two years before his death at the age of 41. One wonders what he might have done with the idea if he’d had several more decades.)
In any event after engaging in a massive survey of the anthropolocial data his conclusion was that more energetic and advanced societies are characterized by greater restrictions on pre-nuptial sex. From that conclusion you might imagine that the book is written primarily from a religious perspective, or as a commentary on modern sexual mores, but that’s not the case at all. In fact one of the reasons for the book’s length is that he goes to great effort explaining what measures he has taken to make his cultural survey as scientific as possible. He throws out a lot of cultures because he doesn’t think there’s enough information. He also spends quite a bit of time examining the various ways in which the information could have been corrupted by issues of translation and data collection. Furthermore he simplifies his criteria to things that are easy to observe, meaning both that such behavior is more likely to have been accurately reported, and that comparisons between cultures should be relatively accurate.
As I said, out of all of this he is mostly interested in information on a culture’s sexual taboos, but if he merely categorizes cultures according to this single measure all he has shown is that different cultures have different taboos, what he needs is a second measurement to set against a culture’s sexual behavior as an independent guide for how advanced a culture is. The methodology he arrives at is actually pretty clever. He observes that every culture has to deal with two questions:
- What powers manifest themselves in the universe?
- What steps are taken to maintain the right relationship with these powers?
From these questions he derives four “cultural conditions”, the first three are:
- Deistic: Cultures which build temples.
- Manistic: Cultures which do not build temples but which do engage in some form of post funeral attention to their dead. (i.e. ancestor worship).
- Zoistic: Cultures which do neither of the above.
It might be obvious how those questions about universal powers are answered at each cultural level, but in short, Zoistic cultures don’t really attempt to answer them. Manistic cultures answer it by assuming that the “powers” which were present recently, that is to say other people, are probably still around. And Diestic cultures are those who come to understand that there’s too much going on for it to just be explained by the dead, leading them to conclude that there are even more powerful forces, i.e. deities which need temples and worship. (All of this seems to point to a natural progression where monotheism would be at the very top, but Unwin doesn’t seem to go that far.)
You might notice that I said there were four cultural conditions. The fourth is Rationalistic, which is when a culture finally starts answering the two questions with the scientific method. Once he comes up with these four levels the next step is to see if they bear any relationship to that same culture’s restrictions on pre-nuptial sex, and out of the 86 cultures he studied he discovers that:
- All the zoistic societies permitted pre-marital sexual freedom; conversely, all societies which permitted that freedom were in the zoistic condition.
- All the manistic societies had adopted such regulations as compelled an irregular or occasional continence; conversely, all the societies which had adopted such regulations were in the manistic condition.
- All the deistic societies insisted on pre-nuptial chastity; conversely, all the societies which insisted on pre-nuptial chastity were in the deistic condition.
Giving evidence to support this correlation takes up the vast majority of the book, but of course you’re probably not that interested in zoistic and manistic societies, and even your interest in deistic societies is probably not all that significant either, what you’re really wondering is what Unwin has to say about the sexual restrictions of societies in a rationalistic condition. Unfortunately, compared to all the other cultural conditions he spends the least amount of time discussing the rationalistic. Perhaps because he assumes that his readers would be the most familiar with it. However the book is long enough that there’s still quite a bit of discussion it’s just more scattered, and in particular Unwin never presents a bright dividing line between sexual restrictions in a diestic society and a rationalist one in the same way he does with the other conditions. Rather he explains the transition as follows (I’m paraphrasing):
The enormous energy available to a deistic society practicing strict monogamy manifests first as a dissatisfaction with the limitations imposed by their geographic environment. This leads to an initial, expansionary phase. The sort of behavior we saw from the Babylonians, the Persians, the Huns, the Mongols, etc. And, for many societies, this is where things end, as sexual taboos are loosened and things like polygamy begin to florish. If, on the other hand, they’re able to maintain the initial sexual restrictions and taboos they pass from this expansionary phase into a phase where, “The great mental energy of such a society is directed to every detail of its environment, to every item of human activity, and to every problem of human life.” This is when they pass into the rationalist condition.
It probably goes without saying that the rationalistic condition is where you want to be, or failing that, in the deistic condition, but either way, in order for that to happen, according to Unwin, you need to have serious restrictions on pre-marital sex. And yes, to be clear, Unwin’s whole model is based on the idea that some cultures are superior to others at least according to certain measurements. And if you’re not willing to grant that I’m surprised you made it this far.
I imagine there are some out there who would assume that, having finally reached a “rationalistic condition”, a society could ease up on the restrictions. Unwin argues that this is not the case, that within a few generations of backing off a culture begins to slip back into the “lower” conditions. How many generations? Unwin claims, “It takes at least three generations for an extension or a limitation of sexual opportunity to have it’s full cultural effect” Unwin defines a generation as being around 33 years, so three generations is essentially a century.
Before we can begin commenting on this theory there’s one other aspect which needs to be considered. Beyond documenting the relationship between sexual taboos and a culture’s condition, he also goes on to propose a mechanism for that connection. At the time the book was written Freud’s psychoanalytic system was probably the most influential system for explaining human behavior, and Unwin based his own theory on that foundation. He hypothesized that a civilization has a certain amount of energy, but all if it ultimately sexual energy (this is a Freudian theory remember). In a culture with no limits on sex, all of that energy get’s used up. But once a culture starts putting limits on things, some energy ends up unused. This energy needs to be channeled somewhere, and it inevitably ends up getting channeled back into society, creating an energetic culture. One that can expand, or build temples, or eventually, develop science.
With Unwin’s theory stated more or less in its entirety, we can now put forth how it explains what’s wrong with the world:
When sexual restrictrictions of all kinds were eliminated or lessened during the sexual revolution the energy available to our civilization was similarly lessened. This began the 100 year process of leaving the rationalistic condition and heading towards the essentially zero energy zoistic condition.
With this explanation in hand the next step is to ask what we should do with it? I assume many people would be inclined to dismiss it out of hand. Merely including words like Freudian, and manistic, may incline them to think the whole thing is ludicrous. I suppose that’s their prerogative, but even if you reject Unwin’s data for some reason, doesn’t it strike you as odd that so many large, expansive civilizations had such draconian taboos around sex outside of marriage? I mean we’re talking Romans, Europeans, Arabs, and Chinese. In fact, can you give me a historical example of a large culture that didn’t have such restrictions? Perhaps they’re not quite as tightly correlated as Unwin would suggest, but could it really be that they are entirely uncorrelated? With any measure of civilizational and cultural success?
If you were going to be scientific about it, the next step would be to examine Unwin’s data. One would imagine that information on the various customs and taboos of primitive cultures has only increased since 1934 (though perhaps not as much as you might think, proximity in time counts for a lot.) Not only should it be possible to attempt a replication, but Unwin’s claims are so strong that they should be easily falsifiable. Has anyone done this? (Some cursory Google searches didn’t reveal any promising leads.)
Alternatively, and this is what I’m inclined to do, you could broadly accept his conclusion (the data seems accurate to me) but question the mechanism. One could imagine lots of reasons why sexual continence correlates with civilizational success (on certain metrics). Certainly the discipline required to abstain from sex outside of marriage might also translate into the kind of discipline that makes a country energetic. There’s also a huge body of evidence on the importance of intact families, and in particular the presence of a father. It’s certainly possible that civilizations which prohibited pre-nuptial sex ended up with stronger families which translated into stronger, more energetic cultures. If everything else Unwin says is mostly true then discovering the exact mechanism doesn’t matter very much.
To be fair, even if someone is prepared to grant the connection, we still have to grapple with the question of how things play out in the modern world. It’s entirely possible that this is something which was very important a hundred or a thousand years ago, but because of recent advances (the social safety net? Birth control?) it doesn’t matter at all now. I certainly understand the appeal of that argument, but when evidence for such prohibitions are so ubiquitous, appearing in the earliest writings we possess (and no, not just the Bible, they also appear in the Code of Hammurabi) it certainly feels like the burden of proof should rest with the people arguing that after several thousand years, things have somehow changed in the last 50.
Speaking of the modern world, and falsification, it could be argued that we’re halfway towards falsifying Unwin’s theories ourselves since it’s been around 50 years since the sexual revolution. That being the case it’s reasonable to ask where the evidence is pointing. When we look around does it appear the Unwin was wrong or right? If you read my reviews for March, The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat was a book of nothing but evidence that Unwin was correct. Douthat makes the compelling case that the US has entered a period of stagnation, and not only does that sound precisely like the lack of energy Unwin predicted, but the timeline of the stagnation is eerily accurate as well. And, as long as we’re on the subject of last month’s book reviews, I’m also reminded of the quote I included from Will Durant:
[Intellect] becomes an instrument for justifying impulse. If you become smart you can prove that what you really want to do, what you’re itching to do is what should really be done… The difficulty is that the intellect is an individualist. It learns how to protect the individual long before it ever thinks of protecting the group. That comes later, that comes with a maturing of the mind. A civilization controlled by intellectuals would commit suicide very soon.
While this isn’t quite as on point as Douthat’s book, Durant nevertheless seems to be talking about much the same thing. Which takes us back to the original question, now that we have considered the candidacy of Unwin’s theory for the position of “What’s wrong with the world?” What should we do with it?
Given everything I read and everything I see, I would argue we should take it seriously. Yes, that would mean undoing the sexual revolution, which is both straightforward and also so difficult I don’t imagine that we have even one chance in a thousand of pulling it off.
There’s not a lot of people willing to moralize about ancient and impenetrable books. So if that’s worth something to you consider donating to one of the few who do.
On the subject of which direction the world is heading, I recommend Satya Nadella’s book (https://www.amazon.com/Hit-Refresh-Rediscover-Microsofts-Everyone/dp/B073ZL8T6V/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1D5AW6JPAPF0Q&dchild=1&keywords=satya+nadella&qid=1588266800&s=books&sprefix=satya%2Caps%2C225&sr=1-1). His view is that the future is neither as amazing nor as bleak as people predict.
Purchased, I’m sure you’ll eventually see it in my month end reviews.
To be fair, Nadella is making a frequency-based assessment of the future. Your eschatological focus is based on tail events. Looking back again at last week’s post, we should probably expect Nadella’s version of the future barring an unlikely tail event. Over long time spans tail events WILL happen, but over short ones they remain unlikely.
The pertinent question is how unlikely? If it’s 1:100,000 we should probably still prepare for it, but I personally am unlikely to live through it. In that case, I’ll just look to Nadella’s future that feels bright but doesn’t end in a singularity of transhumanist living forever under benevolent AGI gods.
If it’s 1:100 there’s a strong probability we see it in our lifetimes, and the Nadella story is what we get to use to prepare for the inevitable collapse.
I’m personally unconvinced. I think in order to be convinced I’d have to accept the tenets you put forward, namely that 1. something is deeply wrong and it’s a major problem, 2. historical examples are not fundamentally different from modern society, and 3. we’re already seeing signs of decline.
I’d agree that the burden of proof is on those claiming that historical societies are different from modern ones IF I’m trying to convince you. However, I think the burden of proof is on you if you’re trying to convince me of a theory built on correlation alone. I’m not currently convinced that the sexual mores of the ancient Romans are a dead canary in the coal mine predicting the downfall of our culture.
Indeed, given the number of diverse cultures that seem to have gradually relaxed taboos on pre-marital sex as they dramatically increase prosperity this seems more like a trend driven by prosperity (in other words, as societies have more resources to soak up the problems associated with pre-marital sex they tend to relax the strict restrictions that were previously necessary). This is similar to the observation that most modern societies tend to have some kind of social welfare system. When you’re near subsistence, you’re not going to spend 15% of your GDP providing free food and shelter for the homeless. When you’re wealthy, and the cost goes down below 0.1% of GDP it’s hard to argue against that same decision.
In other words, some social decisions become natural at a certain level of prosperity. I think it’s likely the relaxation of sexual taboos are similar, especially with the invention of effective birth control.
I know a lot of people predict we’re slowing down in technological progress, but I’ve seen analyses of this sort going back at least the last 150 years. It seems we’re always on the cusp of draining the well of progress, but we never do. Of course, one day we certainly will drain that well, but as per your previous post about forecasting, what good is a prediction of future harm if it doesn’t give us any usable information about when the thing we care about is likely to happen? Will it be in 50 years? 500? 5000? We don’t even know an order of magnitude, and we certainly can’t be sure we’ve hit an inflection point on the sigmoid graph, so it feels premature to start looking for explanations explaining the decline.
Finally, I’m not familiar enough with the culture and taboos of the pre-Columbian American empires, but I know a lot of what we’ve learned about them came out since the 1930’s. This might be a good data source to mine to test the hypothesis Unwin puts forward, since it’s information he would not have had access to when he formulated his hypothesis.
There’s obviously a continuum of consideration for a given idea. There’s rock solid, like gravity, there’s we’re pretty sure, global warming, there’s fiercely debated, does minimum wage cause unemployment, there’s probably untrue, but worth checking out, like the abiotic oil theory, and then there’s demonstrably false, like the Flat Earth hypothesis.
The Sex and Culture theory isn’t in any of these categories, it’s been entirely overlooked, but given that it doesn’t appear to be demonstrably false, I think that people should at least put it in the “probably untrue, but worth checking out” bucket. And even I would only put it in the fiercly debated one.
Although I’m not personally invested in the Sex and Culture theory, I can see the merit in giving it more consideration. There are a lot of ideas that are believed as ‘obviously true’ long before the evidence is gathered; then when we do get that evidence in the whole thing is falsified but people still believe it.
Case in point: when I was a grad student, preparing to get married, the post-docs and my advisor noted that I wasn’t living with my fiancee (now my wife). They argued that if I wanted the relationship to last I needed to try thing out first. After all, didn’t I want this thing to last? Note that the argument wasn’t, “don’t you WANT to live with her now?” It wasn’t an argument for shortcutting marriage so I could get something I wanted sooner. It was an argument that I was skipping a vital step in making the relationship work because we didn’t live together first.
Like the good scientist I am, I didn’t take their word for it, but instead went to the scientific literature to determine whether their idea had merit. It doesn’t. Not only did it lack all merit, the evidence was strongly opposed to the hypothesis, with over forty years of evidence suggesting that the ‘trial marriage’ (there are a couple terms for it) idea is the worst thing you can do if you want your marriage to last. This, despite the fact that the researchers all seemed to believe the theory, and that if they ran a few more regressions they might eventually find that trial marriage wasn’t as bad as all that. They constantly committed sins of statistics, heavily biasing the data in favor of the trial marriages, but still found them to be much worse than direct marriages. I haven’t looked at the data in the ten years since, so maybe something has changed (I doubt it); but the data I had available at the time strongly favored rejecting the hypothesis my colleagues were pushing. This despite the fact that they all had PhDs in biomedical sciences and decades of research experience. Still they kept pushing a theory that should have been rejected long ago.
When something seems like it ought to be so, the quiet accumulation of contrary evidence is less influential than the momentum of the idea itself.
I think that story is a great illustration of what I mean.
Tossing this idea from this quote:
“He hypothesized that a civilization has a certain amount of energy, but all if it ultimately sexual energy (this is a Freudian theory remember). In a culture with no limits on sex, all of that energy get’s used up. But once a culture starts putting limits on things, some energy ends up unused. This energy needs to be channeled somewhere, and it inevitably ends up getting channeled back into society, creating an energetic culture. One that can expand, or build temples, or eventually, develop science.”
A: Mormon culture in Utah
B: Sunni Muslim culture in Saudi Arabia
C: Gay male culture Manhattan, let’s say mid-90’s around the time of Madonna’s Vogue.
Which culture would his theory predict rapid expansion, development of innovative forms, even science? DO we actually see that?
I hesitate to speak for him since I’m not sure I agree with the mechanism, but if I am to put on my Unwin cap I would say:
A- Expansive
B- Expansive
C- Not expansive
I think in case A (though I may not be objective) he’s correct.
B is one I thought about as well, and they do seem more energetic than most civilizations at the moment. But there’s only so much a guy with an AK-47 can do against a guy with cruise missiles, and that is one very big thing that may end up trumping Unwin, even if he was correct.
As far as C, that’s not an area where I’m an expert on either their behavior nor their energy.
Though one thing to remember, Unwin’s theory claims that there is essentially a 100 year lag between the behavior and the full flowering of the energy (Or vice versa) and so we would only be seeing the merest hints of changes related to behavior from the 90s.
You label the first two as expansive and the third as non-expansive yet the kids of both consume the culture created by the 3rd. Who has really reproduced here and expanded here?
I think the theory would not predict the first case as clear-cut ‘expansive’ as you suggest. Sure, from a productivity standpoint they were very active when they were isolated in Utah from, say 1850-1950. Measured as a century of energy and productivity it’s a pretty big bump.
But the theory is contingent on maintenance of monogamous sexual norms, and the sexual norm in Utah during that century was a thorough acceptance of and practice of polygamy. Sure sex outside of marriage was explicitly frowned upon. But as far as maintaining social norms of monogamy I’d think a prosperous culture that embraced polygamy – and was highly productive specifically during that period – would not support the theory.
You might say, “well they did it in a way that created social norms around the behavior, so it wasn’t socially deviant to practice polygamy within the confines of that culture.” At which point, we might ask whether the same normalization process can apply to other norms, such as homosexuality, transgender, and even premarital sex. After all, what’s more normal today than moving in together to try things out before getting engaged? If that’s the case, the theory seems to lose all steam.
That’s a good point, and thanks for calling me on it. Though… having read a fair amount about early LDS polygamy it does vary in many respects from historical polygamy. If early LDS participates are to be believed they mostly took to it somewhat reluctantly, and only because of a strong religious injunction. Historically polygamy had none of the first quality, and, as far as I know, little of the second quality. Historical polygamy was an exciting and valuable reward for being in charge (and I know many people accuse Joseph Smith of engaging in it for precisely that reason, but the evidence for that is murky at best, and it’s a whole other debate all on it’s own.)
I’m not sure how ‘sexual energy’ being pent up via sexual norms so that it could be released into non-sexual purposes like industry, science or art really works. Given the historical norm for men to be married in their early 20’s simply being horny and not having access to PornHub doesn’t seem very convincing to me. Most of the work of culture is done by older people who are married and hence a bit beyond limiting their sexual outlets. Yes, yes I know even in marriage many religions do try to put some limits on sexual activity but it isn’t exactly the same.
I agree with Boonton that the microscale doesn’t really fit here. I’ve seen studies that married men have more sex than single men, so the frustration (and productivity) should end with marriage. Yet there is also a large body of literature suggesting that married men fare better on a host of things that Unwin would consider economic progress. So why are the less frustrated married men doing so well, but the unmarried men who can’t get a date doing so poorly?
In contrast to all that are the highly productive single men who maintain multiple partners. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, where highly productive men have no partners? Except, it appears there is a subset of women who are attracted to high-status men, which in turn motivates those men to dedicate themselves to obtaining higher status – through increased economic, political, or other activity. Case in point, JFK, Newt Gingrich, Henry VIII, any rock band, Alex Hamilton, Bill Clinton, Ben Franklin, and Donald Trump just to name a few. Given that unusually productive activity appears to be a good strategy for obtaining extramarital access to multiple women, it would be strange to accept a theory that says HAVING access to extramarital sex inhibits that kind of activity.
I would also argue that although early Utah polygamy was approached reluctantly, it’s not possible to just say “it was something icky they didn’t want to do and then they were relieved when they didn’t have to do it anymore.” Rescinding polygamy was not a ‘popular’ decision – and not just with family units that already contained plural wives. The society took to polygamy reluctantly, yes, but it also gave polygamy up reluctantly with some refusing to give it up altogether.
Also, how is this significantly different from other social norms that have developed over the years? For example: racial integration, women in the workplace, homosexuality (from not imprisoning all the way through SSM), etc. All these follow a similar trend where the society that thought freeing the slaves was a good idea but “granting The Vote is a bridge too far, of course!” slowly morphed into one where open assertions that black people are different than white people are entirely outside the Overton Window. This one way social norms change – slowly and reluctantly. I don’t see the mode of societal change to be relevant to the hypothesis under consideration, but if it were it doesn’t help the pro-Unwin case.
Any way you slice it, polygamy in Utah was the widely-accepted practice (within Utah) of allowing men to maintain intimate relationships with multiple partners. If that is still somehow considered ‘expansive’ I don’t know that the hypothesis has any teeth left in it. If not, it’s difficult to explain the results. And as to the moral aspect of it, we should consider the nature of the arguments for expanding social acceptability of what Unwin would consider to be positive restrictions. Many of those arguments; for example in favor of gay marriage, trans rights, etc.; are pushed by proponents who see them as moral imperatives.
I’m not claiming this is a religion (I’d rather leave up to individuals to define whether they see something as a religion or not). I’m claiming that many of the meaningful elements present in the social shift toward polygamy in Utah are present in things like the gay rights movement. Whether the two societies would agree with one another (or even recognize each other if they met in a random time-travel incident) is less important. They appear to be two strong examples that run directly counter to the hypothesis. Add to that the micro-data, social science data, and the accelerating technological progress since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s and we should consider rejecting the hypothesis.
(Sorry to pile on there. I know I’m pushing back hard against the theory, but it doesn’t seem like something we would come to naturally after looking at all the evidence. I think it’s possible to say, ‘such-and-such won’t make you happy’ without claiming it’s anathema to social and economic progress.)
Okay… You might have missed the part where I said I didn’t personally buy Unwin’s Freudian explanation as the mechanism. Here’s my process:
1- I wonder why all big historical civilizations seem to be remarkably committed to marriage and pre-nuptial chastity (particularly among females). Particularly when current conventional wisdom declares such restrictions to be a barbarous relic of an unenlightened past. Well if it was how did all civilizations end up coming up with the same barbarous relic? Perhaps I’m missing a bunch of anthropological data.
2- I encounter Unwin and he says, no you’re not missing any anthropological data, in fact the relationship is essentially absolute. He then goes on to say something about Freud, but mostly I’m interested in the fact that he has confirmed my impression that there is a remarkable correlation between sex taboos and other civilizational behavior.
3- So if we reject the Freud theory (which I have) and if we reject the everyone came to up with the same barbarous standards theory (which I also do) and if we accept Douthat’s decadence theory (which feels correct to me, though it’s kind of in the “I don’t like the way the barometer is headed” category) then where does that leave us? It leaves us with Unwin making an interesting prediction (even if we strip it of its freudian baggage) a prediction that I would like more work done on.
Can someone come along and refute Unwin’s anthropological data? If you can’t can you point out how his theory doesn’t map to the modern world because it’s so different? Or can someone refute Douthat to my satisfaction?
That’s my position, and talking about how married people have less sexual frustration has nothing to do with the concerns Unwin raises for me.
” in the fact that he has confirmed my impression that there is a remarkable correlation between sex taboos and other civilizational behavior”
Well right off the bat societies are are more civilized have more property and status markers. Passing down status and property to your own offspring are very important tactics evolution uses. Pre-DNA stricter control of females (and heterosexual males as a consequence) avoids uncertainty on paternity.
Okay, we can drop the sexual repression angle and stick to strictly to the parameter you care about: female extramarital sex. In this case, I think we can go straight back to the microscale interactions and again reject the hypothesis.
Trick question: among heterosexual relationships, which gender is more promiscuous?
Neither. It is a mathematical certainty that they are equally promiscuous. Take the example of 10 men and 10 women (this scales easily into the billions, but is easier to think about in small numbers). Is there any way to combine the number of heterosexual couplings where, on average, men are more promiscuous than women? No. Even if one man has sex with all ten women, the men are – on average – equally promiscuous as the women.
So all those extramarital relationships that men are having are equal to the number of extramarital relationships women are having (the math works out the same for intramarital and extramarital sex). That puts the microscale interactions squarely at odds with the theory (stripped of its Freudian baggage, and adding a term that only cares about female sexual purity, which equals male sexual purity).
Next, you bring up the question: Why is modern society different?
You are already familiar with the standard answer to the question about why modern society has formed its current sexual norms, as well as why they all formed the same strict norms back in the day: control of reproduction and ensuring adequate child-rearing. In a primitive society that can’t even sustain prisons (they have to cut off your hand, put out your eye, put you to death, or something else immediate) it is impossible for a small State to assist in providing for children with only one parent. In modern society, women who get pregnant without a partner to help raise the child get more and more generous assistance from the government. To the point where a single mother friend of mine is considering having a second child out of wedlock because … who needs a man?
In addition, women can engage in extramarital sex without becoming pregnant – a novel option. And as a last resort they can either choose to abort the pregnancy or leave the child at a fire station (instead of on a hillside) and a happy childless couple will gladly raise the baby.
Now, maybe there are other, more subtle effects happening under the surface; but those are all obviously secondary (and hypothetical) compared with the massive effect of a woman getting pregnant with no way of taking care of the resulting child. This single effect should be the obvious first explanation we turn to for why multiple diverse societies independently converged on the same solution in the absence of family planning and a generous welfare state. It also easily explains why multiple diverse societies independently abandoned these social norms as they adopted both family planning technologies and large welfare states; and why multiple diverse societies that have yet to adopt modern welfare states, and who have not yet incorporated family planning technology into their societies maintain the old sexual taboos.
I’m with you that we’re missing something when we play around with the family unit the way we have. That something is both subtle and important. It’s similar to what everyone collectively realized about the stimulus checks, where the government paid everyone, but the out-of-work people still complained that they needed more for their families than simply dollars in their bank account. I think the same thing applies to the case of a supporting father in the home versus a government check, and pursuing a family as part of life’s journey instead of working it in on the side and pretending that a distracted parenting strategy will result in the same quality of child-rearing.
I think there’s a lot of good evidence to support those ideas, but I don’t think it comes from the anthropological pattern you propose. There’s already a strong explanation for that pattern.
In your example on promiscuity being equal by definition, I think it’s an artifact of definitions. Instead of calculating average extramarital relations, define promiscuity as having sex outside of marriage. Now imagine 10 men and 10 women. Of the 10 women, 9 only have sex with their husbands but the 10th woman has sex with all 10 men. All the ten men have sex with their wives and the one woman. In this way it is relatively easy to imagine ways average promiscuity could be different between men and women.
“In addition, women can engage in extramarital sex without becoming pregnant – a novel option. And as a last resort they can either choose to abort the pregnancy or leave the child at a fire station (instead of on a hillside) and a happy childless couple will gladly raise the baby.”
Well ok but let’s keep in mind the woman’s physical investment in pregnancy is pretty serious. Even if it ends in an early abortion, it’s still physically taxing on her body. Even in modern society pregnancy isn’t ‘free’ for women as it is for men.
I think private property and ‘civilization’ created the sexual norms you are focused on and not so much the investment needed in raising a child. In a hunter gather culture the children can stay with the village usually watched over by the women collectively. It would not be a big deal to add another child to that group if the woman did not have a formal husband. Also for much of history parents died. It was common for children to be raised by aunts, uncles, stepmothers and fathers or even just adopted by men and women.
Private property creates a lot of stuff one has to look after, which means one wants to pass it onto his kids. But how do you know they are your kids? Solve for equilibrium as they say at Marginal Revolutions.
On the distribution: Yes of course it matters how this is distributed, but it probably tells us less than we might think – and definitely less in context of the hypothesis the post proposes.
Do you think it’s more likely that one woman sleeps with ten men or vice versa? I think the man sleeping around with lots of women is a fairly well established concept. That means for every man who sleeps with three different women there are two other men who sleep with none. (With implications for incels?)
If we got a room full of 100 random people who engage in pre-nuptual/extra-nuptual sex, we would expect men to be heavily represented among those with more than one partner, but women to be more heavily represented in the population as a whole.
Concerning the cost extramarital childbirth: The situation you describe, where the band/tribe bears the cost of illegitimate children, still represents a significant burden born by others. And it’s not a cost they were oblivious of. Even in a small band, where childcare costs are spread out among other women and extended family members, unexpected children were never just another drop in the bucket. Indeed, children born with birth defects or other abnormalities (or illicitly as a result of a tryst with someone from another band/tribe, etc.) were often abandoned instead of taken care of by the society of women. While monogamy was certainly a modern invention – in contrast to polygamy, which was often practiced in primitive societies – the concept of committed, long-term, and even marriage relationships is not something that requires modern agriculture and industrialization.
In modern society we can spread that cost out, and we have significantly more resources to allow us to bear those costs, since we don’t have to spin our own cloth, etc. It’s true that societies prior to family planning were able to bear the burden of out of wedlock children, but not at the rate we can today. This is likely why the strong social taboos were developed around extramarital sex; because these activities led to babies others would be obligated to take care of.
I suspect the small band simply had children. Fretting about a ‘legitimate’ childbirth being less of a burden than an ‘illegitimate’ one assumes regular predicable income and property. In a small band hunting and gathering was communal and personal property minimal. There was no predicable income hence no point having a child with your ‘husband’ or simply ‘boyfriend’. In either case the tribal group either thrived or starved as a group.
“Do you think it’s more likely that one woman sleeps with ten men or vice versa? I think the man sleeping around with lots of women is a fairly well established concept.”
Well the hypothetical I described, one woman who sleeps with ten men and ten men who sleep with their wives and the other women basically describes prostitution does it not?