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TechnoratiAugustine wrote in the fourth century, “peace is the tranquility that is produced by order” (tranquillitas ordinis). Marriage is the very cornerstone of moral and social order. History has proven time and again that no community can enjoy peace and harmony without following the true moral order, and marriage provides the only effective institution for perpetuating this order.
There is irrefutable evidence to support this statement relative to marriage and its role in producing not only social order but cultural prosperity as well. In 1934, the noted British anthropologist Joseph Daniel Unwin’s research demonstrated that those cultures that held to a strong sexual ethic—in which sex was strictly constrained to the marriage relationship—were as a result more productive and therefore prospered in contrast to cultures that were “sexually free” (Unwin, Sex and Culture, London: Oxford University Press, l934, 411–12, 431–32).
Unwin studied eighty primitive and sixteen civilized cultures spanning more than five thousand years of history and found this principle to be an indisputable fact (Sex and Culture, 324–326). He observed that the cultural condition of any society depends upon its “social energy, which is of two kinds, mental energy and creative energy” (Unwin, “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior,” address given on 27 March 1935 to the medical section of the British Psychological Society, later printed by Oxford University Press). Unwin added, “In human records there is no case of an absolutely monogamous society failing to display great energy.” He further observed that “expansive energy has never been displayed by a generation that inherited a modified monogamy, modified polygamy, or an absolute polygamy.”
Social energy, Unwin argued, is the collective social effort that is directed toward the betterment of society and the common good. Societies with high levels of social energy were inherently more expansive, which gave rise to exploration, discovery, and progress in every category of creative growth. This would include those areas of culture such as economics, science, justice, education, arts, and so on. This social energy, he concluded, was greater within those cultures that held strong marital restraints on sex and greatly diminished in cultures with more liberal sexual ethics. More specifically, “Those cultures which allowed sexual freedom do not display a high level of social energy—their energy is consumed with meeting their physical appetites—they do not think large thoughts about the physical world—they are not interested in metaphysical questions regarding life and its meaning. In these cultures, life is for now” (Sexual Regulations). In essence, Unwin discovered that throughout history, a sexually hedonistic society is inherently less productive and lacking in social vision. Thus it fails to achieve what we would define as a civilized status.
Next week we will examine Unwin’s findings relative to those cultures that once held to a strong marital ethic (like ours) but later compromised, as we are now attempting to do.
S. Michael Craven is the President of the Center for Christ & Culture, a ministry of discipleship and Church renewal that works to equip Christians with an intelligent, thoroughly Christian and missional approach to culture. For more information on the Center for Christ & Culture, additional resources, and other works by S. Michael Craven visit: www.battlefortruth.org
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