Monday, February 19, 2018

When Societies Fall

From Tremr:
Published in a highly underrated 1934 book called "Sex and Culture," the anthropologist J.D. Unwin found a universal correlation between monogamy and a civilization's "expansive energy." His aim in the book was to test the Freudian thesis that advanced civilizations were founded upon repression of sexual desire, and a re-channeling of this energy through a defense mechanism Freud called "sublimation." 

A non-Christian, and as relativistic as any modern anthropologist, he insisted that he offered "no opinion about rightness or wrongness" concerning sexual norms. Nevertheless, among the 86 different societies he studied, he not only found monogamy to be correlated with a society's strength, but came to the sobering conclusion that "In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence." (Read more.)
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1 comment:

julygirl said...

In fact it is with monogamy that women and children were able to flourish along with the commitment to stability and a move away from a nomadic lifestyle.