Does Feminization Of Society End in its Destruction?
This is a review of J. D. Unwin’s Sex and Culture and the topic of The Importance of Sex Relations to Cultural Achievement.
What causes the rise and decline of nations? Geography? Climate change? Returns on complexity? Eugenics and dysgenics? Asabiyyah? These are critical questions to understanding the past and predicting the future. It is impossible to run experiments on history, and so the only available method to answer them is induction. As it happens, there is an extraordinarily comprehensive inductive survey that unintentionally answered this question nearly a century ago.
J. D. Unwin was an early 20th century Oxford anthropologist who published his magnum opus, Sex and Culture, in 1934. His goal was to evaluate the psychological proposition that restraints on sexual activity led to sexual energy’s sublimation into social energy.
To that end, he conducted an inductive survey of the sex relations and social energy of 80 uncivilized societies as well as the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hellenes, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and English, with a few comments about the Arabs and Moors.
[photo: J D Unwin]
This survey was necessarily limited to those societies on which he had reliable evidence, and so could not be exhaustive, but does not appear cherry-picked; he explains why he does not include notable societies (such as China) in his survey and the limitations of his method, and encourages the reader to test his conclusions on societies on which he did not have sufficient evidence and via alternative measures of social energy. Despite his careful hedging, he nevertheless comes to an extremely strong conclusion: that changes in and levels of social energy are deterministically caused by sex relations, and that the course of society can thus be predicted (and perhaps controlled) by changing these.
Unwin’s Model
Unwin defines human energy as the exercise of those powers which are exclusively human, namely the “power of reason, the power of creation, and the power of reflecting upon itself.” The cultural process then, “consists of the use of these powers, which are potential in all human organisms,” but not universally or evenly applied. To Unwin, all individuals have the capacity to display this energy, but only some societies do so.
Unwin divides the social display of this energy into two categories, expansive and productive. Common examples of expansive social energy are “territorial expansion, conquest, colonization and the foundation of a widely flung commerce,” while a society manifesting productive social energy “develops the resources of its habitat and by increasing its knowledge of the material universe bends nature to its will.” Expansive social energy is more common then productive; all societies that display productive social energy first went through a period of expansion, but not all expansive societies become productive.
Unwin furthermore defines human entropy as the innate ability to refine and enrich a cultural tradition, appearing only after a new generation is born into a society of great energy, and refers to an increase in “human entropy” as the Direction of the Cultural Process.
Confusingly, unlike actual entropy, there is no tendency for human entropy to increase without limit; it usually disappears within a given stratum of society within half a generation of its first exhibition. Likewise, the Direction of the Cultural Process can be, and always is eventually, reversed.
Unwin distinguishes between civilized and uncivilized societies, but this not a key portion of his model, which would work even without this distinction. In his own words:
When I speak of ‘civilized’ societies I refer only to the following sixteen historical peoples: Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Hellenes, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Sassanids, Arabs (Moors), Romans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (i.e. ourselves). According to my terminology any society not included in this list was ‘uncivilized’. It is a rough, arbitrary classification. The cultural condition of some uncivilized societies was, of course, higher than that of some of the civilized peoples.
This divide serves as an aid to comprehension rather than a load-bearing part of the model and matches our intuition as to the meaning of civilization.
Rather than attempt to classify societies based on their beliefs, which can be difficult for outsiders to ascertain and which cannot always be translated across cultural lines, Unwin classifies them based on their rites into four categories: zoistic, manistic, deistic, and rationalistic. Unwin defines societies who build temples as deistic (note the architectural definition, rather than one based on beliefs), those who do not build temples but pay post-funeral attention to their dead as manistic, and those who do neither as zoistic. In general, deistic societies have a longer historical memory and display more energy than manistic ones, which in turn have a longer memory and display more energy then zoistic peoples. Rationalistic societies are those which display productive energy; Unwin describes a rationalistic society like so:
It changes its ideas on every conceivable subject, increases its mental range, and expands in all its multifarious activities. Its method of treating sickness is altered in accordance with its new knowledge; by using the inherent power of reason it formulates and applies its knowledge of the physical universe; it produces more than it consumes, thus creating capital; it unearths new sources of wealth which less energetic societies neglect; it discovers new ways of treating old materials, bends nature to its purpose, and assumes a mastery of the earth.
On the grounds that rationalistic societies have the greatest control over their environment, Unwin classifies rationalistic as the highest cultural state. Since all rationalistic societies were deistic prior to becoming rationalistic, he puts deistic next on the scale. Since many deistic societies have cults of the dead, manistic is placed below deistic, with zoistic lowest of all. But there is no fixed progression between them; with the exception of requiring a deistic society before a rationalistic one, a society in any cultural condition can reach any other, without intermediate steps. Furthermore, it is important to note that complex societies are composed of different stratums of people, which can fall into different categories. Unwin classifies complex societies based on their dominant stratum.
When a society ascends in the cultural scale, some sections of the people retain their old opinions and remain in the lower cultural condition. Then the society is divided into two cultural strata. Indeed, the higher a society ascends the greater is the difference in the culture of the various strata, the number of those strata depending on the nature of the rise of the society. In a deistic society which passed direct from the zoistic into the deistic condition, there would be a zoistic as well as a deistic stratum; in a rationalistic society we may find a deistic stratum, and/or a manistic stratum and/or a zoistic stratum, according to the manner in which the most developed stratum emerged.
Unwin defines sexual opportunity as “the opportunity which is afforded to a man or a woman to gratify a sexual desire.” Sexual opportunity is limited when “the sexual regulations prevent such satisfaction; the impulse must be checked or the offender will be punished.” Sexual continence is defined as when sexual opportunity is checked.
Unwin divides sex relations into seven categories; three referring to sex relations before marriage, and four to the structure of marriage. The first group is as follows:
Pre-nuptially (1) men and women may be sexually free, (2) they may be subject to regulations which compel only an irregular or occasional continence, (3) under pain of punishment and even death the women may have to remain virgins until they are married.
The four classes of marriage are defined like so:
Modified monogamy—the practice or circumstance of having one spouse at one time, the association being terminable by either party in accordance with the prevailing law or custom;
Modified polygamy—the practice or circumstance of having more than one wife at one time, the wives being free to leave their husbands on terms laid down by law and custom;
Absolute monogamy—the practice or circumstance of having one spouse at one time, but presupposing conditions whereby legally the wife is under the dominion of her husband and must confine her sexual qualities to him, under pain of punishment, for the whole of his or her life;
Absolute polygamy—the practice or circumstance of having more than one wife at one time, these wives being compelled to confine their sexual qualities to their husband for the whole of their lives.
Post-nuptial regulations are only relevant if pre-nuptial regulations demand absolute chastity. In order of least to most sexual continence, the various categories are thus:
1) Pre-nuptial sexual freedom.
2) Irregular or occasional pre-nuptial continence.
3) Women compelled to be virgo intacta when they join their husbands.
4) Modified monogamy or polygamy.
5) Absolute polygamy.
6) Absolute monogamy.
Note that (3) must be combined with (4), (5), or (6).
It’s important to remember that no energetic society’s sex relations are static; consider the revolution that has taken place in the United States since 1960. This is not an anomaly. As Unwin writes:
I view with alarm the current habit, deplorably widespread among historians and antiquarians, of assuming that the regulations and conventions that prevailed in a century of which we have direct knowledge prevailed also in a preceding or in a succeeding century, of which we may have no direct knowledge at all. Whenever our knowledge is complete, we find that in any vigorous society the method of regulating the relations between the sexes was constantly changing; and, unless there is direct evidence, it is wrong to assume that in any such society social laws were ever static and unchanging, even for three generations.
With terms and categories defined, what did Unwin find?
Unwin’s Findings
The cultural condition of any society in any geographical environment is conditioned by its past and present methods of regulating the relations between the sexes.
There is a perfect correspondence between sexual continence and cultural category. All zoistic societies permit pre-nuptial sexual freedom, and all societies that permit pre-nuptial sexual freedom are zoistic. All manistic societies require irregular pre-nuptial continence, and all societies requiring irregular pre-nuptial continence are manistic. All societies requiring pre-nuptial chastity (among women) are deistic, and all deistic uncivilized societies require pre-nuptial chastity. All uncivilized peoples fall within one of these three categories. Every deistic uncivilized society fell within group (4) above (modified polygamy or monogamy); there were no uncivilized absolute polygamists or monogamists. On this basis, Unwin formulates his three secondary laws of culture as such:
The first secondary law is this:
Any society in which complete pre-nuptial sexual freedom (outside the exogamic regulations and prohibited degrees) has been permitted for at least three generations will be in the zoistic cultural condition. It will also be at a dead level of conception if previously it has not been in a higher cultural condition.
The second secondary law is this:
If in any human society such regulations are adopted as compel an irregular or occasional continence, the cultural condition of that society will become manistic. If the compulsory continence be slight, the post-funeral rites will partake of the nature of tendance. If it be great, they will partake also of the nature of cult.
The third secondary law is this:
If in any human society the girls of an uprising generation are compelled to be pre-nuptially chaste, that society will be in the deistic cultural condition. If a zoistic culture be inherited, the same power will be manifest in all temples. If a manistic culture be inherited, different powers will be manifest in different temples.
Unwin’s most important finding is this: a decrease in sexual opportunity always leads to greater social energy; conversely, an increase in sexual opportunity always leads to less social energy. This applies within societies as well as between them; if different strata have different norms, the most stringent strata will be the most energetic and come to dominate society. There are some qualifiers. The sexual opportunity of men only matters if the sexual opportunity of women has already been reduced to a minimum.
In other words, if a society is absolutely polygamous, absolute monogamy leads to greater social energy, but additional restrictions on male sexuality in a non-absolutely polygamous society do not. Absolutely polygamous societies can display great expansive energy for a short time, but never display productive energy or become rationalistic unless they marry wives reared in an absolutely monogamous tradition (as happened with the Moors in Spain who married Christian and Jewish wives).
From this, Unwin concludes that the sexual opportunity of women is more important than that of men, although both are required to reach the highest peaks of culture. Furthermore, only absolutely monogamous societies display great energy for extended periods and conversely, every absolutely monogamous society displays great energy.
read the rest at arctotherium.substack.com