Purity has a profound effect on human culture. Read this excerpt from Awake, Not Woke to learn more!
Culture of Life
In his 1936 book Sex and Culture, J. D. Unwin published the results of his extensive research studying eighty-six societies and civilizations to see if there is a relationship between sexual freedom and the flourishing of cultures. Unwin, a social anthropologist from Oxford, measured flourishing in terms of art, architecture, agriculture, engineering, literature, and so forth. He divided his inquiry into multiple categories, including restraint before and after marriage.
The single most influential factor in determining the flourishing of a society, Unwin discovered, was whether pre-nuptial chastity was a strict social norm or not; when this was combined with absolute monogamy, the society flourished all the more.
Of this finding, Unwin scholar Kirk Durston notes, “Rationalist cultures that retained this combination for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature, art, science, architecture, engineering, and agriculture.”
Unwin found that if there were a societal change in the norms regarding sexual restraint, either toward more sexual freedom or toward greater sexual restraint, the full effect of the change was not realized until the third generation. Change takes root slowly in the first generation, becomes more normalized in the second, and by the third, realizes its full effect on the society. At that point, when total sexual liberty is embraced, the society “is characterized by people who have little interest in much else other than their own wants and needs. At this level, the culture is usually conquered or taken over by another culture with greater social energy.”
Unwin discovered that there is a deep correlation between prenuptial chastity and absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking. When the first was abandoned, the remaining disappeared within three generations.
Generations are generally considered to cover a span of twenty to thirty years. Let us say thirty. If we consider the sexual revolution to have begun in the mid-1960s when it erupted (though it was seeded and simmering decades prior), then we are at the end of the second generation and entering the third. According to Unwin’s findings, short of a dramatic pivot, we are entering the beginning of societal collapse.
Culture of Death
The revolutionaries, from Marx to Marcuse, seemed to know this with remarkable prescience. Their plan to demolish the family, though it sounds like the rantings of a madman, has turned out to be the most obvious and yet insidious tactic in their playbook. Like a long-term game of Jenga, pull at one stabilizing piece of the tower and the entire thing collapses in on itself.
Religion and the nuclear family stood as the biggest hurdles in the way of the revolution. How were they to dismantle such a basic human institution that fulfilled fundamental human desires? For a sincere Christian family striving to serve God and one another, family life could prove to be greatly rewarding and happy, albeit simple and unsung. Even if told that they were in an oppressive institution, many would still be content in their roles as loving wives, devoted husbands, or religious, shunning the call to resentment and revolution.
This posed a problem, but one which the architects of revolution in America were prepared to face. Weakening the sexual mores of culture is at the heart of dismantling the family by way of the father initially, though it can, and often does, begin by way of the woman as well. Through sexual coarseness, the father becomes weak and devoid of moral authority, the wife becomes devalued and resentful, and the children grow cynical and rebellious. Everyone becomes wounded.
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This article is taken from a chapter in Awake Not Woke by Noelle Mering which is available from TAN Books.
