Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Once Again, the Catholic Church Is Right

Many of you are aware that the Catholic Church (pre-Franny1) held an absolutist line on pre-marital sex (NO!!!) and serial marriage a/k/a divorce and re-"marriage" (NO!!!).   

Actual Catholics (not Franny1) still hold to those positions.

Along comes a sociological researcher whose work is noticed by Surber.

...One of my readers is an Orthodox priest and he forwarded a link to an article by Kirk Dunston about anthropologist J.D. Unwin, who studied 86 cultures: “Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought.”

Dunston said:
 

Effect of sexual constraints: Increased sexual constraints, either pre- or post-nuptial, always led to increased flourishing of a culture. Conversely, increased sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later

Single most influential factor: Surprisingly, the data revealed that the single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not. It had a very significant effect either way.

 Highest flourishing of culture:
The most powerful combination was pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy.” Rationalist cultures that retained this combination for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature, art, science, furniture, architecture, engineering, and agriculture. Only three out of the eighty-six cultures studied ever attained this level.

 Effect of abandoning prenuptial chastity:
When strict prenuptial chastity was no longer the norm, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking also disappeared within three generations.

 Total sexual freedom:
If total sexual freedom was embraced by a culture, that culture collapsed within three generations to the lowest state of flourishing — which Unwin describes as “inert” and at a “dead level of conception” and 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....

Read the red-highlighted text again, and weep for your country.

Think that's over the top?  Yah, well, the latest US egghead fad is cannibalism.

We'll give Franny1 the benefit of the doubt here; perhaps he never read Unwin's work while he was rummaging through Protestant theological works for his 'moral' theology blathers.

After all, he's a Jesuit.

3 comments:

Pat said...

Great post and topic. You might be interested to read this, I read it last night and found it excellent.
Bear with it and note the way it describes tendencies influencing thoughts which influence behaviour.

https://www.traditioninaction.org/History/F_001_RCR_ASG.html

Anonymous said...

Oddly enough, its many young victims of this culture who are waking up to it (see WhateverPodcast).

Anonymous said...

I shared this post with an Engineer friend, and this is his response

Interesting. I agree with the importance of premarital chastity and single life long marriage. Since Susan works with severe abuse survivors, I've come to appreciate that exiting a marriage is sometimes necessary and life is more fulfilled in a second relationship. But generally YES.further marriage is an earthly model of the relationship between God and His people. Revelation in particular describes the church as the bride and Christ as the bridegroom. I increasingly realize that those who are Bridal with christ is a small subset of the church and sadly more often than not does not include the priests, pastors, and hierarchy whether catholic or protestant.

While I agree that cultures are better off when there is premarital chastity and the marriage/family is intact, there was something about the article that bothered me. Part of this is me, I'm increasingly skeptical of research and actively look for the holes, what's not said, and what's omitted. And so....I looked up Unwin. He lived something like 1895 to 1940 and is described as a social anthropologist. This is a subset of social Darwinists. This was a line of thinking widely popular in the early 1900s that used evolutionary theory to claim that society has evolved to favor the superior races. Hitlers world view was driven by social Darwinism. The claim was that the European/white race was superior and could be proven scientifically. Unwin examined 80 primitive tribes (presumably from 17th to 19th century ) and 6 ancient cultures spread over 5000 years. He found the reported results. What he didn't do was examine the inverse question. Were there cultures that excelled that were sexually immoral? Such a query of the inverse of your hypothesis is critical to establishing truth. So are there inverse examples? Rome at the height of its glory was anything but sexually moral. It lasted another several hundred years. Biblical Israel at the height of its glory was led by Solomon with 700 wives. If we claim that the US is currently at the height of art, architecture, engineering, etc we are anything but moral. One could argue that we peaked early in our lifetime and our grandchildren are that third generation.