For the second time in recent weeks I’ve seen folks pushing Unwin’s 1934 book on sex and culture. I would just like to issue a couple of precautionary warnings about picking up a near hundred year old social science work and acting like its conclusions are true without more in the way of examination and thought simply because most Christians would agree that traditional sexual morality stabilizes society versus the alternative. Among Christians on social media, often what happens is that people read an article like Durston’s and if they go beyond rank confirmation bias in the first place, they’ll add Unwin to a list of referenced sources as proof with quotes to follow, and exhibit a sort of Wikipedia-level knowledge of what he presented as true. Then, major planks of Unwin’s thought become talking points on Facebook, in sermons, in conversations with others, and sometimes enough momentum gets going that the relevant bullet points go viral. But, an actual analysis of the text in question and its thesis isn’t typically done and this is where we get into trouble.
Some of what Kathryn Yusoff points out about the historical practice of science is helpful for us to remember even if you may have to sift out what she offers on race and racism in looking at geology and other science through the lens of critical theory. Early twentieth century social science suffers from a lot of problems that we don’t typically think about today in our Google-inspired bullet-pointed examination of anything people consider “science”.
Anthropology and the social sciences in some ways were very much in their infancy in the days leading up to World War II, still very much bound to Enlightenment concerns that included both the works of Freud and Darwin, similar methodologies that helped produce Nazi ideology are present in older works like Unwin’s, and they inevitably work with the sort of gloss that would make Hegel himself proud. A way to think about this without all the references to the philosophy of science that no one but myself and a few others read is still possible. The way they practiced science a hundred years ago can be compared to movie depictions of the quintessential safari hat wearing old English gentlemen traipsing through the jungle with a magnifying glass with locals at hand to guide him where he wants to go, all the while thinking he’s about to discover something momentous that the indigenous there have known about for ten generations. Because. Science.
That’s why you see Unwin surveying 80+ cultures/civilizations for commonalities, something almost impossible to capably do today even with the vast level of technology we can bring to such a question. The West has had to learn the hard way that social science can’t be capably practiced with such a wide scope and devastating presuppositions in play. Further, the glosses required to do so make it very difficult to come to definitive conclusions about any given subject under examination. The categories employed in differentiating between cultures and civilizations are usually quite arbitrary and easily subject to question. Further, Unwin excluded other data as Christians we’d value such as the fact that the earliest cities and civilizations we see in the Genesis narrative are in fact from the line of Cain. Technology in its primal form develops in light of the sons of polygamy and not the sort of monogamy Christians normally envision (Gen 4:19-22).
Few have even bothered to really counter Unwin’s work because of the advent of postmodern/post-structuralist philosophy underlying science that calls the question entirely irrelevant even while it helps men like Marcuse argue that sexual libido should be a primary driver to overturn Western civilization. We don’t see much in the way of replies to Unwin but not because his work can’t be capably countered. In fact, I imagine it would be very easy to write a Yusoff-like criticism of Unwin through the eyes of critical theory. Rather, Unwin actually assists someone like Marcuse more than we might consider at first glance.
This, of course, dovetails into some of the recent criticism I’ve laid down contra Foster/Tennant and how they view sex as the engine of dominion. Marcuse would actually agree and further uses sexual libido to corrupt civilization rather than stabilize it. We’d like to say at first glance, like some others have, that the way forward for civilization is monogamy and avoiding sex before marriage but this misses the forest for the trees.
For the Christian, the real driver of life in Christ is love as it is proclaimed in the gospel of Jesus Christ. We can’t be like Foucault in analyzing sex and marriage thinking all we need to look at is the how of the relationship in terms of its power to stabilize society. We need to understand both the what and the why of this thing God called the union of two becoming one.
Further, we also have to get back to why we do anything apart from its perceived utility. God commanded for us to live a certain way and we do so because we are his children. Trust and obey is the order of the day in terms of how we live our lives in love through Christ and by the work of the Holy Spirit. We love God and we love our neighbor as ourselves because God himself is love and first loved us. While doing so has tremendous benefit to society merely doing what’s required because it’s practical or we think it will solve some social problem is a reductive pragmatism rather than true obedience to God and his word.