“Studies either confirm common sense
or they’re wrong.”—Dennis Prager[i]
Common sense tells us things that eventually social science
can confirm, if done correctly.[ii]
If you start with correct principles, and follow the correct procedures, then
you get the right answers. Same with logic, which is mathematical. If you start
with the right premise, and don’t get off track with faulty reasoning, then you
get the right answer. But if you don’t start with a true premise, your answers
will be faulty. Or if you take a wrong turn along the way.
That’s why it makes sense to look at what has been tried and
tested over many years, by many people, in many places, in many cultures. If
they come to see the wisdom in the same things, they might be right. Learning
from the past, we can identify the principles that lead to civilization.
It’s kind of pointless to say, “Now that we’re more evolved,
or progressive, we can ignore the experience of the sum total of human history,
and try something new and untried, because we’re so advanced.” That is probably
what every decadent society thought: “We don’t need to cling to those old ideas
of morality; we want to do things our own way.” And then they sink from
civilization into savagery, and misery. Every time.
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| Detroit after decay |
Economist Thomas Sowell wrote a piece earlier this month, comparing life for
blacks in America before and after the Civil Rights movement, and then the War
on Poverty in the 1960s.
You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior
to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years
since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.
We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and
white racism. But in fact—for those who still have some respect for facts—black
poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But
violent crime within black ghettos was far less.
Murder rates among black males were going down—repeat, DOWN—during
the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s,
reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children
were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great
majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.
Sowell gets to talk openly about race by virtue of his
color. It’s helpful to get truth from someone who has lived a life worth
knowing. But he doesn’t leave it as a racial problem; you do the same things in
any culture, and you get the same results. He suggests reading Life at the Bottom, by Theodore
Dalrymple, talking about British white slums caused by the welfare state.
Sowell concludes,
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them
from the requirements of civilization—including work, behavioral standards,
personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever
intelligentsia disdain—without ruinous
consequences to them and to society at large.
He’s an economist, so the requirements of civilization he’s
focusing on particularly affect economic prosperity, such as a strong work
ethic. But more than that, you don’t get prosperity without the necessary behavioral
standards and personal responsibility. And what are those? The principles were laid
out in basic form about 3400 years ago, in the Ten Commandments. Every civilization has had something very close to that: you don’t
lie, you don’t steal, you don’t have sex outside of marriage, you don’t take
innocent life, you honor family, and you recognize God as the giver of life and
inalienable rights. If you throw out any of the essential ingredients, you don’t
get to have civilization.
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| image found here |
In 1995 the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints sent out A Proclamation to the World, titled “The Family.”[iii]
It’s a short document, and at the time we thought it seemed puzzling, because
the points made in it were what we’d believed all along. They were common
sense.
But very shortly afterward, ever line in it began to be
attacked. Things like:
· Gender is an essential characteristic of
individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.
· We declare that God’s commandment for His
children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.
· We further declare that God has commanded that
the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman,
lawfully wedded as husband and wife.
· Marriage between man and woman is essential to
His eternal plan.
· Children are entitled to birth within the bonds
of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows
with complete fidelity.
For someone with common sense, those aren’t weird or outmoded
or ridiculous in any way. They’re just the common sense way to happiness.
If you take a look at some older movies, or maybe some
Shakespeare, you’ll find that the assumption that sex must only take place
within marriage is a given. It was so widely accepted that even villains would
expect they needed marriage before they could prey upon the damsel. It has always been known that not everyone
would abide by this societal requirement, but rebels knew they couldn’t expect
society to condone their rebellions. Society must reverence marriage and family
as sacred, or civilization ceases to be.
I’ve mention Vico and Unwin before.
Giambatista Vico came first. Back in 1725 he concluded that marriage between
a man and a woman is essential for civilization—it is the “seed plot” of
society.[iv]
Religious people, statesmen, and pretty much any educated thinking person in
Vico’s day recognized that sex outside of marriage was an evil against society.
Vico just explained the reasoning (the social science).
Two centuries later, in 1935, along came anthropologist and “progressive”
thinker (i.e., progressive movement
that Woodrow Wilson foisted on us) Joseph D. Unwin, who set out to prove that
the institution of marriage was unnecessary, maybe even harmful. He did an
exhaustive study of some 86 cultures, all the world cultures throughout history
that he could obtain sufficient data for.[v]
He was forced by the evidence to conclude that only marriage with fidelity,
what he called absolute monogamy, would lead to the cultural prosperity of a
society—civilization. Anything else,
such as “domestic partnerships” or living together unmarried, or any other type
of promiscuity, would degrade society. He reported:
The evidence was such as to demand a complete revision of my
personal philosophy; for the relationship between the factors seemed to be so
close, that, if we know what sexual regulations a society has adopted, we can
prophesy accurately the pattern of its cultural behavior... (p.5).
Now it is an extraordinary fact that in the past sexual
opportunity has only been reduced to a minimum by the fortuitous adoption of an
institution I call absolute monogamy. This type of marriage has been adopted by
different societies, in different places, and at different times. Thousands of
years and thousands of miles separate the events; and there is no apparent
connection between them. In human records, there is no case of an absolutely
monogamous society failing to display great [cultural] energy. I do not know of
a case on which great energy has been displayed by a society that has not been
absolutely monogamous…(pp.31-32).
So a society’s sexual behavior can be predictive:
If, during or just after a period of [cultural] expansion, a
society modifies its sexual regulations, and a new generation is born into a
less rigorous [monogamous] tradition, its energy decreases... If it comes into
contact with a more vigorous society, it is deprived of its sovereignty, and
possibly conquered in its turn (p.21).
It seems to follow that we can make a society behave in any
manner we like if we are permitted to give it such sexual regulations as will
produce the behavior we desire. The results should begin to emerge in the third
generation ( p.45).
The Family Proclamation ends with a more religious sounding
but nearly identical warning:
We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity,
who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will
one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon
individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and
modern prophets.
Some people have to learn by experience; I understand that.
But let them experiment in their own limited lives and circles. There’s no need
for them to bring on dire consequences to entire civilizations just because
they want to try out ways of living that have proved misery-inducing throughout
all of human history.
I choose common sense rather than the proven path to
calamity.
[i] Donna Carol Voss quotes
(without quotation marks, so possibly a paraphrase) Dennis Prager at the
beginning of her piece, “Could it Be? Stay-at-Home Moms Are Bad for Children?”
[ii] For example, “Why
Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences,” 2002,
Institute for American Values, available at www.americanvalues.org, and the updated
version “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition, Thirty Conclusions from theSocial Sciences.”
See also Linda J. Waite’s
tabulations from the 1987-1988 waves of the National Survey of Families and
Households available in Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, 2000. The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier,
and Better-Off Financially (New York:
Doubleday): 155-156.
[iii] The proclamation was
read by President Gordon B. Hinckley as part of his message at the General
Relief Society (women’s auxiliary) Meeting held September 23, 1995, in Salt
Lake City. In its entirety at https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation?lang=eng&cid=PA0414-02
[iv] Vico, Giambattista, The New Science, 3rd Edition, trans. by
Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin, paragraphs 10-11: “The first of these [human institutions] was
marriage…For marriage, as all statesmen agree, is the seed-plot of the family,
as the family is the seed-plot of the commonwealth…”
[v] Unwin, also Joseph Daniel,
Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior," an address given to the
Medical Section of the British Psychological Society.
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