Stop Throwing Out the Baby

There are some ideas that have been around a very long time, experimented on, varied—and then it turns out the original was the best idea all along.

We’re about to talk about some truths that are very nearly lost in today’s society, because of unwise throwing out of ideas, simply because they’re old. And this has led to some literal throwing out of babies with the proverbial bathwater.

An article was brought to my attention that I thought might be worth reacting to. The piece is for an online forum called Human Parts, which I hadn’t heard of before. Gabrielle Blair writes “Men Cause 100% of Unwanted Pregnancies.” 

image from here

Technically, she’s right. If you go ahead and read her piece, be forewarned that it’s explicit—not in a prurient way, but still not something you want to have up on your computer screen with a nine-year-old looking over your shoulder.

Blair points out that men can cause pregnancy with every orgasm, while a woman can only get pregnant, all things being healthy, during about 48 hours a month. Nature is not equal.

She also accurately points out that contraceptives for women have lots of negative side effects. Meanwhile, the most common contraceptives for men, condoms, are cheap, plentiful, and free of side effects. But men don’t like them. Because they cause slightly less pleasure. Here’s how she puts it:

Imagine a pleasure scale, with pain beginning at zero and going down into the negatives. A good back-scratch falls at 5, and an orgasm without a condom is a 10. Where would sex with a condom fall? A 7 or 8? So, it’s not that sex with a condom is not pleasurable, it’s just not as pleasurable. An 8 instead of a 10.

Let me emphasize that again: Men regularly choose to put women at massive risk in order to experience a few minutes of slightly increased pleasure.

She comes up with a rather radical solution: all men should get a vasectomy, which they can have reversed once they’re married and want to have children.

Yes, that’s radical. No, it’s not likely to catch on. Her point is that men ought to take on the responsibility, rather than women.

But here’s where we differ. She’s talking about which way men should go about mitigating the natural consequences of having irresponsible sex. That does nothing but perpetuate the actual root problem: men having irresponsible sex—and women allowing men to have irresponsible sex.

Here’s something that might seem mind-blowing for young people today: this issue has been part of the human race for all the millennia we’ve had the human race. That means people have had plenty of time to work out solutions. And there is one solution that actually works: absolute monogamy. (We've talked about the research of  Vico and Unwin before, here.)

That means no sex outside of marriage, and absolute fidelity within marriage. Not just for women, but also for men. In another word, that means chastity for both women and men.

Candace Owens (left) and Lila Rose on the Candace Owens Show
May 19, 2019 screenshot from here

This past weekend, Lila Rose, pro-life advocate, was on the Candace Owens podcast, and they had a conversation about this old idea of chastity. Lila Rose got married within the past year; she was a virgin up until marriage. She is 30. Owens is also 30. Her journey to conservatism comes from another direction.  She lost her virginity in high school. She lives differently now and regrets that:

Candace Owens: Because the person meant absolutely nothing to me, and I was doing it because I wanted to fit in. I was doing it because this was the normal thing to do, and you were considered weird if you didn’t do these sorts of things.  

And it’s not even just peer pressure from other students; it’s peer pressure from society. It’s everything that you’re seeing on TV. It’s everything that you’re being taught by your teachers.

Now I’m engaged. I wish I had waited. And that’s a really sad thing, and a weird thing, to say now, obviously, because I live a different lifestyle. But that guilt started creeping up on me before I got engaged.

Before I met my fiancé, I was in a relationship, and I had this conversation where I was, “I think I kind of want to recommit myself back to God.” And my boyfriend at the time said, “No.” Like, if you don’t have—  And this is when I knew something was really wrong. Right?

Lila Rose: Meaning, “I’ll love you if you have sex with me.”

CO: That’s what I heard.

LR: That’s not love.

CO: I think his excuse, what he said to me was, “Sex is how people connect.” Right?

LR: It is, but with someone that you’re going to love lifelong, and you’ve given everything to. It’s more than that.

It ought to be more than that. Think about the difference between giving sex to a man who isn’t committed to you, in the hopes that he might come to love and commit to you—and to earn this chance, you risk pregnancy (not to mention STIs) without his support, just for a hope. Meanwhile, to him it means nothing but temporary pleasure.

Compare that to sex with a man who has already committed to stay with you forever—and has declared that to the whole world with a signed covenant. Then sex becomes the enjoyable expression of that love and commitment, founding an actual family. The social science data shows that sex is better for married couples, and enjoyed more often, than it is for singles. And among married couples who are religious and attend church regularly, they have the most enjoyable sex of any demographic.

As Lila Rose points out, outcomes are better for both women and men when they wait for marriage:

Outcomes meaning, your relationship happiness, your economic happiness, physical health—because of STIs, the potential for pregnancy when you’re not prepared for it. So I think that—  First of all that’s just the social data on that. But from a spiritual perspective, if we think sex is just an act you do, right, and all that matters in consent—  It’s all about consent today, right? All you need to do is consent, and then you’re good, right? That’s the #MeToo movement: as long as there’s consent, that’s good. We need consent. But consent is not enough. Sex should be about love. It should be about commitment. It should be about responsibility. And it is built to be about children.

This next part I thought was most telling:

And it’s only because we sterilize it. I mean, we use women—  Think about it. All these women our age and younger are taking birth control pills. They’re being told, “You need to sterilize yourself. You need to shut down your hormones in order to be sexually available to men.” I mean, that’s what that message is.

There’s something really wrong with a society that values sterility rather than fertility.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s was not progress; it was the repeat of a rebellion that has occurred in every failing society in world history.

A young man who’s a friend on Facebook (used to be a missionary here in Houston—and he’s an eligible bachelor saving sex for marriage, and good looking, strong, and outdoorsy, so there are such men available, just saying) said this wise thing a couple of days ago:

You can judge a culture on how they treat their offspring.

In other words: High rates of abortion is evidence we are not committed. Not committed to those we express we love. Making the most intimate activity a lie. Taking advantage of others. Willing to take a life to justify a lie.

This is our culture.

Abortion has never been about empowering women; it has been about causing women to do unspeakable evil in order for men to have irresponsible sex without consequences.

Of course we need to be against abortion—which is used for a reason other than inconvenience in only about 4% of cases. At least 86% of women having abortions are unmarried—and of those, it’s hard to know what percentage are nevertheless because the man doesn’t want to support offspring. Married women are seldom selfish enough to kill their offspring when a man is willing to work out a solution to give that child a family.

The vast majority of abortions happen because a woman has allowed a man to have sex with her when he is not willing to stay with her and raise a child, when he is not committed to her or her offspring.

The sexual rebellion is touted as freeing men and women from the restrictions on sex of former, old-fashioned times. But look at what has actually happened. A woman used to have the support of society when she expected a man to respect her and wait for sex until after he had committed to love her and stay with her. Now women are expected to pretend, along with men, that sex is meaningless pleasure that they of course want to indulge in. Consider the idea that a woman is expected to “put out” if a man has paid for a nice dinner. She’s expected to give her body to him, risking all that nature brings with it, because he fed her one meal? That’s all she’s worth? And it’s a monetarily determined exchange? That’s what we’re supposed to believe is sexual liberation for women?

Compare this to a man respecting a woman’s reputation so much that he would never compromise her; he loves her and asks for her to marry him before he offers or expects sex in their relationship. And then they work together to have a happy family life together from then on. Not only is the woman happier—and freer from negative life outcomes; the man is also happier and lives a more meaningful life (with better sex as a bonus).

We don’t need men to come up with more and better ways to get away with irresponsible sex with women. We need men to respect and love women so much that sex is returned to its proper place within the sanctity of marriage.

This—men who never have irresponsible sex—is the answer to ending sex trafficking—and the pornography industry related to it. It would be the end to rape. It would be the end to abortion except to save the life of the mother when saving both isn't possible. It would be the end to unwanted pregnancies. It would nearly be the end to children raised without fathers in the home. It would bring about the end to more than 90% of poverty in our society.

Chastity is one of those simple but not easy solutions. But it is possible. Been there, done that, lived that life. And it is what we should be teaching.

Teaching birth control in schools, while failing to teach the meaning of sex, says, “Of course you’ll have sex; of course there are consequences, but our society wants to ignore them. So try these sterilization methods while you’re too young to know better.” And we shouldn't ignore that this approach doesn’t get good outcomes. More than half of women getting abortions were using some form of contraceptives during the month prior to pregnancy.

If you’re cynical enough—and about Planned Parenthood, which provides a large portion of sex education curriculum, this is a natural assumption—you’d think they were touting contraception knowing full well pregnancies would result, so they’d get more money from abortions.

Is more sex education in schools the answer? No! Heck no! We need real sex education, controlled by the parent, and preferably taught by the parent. There may be good programs parents can use. I'm told Utah recently adopted a good program, but I haven't seen it yet. If it's good, wouldn't it be best as a resource to parents? Churches can help. But promoting sex without morality is a bad experiment we need to end.

Nor do we need sexual repression. We don’t need to pretend it’s bad or disgusting. But we do need to celebrate it as the extremely important thing it is, and therefore keep it within marriage.

Let's stop, as a society, valuing sterility as a means of getting more irresponsible sex. And return to valuing fertility—which is a sign of health and vitality not only for women, but for all of civilization.

Chastity—for both men and women—leads to thriving civilization wherever it’s tried.

Mature Conversation

Image found here

To begin, I’ll just place here some story headlines from the news this week.

Planned Parenthood's Richards Details Secret Meeting With Ivanka And Jared About Funding And Abortion

Richards revealed details of the meeting in her book. Trump and Kushner offered full funding for Planned Parenthood, even increased funding—if Planned Parenthood completely stopped doing abortions. She refused. Because Planned Parenthood isn’t about “women’s health”; it’s about doing abortions.

Next, this:

Planned Parenthood CEO Finally Recommends Adoption, But For The Wrong Species 

She recommended adopting shelter dogs, rather than buying a dog. LifeNews had this response:

Planned Parenthood is so obsessed with making a buck that the idea of adoption rarely — if ever — comes up. Sure, the organization will take credit for a few moms choosing life to feed the lie that it does more than abortion, but the numbers are hardly flattering. In its latest annual report, Planned Parenthood could only claim one adoption referral for every 83 abortions. If Cecile wants to rescue dogs, she might want to show a little more concern for their prospective owners.

And a few days earlier was this:

Planned Parenthoodcalled for Disney princess 'who's had an abortion' in now-deleted tweet 

Of course, removing a tweet after it’s gotten a lot of attention means it’s not really gone.

The tweet, found here

It was discussed today on the Michael Knowles show, worth hearing (requires subscription, but audio is free).

From my viewpoint, I’m not surprised when I learn yet one more unfavorable thing about Planned Parenthood. I believe the people within Planned Parenthood are guilty of heinous wrongs of the worst savagery. Chances are you agree.

Abortion is one of the most polarized issues in our society. And yet, it’s horrifying to a huge majority. The Democrat platform position is restriction-free abortion. But only 12% of Americans agree with that position. Not even the majority of the so-called “pro-choice” position agree. Only 22% of women go along with the Democrat position.

Put another way, on this most polarized issue, 88% of Americans agree that there should be some restrictions on abortions. A hefty 76% favor limiting abortion to the first trimester, or limiting it to only certain very rare circumstances (rape, incest, or to save the mother's life), or barring abortion entirely. In fact, 78% of women favor limits.

That’s a lot of agreement.

During a class lecture last May, Dr. Jordan Peterson was asked his opinion on abortion. He’s a thinker, and his answer was careful and much deeper than for or against. But he started with this:

Abortion is clearly wrong. I don’t think anybody debates that. You wouldn’t recommend that someone that you love have one.

Jordon Peterson
screen shot from the video

He’s right. The data bears that out. And yet it seems a surprising thing to say. He gives a larger answer, to address why this wrong thing still presents a problem for society:

So, the discussion regarding the legality of abortion is nested inside a larger discussion about the morality of abortion, and that’s nested inside a larger discussion about the proper place of sexuality in human behavior. And, to me, that’s the level at which the problem needs to be addressed.

If that’s the level at which the problem needs to be addressed, why aren’t we addressing it at that level?

He goes on to touch on the importance of marriage quite beautifully:

It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another. It signifies a place where sexuality can properly be integrated into life. That’s no easy task. It’s a place where children, at least in principle, can be put first and foremost, as they should be once they exist.

But he believes our culture isn’t mature enough to have this conversation on proper sexual behavior.

He’s hardly ever wrong, and probably isn’t now. But maybe we help the culture mature by having the conversation anyway. Think about having a conversation with children around. Sometimes you interact with the kids, but eventually you’re going to have a conversation with the grownups, and the kids will be bored and tune you out. Maybe leave the room, or find some other way to occupy their interest.

But if you have a long series of these conversations around your children, eventually they mature enough to get interested. Long before they're ready to contribute, they start to pay attention, and start to think about what the grownups are talking about. And eventually the listening children have matured enough to join in. By then they’ve been exposed to grownup ideas over and over, and have thought about them, and started to think through their own opinions.

We shouldn’t wait until the immature are matured before having a conversation among the grownups.

The growing awareness and agreement that abortion is wrong is evidence of some maturing among previously less mature listeners.

So, in hopes of more maturing to come, I will say, sex outside of marriage is always wrong.

Look, for example, at the formula for avoiding poverty in America. I’ve written about it before, had this data for more than 15 years. It shows up in Brookings Institute data in 2013. Ben Shapiro mentioned it in a speech last October. It’s essentially the theme of the Charles Murray book Coming Apart. It’s this:

1.       Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.       Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.       Stay married.

4.       Obtain at least a high school diploma.

Regardless of race or economic level of the family-of-origin, 98% of people who follow this formula move up to the middle class.

If “planned parenthood” meant this formula, that would be a societal help. The euphemistically named Planned Parenthood doesn’t tell anyone this. They tell you that everyone has sex outside of marriage, and that the inevitable resulting pregnancy is an inconvenience to you and therefore you have a right to kill. Does that really make a contribution to a person’s life? Or to society’s?

So there are economic reasons for following the formula. Beyond that, the next part of the conversation has to do with reasons for confining sex to within marriage.

I jumped in to that side of the conversation back when I wrote the original Spherical Model material. It’s in the “Family Is the Basic Unit of Civilization” section. Absolute monogamy is a necessary feature of a thriving civilization. This isn’t new information. Giambattista Vico knew it in the mid-17th Century. Nearly a century ago Joseph Daniel Unwin demonstrated it with data about pretty much all the world’s civilizations.

And if that weren’t enough, Moses got that information straight from God about 2300 years ago (Exodus 20:14).

It’s a mature civilization that has figured out how to build on the wisdom of the past, rather than throw it out as old-fashioned. Not every tradition is worth keeping. But when the wisdom of the ages tells us something, maybe we ought to believe it until there’s incontrovertible evidence that it’s not true—instead of assuming it’s worthless regardless of mounds of evidence, which is what our immature culture has been doing the past several decades.

So, this is my effort to get that grownup conversation going. I'm sure we'll talk again.

Common Sense or Calamity

“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.

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.

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.

Devaluing Marriage and Family = Decay of Civilization: Part I--Vico and Unwin

Once I get started talking about the power of families to bring about civilization, more thoughts just keep coming. As Inigo Montoya says in The Princess Bride: “Let me esplain. No, there is too much; let me sum up.” Even if I sum up, there is more than I can say in a single blog post.  

So I’m turning this into a three-part piece, starting today, specifically on how devaluing marriage and family shows up as civilization decay. Part I will be on evidence from world history. Part II will be evidence from around the world. Part III will be evidence from closer to home.  

Expect to see all three pieces within a week, although not necessarily consecutive days. Monday is the 4^th of July, so that already has another purpose.  

Part I—Vico and Unwin 

Vico

Giambattista Vico was an Italian scholar/philosopher/scientist born in the mid-17^th Century. His writings are receiving something of a renaissance in our day. Although he was respected, and often considered ahead of his time, he was never highly renowned in his day, possibly because he spent some effort critiquing Descartes, and that wasn’t very welcome. 

His most famous work was Principles of New Science of Giambattista Vico concerning the Common Nature of Nations (often referred to in brief as The New Science), first published in 1725, and then updated with new editions in 1930 and again in 1944 shortly before his death at age 76. These weren’t translated from Italian into English until around the end of WWII, so there have only been a few decades for his ideas to become more widespread here. 

In The New Science, Vico concluded that there are “divine institutions” from which spring all “human institutions.” He wrote that the first of these is marriage, because “marriage, as all statesmen agree, is the seed-plot of the family, as the family is the seed-plot of the commonwealth” (NS paragraph 10-11). He went on to say, “All nations of the world have branded as false” the “opinion that the sexual unions which…take place between free men and free women without solemn matrimony are free of natural wickedness.” In other words, it was obvious that sexual unions without matrimony were indeed wicked. 

Also, according to Vico, why have all civilizations recognized, encouraged, and enforced marital vows? Because, without those vows, parents “are held together by no necessary bond of law, [and] will proceed to cast off their natural children. Since their parents may separate at any time, the children, abandoned by both, must lie exposed to be devoured by dogs. If humanity, public or private, does not bring them up, they will have to grow up with no one to teach them religion, language, or any other human custom.”  

Religious people (and apparently all statesmen, or any educated thinking person in Vico’s day) recognized that sex outside of marriage was an evil against all of society. Vico is just explaining the reasoning behind it. 

It may be difficult for us to believe that anyone would abandon a child, which Vico predicts as the outcome. As it says in the Old Testament book of Isaiah (49:15), “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” In other words, as unthinkable as it is for a mother to forget her beloved infant, that is more possible than that God will forget us—to emphasize how sure that is. 

And yet the reason Vico gives is that parents, without the promise to each other and society, the marriage vow, they will not feel their obligation to their children. If that is so, we must see it in examples where people in measurable populations without marriage. We will indeed look at that in Part II. 

And what happens when parents don’t keep their vows to each other and to their children? Society must bear the cost of bringing them up—either through public (government services) or private means (adoption services, charitable orphanages, foster care). Otherwise, without those children being taught “religion, language, or any other human custom,” society as a whole decays. Vico puts this rather poetically as, “they [the abandoned, unlearned children] are bound to cause this world of nations, enriched and adorned by so many fine arts of humanity, to revert to the great ancient forest through with in their nefarious feral wanderings once roamed the foul beasts of Orpheus [incest, or perversion]…for such relationships are abhorred naturally by all nations, nor were they ever practiced by any save in their last stage of corruption” (NS paragraph 336). 

Vico was a long time ago, and not even that well known. What we learn from him is what thinking people in his day believed, not necessarily what is true. Is there empirical evidence? I think so. 

Unwin

About 80 years ago renowned anthropologist and progressive thinker Joseph Daniel Unwin set out to prove his theory that marriage was an irrelevant, possibly even harmful cultural institution. He went about this by setting up charts of known information on every society that he could find sufficient data for in the history of the world. The evidence did not show what he expected. In fact, he ended up concluding that only marriage—including fidelity, what he called absolute monogamy—would lead to cultural prosperity for society. Anything short of absolute monogamy (domestic partnerships, cohabitation, etc.) would cause societal decay. 

Here are his words:

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….

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…. 

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 [less 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. 

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.—Joseph Daniel Unwin, Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior,” address given to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society. (Library of Congress No., HQ12.U52) 

I’ve read Unwin’s presentation in full, along with the charts. I’m not an anthropologist, but it is understandable and clear how he concludes what he does. If he is right, then a society that devalues marriage and family will inevitably (unless it reverts to absolute monogamy) weaken and become susceptible to political and cultural takeover by stronger forces, within three generations, or roughly 75-100 years. 

If there are societies within the world today that have weakened their support for marriage and family earlier than we have, we can measure whether Unwin’s predictions are accurate. That will come in Part II.