The downfall of many a great civilization involved the rampant immoral sexuality and perversion in that culture.
Such as?
In
Sex and Culture, JD Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 known civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe.
Well I am unfamiliar with Mr. Unwins work, but "primitive tribes" are hardly "great civilizations". What I can gather from the few sources that are online about this book is that it was written in 1934 in Great Britain during a time when British women were gaining more rights and freedoms. Mr. Unwin apparently believed that women should remain subservient and thus published his work in an effort to provide an argument that women should should revert back to their status of Victorian England. The book doesn't seem to be one that is widely referenced by scholarship and, from the little I have been able to find, those that do consider it a study in the manipulation of data in order to establish a pre-conceived, political agenda.
"
In order to attain this absolute correlation, he has had to manipulate his definitions of both sexual restrictions and of cultural achievement. His restrictions, in fact, only concern the limitation of pre-nuptual freedom in women and the nature of religious rites...in defining cultural achievement the standard is surprising. The lowest level recognized is that characterized by religion without post-funeral honor of the individual dead or without worship in temples, these two being the criteria of the middle and highest levels of primitive cultural achievement. For a culture to rise from the lowest plane to the next highest level it is only necessary to restrict pre-nuptual freedom of women; to rise to the highest level, where they will be capable of building temples, it is only necessary to demand tokens of virginity. It is not necessary for all restrictions to be enforced on all females of a society....
It is impossible within the limits of a brief review to criticize the long list of absurdities that are involved in the correlations of this volume.....This volume is an extreme example of the manipulation of anthropological material to support private programs of social reform, in this case, a program of return to the immediate Victorian past. It makes clear, as has already been abundantly demonstrated in anthropological literature, that any thesis, no matter how unlikely, can be upheld by a suitable rearrangement of cultural facts from primitive peoples. Only insistence upon a greater scrupulousness and a greater intelligence can prevent the recurrence of such volumes of special pleading"
-Dr. Ruth Benedict, Ph.D.
Columbia University, Department of Anthropology
GENERAL Sex and Culture. J. D. Unwin. - Benedict - 2009 - American Anthropologist - Wiley Online Library
.Dr. Benedict also mentions in her review, that
Unwin completely ignored several tribes that were in the immediate area and time frame of other tribes he did consider that would have totally destroyed his hypothesis such as the Cheyenne and Menomini. So, it appears that you are supporting your thesis by quoting a source that was designed to subjugate women and appears to be the 1930's British equivalent of AGW; i.e. '
we will only consider data that supports our political aims and we will ignore the rest'.
And you just proved that you know more about Unwin than Bonzi, who never read his book or anything other than some blurb on a right wing nut job site.
Didn't that happen to other great empires in the past, such as those of Britain, Spain, Rome, Persia, Babylon and Egypt? Is America' s future more secure than theirs was?
Sir John Bagot Glubb (1897-1987), a highly honored British general and historian better known as Glubb Pasha, wrote about the collapsed empires of the past. In his 1978 book
The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival, he described a common pattern fitting the history of some fallen empires. They went through a cycle of stages as they started, expanded, matured, declined and collapsed.
1. The age of outburst (or pioneers).
2. The age of conquests.
3. The age of commerce.
4. The age of affluence.
5. The age of intellect.
6. The age of decadence.
7. The age of decline and collapse.
