Sex and Culture
Sex and Culture
Sex and Culture
is a 1934 book by English social anthropologist J. D. Unwin concerning the correlation between a society’s level of “cultural achievement” and its level of sexual restraint. The book concluded with the theory that as societies develop, they become more sexually liberal, accelerating the social entropy of the society, thereby diminishing its “creative” and “expansive” energy.
According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous, it becomes increasingly liberal concerning sexual morality. It thus loses its cohesion, impetus and purpose, which he claims is irrevocable. Unwin also stated that absolute monogamy required legal equality between men and women
Unwin’s study of 80 native cultures and 6 civilizations led him to conclude that the operant factor behind the cultural decay of a society is largely due to the loosening of sexual conventions and the lessening of monogamous relationships. He purports that through stricter sexual conventions such as abstinence, nations channel their sexual energy into aggressive expansion, conquering “less energetic” countries, as well as into art, science, reform and other indicators of high cultural achievement.
By ‘civilized’ societies the book refers specifically to the following sixteen historical peoples: Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Hellenes, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Sassanids, Arabs (Moors), Romans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons
Unwin divides the civilisations into four groups to compare how far along each one is in terms of progress. The categories are, from the lowest level of sexual restraint to the highest, ‘zoistic’, ‘manistic’, ‘deistic’ and ‘rationalistic’. Unwin bases his categories on certain social phenomena that he observed in his study of the 86 world cultures, phenomena that he found coincided with varying levels of prenuptial chastity:
Zoistic: He describes societies that do not practice any form of prenuptial chastity as being in the zoistic condition.
Manistic: He describes societies that did not practice prenuptial chastity or who practiced limited chastity and who paid respects to the dead (‘tendance’) as being in the manistic cultural condition.
Deistic: He describes societies in which prenuptial chastity was practiced and who built temples and who had priests as deistic.
Rationalistic: Unwin does not give a precise definition of what constitutes a rationalistic culture but describes it as the cultural condition that emerges when a society has been in the deistic condition for long enough to appreciate “a new conception of the power in the universe, based on the yet unknown” that is the result of a widening scope of understanding of the natural.
Sociologically and Normatively
The ideal type of sociologically illegitimate power is kleptocracy. In such a system the powerful exercise power-over purely for the purposes of enhancing their own power-to, with total disregard for the needs, wants or interests of those who are commanded to obey. In kleptocracy power is zero-sum, where the gain of the powerful is at the expense of the obedient less powerful (on the variable sum nature of power see Read Citation2012).
As there is limited gain for the less powerful, compliance is either forced, through direct violence, or is coerced, through the threat of violence or deprivation. A master slave relationship is the real-life social relationship that comes closest to the ideal type of coercive power.
European feudalism has many aspects of such a kleptocratic relationship. The feudal elites were heavily armed, with exploitation dependent upon the ability of powerful overlords to coerce their serfs through control over the means of violence. As argued by Tilly (Citation1985), the early modern state-building process was essentially a monopoly of violence by state-builders who created a protection racket while socially constructing themselves as representing the law
. In the 20th C. some authoritarian systems would also qualify as coming close to the ideal type. Although, many totalitarian systems had some sociological levels of legitimacy, using ideology, fascist and communist, which makes them, in part, the second type (legitimate sociologically – to be discussed).
Even about feudalism, there were legitimizing ideological social constructions, such as the ‘Great Chain of Being’ and ‘blue blood’. To what extent these rationalisations were simply told by the powerful to themselves as self-justification or internalized by the less powerful, is hard to gauge.
To the extent to which they were internalized by the less powerful, these exercises of power would be legitimate, sociologically. However, if purely used by the elite for self-consumption as self-justification, then the power resource is coercion.
Where the sole reason for compliance is violence/coercion, so-called ‘crimes’, are essentially acts of resistance. Coercion is relatively crude because the less powerful will avoid compliance at any moment they can do so. Consequently, surveillance has to be constant to prevent crime.
As the powerful define the rules of the game, any such non-compliance is a crime against the kleptocratic order-of-things. In instances of pure coercion, the dominated do not internalize this order-of-things as part of their practical consciousness. Hence, crime and punishment do not have the legitimizing quality described by Durkheim. Rather, deterrence is the objective of punishment
Revolutionary
As Scott (Citation1990) argues, in cases of extreme domination acquiescence often gives the appearance of ideological incorporation of the dominated, as they go through the rituals or enunciate the mantras of the ideology of the dominant. However, the dominated have a kind of dual consciousness, whereby they learn the public performance of dominant ideology while retaining a backstage practical knowledge of a revolutionary counter-ideology.
The latter only becomes visible when the less powerful are together, at a safe distance from the powerful, or in the moment of actual revolt. In this regard, it is important to understand that the confirm-structuration of dominating social structures does not necessarily mean that the confirm-structurer considers those social structures legitimate. Compliance is out of structural constraint.
The social actors believe, often with good reason (gained from experience of failed resistance), that the disparity of power between the powerful and the less powerful is so great that resistance is pointless. On the surface, the acquiescence that arises may have the appearance of legitimacy through ideological incorporation, as it is based upon a practical knowledge of social order and is reproduced routinely.
However, that practical knowledge is more a resigned acceptance of the order-of-things, rather than a fuller endorsement of the order-of-things as the natural-and-right-order-of-things. As the practical knowledge falls short of a belief in legitimacy, there is a latent conflict present.
Culture
Unwin writes that “such a society is in the rationalistic condition. The advance to that condition depends not only on the reduction of sexual opportunity but also upon its preservation at a minimum.” According to Unwin, among the studied cultures, only three can be considered to have reached the rationalistic cultural state before entering a cultural decline: the Athenians, Romans and English.
The book concludes with the assertion that, to maintain a rationalistic society, sexual drive should be controlled and shifted to more productive work. Unwin notes that women should enjoy the same legal rights as men and that the condition for a high level of cultural achievement lies in restricting prenuptial sexual opportunity rather than a state of patriarchy, although the two have historically coincided.
The book states that the effect of sexual constraints, either pre or post-nuptial, has always led to increased flourishing of a culture. Conversely, increased sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later. The highest flourishing of culture had the most powerful combination: 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.
From a superficial study of the available data it might be thought that the questions of female subjection and parental power are indissolubly allied to that of female continence; but actually, their alliance in the past has been due to the chance factor that sexual opportunity has never been reduced to a minimum except by depriving women and children of their legal status.
It is historically true to say that in the past social energy has been purchased at the price of individual freedom, for it has never been displayed unless the female of the species has sacrificed her rights as an individual and unless children have been treated as mere appendages to the estate of the male parent; but it would be rash to conclude that sexual opportunity cannot be reduced to a minimum under any other conditions.
The evidence is that the subjection of women and children is intolerable and therefore temporary; but we should go beyond the evidence if we were to conclude from this fact that compulsory continence also is intolerable and therefore temporary. Such a statement, indeed, is contradicted by the tenor of the whole story
Power
This blog is just a short sketch, analogous to the kind of charcoal sketch that artists sometimes draw on a canvas before they paint a picture. It is a guide, which I hope will be useful to the readers of this wonderfully rich, textured account of power and crime, contained in this special issue.
I particularly wish to emphasize that what is criminal within the sociological language game is not necessarily so normatively. As we have seen, what is socially constructed as a crime in a kleptocracy and in a society with strong three-dimensional power bias is not necessarily a crime in the normative language game.
I briefly sketched the contours of crime relative to power from a normative perspective to demonstrate that even though crime is a social construction this does necessarily entail a kind of nihilistic relativism, whereby crime refers merely to subjective opinion.
The socially constructivist framework of sociology does not necessarily invalidate the critical aims of the political theorist, although it does qualify them, by pointing out that the political theorist cannot reason from nowhere because normative theory is always situated in practical knowledge that owes a debt to a collective consciousness
In the empirical social science literature, there is significant debate on whether power refers simply to a capacity or the actual exercise of power (for instance, see Dahl Citation1957, Morriss Citation2002, Dowding Citation2017). For the purposes of this essay, the word ‘power’ on its own refers to the actual exercise of power, whereby an actor A, makes B do something that B would not otherwise do. What enables A to do this, what makes A powerful, are the power resources of A.
So, ‘power’ refers to an actual happening, while ‘power resources’ refers to the capacity for action that an actor has, which I later also refer to as ‘dispositional power’. Obviously, this is somewhat at variance with everyday usage, where people refer to power resources simply as ‘power’.
The reason for making this distinction is Dahl’s (Citation1957) point that by and large (there are exceptions), resources need to be activated by social agents for them to have an effect upon the behaviour of the less powerful.
There are two significant power resources that we focus on for the purposes of this essay (there are more types of power resources than these). In political systems, the two most significant power resources are violence-cum-coercion and authority. Violence in its pure unmediated form treats the other as a physical object to be manipulated.
Pure violence is not that usual. The more common use of violence is as the basis for a threat of sanctions or punishment, directed at the less powerful to make them do something that they would not otherwise do, which is coercion. The exercise of power, backed by the use of coercion, is what Weber had in mind with his definition of Macht, as the ability to overcome resistance (Weber Citation1978, p. 53).
Coercion works upon the consciousness of the social subject by an appeal to their calculated fear of punishment or deprivation. When coercion is successful, the less powerful complies because of cost benefit calculation of the relative advantages of doing what they desire versus the cost of punishment.
Coercion is a relatively crude power resource in the sense that there is always actual or potential resistance, which is overcome. The less powerful will defy coercion if either the coercion is insufficient in severity or the less powerful calculate that their non-compliance can be done furtively, thus avoiding punishment
Counter-Ideology
In social practice, a latent subaltern ideology of resistance often manifests itself through social practice through everyday petty crimes Coercively exploited workers may pilfer during the process of production. In the street the coerced less powerful may engage in surreptitious acts of vandalism.
A high prevalence of, so-called, ‘petty crime’ is symptomatic of coercive power relations, with low levels of legitimacy. While appearing small, petty crime suggests a potentially revolutionary power relationship and is symptomatic of a subaltern discourse, running counter to apparent acquiescence.
The types of rationalisation that the powerful construct to justify their domination of the less powerful serve as a justification for the designation of an act of resistance as ‘criminal’. Typically, the person who resists a highway robber is not socially constructed as a ‘criminal’ (the Robin Hood narrative is a possible exception), while the persons who resist kleptocratic rulers are socially constructed as ‘criminal’ within that order-of-things.
