Americans, as brilliant and insightful as we like to think we are, can be so dead wrong about the real-world consequences of something like sexual immorality. 

Paul E. Scates | November 8, 2026

Sigmund Freud once said, "A morality that restricts sex to marriage and procreation is the source of neurotic illnesses." ('Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, 1908). He was referring, of course, to the Judeo-Christian morality of the Bible.

In 1934, anthropologist J.D. Unwin published Sex and Culture, the result of a decade of research testing that hypothesis, in which Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and six known civilizations (Sumerian, Babylonian, Hellene, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and English), covering over 5,000 years of history. His conclusion was just the opposite of Freud's: his research showed that when a society limited sexual freedom, requiring pre-marital chastity and post-marital monogamy, that society flourished intellectually, advanced technologically and architecturally, expanded its territory, was successful economically and endured. Unwin attributed this to what he termed social energy, the redirected sexual energy and effort by men and women into creative enterprises such as science, art, industry, architecture, etc.

Unwin found the inverse was also true: societies with few or no limitations on sexuality made little technological, scientific, intellectual, or economic advancement, but rather stagnated and declined, because that social energy was dissipated by the immediate gratification of sexual desires, leaving a society listless and dormant.

Unwin was not a "religious fanatic" (he was not even a Christian), but used a scientific methodology based on observable historical and anthropological evidence. It's........

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