Can we Learn Anything from History?

Some believe that history doesn’t teach us any lessons. At a round table discussion with a group of secularists, I asked:

• Do you think we can learn from the past? Can we apply the lessons of yesterday to today and to the future? Can they instruct us to build a better world?

Almost all proclaimed that this was a new day – a New Age – and, therefore, the lessons of the past no longer applied.

Their answer was shocking. I had worked for the New York City Department of Probation for 15 years. There was an underlying assumption that the past would tell us a lot about the future. Therefore, when we wrote a report to the court, we always included a copy of the Rap Sheet, which recorded the perp’s criminal history, assuming that the past said a lot about one’s present legal entanglements and his future.

However, progressives seem to be unwilling to regard these lessons. Why? Jason Morgan calls it “the pathology of pride”:

• Most of today’s intellectuals are still lost in this present progressive tense, deaf to the subtle tones that ought to modulate their voices from behind. They dismiss all who came before them, rejecting whatever wisdom our ancestors might have won through hard trial and costly error. They want the future now, and will not let any notes of caution dissuade them from their project. (Salvo Mag., #33, 12)

This is most apparent in the area of human sexuality. Morgan writes:

• Gender Studies departments assure us that there are no differences in sex, only in gender indoctrination. Our bodies seem to indicate otherwise, but dual sexuality is so last century. (13)

Do these departments provide any historical justifications for their bizarre proclamations? No! In fact, they overlook all of the historic lessons, which point to the contrary. These same departments had claimed that traditional values and family had enslaved wives, depriving them of sexual fulfillment. However, studies have shown the exact opposite thing:

• Women without religious affiliation were the least likely to report always having an orgasm with their primary partner – only one in five … Protestant women who reported always having an orgasm [had] the highest [percentage], at nearly one-third. In general, having a religious affiliation was associated with higher rates of orgasm for women. (The Social Organization of Sexuality, 115; quoted by Salvo, Spring 2013, 35)

This is consistent with previous studies. A Redbook Magazine survey of 1970 found that:

• The more religious a woman is, the more likely she is “to be orgasmic almost every time she engages in sex.” Conversely, irreligious women tended to be the least satisfied with the quality and quantity of their intercourse. (35)

Writing for USA Today, William R. Mattox:

• Suggested that “church ladies tend to be free from the guilt associated with violating one’s own sexual standards” – a factor that a University of Connecticut study found to hinder sexual satisfaction among unmarried college students. 

Are the gender studies people creating a better society? The evidence would not suggest so. According to Brian Fitzpatrick, the most “definitive work on the rise and fall of civilizations, was published in 1934 by Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin”:

• In Sex and Culture, Unwin studied 86 human civilizations ranging from tiny South Sea island principalities to mighty Rome. He found that a society’s destiny is linked inseparably to the limits it imposes on sexual expression and that those sexual constraints correlate directly to its theological sophistication and religious commitment.

• Unwin noted that the most primitive societies had only rudimentary spiritual beliefs and virtually no restrictions on sexual expression, whereas societies with more sophisticated theologies placed greater restrictions on sexual expression and achieved greater social development.

• In particular, cultures that adopt what Unwin dubbed “absolute monogamy” proved to be the most vigorous, economically productive, artistically creative, scientifically innovative, and geographically expansive societies on earth. Absolute monogamy is a very strict moral code. Under absolute monogamy, sex can occur only within one-man/ one-woman marriage. Premarital and extramarital sex are not tolerated and divorce is prohibited.

Even from our limited, contemporary perspective on human thriving, we can see how Unwin had been spot-on:

• According to the Family Research Council… more than half (54 percent of American teens 15-17 years old do not live in a home with their married mother and father. The benefits to children of being raised by their married parents are significant, including higher educational attainments levels, better emotional health, and better self-esteem. Conversely, the risks to teens of not living with a father in the home are notable. Teenage boys are more likely to engage in delinquent behavior, and girls are seven to eight times more likely to experience a teen pregnancy. (Salvo, 19)

Besides, if we regard the stats, the fallout from extramarital sex is horrendous. We can only close our eyes to history at great cost, even in terms of lives.

The French Revolution, which promised freedom, brought a Reign of Terror through their “enlightened” reason. However, the communists were unwilling to learn from this horrible experiment. Morgan writes:

• Communism, which promised the ultimate in a rationally based society, found, much to their embarrassment, that in order to liberate humanity it was necessary to put tens of millions of its members into an early grave. A clearer view of history might have reminded man of his record of depravity and of the inadvisability of relying on his fallen nature to achieve perfection.

Morgan is not simply concerned about the disregard of history, but he claims that the “pathology of pride” is actively involved in tearing down or revising history to coincide with their narrative:

• The problem, beyond bad scholarship, is that young people flock to these madhouses every year, told by cynical university bureaucrats that they need to learn contempt for their own tradition if they want to get a well-paying job. Professors are being paid to take battle-axes to the roots of Western civilization.

In such a repressive climate, even conservative professors are afraid to come to the defense of Western Civilization. Oddly, commendation for the Christian West is more likely to come from Muslims turned atheists. Pakistani former-Muslim, Ibn Warraq, has written:

• The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law and equality under the law, freedom of thought and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy—are superior to any others devised by humankind. It was the West that took steps to abolish slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in Africa, where rival tribes sold black prisoners into slavery. The West has secured freedoms for women and racial and other minorities to an extent unimaginable 60 years ago. The West recognizes and defends the rights of the individual: we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live lives of our choosing.

• In short, the glory of the West, as philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, is that life here is an open book. Under Islam, the book is closed. In many non-Western countries, especially Islamic ones, citizens are not free to read what they wish. In Saudi Arabia, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faith—clear violations of Article 18 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• The edifice of modern science and scientific method is one of Western man’s greatest gifts to the world. The West has given us not only nearly every scientific discovery of the last 500 years—from electricity to computers—but also, thanks to its humanitarian impulses, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. The West provides the bulk of aid to beleaguered Darfur; Islamic countries are conspicuous by their lack of assistance.

• Moreover, other parts of the world recognize Western superiority. When other societies such as South Korea and Japan have adopted Western political principles, their citizens have flourished. It is to the West, not to Saudi Arabia or Iran, that millions of refugees from theocratic or other totalitarian regimes flee, seeking tolerance and political freedom. Nor would any Western politician be able to get away with the anti-Semitic remarks that former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad made in 2003. Our excusing Mahathir’s diatribe indicates not only a double standard but also a tacit acknowledgment that we apply higher ethical standards to Western leaders.

• Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

Another Muslim-turned-atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, also speaks highly of the Christian West, in a way the Western scholars would not dare to:

• The Christianity of love and tolerance remains one of the West’s most powerful antidotes to the Islam of hate and intolerance. Ex-Muslims find Jesus Christ to be a more attractive and humane figure than Muhammad, the founder of Islam. 

These are willing to listen to history, as any rational person would. A good farmer once told me:

• If you want to grow corn, find the farmer who always has a good stand of corn, and ask him how he does it. 

His advice was unimpeachable. However, I had asked my secular associates a similar question - if we could learn anything from the principles that had made the USA wildly successful. They were even appalled at my question.

Sex and Civilization

With the West massively committed to redefining sex, marriage and the family, it might be fruitful to see if any of these innovations have already been tried and what has been history’s verdict regarding them.

Brian Fitzpatrick suggests that the most “definitive work on the rise and fall of civilizations, was published in 1934 by Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin”:

• In Sex and Culture, Unwin studied 86 human civilizations ranging from tiny South Sea island principalities to mighty Rome. He found that a society’s destiny is linked inseparably to the limits it imposes on sexual expression and that those sexual constraints correlate directly to its theological sophistication and religious commitment.

• Unwin noted that the most primitive societies had only rudimentary spiritual beliefs and virtually no restrictions on sexual expression, whereas societies with more sophisticated theologies placed greater restrictions on sexual expression and achieved greater social development.

• In particular, cultures that adopt what Unwin dubbed “absolute monogamy” proved to be the most vigorous, economically productive, artistically creative, scientifically innovative, and geographically expansive societies on earth. Absolute monogamy is a very strict moral code. Under absolute monogamy, sex can occur only within one-man/ one-woman marriage. Premarital and extramarital sex are not tolerated and divorce is prohibited.

Why should sexual prohibitions cause social flourishing? Perhaps for the same reason that tobacco prohibitions might cause health to flourish! There are things that are pleasurable for a season, whose final bill might prove unaffordable.

There are other things or institutions that tend to tame the beast within. For one thing, there is nothing comparable to a committed and trusting relationship. Only within such an institution can a couple make the necessary sacrifices for the sake of family well-being.

I had worked for the New York City Department of Probation for 15 years. Countless times, I’ve had probationers tell me:

• Mr. Mann, I have a wife and child now. I really need to settle down and find a job!

They were committed to taming the beast within with a commitment to something more glorious. However, society is now telling these probationers:

• “Families” can take many different forms, and no one can say that one is better than another.

Perhaps he doesn’t need that job after all. However, In This Present Age, sociologist Robert Nisbet writes:

• “What sociologists are prone to call social disintegration is really nothing more than the spectacle of a rising number of individuals playing fast and loose with other individuals in relationships of trust and responsibility.”

Without trust, commitment cannot survive, and without commitment, we are left with nothing more than social disintegration and children who believe that life is just about taking care of #1!

Our behaviors can undermine our families and the future welfare of our children, and our ideas and beliefs will undermine our behaviors. If sexual freedom is pushed as a virtue or as a “human right,” it will become increasingly difficult to resist those momentary, powerful urges. And when our sexual conduct undermines the stability of our families, it also undermines society.

Fitzpatrick refers to the work of Harvard historian Carle Zimmerman:

• [He] concludes that “the creative periods in civilization have been based upon” the strongest form of family, which he terms the “domestic” type: “The domestic family affords a comparatively stable social structure and yet frees the individual sufficiently from family influence to perform the creative work necessary for a great civilization.” (Family and Civilization) 

• In other words, in an amoral, hedonistic society, you can’t trust the people you need to trust, not even your spouse. Moreover, if people can make and break relationships at will, with no legal repercussions or social stigma, they are much more likely to abandon their marriages—at their children’s expense—when the going gets tough. Husbands with roving eyes are much more likely to trade in their wives for new models. (Whistleblower, Nov. 2010, pp. 38f)

It is no surprise, therefore, that social commentator, Michael Novak, concludes:

• One unforgettable law has been learned through all the disasters and injustices of the last thousand years: If things go well with the family, life is worth living; when the family falters, life falls apart.

The new family configurations are not only a violation of traditional values; they are also a violation of our own nature. We are not made for sexual gluttony. While we can choose to live gluttonously, there is another part of our nature – a deeper core - that rebels against it.

Much of Israel had been settled by radical socialistic communities – kibbutzim. The ideal shared by many of these communities was to have everything in common. This included their clothing, sexual partners, and even their children. Anything else constituted ownership – a dirty word in their thinking.

However, over the years, they succumbed to the pull of their deepest human desires/needs. Consequently, each gravitated to a single mate, forming committed monogamous unions. Even though, in many instances, the children are still raised communally, they return to their own parents in the evenings, thereby proclaiming afresh that there is no place like home, and home is with one’s own committed parents.

It’s a Human Right to Kill the Unborn but not to Teach Her

What is a “human right?” In several Western nations, it is no longer considered a human right for parents to raise their children in the way they want. Instead, the State has usurped that right. A Christian couple had recently found an uneasy asylum in the USA, lest their children be taken away by the German State:

• The Christian couple [Uwe and Hannelore Romeike] faced increasing fines and the threat of losing custody of their children after they decided to homeschool in 2006. The family settled here in Morristown, Tenn., where they knew another German family. They soon applied for asylum, arguing that they couldn’t return to Germany because they feared persecution for their religious-based determination to homeschool. An immigration judge granted the family’s asylum request in 2010…But the Obama administration appealed, and the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed the Romeikes’ asylum win. The case is set to continue on April 23 in another hearing at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio.

Clearly, our administration doesn’t regard parental rights as unalienable human rights. Meanwhile, they have invented a broad array of their own “human rights.” Our former Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton had consistently proclaimed that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” Consequently, homosexuals are all guaranteed asylum here.

Ironically, the same secular thinking declares that it’s a human right to murder the pre-born, but it’s not a human right to raise and instruct the post-born.

What then is a human right? Here are several considerations:

“Human rights are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being” (Wikipedia). However, there must be an Agent that establishes these “inalienable fundamental rights,” as rights that trump whatever the State might determine. Without the authority of God, human rights would be no more authoritative than a herd of cows universally thinking that they have a right to not be eaten, however understandable such thinking might be.

Everything in this world is alienable – a mere matter of molecules in motion. It is only the Transcendent that can give and enforce human rights. It is noteworthy that all of the major world religions recognize parental rights, while they don’t recognize abortive or homosexual rights.

The Bill of Rights – the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – grants parental rights through its “free exercise” of religion clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” However, the Constitution contains not even a whisper about abortive or homosexual rights!

States Rights. Only nine states out of our fifty have passed SSM. The other 41 have rejected SSM. Furthermore, “Pro-abortion forces by the end of 1972 had won in only four states the virtually unrestricted abortion that Roe v. Wade would soon mandate for the nation [in 1973]” (World, May 4, 2013, 80). Clearly, these “rights” were not deemed rights by either the majority of the states or by popular vote.

Rights Based on Nature. There is nothing natural about abortion or homosexuality. However, all nature testifies to the self-sacrificial behavior of parents for their children. They know how to love them better than the State or unnatural and temporary modern couplings. Besides, gays have a much lower lifespan and higher incidents of depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide, even in countries that are far more accepting of their lifestyle than the Christian lifestyle. Therefore, the gay lifestyle is not conducive to child-rearing.

Rights based on Historical Considerations. Homosexuality has often been tried, but it has never survived for long. Historically, it seems to be a suicidal, lacking any historical continuity, suggesting that it is endemically flawed.  What lifestyle then promotes a nation? John J. Davis (Evangelical Ethics) wrote of the work of British Anthropologist, J.D. Unwin:

• After a comprehensive study of both Western and non-Western cultures throughout human history, Unwin concluded that the record of mankind “does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it had been absolutely [heterosexually] monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.” Unwin observed that a society’s adoption and maintenance of heterosexual monogamy as a social standard “has preceded all manifestations of social energy, whether that energy be reflected in conquest, in art and sciences, in extension of the social vision, or in the substitution of monotheism for polytheism.” (p. 116)

On what then are abortive and gay rights based? Militant demands alone! While our administration is aggressively pushing abortive and homosexual rights – even internationally – it is attacking human rights. Just this past week, the Pentagon announced that Christians who evangelize could now be court-marshaled. 

Similarly, chaplains who continue to call homosexuality “sin” are being threatened with disciplinary action. So much for our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech! Clearly, the Pentagon has no problem with evangelizing in favor of its own agenda - homosexuality.

Why the hostility towards the Christian faith? Jesus claimed that “The world…hates me because I testify that what it does is evil” (John 7:7). Why should it matter what we have to say? To the world we are just narrow-minded fundamentalists. What if we do call homosexuality and abortion “sins”? Why should it bother them so much? I think it’s because they know that we’re right!

Richard Dawkins, Atheism and Sexual Faithfulness

Can we be good without God? Certainly not sexually!

Richard Dawkins has been termed “the world’s most famous atheist.” He also insists that we don’t need God to be good. However, he makes some interesting admissions:

• Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity in the first place? The underlying presumption — that a human being has some kind of property rights over another human being’s body — is unspoken because it is assumed to be obvious. But with what justification?   

• And why don’t we all admire — as I increasingly do — those rare free spirits confident enough to rise above jealousy, stop fretting about who is “cheating on” whom. (Banishing the Green eyed Monster)

What does Dawkins admit? He admits that monogamous marriage is a matter of “property rights” and cheating is admirable. Of course, this must also include lying. If you’re a cheat, you must also be a good liar:

• Bill Clinton was impeached not for sexual misconduct but for lying about it. But he was entitled to lie about his private life: one could even make a case that he had a positive duty to do so

If cheating requires a “positive duty” to lie in order to cover it up, perhaps that says something about the nature of cheating. If a couple can’t handle the truth that one party is cheating, perhaps self-control is more in order. And perhaps true love requires faithfulness!

However, Dawkins might be right that the cheater can’t be honest about the cheating. His partner might not be able to handle it. When I returned to college, I wanted to try what had become a rage – a sensitivity (therapy) group. I wanted to stay close to “home,” so I decided to join a group sponsored through the United Campus Ministry. However, before long, it became apparent that the “minister” was putting-the-make on two attractive females in the group. They confronted him about this, and he responded that he and his wife had an “open marriage.”

However, he later admitted that they had to carry out this “openness” in secret. Once he came home early to find his wife entering their home with her cheating-prey. The minister admitted that this sight so disturbed him that he had to be committed to the mental hospital for two weeks.

However, these are precisely the “free spirits” that Dawkins “admires.” But are they really free spirits? Is it freedom to jump from a 12-story building or to drink lye? Dawkins think so and therefore rhetorically asks,

• Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined?

There seems to be many good reasons – mental breakdown, divorce, disease, damage to children and even to society. John J. Davis (Evangelical Ethics) wrote of the work of British Anthropologist, J.D. Unwin:

• After a comprehensive study of both Western and non-Western cultures throughout human history, Unwin concluded that the record of mankind “does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it had been absolutely [heterosexually] monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.” Unwin observed that a society’s adoption and maintenance of heterosexual monogamy as a social standard “has preceded all manifestations of social energy, whether that energy be reflected in conquest, in art and sciences, in extension of the social vision, or in the substitution of monotheism for polytheism.” (p. 116)

Why wasn’t Dawkins cognizant of the various costs of “open” marriages? Perhaps his own lusts clouded his thinking. However, it seems that this has clouded the thinking of many non-theists.

Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, president of the World Federation for Mental Health, had stated in 1945:

• The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking with faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.

• The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely.

• If the race is to be free from the crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

How widespread was this thinking “In a 1976 survey of members of the APA, 95% reportedly admitted to being atheists or agnostics.” Were these philosophical commitments the product of evidence or lifestyle choices? According to Al Parides, Prof. of Psychiatry, UCLA:

• If you look at the personal lives of all Freud’s followers—his initial disciples—these people certainly have an unbelievable amount of particular problems in the sexual area…The amount of deviancy as far as their sexual behavior and so forth is enormous. If you are saying that psychiatry promotes a certain form of morality that is a deviant morality in regard to many areas including sexual behavior—yes, I would agree. (Psychiatry: The Ultimate Betrayal, Bruce Wiseman, 12-14)

Perhaps God is necessary for the well-being of the family!