But when the European horizon was widened by the geographical discoveries of modern times, men suddenly realized the existence of societies whose social organization was utterly different to anything that they bad imagined.The discovery of totemism and exogamy, of matrilinear institutions, of polyandry, and of customs of organized sexual licence gave rise to a whole host of new theories concerning the origins of marriage and the family.
This was written in 1933, and is pretty clearly heavily influenced by the 1928 publication of Margaret Mead's nine-day wonder, "Coming of Age in Samoa", and her 1930 work "Growing Up in New Guinea". The trouble is, virtually no societies like these described here have ever actually existed, Mead's fevered imaginings notwithstanding.
That's the basic problem here - the author wants to make the case that "traditional" family arrangements prevailed over "non-traditional" arrangements, but in so doing he's accepted the basic premise that such "non-traditional" arrangements have ever really existed in the first place. And once you do that, you're reduced to quibbling over the details.
And it's not very good quibbling, either. If patriarchy is the key, then there were few societies that were more patriarchal than classical Rome - the Romans invented the concept of patria potestas, and they took it to extremes not really seen in any other society. But here we're told that they "failed to adapt to urban life" (why, we aren't really told), and thus lost out in spite of their patriarchal society.
Anyway, if you want to argue in favor of traditional families, it seems to me that the classical conservative argument is still the best argument - "non-traditional" arrangements don't really exist in the way some would have you believe, and never have existed, really. So let us not embrace the new and untested simply for the sake of novelty, which is all you've got in the absence of a track-record - traditional families have served us all quite well over the last few thousand years, and we ought to be loathe to simply abandon that time-tested experience for the latest fad in "alternative families".
The moral of the article might as well be: don't frame your own argument in such a way as to implicitly accept the basic premises of your opponents. Do that, and you've lost right off the bat, because you're arguing on someone else's home field ;)
I think he too is rather dismissive of the matriarchy thing ... flat out say any such society is negligible because it cannot -- never has -- produced anything remarkable in the least.
What about his two paragraphs on the Hellenistic civilization. He appears to be describing us.
As again he does appear to nail us in the second to last paragraph.