Sexual Behavior and Physiology

to the most stolid and concrete, show similar patterns. J. Hajnal adduces indications that, in the early modern age, the population patterns of western Europe departed decisively from those prevalent elsewhere. Marriage ages rose to medians fully five andten years later than those found in other parts of the world and in Europe itself before the seventeenth century. Unparalleled proportions of the populace never married at all. Louis Henry.E. A. Wrigley, and a number of others demolish old sociological assumptions that traditional populations had unvaryingly high fertility levels until nineteenth-century industrialization, urbanization, and modernization led to secular declines They demonstrate that such declines were more rural than urban and that, as early as the seventeenth century, voluntary control of fertility went forward without any "fundamental modernization of the underlying socio-economic structure" in towns and villages all through Europe. Summarizing these showings. Robert Wells explicitly rejects the sociological shibboleth that the demographic transition to modernity "resulted from the economic and social changes accompanying industrialization" and bluntly contends that that passagemaybe better comprehended in motivational terms that clearly antedate the advent of extensive mechanization It was "only one manifestation of a major change in value orientation, a change whichcan conveniently be typified as a shift from a traditional to a modern world view." W. G. Hoskinsand Lewis Mumford advancean almost identical interpretation of the housing revolution which "destroyed the form of the medieval dwelling" andthereby set a new physical stage for domesticity in early modern England. Hoskins discounts as its causes such structural factors as price shifts and population growth. He demonstrates that the emerging form of the domestic interior-division into separate roomsand floors and provision of specialized furnishings for each room-was not a product of urbanization since it was as prevalent in rural areas as in urban ones. He holds flatly that "we must look for the cause of the Great Rebuilding in the filtering down to themass of the population ... of a sense of privacy." Natalie Z. Davis specifies some changes which hinged on this priority on domestic privacy, andshe too finds them insufficiently explained by structural alterations. Tracing the rise of a new sensitivity to family strategy, a new conception of family identity, anda new concern for family order in early modern France, she refuses to relate such developments directly to their social contexts. "How can we talk of family strategies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," she demands, "when even propsperous parents could not be sure of how many children they would bring up to adulthood? How can we talk of a heightened sense of family identity" when death andremarriage left all too often unclear "where the nuclear family beganor ended?" Yetshe showsthat the "push toward planning" and "manipulation" gained ground steadily. If it is "assisted" by some of the social forces of the time, it wasquite "in defiance of" others. In the final analysis, Davis simply asserts that "all this planning" wasdone with "a curious confidence" that it would be efficacious amid the "turns and twists" of early modern life. In still other spheres a similarly inexplicable assurance came to the fore. In medicine, supernatural theories went out before effective techniques came in; In science, a "new faith in the potentialities of human initiative" enabled men such as Bacon and Descartes to stand "foremost" amongthosewho "invented, instigated, and popularized" a "Western selfconfidence" in the mastery of nature which far outran extant Western scientific achievement. In economic endeavor itself the evolution of a norm of work-discipline whichWeber long ago labelled the Protestant Ethic preceded by decadesand even centuries the evolution of commercial and industrial regimes that demanded such discipline. In the emergence of such an economic ethic, and in the alteration of assumptions andaspirations more generally, we have what has been well-called a revolution before the revolution, a revolution in men's minds that preceded the revolution in machines and machinations. If we would come to any comprehension of such times, we will have to fathom a collective psychic current-a social character or communal sensibility-that is crucial in alterations such as those of early modernization yet is creative and uncoerced rather than being merely an aspect of thecosmic determinism customarily associated with imputations of underlying social forces. Human ideas have not always found widening audiences merely for having struck a responsive chord, but they sometimes have:and if the history of the origins of western European modernization yields up any lesson at all, it must surely be that we bear an almost awesome responsibility for what we dream and dread. The world we bequeath our great-grandchildren mayas nearly be theonewe envision most compellingly as theonewe build most bulkily. U Thant once said that "the central stupendous truth about developed economies today is that they can have-in anything but the shortest run-the kind of scale of resources they decide to have .... It is no longer resources that limit decisions It is the decisions that make the resources." Yet if Aries andThomas and so many others are right, that may have been the case as much in early times as in ourown time. Collaborative volition maybe the human condition as much as it is the modern