In the first quarter of the 21st century, planetary humanity underwent an enormous transformation, one that is more accurately described not merely as historical, but as anthropological, because it alters the very mode of being of the species Homo sapiens. What is striking is not only the evolutionary scale of this transformation, but also the speed with which it occurred. Very quickly, literally within the span of one generation, humanity shifted toward a family-less way of life.
Let us grasp the meaning of what has happened. Human beings of our species were formed, multiplied, and spread across the planet in tightly knit kin groups that expanded into tribes while simultaneously dividing into more compact and distinct families. Aristotle therefore did not invent, but simply described the social nature of the rational human being and called the family the first – that is, the basic and foundational – form of human association.
Incidentally, Aristotle, long before Jesus Christ, also warned of the existential threat to humanity posed by chrematistics (Ancient Greek χρηματιστική, money-making, from χρήματα, money), or capitalism, in modern terms. He regarded chrematistics as a perverted form of economic activity, contrary to human nature and destructive of society, including the family. Then, some three hundred years later, Jesus Christ came and taught that worship of Mammon leads people away from God – with all the consequences that follow.
Two thousand years have passed. Let us omit the details and focus on the essential point. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama called the end of the 20th century the end of world history. Only frivolous people can think Fukuyama was simply inventing things. The state of global humanity at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries was described by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as individualized and “liquid,” because all social institutions and concepts had lost their certainty and obligatory force. But Bauman had not yet witnessed the annihilation of the family as the matrix of humanity.
Let us trace the chronology of disintegration. The so-called sexual revolution of the baby-boomer generation in the late 1960s, affirming postmodern values of individual self-expression and hedonism, cast aside religious “narratives” that is, commandments – and severed the root tradition of family life. After that, churches in Western Europe rapidly emptied, and both marriage and childbearing went into decline. The United States, owing to the conservatism of its heartland and the inflow of Latin American immigrants, has lagged slightly behind, but is moving in the same direction, and the process is accelerating. This is clearly visible in the following data. Through the entire first half and middle of the 20th century until the 1970s, the annual marriage rate averaged 10–11 per thousand people, but then began to decline, repeatedly reaching historic lows.
Statistics on marriages and divorces in the 21st century for one hundred countries of the world are collected here. In the 2000s, the United States already had fewer than 8 marriages per thousand population. In Russia at the start of the century, the marriage rate stood at 7.5 per thousand, and in China at 7.1. In Europe, Latin America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, the number of marriages was shrinking even faster. As a result, the average marriage rate across one hundred countries fell below 6 in the 2000s – 5.96 marriages per thousand people.
Over the first quarter of the 21st century, the global marriage rate fell to unprecedented lows: today the average indicator across one hundred countries is noticeably below 5, at 4.83 marriages per thousand people. The number of marriages has declined in 81 of those 100 countries. In Japan, South Korea, and Australia, the figure has fallen to 4; in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Britain it is below 3.5 marriages per thousand people. In South America, once considered a bastion of Catholicism, and in black Africa, which is regarded as such today, marriage rates are even lower because most cohabiting couples neither marry in church nor formally register their unions.
At the same time, in 70 out of 100 countries, the fall in the marriage rate is accompanied by a rise in the number of divorces. In 65 countries, the number of divorces already exceeds one-third of the number of marriages, including 30 countries where divorces amount to half or more of marriages.
The result of these processes is a rapid decline in the number of two-parent families with children. Looking at 73 countries, for which detailed information is available, we can see that only in 7 of the 73 countries does the share of families with children exceed 40% of all households, and in only 4 more countries do families with children account for more than one-third of households. In 44 countries – that is, in the overwhelming majority of countries for which there are statistics – the number of families with children amounts to less than a quarter of all households. In the United States, the family share has fallen below 20%, while in Europe it is even lower, down to 16–14% in most cases, and even as low as 10% in Lithuania and Denmark.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: rt.com
