Dahnielson

It has been stated by studies that marriage is in decline and so is the birth rate in the western world. Will the young generation prioritize family life and parenting? What do this hold in the future of our western civilization?

But first of all, I may ask: Why should we worry?

As of now the world population is projected to reach 6.5 billion in a couple of days.¹ So isn’t a decline in our part of the world a welcome gift to lessen the burden on an already overpopulated earth? Common sense tells us that anything else would be highly irresponsible if we wish to contribute to a sustainable world.

In my opinion the decline in west is a natural process that can be attributed to several factors, like the shift in dominance and change of underlying economics.

By using a holistic view on the world we can spot a slow shift in dominance of civilizations through out of history — with a clear west-bound trajectory. Just as the European and eurocentric world have enjoyed the last millennia in the limelight, like Mideast before, it is now time to pass it on and for other parts of the world to take our place. Although, we still try to hold on to it with a hollow and as time pass by even more artificial grip.

Even if we kept up with our old birth rate the rest of the world would have out-performed us even then. No, there is definitely a future heading for India, China and ultimately Africa. Where the struggle with population growth will be replaced with a fast economic growth. Eventually. What we have experienced so far is an increasingly global world (sic) with continents in vastly different demographical phases.

The other observable factor is the change of lifestyle caused by change in underlying economics. This type of change has happened several times before. The most recent example is the transition from a more or less self-sufficient three-generation household to a modern nuclear family as norm. Since those changes have direct social implication, and sometimes happend in one generation or less, they can be perceived as frightening.

This view depend on the notion that the economics, in the sense of households, forms the base for how we choose to mate and form families. Hence, our society has changed so that we no longer have any “need” for children in the strict utilitarian² view, while we continue to have them for purely emotional reasons. One can argue the deeply-rooted urge to have an offspring. Or are we loosing that urge too? Probably not, since we as modern humans have not changed considerably in a long time, as biological and physiological being we are still the same as our ancestors living in caves. Only the attributes for our old behaviors have been swapped — e.g. the group of our closest friends have replaced the tribe.³

To put it more correctly: our “tribe” has yet again expanded from the small group of the nuclear family to a larger one of our friends. While the ”family” is a near-universal cultural phenomenon there is no single norm that can fit all societies or times.

We must therefore realize that the family is a social construct, an organizational unit of life, whose form has varied depending on the same external factors that formed our history and gave rise to civilization.

It is also interesting to note that it seem to display a cyclic property — even though 10 000 years of human civilization is too short for a final judgement on that part. The nuclear family is typical in societies where people must be relatively mobile, such as hunter-gatherers. While the larger family unit was created in the agrial society that followed and with the industrial society we yet again turned to the mobile nuclear family. So how do our post-industrial society fits in any of those molds?

From the cyclic property we might conclude that the transition to a larger unit is the natural progression. Still, we may keep in mind that the economic forces applied to the agrial society are no longer active in our case — we do not rely on our “tribe” for production. But that’s not an argument against the cyclic model, N.B. the nuclear family was developed twice during two widely different demographical phases in human history.

So, will the young generation prioritize family life and parenting? Every human being has her own free will. We can question the young individuals motive and reason, but the group will always be larger than the sum of its parts. In the big picture, forces that affect us is out of our control — vis major.

I do not posses any answers. Only the empiric conviction that change is the only normal state — albeit being somewhat of an contradictive concept.