Society has defeated the family
All societies exist in a tense relationship with families. Current high-tech society is the first to win that battle outright.
A loose part 3 to a series on why humans develop. Part 1 here and part 2 here.
A year ago, in a post called Violent enough to stand still, I claimed that the male sexual drive is a main obstacle to the evolution of civilization. The polygynous drive leads to perpetual warfare between small groups of men - only close relatives like each other enough to share the available women in relative peace. The warfare leads to high mortality rates from violence. The high mortality rates perpetuates rather low population densities. Low population density means it is rather easy to find or grow food. That means that much of food collection or food growing can be left to women. In such environments, men have weak incentives to focus on developing more effective subsistence technologies. Instead, focusing on winning more wives through warfare leads to high reproductive success. Men's focus on warfare and lack of focus on subsistence leads to technological stasis. The human race has spent most of its time in such states of technological non-development.
To allow larger-scale and more advanced societies to form, some kind of freak event is needed (I outlined that in my post Why do humans ever develop?). For example, an unusually unpleasant leader might scare people into submission, or an idea with the power to gather more people than usual might occur. In case of such freak events, men can overlook their perpetual disagreement over who should have several wives and instead cooperate in bigger units. That starts a chain reaction where the more cooperative men vanquish all neighboring groups, forcing them to become equally cooperative or disappear. As the ball of cultural evolution has been set in motion, bigger states with peaceful interiors are formed. Deaths from violence decrease. Population increases. Land becomes so scarce that women can no longer do most of the work to provide for children. Men get incentives to engage wholeheartedly in production in order to provide for their children. Thereby, men who are the best producers and the best adopters of production technology are favored. A civilization process is set in motion.
That is, however, just the beginning of the evolution of civilization. A very important obstacle against human cooperation remains: Those good fathers themselves. In the evolution of human societies, men's drive to fight each other over women is a first obstacle to overcome. A second obstacle is men's and women's drive to further the interests of their own children at the expense of the common good.
Against nature
Cultural evolution is about overcoming human nature. Or rather, it is about encouraging certain aspects of human nature and suppressing other aspects of human nature. Without civilization, humans tend to organize into small, slightly polygynous groups that fight each other over women and resources. Civilizations evolved because they could form bigger and more efficient armies than small-scale societies. And then civilizations sparred against each other, with the most militarily efficient of them as winners.
In this process, societies needed to suppress human instincts that cause division and infighting and enhance human instincts that cause unity and material production. The role of the family is double-sided. On the one hand, the family is a very valuable production unit for society. It produces children, and, before industrialization, also most goods. On the other hand, families are constant threats to any large-scale society. Whenever they grow too powerful, they start furthering their own interests at the expense of society as a whole.1
Massive challenge
Throughout history, civilizations have balanced these functions on a tightrope. On the one hand, they have upheld sexual norms with at least the partial aim of encouraging people to take good care of their children. On the other hand, they have needed to prevent people from being too selfish on behalf of their own kin groups.
The last mentioned point has been the most massive challenge. History basically is about how families fought, allied, betrayed each other, dominated each other and extinguished each other. Until recently, families have existed in a very tense balance with society. Most societies have been monarchies, with one family on top. Such societies can remain large-scale through upholding a fragile hierarchy. If enough people can just be made to agree that one family is on top of the others, quite a bit of infighting can be prevented and quite a bit of unity can be attained.
Simple clan systems that are no more than family groups negotiating with each other have obvious disadvantages: They get unstable, rife with blood feuds, vulnerable to the whims of individuals. For thousands of years, cultural evolution has pulled in another direction: Toward social counterweights to families. Christianity is the most obvious. It started more or less as an anti-family movement, describing bachelorhood as the most noble state of living. It later developed into more of an anti-clan force. The prohibition on cousin marriage instituted by the Christian church weakened clans and thereby strengthened social cohesion between family groups. To a lesser degree, also Islam had this effect. It was once founded as a force to unite clans on common military adventures and did so very successfully. However, it didn't suppress the family as efficiently as Christianity, and the Muslim world at large is still more clan-based than the Christian world.
Gradual victory
Basically, corruption means furthering the interests of one's own family at the expense of society. In clan-based societies that expression doesn't make sense, because society more or less consists of families. Cultural evolution has taken us to a point where society and the family are separated, and where the family is supposed to be inferior to society.
The process has been very gradual. One cultural invention here and one there. A war here and a war there between societies with different bureaucracies and different rules. It all led to a gradual strengthening of the state and weakening of the family.
For thousands of years, history was about families allying and those alliances breaking up whenever external threats didn't seem serious enough. Peter Turchin has summarized it nicely. Every powerful family preferred to be the kings of their own castle. Whenever external enemies were vanquished, they used the respite in external warfare to fight for their own superiority over other families.
Eventually, social evolution selected for societies that could use times of peace to build up production capacities rather than for infighting. Whatever made people identify less with their kin groups and more with society as a whole, made them less likely to start a feud to the benefit of their kin and to the detriment of everyone else.
It seems that this weakening of the family and strengthening of society at large was a prerequisite for high-tech society to take form.
Only societies where people have discontinued their family-focused, high-fertility lifestyle have become high-tech. There virtually are no high-tech clan societies. Probably because they are just impossible. Without the suppression of families as important power houses, the level of cooperation required to handle advanced technology can just not be attained.
Instinct against instinct
The last death knell for the family as an independently viable phenomenon came in the highly productive 20th century. The shocking rise in living standards convinced most people of the power of society. Thereby their loyalties to family life decreased in comparison. Why stay on the family farm when employment in a factory paid so much better? With the productivity boom, society obviously had much more to offer than people's families.
After millennia of struggle between society as a whole and the family, it looks like society as a whole finally won. The family is now so weak that it has lost its appeal. People don't even want to form families anymore. It is difficult to believe such a thing can happen. After all, family is a fundamental part of human nature.
The drive to form families is part of human nature. But it is not the only part of human nature. We also have other instincts. If those instincts are appealed to and organized in an efficient enough way, people can actually be steered away from their family-forming instincts.
It wasn't easy. It took thousands of years for such an advanced social organization to evolve. But here it is. After a very prolonged struggle, the family has finally been overcome.
It would have been reasonable to assume that the human drive to procreate at least required some force to repress. Obviously, it doesn't. It is enough to use our other joys, ambitions, fears and insecurities in an elaborate enough way. That was what it took to overcome the family.
Tame the family
Society finally overcame the family and an amazing productivity boom followed. But we still haven't solved the riddle of how to reproduce in this situation.
I think that an appropriate analogy to this stage of development is the stage when humans started to grow food in fields. In order to be able to cultivate their vegetable food, humans needed to control the macro fauna to some extent. With beasts overrunning their fields, agriculture didn't make sense. In order to grow food, humans needed the ability to scare away the beasts. As far as archeological evidence can show, humans gained that ability thousands of years before they were capable of taming (some of) the beasts.
High-tech society currently stands in the same relationship to the family. It has enough ability to prevent the family from wreaking havoc with the social fabric. After thousands of years of civilization, people can finally gather across kin-groups in the service of productivity. But high-tech society hasn't yet figured out how to promote the prosperity and growth of families in order to produce new citizens.
High-tech society exists on the condition of suppressing the family. For that reason, it faces extinction. There is only one way it can survive: It has to domesticate the family. Domestication of the family is the next step in cultural evolution.
Reaction against reaction
This is my foremost reason not to be a neo-reactionary. Some people describe the 1950s as an ideal and say that we need to go back to how families were then in order to regain the ability to procreate. I disagree. The 1950s wasn't a golden age for the family. It was just the family's last show of independent life before it was finally defeated. The direction was already set: Society was getting stronger, the family was getting weaker. One last time, people were able to use their instincts to form families and care for those families, before the family was finally too marginalized to be able to live in the wild.
As things are now, the family is like a dangerous beast that has been pushed into a habitat that is too small, isolated and resource-poor to be liveable. Now the families of high-tech society face the same fate as so many other annoying beasts: Extinction. Less advanced societies, societies that didn't defeat their families enough to extinguish them, will then take the place of high-tech society.
If high-tech society wants to survive, it needs to rapidly start a domestication process of the family. It needs to find out how to select docile and productive specimens and how to make those specimens thrive. Society has conquered the family. Now it needs to subjugate and incorporate the family into the societal whole if its victory is not to go to waste.
That victory was indeed a quite amazing feat. But every day spent celebrating it is a lost day. Whoever first stops bragging over the defeat of the corrupted clans of yesterday and starts building the society-family alliance of tomorrow will be well positioned to rule the future.
Joseph Henrich has described this better than anyone, in his book WEIRDest People in the World, 2020. Rob Henderson has written a great summary of that book.
Surprised to not see any reference to the Amish here.
Terrific series. I especially liked the recap at the start of this post.
Isn't the ethic of 'individualism' a tool domesticating 'the clan' in favour of 'society'?
To me, the current low fertility is a result of the status given to hedonism ie self pleasure.
Raising one's kids is not hedonic. The pleasure is indirect, coming from seeing them establish themselves as effective agents among other kids and, ultimately, among other adults.
This has come about because now, with effective birth control, reproduction does not (automatically) follow from having sex. In a few generations, say 5 or 6 equating to about 150 years after the widespread adoption of birth control. Perhaps by the year 2124, I expect high-tech society will have selected for people much more sensitive to the pleasures to be got from child rearing. If we last that long, of course!