Technological Revolution in Sex and Family
The wealth of the West expanded after 1945. Major breakthroughs took place in physics (nuclear energy), biology (the antibiotics revolution, DNA, genetic engineering, the food revolution) and artificial intelligence (computers, data, imagery, algorithms, the Internet). Over time, the pre-1914 euphoria returned, and with it the Enlightenment hubris according to which man is all-powerful. Such a view no longer required the biblical, transcendent God. As the postwar era matured, the new proclamation was that man (or something like a technologically augmented man) was God, or about to become God.
Nowhere was the new proclamation more visible and more dramatic in its consequences than in sexual matters. In the late 1940s, antibiotics erased the threat of most venereal diseases. In the 1960s, the pill and intrauterine devices provided reliable female contraception. In the 1970s, abortion was legalized and reframed as a routine surgical operation. In vitro fertilization, achieved in 1978, led to technologies that assisted reproduction to counter infertility among married couples, and this in turn led to a whole gamut of medically assisted procreation procedures, designed for single parents or same-sex parents, and finally, to surrogacy. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, gender reassignment technologies have become accepted practices.
Though some of these technologies may have been compatible with traditional family patterns, they led, as a whole, to a gradual dissociation of sex and family, and then to the erosion of the family itself.
In the United States, where the concepts of marriage and family remain relatively important (61 percent of never-married Americans said in 2011 that they wanted to get married), the decline of marriage as an institution is nonetheless marked. In 1940, 90 percent of all households were families. In 2010, 66.4 percent of households were families. Fertility dropped from 3.4 children per woman to 1.8. Single-parent births rose from 6 percent of all births in 1960 to 43 percent in 2010.
In most European countries, marriage has lost its magic altogether. According to a 2011 OECD report, cohabitation has replaced or is replacing marriage or civil partnerships among couples aged twenty to thirty-four in Sweden (62.6 percent of all couples in that age bracket), France(56.58percent), Germany(56.03 percent ), the Netherlands(54.21 percent), the U.K.(50.02 percent), Spain(41.43 percent), and Switzerland (40.14percent). Surveys by the National Institute for Statistic Studies show that marriage rates dropped in France from more than 400,000 marriages per year in the early 1970s to fewer than 221,000 (including six thousand same-sex marriages) in 2019. “Civil solidarity pacts” or PACS, a low-cost and easily dissolvable marriage, rose to 209,000.
By the same token, according to Max Planck Institute data, fertility in France dropped from 2.7 children per woman in 1960 to 1.8 in 2018, which is still the highest rate in Europe in relative terms, an anomaly that may be explained by a large Muslim immigrant presence. (The French government prohibits gathering data concerning race, religion, or ethnicity.) In Germany, fertility dropped from 2.3 children in 1960 (both in the Western and Eastern parts of the country) to 1.2 in 1993, but returned to 1.5 in 2017 (in a reunited country), probably thanks to immigration. In Italy, fertility has fallen from 2.4 to 1.3. In Spain, from 2.8 to 1.3. In the U.K., from 2.7 to 1.8. The average European rate of out-of-wedlock births (or births from polygamous parents, in the case of some immigrants) is about 50 percent. It is 60 percent in France.
Clearly, changes of this magnitude lead to further disruptions. A demographically declining nation without strong family formation will need immigrants—or will be unable to control immigration flows. Its capacity to create, produce, and engage in business will likely falter. Many aspects of its culture will become irrelevant. Its survival as a polity is not assured.
In March 2019, Jérôme Fourquet, a pollster and essayist, published L’Archipel français (The French Archipelago). In a dry and dispassionate manner, relying on multiple surveys and a wide array of data, Fourquet concludes that the nation of France is vanishing. Its dissolution is due to the decline of its national religion and the disintegration of its traditional family patterns.
In 1961, Catholicism was the social norm and baptism a near universal practice: 92 percent of the French were baptized. Among the children seven years old and younger, “48.8 out of 100 were baptized in 1999, 40 out of 100 in 2005, 34 in 2010, and 30 in 2015.” In 1961, 38 percent of baptized Catholics said they attended Mass “every Sunday” or “as often as possible.” In 2012, just 7 percent did.
The decline of Catholicism in France has many causes, according to Fourquet, including the sense of spiritual dispossession created by some of the Second Vatican Council’s doctrinal, liturgical, and disciplinary reforms. But it also has been caused in no small measure by the breakdown of sexual morality, marriage, and family, which undermines the basis for stable religious practice. One casualty has been the clergy. There were 25,203 French priests in 1990 and only 11,908 in 2015, the latter number including some six thousand already beyond the age of retirement. Another factor is Christian militancy in social and political affairs, a worldly orientation that downplays the transcendent.
These dramatic declines influenced the postwar European political settlement, which was dependent on Christian parties. All over Europe, Christian Democracy has lost its traditional basis of support: churchgoing parents and grandparents concerned to ensure cultural and economic stability for themselves and their children. As that basis of support has eroded, Christian Democratic parties have lost touch with their core commitments. The process was so incremental that it went unnoticed for years.