Do families still play an important role in today’s society?
In most Western countries, divorce rates rose steadily over the second half of the 20th century. The only people not very likely to get divorced today are those with high education and incomes. Data on children of divorced parents are clear: They fare worse in aggregate.
On the other hand, the fragmentation of the family and of the patriarchal norms that underlie it has opened up for freedoms vastly greater than before. People are free to form identities and pursue life goals that would have interfered with traditional family roles, giving rise to new innovation and cultural expressions.
What appears to have happened is that the family is no longer considered necessary as a source of financial and emotional safety. Rather, it has become a hindrance to freedom.
Technology lies at the root of these developments. First, by making possible the kind of work and abundance in industrial and post-industrial societies which make the safety functions of the family redundant. Second, by providing contraceptives, making the policing of female sexuality redundant. And third, by providing brand new opportunities for romance and managing of family life.
Here at Radius, we will be chiefly concerned with the third kind of developments: The most recent technologies of romance and family life.
Tinder, sex robots, pre-natal diagnostics, gene-editing and parental surveillance apps are all transforming the ways in which dating, sex, child-bearing and family life function. In the dance between safety and freedom, between the will to express oneself individually and the need in children for stability and emotional support, all of these technologies have the potential both for great improvement and major disaster. Which of the two takes precedence is up to us to decide.
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Sources for the above:
Literature
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society (Sage 1992)
Castells, Manuel. The Information Age Trilogy II: The Power of Identity (2nd ed, Wiley-Blackwell 2010)
Giddens, Anthony. Sociology (6th ed, Polity 2009)
Online resources (visited June 2021)
Wikipedia. Entries on “CRISPR gene editing”, “Divorce”, “Effects of divorce”, “Marriage”, “Parental controls”, “Prenatal testing”, “Sex robot”.
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