Transformations of the family institution: from the pre-modern to the metamodern

Mukhamedzhanova Nuriya Mansurovna ORCID: 0000-0002-6847-2173 Doctor of Cultural Studies Professor; Department of Philosophy, Culturology and Sociology; Orenburg State University 460018, Russia, Orenburg region, Orenburg, Prospekt Pobedy str., 18, office 20806 nuriyam@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The relevance of the family theme is due to the current socio-cultural situation both in Russia and in the world as a whole. On the one hand, the family is recognized as the most important social institution, on the condition of which the well-being of society largely depends, and the state pays great attention to supporting the family, motherhood and childhood. On the other hand, scientists talk about a family crisis, which finds its expression in a decrease in marriage and fertility rates, a narrowing of family functions, a decrease in its status and a decrease in childbearing, a growing number of divorces, etc.

The importance of the family as a social institution is determined by the functions it performs, the most important of which is the reproductive function, the function of giving birth to children, their maintenance and socialization. However, for many centuries, the family has performed other non-specific functions: accumulation and transfer of property, inheritance of social status, organization of production and consumption, household, recreation and leisure related to taking care of the health and well-being of family members, with the creation of a microclimate conducive to stress relief and self-preservation of each member, etc. In addition, for many centuries, the family has been the most important mechanism for ensuring the translation and reproduction of culture, the transfer of socio-cultural experience to the next generation, which cannot be replenished and compensated by anything else. Therefore, the state of the family is the most important indicator of the state of society, its viability.

The Russian philosopher I. A. Ilyin calls the family the first "form of human spiritual unity" ^{[1, p. 199]}, from which a person can rise to other, higher forms of spiritual unity – the motherland and the state. The family, from the point of view of the thinker, is "the primary bosom of human culture" ^{[1, p. 199]}. And therefore, the crisis of the family in the modern world is a consequence of the spiritual crisis experienced by mankind. As history shows, "great collapses and disappearances of peoples arise from spiritual and religious crises, which are expressed primarily in the disintegration of the family" ^{[1, p. 201]}.

The reasons for the transformation of the family in the modern world

Although I. A. Ilyin argues that "the family does not disintegrate at all from the acceleration of the historical pace" ^{[1, p. 201]}, it should still be recognized that the cause of the crisis of the family institution was objective historical processes associated with the modernization of societies, their transition from the agrarian to the industrial stage of development, from traditional society to modern.

Let's consider these processes on the example of a Russian traditional family, whose demographic behavior was determined primarily by the norms of Orthodox ethics aimed at ensuring the safety of the family. Marriage was perceived as an indicator of a person's well-being, his social authority and material well-being. The bachelor state was condemned, caused the villagers a contemptuous and suspicious attitude. The concept of "single" was practically equivalent to the concept of "defective". The purpose of marriage, which was considered a sacred union, was to give birth and raise children, and not to obtain any carnal pleasures. Children were the moral justification of marriage, the fulfillment of a divine prescription ^{[2, pp. 161-162]}.

For objective reasons, the Russian Empire was characterized by a high mortality rate, especially infant mortality, and, as a result, a high birth rate. A healthy married woman gave birth on average 10-11 times during her life, but not all of the children she gave birth to lived to adulthood. Even in 1897, the year of the first census of the empire, only 57% of newborn Russians lived to be 5 years old ^{[2, p. 199]}. "About a third of children died in the first year of life and more than half died before they reached the age of 6" ^{[2, p. 205]}, and the average life expectancy in 1904-1913 was 32.4 years for boys and 34.5 years for girls ^{[2, p. 210]}.

Naturally, with such child mortality, a high birth rate was the main condition for the preservation of offspring: "For thousands of years, high mortality has been one of the cornerstones on which the entire edifice of cultural norms, religious and moral precepts regulating human behavior in the demographic sphere was built. In particular, high mortality dictated the widespread convergent development of those principles of social life that affected the production and care of offspring and ensured the continuity of generations. With all the variety of cultural forms and norms in this area, they all rested on a common foundation. ... Marriage was supposed to be almost universal and lifelong, a woman was seen primarily as a continuer of the family, a large number of children were considered an unconditional blessing, any interference in the procreation process was condemned, etc. If all these norms were not protected by culture and were not observed, humanity would have died out in conditions of high mortality" ^{[3, p. 64]}.

The Russian traditional family was a socio-economic organism linked by hierarchical relationships and based on the age-and-sex division of labor. Therefore, having many children was a condition for her material well-being and, ultimately, survival. In addition, due to the lack of pension provision and social insurance of the population, children were the only guarantee of a calm, secure old age. Marriage before the beginning of the 20th century was not only early, but also almost universal. Thus, at the end of the XVIII – first half of the XIX century, only 1% of men and women were unmarried by the age of 60, which almost coincided with the proportion of disabled and mentally ill people in the country's population. That is, celibacy was practically absent in the peasant environment ^{[2, p. 172]}. Divorce required serious grounds and was an extremely rare phenomenon in the life of the peasantry.

These features of demographic behavior were characteristic of other, non-Orthodox, peoples of the Russian Empire, which is understandable. In this case, the means of unifying demographic practices are world religions that promote "the same type of understanding of the value of human life and the necessary conditions for its protection ..." ^{[3, p. 60]}.

However, the process of modernization of Russian society in the 20th century leads to a significant improvement in the living conditions of the Russian family: material well-being, working conditions, medical care, sanitary conditions, food quality, etc. Pension provision and social insurance of the population are being developed. The consequence of these processes is a significant increase in life expectancy and a drop in mortality, which ultimately leads to a drop in the birth rate in society. At the same time, significant changes are taking place in the family itself.

Already in the XIX century, and especially in the XX century, there is a reduction, a curtailment of the socio-cultural functions of the family: economic, industrial, religious, educational, recreational, educational, etc., which are "shifted" to other social institutions: the function of education and upbringing – to kindergarten and school; vocational training – to higher educational institutions and colleges; protection and protection – for the police and the army; the function of food, leisure, provision – for the service sector, etc. Thus, the State assumes a significant part of the family's functions. As a result, the family in an industrial society turns into "an elementary place of residence for those who give birth and those who are born (parents and children)" ^{[1, p. 201]}.

The development of an industrial economy, involving the employment of both parents in the system of social production, turns children into a burden for their parents, makes family and work incompatible: "On the one hand, the labor market requires mobility without taking into account personal circumstances. Marriage and family require the exact opposite. If we think through the market model of modernity to the end, then it is assumed to be based on a family-free and marriage-free society. ... The market actor is ultimately a single individual, not "burdened" by a partnership, marriage or family. Accordingly, a developed market society is also a childless society, except that children grow up next to mobile single fathers and mothers" ^{[4, p. 175; 5, pp. 205-206]}.

Thus, the modernization of society, its transition to industrialism destroys the very foundations of the traditional family, and the main contradiction of the modern era, which destroys the family, is the contradiction between the requirements of the labor market and the requirements of the family, partnership. Therefore, a decrease in the birth rate is an objective and natural process characteristic of all developed industrial societies, including eastern ones, such as Japan ^{[6, p. 38]}. According to scientists, it was the "unprecedented high level of existential security" ^{[7, p. 38]}, characteristic of industrial society, that caused the decline of traditional norms ^[8].

However, even more serious changes in the family occur in the postmodern era, when there is a transition of "society from traditional values to secular-rational and from survival values to values of self-expression" ^{[7, p. 35]}, a new ethics is being formed based "on the principle of 'duties towards oneself'" ^{[4, p. 35]}. 143]. The very spiritual foundations of the family are changing: there is a total secularization of society, an increase in the degree of individual freedom and the discrediting of those values on which the traditional family was built; the spread of consumerism, the values of individualism and hedonism. "The family is disintegrating and losing its sanctity. Marriage breaks up easily; divorce is common and widespread. ...Since the family breaks up easily, it cannot be an effective educational tool…It cannot shape children to the same extent mentally and morally as society" ^{[9, p. 408]}.

In postmodern society, there is a further transformation of family functions due to the fact that sexuality is freed from the reproductive function, from the age-old connection with kinship and offspring, becoming completely autonomous, "plastic" and even decisive in family life ^{[10; 11]}. Obeying the general logic of postmodern culture, sexuality also becomes "a form of self-identification, self-expression and self-affirmation of personality" ^{[7, p. 42]}. As R. Rorty emphasizes, the basis of these spiritual changes in postmodern culture were Darwinian ideas about man as an intelligent animal that strives to adapt to the environment as much as possible with the help of tools that allow him to experience as little suffering and as much pleasure as possible ^{[12, p. 24]}. In the postmodern era, the family also becomes such a tool used by a "smart animal", which disintegrates when it ceases to bring pleasure to a person.

In conditions when there is a "complete absorption of culture by the logic of consumption" ^{[13, p. 86]}, the main figure of the postmodern era becomes a consumer who seeks to get maximum pleasure "here and now" and avoids excessive attachment to people, business, place. This perception of life "here and now" gives rise to "plastic sexuality", that is, sexuality, which becomes an object of consumption. The postmodern world is a world of cheap products created for short–term use. In this world, any identity, including gender, can be discarded as a boring costume. The life strategy of a postmodern figure striving to "live one day" is the strategy of playing short games: "Playing short games means avoiding long-term obligations. Reject any "fixation". Don't get attached to a place. Do not condemn your life to doing only one thing. Do not swear allegiance to anything and no one. Do not control the future and in no case lay it down: make sure that the consequences are not carried beyond the scope of the game itself, and in case of anything, do not admit your responsibility. To forbid the past to limit the present" ^[14].

The pathos of unlimited personal freedom permeating modern culture leads to the fact that love is being replaced by eroticism; traditional communities based on unity of interests and values – unstable virtual communities; good old values – the cult of physicality and pleasure. The motto of the modern consumer society is "Live for yourself and enjoy life!" ^{[6, p. 38]}.

Female emancipation is also becoming one of the factors of family disintegration, including the feminist movement in Western countries, which considers traditional marriage as a burden, a form of exploitation of women or prostitution ^{[6, pp. 64-66]}. An even greater devaluation of family values in Western society is taking place today, when the traditional family is seen as an anachronism, a vestige of an authoritarian society, and the spread of alternative forms of marriage is an indicator of democracy and tolerance of society. Another sexual revolution is taking place in Western society, which finds expression in the existence and spread of "a wide range of family and non-family forms of living together" ^{[4, p. 179]}, such as partnership/cohabitation, homosexual unions, "open relationships", "guest marriage", "trial marriage", etc. The number of women who completely abandon the "joys of motherhood" for the sake of individual well-being and career (child free) is growing.

Thus, the only reliable foundation and foundation of marriage in modern society remains loneliness, and the main conflict of the era is the contradiction between the freedom of the individual, her desire to live her "own life", on the one hand, and longing for the "other", the search for personal happiness in conditions of thinned public relations– on the other. All this gives rise in modern culture to testing and painful experimentation with different forms, roles and strategies of living together with unpredictable results.

The problem of the family's future

How can the experimentation with different forms, roles and strategies of living together inherent in modern culture end? The opportunity to imagine the future of society and all mankind in connection with family changes is given to us by dystopia, a genre that became most widespread precisely in the era of modernity, in the era of socio–cultural crisis. The image of the future is created in dystopia on the basis of awareness of those problems that threaten the very existence of mankind, and extrapolation of current trends in the development of the world into the future. However, the image of the future in complex systems is always ambiguous, because at the point of bifurcation, a multivariate branching of the paths of evolution of a nonlinear system arises: "The future is open and not the only one, but it is not arbitrary. There is a limited set of development opportunities.... This spectrum is determined solely by its own properties" ^{[15, p. 293]}.

One of these future options is described in the dystopian novel by the English writer Kazuo Ishiguro "Don't Let Me Go". Here we are talking about the fact that in some distant future the main function of the family - the function of the birth and upbringing of children – can also be transferred to state structures and institutions. Children are reproduced through cloning, raised outside the family, in residential institutions, and can be used to solve a variety of social problems, including medical ones ^[16].

More realistic, in our opinion, is the picture of the future described in another dystopian novel - "The Mosque of Notre Dame: 2048" by E. Chudinova ^[17]. As a result of the decline in the European population and the growth of migration flows, the spread of multiculturalism and tolerance policies aimed at adapting migrants to life in European societies, etc., the European Union is turning into a Wahhabi Islamic state – Euro-Islam. Europeans are evicted into ghettos and forced to live according to Sharia law; those who disagree with the new policy create a resistance army fighting for the return of their temples and homes. Global transformations have affected all countries of the world, forced to choose their development priorities in the context of the new world order.

It should be said that such a forecast of the development of events has quite good reasons. Today, scientists are talking about the serious danger of active migration processes for the future development of European countries. Firstly, these are the dangers associated with the loss of the cultural unity of the country, in which the indigenous population is gradually becoming a "minority", and, as a result, with the cultural transformation of the West, turning it into a fundamentally different civilizational entity with uncertain prospects. It was about these processes at the beginning of the XXI century that the famous American statesman and public figure P. Buchanan wrote in his book "The Death of the West", arguing that modern America is turning "into a chaotic cluster of peoples who have virtually nothing in common with each other – neither history, nor folklore, nor language, nor culture, nor faith, no ancestors" ^{[6, p. 14]}; turns into a country where "millions of people feel like strangers in their own country" ^{[6, p. 16]}. In addition, the negative impact of this factor is further aggravated by the fact that most migrants arrive in the United States from countries that do not have a stable democratic tradition ^{[18, p. 66]}. All these factors contribute to the destabilization of public order in modern Western societies ^{[6, pp. 192-193]}.

In the context of civilizational dynamics, a significant reduction in the number of the dominant ethnic group (less than 50% of the total population) in a single multiethnic system can lead to a change in the dominant ethnic group, which is accompanied by a change in the socio-cultural orientation of the population ^{[19, pp. 134-136]}. This means that the indicators of demographic growth are the main reason for the change of the subject of the historical process in the space of civilization. This is exactly the situation that developed after World War II in Kosovo and Metohija, where the imbalance in the demographic structure of the region resulted in the expansion of the Albanian population, the seizure of Serbian historical territory, cultural segregation and ghettoization of the Serbian population ^{[20; 21]}.

As civilization studies prove, the upward dynamics of civilization is associated with population growth, while the downward dynamics is associated with depopulation. The connection between these indicators was pointed out by L. N. Gumilev, who proves that the decline in the birth rate is one of the main symptoms of the phase of the fracture of the ethnic system ^[22]. P. Buchanan also writes about this: "Just as population growth has always been considered a sign of the health of the nation and civilization as a whole, depopulation is a sign of the disease of the people and society" ^{[6, p. 24]}. Since the depopulation of Western countries goes hand in hand with the population growth of other civilizations, this can radically change the balance of power on the world stage and ultimately lead to a change in the leader of world development: "The Western man will not disappear, but his presence on the planet will sooner or later cease to be noticed..." ^{[6, p. 363]}.

Thus, the analysis shows that in the modern world, the fetishization of individual freedom and the spread of values of self-expression contradict the values of survival and self-preservation of society as an integral and unique education.

Consideration of the problems of the modern family leads some scientists to the disappointing conclusion that the disintegration of the family is a consequence of objective processes that cannot be reversed, and the state, trying to change the situation in this regard, only "signs its own impotence.... There will never be a return to the old family values" ^{[7, p. 51]}. However, in our opinion, this position may be questioned. And the refutation of this conclusion is the state of Utah – one of the largest industrial centers in the United States and at the same time the region characterized by the highest birth rates in the country ^{[23, p. 160]}. The main population of the state is Mormons, who are characterized by high religiosity and exceptionally high family value, which confirms: "Strong faith and a large family go hand in hand" ^{[6, p. 320]}. This means that a high birth rate can persist even in economically developed regions and countries if their population remains committed to traditional cultural values.

Therefore, another, more optimistic, albeit difficult, scenario is possible, associated with a change in the value system of society. It is values that act in crisis moments of society's life as attractor structures that bring the system into a self-building mode. And the change in the value system becomes a reaction to the socio-cultural crisis, to the sense of the end, the inevitability of disaster that engulfed humanity in the 21st century. The Idea Of The End Of The Story By F. Fakuyama, which nourished the culture of postmodernism, has acquired a completely different, apocalyptic meaning in the modern situation. And already in the early 2000s, thinkers declared the death of postmodernism, which is being replaced by metamodernism as one of the options for describing the current culture of the XXI century ^[24].

Metamodernism has become a cultural response to crisis processes in the world, since postmodern logic has proved inadequate to the modern socio-cultural situation, unable to cope with its problems. The irony, sarcasm, nihilism and cold detachment characteristic of postmodernism can in no way help a person who finds himself face to face with his many problems. Using the techniques and tools of postmodernism (irony, pastiche, sarcasm, etc.), metamodernism returns to the "old–fashioned" content of the modern era - to ethical and socio-political issues that are burning and urgent: terrorism, the environment, intercultural conflicts; to the eternal metaphysical issues of collective memory, fate, death and faith, that is, he "seeks to restore what postmodernism has violated or destroyed..." ^{[13, p. 234]}.

In the ethical, political sphere, in art and even in economics, there is a turn from the "cold" emotional style of postmodernism to the emotionally "warm" style of metamodernism ^{[25, p. 78]}, since society needs hope and faith, human participation and solidarity, empathy and sincerity more than ever before. "After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, irony again "died" or "ended", which ... became the "only good moment" due to "this horror" ^{[13, p. 222]}. In a world shaken by crisis processes, a person strives to know and understand his "I", to find emotional ground in relationships with other people, to realize his responsibility and affective involvement in events and facts ^{[13, p. 315]}. It is at such moments of social cataclysms and acute emotional experiences that a person discovers a way of existence identical to human nature – an authentic way of existence when he must make the only right choice and take responsibility for it ^{[25, p. 79]}. It is a way of existence focused on the highest values of culture: love, compassion, faith, solidarity. According to psychologists, it is positive value experiences that are a source of mental energy that supports a person's spirit in a difficult life situation ^{[26, p. 11]}. In addition, in a crisis, the very situation of existential danger actualizes in a person the instinct of self-preservation inherent in all living things, and generates group solidarity, mass cohesion and support aimed at ensuring protection: "With a common threat, it seems safer if everyone feels next to the other" ^{[27, p. 379]}. This means that the crisis situation can contribute to the revival of traditional cultural values.

Thus, the crisis processes in the modern world undermine the sense of existential security that was inherent in the previous era and caused the decline of traditional norms. This means that a turn towards transcendence, spirituality, and sincerity can become a turn towards traditional cultural values that have been totally discredited in the culture of postmodernism. Family is one of these values. And this, in our opinion, may be the positive significance of the modern socio-cultural crisis.