It all begins with the brain.
Humans are smarter than other primates because we have bigger heads and bigger brains. Having big heads means that human babies must be born while the head size is small enough to pass through the birth canal of the mother without rupture, and the resultant baby is consequently small and totally incapable of surviving without constant and complete outside care and protection. That in turn means that both parents, and often grandparents, must tend to the child night and day for at least the first few years and often longer. That in turn means a pair-bonding unit together long enough to tend to the child’s needs, and thus the creation of the family, a social feature that no other creature has evolved to the extent we have, not even chimpanzees, our closest relatives among primates.
The family, then, is the social unit that makes us the most successful mammal ever created. To it we owe our primacy in stable, coherent communities and in larger units such as tribes and nations.
Why then are we allowing it to collapse?
Throughout the civilized world human populations are decreasing. The replacement rate for almost all developed societies is inadequate. The world birth rate has decreased dramatically from 37.8 per 1,000 women to 32.6 in 1970 and then 17.5 in 2020, 17.3 in 2025. In America the birth rate has declined from 24.8 in1950 to 18.4 in 1970 and 10.9 in 2020 and 10.7 in 2025. Most people do not want families, or any but small families. Add to this the decline in people who are even getting married, which has declined worldwide for the last 50 years and is down to under 5 marriages per 1000 people in developed countries; in the U.S. from 8.2 per thousand in 2000 to 6.8 in 2010 and 6.1 in 2023, the lowest ever recorded.
The family, in short, is disappearing.
It might not be necessary to name a culprit, but one glaring party stands out: the state. It has always been in the interest of the state to diminish any other sources of power in society so as to strengthen its own. The parish, the guild, the prince or margrave, these have all been relegated to minor roles as central authority has increased, and the welfare/warfare state of the 21st century is the apex of this enlargement. The family, too, has become less influential in daily affairs as politicians and bureaucrats intrude, and what the extended family, local church, and father’s union used to provide in times of need is now the province of the state.
In the U.S. there are now 95 government programs giving subsidies in food, health, housing, and other benefits to poorer households, amounting to the equivalent of some $135,000 a year for a family of four in 2023, so that the father’s role as central provider is entirely displaced and indeed the father comes to have to particular role in the family’s well-being at all.
With all that it is no surprise that since the War on Poverty began in 1965 with the state’s takeover of family earnings, the percentage of households in the labor force has dropped by half, from 70 to 36 per cent, meaning that the parents of at least a fifth of the nation don’t even have to get out of bed.
Obviously without fathers children can easily drift to crime, and the correlation between fatherless boys and illegality is nearly absolute. But the effect on many other aspects of society is also palpable and deplorable, and there is no sign that this is going to change with a Trumpian anti-crime government in charge.
I’ve said for some time that Western civilization is collapsing. The dolorous status of the family nowadays, that most basic unit in primate superiority, is proof of its immediacy.
