Conclusion
Among the fundamental structures of the state, the family is perhaps the single most important one, for it is in its bowels that the processes take place which enable the state itself to reproduce its own “I”. As every social phenomenon, the family underwent change over the ages of mankind’s existence. Despite this, it preserved always its main essence of being: it reproduced life, i.e. man, and through him the entire human species. The “quality” of the family determined the delta of society’s life. This delta was different for different peoples and nations at different times. Even in our time it equals approximately 35 years for African countries and about 80 years for First World countries. I want to stress again that the delta itself, i.e. progress of society, depends on many fundamental factors: the level of social-economic development, the state of science and technology, the degree of religion in the nation, factors of climate and geography. Still, I repeat, the family yields nothing in importance to these listed fundamental factors.
In the modern era processes started precisely in the advanced part of mankind that are destroying the family and the institution of marriage. In Russia this process has the form of a catastrophe, in the West – the form of a crisis. Its main indicators are the decay of the traditional family and the emergence of anomalous families (of the homosexual type) and ersatz families in the form of “co-habiting.”
The latter two versions are dead-end branches on the human tree of life; not just dead-end but deathly dangerous to the whole tree, for they suck the life-giving juices out of it. These branches must be decisively cut off through the state’s social policy of the harshest kind. The prototypes are the policies of the former USSR and of today’s China.
All states should be directing their efforts at asserting precisely the monogamous family and transforming it in the future into the monophilogamous kind. This is precisely the kind of family that is best suited to the progress of society and mankind as a whole. Within its framework love is asserted as the concentration of the highest moral qualities of man.
The establishment of the monophilogamous family is, of course, a lengthy historical process, for it implies not only the change of social values in this or that state. In order to become established as the dominant of society, it will require replacement of the societies themselves, of their formational essence, in accordance with the laws of historically promising way of development.
There is no point in guessing when it will happen. Nonetheless, even now the pace of this transition can be forecast through analyzing changes in the traditional monogamous family. Particularly important in this connection is the study of proportions between marriages and divorces.
Divorce is just as necessary as marriage, on the strength of both objective and subjective reasons. The whole issue is in the proportion between the number of marriages and the number of divorces. Strange as it may seem, these optimal proportions can be derived based on the law of entropy growth, a.k.a. “the law of death.”
I already wrote of this law in the Introduction, yet it makes sense to repeat here some of its important consequences. Let me remind first its general definition: entropy is the degradation of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. There is a mathematical correlation between entropy growth and increasing disorder. The total entropy of an isolated system never decreases. However, the entropy of some part of the system can spontaneously decrease at the expense of even greater entropy growth in other parts of the system. When heat spontaneously moves from a system’s hot part to its cold part, the hot part’s entropy is spontaneously reduced. Important to us here is one of the theses following from this law, namely: entropy is the measure of organization, or disorganization, of the system. The more organized the system, the lower the entropy, and vice versa.
Family is an ordered integrity, or system; therefore its entropy is lower than the sum of entropies of those same elements (mother, father, and children) outside the family-system. This means that the more family-integrities fall apart in the state, the more chaotic processes emerge that increase the summary entropy of the state. The higher the state’s entropy (its peak is reached when all structures of the state are destroyed), the higher the probability of disintegration (=death) of the state itself.
Based on this, the following regularities can be formulated:
The more families in the state, the lower its entropy, and vice versa. Therefore, as soon as the number of divorces starts exceeding the number of marriages, the state enters the stage of dying away; it is doomed to perish. From the proportion of divorces to marriages, one can not only judge the current state and quality of the state and its citizens, but also predict their future.
How this future is to be managed? This is a question I propose to answer in other parts of my work which is titled (I remind the reader): Society: Force and Progress.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)