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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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39% of adults in which age group? Or 39% died being unmarried and/or never having been married? And if we go back to 1800 or 1700 or 1200, how do those numbers look? (It might seem bizarre by modern standards to consider 1900 particularly progressive, but if you compare it to the general trend of history it mostly is.) Also what about particular subsets of society who almost constitute their own society? How many Mormon adults in 1900 were unmarried? Or Muslims? How about in the middle Ottoman Empire (as the late one actually did have reported increasing amounts of romantic instability, being in decline and all)? Or pre-Meiji Japan? (Just random examples off of the top of my head.)

Plus, at the very least, 39% (assuming the age group involved is relatively young) is still a lot better than the modern numbers.

This survey from 2015 shows 66% of Mormons married, better than your general population numbers from 1900, and they enjoy all of the benefits of modern technology/society while being pretty heavily integrated with it and without much insulation from its general romantic/sexual rot and decline. So while they're not anywhere close to almost universality, that number still suggests that getting a lot closer to there isn't even necessarily that difficult if you have the institutional will.

(For more specific historical examples, it's worth noting that exact kind of traditional societies that had nearly universal marriage would have likely existed before the advent of modern demographic statistics. It's also worth noting that if you have nearly universal marriage, even if you have modern statistics, the concept of marriage rate as a statistic wouldn't seem to make much sense/have much relevance, same as we don't particularly put much emphasis on the rate of people who have two thumbs, even though some don't.)