But I think it's worth questioning whether the supposition is true or not, and not in the sense of "can I think of any examples of a dysfunctional family being exposed now that would not have been back then?" because when you're talking about a large population you can find examples of pretty much anything (including that a lot of dysfunction that would not have been tolerated in the past is now flying under the radar).
Rather the right question (according to me) is: what are the broad trends of what is actually happening to hundreds of millions of people and what are some of the factors driving the trends?
1. Coming out. I suspect that gay people always existed, but just didn’t come out.
2. Interracial relationships. Far less common in the past. And society doesn’t view them as negatively now, which changes the power balance.
3. Parental affairs. I suspect this is the one that always happened, but people just lived with it more.
From my anecdotal list the problems are actually new. And except for the third, likely to get better.
Did you mean they aren't actually new?
It's hard to make this question grounded in data, but here's an anecdote I do think is accurate.
My grandfather was a horrific man. He died of complications due to alcoholism before I was born. That said, I've heard a lot about just what he was like, including from people outside the family. I've also seen 16mm film footage of him at family holidays, and it's shockingly clear every single other person in the room is straight up terrified of his potential temper. I'm not exaggerating on this point. I think he must have had something going very, very, wrong inside that skull.
My grandmother, who otherwise was a fiercely independent woman, stayed with him despite the abuse. My Dad, hitchhiked to Mexico one summer to escape him, but otherwise still tried to be the good son.
Why? Why not just divorce/disown the asshole?
The norms against that half a century ago were so much stronger. I do think that's an important shift that's happened recently. There's still plenty of people that stay in a bad situation due to loyalty, but the stigma, in the sense of victim blaming, has definitely eroded within my lifetime.
This is a very good thing in my book, even if it looks like a decay of society to some idiots.
In 1900, a husband beating his wife wasn't even illegal in most of the world. [1] Beating children and other animals would barely even register as unusual.
[1] It wasn't practically illegal in most of the US, both on the state & federal level until the late 20th century - https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/domestic_abus...
Adultery, abuse, and addiction are not new.
E.g. One reason ancient Christianity was such a big deal according to historians (and resulted in billions of followers, etc.) was their profoundly different family structure when compared to what was happening in the roman culture and throughout the world.
They brought Jewish traditional family structure to the ‘gentiles’ (read: everyone else who wasn’t omitted by blood line).
It’s possible that a more secular materialistic society will have completely different relationship structures because there is no objective truth saying ‘hey, respect your elders’
First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddhism?) have been around long enough to form a sort of base social reality.
Second fold: These 2,000-year-old cultural regimes are crumbling and we are moving into new cultural regimes.
Third fold: The crumbling is actually, as you said, a reversion to the mean.
Fourth fold part A: This so-called reversion to the mean is itself impossible because cultures from 2,000 years ago were themselves much different from the cultures that came before them, and so on in both time and space dimensions.
Fourth fold part B: This so-called reversion to the mean is impossible also because we don't have enough context about ancient cultures to say that we are reinstantiating them, and things have changed so much (technology, residual effects of the most recent cultural regimes) that, even if we had enough information about the ancient cultures, there's no way we're really doing what they were doing.
Every (expired) empire on earth has been a blip on the radar of the oldest continuous organization in recorded history (the Roman Catholic Church).
Most demographers are actually predicting a precipitous drop in the population of ‘non-believers’ since secularists choose to have so few children. It might be an evolutionary dead end, so to say.
50,000 years ago - behavioral modernity. The whole world a primitive communist society of hunter-gatherer bands. Remaining culture is cave paintings and Venus figurines.
10,000 years ago - agricultural revolution. The rise of slave states, polytheistic religions, emperors and high priests with many wives and concubines.
2,000 years ago - the end of the Roman slave latifundias and rise of feudalism. Kings and peasants. The beginning of the Roman Catholic church.
Turn of the 16th century - the beginnings of modern capitalism, bourgeois republics, Protestantism, the rise of the city and universities.
Changes in the forces of production affect the relations of production and culture (hegemony), in this idea.
The idea in Engels crowd was the beginning of the next system was the 1871 Paris commune.
If one were looking for modern changes in production, I would guess programming and media would be two candidates for being at the vanguard of production change. Stephen King and John Carmack can make a lot of money just going into a room, whipping something up, and sending it out to the masses to see millions rolling back in. That's not like a Detroit factory 75 years ago, and is less so a farmer's field 750 years ago.
And those changes in production would affect society, the culture. In that case it would be San Francisco, and/or Shenzhen culture at the vanguard. Also media creation, so that coming out of LA, Mumbai etc.
Is there a name for this phenomenon? I think many articles could plausibly be "This Bad Thing is Downright Ubiquitous, But We Only Just Realised!".
They tell everyone they know that she's addicted to drugs and won't talk to them because they want to help her. In reality she's more successful than all of them combined, which she attributes largely to seeking mental health counseling and removing herself from their constant drama.
We're living through a reckoning for abusive people. In the past people were ostracized for cutting off their families for any reason, especially women... but now there's little reason to put up with this kind of bullshit. These cycles of familial abuse reach back generations and it's about time they're addressed.
I recently received a torrent of abuse via WhatsApp from him after a relatively minor disagreement on a news story I wasn't interested in (Harry and Meghan). It happened just as I started a week on-call as the most senior clinician, and I found I couldn't concentrate because of the things that he said echoing in my mind. Stuff that referred to things when I was less than half my current age, and hugely hurtful.
Why should I allow this in my life? An I risking the things I'm responsible for by doing this? My wife has pointed out I'm in a foul mood if I've been arguing with him about something. Is that fair on my wife and children?
However, she's very cyclical and can act normal ~30% of the time. She's told everyone that we're all drug addicts, or child abusers. Lots of people believe her, and think we all abandoned her. I've had family members call me and reduce me to tears with insults, because of the things she's told them.
From what I've seen anecdotally in every single family where the child has cut contact: there's ALWAYS a (good) reason. It almost always boils down to a failure in respecting their children, and treating them with kindness and understanding.
Younger generations are growing up with better mental health care and social awareness (due to the pervasive nature of it these days with social networks) than previous generations. We grew up in an era of public PSAs and school videos on bullying and acceptable behaviour. We know what's "right", can recognize abuse, and prefer to associate with those that treat us well.
There are and have always been extremely problematic issues in many families, it's just that in the past you would be denigrated for severing ties with your family for those reasons due to a sense of duty.
So we now finally see the elephant in the room. We cannot go back to unseeing it, but we have to deal with it gracefully. To me this is just the continuing process of development of human empathy.