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DAVID GOLDMAN ON
DECLINING BIRTH RATES: SOME THOUGHTS
November 28, 2012 By Joseph P. Farrell 7 Comments
There’s
an article at The Daily Bell recently that I found very interesting, or
rather, a few paragraphs in it that I found very interesting, and it provoked a
lot of thoughts that I want to share. First, the article itself is here:
The
paragraphs that provoked my reflections are these:
“Daily Bell:
You wrote How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). Can you
give us a synopsis?
“David P. Goldman: The explanation of the death of civilizations in many cases is
that they no longer want to live. Most of the industrial world faces
depopulation. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most
developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three
Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If
present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the
next two centuries. Fertility is falling at even faster rates − indeed, at
rates never before registered anywhere − in the Muslim world. These are
observations that raise two questions: Why is this happening and how will this
reshape the world? To the extent that demographers can find an explanation, the
decline of religious faith appears to be the decisive factor. I drew on
academic work and some of my own investigation to support this view. And then I
sought to explain why some forms of religion survive in the modern world and
others come to grief. Islam among all the world’s religions is the least likely
to succeed in modernity, I concluded.
“The
consequences for political science and strategy are tremendous. Conventional
geopolitical theory, which is dominated by material factors such as territory,
natural resources, and command of technology, does not address how peoples will
behave under existential threat. Geopolitical models fail to resemble the real
world in which we live, where the crucial issue is the willingness or
unwillingness of a people inhabiting a given territory to bring a new
generation into the world.
“I
concluded: ‘Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will
cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth,
such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own
mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged
beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic
aims – until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to
do so. Analysis of national interests cannot explain why some nations go to war
without hope of winning, or why other nations will not fight even to defend their
vital interests. It cannot explain the historical fact that peoples fight
harder, accepting a higher level of sacrifice in blood and treasure, when all
hope of victory is past.’”
To
my mind, Goldman has put his finger on something significant, and something I
have felt or intuited is deeply related to this “cycle of civilization” we
appear to be traversing. I have often stated that I believe this to be one of
those 500 year cycles, although with the technological changes of the
post-World War Two decades, this particular cycle is unlike any previous in
recorded human history: it is deeply, qualitatively, different.
At
the center of this transition – and I believe Goldman has put his finger on
something profound – is the fact that the traditional monotheisms, or as I
prefer to call them, the traditional Yahwisms, are simply inadequate to the
task, though an unreformed, unreconstructed mediaeval version of it, such as
Islam, is the most inadequate of them all. One can sense a despair in
those nations where the fundamentalist versions of it are in ascendancy, for it
is hard to divine how, for example, in Egypt the wish to destroy the pyramids
and other monuments of an ancient human culture, one so important to human
history and civilization, could advance the cause of Islam in the eyes of the
rest of humanity. It is merely the act of stupid, insane people. One can
intuit the sense of despair of being in a culture or nation where the rulers
are insane, and express such open discontent with the value of their own
population, and a contempt for human life in general, or contempt for
women.When I lived in the United Kingdom, one of the most interesting things to
me were the many people I came to know from the Islamic world, and many of
them, in moments of candor during conversations, would acknowledge the need for
a thorough reform of the culture, sensing the impending moves, I suspect, into
Islamicist reaction. They would, I recall, often make their remarks in an
almost low-voiced, hesitant way, as if afraid someone was listening.
But
Islam’s difficulties are a symptom of something much larger and not unique to
it: Goldman mentions declining birth rates in solidly western countries such as
Germany as well. I suspect that the Angst that Goldman refers to obliquely
in the above paragraphs is, in a subtler though no less real sense, at work
there as well: the old paradigms are simply not working, though for a slightly
different reason having to do with a much deeper questioning of the sanity and
agenda of its ruling elites, and of the long history and agenda in which they
have been engaged. What really seems to be suggested by Goldman’s piece
is the growing absence of hope, growing discontent with the direction
the future appears to be going, and a growing awakening to the fact that the
people currently in charge not only in the West but in the West’s “cousin
culture,” Islam, are increasingly acting only in the interest or preserving
institutions and their own power in the face of changes that will, eventually,
overwhelm them.
Here,
Goldman is correct: this needs to be factored into geopolitical thinking, and
it thus far is not
Read more: DAVID GOLDMAN ON DECLINING BIRTH RATES: SOME THOUGHTS
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