How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too)

David P. Goldman, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too). Regnery 2011. Reviewed by Laina Farhat-Holzman Summary: "Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room." If population declines continue in the developed world, there will be an inverted pyramid of the elderly on top being supported by too few young people, the opposite of most of world history. "For the first time in history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return" (p. x). What has not been noticed is a very precipitous crash of population in the lesser developed world, the most significant of which is the crash of Muslim population - the opposite of what we have assumed. The author notes: "... Islamic Society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. Iranian women in their twenties who grew up with five or six siblings will bear only one or two children during their lifetimes. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial counties - but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world" (p. x). Radical Islamists already are driven by despair that their culture has been ruined. The demographic bomb will frighten them even more. What happens to society when people's very existence is under threat? We have no idea how people will behave under existential threat, and social scientists have not cast much light on this issue as yet. Goldman takes this speculation to the extreme, anticipating irrational responses from the Muslim states who think they have no future. He asks: why do individuals, groups, and nations act irrationally, often at the risk of self-destruction? The question, of course, is what is rational? It seems irrational to us when people set themselves on fire to make a political protest (Buddhist monks in Vietnam) or enlist and send their young to become suicide bombers. Americans could not understand why the Japanese in World War II made human explosives of their pilots and sailors - suicide dive-bombers, human torpedoes strapped with explosives sent to swim out to American ships. It was so apparent that they were losing the war that such extreme actions seemed highly irrational. The same can be said for the seeming Muslim "death cult" that has enlisted (and often deceived) youngsters to be suicide bombers. How many young can they afford to lose in a hopeless and delusional struggle? Despair does strange things. Canada has noted that the overall suicide rate among their Native American communities is twice that of the rest of Canada, and the rate among the Inuit is still higher. There is also an epidemic of suicides and alcoholism among the ancient Amazon tribes, who were until recently isolated. Demographers have identified several different factors responsible for population decline overall: urbanization, literacy and education, and modernization of traditional societies, enforcing changes in the treatment of women and children. Female literacy is the most powerful predictor of population decline among the world's countries. My feminist antennae go up when I hear that female literacy is a powerful predictor of population decline. Literate females are perfectly capable of having two or three children at replacement levels (as they do in the United States). But when such women choose to have no more than one (or none), they have plenty of reasons for this other than the frivolity of materialism. …