PoliticalChic
Diamond Member
1. Political science is at a loss in the face of demographic decline, and the consequences thereof. Political theory is based on the principle of nations rational self-interest
but if a nation is at the doorstep of extinction, we can imagine Spenglers Universal Law: A nation at the brink of death does not have a rational self-interest.
a. Conventional geopolitical theory, based on material factors, cannot address how peoples will behave under such existential threats.
2. Muslim fertility is shrinking at a rate demographers have never seen before, converging on Europes catastrophically low fertility.
a. Iranian women who grew up with five or six siblings will bear only one or two children in their lifetimes.
b. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran in this regard, and most of the other Muslim nations are catching up (down?) quickly!
c. By mid-century, the belt of Muslim counties from Morocco to Iran will become as grey as depopulating Europe, and will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries- but with one tenth the productivity!!
3. With population collapse imminent, radical Islam becomes ever more dangerous, as the taste of their ruin proving to them that they have nothing to lose, and, confronting fertility death, might very well choose to go down in a blaze of (nuclear) glory!
4. European apathy is the flip side of Islamic extremism, both losing their connection with the past, and their confidence in the future, between European resignation with cultural extinction and the Islamist boast You love life, we love death!
5. Factors associated with population decline include urbanization, education and literacy, modernization.
a. Children had an economic value in a traditional, agricultural society. Pension systems turned children into a cost rather providers for the elderly.
b. Female literacy is a powerful predictor of population decline. Literate and affluent women have one or two children, not six or eight. The determination between one, or two, is often religious faith: the industrial worlds lowest fertility rates are found among the Eastern European nations where atheism was the official ideology for generations. The highest rates are associated with nations such as the United States and Israel, with relatively high religious populations. Where faith goes, fertility vanishes. This is not to say that all faiths are equal in this regard: the fastest decline is taking place in Muslim countries.
6. The secularism that our world offers as the alternative to religion exposes the emptiness, and the lack of fecundity that it proposes.
a. The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for peoples powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones, so says sociologist Eric Kaufman, in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, p. 19.
7. After literacy, the next largest indicator of family size is religious practice. The more frequently Muslims attend mosque, the more likely they are to have a big family. A third of the 88% literate Turks never attend mosque, as is true of the 82% literate Iranians; in both countries fertility is below replacement. But only a fifth of Egyptians never visit a mosque, and fertility is up to about three.
a. In nations such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Egypt, worship is high, literacy low, fertility rates high, poverty high, unemployment high, social instability high.
b. In nations such as Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, there is a high degree of literacy, but face a more devastating degree of social failure in the form of a dearth of children.
Above based on How Civilizations Die, by David P. Goldman.
a. Conventional geopolitical theory, based on material factors, cannot address how peoples will behave under such existential threats.
2. Muslim fertility is shrinking at a rate demographers have never seen before, converging on Europes catastrophically low fertility.
a. Iranian women who grew up with five or six siblings will bear only one or two children in their lifetimes.
b. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran in this regard, and most of the other Muslim nations are catching up (down?) quickly!
c. By mid-century, the belt of Muslim counties from Morocco to Iran will become as grey as depopulating Europe, and will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries- but with one tenth the productivity!!
3. With population collapse imminent, radical Islam becomes ever more dangerous, as the taste of their ruin proving to them that they have nothing to lose, and, confronting fertility death, might very well choose to go down in a blaze of (nuclear) glory!
4. European apathy is the flip side of Islamic extremism, both losing their connection with the past, and their confidence in the future, between European resignation with cultural extinction and the Islamist boast You love life, we love death!
5. Factors associated with population decline include urbanization, education and literacy, modernization.
a. Children had an economic value in a traditional, agricultural society. Pension systems turned children into a cost rather providers for the elderly.
b. Female literacy is a powerful predictor of population decline. Literate and affluent women have one or two children, not six or eight. The determination between one, or two, is often religious faith: the industrial worlds lowest fertility rates are found among the Eastern European nations where atheism was the official ideology for generations. The highest rates are associated with nations such as the United States and Israel, with relatively high religious populations. Where faith goes, fertility vanishes. This is not to say that all faiths are equal in this regard: the fastest decline is taking place in Muslim countries.
6. The secularism that our world offers as the alternative to religion exposes the emptiness, and the lack of fecundity that it proposes.
a. The weakest link in the secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for peoples powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones, so says sociologist Eric Kaufman, in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, p. 19.
7. After literacy, the next largest indicator of family size is religious practice. The more frequently Muslims attend mosque, the more likely they are to have a big family. A third of the 88% literate Turks never attend mosque, as is true of the 82% literate Iranians; in both countries fertility is below replacement. But only a fifth of Egyptians never visit a mosque, and fertility is up to about three.
a. In nations such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Egypt, worship is high, literacy low, fertility rates high, poverty high, unemployment high, social instability high.
b. In nations such as Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, there is a high degree of literacy, but face a more devastating degree of social failure in the form of a dearth of children.
Above based on How Civilizations Die, by David P. Goldman.