Content area
Full Text
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...