Islamophobia

"Islamophobia" is the flavour of the month in Britain, especially since former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw criticised the wearing of the eye-slit-only niqab

I mentioned Oswald Spengler the German philosopher in a previous post. His namesake is a columnist on the Asia Times On Line, and a pleasure to read: reasonable reactionary intellectuals are even rarer than the left wing variety. This post is an intellectual tour de force, but like most theology, misses the point.

Islamofascism has nothing to do with religion. People will believe in any rubbish if they think it is a winning cause. The previous generation of Middle Eastern pin-up fanatics were secular marxist-fascists in the Baathist/Al Fatah mode. Extremist Islam is totalitarian nonsense just like Marxism or Fascism (or fundamentalist Christianity)

The niqab is not traditional Islamic wear over most of the Muslim world, and nor did any of the previous generation of immigrants wear it. It is an in-your-face (sorry about the pun) badge of rebellion and contempt for the host society. Meanwhile it is up to moderate Muslims to fight Islamists just as the democratic left fought Communism, and the democratic right fought Fascism.

Meanwhile the Islamists have one legitimate gripe: the decadence of the secular West. The combination of work-all-hours Capitalism and radical feminism means that the family is devalued and people will not or cannot have children. European demographics, as shown in the previous but one post, are a disaster. If secular society is finally overcoming its PC taboos on multiculturalism, thank goodness, then it also needs to reclaim the primacy of the family, and to stop uncontrolled immigration, and not leave them to the reactionary right.

Musings on God: half of Her is missing

I am not a theologian, and much of this post may seem pompous and amateurish, but here goes

There are two general attributes ascribed to God (as if He/She could be described…) – transcendence and immanence. I will call them the God of power/magic and the inner light, the God of love. Neither are in themselves good or bad. The abuse that can be made of the God of power is obvious, but , in modern business-speak, it’s no good having a strategy if you do not have an implementation plan. The inner light is more obviously appealing – but not if it leads to quietism and indifference, the two curses of Indian religions.

All the great religions have room for both attributes, although they come at them from different directions . At one extreme is Buddhism, so inwardly directed and seemingly without God that it is amazing that it could create gods of power – but that is what the boddhisatvas become in the Mahayana, because the faithful needed them to intercede for them.

At the other extreme is Islam. The warrior Prophet executing his enemies, and an uncompromising worldly theocracy, seems unpromising candidates for the inner light . Yet by the 9^th century, probably under the influence of contact with India, Sufism became established, and has been one of most powerful and beautiful mystical traditions of love for God and fellow man.

The old gods of power are obsolete – they have been superceded by science. It can explain everything except “why?” and the traditional religions are not much good at that either. Traditional Christianity, which tried to combine reason and faith, is merely dying as a result. Islam and Christian fundamentalism are both in denial (literalism cannot be reconciled with science: the order of creation in both Genesis and in the Koran is not in line with modern cosmology). One of the most tragic figures in Islam is Al Ghazali, the great 11^th century philosopher. He made Sufism acceptable in the Sunni mainstream, but he also discovered scepticism seven hundred years before David Hume. He concluded that God recreates the world each moment by acts of unconstrained will – there are no laws. End of Islamic science, which had been flourishing for three hundred years (Christians since Hume’s day took the opposite conclusion –there is no God; their natural laws work too well)

The other issue is that none of the three dynamically flourishing religions currently has any room for the inner light. Sufism is pretty moribund ( I think Spengler has a main post on this somewhere). Secularism has no problem with its God of power, and is not bereft of love and compassion for others, but it’s directed to greed and the ego, while the core of any belief which makes men alive and happy, is mutual love, and submission to, a higher power. Despite the “born again” phenomenon, the same narrow aim seems to characterise the Evangelical Christianity which Spengler puts so much faith in, greed being the besetting sin of Puritanism.

Apart from Oswald Spengler style resignation to History, what is to be done? The absence of the inner light is clear from the spiritual shopping in the East done by Westerners, but you cannot pick-and-mix from a tradition. Western Buddhism is just another Protestant sect, dedicated to self improvement, which misses the point.

A citizen of a great Western country - also a member of a zealous, exclusive, Middle Eastern faith which refuses to “integrate”, and whose violent rebellions are doomed to fail. He is caught between two cultures, at home in neither – and invents a great religion. Yep, that’s St.Paul. Perhaps his successor is already alive in Bradford or Corbeil-Essonnes today…. But no-one can consciously become a religious prophet.

Why no babies?

Some obvious theories do not seem to be corroborated by the evidence.

- it is all the fault of women's lib, eroding the traditional family, encouraging women to go and work and "fulfil themselves" in other ways then having children... but Japan still has severely traditional roles and rampant sexism, and Korea, Russia and (surprisingly) Germany are not that liberated. Those cliches of liberated womenhood, Scandinavians have higher birthrates, even if still below replacement;

- "the decline of the west": but it is taking place everywhere

- the lagged response of birth rates to lower death rates, the so-called demographic transition. Certainly that is a major factor why population surges followed by a fall in the birth rate which then reduces the growth - but not the difference between similar countries, such as very low birth rates in Spain and Italy and higher rates in France next door, or USA (close to replacement) and Canada (as in so much else, Europeans in check shirts)

- higher immigrant birth rates. A partial explanation but a patchy and incosistent one, and disappears over time. Hispanic birth rates are higher than "whites" in the US, but not by much, and converging. South Asian families (Hindu or Moslem) have higher birth rates (still over 3 per women) but falling sharply in the UK, but immigrants in France do not appear to have a significantly higher rate than native Frenchwomen (who admittedly reproduce faster than some of their European sisters). The French government does not publish statistics by ethnic group, bit does by region, and the birth rates are remarkably similar between those areas with a high immigrant population and those where there are not (there are more immigrant births because of a younger age structure, but that is another issue)

- modernisation and urbanisation. The biggest single factor, with a clear correlation. Give women a minimum of freedom, contraception, and push people into urban environments and they have fewer children. They do not have to be rich or even well educated for this to happen

- capitalist values. I go with the Russian joke that socialism was evil and incompetent, while capitalism is evil and competent. Greed is good, and materialism the highest value. We all have to work all hours, and the system bids up the price of key assets (especially housing) so we need to. Result is no-one has time to breed

- religion. Ambigouous. Despite much better social incentives Americans have far more children than Canadians - religion seems the only explanation. But even the secular "blue" states breed more, if age structure is taken into account. It may have something to do with Americans still being generally optimistic - for them and for their children. But Thais, Indians, Iranians are religious, and their birth rates are falling sharply

Developed societies are not sustainable: they do not reproduce

It is only a few years ago that world's biggest problem seemed to be overpopulation. Be careful what you wish for.

If, as still seems probable, the world manages to survive the global greenhouse, there is another slower and more insidious major problem: industrial society, on present demographic trends, is not sustainable because the population will collapse through lack of births. This map shows not only the extent of the fall in global birthrates, but some unexpected details. Birth rates are below replacement levels of 2.1 children per woman in all of the developed world with the singular exception of the United States, where they are just above replacement. They are also below replacement however in China, Brazil, parts of South East Asia (Thailand, Vietnam), and interestingly in the more developed parts of the Middle East, (with the singular exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Iraq), that is in Turkey, Iran, Algeria and Tunisia. In India, spanish speaking Latin America and most of the rest of the middle East birth rates have fallen sharply to just above replacement, between 2-3 children per woman, and judging from trends elsewhere will continue to fall to below replacement.

In the developing world the fall in birthrates has been so sudden that total population will continue to grow for at least another generation, due to the age structure of the population. In developed countries where birth rates have been low for some time, and have now fallen to very low levels, then absolute population decline is in prospects unless counteracted by immigration: Japan and Korea especially, Germany, Italy and most of eastern Europe and Russia.

What are the causes? What are the implications, and does it matter? What can be done about it? I will focus on this in later posts.