How Civilizations Die

(And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

David Goldman

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781596982734
• eBook ISBN: 9781596982802
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Thanks to collapsing birthrates, much of Europe is on a path of willed self-extinction. The untold story is that birthrates in Muslim nations are declining faster than anywhere elseâ??at a rate never before documented. Europe, even in its decline, may have the resources to support an aging population, if at a terrible economic and cultural cost. But in the impoverished Islamic world, an aging population means a civilization on the brink of total collapseâ?? something Islamic terrorists know and fear. Muslim decline poses new threats to America, challenges we cannot even understand, much less face effectively, without a wholly new kind of political analysis that explains how desperate peoples and nations behave. In How Civilizations Die, David P. Goldman, author of the celebrated Spengler column read by intelligence organizations world wide, ??reveals how, almost unnoticed, massive shifts in global power are remaking our future.

PART ONE

THE DECLINE OF THE EAST

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CHAPTER 1

THE CLOSING OF THE MUSLIM WOMB

If demographic winter is encroaching slowly on the West, a snap frost has overtaken the Muslim world. Europe has had two hundred years to make the transition from the high fertility rates of rural life to the low fertility rates of the industrial world. Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria are attempting it in twenty. The graying of the Muslim world in lapsed time, as it were, can have only tragic consequences.

The Muslim world is on the brink of the fastest population decline in recorded history. Academic demographers are stunned. “In most of the Islamic world it’s amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened,” Hania Zlotnik, head of the United Nations’ population research branch, told a 2009 conference.¹

Think of a train wreck: the front car hits an obstacle, and the rear cars collapse accordion-style with the momentum. Driving the demographics of Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, and other Muslim countries is a “locomotive” made up of people in their teens and twenties. They were born into families of six or seven children. But this “locomotive” has hit a demographic wall: these young people are having only one or two children. Today’s “bulge” generation of young Muslims, whose political humiliation and frustration over economic stagnation stoked the Arab rebellions of 2011, will be followed by a generation dramatically smaller than their own.

Today there are more Iranians in their mid-twenties than in any other age bracket. But they are not reproducing. An educated twenty-five-year-old Iranian woman today probably grew up in a family of six or seven children, but will bear only one child. The consequences will be catastrophic. Today there are nine Iranians of working age for every elderly dependent. By 2050, when the bulge in Iran’s population will be at retirement age, there will be more Iranians in their mid-sixties than in any other age bracket—seven elderly dependents for every ten working Iranians. The country produces just $4,400 per capita, about a tenth of America’s GDP, and most of that comes directly or indirectly from oil and natural gas reserves—which are running out.

It’s already too late to fend off the population decline. That Iranian twenty-five-year-old’s mother married in her teens and had several children by her mid-twenties. Her daughter has postponed family formation, or foregone it altogether, and spent her most fertile years on education and work, if she can find it—a quarter of young Iranians are unemployed by the official count, and the true number is probably worse.

Aging populations present a danger even to rich countries with well-funded public pension systems. For poor countries with a primitive social safety net or none at all, a graying society will be a disaster.

The Muslim world will re-enact in lapsed time the demographic winter of the industrial world, with a deadly difference: the industrial nations are wealthy enough to cushion the impact, but the worst-affected Muslim nations are not. With GDP per person of $30,000 in 2009, Europe is wealthy enough to support its elderly—with sacrifice, skimping, and a certain amount of social dislocation. Egypt and Indonesia have less than a tenth of Europe’s per capita GDP. Algeria, like Iran, earns $4,400 per capita, while Pakistan shows barely $1,000 per capita—half of Pakistanis live on $1 a day or less. Even Turkey, the one Muslim country with a semblance of a modern economy, generates only $8,000 per capita, about a quarter of Europe’s GDP.

By the end of the century, under the assumption of constant fertility, the economically active population (aged 15 to 59 years) of Western Europe will fall by two-fifths, and of Eastern Europe and East Asia by about two-thirds. The working-age population of the United States will grow by about a quarter. The least fertile European countries will see their total populations drop by 40 to 60 percent in the course of the present century.

This is the great underreported story of our time. Population collapse across almost the entire industrial world is threatening to disrupt the world’s economy and endangering political stability. Eastern Europe and especially Russia are already facing a demographic death spiral. As the working-age population shrinks in most of the industrialized world, elderly dependents will make up most of Europe and East Asia’s population. (But only two-fifths of America’s.) Economies and tax revenues across Europe and East Asia will implode while pension and health care costs skyrocket. Pundits who preach America’s inevitable decline should be sentenced to a year’s hard labor at the United Nations database. For all the concern about the future cost of pensions and health care as America’s population ages, America will still have the people to shoulder the burden. In the rest of the world, there simply will not be enough workers to support the elderly. Demographic winter means fiscal ruin and social upheaval.

But even more remarkable than the demographic decline of the industrial nations in Europe and the Far East is the speed at which Muslim nations are catching up to and in some cases overtaking the rest of the world in fertility collapse. World fertility has fallen by about two children per woman in the past half century—from about 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5. Fertility in the Muslim world has fallen two or three times faster than the world average. The drastic drop-off in fertility has hit Arab, Persian, Turkish, Malay, and South Asian Muslims. Iran’s fertility has fallen by almost six children per woman, Turkey’s has fallen by five children per woman, Pakistan’s by more than three children per woman, and Egypt’s and Indonesia’s by four.

Muslim Countries’ Fertility Falls
Much Faster Than the World Average

Source: United Nations World Population Division

Most Muslim countries have no public pension or health systems. The aged rely on their children to care for them. Muslims now in their sixties and seventies have on average several working-age children. In Iran, Turkey, and Algeria, most old people will have one or two children at mid-century. Europe is already struggling to cope with an aging population and increased demands for pensions and health care. During the next forty years, the average age of the European population will increase only from forty to forty-six years. In most Muslim countries, the average age today ranges from late teens to late twenties—but by 2050, it may rise to forty years or more. Many of the largest Muslim countries may well catch up with Europe’s geriatric crisis in a generation and a half. By 2070, Iran will be grayer than Europe.

By the year 2070, several Muslim countries will have a higher proportion of elderly dependents than Western Europe. And the relative economic burden will be much, much heavier in the fast-aging Muslim countries.

Percentage of Population over 65 Years,
Europe vs. Selected Muslim Countries

Source: United Nations World Population Division (Low Variant Scenario)

Most of the variation in birth rates among Muslim countries is explained by a single factor: literacy. Literacy is the threshold that separates traditional society from modernity. The moment Muslims learn to read, family size falls below replacement. Literacy explains about 60 percent of the fertility differential across the Muslim world.

Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts. As soon as Muslim women break the constraints of traditional society, they have one child and sometimes two, but rarely three or four—and almost never the six or seven children that their mothers bore. This correlation holds whether we compare fertility among different Muslim countries or compare the fertility of women with differing educational levels within the same country, as we will see in the detailed data for Iran and Turkey.

Other factors impinge, to be sure: Bangladesh has promoted contraception more than some of its neighbors. In consequence its fertility rate of just under three children per woman is a bit lower than its 38 percent literacy would predict. “The contrast between Pakistan and poorer Bangladesh is stark,” writes sociologist Eric Kaufmann. “Pakistan’s religious authorities resisted family planning far longer than their counterparts in Bangladesh, who are much less influenced by...fundamentalist ideology.”² Whether Muslim governments support or oppose contraception, though, makes only a small difference. Pakistan has the same literacy rate as Bangladesh, and Pakistani women have only one child more on average than Bangladeshi women; Pakistan’s fertility rate of about four is just what the literacy rate there predicts. The only Muslim countries where women still give birth to seven or eight children are the poorest and least literate: Mali, Niger, Somalia, and Afghanistan.

Another factor is religious practice, itself inversely correlated with literacy. The more frequently Muslims attend mosque, the more likely they are to have big families, according to the World Values Survey—although data are available for only a small number of countries, and from years during which rapid change was under way. A third of the 88 percent-literate Turks never attend the mosque, according to the WVS polls, along with a quarter of 82 percent-literate Iranians (some recent news reports put mosque attendance in Iran even far lower)—and in both countries fertility is below replacement. By contrast, only a fifth of Egyptians never visit a mosque, and their fertility is correspondingly higher, at around 3 children per woman. And in illiterate Mali only 3 percent of respondents say they never to go a mosque—and the fertility rate jumps to 5.5 children per woman.

The Muslim world is trapped between two extremes. Some countries—notably Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt—have populations nearly half of which cannot read. Those populations retain the habits of the tribal world, including high fertility rates. But these countries can barely feed the illiterate half of their people, let alone employ them; and the persistence of extreme poverty and the threat of hunger keep them poised at the precipice of social instability. At the other extreme, countries that have achieved a high degree of literacy—Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria—are facing an even more devastating degree of social failure, in the form of deficient family formation and a dearth of children.

Modernity has attacked Muslim society in its most vulnerable organ—indeed, in the organ that was supposed to ensure Islamic triumph over the decadent West: the womb. But fragility does not make vulnerable Muslim countries less dangerous. On the contrary: whereas Europe tends toward pacifism because it knows it has nothing to gain from aggression, Iran tends toward belligerence because it knows it has nothing to lose.

Demographics and Desperation

Muslim leaders show more panic about their own demographic decline than the most despondent Western pessimist. The presidents of Iran and Turkey, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Tayyip Erdogan, both warn that their nations may be extinguished in a single generation. For the most part, the English-language media has ignored their warnings, but they permeate the Turkish- and Persian-language press and blogs. The sense of impending doom that pervades much of the Muslim world makes these countries dangerous and unstable. The real risk to world security is not the gradual triumph of Islam by demographic accretion, but an era of instability, social breakdown, and aggression impelled by despair.

“They want to eradicate the Turkish nation,” Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan averred in 2008. “That’s exactly what they want to do!” The “they” to whom Erdogan referred in his speech to a women’s audience in the provincial town of Usak means whoever is persuading Turkish women to stop bearing children. Turkey is in a demographic trap. Its birth rate has fallen, and its population is aging almost as fast as Iran’s. Speaking as a “worried brother” to his “dear sisters,” Erdogan implored his audience, “In order that our people may remain young, you should have at least three children.” No one listened. “Erdogan asked women to have three children, and demand for contraceptives went up,” sniffed a prominent Turkish academic. Behind the fertility data, Erdogan sees nothing less than a conspiracy to destroy Turkey. “If we continue the existing trend, 2038 will mark disaster for us,” he warned in May 2010.

Erdogan is right: the future of the Turkish nation is at risk. The demographic problem is not without remedies, but Erdogan’s Islamism may not have access to them. Turkish fertility today is already below replacement and converging on European levels. It shows the same pattern we have seen in Iran and across the Muslim world: educated and literate Turkish women are having one and sometimes two children, while illiterate women in Anatolia’s eastern back country are having four. For Turkey, that constitutes an existential threat. The most fecund group in Turkey is the Kurds, the restive fifth of the country who have been fighting for independence for decades. By the middle of this century, two-fifths of the total Turkish population and the majority of military-age men likely will be Kurdish.

Iran’s Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, warns that national extinction will be the result of his country’s collapsing birth rate. On September 10, 2010, the Iranian president declared during a meeting with officials in Alborz province, “‘Two children’ is a formula for the extinction of a nation, not the survival of a nation.... The most recent data showing that there are only 18 children for every 10 Iranian couples should raise an alarm among the present generation.... This is what is wrong with the West. Negative population growth will cause the extinction of our identity and culture. The fact that we have accepted this places us on the wrong path. To want to consume more rather than having children is an act of genocide.”³ The Persian-language website Javan Online quoted President Ahmadinejad and also cited sociologist Majid Abhari, warning of a “tidal wave of elderly” due to “decreased fertility” coming in the next few decades, leading to “workforce reduction and higher social insurance and medical costs due to an overwhelmingly elderly population.”

The Iranian Train Wreck:
Projected Population by Age Bracket, 2010 vs. 2050

Source: United Nations Population Division (Constant Fertility)

The factors reducing fertility, Javan pointed out, include “increased education for women, increasing employment of women, improved health care and family planning, higher marriage age, more frequent divorce, changing view of family in the global culture, the changing family structure, and urbanization.” The consequences of low fertility will include “a reduced labor force, an elderly population, a reduction of the country’s international strength, a gradual deterioration of culture and community identity, migration of qualified personnel due to lack of opportunity, and psychological problems for only children.”

In November 2010 President Ahmadinejad demanded that Iranian girls marry at the age of sixteen and produce more children. As he told the government newspaper Jam-e Jam, “We should take the age of marriage for boys to 20 and for girls to about 16 and 17.”⁴ For years, Ahmadinejad has denounced Iran’s falling birth rate as a Western conspiracy...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• PART ONE - THE DECLINE OF THE EAST
• PART TWO - THEOPOLITICS
• PART THREE - WHY IT WON’T BE A POST-AMERICAN WORLD
• Acknowledgments
• NOTES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page