Quadrant Article Dec 2012

RELIGION

Reaping the Whirlwind

Philippa Martyr

On October 10, an inquiry into the extent of child abuse and its cover-up by the Catholic Church in Victoria opened with some startling figures. Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton (Victoria Police) told the inquiry that police now had complete figures on reported child sexual abuse cases linked with the Catholic Church since January 1956: 2110 offences against 519 victims, overwhelmingly perpetrated by Catholic priests and mostly against boys aged eleven or twelve. Not one of these crimes had been reported to the police by Church authorities.

Ashton also noted that certain Church authorities had engaged in a pattern of obstruction and concealment: alerting offenders to investigation, destroying evidence, hiding documents, seeking injunctions, moving offenders, and discouraging victims from reporting or seeking justice through the courts. Furthermore, he argued that this had not really changed, even though new protocols were introduced in 1996 to address these problems more rapidly and justly.[1]

Christopher Akehurst (Quadrant, October 2012) has written at length on what he perceives to be the negative impact of Vatican II on the Catholic Church in Australia and worldwide. Both this inquiry and his article—and the fact that this October marked the beginning of celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II—have given me much food for thought. On the whole I have a far more positive view of the Council and its impact than Akehurst. Yet I would not for one instant trivialise the abuse of minors by clerics and other people in positions of authority in the Catholic Church.

Rather, I want to do two things. First, I want to offer some thoughts on how this process of obstruction has been used by the same Church authorities to neutralise protest against other obvious abuses of liturgical practice and doctrine. Second, I want to show how this process—and the bad theological thinking behind it—began well before the Council, and how the rot that appears to have followed it actually predates it.

Sowing the wind

I have to speak from personal experience, as well as from the experience of those around me and known to me over the last two decades, and the story could be repeated hundreds of thousands of times over. I grew up in the immediate post-conciliar Church in Australia, where we had a good Catholic parish priest who in the mid-1970s was sent to attend a course in the United States. He came back some months later and proceeded to dismantle and remake the parish along the latest liturgical lines, including the customary “wreckovation” of the sanctuary to turn it into something rather like a Protestant worship space.[2] Hymns were replaced with songs, and we experimented with dialogue sermons and other fun and games.

My family watched in bewilderment and dismay, and then left the parish—only to find that the same changes were happening everywhere else. I also attended a Catholic girls’ school run by increasingly feminist nuns (star graduates include former West Australian premier Carmen Lawrence, Compass presenter Geraldine Doogue and self-deprecating comedian Judith Lucy). We started with liturgical dancing in the 1970s, and quickly branched out into female altar servers at Mass. Neither of these innovations was sanctioned by the documents of the Second Vatican Council, but there they were, nonetheless. What the school taught as religion also gradually became a mish-mash of good intentions, social justice and psychology, underpinned by a genuine devotion to reliable contraception.

What on earth was going on? A copy of the late Anne Roche Muggeridge’s book The Gates of Hell (1975) then made its way onto my family’s dining table, and our eyes were opened. Muggeridge was the first to document the destruction of Catholic education, liturgy and church interiors that took place in Canada in the name of something called the “spirit of Vatican II”, which bore no relation to the documents and promulgations of the same Council. Priests ran amok, nuns ran away, and bishops stood by with their hands over their eyes. It all sounded very, very familiar.

So we began the process of making formal complaints to relevant Church authorities about what was going on in our parishes and in my school. We were not the only ones complaining, but we were strongly encouraged to believe that this was the case—that we were the lunatic fringe, the odd-bods, the crazy ones. Everyone else was happy, so why weren’t we?

This can only go on for so long before the like-minded begin to organise. Newsletters appeared, mailing lists developed, and periodicals from fellow sufferers in the United States also began to flood in (such as Catholics United for the Faith’s Crisis magazine). In Melbourne, the courageous Brian and Maureen Schaefer put their livelihood into a small co-operative, the John XXIII Fellowship, which supplied excellent books from the newly-founded Ignatius Press and other small printing houses which were trying to salvage something from the ruins of diocesan-approved liturgical “experimentation”. The Schaefers also published Fidelity magazine, which proved a lifeline to isolated and marginalised victims of liturgical and doctrinal abuses across Australia and New Zealand.[3]

Yet at no time in those dark days of the 1970s and 1980s did anyone seem to have any luck complaining to their local bishop, or to the Papal Nuncio (the Pope’s official diplomatic representative in Australia). Those of us who compared notes always found the same responses: priests were informed by prelates that specific individuals had complained about them, and there would be personal attacks outside the church after Mass. Letters and dossiers of evidence went missing from diocesan offices, or never reached the bishop in question (I remember one story circulating in the 1990s about how a cleaner found a certain named Australian prelate’s waste-paper basket full of such letters.) Avant-gardeparish priests who could not face down local opposition were moved elsewhere, or were given teaching posts. Above all, we were encouraged to shut up and stop complaining. “Who are you,” I was told on one memorable occasion in Tasmania, “to argue with a priest with ten years’ theological training?”

The impact of these changes on Australia’s seminaries was significant. I didn’t know anyone who was undertaking formation at the time, but later the stories emerged—homosexual cliques, bad doctrine, alcoholism, pornography, and above all the deliberate exclusion of anyone who did not fall into line with the “new” liturgical and doctrinal ways. Those who managed to enter and stay were subjected to constant ridicule and isolation. Many left; many never entered at all. The massive decline in the number of priests has been shown since then, especially in the United States, to have been largely a product of artificial suppression rather than the much-vaunted “lack of vocations”—Michael Rose’s study Goodbye, Good Men (2002) crunched the numbers and provided a mass of anecdotal evidence from two generations of would-be seminarians.

In Australia the tide began to turn in the 1990s. In 1994, the Western Australian Law Reform Commission investigating the sterilisation of developmentally disabled young people received submissions from the L.J. Goody Bioethics Centre, Catholic Care for Intellectually Handicapped, the Catholic Community Care Commission and Bishop Robert Healy. These submissions were rumoured to be at odds with the Church’s publicly stated position, but it was difficult to prove this when copies could not be obtained either from these agencies or through Freedom of Information. Once copies were tracked down, concerned laity went through the (unsatisfactory) local channels, and then went directly to Rome, which forced an intervention and the submissions were withdrawn.[4]

Then in 1998 came the now-infamous ad limina visit to Rome, which bishops make every five years. One layman in particular, the late Paul Brazier, was tireless in collecting documentary evidence of liturgical and doctrinal abuses in the Australian Catholic Church. Brazier was a barrister who knew the value of due process, and was patient enough to allow for the fact that the Catholic Church’s administration moves in geological time.

It was Brazier who organised by-now angry and frustrated Catholics across Australia to collect and document liturgical and doctrinal abuses committed by priests (and endorsed by silent or evasive bishops). Brazier also ensured that these complaints were put in statutory declaration form and sent as a dossier to Rome, and put into the right hands rather than the waste-paper basket. The Australian bishops were sent home from their ad limina with a flea in the ear and a Statement of Conclusions which exposed their years of silencing and denial.[5] Brazier and his supporters were then accused of “spying”, and roundly denounced as “un-Australian”[6]—the ultimate insult from clergy who had to come to regard partisanship and the covering of each other’s backs as a doctrine in itself.

It is clear now in the light of Graham Ashton’s comments that the techniques used to silence those who complained about sexual abuse were identical to those used to silence those who complained about liturgical and doctrinal abuse. Both groups responded to their deliberate marginalisation in similar ways. They formed their own grassroots support networks, their own newsletters and their own dossier collections, and there was also some crossover between the two movements. Melbourne writer Margaret Joughin, who originally wrote for the Schaefers’ Fidelity magazine, later went to work for Broken Rites, the Australian support group for victims of clerical sexual abuse, and made the same link between the doctrinal abuse cover-up and the sexual abuse cover-up.[7]

The outcomes in both cases have also been the same. Angry, disenfranchised and ostracised Catholics have organised themselves and fought back, producing public relations disasters which could have been avoided by prompt, just and appropriate action when the complaints were first made. The Church authorities who failed to deal with these problems have only themselves to blame for these outcomes.

The problem of sexual abuse is not new in the Catholic Church; it is not new anywhere, but its neglect has historically been reprehensible. For centuries Catholics as individuals and groups have also been trying to do something about it, usually in the face of episcopal lassitude—if you want an eleventh-century version, try St Peter Damian’s Letter 31 on the subject.[8] According to the Sisters of St Joseph, complaints about a local priest abusing children were also the reason Bishop Laurence Shiel excommunicated the complainant, now St Mary MacKillop, in 1871.[9]

Irish Jansenists like Shiel had one way of dealing with things; Italians had another. An example which should make the Australian bishops glad that they only had statutory declarations to deal with is that of Pasquale Gagliardi (1859–1941), archbishop of Manfredonia on Italy’s south-eastern coast. A notoriously unchaste and corrupt prelate, his chancery office was swamped with complaints from his people: that he showed a preference for homosexual priests, refused to remove from his assignment a priest convicted of sodomy in two courts, and promoted another convicted homosexual priest. A third priest was promoted even though Gagliardi knew that he was guilty of “continual and habitual pederasty”.

Then one day in 1919, enough was enough, and in the town of Vieste where he was celebrating Mass, a riot broke out. An angry mob of some 600 people attacked the church and bashed the sixty-year-old Gagliardi until he was rescued by two priests and the police helped him to escape. The mob then pursued Gagliardi through the streets and recaptured him, and a group of women with knives stripped him and were preparing to castrate him when more police arrived and rescued Gagliardi again. He was bedridden for a month afterwards.[10]

Vatican II and all that

So what has all this to do with Vatican II? Christopher Akehurst has complained that the Council damaged the Church’s historical liturgy and introduced widespread disorder and chaos, and that Pope John XXIII was simply engaging in grandstanding without any clear plan or direction. I have no idea what was going on in the Pope’s head at the time of the Council or during it, but I am still grateful to him for calling it.

The reasons why are this. The sexual abuse crisis has shown us that the Church in Australia before the Council had serious problems. These reported abuse cases in Australia alone stretch back to 1956, two years before the accession of John XXIII and six years before the Council opened in 1962. There must also be decades of unreported cases before that. Similarly, the history of doctrinal and liturgical abuse stretches back to well beyond the Council, and again, like the sexual abuse, it was conducted privately and with no recourse by people whom their victims had every reason to trust.

From 1910 to 1967, clerics who held teaching positions in the Catholic Church had been obliged to take an oath against the heresy known as Modernism.[11] Whatever else you may think of the Catholic Church’s attitude to liberalism in economics or in social policy, there is no doubt that Modernism as a doctrinal influence was highly corrosive to its established body of teaching. As far as it can be seen, all these teachers took the oath, but many of them lied when they did so, and decided to dissent from Church teaching while keeping the collars, the sinecures and the respect that went with their office. Even Pope Pius X—who introduced the oath—is said to have concluded that he had not destroyed Modernism, but had simply driven it underground.[12]

The best proof that he was right is in the impact of the Council itself. John XXIII’s greatest gift to the Church—whether he intended it or not—was that he got these men to break cover. Every crypto-Modernist in the Catholic Church who had up till then been wearing the uniform and playing dumb could now emerge triumphant in the light, speaking openly and freely; publicly dissenting, challenging and thriving. It was the Catholic equivalent of the Hundred Flowers Movement, but without any purges immediately afterwards: such a huge tide of dissent could not have simply formed overnight.

It is common for critics of Vatican II to focus on the architects of the Novus Ordo, or “new” Mass which came into general use, particularly Annibale Bugnini (1912–82). But again, who were these men? There were ten clerics on the original Commission for Liturgical Reform, the youngest of whom was Bugnini (who was forty-eight in 1960) and the oldest of whom was Alfonso Carinci (1862–1963, who attended the first session of the Council, aged nearly one hundred). Bugnini et al were not young long-haired radicals when they put together their new Mass—they were well-established men in mid-career, and the products of the covert dissent and bad teaching that was already in place well before the Council.[13]

Akehurst is, however, right to focus on the liturgy, because it’s at the heart of Catholic practice. Yet bad liturgy was never an intention of the Council, and anyone who reads the Council documents will quickly discover this. I don’t believe the embarrassingly home-made liturgies of the 1970s onwards were the cause of the problem, but I do believe that they were a manifestation of bad doctrine and bad belief which was already present in the Church before the Council. Priests who truly understand and believe in the Mass don’t suddenly decide to improvise with card tables, brown lunch rolls and gran spumante. But priests whose bishops have sent them on courses presented by well-educated and well-spoken liturgical experts, and who have been exposed to what everyone else is doing, and who have been mocked for not going along with the other guys, soon learn how to do just that.

I want to advance the hypothesis that the Church in Australia fell into chaos after the Council not because of changes to the liturgy (as Akehurst argues), but because it was already rotten from the inside. It was not just the sexual abuse issue, although that was certainly there as well. Struggling as second-class citizens, Catholics were too eager to invest in bricks and mortar—schools, property, big building projects—and in doing so lost sight of the need to build up the spiritual body of Christ. There was too much factionalism and too much politics, and while it’s easy to understand why this happened, its consequences were to prove far-reaching.

I believe that the mass desertions of priests and nuns came in part from a similar warped formation. Priests and nuns with a strong faith and clear understanding of their vocation don’t just leave at the first sign of trouble—although I do acknowledge that in some cases it took years of attack before some finally left. But many embraced the changes enthusiastically, and perhaps this is proof that there were too many “social vocations”: families who wanted a priest son, or women who wanted to avoid the burdensome and troubled marriages they saw around them. Anyone who has read any Church history will recognise this sifting as a tragic but integral part of any major ecclesiastical shake-up, including the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent events described as the “Counter-Reformation”, which were in fact part of a process of genuine reform in the Catholic Church.

Reaping the whirlwind

So yes, there has been a lot of covering up, and it has taken years for justice to be done and for marginalised, scandalised and angry voices to be heard. For both child abuse victims and those who have fought against bad doctrine and liturgy, there have been painful casualties. Child and teenage abuse victims have left the Church or have committed suicide in despair. Liturgical victims have also endured years of ridicule, and some left to form schismatic groups like the Society of St Pius X, or have joined other Catholic rites where the liturgical tradition has not been altered. Some, like the Traditional Anglican Communion’s Archbishop John Hepworth, fall into both camps and have been doubly wounded.[14]

But there are blessings buried here. The exposure of the sexual abuse scandal both in the Church and in secular organisations has made ordinary people much more alert to it, and its victims less isolated and stigmatised. Doctrinal dissent in high places has also forced a lot of ordinary Catholics in Australia and elsewhere to learn their faith well enough to defend it against their parish priest, Catholic school principal or local bishop. Sadly, thousands chose not to, and decided instead that the new low-calorie Catholicism—child-proof, affluent and socially indistinguishable from mild agnosticism—suited them better.

Unfortunately we cannot use the strategy of holding a Vatican Council with an amnesty on child abuse to make more offenders break cover. What we can do, however, is start being honest about the relationship between bad doctrine and bad morality. Human beings are weak; we have the capacity to compartmentalise our lives so that we can preach strict morality for everyone else and yet not practise it ourselves. This is not restricted to the sexual realm, nor is this failing unique to the Catholic Church.

We can also be more honest about the fact that Catholic priests and bishops (and parish councils and liturgy committees and scary nuns on various quasi-authoritative bodies) tried—and continue to try—to silence, ostracise and marginalise good people who complained about the misrepresentation of Catholic belief and practice. This includes the Catholic media in Australia, notably diocesan-run Catholic newspapers and periodicals which have for the most part sung from the same post-conciliar song-sheet.

However, time is passing. The generation of Catholics who still believe Vatican II allowed a free-for-all is just beginning to die out. Many Australian bishops have now been removed from their dioceses and replaced with men who we all hope will be more vigilant shepherds. There is still an entrenched layer of people in flourishing diocesan bureaucracies who maintain the 1980s party line, but they are now reaching retiring age.

And what do we already have in place to succeed them? A more alert and better-informed laity, who will act swiftly to counter any hint of sexual abuse and who will not be put off by prevaricating, weak-willed or dissembling clergy. There has been a revival of the Latin form of the Mass in many parts of Australia, and while this may not be the ultimate solution, it certainly shows by its growing numbers of young attendees that it is meeting a genuine pastoral need. The homeschooling movement is combatting the failure of Australia’s Catholic schools to provide a Catholic education. The two children of low-calorie Catholics are easily outnumbered by the families of four, five, six and more, where parents have decided to give their children siblings to play with, rather than X-Boxes. The career nuns are fading away, their place taken by both old and new thriving religious communities with young and genuine vocations, many cloistered, and all wearing habits.

The downfall, implosion and destruction of the Catholic Church is always predicted to be just around the corner, and so far it has disappointed everyone except those who believe its founder’s promises. It will always have problems; it was promised that as well. The best cure for present pessimism, even when faced with grave scandal, is to read Church history: we have been here before, and somehow we survived, and we will do so again. This awful chapter in the history of the Church in Australia has left us much sadder, but also much wiser. Hopefully we will retain these lessons, even if it only ensures that we now listen to those who complain, and believe them.




[1] http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/awful-tally-of-abuse-opens-inquiry-20121019-27vqi.html#ixzz29j6wfKvx


[2] The classic study of this process is still R Michael McGrade [pseudonym of Rod Pead],Death of a Catholic parish: the Benalla experiment, Benalla, Vic, 1991. Michael Rose has more recently produced a guide to the restoration of such ‘renovations’, Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We Can Change Them Back Again, Forthright, 2001.


[3] Not to be confused with the American Catholic magazine of the same name, nor of the Society of St Pius X publication, also of the same name. This in itself speaks volumes about the confusion which has dominated the post-conciliar Church. The National Civic Council’s AD2000 magazine was by contrast a relative latecomer to the scene, beginning in 1988.


[4] The WA Law Reform Commission document can be accessed at http://www.lrc.justice.wa.gov.au/2publications/reports/P77-II-R.pdf—see the footnote on p 132.


[5] The full text of the Statement of Conclusions can be found at: http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1046


[6] Michael Baker, ‘Paul Brazier’, eulogy, reproduced in full at http://www.superflumina.org/brazier_tribute.html. Attacks have even continued after Brazier’s death—http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/catholic-website-lashes-barrister-paul-brazier/story-e6frg6nf-1226050118885—accessed 22 October 2012.


[7] Margaret Joughin, ‘The Catholic response to clerical corruption’, Christian Order, June-July 1996, http://www.christianorder.com/features/features_1996/features_june-july96_4.html—accessed 22 October 2012.


[8] Owen J Blum OFM (ed), The Letters of St Peter Damian, 31-60, The Fathers of the Church—Medieval Continuation series, CUA Press, 1994; Letter 31 is available for preview on Google Books.


[9] See for example http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/mackillop-punished-over-abuse-scandal-20100925-15qwu.html—accessed 22 October 2012.


[10] C Bernard Ruffin, Padre Pio: the true story, Our Sunday Visitor, 1991 (revised and expanded edition), pp 187-188.


[11] The text of the Oath can be found at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10moath.htm—accessed 22 October 2012.


[12] I cannot find a reliable source for this alleged statement, which is nonetheless frequently repeated in discussions of the Oath and its effectiveness.


[13] There are many and varied claims that Bugnini was also a secret Freeemason. My point is that he did not need to be a Freemason to do damage to the Church; his private track record of Modernist belief and practice was enough.


[14] There is ample material in the public domain on this issue, but there is a useful summary at http://brokenrites.alphalink.com.au/nletter/page267-archbishop-john-hepworth.html—accessed 22 October 2012.

ConfessionalSeal

The seal is sacrosanct

• BY:GREG CRAVEN 
• From:The Australian 
• November 19, 2012 12:00AM 

THERE are some ideas so bad they need to be killed quickly. Not just to protect those affected by them, but those pushing them.

Breaking the seal of the Catholic confessional is such an albatross. Pursue it, and Australia will carry a human rights cross through a constitutional minefield. The appeal is obvious. Why should a criminal priest unburden himself to his brethren without fear of disclosure?

The obvious fact that criminal clergy do not go to confession, and would not receive absolution unless they agreed to turn themselves in, is ignored. And if the seal is withdrawn, so will be the disclosures. But beyond this are immense constitutional and human rights problems.

First Section 116 of the Constitution bans the commonwealth from prohibiting the "free exercise of religion". Few outside the Catholic Church understand confession. The sacrament is central to being a Catholic. Catholics must confess, and priests must hear their confession in absolute secrecy. The priest acts as the ear of God. In other words, a priest cannot be a priest and a Catholic cannot be a Catholic without the sealed confessional.

So far, no law has ever been struck down as breaching Australia's constitutional freedom of religion. But a law smashing the confessional will be that law: a law prohibiting the exercise of a central belief of the world's largest religion. A good deal of sophistry has gone into denying this. One argument is that a law forcing confessional disclosures of child abuse would not be aimed at Catholics because it could be drafted "generally". Like a law outlawing large flightless birds is not aimed at emus. We do not employ judges that stupid.

The other argument is that freedom of religion must give way before the right against abuse. The High Court has in the past tolerated restraints on religion if aimed at some other legitimate objective.

But in pondering such questions, the court presumably will compare this extraordinary restriction on freedom of religion with other laws that do exempt people from reporting crimes.

For example, if priests must break the confessional, surely lawyers must report evidence strongly indicating their client has abused a child. But no one yet - rightly - has proposed abolishing legal professional privilege.

And if priests must disclose child abuse, surely they should disclose other monstrous crimes such as murder, rape and endemic corruption. And so should lawyers. And why should journalists dismissive of the confessional seal have a right to "protect their sources", even when they are criminals? Surely, freedom of religion and freedom of the press march together.

All these convenient inconsistencies will puzzle a High Court considering the legitimate object of a law dramatically limiting the freedom of a particular religion.

It will be assisted by other factors, such as international law, so favoured by many critics of the confessional in other contexts. It will know Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Australia is a signatory, guarantees a fundamental freedom of religion.

The court will note that in both the US and Canada, there is high judicial authority that cracking the seal of the confessional amounts to a basic breach of a constitutional right to religious freedom.

Most of all, judges will know that law or no law, priests will not betray their religion. Like Father Frank Brennan, they will be prepared to go to jail before violating their consciences. And judges will be required to send them there.

We even have had the bizarre suggestion that this prospect does not matter, because no one will actually know what passes in the confessional anyway. But if so, why have the law?

Moreover, everybody will know every bishop is instructing every priest to keep the seal. This constitutes the very public offence of incitement, if not conspiracy. How constitutionally confident can a government be of a law to jail bishops? How confident can a world be of such a country?

Of course, the states are not bound by the freedom of religion contained in Section 116, so they theoretically could make laws banning Catholics from being Catholics.

But Australia will still be in breach of its treaty obligations. It will still be a human rights spectacle. And the High Court will still have a sense of smell.

Perhaps we should concentrate on doing something that actually helps prevent child abuse.

Greg Craven is vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

RealityEconomics

ECONOMICS

When Bad Economics Takes Over

Peter Smith

Let me start by taking you to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, a well-heeled part of London, in November 1930. The drawing room is large and comfortable with numbers of armchairs and couches. An open fire roars in the hearth. Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova is reclining on a chaise longue. John Maynard Keynes, her husband, the celebrated academic, economist and government adviser, sits opposite. A number of friends are gathered around, among them Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Keynes’s former lover Duncan Grant. The economy is spiralling down. The Great Depression is under way. Keynes has just finished an essay on the “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”. He is holding forth.

You know, he says, we’ll be able to build enough capital so that within one hundred years what work there is to be done will have to be shared as widely as possible. “We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.” And, while looking around fondly at his friends: 

We shall honour those who can teach us to pluck the hour of the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, like the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

Well, delightful people have now only another eighteen years to wait before they can be like lilies, neither toiling nor spinning. That’s something to look forward to.

An even more bullish Keynes was evident in his seminal work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. In the wake of the Great Depression, and with the laggard US economy still struggling, he wrote that within a single generation it might be possible to make capital so abundant that the return on new investment would fall to zero. This, he thought, “may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of the objectionable features of capitalism”.

I have made none of this stuff up. Not to any extent that matters anyway. Keynes’s vision of future abundance is central to his economics. I will come back to it later.

Economics matters. Bad economics is not simply an academic wrong turn. Pestilent economists, the purveyors of bad economics, are not kept quarantined behind bars in laboratories or even locked up in universities. They are set free in the public service. They affect our lives. Big and bigger government, crippling debt, entrenched unemployment, soul-destroying dependency, and even insurrections, are all products of bad economics. So, what is this bad economics?

In a nutshell, bad economics relegates the role of prices in free markets (the very heart of economics) to a mere footnote and elevates buying things above saving, investing and making things. It is the antithesis of economics as it was thought about and taught by the giants of the past; from the time of Adam Smith onwards until the dawning of the economics dark ages in 1936, when Keynes set The General Theory on the world and, seemingly, at least partially lobotomised most of the economics profession at the same time.

Of course, bad economics pre-dated Keynes. John Stuart Mill railed against it in the second half of the nineteenth century. Roosevelt put it into practice, via the New Deal, four years ahead of Keynes. He managed to keep the US economy depressed long after other economies had recovered. For that he’s been lauded as a saviour by the Left and accorded sainthood by the Democratic Party and the New York Times.Just imagine if his policies had actually worked!

So, Keynes did not invent bad economics. But before Keynes, it had lurked furtively in the shadows, in the keeping of assorted cranks. Keynes gave it theoretical and academic respectability. He brought it out of the closet. His disciples codified it. Its influence became pervasive. In 1972 President Nixon said, “We are all Keynesians now.” The policy responses to the GFC bring the story bang up to date.

Where does that leave John Stuart Mill? He was an intellectual giant. His Principles of Political Economy was the defining economics text throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. He dismissed Keynesianism by other names; and easily won the debates of his day. If Keynes was right, we have to assume Mill was wrong.

Thankfully Mill was right. It would be a pity if his reputation were tarnished. To put it kindly, Keynes may have been a trifle crack-potted; albeit in a sophisticated, intelligent, famous and erudite way. You might say: how could crack-potted economics have defined economic policy since the Second World War? I don’t know the answer. I suspect that politicians and economists have gradually become less intelligent since the end of the nineteenth century, but I can’t prove that so I’ll leave it hanging.

Keynes’s main conclusion in The General Theory was that we needed to “socialise”investment—in other words, to put the size and direction of business investment in the hands of wise and morally-upright planners. We needed this, he thought, in order to keep the economy on an even keel and to keep demand up in a world of over-saving and approaching superabundance. Now this is crack-potted stuff; hard to swallow and unworkable—what exactly does it mean to “socialise” investment? End of story, you would think. The world moves on, as it did from his earlier works.

Enter John Hicks and other economists with a fondness for elegance and simplicity. From The General Theory they extracted a pared-down theory which, apart from some bells and whistles on the monetary side of things, tied the ups and downs of economic activity to spending. This became Keynesian economics. I read somewhere that it had to be explained to Keynes. Who knows? It’s a nice story. Keynesian economics has the distinct advantage of being beguilingly simple andcompletely suiting the predilection of governments. Let me take them in turn.

Keynesian economics is beguilingly simple. The economy, with all of its complexity, is reduced to just a few aggregates. The most important of these is aggregate demand. This is the total of intended expenditure on goods and services right across the economy—by households, by businesses, and, importantly, by government. You must have heard the term bandied about. Keynesian economists—that means most economists and all economists in the public service—swoon at its very mention.

Now it’s a matter of record that total expenditure and total production (GDP) are equal. Why is this? Well, ignoring foreign trade, anything bought must have been produced. By definition, from an after-the-fact accounting perspective, the more total expenditure there is, in other words, the more demand there is, the more production there is. The more production there is, the more employment there is. And, critically, in the Keynesian world, that’s the direction of causation—from demand to production to employment.

If the economy falls into recession in this world it can be rescued by increasing demand. This will increase production, and thereby employment. How do we increase demand? That’s easy. We increase government spending; because government spending is a component of aggregate demand. Voila! Problem solved. How beguilingly simple is that?

It suits government. Governments like to spend. Keynesian economics gives them a blank cheque in times of recession. They can let themselves go without the least restraint or feelings of guilt, shame or remorse. In fact, they become economic saviours. Photo opportunities abound as various stimulus projects around the country get under way.

Now the simple-minded will understand and see the sense in this Keynesian economics. This should tell you that it’s probably wrong. If this doesn’t tell you that it’s wrong I will up the ante. Commentators on the ABC, the BBC and NBC universally accept it as being right; as being settled economics science. What I’d like to do is to explain why it’s not right but wrong and yet why it survives. And to go on briefly to explore how it encourages and nourishes a broader economic, political and social culture which produces great harm.

I had an article in Quadrant in September 2010 titled, “Time to Topple Keynesian Economics”. It earned me a couple of minutes of fame. Well, it was briefly noticed in some obscure quarters. For example, I was interviewed by a chap with the unlikely name of Guy Razz, who runs a program called All Things Considered on National Public Radio. NPR is a nationally-syndicated left-wing radio station in the USA. It’s very popular in California, I understand. Anyway, deeply on the political Left, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and writer for the New York Times, was on the same segment. He got more time on air than I did. On reflection, I suppose that was fair enough. He is a Nobel Prize-winner. All the same, I talked sense; Krugman talked though his Nobel laureate hat. Mind you, that wasn’t the view of NPR listeners. They didn’t like me at all. Krugman, in contrast to me, was not only right but all heart. I was not only wrong but callously indifferent to the plight of the unemployed. Such is the conservative’s burden.

Krugman wanted the US government to spend another $800 billion or so; the same amount as the original stimulus. He was asked what it should be spent on. He answered that it didn’t matter so long as it were spent. In other words, he wanted another boost to aggregate demand. What particular demand he didn’t care, and he didn’t think it mattered. Why is this nonsense?

Consider how the economy works. Many thousands of businesses use their own savings or the savings of others to employ people. They pay these people to make products that they believe lots of other people will buy, and at a profitable price. When the economy is working well there is a close correspondence between the quantity of each product produced and the demand for it. Periodically things go wrong. This results in unsold stocks or in loss-making sales. Minor glitches happen all the time. They don’t matter. But, if the glitches are serious or systematic enough—like the gross over-building of houses in the USA in the decade leading up to the GFC—then they can have wide repercussions. They can lessen confidence across the whole economy. We have a recession.

As an aside, if you read accounts of the GFC you will find the silliest stuff in book after book. It was attributed to greed and incompetence among bankers; to derivative trading; and, of course, to the complete failure of capitalism. I once worked for a bank. Is anyone serious about greed and incompetence? We’d have a crisis every year if they were the cause. They had absolutely nothing to do with causing the GFC; nor did derivative trading; nor did capitalism. The meddling hands of politicians and government were all over it.

But, the GFC aside, we have to understand that market economies are dynamic and ever changing. Even without the misconceived meddling of politicians and governments, recessions occur. On balance, they are generally beneficial in the end; uncompetitive businesses are driven out, leaving room for the growth of new innovative businesses. Societies grow wealthier.

We also need to understand that once an economy is in recession it is trying to restore itself. Businesses closing down free resources for other uses. Relative prices, including wages, change to reflect changing conditions. Interest rates fall. Individuals and businesses reassess their expectations. They respond to movements in prices, wages and interest rates; to opportunities closing down and to others opening up. The clearer they begin to see the future, the more likely it is that confidence will return, and investment and growth resume. Historically, most recessions last no longer than a year.

Now overlay massive and temporary government stimulus spending on an adjusting economy—thousands of school halls, for example; roads, bicycle paths, public housing, bridges, pink batts. People and resources that would be guided by price and wage movements into productive ventures will be held occupied on wasteful stimulus projects. Businesses wanting to expand will face delays and higher building costs. Whatever the government temporarily spends money on will form no part of the array of products produced and bought in a recovered economy. The temporary influx of spending will have gone. It will have distorted market signals, kept interest rates up, and complicated recovery. This will not be evident. When economies recover, governments will claim credit for their spending policies. 

Until it was overtaken by an even greater scam, Keynesian economics easily outstripped the Piltdown Man as the greatest scam of the twentieth century. But being now only in second place should not blind us to the enormity of the Keynesian scam.

In July 2010, the US economy had lost 2.3 million jobs since the early 2009 stimulus spending on so-called “shovel-ready” jobs. The chair of the White House Council of Economic Affairs, Christina Romer (looking, to my mind, distinctly embarrassed) announced that, in fact, the stimulus had created or saved three million jobs. We were meant to believe that minus over two million jobs was reallyplus three million jobs. We were meant to believe the unbelievable; because we’re taken for fools. Even Goering only gave the Fuehrer licence to make two plus two equal five; not to make minus two into plus three!

Were the miraculous three million jobs actually counted? No. These jobs fell out of a model, which was built to give no other possible result. In this Keynesian econometric model—of the kind used in the USA as it is here—government spending on goods and services adds dollar for dollar to demand and therefore to GDP (and then plus some because part of each dollar spent is assumed to be spent again). And more GDP means more employment—in the model. It has as much to do with reality as does CGI in the movies.

Let’s be clear. It doesn’t matter what happens to the economy. It can grow as did the Australian economy after the GFC. It can decline as did the US economy. In both cases, the stimulus spending (of more or less the same size relatively speaking) was given credit for saving each economy. The patient gets well or relapses. It doesn’t matter. The leeches worked. The sickened patient would have died without them. It was only for the want of more leeches that the patient suffered. That’s the tall tale.

Just why would the dumping of large dollops of government expenditure on an adjusting economy help? It is treating the economy as though it were a giant amoeba. It pays no attention to the role of changes in relative prices in guiding the recovery process. It’s as though they don’t count. The world is a congealed one in which individual products and prices disappear. The sole objective is to boost aggregate demand as quickly as possible. And, as Paul Krugman told us, any old demand will do. If Krugman and Keynesians are right, then, presumably, it would have been sensible for the US government to spend money on having more houses built in 2009. It is patently and completely daft. 

Before Keynes, saving and well-directed investment and production were accorded primacy in generating economic activity. Keynesian economics gives primacy to indiscriminate spending. If you have seen the movie War of the Roses, you may recall Kathleen Turner’s character claiming ownership of their house because she’d chosen all of the furniture and furnishings to make it into a home. Michael Douglas, as her husband, takes a different view: “It’s easier to spend it than to make it, honeybun!” I don’t want to get into this domestic argument, but Douglas has a point. It’s not a point that seeps into the consciousness of Keynesian economists or into the consciousness of the great mass of people who’ve been taken in. Listen to it. Good news: consumer confidence has risen; people might start spending again.

Step back from it all. Australia can’t generate enough savings to support its capital investment. Banks and other companies source savings from overseas to make up the shortfall. And we think it is a good idea if consumers spend more and save less? It is ridiculous (unless of course you are Gerry Harvey). In the normal course, if some retailers, manufacturers and importers are in trouble, it’s because they’ve made wrong decisions. They need to reassess their business model or, perhaps, go out of business. There might well be a mismatch between some consumer goods produced and imported, and the demand for them. There is no shortage of aggregate demand. There is a mismatch. The market will sort it out; if the government doesn’t interfere too much and start bailing out selected companies, or putting obstacles in the way like onerous regulations, or imposing taxes of uncertain application and impact, like the carbon tax.

Making stuff that people want to buy makes us rich. Buying stuff is secondary. Once this is understood, saving is restored to the virtuous place it had in the scheme of things before Keynes came along. And we are on our way to understanding good economics.

To Keynes and his followers, saving is a vice. It lowers demand and therefore lowers production and employment. In fact, in the world in which we actually live, we don’t have to worry about people demanding too little. Our demands will never be satisfied. Poverty still abounds. And, poor or not, we are insatiable. New and more exciting products continually come to the marketplace and we want them. There were queues outside Apple stores to buy the new iPad. Who among us would have difficulty in spending another $10,000 a year?

Keynes’s view, which I began with, was that we’d soon be lolling around replete, with not enough to do. This is why he put demand at the centre of his economics and cast saving as the villain. Saving is not a villain. It’s a super-hero. Saving underpins capital investment. Capital investment makes us prosperous. Without saving there would be no capital investment. We would gradually become poorer and poorer.

Keynesian economics is macroeconomic folly. Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. It is also a common-sense-destroying virus which infects the whole body politic. It has been embraced by the Left because it appears to demonstrate that the market doesn’t work and that we need government to save us.

Keynesian economics downplays the role of individual prices, and saving, and making things. From there, it is a short step from a Keynesian world to a broader socialist one. Micawber is turned on his head. Happiness comes from spending more than you earn. Of course, it isn’t put that way. But the whole edifice undermines the old virtues of working hard, self-reliance and thrift, to say that we can collectively spend our way out of problems—not only out of recessions, but out of shortages of goodies like pensions and health care, and child minding, and dental care, that we can’t personally afford.

We enter a socialist world where there is a disconnection between making things and distributing them. These aren’t the socialists of old, nationalising industries. The experience of Eastern Europe has put paid to that brilliant idea. Their method now is more insidious. They white-ant away at self-reliance among businesses and individuals, until government becomes the sole and great benefactor. These born-again socialists, hiding behind the labels of “Progressives” or “Greens”, see food on the table which they want to share around. How the food was planted, grown, harvested, transported, cooked and served is, to them, incidental. This leads them to a loaves-and-fishes mentality; albeit stripped, as you might imagine, of any religious connotation. They act as though more can be shared than is collectively produced. They’re cargo cultists without the excuse of wearing bones through their noses.

In free-market capitalist economies (and who would want to live elsewhere—certainly not Michael Moore, who unfortunately shows no inclination to migrate to the Cuba he admires so much) production and reward are tied together. They are not discrete processes. Price movements encourage resources to move to where they are best rewarded. And where they are best rewarded is where they are most productive. Disconnecting productivity from reward eventually brings down capitalism. It is as simple as that. It also confounds economics. This is essentially why a socialist economist (even a Nobel Prize winner) is a contradiction in terms. 

It is a fact of life that some people are more productive than others; and that some are extremely productive, and are, therefore, extremely well rewarded and become wealthy. Socialists of any sort don’t like this at all. Through the fog that inhabits their minds, they cannot see the advantage of leaving all that wealth in the hands of the wealthy. It is unfair. They want it spread about and spent.

I heard part of a debate on Fox News in which one Democrat commentator complained that it was no use extending (the Bush) tax cuts to the rich because they would “pocket the proceeds” rather than spend them. What do you say to people who come out with this kind of thing? Their common sense has been almost entirely eaten away by bad economics. It’s not their fault entirely. Listen to Michael Moore talking to a union crowd and weep for his lost intelligence: 

America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and the consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber rich.

You may recall Senator Obama telling Joe the Plumber, back in 2008 when he was running for president, that it was a good thing to spread the wealth. President Obama has clearly doubled-down on that view. If you read Wayne Swan’s recent article in the Monthly you will see that he has exactly the same view. For example, he apparently believes that the benefits of the industrial revolution in Britain all went to the rich. With due respects to the Treasurer, it is hard to imagine anything quite as silly as that being written down. It is yet another example of the corrosive effect of bad economics on the human mind.

Don’t think this is just a different view. “Some people think like this; some people think like that.” No, these people don’t think rationally or logically at all; they only feel. Thinking would bring their whole worldview crashing down. They can’t afford to think too hard because that would mean having to take consequences into account.

Adam Smith was a thinker. He understood that what the rich do, which the poor don’t to any great extent, is to save. If monetary wealth were spread about, the recipients would spend it on consumer goods and baubles. There would be little saving and therefore little investment. We need rich people to keep hold of their financial wealth. They use it to invest directly in productive physical capital and in hiring labour or, to buy stocks and bonds, to support the investment of others in productive physical capital and in hiring labour.

Adam Smith was, of course, brighter and wiser than Moore, Obama or Swan. In itself that’s not surprising; what is surprising is the gulf. Spread financial wealth around all you want. It won’t add one physical thing that people can use. Spread enough of the billions around and it will cause rising prices of consumer goods. In turn, this will trigger a change in the way resources are used. Factories will be retooled to produce more cars and boats and houses and expensive clothes and jewellery for the populace at large. The physical capital stock will run down. Inflation and then poverty will ensue.

We need to encourage demonstrations and sit-ins and occupy public buildings and parks with people with placards saying: Thank you, rich people, for holding on to your wealth. Please don’t spend or give away too much of it; or, for short, Hooray for the one per cent!

In summary, bad economics has blighted public policy. It has replaced faith in individuals and in free markets with dependence on government. It has created a delusion of power over economic events. It has caused massive interference in market processes. It has led to utopian promises which can’t be fulfilled. It has led to the entitlement society, and to massive debt and economic and social misery. Over-striding it all have been pestilent economists, who have failed to properly understand the role of market prices in rationing demand and allocating resources; and who have given primacy to buying things rather than making things.

The only benign way out of the mess in Europe, in the United States, and eventually in Australia, is to renew faith in individuals and in capitalism. Nothing else will do. The option is to gradually morph into despotic socialist utopias. Does anybody of rational mind think that the answer lies in more government? The answer lies in getting rid of crony capitalism, getting rid of much of the red, and the green, and the indigenous tape, which is delaying and stopping business development; and getting rid of the subsidisation of grossly inefficient green energy.

It also lies in governments setting credible plans to move towards balancing their budgets. How quaint is that: governments living within their means; a modern-day socialist’s nightmare. This in turn will require governments to reduce, to means-test, and to ring-fence, unaffordable pensions, and welfare, and child minding, and health care entitlements; and to get people off the public payroll. There may be scope in all of this for conservatives to join with the industrial Left, to freeze out the destructive Greens, who would drive us all back to a more primitive and impoverished age. A simple rule for governments to follow is to make it as easy as possible for businesses to produce things that other businesses or people will be prepared to pay their hard-earned cash to buy. All economic policies should be measured against this “good economics” benchmark.

This is an edited version of a talk Peter Smith gave at a Quadrant dinner on August 15 to mark the publication of his book Bad Economics, published by Connor Court.

The Real Green Agenda

From Icecap website

Genocidal Green Quotes as Earth Day (Lenin’s birthday) approaches

Before you celebrate Earth Day, you should take a look at the facts about earth day and the real motivations. You see it is all about power, control and Maltusian philosophy that the earth has limited resources and too many people and that the world through some organizing force (farce) like the UN should remedy that.

In Eco Tyranny, meteorologist Brian Sussman (story below) writes that the environmentalist movement isn’t about protecting the environment at all, it’s about destroying private property, controlling behavior, and expanding government - and the Obama administration has a secret plan to further all of it.

As Earth Day 2012 occurs on Sunday, April 22, Alan Caruba offers a selection of quotes from leading figures in the environmental movement that are worth reading so that you can draw your own conclusions:

In a recent story penned here, I provided perspective on the movement and their real motivations.

David Evans, who consulted for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) 1999-2005 and 1998-2010, and was a believer in AGW until the evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself in 1998 to 2006, when he became a skeptic.

“The AGW scam involves a “regulating class” of believers, consisting of the UN, western governments, major banks and finance houses, NGOs and greenies, totalitarian leftists, government-funded scientists, academia, renewables corporations and the mainstream news media. Against them are the doubters: independently-funded scientists, private-sector middle class, and amateurs. The regulating class does not try to hide its belief that it is cleverer and morally superior. Their solution is regulation of the whole world�s economy by themselves, which was the object at the failed Copenhagen climate conference. On climate change, the regulating class has won over the leadership of most professional and business organizations by lobbying and pressure.”

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Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation

“The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation�’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

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Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, visited Australia in July 2011. In referring to the ideological orientations of those individuals and organisations who have significant financial and other vested interests in propagating the ‘Doctrine. of anthropogenic induced climate change, President Klaus said: “They want to change us, to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences, they want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. What is endangered is freedom, the climate is okay.”

After noting that today’s human-induced climate change alarmists are the ideological descendents of the zero and negative population growth advocates of the 1970s who erroneously forecast that human population pressures would lead to increases in global poverty and growing shortages in resources, President Klaus went on to add: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world - called communism - and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”

SEEN IN THEIR OWN WORDS:HERE Here are just a few examples:

> Maurice Strong, senior advisor to Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General who chaired the gigantic (40,000 participants) “U.N. Conference on Environment and Development� in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 , who was responsible for putting together the Kyoto Protocol with thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians, stated: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse....isn’t it our job to bring that about"]

>“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention...and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself....believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or...one invented for the purpose.” Quote by the Club of Rome.

> Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, seconded Strong’s statement: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

> Richard Benedick, a deputy assistant secretary of state who headed policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, stated: “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”

> “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” - Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

> “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” - Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University

> “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” - Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace”

> Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” - Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC

> “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” - Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment

> IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer in November 2010 admitted “one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth...”

> “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” - Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

> “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.” - Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

> “We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.” - David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

> “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” - Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

>“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” - Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

>“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide (we are now at 6.8 billion), destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” - Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

> “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.” - Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit (THE REASON FOR THE PUSH TO ALTERNATIVE GREEN ENERGY WHICH WOULD CAUSE COSTS TO SKYROCKET AND MAKE ITS USE UNAFFORDABLE).

> “Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.” - Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia

> “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” - Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

> “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” - Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

> “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.” - United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment

> “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” - Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor

> “… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.” - Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind

> “One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.” - Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier

> “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” - John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

> “The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.” - Christopher Manes, Earth First!

> “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” - David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club

> “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” - Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace

> “The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.” - emeritus professor Daniel Botkin

> “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis.” - David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager

> “Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global seal level rise of seven meters. That’s bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis.” - Greenpeace International (It has risen less than 7 inches in 100 years and is decelerating)

> “We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.” - Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

> “The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.” - Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens

> “A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.” - Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

> “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced - a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.” - UN Agenda 21

> “Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today�s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

> “In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.” - Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General

>“Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises.” - Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute

From quadrant April2012

Civilisation

How Civilisations Die

Mervyn F. Bendle

Is demography destiny? And does drastic demographic decline entail the death of civilisations? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes it does, and that the plummeting fertility rates in his country foretell the inevitable doom of his Muslim theocratic tyranny. “Negative population growth will cause the extinction of our identity and culture,” he rages. He views it as a self-inflicted “act of genocide” by the young women of Iran.

Demographic decline is, of course, a dread future that has confronted the West for some time. As Mark Steyn observes in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006), Europe faces the “Four Horsemen of the Eurocalypse”:

Death—the demise of European races too self-absorbed to breed; Famine—the end of the lavishly-funded statist good times; War—the decline into bloody civil unrest that these economic and demographic factors will bring; and Conquest—the re-colonization of Europe by Islam.

However, the Muslim world faces a similar demographic calamity, as David Goldman explains in How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too) (2011). In his view the approaching disaster will indeed engulf Europe and other developed economies but then, after some decades, it will also devastate the Muslim world. The key difference will be that Europe possesses considerable economic, cultural and institutional resources to draw upon to alleviate the impact; Islam, on the other hand, will not be so fortunate, and when the blow comes, in the latter half of this century, it will devastate what remains of that civilisation.

This calamity, Goldman argues, betrays a terminal malady, a debilitating cultural despair—a nihilism—that is rapidly corroding the finely knit cultural and social fabric that sustains all civilisations—although, as the parenthetical subtitle suggests, he doubts that contemporary Islam actually constitutes a coherent civilisation. (Indeed, the image of a coherent and benign “Islam” that we are presented with in the West is largely a confection of public relations firms, compliant politicians and media, and academics funded by copious amounts of petro-dollars.) Nevertheless, Islam confronts a catastrophe that may easily dwarf that facing Europe and other advanced societies.

The implications of this are profound. As Goldman observes about the decline of civilisations in general: “the death of a culture is an uncanny event, for it erases not only the future but also the past, that is, the hopes and fears, the sweat and sacrifice of countless generations whose lives no longer can be remembered”. Goldman believes that there is a civilisational tipping point, a moment when the spiritual and cultural resources of a people or a nation are exhausted or destroyed and it is no longer possible for them to attain or retain a sense of immortality through participation in a great chain of generations stretching from the past into the future. At this point some nations “fight to the death. Others cease to breed. Some do both.” Global politics over the next half-century will be determined largely by which countries choose which of these paths.

The nature and scale of the global demographic future are becoming ominously clear. As Goldman points out, on present trends, “in the second half of this century most of the great powers of the past—Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, and Japan, among others—will cease to function. A century later they will have ceased to exist.” In Western Europe, by 2100 the working-age population will have fallen by about 40 per cent, and in Eastern Europe, Russia, and East Asia by some 66 per cent. The least fertile European nations face a population decline of 40 to 60 per cent, with Germany’s population projected to decline by 98 per cent over the next 200 years if present trends continue.

Simultaneously, in all these countries the old-age dependency ratio (the ratio of people aged sixty-five and over to those of working age, fifteen to sixty-four years) will increase significantly, especially over the next few decades, placing huge burdens on the economic systems and social structures of these countries. Locked in a “demographic death spiral … Economies and tax revenues across Europe and East Asia will implode while pension and health care costs skyrocket”, according to Goldman.

Goldman doesn’t mention Australia, but our overall demographic profile is similar to Europe’s although our situation is nowhere near as grave. Our population is projected to grow to 36 million by 2056 and 45 million by 2101, on the most likely trends, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). On these trends, the proportion of people aged sixty-five years and over will increase from 13 per cent in 2007 to 23 per cent in 2056, while the working-age population will decline from 67 per cent in 2007 to 60 per cent in 2056. As a result, the old-age dependency ratio will increasing from 1:5 to more than 1:3, a challenging but manageable situation, certainly in comparison to Europe, and one largely managed by continuing high levels of immigration.

In comparison, Islam faces a catastrophe. In Goldman’s view:

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.

These and other Muslim countries presently have disproportionately large populations of teenagers and young adults, trapped in long-term unemployment and under-employment, or wasting their time at sub-standard universities that produce hundreds of thousands of unwanted graduates who are presently being radicalised in the “Arab Spring”. They are the progeny of previous generations where the average family had six or seven children, but will themselves have only one or two children on average. The result will be an eventual demographic “train wreck”, according to the scenario described by Goldman, as this huge cohort ages amid economic stagnation and political chaos and comes to depend on the next generation for support that will not be there.

For example, at present there is only one elderly dependant for every nine working-age Iranians—producing an old-age dependency ratio of 1:9; but in 2050 that ratio will be 7:10, meaning that the economic burden of the elderly on working-age Iranians will be over six times greater than at present. The Iranian economy is already in a parlous state, with a 50 per cent inflation rate, and the output from its declining oil reserves is projected to halve by 2050. And Iran is a benighted, corrupt, theocratic state that has resolutely turned its back on almost all aspects of modern culture, alienating a vast proportion of its population. Prospects are unremittingly bleak and people are acting accordingly in the one area of their lives where the state cannot (yet!) intrude. Unsurprisingly, in 2010 Ahmadinejad denounced the increasingly prevalent “two children per woman” attitude amongst Iranians as “a formula for the extinction” of Iran.

The Iranian leadership has only slowly become aware of the approaching demographic disaster. In 2006 Ahmadinejad had declared that Iranian girls should marry at the age of sixteen and commit themselves to producing the six or seven children necessary to avoid the looming depopulation of their country. The women of Iran responded by dropping the average fertility rate even further, to 1.7 in only four years. Moreover, the situation is worse amongst the dominant Persian population, which constitutes a slim majority in Iran and is confronted with eventual engulfment by a range of sizeable and more fecund minorities, including the increasingly restless Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluchis. Already, in the capital, Tehran, the rate is only 1.5, emphasising the extent to which urban women are recoiling from the grim future that is unfolding in Iran.

Ahmadinejad believes the drop in fertility in Iran is part of a Western plot to seduce Iranian women into a life of consumerism rather than reproduction, ignoring the fact that the decline started in 1980, immediately after the Islamic Revolution that brought the present regime to power. This conspiracy theory is shared by another Islamist national leader, Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey. “They want to eradicate the Turkish nation,” he declared in 2008, and called upon Turkish women to have at least three children each. The reaction was negative, and the demand for contraceptives apparently rose.

A similar situation confronts most of the Muslim world, which is shadowing the depopulation of the West but with about a half-century time-lag. As Goldman points out:

a good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life … The world’s population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the twenty-first century, by far the worst decline in human history.

While there has been recognition in the West that plummeting fertility will create enormous problems, especially in Europe where some countries have already passed the demographic point of no return, the fate facing the Muslim world is even bleaker.

Even though its population profile is presently much younger than the West, the fall in Muslim fertility rates is precipitant—indeed, it is “the fastest demographic decline ever registered in recorded history”, as Goldman notes. “World fertility has fallen by about two children per woman in the past half century [but] fertility in the Muslim world has fallen two or three times faster”, especially amongst Arab, Persian, Turkish, Malay and South Asian Muslims. For example, fertility in Iran has fallen phenomenally, by nearly six children per woman, closely followed by Turkey (by five), Egypt and Indonesia (four), and Pakistan (three).

But while the West probably possesses the economic resources and political infrastructure necessary to manage an unprecedented transition to smaller, older populations—albeit with considerable dislocation and turmoil—the Muslim world has nothing comparable. “As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before”, it is closing quickly on the ageing West so that “by the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe”, but with as little as one tenth of Europe’s economic capacity to deal with the problem.

The political implications of this situation are ominous: “the sense of impending doom that pervades much of the Muslim world makes these countries dangerous and unstable”. As far as militant Islamism is concerned, Goldman entertains no illusions. History shows that people entombed in a dying culture “live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war.” Consequently:

imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose … Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory … Radical Muslims will fight to the death

—in accordance with the frequent boast of the fanatical Islamist: “You love life, we love death”—an assertion that now seems only half right, and it’s the wrong half.

Obviously, this apocalyptic prospect has immense implications for legal and illegal immigration into Europe and elsewhere, particularly as the situation in Iran deteriorates and the violent and authoritarian nature of the forces contesting the “Arab Spring” become more obvious. Increasingly large masses of Muslims are gazing longingly across the Mediterranean at the affluent but vulnerable welfare states that beckon, and beginning what many see as the “re-colonisation” of Europe by Islam. Smaller but increasingly significant numbers are also casting a covetous gaze in the opposite direction, to the southern outposts of European civilisation in Australia and New Zealand.

The spectre of Eurabia, with the continent dominated by a Muslim majority by century’s end, has long haunted vigilant scholars and commentators, such as Bat Ye’or (Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, 2005); Tony Blankley (The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, 2005); Walter Laqueur, (The Last Days of Europe, 2007); and Christopher Caldwell (Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, 2009). According to these analyses, we are living through the self-extinction of the European civilisation that shaped the world we live in.

Caldwell points out that nearly 11 per cent of the European population was born overseas, most of whom are Muslims who are successfully resisting integration into their host societies. In Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), Niall Ferguson observed:

if the Muslim population of the UK were to continue growing at an annual rate of 6.7 per cent (as it did between 2004 and 2008), its share of the total UK population would rise from just under 4 percent in 2008 … to 28 per cent in 2040, finally passing 50 per cent in 2050.

Various other demographic projections indicate that the Muslim communities in Italy and Sweden will more than double over the next twenty years; France will be an Islamic republic by 2048; Muslims will form a majority in Holland by 2030; and Germany will follow suit shortly after that. The late Libyan President Gaddafi boasted in 2006 that “the 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades”.

The threat of Eurabia, it now seems, is much closer than this vision of a stealthy takeover implies, as the Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East slip further into crisis. In Goldman’s view:

we may not have the opportunity to observe at leisure how demographic trends in the Muslim world play out. The childless twenty-somethings of Islam’s Generation X do not have to wait another forty or fifty years until they face starvation upon retirement. They are hungry now.

Consequently, it is not a protracted process of demographic conquest that faces Europe in the near future but “inundation by Muslim refugees fleeing the chaos” unfolding in their homelands.

The 16 million people of Tunisia and Libya are already one source of increasingly desperate illegal immigrants as their nations disintegrate and fall under the domination of the Muslim Brotherhood or similar Islamist regimes. Egypt, however, has 82 million people and is also on the verge or political and economic collapse as the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups tighten their grip. As Goldman points out, this is a land where (according to World Health Organisation estimates) 97 per cent of married women have suffered genital mutilation, 40 per cent are functionally illiterate, and half the population lives on about $2 a day. It also has a dysfunctional political system, a corrupt military, a failing economy, a disappearing tourism industry, fleeing capital and shrinking foreign reserves, and needs to import half its wheat and other foodstuffs in volatile markets if its people are not to starve.

Unsurprisingly, Goldman foresees a catastrophe of “biblical proportions” unfolding in Egypt, sending a massive wave of refugees across the Mediterranean. “The simultaneous demographic decline of Europe and the adjacent Muslim countries may bring about mass starvation, political instability, and an unmanageable refugee crisis—and common ruin—before the end of the present century.”

How and why has this situation arisen? Demographers and other social scientists have identified a range of factors that help explain this historically unprecedented event, which is affecting most of the world. Chief amongst these are the profoundly transformative effects of modernisation on feudal, traditional and tribal societies, including urbanisation, industrialisation, education and literacy, greater female workforce participation, improved health care, family planning, higher ages at marriage, and more frequent divorce.

The ultimate demographic effect of these multiple factors was obscured by the moral panic generated around the spectre of “the population bomb” that became widespread in the latter half of the twentieth century. People focused only on the sudden growth of the global population. Various alarmists, such as Paul Ehrlich, insisted in the 1960s that this was out of control, demanded “zero population growth”, and ignored countervailing forces that are now becoming obvious. Indeed, according to Goldman’s analysis, the long-term demographic projections now reveal that the “bulge in world population” that excited Ehrlich and many others was “a one-off event in human history, not the harbinger of environmental doom”. It was an effect produced by the fact that death rates declined rapidly under the impact of modernisation, while birth rates fell much more gradually, causing “a blip in the statistics [that] is about to fade in the rearview mirror”. While global population is set to peak at about 8 billion around 2050 it will then decline precipitously by perhaps 2 billion over the following fifty years, leaving behind a smaller, much older global population, the effects of which will reverberate over the following century.

However, by themselves, Goldman insists, these factors fail to tell the whole story. To the processes of modernisation just noted must be added the profound impact of religion and secularisation, interacting in complex and previously misunderstood ways within societies. Secularisation, it appears, promotes infertility. As secularisation promotes and facilitates the supremacy of individual choice regarding reproduction within previously traditional societies it activates a “demographic contradiction—individualism leading to the choice not to reproduce—[that] may well be the agent that destroys” those societies, as the sociologist Eric Kaufmann suggests in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010).

This is not an argument against the liberalisation of tradition-bound societies or for the artificial preservation of obviously non-viable tribal communities. Rather, it is part of Goldman’s case that such liberalisation can have devastating demographic effects that can only be comprehended if adequate attention is given to the spiritual dimensions of human reproduction, and such attention has not been paid by most of the prominent commentators in the field. He believes that “secularism in all its forms fails to address the most fundamental human need”—the deeply embedded human desire to achieve some form of immortality for themselves and their loved ones. The world that secularism offers is a purely immanent world of the here-and-now, stripped of any sense of the transcendent or the eternal. It appears that people are increasingly choosing not to bring new life into such a world.

Religions, on the other hand, in their different ways, “offer the individual the means to transcend mortality, to survive the fragility of a mortal existence”. Life is experienced as a journey full of challenges, joys and disappointments, and new life is embraced as part of a shared voyage through various stages that ultimately stretch beyond this world. Goldman recognises that such claims will mean little to convinced secularists, and that communicating the existential force of religious faith to such persons would be akin to “describing being in love to someone who never has been in love”.

For example, traditional political science, Goldman points out, regards religion as just another belief system, an ideology like communism or fascism, and is therefore unable fully to comprehend the existential grip that the longing for some form of immortality has on human consciousness. Nonetheless, without a comprehension of the power of this spiritual force in human societies, Goldman believes it will be impossible to understand how entire societies can lose faith in the future, turn away from having children and choose instead to accept oblivion. For example, across a range of modern societies the lowest fertility rates in the industrial world are now found in the atheistic former Iron Curtain states of Eastern Europe, while the highest rates are registered in America and Israel, where religion continues to play a major role in people’s lives.

This is not because Americans in general have more children, but because Americans of faith continue to have many children and they constitute a much larger proportion of the overall American population than in any other society that has passed through the processes of modernisation. For example, Goldman cites a 2002 survey that showed that 59 per cent of Americans claimed that religion was important to them, compared to 11 per cent in France, 21 per cent in Germany, 27 per cent in Italy, and 36 per cent in Poland. Another showed that one in two American women of child-bearing age said that religion is “very important” to them, compared with less than one in six European women. Ultimately, religious adherents have more children than others, and far more Americans adhere to their faith than Europeans, Japanese or Russians, among others, including Australia.

Islam is not immune to this process of waxing secularity and waning religiosity. Contrary to the impression confected in the West, Islam is not at all a monolithic edifice of the faithful. Indeed, fundamentalism, with its frenzied re-assertion of archaic religious dogmas, has been only the most recent ideology adopted over the past century as Muslims search for a viable perspective on the processes of modernisation that are engulfing their traditional social structures. In Goldman’s view:

demographic winter arises from a crisis of faith, in the West as well as the Islamic world. In many respects the demographic tailspin of Muslim countries repeats a well-studied pattern in the West: as traditional society gives way to modernity, faith and fertility vanish together.

Consequently, the so-called “Islamic Reformation” being promoted by Tariq Ramadan, other Islamist ideologues, and Western academics, with its alleged return to traditional Muslim faithfulness, is being exposed as a mirage by the actual behaviour of the masses of young Muslims of child-bearing age: “the vast majority of educated young Muslims are alienated from the traditional Islamic culture of previous generations and rebel quietly against the Islamists’ attempt to re-impose it by force. They have voted with their wombs”, Goldman observes.

According to this analysis, the recent recrudescence of medieval Muslim fundamentalism is a desperate and increasingly hysterical response to the demographic threat, obscuring the spiritual collapse of contemporary Islam that is actually under way. The violent aggression of Islamist and Salafist groups, their fanatical self-assertiveness, their primitive attitudes towards women, and their xenophobic behaviour towards all other faiths and cultures have conjured up a “facade of religious authority [that] seems unbroken in most of the Muslim world”, when in fact, “behind the facade … the deterioration of traditional society hollows out religious faith”.

Therefore, despite Iran’s pretensions to being an observant Islamic theocracy, surveys indicate that there are lower rates of mosque attendance there than in any other Muslim country except Turkey, which has been a militantly secular state for most of the past ninety years. Only around 2 per cent of Iranian adults regularly attend Friday prayers. Meanwhile, as Goldman points out, “under the facade of radical Islam, Iran suffers from an eruption of social pathologies such as drug addiction and prostitution on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West”. There may be as many as 5 million hard-drug users, while in Tehran alone there are some 300,000 prostitutes, and this figure doesn’t include women engaging regularly in “temporary marriages”, which conveniently last from five to twenty-four hours and are legally sanctioned by Shi’ite Islam. There is also a flourishing international trade in Iranian women, who find themselves being trafficked to the Gulf States, Europe and Japan. “It appears that Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay,” Goldman points out. The Islamo-fascist facade serves to hide a disintegrating civil society.

Civil society is a central concept in Goldman’s analysis, as it is within this realm that family life unfolds and is sustained. It is also a realm whose historical vibrancy characterises Western societies, while its absence or rudimentary level of development is a central feature of Muslim societies. Here he derives insights from St Augustine in The City of God, which, he emphasises, was written as the Roman empire collapsed through demographic decline, and the author awaited the rampaging barbarians that would soon lay waste to his civilisation. Goldman contrasts Augustine’s recognition of the role of civil society with the focus on the state by the Roman philosopher Cicero: Augustine “looked through the state to the underlying civil society, and understood civil society as a congregation—a body bound together by common loves, as opposed to Cicero’s state founded only on common interests”.

It is the strength and vibrancy of civil society, bound together at the most intimate personal levels, that ensure the continuity of a civilisation, and not the exercise of power by the state in the pursuit of its own interests, whatever they might be and however much it may claim to rule on behalf of the people. A theocracy such as that of Iran, despite its pretensions to be implementing traditional religious values, actually operates like any other totalitarian or statist regime, destroying civil society by its domineering presence in the life of the people, and suppressing, suffocating and dissipating the very social and cultural dynamism that any civilisation depends upon if it is going to survive and flourish. (An excellent description of how this process destroyed civil society under the highly intrusive rule of the Soviet communist state is contained in Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, 2007.)

Goldman’s analysis leads to what he calls a position of “Augustinian realism” in foreign policy, which focuses on those societies that both preserve civil society and nurture within it the values that resonate within American civil society. The calculation here is simple: the principle that “civil society precedes the character of a nation [means that while America] can ally with, cajole, or even crush other states … it cannot change the character of their civil society”, and consequently it is a chimerical pursuit to attempt to do so by military intervention or massive amounts of foreign aid.

It follows therefore that America should not waste its time seeking to democratically transform intrinsically ruinous states, but should focus instead on pursuing and nurturing alliances with “people who are linked to [American] civil society—our mother country England, for example, as well as the Christians in the global South”, including Australia. This approach also entails a continuing alliance with Israel, which, along with America, possesses both a dynamic civil society and a substantial fertility rate—indeed it exceeds that of America a time at a time when the Israeli people face a continuing and escalating threat to their very existence.

Australia is in a unique position in this scenario. As a Western society we possess not only a dynamic civil society like that of America but also share similar political, economic, cultural and social institutions and values. On the other hand, Australia is a far more secular society than America (and indeed much of its political, cultural and academic elites are militantly secularist), and it exhibits some of the demographic dynamics that will lead soon to the perhaps terminal decline of Europe. These tendencies have been partially offset by a sustained program of immigration from many parts of the world, but we are also in close proximity to populous Muslim countries and are vulnerable to uncontrolled and illegal immigration from that region. This could easily undermine the success of our immigration program, especially if separatist Muslim ghettoes and “no-go areas” are tolerated, as they have been in Europe and especially in Britain.

According to standard ABS projections, Australia’s population will increase to between 31 million and 43 million by mid-century, depending on assumptions relating to fertility rates, life expectancy and net immigration. In the second half of the century the types of dynamics highlighted by Goldman increasingly take effect and the projections diverge, varying between 34 million and 64 million people. The lower projections are those preferred by much of the Labor Party, the Greens, the environmental movement, and urban and academic elites who are obsessed with “sustainability” and apparently comfortable with an Australia sparsely populated by an aged, enfeebled and increasingly vulnerable population sustained by a failing welfare state, and facing a world in demographic crisis and economic and political turmoil.

The alternative is to embrace very high levels of population growth and the economic dynamism that goes with it. Quite apart from the resources boom and the need to upgrade Australia’s infrastructure on a national scale, there are also major opportunities for development in northern Australia, capitalising on its vast fertile lands and the gigantic rainfall that the region enjoys but which remains largely unharvested, for consumption, irrigation, and diversion into the Murray-Darling system, and for other purposes including hydro-electricity. Visions of Australia serving as the “food bowl of Asia” have a great deal to commend them, especially while the world passes through the demographic catastrophe that appears certain to occur later this century.

It is a point not made by Goldman, but Australia shares with America one other vital characteristic—both nations have been frontier societies, surging ahead over the past two centuries with economic and social development on a continental scale. For generations both countries have been able to attract settlers and immigrants who have built their lives in our respective societies through determination and perseverance, and a desire to hand something on to their children.

This frontier ethos and nation-building spirit—“the Australian Legend”—remains a dynamic force in our country and explains the ease with which our society remains cohesive despite the fact that some 24 per cent of its population is overseas-born (a far greater proportion than any other country, and twice that of Europe, which is imploding as we have seen). Now, perhaps more than ever, it is the time to re-activate, re-embrace and promote that spirit, as we confront the colossal challenges that the demographic revolution of the twenty-first century will place before us.

Dr Mervyn F. Bendle is Senior Lecturer, History and Communication, at James Cook University.