Falling Human Fertility and the Future of the Family
By Philip Longman*
* Philip Longman, Ph.D., is author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as remarks to the World Congress of Families IV in Warsaw, Poland, in May 2007.
We can approach a very important demographic concept by way of Cavett’s Iron Law of Population. Formulated many years ago by a man named Dick Cavett, Cavett’s Law articulates a basic truth: “If your parent’s never had any children, chances are you won’t either.”
Dick Cavett, obviously, was a comedian. But his observation is not just funny. It’s also importantly true. Because, as a careful analysis will demonstrate, the ongoing global decline in human birthrates is the single force that will most affect the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st century.
Some might regard that prediction as implausible. After all, most of us just take it for granted that there will always be more and more people in the world.
We see it in our day-to-day lives. Every year, traffic gets worse. Every year, the price of waterfront property gets more prohibitive. If we turn on the television, we see images of Third World famine, war, and environmental degradation. And we see a pattern of population growth in the official numbers (see graph: “World Population Growth”).
Today, world population is increasing by some 76 million annually. That’s equivalent to adding a whole new country the size of Egypt every year. In my parents’ lifetime, world population has tripled. Just during the 50 years since I was born, world population has more than doubled.
We have grown up—and continue to live in—an era of explosive world population growth. And for most of us, this phenomenon deeply informs our world views and expectations for the future.
But now, here’s a curious fact—the first of many essential to understanding our current demographic circumstance—world population is still growing, but the world supply of children is shrinking.
The claim that global population is growing while the number of children is declining may strain credulity. But it’s true. This paradoxical trend started in Europe in the middle of the last century. Today there are 36 percent fewer children under age 5 in Europe than there were in 1960. In Poland, the number of young children declined by a full 50 percent during this period.
Now that same trend is going global. For the world as a whole, the absolute number of children aged 0 to 4 is actually six million lower today than it was in 1990.
How can this be? Where have all the children gone?
To be sure, war, hunger, and disease still carry away millions of the world’s children. In parts of Africa, as many as 20 children die for every 100 that are born.
But as horrible as this reality is, it’s not the explanation for the shrinking supply of children. Child and infant mortality are generally improving throughout the world, often dramatically. What has changed is something much bigger and newer and stranger.
It’s happening in rich countries. It’s happening in poor countries. It’s happening in Catholic countries; it’s happening in Protestant countries. It’s happening in Muslim countries, both Shia and Sunni. It’s happening throughout the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere, North and South. It’s happening under all forms of government.
And just what is this big, universal trend? More and more people are choosing to have only one child—or none at all. Birthrates are plummeting around the world.
Recent data indicate that among the major industrialized countries, only the United States still comes close to producing enough children to replace its population. (See chart: “Fertility in Developed Countries”.) In modern societies such as the United States, Japan, and Italy, the average woman must give birth to an average of 2.1 children in order to avoid long-term population loss.
Why 2.1? To maintain a stable population, each woman needs to have one child to replace herself. Then she has to have another child to replace her male partner. Since some children die before reaching reproductive age, an additional one-tenth of a child is needed on average in modern countries to replace the population.
And yet there are fewer and fewer places left on earth where women still have as many as 2.1 children. From Argentina to Austria, from China to the Czech Republic, sub-replacement fertility rates are now spreading to every corner of the globe.
True, the total fertility rate runs above 2.1 births per woman through most African countries. But the AIDS epidemic in Africa and the high infant-mortality rates found through much of sub-Saharan Africa means that many of the countries in this region are actually experiencing below-replacement fertility levels. South Africa, for example, with a total fertility rate of just 2.24 children per woman, is surely at below replacement level, given its high rates of child mortality.
Where is fertility falling the fastest? Just where most people think it is growing the most: that is, in the Middle East. Consider, for instance, Iran’s little-noticed birth dearth. Who would know, from reading today’s headlines, that Iran’s total fertility rate fell below replacement level in 1999 and—according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Data Base—has since dropped to just over 1.6 lifetime births per Iranian woman, 22 percent below replacement level. Similarly, how many Americans know that Iran has been joined by four other countries in the region—Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, and Turkey—in the slide into sub-replacement fertility? (See chart: “Sub-Replacement Fertility North Africa and the Middle East.”)
Most countries in the Middle East, to be sure, still have birthrates above replacement levels, and the populations are still growing. But everywhere birthrates are falling, and the long-term trend is unmistakable. Even in Egypt, for instance, a country feeling the growing appeal of radical Islam, with its emphasis on patriarchy and pronatalism, total fertility has fallen from approximately seven lifetime births per Egyptian woman in the middle of the twentieth century to just three births in the early twenty-first century, with population scholars predicting a drop to sub-replacement fertility by mid century. (See graph: “Lifetime Births Per Woman in Egypt.”)
A similar picture emerges in United Nations’ demographic data for Pakistan during the same period, where total fertility has fallen from over six births per Pakistani woman in the 1950s to just three births in 2000, with demographers again anticipating a continued slide to just two births by mid-century.
The same pattern, often even more striking, is evident throughout most of Asia, as recent demographic data make clear. (See table: “Sub-Replacement Fertility in Asia.”)
In China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, birthrates have dropped so low that we see the emergence of so-called 4-2-1 societies: these are societies in which single child families are the norm, and each only child eventually becomes responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents.
Despite the images Americans see in the media of China’s teeming cities, its working-aged population is on course to begin shrinking within ten years. The big question for China is, Will it get rich before it grows old (as the West did), or will it grow old before it gets rich?
India is not yet on this list. As a whole, it still has an average fertility of about 2.5. But its southern provinces are already reproducing at well below replacement levels.
Sub-replacement fertility prevails in Eastern Europe as well. (See chart: “Sub-Replacement Fertility in Eastern Europe.”)
In a country such as the Czech Republic, fewer and fewer children have any siblings. If current trends continue, it will also be rare in another generation for anyone to have an aunt or an uncle. Similarly, nieces, nephews, and cousins are becoming endangered social species.
The retreat from childbearing is especially dramatic in the former Soviet Union. (See chart: “Sub-Replacement Fertility in the Former Soviet Union.”) As a consequence of its plummeting birthrates and its very high death rate, Russia has a population that is shrinking by some three-quarters of a million people a year.
What about the United States? Within North America today, we see much the same pattern that we see in the world as a whole. That is, fertility rates are falling, and falling especially fast among historically disadvantaged groups.
Indeed, recent fertility data reveal that the only major American ethnic or racial group that has experienced an increase in fertility since 1990 is non-Hispanic Whites, and that increase has been a mere one percent. (See chart: “Change in Total Fertility Rates for Major American Ethnic and Racial Groups, 1990-2002.”)
Families are also shrinking among our friends to the south. Indeed, the drop in the number of Mexican children is a national phenomenon without precedent in its speed and extent. The number of Mexican children below the age of four has fallen dramatically—by tens of thousands—just since 1995! (See graph: “Mexican Children, Age 0-4.”)
Informed observers see much the same picture elsewhere in the Americas. Today, the median age in Latin America and the Caribbean may be 10 years lower than it is in the U.S. But reliable UN projections indicate that the age gap will soon begin closing and will virtually disappear by mid-century. The gap will close particularly rapidly if—as seems quite possible—the UN’s “low variant” projection for the region’s future fertility rates proves more accurate than the “medium variant” projection. (See chart: “Shrinking Youth Supply to the South.”) Since youthful Latinos are those most likely to immigrate to the United States, rates of immigration from South to North America may well taper off in the decades ahead.
Nonspecialists may understandably wonder how the population can continue to grow in countries where fertility rates are well below replacement levels. This perplexity can be resolved by taking into account the high rates of population growth that occurred in the ’70s and ’80s. This population growth wasn’t the result of high birthrates, but of falling death rates, particularly for the children in the Third World. And today, that accomplishment leaves a large percentage of the population still in its prime reproductive years.
But the demographic momentum traceable to the Seventies-and-Eighties population surge is fast dwindling. In many countries, such as Italy and Spain, population momentum has already turned negative. That is to say, in these countries the decades-long decline in the number of women of childbearing has created aging societies certain to shrink in the years ahead. Today in Italy, there are only half as many women of childbearing age as there were in 1960. A country in which women of childbearing age are disappearing is a society headed toward long-term depopulation. After a certain point, even if the average woman starts having substantially more children than her mother did, the population will still fall.
The dynamics that push society toward depopulation create another curious feature of early 21st century demography—something mankind has never seen before. Never before has the world seen the global population continue to grow when almost all of that growth is among people who have already been born. Such a growth pattern defies traditional logic. But it’s quite real.
As already noted, the global number of small children is already falling. By 2050, according to one United Nation projection, there will be 248 million fewer children under age 5 in the world than there are today—even if birthrates rise in the developed world! But the population of elders will have swollen by nearly a billion. (See chart: “Total Fertility From Now On, Population Growth Comes From More Elders and Middle Aged People, Not From More Infants.”) Over the next half century, then, population growth will thus reflect the replacement of a smaller aging generation by a larger aging generation: that is, population growth will come from people who are already alive, not the birth of new babies—as paradoxical as that might seem.
How sure the trend?
But what is driving these trends, and how likely are they to continue? In developed countries, sheer economics largely accounts for the disappearance of children. In today’s advanced economies, many people are not even done with school before their fertility (or their partner’s) begins to decline.
Then there is the rising cost of raising children. In the U.S., the direct cost of raising a middle-class child born this year through age 18, according to government estimates, exceeds $200,000—not including the cost of college tuition. As women, as well as men, have gained new economic opportunities, the real cost of children in the form of foregone wages and compromised careers can often run much, much higher. Indeed in my book, The Empty Cradle, I calculate that, for a typical middle-class couple, the opportunity cost of raising a child just through age 18 can easily surpass $1 million—again, not including the cost of college tuition.
Meanwhile, although the world’s social security systems—and private pension plans—depend on the human capital created by childbearing parents, these systems create huge incentives to remain childless. We no longer must have children to find support in old age. Instead, we can rely on retirement benefits paid for by other people’s children.
Urbanization counts as another potent cultural development driving down fertility. As mega-cities have grown around the world, the percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas has grown from less than thirty percent in 1950 to over fifty percent in 2005. This trend shows no sign of abating. UN demographers anticipate that by 2030 fully sixty percent of the earth’s population will live in urban areas.
The widespread use of safe and effective contraception and abortion also pushes fertility lower. Today, among married or cohabiting women of reproductive age, slightly more than 50 percent are using modern contraceptive methods. Such levels of contraceptive use are found in rich and poor countries alike.
But a full understanding of current population patterns requires a careful look at the subjective—but perhaps more important—question of how sub-replacement fertility reflects certain cultural and religious values (“memes” in the vocabulary of Richard Dawkins). Scholars who have scrutinized polling data have limned a strong correlation between what we might call modern, individualistic, secular values on the one hand and low fertility on the other.
Survey sociologists have identified a number of value questions that separate those inclined to have large families from those inclined to minimize or altogether avoid parental responsibilities. For example, Do you distrust the army? Among Europeans, at least, those who say they do are far less likely to be married and have children, or ever to get married and have children, than those who do trust the military.
Do you think the most important goal in education is that of developing imagination and independence? Then according to polling data, there’s little chance you’ll have a large family.
Or again, are you not very proud of your nationality? Do you have little identification with the village or town you grew up in?
Do you find soft drugs acceptable? Homosexuality? Suicide and euthanasia? For whatever reason, people answering affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live in childless, cohabitating unions than those who answer negatively. (See table: “Anti-Natal Memes: Some values and attitudes associated with low fertility.”)
A variety of other modern attitudes also go hand-in-hand with low fertility. In Brazil, for example, birthrates have dropped, province by province, coincident with the introduction of television. Today, the more hours that a Brazilian woman spends watching television, the less likely she is to have a large family.
What’s on Brazilian television? Mostly domestically produced soap operas, called telenovelas. These soaps rarely address reproductive issues directly. Instead, they typically depict wealthy individuals living the high life in big cities.
The men are dashing, lustful, power hungry, and unattached. The women are lithesome, manipulative, independent, and in control of their own bodies. The few who have young children delegate their care to nannies.
The telenovelas thus reinforce a cultural message that is conveyed as well by many North American and European cultural exports: people with wealth and sophistication are people who have at most one or two children.
Implications
Sub-replacement fertility is a pervasive global reality. But what are the implications of that reality? Should we laugh or cry, be thankful or wary?
Space does not here permit full consideration of the implications of sub-replacement fertility. But one social consequence of current fertility trends does deserve attention.
This consequence comes to light when people ask a natural question: Won’t persistent, sub-replacement fertility lead to eventual extinction? If current trends continue, Europe’s population, for example, will just wither away. But sober analysis suggests that current trends will not continue indefinitely in Europe or the West in general, for a special reason.
In Asian countries such as Japan, nearly every one eventually marries and eventually has one child. In Europe, and the West in general, by contrast, there is far more diversity in reproductive behavior. In my generation of Americans, for example, nearly a fifth of us never had children, and another 17 percent had only one.
The high incidence of childless and single-child families in the West has one big implication many overlook. It means a very large proportion of what children are being born are being produced by a small subset of the current population. And who are the people who are still having large families today?
The stereotypical answer is poor people or dumb people or members of minority groups. But the more accurate answer is deeply religious people.
To be sure, religious fundamentalists of all varieties are themselves having fewer children than in the past. But whether they be Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Islamic or Christian fundamentalists, or evangelicals, devout members of all these Abrahamic religions have on average far larger families than do the secular elements within their society.
In Europe, for example, the fertility differential between believers and non-believers has recently been estimated at 15 to 20 percent. Though children born into religious families often do not become religious themselves, many do, especially if they themselves go on to have children.
But if, over several decades, many of the secular-minded choose not to have children, the faithful begin to inherit society by default. Total population may fall, perhaps for quite a while; but those who remain will be disproportionately committed to God and family.
Remember Cavitt’s law: If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t as well.
A corollary might be, If you forgot to have children, chances are your descendents won’t grow up to be secular humanists.
Remember, too, that other strong finding of sociology, which is also enshrined in European folklore: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
This is the way of the world.
The broad sweep of human history offers many examples of peoples, or classes of peoples, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, sub-replacement fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Like today’s modern, well-fed nations, both ancient Greece and Rome, for example, eventually found that their elites had lost interest in the often-dreary chores of family life. Here is the Greek historian, Polybius, around 140 B.C, lamenting the fate of his country as it gave way to Roman domination:
In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and general decay of population... This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life.
By the time of Caesar Augustus, birthrates among Roman nobles had fallen so low that the Emperor felt compelled to enact steep “bachelor taxes” and otherwise punish those who remained unwed and childless. Augustus explained in clear language his deep concern about the Roman rejection of parenthood:
We liberate slaves chiefly for the purpose of making out of them as many citizens as possible; we give our allies a share in the government that our numbers may increase: yet you, Romans of the original stock...are eager that your families and names at once shall perish with you.
Needless to say, such exhortations didn’t work. Divorce became rampant in Roman society; childlessness increasingly common. When cultural and economic conditions discourage parenthood, not even a dictator—and many have tried—can force people to go forth and multiply. Eventually, the sterile, secular noble families of Imperial Rome died off, and with them, their ancestors’ traditional Roman ideals.
But what was once the Roman Empire remained populated. Only the composition of the population changed. Nearly by default, it became comprised of new, highly patriarchal family units, hostile to the secular world and enjoined by faith either to go forth and multiply or join a monastery. Sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that nearly all the spread of Christianity in late antiquity was the result of higher birthrates, and lower death rates, enjoyed by Christians.
With these changes came a Medieval Europe, but not the end of Europe, nor the end of Western Civilization. But secularism and individual freedom went into a long decline. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is still very much with us.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Monday, August 13, 2007
Elitism
An excellent article From The Australian
Elitism should not be a dirty word
Peter Saunders | August 13, 2007
WHEN 19th century liberals such as John Stuart Mill made the case for extending individual liberties, they argued it on moral grounds. They believed human beings are put on Earth with talents and potentials which they are meant to develop and exploit to the full, so they urged us to improve ourselves by becoming better educated and more enlightened. To achieve this, they understood we needed to be free.
In the 19th century there were many restrictions on freedom that hindered people from fulfilling their potential. Some of the worst were enforced by law: women, for example, could not own property, had no vote and were legally subordinated to men. Mill and other liberals saw such laws as indefensible, and they fought to have them changed.
Other restrictions were derived from people's social or economic circumstances rather than from discriminatory legal rules. The children of the poor, for example, were often expected to work from an early age, which made it difficult to get a proper education. This limited their opportunities for self-improvement, so children of labourers often grew up tobecome labourers themselves, even if they had the talent to achieve greater things.
Recognising these problems, liberals came to understand that legal equality may not be enough to enable people to fulfil their potential. What is also needed is access to an adequate education and a basic level of material resources so individuals can put their talents to good effect.
Today, most of the restrictions that limited people's opportunities in the past have weakened or disappeared. Race and gender discrimination are both outlawed. A minimum of 10 years' free schooling is guaranteed to every child. The welfare state delivers a basic level of income security and health care to everybody. Competition for jobs is relatively open, and corruption is minimal. There are still inequalities, of course, but if you are bright and strongly motivated, there is little to stop you succeeding.
Yet something is still hindering many of us from developing and fully exploiting our potential. The problem is no longer that we lack opportunity, it is rather that fewer demands are being made of us.
The opportunities are in place but the expectations have been lowered, and because less is demanded, we settle for less and our lives are less fulfilled as a consequence.
In a democratic age, egalitarianism has been redefined as mediocrity. The belief that Jack is as good as his master used to be a liberating idea, encouraging people to strive to succeed no matter what their origins. But the belief that lazy, ignorant Jack watching television all day is as good as his neighbour working all hours to get qualified or build a business is not liberating, it is a recipe for envy, sloth and passivity.
This perverted version of egalitarianism holds that the world owes us a living even if we make no effort to better ourselves. It emphasises our rights but has nothing to say about our obligations. It makes excuses for bad behaviour and derides those who try to maintain high standards. It encourages envy of those who succeed and it treats failure not as a spur to try harder but as evidence of victimisation requiring compensation and special treatment.
Today's egalitarianism makes us reluctant to judge or evaluate people's actions, even when some are clearly better than others. Welfare agencies refuse to discriminate between responsible people who fall on hard times and claimants who bring about their own misfortune through reckless, short-sighted or self-destructive behaviour.
Teachers feel uncomfortable grading students' performances, and they push increasing numbers of low-ability students into university while denying the inevitable dilution in standards this entails.
Psychologists stay silent rather than acknowledge evidence on the deleterious effects of single parenting and the decline of marriage; criminologists prevaricate rather than condemn law-breakers; even theologians hedge on the existence of good and evil. As standards crash, the experts have gone into denial.
Nineteenth-century liberals urged us to improve ourselves, and many working-class people did just that, forming educational associations, creating mutual aid clubs, sending their children to Sunday school to learn about morality. But today's egalitarianism panders to the lowest standards rather than demanding the highest.
TV is a major culprit. Chasing a mass audience in an age of multiple channels has led inevitably to cheap and dumbed-down content: Paris Hilton's drug habit, Shane Warne's love life, an exposed penis on Big Brother.
Crude and vulgar language which was never heard on TV is now indulged with a wry smile. Meanwhile, youngsters exchange videos of fights and sexual assaults recorded on mobile phones, and hard-core pornography dominates the internet.
In the 19th century, Mill warned against weighing the opinions of ignorant people equally with those of the best-informed, for people who make no effort to accumulate wisdom should not expect the respect of their peers. But today, ignorance is prized.
We oblige ignorant people to vote, and we enlist them to serve on juries, kidding ourselves that their judgment is just as valuable as anyone's else's. Then we act surprised when it turns out voters have no idea what the parties stand for, and that jurors are clueless about the cases they hear (research on Sydney jurors last year found many did not even know what verdict they had just delivered).
Politicians talk down to us like children, assuming (rightly in many cases) that they can buy our votes with handouts rather than winning our support with arguments. And on TV, they try to act dumb. Before he got the Labor leadership, hacks speculated that Kevin Rudd was too clever to be elected, but larking around on Friday mornings with Mel and Kochie on Channel 7 helped him over that obstacle. On Channel 9 recently, Health Minister Tony Abbott ridiculed himself for using the phrase "supping with the devil" after he realised nobody else in the studio had heard the term before. The worst thing for a politician is to stand out from the mob and set a standard. American research finds that candidates in presidential debates are using increasingly simple, child-like language as the years unfold. The Gettysburg address cannot compete with a 10-second sound bite.
There is only one area of modern life where we still celebrate excellence, demand high standards, insist on the virtues of competition and devote ourselves to self-improvement, and that is sport. The home page of the Australian Institute of Sport unashamedly uses the word elite three times in its opening paragraph.
Search the websites of our leading universities and almost the only place you will find them claiming elite status is in relation to the sporting achievements of their athletes.
So we are happy to praise elitism in sport but not, it seems, in areas of life that arguably matter much more.
John Stuart Mill must be spinning in his grave.
Peter Saunders is the social research director at the Centre for Independent Studies. He will chair a CIS Big Ideas Forum, "In Praise of Elitism", at the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney today.
Elitism should not be a dirty word
Peter Saunders | August 13, 2007
WHEN 19th century liberals such as John Stuart Mill made the case for extending individual liberties, they argued it on moral grounds. They believed human beings are put on Earth with talents and potentials which they are meant to develop and exploit to the full, so they urged us to improve ourselves by becoming better educated and more enlightened. To achieve this, they understood we needed to be free.
In the 19th century there were many restrictions on freedom that hindered people from fulfilling their potential. Some of the worst were enforced by law: women, for example, could not own property, had no vote and were legally subordinated to men. Mill and other liberals saw such laws as indefensible, and they fought to have them changed.
Other restrictions were derived from people's social or economic circumstances rather than from discriminatory legal rules. The children of the poor, for example, were often expected to work from an early age, which made it difficult to get a proper education. This limited their opportunities for self-improvement, so children of labourers often grew up tobecome labourers themselves, even if they had the talent to achieve greater things.
Recognising these problems, liberals came to understand that legal equality may not be enough to enable people to fulfil their potential. What is also needed is access to an adequate education and a basic level of material resources so individuals can put their talents to good effect.
Today, most of the restrictions that limited people's opportunities in the past have weakened or disappeared. Race and gender discrimination are both outlawed. A minimum of 10 years' free schooling is guaranteed to every child. The welfare state delivers a basic level of income security and health care to everybody. Competition for jobs is relatively open, and corruption is minimal. There are still inequalities, of course, but if you are bright and strongly motivated, there is little to stop you succeeding.
Yet something is still hindering many of us from developing and fully exploiting our potential. The problem is no longer that we lack opportunity, it is rather that fewer demands are being made of us.
The opportunities are in place but the expectations have been lowered, and because less is demanded, we settle for less and our lives are less fulfilled as a consequence.
In a democratic age, egalitarianism has been redefined as mediocrity. The belief that Jack is as good as his master used to be a liberating idea, encouraging people to strive to succeed no matter what their origins. But the belief that lazy, ignorant Jack watching television all day is as good as his neighbour working all hours to get qualified or build a business is not liberating, it is a recipe for envy, sloth and passivity.
This perverted version of egalitarianism holds that the world owes us a living even if we make no effort to better ourselves. It emphasises our rights but has nothing to say about our obligations. It makes excuses for bad behaviour and derides those who try to maintain high standards. It encourages envy of those who succeed and it treats failure not as a spur to try harder but as evidence of victimisation requiring compensation and special treatment.
Today's egalitarianism makes us reluctant to judge or evaluate people's actions, even when some are clearly better than others. Welfare agencies refuse to discriminate between responsible people who fall on hard times and claimants who bring about their own misfortune through reckless, short-sighted or self-destructive behaviour.
Teachers feel uncomfortable grading students' performances, and they push increasing numbers of low-ability students into university while denying the inevitable dilution in standards this entails.
Psychologists stay silent rather than acknowledge evidence on the deleterious effects of single parenting and the decline of marriage; criminologists prevaricate rather than condemn law-breakers; even theologians hedge on the existence of good and evil. As standards crash, the experts have gone into denial.
Nineteenth-century liberals urged us to improve ourselves, and many working-class people did just that, forming educational associations, creating mutual aid clubs, sending their children to Sunday school to learn about morality. But today's egalitarianism panders to the lowest standards rather than demanding the highest.
TV is a major culprit. Chasing a mass audience in an age of multiple channels has led inevitably to cheap and dumbed-down content: Paris Hilton's drug habit, Shane Warne's love life, an exposed penis on Big Brother.
Crude and vulgar language which was never heard on TV is now indulged with a wry smile. Meanwhile, youngsters exchange videos of fights and sexual assaults recorded on mobile phones, and hard-core pornography dominates the internet.
In the 19th century, Mill warned against weighing the opinions of ignorant people equally with those of the best-informed, for people who make no effort to accumulate wisdom should not expect the respect of their peers. But today, ignorance is prized.
We oblige ignorant people to vote, and we enlist them to serve on juries, kidding ourselves that their judgment is just as valuable as anyone's else's. Then we act surprised when it turns out voters have no idea what the parties stand for, and that jurors are clueless about the cases they hear (research on Sydney jurors last year found many did not even know what verdict they had just delivered).
Politicians talk down to us like children, assuming (rightly in many cases) that they can buy our votes with handouts rather than winning our support with arguments. And on TV, they try to act dumb. Before he got the Labor leadership, hacks speculated that Kevin Rudd was too clever to be elected, but larking around on Friday mornings with Mel and Kochie on Channel 7 helped him over that obstacle. On Channel 9 recently, Health Minister Tony Abbott ridiculed himself for using the phrase "supping with the devil" after he realised nobody else in the studio had heard the term before. The worst thing for a politician is to stand out from the mob and set a standard. American research finds that candidates in presidential debates are using increasingly simple, child-like language as the years unfold. The Gettysburg address cannot compete with a 10-second sound bite.
There is only one area of modern life where we still celebrate excellence, demand high standards, insist on the virtues of competition and devote ourselves to self-improvement, and that is sport. The home page of the Australian Institute of Sport unashamedly uses the word elite three times in its opening paragraph.
Search the websites of our leading universities and almost the only place you will find them claiming elite status is in relation to the sporting achievements of their athletes.
So we are happy to praise elitism in sport but not, it seems, in areas of life that arguably matter much more.
John Stuart Mill must be spinning in his grave.
Peter Saunders is the social research director at the Centre for Independent Studies. He will chair a CIS Big Ideas Forum, "In Praise of Elitism", at the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney today.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Maybe the sun IS the problem?
Nigel Calder: Relax, it's only the sun
- February 20, 2007
WHEN politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change, which is due for publication in a few months' time.
They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains very likely as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90 per cent sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when John Cockcroft, Britain's top nuclear physicist, said he was 90 per cent certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion.
It turned out that he was wrong.
More positively, a 10 per cent uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latter-day Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea.
That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers.
And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter's billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages.
The early arrival of migratory birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adelie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8 per cent in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you're forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is "Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered.
Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor?
Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report. Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate.
The sun's brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds.
The sun's magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.
The only trouble with Svensmark's idea - apart from its being politically incorrect - was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation.
After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Centre hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water.
These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark's initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then.
The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it: A New Theory of Climate Change.
Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.
The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark's scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile, humility in face of nature's marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.
Nigel Calder is a former editor of the New Scientist. This is an extract from The Sunday Times in London.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Moral Pollution
The Church and the environment: address the moral pollution first
Recently in Rome, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Pontifical Household preacher, gave a commentary on the well known passage in Mark's Gospel (7:1-23) in which Jesus raises the question: what defiles a man?
He points out, what is often drawn out from this passage, that Christ is critical of those those who attach more weight to external gestures and rites than to the heart's dispositions, and who place more importance on "appearing" good rather than on being good. Here Christ surveys the depths of the human heart in his litany of the defilements that can issue from it.
However, Father Cantalamessa goes beyond this traditional interpretation adapting this passage to our times. He says the distortion Jesus criticised, of giving more importance to external cleanliness than purity of heart, is reproduced today on a worldwide scale, in a preoccupation with the physical defilement of nature while "there is almost absolute silence about interior and moral defilement" (see www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=3602).
Moral pollution
It is true that many are more preoccupied with the purity of their water than purity itself, with physical pollution of the air more than the moral pollution of their souls.
Father Cantalamessa brings home this point when he remarks, "We are indignant on seeing marine birds emerging from waters contaminated with petroleum stains, covered with tar and unable to fly, but we do not show the same concern for our children, vitiated and spent at an early age because of the mantle of wickedness that already extends to every aspect of life".
He refers here to children who actually made it out of their mothers' wombs, who are then subjected to moral pollutants as others look on. This is not to mention the many children who do not make it beyond the womb having been killed by toxins that fewer complain about.
In this concern for the environment at the expense of spirit there is a danger, Father Cantalamessa reminds us, of forgetting the ecology of the human heart. In our times it is strange to note the preoccupation on the part of Catholics with natural ecology at the expense of spiritual ecology.
Is this the new form of pharisaism of our era? Have the visible shapes of trees and lakes lulled us into a coma about the inner terrain of our souls? It is not just that the language of the spiritual has been reduced to the physical, with the earth referred to as "sacred" and "holy" while omitting the Creator who made it, and water described as literally "life giving" with no reference to the life of grace without which the soul cannot live.
No it is not just that. It is rather that the greenie cause has mapped out a new religion, what Cardinal Barragan called the "new paradigm" which holds that the highest good is not what the Catechism tells us, but is now to be found in "sustainable development" (Zenit, 11 February 2003).
This pharisaism can be seen in the statements of those who say that climate change, sustainability and survival of the physical earth are the most important issues of our era. These issues are central to the new global ethic promulgated by the Earth Charter - a master plan whose "final solution" involves the blurring of all religious boundaries and implementing a "green agenda", with population control and universal access to abortion at its core.
In this eco-religion the greatest sin is not to take care of the physical earth. The theological virtues are supplanted by the three ecological virtues: revering the earth, conserving water and signing the Kyoto Protocol.
In an age when Catholics are often under attack, eco-activism can give a sense of social relevance in a society that does not want to hear about those "troublesome other issues", e.g., abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia and that taboo topic buried under decades of silence, contraception.
In fact there is an ecological terrain which the greenie- theologians have never visited, a virgin territory where the marginalised exist, among them pro-life Catholics, where there are minimal footprints as so few come to visit.
"Cultural" Catholics
It is hardly ever visited by the "social" or "cultural" Catholics who attend baptisms, funerals and weddings, but who can run faster than Speedy Gonzalez whenever the 'A' word is raised, not to mention barbeque-destroying topics like post- abortion grief, the frozen orphan- ages of surplus IVF embryos and the new weapon of mass destruction RU-486.
One is certainly more socially popular if one sticks to externals, denounces climate change and advocates love of the visible environment than if one exhorts love for the invisible child threatened with abortion in the womb.
Perhaps the social sin in our age is indifference to the greatest ever ecological assault on the vulnerable: in the abortion holocaust, in the frozen orphanages (the ultimate "stolen generation" if ever there was one) and euthanasia. Perhaps our era prefers to tend the trees outside our Auschwitzs and not listen to the muted cries of people within the wall.
But says US Monsignor Reilly, founder of the Helpers of God's Precious Infants, of his silent prayer vigils outside abortion clinics, there is a time and place to "shine the spotlight" on the new Calvaries where the dying is occurring. As an example he cites the Blessed Virgin who did not weep at home or in a synagogue at the time Christ was crucified on Calvary but stood where he was dying till the end.
In highlighting environmental degradation at the expense of moral degradation, eco-activists forget that it is possible to love trees and not be a formal greenie, to be a Catholic and not support the Kyoto Protocol, to care for whales and the "web of life" and yes, also pray outside abortion clinics.
Spiritual ecology
There is a spiritual ecology at the heart of Catholicism much more profound than the physical boundaries of rivers, forests and ozone layers. This ecology begins in acknowledging the transcendence of God and the specific details of what He asks of us through his teaching Church.
It is in the pursuit of personal sanctity that the beginnings of environmental degradation will begin to be addressed. If God holds back rain and makes the innocent suffer because of our sin - as the Gospels unequivocally say He does - it is not the Kyoto Protocol that will reverse this but our recognition that sin is a reality.
Personal sin degrades the environment, the universe. Pope John Paul II's 1990 World Day of Peace statement, much neglected by eco-theologians, says as much: "When man turns his back on the Creator's plan he provokes a disorder which has inevitable repercussions on the rest of the created order".
We need spiritual geographers to remind us of this deeper ecology of the heart. We need to listen to the Elijas of the new millennium pointing out what inner degradation and soul pollutants do.
We need to hear with our inner ears what calls to prayer, fasting and purity mean. And we need to tune into the greatest universal "protocol" of all, the Eucharist, Christ-with-us, and remember that this is the basis of any cosmic "web of life", the ultimate in interconnectedness, the basis of all ecological conversions.
Wanda Skowronska is a registered psychologist living in Sydney.
Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 20 No 1 (February 2007), p. 10
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Common sense
Common sense wherefore art though!
Obituary
Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Mr Common Sense.
Mr Sense had been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as knowing when to come in out of the rain, why the early bird gets the worm and that life isn’t always fair. Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you earn) and reliable parenting strategies (adults, not kids, are in charge).
His health began to rapidly deteriorate when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a six-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.
Mr Sense declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer aspirin to a student; but could not inform the parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.
Finally, Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.
Common Sense finally gave up the ghost after a woman failed to realise that a steaming cup of coffee was hot, she spilled a bit in her lap, and was awarded a huge settlement.
Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust, his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason. Not many attended his funeral because so few realised he was gone.
Anonymous
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Europe and eurabia
Interesting article from Australia's biweekly magazine Newsweekly
Since the early 1970s, EU officials and bureaucrats have been seeking to merge Europe with the Islamic world through massive Muslim immigration, writes Bernard Moran.
The central mystery of resurgent Islam in Europe is: how did so many Muslims actually get there in the first place? This question excludes the Turkish guest workers in Germany from the 1950s and the Algerians in France; it is about the many hundreds of thousands of more recent arrivals forming enclaves throughout Europe and Scandinavia.
All has been revealed in the 2005 publication of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by a previously obscure Egyptian-born Jewish researcher, Bat Ye'or. Married to English historian David Littman, Bat Ye'or (Hebrew for "daughter of the Nile") now lives in a village in Switzerland.
Her research and documentation are considered unimpeachable. She describes the progress of the secretive 32-year Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), a joint initiative of the European Union (EU) and Arab governments. The meetings involving the EU political and bureaucratic elite and their Arab counterparts were closed, unpublished and, in Ye'or's words, "shielded from scrutiny and democratic control".
Both sides of the "Dialogue" agreed that the future of Europe and the Middle East lay in the fusion of a new geopolitical entity they termed "Eurabia". Mass Muslim emigration was therefore officially encouraged and funded by the EU through the ideology of "multiculturalism".
On the European side, there was the promise of security of oil supplies and privileged access to the vast Arab market for technology, products and professional expertise.
The European participants were mainly secularists and had little understanding of Islam, particularly the doctrines of Jihad, Sharia law and "dhimmitude" - the status of submission required of non-Muslims living in Islamic territory.
Their Arab counterparts viewed the EAD as providing myriad economic and technological benefits to their respective regions. As Muslims, it also provided the diplomatic weight of the EU political establishment in support of the Arab League agenda on Israel and Palestine, unprecedented opportunities for mass immigration, future demographic and political supremacy, thus achieving the long-term goal of bringing Europe into the House of Islam.
Before covering the details of the European-Arab Dialogue, it would be helpful for readers to comprehend what are, until recently, little-known concepts of Islam. Bat Ye'or (now 70) is a pioneer researcher on dhimmitude. Her three major books translated from French are: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: 7th–20th Century (1996), and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002).
In a presentation at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris (June 11, 2001), Bat Ye'or outlined the theory of jihad which regulates the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims on a global scale, codified and institutionalised by the eighth century. "This (jihadist) ideology impregnates current thinking and conduct," she said.
She quotes the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi, speaking in 1997 on Islamic law, as dividing mainly the People of the Book - Jews and Christians - into three categories:
• non-Muslims in the lands of war.
• non-Muslims in the lands of temporary truce.
• non-Muslims protected by Islamic law, that is to say, the dhimmis.
The inhabitants of the lands of war are to be fought because they oppose the introduction of Islamic (Allah's) law to their country. These infidels have no rights and their possessions and lives belong to any Muslim. Their very existence is considered illegal.
The infidels from a land of temporary truce are in a state of respite between two wars.
The dhimmis are those infidels who have ceded their land in exchange for protection. They have no rights beyond those specified and protected by Islamic law. This law is the source of all non-Muslim rights.
In the theological domain, Islamists believe (on the basis of numerous verses in the Koran), that Islam appeared at the beginning of Creation and therefore preceded Judaism and Christianity. Adam, Eve and Noah, were Muslims and professed Islam. Therefore mankind is Islamic and all children are born Muslim.
All the leading figures in the Bible - Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and the apostles - are prophets who were Muslims. The Jews and the Christians re-wrote a falsified Bible. They believe lies and teach their children lies.
It follows that, when offered the chance to accept the Truth - Islam - and they refuse, preferring to believe falsehoods, then as infidels they deserve death or slavery.
Another legitimate means of waging jihad is taqiyya (pronounced "tark-e-ya"), which is essentially "spin", employed to confuse and split the enemy. Taqiyya is the deployment of subterfuge to dissemble and camouflage one's real thinking and purpose, in the service of advancing Islam.
Bat Ye'or provides a detailed chronicle of the process beginning in May 1945 when Charles de Gaulle, embittered about France's exclusion from the Yalta negotiations, rescued the notorious former Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin, from appearing at the Nuremberg Trials as a war criminal. The Mufti had spent most of the war in Berlin, but now he offered his influence in the Arab world, and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, to advance a new alliance with France.
Growing public knowledge of his Nazi past and war crimes forced the French to facilitate his escape from Paris to Egypt, where he maintained contact with the French Embassy, through to his settling in Lebanon in 1962.
Haj Amin's advocacy of a French-Arab alliance attracted powerful support in Gaullist and intellectual circles. They saw such an alliance with a Muslim federation extending through North Africa and the Middle East as restoring French prestige, impressing the Soviet Union and establishing a rival power bloc to the United States.
Bet Ye'or writes: "Two elements thus cemented the Franco-Arab alliance in the 1960s: French anti-Americanism fed by frustrated power ambitions, and a convergence of French Vichy anti-Semitism with the Arab desire to destroy Israel. From then on, America and Israel were inextricably linked in this policy."
The Euro-Arab Dialogue actually dates from a meeting between the French President Georges Pompidou and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt on November 26–27, 1973, which coincided with the summit of the Arab Conference in Algiers on November 28.
The conference issued a statement specifying their conditions for cooperating with the then European Economic Community (EEC): that Europe would defend Arab claims to Jerusalem and the "occupied territories" and recognise the autonomous Palestinian people.
The Arab Declaration of Algiers was followed by President Pompidou calling for an EEC summit in Copenhagen in December 1973. European heads of state and their civil servants examined the Middle East crisis and planned for cooperation between the Arab League and EEC countries.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMagazine.com (September 21, 2004), Bat Ye'or described how Eurabia as a geopolitical reality was synchronised as an association called the Europe-Arab Dialogue (EAD) in July 1974 in Paris. She said:
"A working body composed of committees, and always jointly presided by a European and an Arab delegate, planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the applications of the decisions.
"The field of Euro-Arab collaboration covered every domain: from economy and policy to immigration. In foreign policy, it backed anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and Israel's delegitimization; the promotion of the PLO and [Yasser] Arafat; a Euro-Arab associative diplomacy in international forums; and NGO collaboration.
"In domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media: television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centres, school textbooks, student and youth associations and tourism.
"Church inter-faith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations - a comprehensive symbiosis, with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture."
Bat Ye'or believes that France and the rest of Western Europe cannot change their policy anymore - their future is Eurabia.
"I don't see how they can reverse the movement they set in motion thirty years ago. Nor do Eurabians want to modify this policy. It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently though immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration.
"Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it."
"This is the source of the strong anti-American feeling in Europe and of the paranoiac obsession with Israel, two elements that form the cornerstone of Eurabia."
A 2003 poll conducted for the European Commission in the 15 EU countries, found that Europeans considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace - greater than Islamic terrorism or North Korea.
Mass Muslim immigration was planned at the University of Venice, in March 1977.
Under the auspices of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, there were four sessions under joint Euro-Arab chairmanship. Representatives from 14 universities in Arab countries joined 19 Arabists from European universities. The recommendations from the seminar on Arab inculturation served to end any critical public discourse about Islam and the Islamic world.
Also the recommendations on meeting the educational needs of Muslim immigrants were then approved by the foreign ministers of the European Community, the president, and their Arab counterparts on the EAD General Commission.
As Bat Ye'or notes, the EAD General Commission held closed sessions, with no public record of the proceedings. The decisions to encourage mass Muslim immigration were apparently agreed upon behind closed doors and could only be "deduced by the fact of their subsequent implementation".
At Alexandria in October, 2003, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission (in 2006 elected Prime Minister of Italy) announced the Proximity Policy which would place the Euro-Mediterranean partnership on an equal footing. The practical instrument would be the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation, enabling new policies and cultural and intellectual exchanges.
Prodi encouraged the advisory group to create a "friendly neighborhood policy" in which the EU would consider its "Mediterranean partners" on a par with the Eastern European countries that had entered the EU.
The ensuing report recommended that the new Eastern European member states could themselves become open lands for southern Muslim immigration. This influx would assist Arab states concerned about their rapid demographic growth.
The Muslim populations of Bulgaria, the Balkans, Turkey, and those of Turkish origin in Germany and Austria, could combine with Arab Muslims in bringing about the diversification of European Islam.
It was believed this new European Islamic culture would dispel the notion of a rampant Islamisation of Europe.
Proximity Policy
The Proximity Policy is intended to unfold, utilising existing EU-funded support structures for the increased teaching of Arabic and other measures to assist Muslims integrate into European society.
A crucial arm of the Proximity Policy is the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation which is intended to function as a cultural or social "change agent". The advisory group insists that no culture can claim any kind of superiority. The European and Mediterranean (PC term for Arabs) entities will together form "the cultural dimension of our unfolding history".
Bat Ye'or summarises the Foundation's design as "nothing less than complete Euro-Arab integration under its guidance, with control over European intellectual life and education".
She says: "This intercultural dialogue thus requires that the Europeans reinvent their identity and history in order to integrate the Southern Arab migrant populations."
The planners intend to effect social change at every educational and cultural level. "States will have to undertake a re-examination of schoolbooks dealing with the history of the region. Study centres and networks of scholars will assume the control of publications and the diffusion of knowledge of the history of the Euro-Mediterranean region. The Foundation will create an active network of artists and writers and the media: film, television and publishing will be a vital instrument of its policy."
Bat Ye'or reports that Euro-Mediterranean foreign ministers met in Dublin on May 5-6, 2004, and agreed on the creation of the Foundation under the title: the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, whose headquarters will be in Alexandria, Egypt.
Anna Lindh was the Swedish foreign minister stabbed to death by a deranged man in September, 2002. She was a strong supporter of Yasser Arafat, personally boycotted Israeli products and condemned President Bush's Middle East policy.
Since the early 1970s, EU officials and bureaucrats have been seeking to merge Europe with the Islamic world through massive Muslim immigration, writes Bernard Moran.
The central mystery of resurgent Islam in Europe is: how did so many Muslims actually get there in the first place? This question excludes the Turkish guest workers in Germany from the 1950s and the Algerians in France; it is about the many hundreds of thousands of more recent arrivals forming enclaves throughout Europe and Scandinavia.
All has been revealed in the 2005 publication of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by a previously obscure Egyptian-born Jewish researcher, Bat Ye'or. Married to English historian David Littman, Bat Ye'or (Hebrew for "daughter of the Nile") now lives in a village in Switzerland.
Her research and documentation are considered unimpeachable. She describes the progress of the secretive 32-year Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), a joint initiative of the European Union (EU) and Arab governments. The meetings involving the EU political and bureaucratic elite and their Arab counterparts were closed, unpublished and, in Ye'or's words, "shielded from scrutiny and democratic control".
Both sides of the "Dialogue" agreed that the future of Europe and the Middle East lay in the fusion of a new geopolitical entity they termed "Eurabia". Mass Muslim emigration was therefore officially encouraged and funded by the EU through the ideology of "multiculturalism".
On the European side, there was the promise of security of oil supplies and privileged access to the vast Arab market for technology, products and professional expertise.
The European participants were mainly secularists and had little understanding of Islam, particularly the doctrines of Jihad, Sharia law and "dhimmitude" - the status of submission required of non-Muslims living in Islamic territory.
Their Arab counterparts viewed the EAD as providing myriad economic and technological benefits to their respective regions. As Muslims, it also provided the diplomatic weight of the EU political establishment in support of the Arab League agenda on Israel and Palestine, unprecedented opportunities for mass immigration, future demographic and political supremacy, thus achieving the long-term goal of bringing Europe into the House of Islam.
Before covering the details of the European-Arab Dialogue, it would be helpful for readers to comprehend what are, until recently, little-known concepts of Islam. Bat Ye'or (now 70) is a pioneer researcher on dhimmitude. Her three major books translated from French are: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: 7th–20th Century (1996), and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002).
In a presentation at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris (June 11, 2001), Bat Ye'or outlined the theory of jihad which regulates the relations of Muslims with non-Muslims on a global scale, codified and institutionalised by the eighth century. "This (jihadist) ideology impregnates current thinking and conduct," she said.
She quotes the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi, speaking in 1997 on Islamic law, as dividing mainly the People of the Book - Jews and Christians - into three categories:
• non-Muslims in the lands of war.
• non-Muslims in the lands of temporary truce.
• non-Muslims protected by Islamic law, that is to say, the dhimmis.
The inhabitants of the lands of war are to be fought because they oppose the introduction of Islamic (Allah's) law to their country. These infidels have no rights and their possessions and lives belong to any Muslim. Their very existence is considered illegal.
The infidels from a land of temporary truce are in a state of respite between two wars.
The dhimmis are those infidels who have ceded their land in exchange for protection. They have no rights beyond those specified and protected by Islamic law. This law is the source of all non-Muslim rights.
In the theological domain, Islamists believe (on the basis of numerous verses in the Koran), that Islam appeared at the beginning of Creation and therefore preceded Judaism and Christianity. Adam, Eve and Noah, were Muslims and professed Islam. Therefore mankind is Islamic and all children are born Muslim.
All the leading figures in the Bible - Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jesus and the apostles - are prophets who were Muslims. The Jews and the Christians re-wrote a falsified Bible. They believe lies and teach their children lies.
It follows that, when offered the chance to accept the Truth - Islam - and they refuse, preferring to believe falsehoods, then as infidels they deserve death or slavery.
Another legitimate means of waging jihad is taqiyya (pronounced "tark-e-ya"), which is essentially "spin", employed to confuse and split the enemy. Taqiyya is the deployment of subterfuge to dissemble and camouflage one's real thinking and purpose, in the service of advancing Islam.
Bat Ye'or provides a detailed chronicle of the process beginning in May 1945 when Charles de Gaulle, embittered about France's exclusion from the Yalta negotiations, rescued the notorious former Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin, from appearing at the Nuremberg Trials as a war criminal. The Mufti had spent most of the war in Berlin, but now he offered his influence in the Arab world, and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, to advance a new alliance with France.
Growing public knowledge of his Nazi past and war crimes forced the French to facilitate his escape from Paris to Egypt, where he maintained contact with the French Embassy, through to his settling in Lebanon in 1962.
Haj Amin's advocacy of a French-Arab alliance attracted powerful support in Gaullist and intellectual circles. They saw such an alliance with a Muslim federation extending through North Africa and the Middle East as restoring French prestige, impressing the Soviet Union and establishing a rival power bloc to the United States.
Bet Ye'or writes: "Two elements thus cemented the Franco-Arab alliance in the 1960s: French anti-Americanism fed by frustrated power ambitions, and a convergence of French Vichy anti-Semitism with the Arab desire to destroy Israel. From then on, America and Israel were inextricably linked in this policy."
The Euro-Arab Dialogue actually dates from a meeting between the French President Georges Pompidou and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt on November 26–27, 1973, which coincided with the summit of the Arab Conference in Algiers on November 28.
The conference issued a statement specifying their conditions for cooperating with the then European Economic Community (EEC): that Europe would defend Arab claims to Jerusalem and the "occupied territories" and recognise the autonomous Palestinian people.
The Arab Declaration of Algiers was followed by President Pompidou calling for an EEC summit in Copenhagen in December 1973. European heads of state and their civil servants examined the Middle East crisis and planned for cooperation between the Arab League and EEC countries.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMagazine.com (September 21, 2004), Bat Ye'or described how Eurabia as a geopolitical reality was synchronised as an association called the Europe-Arab Dialogue (EAD) in July 1974 in Paris. She said:
"A working body composed of committees, and always jointly presided by a European and an Arab delegate, planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the applications of the decisions.
"The field of Euro-Arab collaboration covered every domain: from economy and policy to immigration. In foreign policy, it backed anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and Israel's delegitimization; the promotion of the PLO and [Yasser] Arafat; a Euro-Arab associative diplomacy in international forums; and NGO collaboration.
"In domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media: television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centres, school textbooks, student and youth associations and tourism.
"Church inter-faith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations - a comprehensive symbiosis, with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture."
Bat Ye'or believes that France and the rest of Western Europe cannot change their policy anymore - their future is Eurabia.
"I don't see how they can reverse the movement they set in motion thirty years ago. Nor do Eurabians want to modify this policy. It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently though immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration.
"Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it."
"This is the source of the strong anti-American feeling in Europe and of the paranoiac obsession with Israel, two elements that form the cornerstone of Eurabia."
A 2003 poll conducted for the European Commission in the 15 EU countries, found that Europeans considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace - greater than Islamic terrorism or North Korea.
Mass Muslim immigration was planned at the University of Venice, in March 1977.
Under the auspices of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, there were four sessions under joint Euro-Arab chairmanship. Representatives from 14 universities in Arab countries joined 19 Arabists from European universities. The recommendations from the seminar on Arab inculturation served to end any critical public discourse about Islam and the Islamic world.
Also the recommendations on meeting the educational needs of Muslim immigrants were then approved by the foreign ministers of the European Community, the president, and their Arab counterparts on the EAD General Commission.
As Bat Ye'or notes, the EAD General Commission held closed sessions, with no public record of the proceedings. The decisions to encourage mass Muslim immigration were apparently agreed upon behind closed doors and could only be "deduced by the fact of their subsequent implementation".
At Alexandria in October, 2003, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission (in 2006 elected Prime Minister of Italy) announced the Proximity Policy which would place the Euro-Mediterranean partnership on an equal footing. The practical instrument would be the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation, enabling new policies and cultural and intellectual exchanges.
Prodi encouraged the advisory group to create a "friendly neighborhood policy" in which the EU would consider its "Mediterranean partners" on a par with the Eastern European countries that had entered the EU.
The ensuing report recommended that the new Eastern European member states could themselves become open lands for southern Muslim immigration. This influx would assist Arab states concerned about their rapid demographic growth.
The Muslim populations of Bulgaria, the Balkans, Turkey, and those of Turkish origin in Germany and Austria, could combine with Arab Muslims in bringing about the diversification of European Islam.
It was believed this new European Islamic culture would dispel the notion of a rampant Islamisation of Europe.
Proximity Policy
The Proximity Policy is intended to unfold, utilising existing EU-funded support structures for the increased teaching of Arabic and other measures to assist Muslims integrate into European society.
A crucial arm of the Proximity Policy is the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation which is intended to function as a cultural or social "change agent". The advisory group insists that no culture can claim any kind of superiority. The European and Mediterranean (PC term for Arabs) entities will together form "the cultural dimension of our unfolding history".
Bat Ye'or summarises the Foundation's design as "nothing less than complete Euro-Arab integration under its guidance, with control over European intellectual life and education".
She says: "This intercultural dialogue thus requires that the Europeans reinvent their identity and history in order to integrate the Southern Arab migrant populations."
The planners intend to effect social change at every educational and cultural level. "States will have to undertake a re-examination of schoolbooks dealing with the history of the region. Study centres and networks of scholars will assume the control of publications and the diffusion of knowledge of the history of the Euro-Mediterranean region. The Foundation will create an active network of artists and writers and the media: film, television and publishing will be a vital instrument of its policy."
Bat Ye'or reports that Euro-Mediterranean foreign ministers met in Dublin on May 5-6, 2004, and agreed on the creation of the Foundation under the title: the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, whose headquarters will be in Alexandria, Egypt.
Anna Lindh was the Swedish foreign minister stabbed to death by a deranged man in September, 2002. She was a strong supporter of Yasser Arafat, personally boycotted Israeli products and condemned President Bush's Middle East policy.
- Bernard Moran is a New Zealand writer
Saturday, July 29, 2006
What future civilisation?
An excellent article in an Australian biweekly magazine - Newsweekly:-
Civilisations, like humans, are born, mature, decay and eventually die. Warning signs are clearly evident that Western civilisation today is in an advanced state of decay.
Is this decay terminal or reversible? Bill Muehlenberg takes Christians to task for their complacency in the face of such danger, and asks whether it may not be too late to save civilisation.
A lot of thought has gone into human mortality, and how we can prolong life. Less thought has gone into the question of why nations die. But nations, like people, do have a beginning, and do have an end. Thus it is worth looking at the questions of how and why nations collapse.
This article is not a scholarly examination of the subject, but more of a rough outline, sustained by a string of thoughts and quotations taken from those who have pondered these important questions. Historians, philosophers, theologians and others here contribute to the discussion.
Decline of nations
One common theme of those who have thought carefully about the decline of nations is that, often, it is the case that they collapse from within, instead of perishing from without. Thus Arnold Toynbee could rightly say, "Civilisations die from suicide, not murder."
Toynbee, a British historian (1889-1975), is most famous for his magisterial A Study of History, 1934-1961. In this 12-volume work, he examined the rise and fall of nations.
One of his more significant remarks is worth recalling: "Of the twenty-two civilisations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now." Given that this is now a dated comment, how much more true is it today?
Other historians have of course remarked on the suicidal tendencies of nations. Will Durant (1885-1981), an American historian, made this observation: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars."
Along with his wife Ariel, he penned the monumental 11-volume Story of Civilization (1935-1975). They also penned, among other works, the 1968 study, The Lessons of History. In both these works they noted the tendency of nations to wither from within.
Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), the English writer and historian, made a similar observation about the fate of democracies. He said that the average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith.
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.
(A letter from Lord Macaulay to an American friend, May 23, 1857).
The questions of course that arise are these: Where are we in this progression? How far along are we on the road to decay? Can we escape this fate?
It is not hard to pinpoint where we are on Macaulay's timeline. The examples of corruption, selfishness, apathy and decadence are all around. The easiest way to make this case is simply to open the daily newspaper. Recent newspaper headlines readily make the case. Consider just a few from the past several months:
• Paedophiles launch own political party (May 30, 2006)
Paedophiles in the Netherlands are registering a political party to press for lowering the legal age of sexual relations from 16 to 12 and to allow child pornography and bestiality. The party says it eventually wants to get rid of the age limit on sexual relations.
• Bibles banned (May 12, 2006)
Bibles are being banned in Australian hospitals and schools in order not to offend non-Christians.
• Gay school guide: Teachers' manual rejects "mum" and "dad" (June 4, 2006)
Victorian schools are being advised to dump the words "mother" and "father" by a new teachers' manual that promotes the cause of same-sex parents.
• PC penguins (April 16, 2006)
Sea World on the Queensland Gold Coast changed the names of "fairy penguins" to "little penguins" for fear of offending homosexuals (although the decision was later reversed).
Many more examples could be provided. But I think you get the point. These are all examples of a culture in deep decline. Or, as one American sociologist and Democratic Senator once put it, these are illustrations of "Defining Deviancy Down".
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) wrote an important essay by this title in 1993. In it he decried the moral collapse in the West, and the way we try to cope with it. He wrote: "The amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can 'afford to recognise' and that, accordingly, we have been redefining deviancy so as to accept much conduct previously stigmatised, and also quietly raising the 'normal' level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard."
He rightly noted that the saturation of evil is becoming so complete that the only way we can cope is to redefine it. Of course such attempts are not new. Twenty-five hundred years ago the prophet Isaiah could warn of similar calumny: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." (Isaiah 5:20).
There is a long answer which we cannot go into here. We could look at the Enlightenment and its impact. Or more recently, the counter-culture of the 1960s. But we can provide a short answer: The past century has been one grand social experiment to see what life is like when we reject God. (And the results are in!)
We have tried to live as if there is no God, and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
One modern prophet who shares this view is the former Russian gulag prisoner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He has written much on this theme. His assessment is simple yet profound: "It is because we have forgotten God. That is why all this is happening to us."
Our moral decline is directly connected to our rejection of God. Will Durant offered this insight: "There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."
Another important voice in this regard is T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The American-British poet and critic wrote an important volume in 1948 entitled, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. His thoughts are well worth recalling:
"If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it."
Exactly. Throw out God, and the work of civilisation becomes very difficult indeed. Again, Will Durant concurs: "From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day."
What is needed more than ever is a rebuilding of the foundations. As the Psalmist said so long ago, "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Psalm 11:3).
The job will not be easy, but it must be done. We need to preserve what is good, and resist those anarchic voices who would take it away from us.
A big part of this is to learn from history, and to avoid the problems we encounter there. As the Spanish philosopher George Santayana reminds us, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes."
But it is not enough just to recall the lessons of history. We must be willing to act, to take a stand, to make a difference. We cannot sit on the sidelines in a time of danger and threat. It was Dante in his Inferno who remarked: "The hottest level in hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in a moral crisis."
We must get involved. It is not enough just to talk about the problem, or to theorise about our current malaise. Karl Marx knew the importance of action: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
But I am just one person, you might protest. What difference can I make? The problems are just too big. But the anthropologist Margaret Mead would have us believe otherwise: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. ... Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Or as Edmund Burke has written: "Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
A radical Black Panther activist of the '60s, Eldridge Cleaver, perceptively said: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem." And a prophet of 2000 years ago put it this way: "You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world." (Jesus Christ, Matt. 5: 13).
So what can Christians do? Often people debate as to whether believers should seek personal revival or social reformation. The argument is often presented as if it is either/or. But may I suggest that it is both/and. The need of the hour is for Christians to both get their own act together, and to seek to be a light in a dark world, to be a preserving salt in a corrupt nation.
Indeed, the bottom line is this: Society is in a mess because the church is in a mess. And the church is in a mess because you and I are in a mess. We need to get back to our first love. We need to stop our trivial pursuits. We need to realise that we are here for a purpose, and the purpose of our existence does not revolve around ourselves, but around someone who gave his very life for all of us. We can do no less for him.
Reminder
Thus we need to get back to basics. And we need to seek forgiveness for losing the plot. As we were reminded so long ago: "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:14).
In the end, we must agree with Toynbee: "Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God."
The question is, how will we respond?
CULTURE WARS: Is it too late to save our civilisation?
by Bill MuehlenbergAniel (reviewer) |
Civilisations, like humans, are born, mature, decay and eventually die. Warning signs are clearly evident that Western civilisation today is in an advanced state of decay.
Is this decay terminal or reversible? Bill Muehlenberg takes Christians to task for their complacency in the face of such danger, and asks whether it may not be too late to save civilisation.
A lot of thought has gone into human mortality, and how we can prolong life. Less thought has gone into the question of why nations die. But nations, like people, do have a beginning, and do have an end. Thus it is worth looking at the questions of how and why nations collapse.
This article is not a scholarly examination of the subject, but more of a rough outline, sustained by a string of thoughts and quotations taken from those who have pondered these important questions. Historians, philosophers, theologians and others here contribute to the discussion.
Decline of nations
One common theme of those who have thought carefully about the decline of nations is that, often, it is the case that they collapse from within, instead of perishing from without. Thus Arnold Toynbee could rightly say, "Civilisations die from suicide, not murder."
Toynbee, a British historian (1889-1975), is most famous for his magisterial A Study of History, 1934-1961. In this 12-volume work, he examined the rise and fall of nations.
One of his more significant remarks is worth recalling: "Of the twenty-two civilisations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now." Given that this is now a dated comment, how much more true is it today?
Other historians have of course remarked on the suicidal tendencies of nations. Will Durant (1885-1981), an American historian, made this observation: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars."
Along with his wife Ariel, he penned the monumental 11-volume Story of Civilization (1935-1975). They also penned, among other works, the 1968 study, The Lessons of History. In both these works they noted the tendency of nations to wither from within.
Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), the English writer and historian, made a similar observation about the fate of democracies. He said that the average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith.
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.
(A letter from Lord Macaulay to an American friend, May 23, 1857).
The questions of course that arise are these: Where are we in this progression? How far along are we on the road to decay? Can we escape this fate?
It is not hard to pinpoint where we are on Macaulay's timeline. The examples of corruption, selfishness, apathy and decadence are all around. The easiest way to make this case is simply to open the daily newspaper. Recent newspaper headlines readily make the case. Consider just a few from the past several months:
• Paedophiles launch own political party (May 30, 2006)
Paedophiles in the Netherlands are registering a political party to press for lowering the legal age of sexual relations from 16 to 12 and to allow child pornography and bestiality. The party says it eventually wants to get rid of the age limit on sexual relations.
• Bibles banned (May 12, 2006)
Bibles are being banned in Australian hospitals and schools in order not to offend non-Christians.
• Gay school guide: Teachers' manual rejects "mum" and "dad" (June 4, 2006)
Victorian schools are being advised to dump the words "mother" and "father" by a new teachers' manual that promotes the cause of same-sex parents.
• PC penguins (April 16, 2006)
Sea World on the Queensland Gold Coast changed the names of "fairy penguins" to "little penguins" for fear of offending homosexuals (although the decision was later reversed).
Many more examples could be provided. But I think you get the point. These are all examples of a culture in deep decline. Or, as one American sociologist and Democratic Senator once put it, these are illustrations of "Defining Deviancy Down".
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) wrote an important essay by this title in 1993. In it he decried the moral collapse in the West, and the way we try to cope with it. He wrote: "The amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can 'afford to recognise' and that, accordingly, we have been redefining deviancy so as to accept much conduct previously stigmatised, and also quietly raising the 'normal' level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard."
He rightly noted that the saturation of evil is becoming so complete that the only way we can cope is to redefine it. Of course such attempts are not new. Twenty-five hundred years ago the prophet Isaiah could warn of similar calumny: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." (Isaiah 5:20).
There is a long answer which we cannot go into here. We could look at the Enlightenment and its impact. Or more recently, the counter-culture of the 1960s. But we can provide a short answer: The past century has been one grand social experiment to see what life is like when we reject God. (And the results are in!)
We have tried to live as if there is no God, and we are now reaping the whirlwind.
One modern prophet who shares this view is the former Russian gulag prisoner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He has written much on this theme. His assessment is simple yet profound: "It is because we have forgotten God. That is why all this is happening to us."
Our moral decline is directly connected to our rejection of God. Will Durant offered this insight: "There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."
Another important voice in this regard is T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The American-British poet and critic wrote an important volume in 1948 entitled, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. His thoughts are well worth recalling:
"If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it."
Exactly. Throw out God, and the work of civilisation becomes very difficult indeed. Again, Will Durant concurs: "From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day."
What is needed more than ever is a rebuilding of the foundations. As the Psalmist said so long ago, "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Psalm 11:3).
The job will not be easy, but it must be done. We need to preserve what is good, and resist those anarchic voices who would take it away from us.
A big part of this is to learn from history, and to avoid the problems we encounter there. As the Spanish philosopher George Santayana reminds us, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes."
But it is not enough just to recall the lessons of history. We must be willing to act, to take a stand, to make a difference. We cannot sit on the sidelines in a time of danger and threat. It was Dante in his Inferno who remarked: "The hottest level in hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in a moral crisis."
We must get involved. It is not enough just to talk about the problem, or to theorise about our current malaise. Karl Marx knew the importance of action: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."
But I am just one person, you might protest. What difference can I make? The problems are just too big. But the anthropologist Margaret Mead would have us believe otherwise: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. ... Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Or as Edmund Burke has written: "Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
A radical Black Panther activist of the '60s, Eldridge Cleaver, perceptively said: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem." And a prophet of 2000 years ago put it this way: "You are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world." (Jesus Christ, Matt. 5: 13).
So what can Christians do? Often people debate as to whether believers should seek personal revival or social reformation. The argument is often presented as if it is either/or. But may I suggest that it is both/and. The need of the hour is for Christians to both get their own act together, and to seek to be a light in a dark world, to be a preserving salt in a corrupt nation.
Indeed, the bottom line is this: Society is in a mess because the church is in a mess. And the church is in a mess because you and I are in a mess. We need to get back to our first love. We need to stop our trivial pursuits. We need to realise that we are here for a purpose, and the purpose of our existence does not revolve around ourselves, but around someone who gave his very life for all of us. We can do no less for him.
Reminder
Thus we need to get back to basics. And we need to seek forgiveness for losing the plot. As we were reminded so long ago: "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:14).
In the end, we must agree with Toynbee: "Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God."
The question is, how will we respond?
- Bill Muehlenberg is a lecturer in ethics and philosophy at several Melbourne theological colleges.
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