ClydeR
10-29-2010, 01:09 PM
There's good news and bad news. The good news is that Christian fundamentalists are having children in higher numbers than liberals. The bad news is that a lot of Muslims are moving to the West, including the United States, and having lots of kids.
Kaufmann’s thesis is seductively simple: the barbarians are copulating at the gates. For years, his book tells us, people have assumed that as societies develop, as public institutions become secular and the culture liberal, religion would effectively dry up. Secularisation was seen almost as a sort of destiny. And from falling rates of church attendance in the West to the gradual loss even of a belief in God, plenty of stats and surveys seem to back such a picture up. But the problem is that a liberal democracy, encouraging people to pursue their own lives as they see fit, seeking ‘this-worldly’ pleasure as Kaufmann puts it, also places too few demands on the individual to pursue the greater good. And one of the side effects of slack, comfortable lives is that people in liberal democracies are having fewer children. After all, in a ‘me first’ culture, there’s little reason to have three children.
More... (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9107/)
Globally, secular societies are in demographic retreat. In 1950, Europe alone had two-and-a-half times the population of Africa. By 2050, Kaufmann predicts Africa will have four times Europe’s population. Which is not surprising given that just 11 per cent of the world’s under-15s currently live in Europe (including Russia) and North America. In non-Muslim Asia (China, Vietnam, and southern India), populations are likewise aging as fertility rates decline. But in Sub-Saharan Africa and much of the Muslim world, fertility rates are rising. This is not a simple fact for Kaufmann, it’s a source of terror: ‘Demography is a coiled spring’, he trembles, ‘whose explosive potential is only just being released’.
That is how Kaufmann presents population data. It is not a bald quantitative fact; it is a qualitative force. Just as the Ancient Greeks gave way to the prosaic Romans, and in turn the Romans gave way to German barbarians, or the ‘lettered Byzantines’ lost out to the Turks and Mongols, so Western liberals look set to be overwhelmed by fundamentalist hordes. And the reason: there’s more of Them. Tellingly, not to mention worryingly, Kaufmann repeatedly mentions the numerical basis of military force in this regard.
Kaufmann’s thesis is seductively simple: the barbarians are copulating at the gates. For years, his book tells us, people have assumed that as societies develop, as public institutions become secular and the culture liberal, religion would effectively dry up. Secularisation was seen almost as a sort of destiny. And from falling rates of church attendance in the West to the gradual loss even of a belief in God, plenty of stats and surveys seem to back such a picture up. But the problem is that a liberal democracy, encouraging people to pursue their own lives as they see fit, seeking ‘this-worldly’ pleasure as Kaufmann puts it, also places too few demands on the individual to pursue the greater good. And one of the side effects of slack, comfortable lives is that people in liberal democracies are having fewer children. After all, in a ‘me first’ culture, there’s little reason to have three children.
More... (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9107/)
Globally, secular societies are in demographic retreat. In 1950, Europe alone had two-and-a-half times the population of Africa. By 2050, Kaufmann predicts Africa will have four times Europe’s population. Which is not surprising given that just 11 per cent of the world’s under-15s currently live in Europe (including Russia) and North America. In non-Muslim Asia (China, Vietnam, and southern India), populations are likewise aging as fertility rates decline. But in Sub-Saharan Africa and much of the Muslim world, fertility rates are rising. This is not a simple fact for Kaufmann, it’s a source of terror: ‘Demography is a coiled spring’, he trembles, ‘whose explosive potential is only just being released’.
That is how Kaufmann presents population data. It is not a bald quantitative fact; it is a qualitative force. Just as the Ancient Greeks gave way to the prosaic Romans, and in turn the Romans gave way to German barbarians, or the ‘lettered Byzantines’ lost out to the Turks and Mongols, so Western liberals look set to be overwhelmed by fundamentalist hordes. And the reason: there’s more of Them. Tellingly, not to mention worryingly, Kaufmann repeatedly mentions the numerical basis of military force in this regard.