Spengler On Global Demographics

NOT SURPRISINGLY, liberal academicians have hesitated to investigate the consequences of the childless society that they and theirs have championed. That is why we have Spengler, the peripatetic scholar writing at Asia Times.

Spengler wonders whether there is a statistical correlation between childbearing and religious belief. Since no social science professionals have been doing any serious statistical study of the problem, Spengler recently volunteered his amateur services as a temporary substitute for serious scholarly study of the problem.

Having found no academic research that specifically measures the impact of religious belief on fertility controlling for these factors, I have done some calculations of my own using a cross section of data for 174 countries. My analysis, preliminary as it is, supports the conclusion that religious belief strongly influences fertility after controlling for wealth and education. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, of course, and results of this kind should be viewed with caution. Still, this analysis passes the first cut of tests for rigor.

He finds that by far the biggest predictor of family size is literacy, but that religious belief is also a strong predictor. All this is to support his feeling that:

Underlying the demographic crisis of the industrial world, I believe, is a spiritual crisis. If the above analysis has any merit, the issue is not wealth, but rather the desire of men to continue to inhabit this planet. Secular ideologies - socialism, positivism, and so forth - promised a world free of bigotry and hatred, and an unending vista of peace and prosperity.

And religious belief, he believes, is necessary to populate the planet because

Humankind cannot abide the terror of mortality without the promise of immortality, I have argue in the past... In the absence of religion human society sinks into depressive torpor.

Then Spengler turns to a review of Jared Diamond�s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a book that attempts to explain the fall of societies as a consequence of environmental folly. Why should a tale of environmental extinction appeal to a mass audience?

Diamond�s books appeal to an educated, secular readership, that is, precisely the sort of people who have one child or none at all. If you have fewer than two children, and most of the people you know have fewer than two children, Holmesian deductive powers are not required to foresee your eventual demise.

Spengler things that these secular readers should look in the mirror if they want to think about the cause of collapse.

In fact, the main reason societies fail is that they choose not to live. That is a horrifying thought to absorb, and the average reader would much rather delve into the details of obscure ecosystems of the past than reflect upon why half of Eastern Europe will die out by mid-century

Of course, the real question facing the west is the Muslim demographic invasion of Europe. They had better get on with it, Spengler writes. Although Muslims are having lots of children compared to secular Europe, their birth rate is falling faster. If they want to conquer Europe, they had better do it in the next 30 years, or it will be demographically too late.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.