The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
By Spengler
(The essay below appears as a preface to my book
How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). [1]
Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of
arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break
down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four
Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. [1] If present fertility rates
hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No
pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid.
Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at
even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the
Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the
end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.
The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The
European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world's population to reduce
carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not
be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and
medical care. [2] For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the
whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it
has passed the demographic point of no return.
But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate
demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's
catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. The average
30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will
bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just
behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are
catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim
countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The
Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the
industrial countries - but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot
be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.
Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so.
For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their
culture believe that they have nothing to lose.
Political science is at a loss in the face of demographic decline and its
consequences. The wasting away of nations is an insoluble conundrum for modern
political theory, which is based on the principle of rational self-interest. At
the threshold of extinction, the political scientists' clever models break
down. We "do not negotiate with terrorists". But a bank robber holding hostages
is a terrorist of sorts, and the police negotiate with such miscreants as a
matter of course. And what if the bank robber knows he will die of an incurable
disease in a matter of weeks? That changes the negotiation. The simple truth -
call it Spengler's Universal Law #1 - A man, or a nation, at the brink of death
does not have a "rational self-interest".
Conventional geopolitical theory, which is dominated by material factors such
as territory, natural resources, and command of technology, does not address
how peoples will behave under existential threat. Geopolitical models fail to
resemble the real world in which we live, where the crucial issue is the
willingness or unwillingness of a people inhabiting a given territory to bring
a new generation into the world.
Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent
upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran,
are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may
choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the
point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until
all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so.
Analysis of national interests cannot explain why some nations go to war
without hope of winning, or why other nations will not fight even to defend
their vital interests. It cannot explain the historical fact that peoples fight
harder, accepting a higher level of sacrifice in blood and treasure, when all
hope of victory is past. Conventional geopolitical analysis cannot explain the
causes of population collapse either, any more than its consequences - for
example, under what circumstances strategic reverses (notably the two world
wars of the past century) may crush the aspirations of the losers and result in
apathy and demographic death.
Why do individuals, groups, and nations act irrationally, often at the risk of
self-destruction? Part of the problem lies in our definition of rationality.
Under normal circumstances we think it irrational for a middle-aged man to cash
in his insurance policy and spend money as fast as possible. But if the person
in question has a terminal illness and no heirs, we think it quite reasonable
to spend it all quickly, like Otto Kringelein in
Grand Hotel or his
updated equivalent, Queen Latifah's character in
The Last Holiday. And
if we know that we shall presently die of rabies, what is to prevent us from
biting everyone we dislike? Countries sometimes suffer the equivalent of
terminal illness. What seems suicidal to Americans may appear rational to an
existentially challenged people confronting its imminent mortality.
Self-immolation of endangered peoples is sadly common. Stone-age cultures often
disintegrate upon contact with the outside world. Their culture breaks down,
and suicides skyrocket. An Australian researcher writes about "suicide
contagion or cluster deaths - the phenomenon of indigenous people, particularly
men from the same community taking their own lives at an alarming rate". [3]
Canada's Aboriginal Health Foundation reports, "The overall suicide rate among
First Nation communities is about twice that of the total Canadian population;
the rate among Inuit is still higher - 6 to 11 times higher than the general
population." [4] Suicide is epidemic among Amazon tribes. The London Telegraph
reported on November 19, 2000,
The largest tribe of Amazonian Indians,
the 27,000-strong Guarani, are being devastated by a wave of suicides among
their children, triggered by their coming into contact with the modern world.
Once unheard of among Amazonian Indians, suicide is ravaging the Guarani, who
live in the southwest of Brazil, an area that now has one of the highest
suicide rates in the world. More than 280 Guarani have taken their own lives in
the past 10 years, including 26 children under the age of 14 who have poisoned
or hanged themselves. Alcoholism has become widespread, as has the desire to
own radios, television sets and denim jeans, bringing an awareness of their
poverty. Community structures and family unity have broken down and sacred
rituals come to a halt.
Of the more than 6,000 languages now
spoken on the planet, two become extinct each week, and by most estimates half
will fall silent by the end of the century. [5] A United Nations report claims
that nine-tenths of the languages now spoken will become extinct in the next
hundred years. [6] Most endangered languages have a very small number of
speakers. Perhaps a thousand distinct languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea,
many by tribes of only a few hundred members. Several are disappearing tribal
languages spoken in the Amazon rainforest, the Andes Mountains, or the Siberian
taiga. Eighteen languages have only one surviving speaker. It is painful to
imagine how the world must look to these individuals. They are orphaned in
eternity, wiped clean of memory, their existence reduced to the exigency of the
moment.
But are these dying remnants of primitive societies really so different from
the rest of us? Mortality stalks most of the peoples of the world - not this
year or next, but within the horizon of human reckoning. A good deal of the
world seems to have lost the taste for life. Fertility has fallen so far in
parts of the industrial world that languages such as Ukrainian and Estonian
will be endangered within a century and German, Japanese, and Italian within
two. The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and
peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie of Greece in
its post-Alexandrian decline and Rome during the first centuries of the Common
Era. But Greece fell to Rome, and Rome to the barbarians. In the past, nations
that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War,
Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today's more
civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: loss of faith. Today's cultures are dying
of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.
The Arab suicide bomber is the spiritual cousin of the despondent aboriginal of
the Amazon rain forest. And European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of
Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their
connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great
deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the
hundred-year horizon, and the Islamist boast, "You love life, and we love
death." Which brings us to Spengler's Universal Law #2: When the nations of the
world see their demise not as a distant prospect over the horizon, but as a
foreseeable outcome, they perish of despair. Like the terminally ill patient
cashing in his insurance money, a culture that anticipates its own extinction
has a different standard of rationality than does conventional political
science.
Game theorists have tried to make political strategy into a quantitative
discipline. Players with a long-term interest think differently than players
with a short-term interest. A swindler who has no expectation of encountering
his victim again will take what he can and run; a merchant who wants repeat
customers will act honestly as a matter of self-interest. By the same token,
the game theorists contends, nations learn that it is in their interest to act
as responsible members of the world community, for the long-run advantages of
good behavior outweigh the passing benefits of predation.
But what if there isn't any long run - not, at least, for some of the "players"
in the "game"? The trouble with applying game theory to the problem of
existential war is that the players may not expect to be there for the nth
iteration of the game. Entire peoples sometimes find themselves faced with
probable extinction, so that no peaceful solution appears to be a solution for
them.
Situations of this sort have arisen frequently in history, but never as
frequently as today, when so many of the world's cultures are not expected to
survive the next two centuries. A people facing cultural extinction may well
choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival. That is just how
radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional Muslim society in the
face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and
culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modern world. Many of them
rather would die fighting.
Paradoxically it is possible for wars of annihilation to stem from rational
choice, for the range of choices always must be bounded by the supposition that
the chooser will continue to exist. Existential criteria, that is, trump the
ordinary calculus of success and failure. If one or more of the parties knows
that peace implies the end of its existence, it has no motive to return to
peace. That is how the radical Islamists of Hamas view the future of Muslim
society. A wealthy and successful Jewish state next to a poor and dysfunctional
Palestinian state may imply the end of the moral authority of Islam, and some
Palestinians would rather fight to the death than embrace such an outcome.
Rather than consign their children to the Western milieu of personal freedom
and sexual license, radical Muslims will fight to the death.
But why are Muslims - and Europeans, and Japanese - living under a societal
death sentence? Why are populations collapsing in the modern world? Demographers have identified several different factors
associated with population decline: urbanization, education and literacy, the
modernization of traditional societies. Children in traditional society had an
economic value, as agricultural labor and as providers for elderly parents;
urbanization and pension systems turned children into a cost rather than a
source of income. And female literacy is a powerful predictor of population
decline among the world's countries. Mainly poor and illiterate women in Mali
and Niger bear eight children in a lifetime, while literate and affluent women
in the industrial world bear one or two.
But what determines whether it is one child or two? Children also have a
spiritual value. That is why the degree of religious faith explains a great
deal of the variation in population growth rates among the countries of the
world. The industrial world's lowest fertility rates are encountered among the
nations of Eastern Europe where atheism was the official ideology for
generations. The highest fertility rates are found in countries with a high
degree of religious faith, namely the United States and Israel. And
demographers have identified religion as a crucial factor in the differences
among populations within countries. When faith goes, fertility vanishes, too.
The death-spiral of birth rates in most of the industrial world has forced
demographers to think in terms of faith. Dozens of new studies document the
link between religious belief and fertility.
But why do some religions seem to provide better protection against the
sterilizing effects of modernity than others? The fastest demographic decline
ever registered in recorded history is taking place today in Muslim countries;
demographic winter is descending fastest in the fifth of the world where
religion most appears to dominate. And even more puzzling: why does one
religion (Christianity) seem to inoculate a people against demographic decline
in one place (America) but not in another (Europe)? In many parts of the world,
what once looked like an indestructible rock of faith has melted in the hot
light of modernity. In others, modernity has only added compost for the growth
of faith. Apparently some kinds of faith will survive in the modern world, and
others will fail.
Strategic analysts and politicians are poorly equipped to understand these new
and disturbing circumstances, with their overarching implications for political
strategy and economics. To make sense of the world today we must do better than
secular political science, which pigeon-holes faith as one more
belief-structure among the other belief-structures in its collection of
specimens.
Our political science is uniquely ill-equipped to make sense of a global crisis
whose ultimate cause is spiritual. But was not always so. From the advent of
Christianity to the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, the West saw politics
through the lens of faith. St Augustine's fifth-century treatise The City of
God looked through the state to the underlying civil society, and understood
that civil society as a congregation - a body bound together by common loves,
as opposed to Cicero's state founded only on common interests. (In the
concluding chapter, we will consider Augustine's view as a lodestar for an
American foreign policy that realistically addresses the threats created by the
imminent demographic collapse of nations.)
We might call Augustine's view "theopolitics." A millennium later, Niccolo
Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes changed the subject, to the individual's desire
for power, wealth, and personal survival. Hobbes, the 17th-century grandfather
of modern political science, introduced a radically truncated anthropology,
centered on the individual's struggle for survival. The state, he argued, was a
compact among individuals who survival prospects were poor in a "state of
nature"; thus they ceded their individual rights to a sovereign in return for
protection. A century later Montesquieu added differences in climate, terrain,
and resources to the mix. The modern view of atomized man motivated only by the
pursuit of material advantage is loosely known as "geopolitics".
What prompted this revolution in political thinking that has left modern
political theory without the tools to understand the causes and implications of
the current demographic collapse? Undoubtedly, the terrible religious wars of
the 16th and 17th centuries poisoned the idea of faith-based politics. Europe
fought dynastic and political wars under the false flag of religion until the
Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648 destroyed almost half the population of Central
Europe. The Peace of Westphalia that ended this fearful war forever buried the
political model that Christendom had advanced since Augustine: a universal
Christian empire that would keep the peace and limit the arbitrary power of
kings. Things are not as simple as they seem in the standard account of the
violence that soured the West on theopolitics. For - as we shall see - the
nation-states that opposed universal empire were founded on a contending kind
of faith, a fanatical form of national self-worship whose internal logic was
not played out until world war and genocide in the 20th century, and the
collapse of faith and fertility in the 21st. But when Thomas Hobbes published
his great book Leviathan three years after the end of the Thirty Years' War, it
seemed credible that "the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased
Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof".
One powerful attraction of the Hobbesian revolution in political thinking was
the power it promised to intellectuals. If politics reduces to the individual
and his material concerns, then it is possible to manipulate the individual
through the alternation of his material circumstances. A clever elite could fix
all the problems of the world. Immanuel Kant boasted in 1793 that he could
write a constitution for a race of devils, "if only they be rational." Europe
ignored him and proceeded to destroy itself in the Napoleonic Wars and the two
world wars of the past century. Today, as in Kant's time, the great frustration
in world affairs is the refusal of some players to act rationally. Something
was gained, but much more was lost, in the 17th-century Hobbesian revolution in
political thought. To view human beings as creatures concerned solely with
power, wealth, and security is an impoverished anthropology. The missing tools
- the ones Machiavelli and Hobbes removed from the toolbox - are exactly the
ones we need to understand and cope with the dangers inherent in the wholesale
collapse of cultures that faces us today.
Secularism in all its forms fails to address the most fundamental human need.
Sociologist Eric Kaufmann, who himself bewails the fecundity of the religious
and the infertility of the secular, puts it this way: "The weakest link in the
secular account of human nature is that it fails to account for people's
powerful desire to seek immortality for themselves and their loved ones."
Traditional society had to confront infant mortality as well as death by
hunger, disease, and war. That shouldn't be too troubling, however: "We may not
be able to duck death completely, but it becomes so infrequent that we can
easily forget about it."
Has death really become infrequent? Call it Spengler's Universal Law #3:
Contrary to what you may have heard from the sociologists, the human mortality
rate is still 100%.
We can stick our fingers in our ears and chant "I can't hear you!" only so long
in the face of mortality. Religion offers the individual the means to transcend
mortality, to survive the fragility of a mortal existence. Homo religiosus
confronts death in order to triumph over it. But the world's major religions
are distinguished by the different ways in which they confront mortality. We
cannot make sense of the role of religion in demographic, economic, and
political developments - and of the different roles of different religions in
different places and times - without understanding the existential experience
of the religious individual. It is challenging to recount this experience to a
secular analyst; it is somewhat like describing being in love to someone who
never has been in love. One doesn't have to be religious to understand
religion, but it helps.
But without understanding humankind's confrontation of his own morality in
religion, political science is confined to analysis on the basis of the
survival instinct - which suddenly seems to be failing whole peoples - and
rational self-interest - at a time when nations and peoples are not behaving in
a conspicuously rational manner.
At the conclusion of a previous irruption of irrationality - the First World
War - a young German soldier at a remote post in Macedonia jotted down his
thoughts on army postcards in the final months of the First World War. A small,
bespectacled man with a thin mustache, he had been groomed to be one of the
mandarins of the German academy, a philosopher whose function was to reinforce
the country's confidence in its culture. Just before the war began he had
returned to Judaism, after a near conversion to Christianity. As the casualty
lists rose in inverse proportion to the hope of victory, the consolations of
philosophy seemed hollow. Philosophers, he wrote, were like small children who
clapped their hands over their ears and shouted "I can't hear you!" before the
fear of death. "From death - from the fear of death - comes all of our
knowledge of the All," the soldier began. It was not the individual's fear of
death that fascinated the young soldier, but the way entire nations respond to
the fear of their collective death. He wrote:
Just as every individual
must reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the world foresee their
eventual extinction, be it however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the
peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of
death. Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed towards a mortal
object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the
bitterness of death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a time when their
land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today,
but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and
their laws and customers have lost their living power.
The soldier was Franz Rosenzweig, and the postcards would become his great book
The
Star of Redemption. Awareness of death defines the human condition, so
that human beings cannot bear their own mortality without the hope of
immortality. And our sense of immortality is social. The culture of a community
is what unites the dead with those yet to be born.
The death of a culture is an uncanny event, for it erases not only the future
but also the past, that is, the hopes and fears, the sweat and sacrifice of
countless generations whose lives no longer can be remembered, for no living
being will sing their songs or tell their stories.
The first surviving work of written literature, the
Epic of Gilgamesh
written perhaps 3,700 years ago, recounts the Sumerian king's quest for
immortality. After a journey beset by hardship and peril, Gilgamesh is told:
"The life that you are seeking you will never find. When the gods created man
they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping."
In the pre-Christian world, Rosenzweig points out, the peoples of the world
anticipated their eventual extinction. Every nation's love of itself is
pregnant with the presentiment of death, for each tribe knows that its time on
earth is limited. Some fight to the death. Others cease to breed. Some do both.
Christianity first taught them the Jewish promise of eternal life. To talk of
"man's search for meaning" trivializes the problem. What humankind requires is
meaning that transcends death. This need explains a great deal of human
behavior that otherwise might seem irrational. One does not have to be
religious to grasp this fundamental fact of the human condition, but religion
helps, because faith makes explicit the human need to transcend morality.
Secular rationalists have difficulty identifying with the motives of
existentially challenged peoples - not so much because they lack faith, but
because they entertain faith in rationality itself, and believe with the
enthusiasm of the convert in the ability of reason to explain all of human
experience.
But not only the religious need the hope of immortality. The most atheistic
communist hopes that his memory will live on in the heart of a grateful
proletariat. Even if we do not believe that our soul will have a place in
heaven or that we shall be resurrected in the flesh, we nonetheless believe
that something of ourselves will remain, in the form of progeny, memories, or
consequences of actions, and that this something will persist as long as people
who are like us continue to inhabit the Earth. Humanity perseveres in the
consolation that some immortal part of us transcends our death. Sadly, our hope
for immortality in the form of remembrance is a fragile and often a vain one.
Immortality of this sort depends upon the survival of people who are like us -
that is, upon the continuity of our culture. If you truly believe in a
supernatural afterlife, to be sure, nothing can really disappoint you. But
there is no consolation in being the last Mohican.
And that's because of Spengler's Universal Law #4: The history of the world is
the history of humankind's search for immortality. When nations go willingly
into that dark night, what should we conclude about human nature?
Human beings may not be the only animals who are sentient of death. (Elephants
evidently grieve for their dead, and dogs mourn their dead masters.) But we are
the only animals whose sense of continuity depends on culture as much as it
does upon genes. Unlike men and women, healthy animals universally show an
instinct for self-preservation and the propagation of their species. We do not
observe cats deciding not to have kittens the better to pursue their careers as
mousers.
I do not mean to suggest that humans beings of different cultures belong to
different species. On the contrary, the child of a Kalahari Bushman will thrive
if raised in the family of a Glaswegian ship's engineer. (As Jared Diamond, the
author of
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, observes it
is easier to be stupid in a modern welfare state than in a hunter-gatherer
tribe in New Guinea.)
But culture performs a role among human beings similar to the role species
plays for animals. An adult Bushman would never fully adapt to industrial
society, any more than a Glaswegian ship's engineer would last a fortnight in
the Kalahari. Insofar as an animal can be said to experience an impulse toward
the future beyond his own life, that impulse is fulfilled by the propagation of
the species. But individual human existence looks forward to the continuation
of the culture that nurtures, sustains, and transmits our contribution to
future generations. Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the hope of
immortality - not merely through genetic transmission but through
inter-generational communication.
In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of
transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a
dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility,
concupiscence, and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of
sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have
children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too
frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived
source of their humiliation.
The truth is - to invoke Spengler's Universal Law #5 - Humankind cannot bear
mortality without the hope of immortality. When men and women lose the sacred,
they lose the desire to live. Despairing of immortality, we stand astonished
before the one fact we know with certainty - that someday we must die. This is
as true of modern homo sapiens sapiens as it was of our remotest ancestors.
Even Neanderthal burial sites have been unearthed with grave gifts. "Man does
not live by bread alone," Moses said on the east bank of the Jordan River. The
affluent peoples of the world have all the bread they need, but have lost the
appetite for life.
Americans are ill-equipped to empathize with the existential fears of other
nations. America is the great exception to the demographic collapse sweeping
the modern world. As an immigrant nation we regenerate ourselves. We bear no
baggage from a tragic past. The glue that holds us together is a common concept
of justice and opportunity. The United States is what John Courtney Murray
called "a propositional nation". In our benevolence and optimism we assume that
all peoples are like us, forgetting that we are or descend from people who
chose to abandon the tragic fate of their own nations at the further shore and
selected themselves into the American nation. But we have learned that our
capacity to influence events in the rest of the world, even in the absence of a
competing superpower, is limited, and that the dissipation of our resources can
be deadly for us. Our strategic thinking suffers from a failure to take into
account the existential problems of other nations. We think in the narrow
categories of geopolitics, but we need to study theopolitics - the powerful
impact of religious beliefs and aspirations on world events. Even we
exceptional Americans must come to grips with the collapse of faith and
fertility - especially in the rapidly and dangerously declining Muslim world -
in order to prevail in a world in which tragic outcomes are more common than
happy endings.
Notes
1. These ratios are based on the Elderly Dependency Ratio calculated by the
model of the United Nations World Population Prospects 2010 revision, assuming
constant fertility. The model is available at
http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm 2. Jared Diamond’s 2005
book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed blames exhaustion of
resource and environmental damage. The extinct people of Easter Island and the
pre-Columbian Mayans chopped down too many trees, Diamond observes, and thus he
argues that environmental damage is the greatest threat to our civilization.
(Never mind that America has expanded its forests by 20 million acres during
the past quarter century: disaster stories of this sort resonate with a public
fed on media reports of global warming and apocalyptic disaster movies.) Easter
Island, though, is something of a rarity in world history. The cultures about
which we know the most - and from which our own civilization descends - failed
from a different cause. Classical Greece and Rome died for the same reason that
Western Europe, Japan, and other parts of the modern world are dying today:
they lost their motivation to bring children into the world. The infertile
Greeks were conquered by Rome’s army and the inexhaustible manpower of the
farms of the Italian peninsula; as the Romans later grew childless, they were
overrun by a small force of barbarian invaders.
