Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Spengler: From Infancy to Senescence

David P. Goldman, who channels Spengler, writes about the disastrous Middle East:
The Muslim world is full of failed and soon-to-be-failed states that no force on earth will save from self-destruction. In my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), I argued that Muslim society goes from infancy to senescence without passing through adulthood. As soon as Muslim countries achieve adult female literacy, the bonds of traditional society dissolve and post-modern pathologies replace pre-modern constraints.

Iran is the poster-child for civilizational failure. Iranian women had seven children in 1979 and have just 1.7 children today, which means that Iran will be the first country to get old before it gets rich. By 2040 it will have an elderly dependent ratio like Europe's with a tenth the per capita income, and that is a social death sentence.

We elected Donald Trump to protect us. His promise to halt Muslim immigration was the turning point in his campaign fortunes, and rightly so. To declare that we will no longer bear the burdens of failed states, though, is to tell the elite that they are not an elite at all--they simply are unemployed. And it tells liberals that their secular path to salvation is shut down for the duration.
When a secular path is the only belief they've got, and it is "shut down," no wonder they are going bat-guano crazy. Watching the left melt down is so much fun it almost feels sinful.