Verify the Recall

If you’re among those of us who want to take action to protect our country, this is a call to action.

I’m assuming you’re aware that there is a recall election going on in Wisconsin, to recall Governor Scott Walker. He stood up to the labor unions, and they don’t like that. This is in addition to an attempt last summer to change the outcome of elections that left unions out of favor in the state senate. The outcome of that onslaught was a net loss of two for Republicans, but leaving them in the majority. So there is an additional attack on four state senators: Wanggaard, Galloway, Fitzgerald, and Moulton.

Are you aware of the Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the system? That is happening in Wisconsin. If the unions who are pushing for recalls can dump literally millions of signatures onto the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, they can make it impossible for the GAB to verify the signatures—which opens the way for fraudulently forcing the recalls.

In step the volunteers from King Street Patriots, whose project True the Vote has attempted to prevent fraud in elections across the country. (I was trained by them as a poll watcher, which I have done several times now.) They have an additional project called Verify the Recall. Mark Antill and a small team of other volunteers in Houston, TX, have developed database capabilities to verify the signatures quickly and accurately.

The verification has already taken place for the four state senators. Verify the Recall does not work for any candidate, nor even contact them. The purpose is simply to allow for the possibility of verifying that the system is just. Nor can they expect the Wisconsin GAB to simply accept the information from an outside party. But those candidates who want to can use the Verify the Recall results to question specific records to challenge whether there are adequate signatures (when/if the results show there may be too few eligible signatures).

The recall verification is going on this week for Governor Walker’s signatures.

Here is where you come in. The actual entering of data requires many many volunteers. So far more than 16,000 unique volunteers from around the country have stepped up. If you want to join this volunteer force, go to www.verifytherecall.com. What you do is sign up. They will shortly send you a login ID. Then you can go to the site and login to volunteer to enter data. You can do just a page or two, or as many as you have time for. (Mark Antill says, "One hundred minutes for one hundred records; that's all we ask.)

You will see a scanned page of signatures, and you will enter the data, as you discern it, into the form. At least two other people will enter that same record (each name is a record), so there can be comparisons to identify the most accurate information. Then the data is compared to voter rolls and other state data to verify that the person signing is an actual person, and actually lives in the jurisdiction, and that there are no duplicates.

Do not put this off. They are trying to get Governor Walker’s recall petitions entered by this weekend, so that the miraculous software can do its thing in time for the governor's deadline at the end of February.

I’m assuming that Verify the Recall will continue to be useful as unions and others use recall petitions elsewhere in the country, so stay tuned. You can sign up for updates by email or Facebook.

Unprecedented

I wrote on the president’s mandate that Catholic entities pay for birth-control and abortifacients both last Friday and the week before that. But as I wrote on Friday, the president came out with his “compromise”:  instead of having the Catholic Church pay for these services that go against its conscience, he would simply have them pay for the insurance plan without those services, and then the insurance companies involved would go ahead and provide the services for free.

On Saturday, economist Greg Mankiew posted a very clear summary of the “compromise.” It’s brief, so I’m including the whole thing.

Semantics at the Highest Level

Consider these two policies:

A.     An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance that covers birth control.

B.     An employer is required to provide its employees health insurance. The health insurance company is required to cover birth control.

I can understand someone endorsing both A and B, and I can understand someone rejecting both A and B. But I cannot understand someone rejecting A and embracing B, because they are effectively the same policy. Ultimately, all insurance costs are passed on to the purchaser, so I cannot see how policy B is different in any way from policy A, other than using slightly different words to describe it.

Yet it seems that the White House yesterday switched from A to B, and that change is being viewed by some as a significant accommodation to those who objected to policy A. The whole thing leaves me scratching my head.

In other words, it is not a compromise; it is simply word play.

A couple of days earlier Mankiw had linked to a Wall Street Journal piece written by John H. Cochrane, “The Real Trouble withthe Birth-Control Mandate,” with some additional basic insurance information it is helpful to understand. Cochrane says,

Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill.

Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses. There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn’t add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn’t charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste. You’d have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you’d end up spending more.

He goes on to point out that the government’s interference with individual decisions about purchasing birth-control and related things is bound to raise the cost of those things, making it even more difficult for poor people to choose to pay for them—except that the government will “make it free.” But since they aren’t actually free, government is in fact causing society as a whole to pay more.

There’s a larger point than the religious exemption. Cochrane ends his piece with this:

The critics fell for a trap. By focusing on an exemption for church-related institutions, critics effectively admit that it is right for the rest of us to be subjected to this sort of mandate. They accept the horribly misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and they resign themselves to chipping away at its edges. No, we should throw it out, and fix the terrible distortions in the health-insurance and health-care markets.

Sure, churches should be exempt. We should all be exempt.

With Obamacare, we have a series of unprecedented and progressively onerous mandates:

·         Never before has the federal government required individuals to enter the marketplace and make a purchase simply because they breathe American air.

·         Never before has the federal government required individuals to enter the marketplace and make a purchase that violates their conscience, which they would never purchase of their own free will.

·         Never before has business (nor a person, since slavery was outlawed) been required to provide products/services for which it will receive no remuneration.

All, in my opinion, are considerably more tyrannical than the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence that led the founders to break free from Britain. All are clearly unconstitutional. If we cannot get the president impeached for these (and other) violations of our law, then we must, absolutely must, remove him from office through this year’s election.

First Amendment Freedom of Religion vs. Obamacare

The question is not whether people should be allowed to use contraceptives and other sterilization methods; in this debate there is no attempt to curtail what is currently legal. The question is whether paying for such products/services or not is a private decision or a public one. 

Is a person allowed to say, “I personally believe it is wrong to artificially limit fertility, and it goes against my conscience to pay for such things,” or can a person with those beliefs be forced to spend money for those products/services? Obama and his Health and Human Services enforcers have decided it is their decision. What is their rationale for taking that decision away from private citizens and groups? 

There seem to be two main points:

·         Churches employ people who are not all of their religion; they shouldn’t impose their religious views on their employees.

·         Churches should expect to do what the government mandates, since they are receiving government benefits. 

Joan Vennochi puts these together in one paragraph in a Boston Globe piece: 

But not all employees of Catholic institutions are Catholics. Why should their employers impose their religious beliefs on them and deny coverage for birth control and other medical care? As long as those Catholic institutions are getting taxpayer money, they should follow secular rules. That’s the Obama administration’s argument, and it makes sense.  

Maybe it makes sense to her, but not to me. If I hire someone to clean my house who happens to be a smoker, and I have a religious proscription against smoking, for example, am I required to accommodate smoking in my home? If that were true, I would never hire a smoker. I do not allow smoking in my home for many reasons that have nothing to do with government interests. I would very much resent having government interfere with that decision in any way. And if government insisted I allow smoking in my home by any employee, I simply would hire no one. (In fact, I do my own housekeeping, thank you. Smoke free. And cheap.) 

As for taking government money, that’s interesting. Obamacare is imposed on us, so if that is the “benefit” referred to, then forcing someone to take a “benefit” and then forcing them to do something even more repugnant because they had accepted the first “benefit” is pretty twisted. This is a no-win situation for anyone with a different opinion from the President. 

But I think the reference is to joint ventures between government and churches. These were efforts put forth by Pres. Bush, and probably before that. Have government support those entities already doing charity; it’s an effective and efficient use of government benevolence. [I know, benevolence is not actually a proper role of government; I am simply describing the situation.] So government reaches out, offers support for good the religious entity was already doing, and then claims the right to control the organizations beliefs? That looks like manipulative entrapment. 

I went to a very large church-owned university that does not take any government money. The reasoning is that it does not want to give government any leverage in controlling what is taught and how. Still, government has tried to argue that taking student tuition money that the student gets from a government grant or loan is taking government money. While that would be a stretch, it shows how much vigilance is required to prevent government usurpation of our private lives. 

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Dem., Connecticut) suggests not only that compromise on religious issues vs. government-invented “rights” to free contraception are a good thing, but that the president already did enough compromising: 

With this well-crafted balance, the religious liberty of our churches and other houses of worship is respected. They are exempted from the rule, as they should be. There is no mandate that individuals use contraception or that anyone dispense contraception, and there are no changes to existing conscience protections. At the same time, the nearly 800,000 employees and dependents of employees at Catholic hospitals can still benefit from access to these services if they desire them, a good compromise that maintains access while respecting religious liberties.  

Sen. Barbara Boxer (Dem., California) also supports the president’s supposed careful compromise: 

The truth is, the president's decision respects the diverse religious views of the American people, who deserve the right to follow their own conscience and choose whether to obtain contraceptives, regardless of where they work. And that is what this policy guarantees—with one carefully drawn exception. This decision respects the deeply-held views of religious institutions. If their mission is primarily religious and the majority of their employees and clients share that faith, religious institutions do not have to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees.  

Actually, the truth is it isn’t up to the president to decide how and whether American citizens are allowed to live their religions. That is a Constitutionally guaranteed God-given right, no matter what he says, or how much tyranny he imposes. She’s also wrong about how the government has gone about determining what is a primarily religious mission. She doesn’t understand that, while hospital care to her might seem secular, to the church that set up and supports the hospital, that is an act of goodness that is religious at its core. The same can be said for schools, where certainly many secular things are taught, but the purpose is to have those things taught in an environment that encourages the church’s beliefs.

I think she may also be wrong about the “majority” of employees phrase. I think it is likely that most (a majority, over 50%) of teachers at Notre Dame are Catholic. The argument elsewhere has been that if they hire any employees not of their faith, they must provide a form of coverage that allows that employee whatever the federal government prescribes. 

As I listen to news today, I hear the president has added a little extra twist. He claims that churches aren’t actually being forced to pay for something against their beliefs; they’re only required to pay for medical coverage as the federal government mandates, and it is actually the insurance companies that are providing the services. Our president doesn’t think that should affect anyone’s conscience. This is evidence of how very different he thinks from the average American—and certainly different from the average religious American. 

If you’re reading this, chances are we’re in agreement the president is wrong on this issue, and we are pulling for the Catholic Church and others to resist. 

I want to take just a minute to cover a tangent. Rick Santorum (and others) have tried to claim that Mitt Romney’s position is no different from Obama’s. That is patently untrue. Here is a brief explanation of the controversy by Ryan Larsen (WhyRomney.com on Facebook, February 8):

Romney spoke with his veto pen—he vetoed the legislation which would require hospitals to provide “morning after” pills. But the legislature overrode the veto. 

The only role Romney had in the matter was enforcing the law, which he was bound to do by his oath of office. 

The confusion results because Romney tried to craft an exemption for Catholic hospitals but ultimately realized that the exemption was not legally sound. There was one clear obstacle to Romney’s preferred exemption: the legislature has authority to supersede any contradictory statues or provisions rather than to work in harmony with the older statue. Thus, if Romney were to challenge the intended effect of the law, he would have had to argue disingenuously in court that the older provision and the new provision could be reconciled when that was likely not true. It is perhaps not surprising that Romney felt bound by the new law and it was in this context that Romney told the Department of Public Health they had to enforce the intent of the law even though he disagreed with it.

Clearly Romney’s effort to provide exemption for the Catholic Church is in direct contrast to Obama’s insistence on imposing his will. He has actually faced the problems of working as an executive with a liberal legislature, and will have been working on ways of avoiding those problems in any future opportunities. Santorum may claim he would always stand strong, but he has not had the executive experience so we can see what he would have done. Concerning Santorum’s integrity, does he know this and lie about it? Or does he not know it and yet makes the accusation based on faulty information? Either way, that lessens my respect for him. 

This gives me one more reason to pause about Catholics, however. This controversy happened in 2005. Catholics have tended to be strongly Democrat, so it was their own political choices that directly led to the imposition of the law against their religious freedom at the state level. It was 2010 when Obamacare was pressed through. They knew what the Democrat view was, how it would play out—yet they supported Obama and Obamacare, and trusted that this time things would be different. May I suggest it is time for Catholics in general to seriously rethink their long-held political positions?

Why Civilizations Die: Part III

This series on David P. Goldman’s book How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) starts with Part I on population decline, and Part II on the connection between secularization and population decline. Today we’ll cover what works for a lasting civilization.

Goldman proposes that religion is important in “culture,” because “culture” is about dealing with our own mortality.

Why have so many branches of the human family lost the will to live? They have lost the cultural resources that enabled them to cope with their own mortality. From awareness that we will die arises culture—the capacity to order our behavior consciously rather than by instinct. Culture is the stuff we weave out of the perception of immortality, the bridge between generations. Every echo of our earthly footsteps will die out unless those who follow us inherit more than our genes. To speak of a “search for meaning” is pointless unless that “meaning” endures beyond our lifetime. With sad frequency, ethnic groups will die rather than abandon their culture. And their culture is failing many peoples in the modern world (p. 20).

Religion, Goldman says, isn’t just an aspect of sociology; it is the primary factor; he uses the word theopolitics. But there is a difference between pagan religion and the covenant God of Jews and Christians. In pagan religions, faith in their god(s) is tentative, depending on success. As Goldman puts it,

Pagans worship their own image in the person of gods who are like them, only better. Pagan faith is everywhere and always fragile, according to Spengler’s [his online columnist name] Universal Law #15: When we worship ourselves, eventually we become the god that failed. The function of pagan gods is not to redeem us from death, but to bring us success. Pagan gods do not love men and women…. Absent success, pagan societies lose their faith; the religion of the ancient world is a carnival-parade of new gods introduced by winners to replace the failed gods of the losers, as defeated tribes were absorbed into their conquerors (p. 122).

He adds, in Spengler’s Universal Law #19: “Pagan faith, however powerful, turns into Stygian nihilism when disappointed.” In the modern world, pagan gods may not be the same as in ancient religions; they might be the tribe, the culture [Kultur was the word used in Nazi Germany], or self. All are fallible, and therefore will eventually fail.

But the Judeo-Christian God makes a covenant with man. “The American founding notion of ‘inalienable rights’ stems from the Hebrew concept of covenant: a grant of rights implies a Grantor, and an irreversible grant implies a God who limits his own sovereignty in covenant with mankind” (p. 80). This difference means that God isn’t available depending on specific seasonal outcomes, but is there throughout life and into eternities. And there is hope for peace and happiness beyond this life if we obey God’s laws in this life.

Goldman spends a fair amount of time explaining why he sees the Muslim God as more “pagan” than “covenant.” He says the idea that Allah would limit his powers for the sake of a human is repugnant to Muslims. They do not have a relationship with their creator; they rather simply try to appease and hope for good fortune. But their behavior doesn’t affect what happens; all is Allah’s will. I do not understand Islam enough to know whether this assessment is true. But the evidence of cultural failure when moving from traditional (agrarian) societies to modern (urban) societies is evident in the Muslim world as it is in Europe and Japan.

But America hasn’t failed. Its fertility rate holds steady at replacement. Israel is another exception. What makes the difference? Faith.

It is not that Americans in general are having children, but that Americans of faith are having children, and there are more Americans of faith than citizens of any other industrial country. According to a 2002 survey by the Pew Research Institute, 59 percent of Americans said that religion was important to them, against 11 percent in France, 21 percent in Germany, 27 percent in Italy, 33 percent in Great Britain, and 36 percent in Poland. In both Europe and America, people who practice a religion have far more children than those who do not. It’s just that there are far more Americans than Europeans practicing a faith (pp. 191-192).

Here’s some of the data comparing religion among childless vs. large families:

·         33% of childless families say they are not religious; only 12.5% of families with 4+ children are not religious.

·         41% of childless families say grace before meals; 62% of families with 4+ children say grace.

·         45% of childless families “strongly agree” that there is a “God who watches over me”; 80% of adults with four children “strongly agree.”

·         50% of families that never take part in religious activities have no children, but only a third of families with 3+ children do not. (p. 194).

There are differences among different religions in America, even among different Christian religions. If we separate them into “mainline” and “fundamentalist” Christians, we see some patterns. Fundamentalists who attend services weekly have a fertility rate of 2.7 (27% higher than the national average). But mainline Christians, such as Episcopalians and Presbyterians, average 1.3 children—the same as failing European societies.

American Jews show similar differences. “Nine-tenths of American Jews belong to the liberal denominations (Reform and Conservative) or to none at all. A generation ago, the Orthodox Jews seemed like a vanishing remnant of old country life. An observer looking at the configuration of American religion circa 1970 well might have forecast the end of faith in America, for the churches and synagogues that embodied faith at that moment in time were in decline. But the fervor of the evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals, and others [Mormons] has filled the vacuum left by the mainline denominations, and Jewish Orthodoxy is growing rapidly in part by attracting adherents from liberal denominations, but mostly through its own fecundity. Although traditionally observant Jews remain a small minority in terms of overall numbers, a third of synagogue-going Jews below the age of thirty attend Orthodox services (p. 196).

In other words, growing by attrition includes some conversion, but it is fueled by large families. Similar growth is happening in Israel. Among secular Jews, fertility has increased in a generation to 2.6, the highest in the industrial world. Ultra- Orthodox Jews have a fertility rate of 8.5, bringing the national fertility rate to 2.9. Meanwhile, “Arabs births in Israel remain steady at around 39,000, while Jewish births rose from 80,000 in 1994 to 120,000” in 2009. In another 60 years (two generations), Israel’s population will be larger than Poland. Poland’s median age will be 57 (as many older as younger), while Israel’s will be 32 (p. 201). And in the wake of this fertility by more orthodox segments of society, the shift of the culture as a whole is toward orthodoxy. The desire to live, and to have the culture live on, is strong. It bodes well for that little nation.

But, back to America. If Europe was made up of Christian nations originally, why have they failed to remain Christian, and then also failed to continue the will to have their individual cultures live on? And why, facing the same modern world, has America remained Christian at its core? Goldman says,

America is different because it was founded to be different. America remains a Christian nation because it overcame the centrifugal forces of ethnic rivalry through a radical and unprecedented device: the creation of a new country founded on a proposition—rather than commonality of language, race, or history. At the moment of Europe’s most catastrophic failure, people of faith chose to risk everything to found the country that became the United States of America.

The proposition that America was founded on is that our Creator has granted us unalienable rights, among them: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property, and our own choice of ways of seeking it). And the Bill of Rights spells out what was understood at the founding, that God granted us freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to protect ourselves, freedom from oppressive government. We do not delegate to government powers beyond what is necessary to secure our rights.

The principles are eternal. They are based on promises from an unchanging, unfailing Creator. Unlike civilizations that base their meaning on love of something ethnic or otherwise ephemeral, the proposition will not fail. Only people fail in their understanding, and in their desire to value—to love—the covenant with God.

Goldman points out that we cannot export what we have in America, because it requires Americans—people who love the covenant with God. What we can do, and have done, is “evangelize,” or tell the world about the freedom concepts. Then, as has always happened, people select themselves out of the world to join the American covenant by immigrating, or to develop their own covenant based on God-given rights, as Israel has done.

This leads to a fair amount of foreign policy discussion. Goldman is persuasive and logical, but I don’t understand enough yet to know whether I can fully agree with his “therefore, we must” conclusions. Still, there is enough here to keep a person thinking a long time. And especially there is a lot that is hopeful about the long-time survival of the America that we love.

Why Civilizations Die: Part II

This is Part II on David P. Goldman’s ideas from How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). Part I is on fertility decline. Today we cover the idea that secularization and fertility decline go together.

Goldman suggests that sociologists have been wrong in the way they include religion as just one factor among many, when looking at a civilization, no more important than political structures, language, and climate, for example. But religion, he says, is a more important factor in civilization success than any other.

In the introduction, Goldman asserts,

The repudiation of life among advanced countries living in prosperity and peace has no historical precedent, except perhaps in the anomie [breakdown or loss of social norms, uprootedness] 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 (p. xiii).

What is this loss of faith? Where does it come from? Can we see it coming and prevent it? Because knowing that most of the world is in collapse is rather overwhelming if we can’t learn something useful from the awareness.

Goldman proposes that there is a relationship with our need to overcome death. Is there something of who we are that lives on? “The truth is that humankind cannot survive without faith, specifically faith that our lives have meaning beyond the mere span of our years. Civilizations that lose their faith also lose their desire to continue and fail to reproduce themselves” (p. 16).

Simple faith in a religion equals sustainable fertility—but it is not enough. If the faith is tied to culturalism or nationalism (seeing the tribe or nation as central), the faith slips once the other purpose fails. Once a traditional society—one of believing people, usually rural and agrarian—enters the modern world (high education, urbanized, governmental usurpation of family responsibilities such as caring for the elderly), the clash frequently leads to secularization hand in hand with drop in fertility.

Goldman examines several places where fertility decline was sudden, and coincided with a precipitous decline in religious observance: Quebec, Poland, Spain, and Ireland. From the mid-1930s for several decades,

Quebec was more Catholic and more fecund [had a higher fertility rate] than any province in the industrial world. In 1960 attendance at mass was 88 percent, the highest in the Catholic world, and the average Quebecoise had four children. By the 1980s the fertility rate had fallen to just 1.5, and Mass attendance to 20 percent (p. 180).

Quoting a report by Catherine Krull and Fran Trovato, called “Where Have All the Children Gone,” the book notes,

By 1982, more than 42 percent of Quebec men and women still in their reproductive ages had undergone voluntary sterilization. Moreover, in the period 1978-1998, abortion increased from 17.9 per 100 live births to 41. The 1998 figure is in fact much higher than the ratio for the same year in Canada as a whole” (p. 181).

The failure of the culture coincides with the failed efforts for Quebecois nationalism (separatism from the rest of Canada and preservation of French language and culture). Religion there was tied together with the sense of chosen-ness. When the dream died, religious belief died with it.

Poland’s fertility collapse is somewhat similar. In the 1950s, Polish families had 3-4 children. By 1979 (when Pope John Paul II visited), families still had 2-3 children, a drop, but still high by industrial world standards. Now, a single generation later, fertility is at 1.25 (children per woman), about half replacement level, and among the lowest in the world. What happened? The Cold War ended. That should have been a good thing. But Poland had viewed its Catholicism as resistance to Soviet-imposed atheism. Their faith and heroism contributed to the end of the Cold War. But without the need to resist, they seemed to lose their purpose—along with their reason for survival.

In Ireland there is the usual secularization pattern: rising prosperity and urbanization. But just as in Quebec and Poland, “the Irish stopped having babies and families—and shortly afterward stopped going to church” (p. 185). In 1965 Irish women had four children. By 2010, that number was two. And Mass attendance dropped from 91% in 1973 to 34% in 2005. This coincides with the cease in hostilities against Great Britain.

Spain was another country that combined nationalism and Catholicism, particularly under Francisco Franco.  The fertility plunge began in 1975, the year Franco died. Up till then, Spain had enjoyed one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, around 3 per woman (about 2 more than the rest of Europe). Within a mere twenty years Spain plummeted to the lowest fertility in Western Europe. Spain was “the most extreme turn away from family life observed anywhere in the world—until Iran’s population plunge of the past fifteen years” (186).

When a culture either achieves some grand goal it is seeking, or recognizes that it is doomed to failure regarding that goal, it loses its will to live. But if it’s going to lose the will to live either way, where is there hope?

Hope must be what we find when we look at the exceptions, particularly America and Israel. What is different about these two nations that allows for faith to continue, even to thrive, in the modern world? Goldman describes the difference as having to do with our understanding of God, his covenants with us, and inalienable rights. And it comes down to what we choose to love. More on that in the next post.

Why Civilizations Die: Part I

At Spherical Model, I propose that civilization requires certain things to thrive: belief in God, who grants us unalienable rights, and therefore obedience to God’s law; and in order to perpetuate the belief and train in the civilized behavior, families are the basic unit and must be honored and nurtured. My way of organizing the ideas may be unique, but these beliefs about civilization are more widely understood. So when I hear a book title like How Civilizations Die, my interest is piqued, to see if this supports my thesis or adds additional insight.

How Civilizations Die(And Why Islam Is Dying Too) came out just last year. The author is David P. Goldman, online columnist “Spengler,” whom I admit I was not aware of (read an explanation of his column themes here ). The original “Spengler” authored the pessimistic work The Decline of the West, so Goldman took the name in irony. Sometimes with such a book, I end up having to study and reread, and write down quotes. This is one of those.

It does indeed support my basic Spherical Model thesis about civilization. But while I mainly outline the positive requirements for civilization, he covers the much broader subject of what doesn’t work, and along the way reveals what works. There’s a lot in here, and I’m still developing how to write about it, but I think I will spend two or three blog posts on it.

He describes his theme as following the direction of German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, and then giving it broader application: the mortality of nations and its causes, Western secularism, Asian anomie [breakdown or loss of social norms, uprootedness], and unadaptable Islam.

I think I will simplify somewhat. Here are his basic themes:

·         Population decline is the identifying symptom of a culture in decline.

·         Culture declines when it secularizes.

·         Culture decline is inevitable if culture is formed on the wrong basis.

o   Ethnicity, location, and history are the wrong bases for culture.

o   Belief in God-given individual rights is the right basis. 

Population Decline

Goldman pulls no punches. This is from the introduction:

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. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98 percent over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid (p. ix).

I’ve been interested in population decline for quite a while, and have occasionally written on it. But Goldman presented not only a lot of specificity, but also information I didn’t have before. I was unaware, for example, that much of the Muslim world is experiencing a plunge in fertility rates. Here’s the Iranian situation for example:

Today there are more Iranians in their mid-twenties than in any other age bracket. But they are not reproducing. An educated twenty-five-year-old Iranian woman today probably grew up in a family of six or seven children, but will bear only one child. The consequences will be catastrophic. Today there are nine Iranians of working age for every elderly dependent. By 2050, when the bulge in Iran’s population will be at retirement age, there will be more Iranians in their mid-sixties than in any other age bracket—seven elderly dependents for every ten working Iranians. The country produces just $4,400 per capita [adjusted constant dollars], about a tenth of America’s GDP, and most of that comes directly or indirectly from oil and natural gas reserves—which are running out.

It’s already too late to fend off the population decline…. Aging populations present a danger even to rich countries with well-funded public pension systems. For poor countries with a primitive social safety net or none at all, a graying society will be a disaster (p. 2).

The speed of the fall of fertility in the Muslim world is startling. Worldwide fertility has fallen over half a century from 4.5 children per woman to about 2.5. But in the Muslim world in the last fifteen years, the rate has fallen two to three times faster: Iran by six children per woman, Turkey by five, Pakistan by a little more than three, and Egypt and Indonesia both by four.

The few Muslim pockets retaining fertility are those with higher illiteracy. Another factor is religious practice—more frequent attendance at the mosque equals higher fertility. In short, they retain high fertility if they remain in a traditional Muslim world and have not entered the modern world. But remaining outside the modern world also means being unable to employ and feed the population. And that’s a serious problem, but it’s worse for those with higher literacy: Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria. There the lack of children means the lack of hope for a future.

Goldman warns, “Whereas Europe tends toward pacifism because it knows it has nothing to gain from aggression, Iran tends toward belligerence because it knows it has nothing to lose” (p. 7).

I am disturbed that higher literacy tends to correlate with lower fertility. Education is a good thing, in itself. So the other factor, faith, must also be significant. In just about all the ways you can think of “faith,” Goldman says, “Demographic winter arises from a crisis of faith” (p. 16): loss of adherence to a specific religion, loss of faith in one’s culture, loss in faith in personal or national purpose and value.

We’ll focus more on faith in the next couple of posts. But there’s one more factor to look at regarding demographic demise: economics. Somewhere during the past century children changed from being an economic asset to being a cost. Some of this is a shift from rural farm labor to urban labor.

We used to ask questions like, “How many children do I need to help me work and then support me in my elderly years?” The answer on a subsistence farm is five. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when life expectancy was lower, that was equal to the number needed to keep the population stable. And it was how many children women bore in 1950, when 70% of the world lived in farming communities. In 1800 90% of Americans lived on farms, and women bore an average of seven children. By 1900 only 50% lived on farms, and fertility had fallen to four children per woman. In 2000 US fertility dropped to two.

People have stopped thinking of children as an economic asset. We don’t use them for child labor, and we don’t expect them to directly care for us in our old age—that has shifted to a collective care. In other words, our children pay a rising portion of their wages to the government, which doles out elderly care as it sees fit. So there is a disconnect between the number of children an individual has and the amount of care he receives in old age.

The disconnect means there is no incentive to personally have more children. We look at the quarter million dollars it costs to raise a child, and think about whether we would prefer to spend that income on ourselves instead. The only social reason to have children who contribute to collective elderly care is altruism; there is incentive to freeload.

Those who have a “faith” reason for having children, however, still have them. On the individual and national/cultural level, people who believe only in themselves fail to find something worth caring enough about to reach into the future.

We Will Not Comply

The obvious big news of the day was the overwhelming win in Florida for Mitt Romney, across all demographics (particularly high among Hispanics). But the most earth shaking news was from this past weekend: the letter read in Catholic churches on Sunday.

Here’s the background as I understand it. Health and Human Services decided to enforce all Obamacare rules on all employers, including religious entities. What is at issue is a rule, set to take effect August 1^st of this year, requiring almost all private health care plans to cover sterilization, abortifacients (abortion-inducing drugs), and contraception. Only a very limited definition of “churches” allows for exemptions. Non-profits, such as Catholic and other church-affiliated hospitals, schools, and charities don’t meet the exemption.

Back in 2010 the Catholic Church supported Obamacare—a serious mistake, in my opinion. But they did so based on personal promises from Obama that exemptions would be given wherever there could be a violation of conscience. The HHS declaration in January reneged on that bargain. HHS throws out a bone: “You non-profits still have to pay for what we say you have to pay for, but we’ll give you an additional year, all the way till August 1, 2013, to comply. Happy?” [My paraphrase, not a quote.]

The Catholic Church—as the most notable entity in size, but also anyone else whose conscience disallows them to pay for birth prevention or abortion—is not happy with that. “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan (archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops).

Catholics all over the country were read letters written by their leadership in churches Sunday, explaining the situation, explaining the violation of conscience, encouraging civic action to change the law, and stating with great resolve the Catholic Church’s unwillingness to give up religious liberty. In the Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona, Catholics were told to stand united: “We will not—we cannot—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens.”

Sacramento Bishop Jamie Soto wrote on the diocesan website, “This is an alarming matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly. It strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith. The federal government, which claims to be ‘of, by, and for the people,’ has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people—the Catholic population—and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.” He added, “This unjust law cannot stand.”

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo (archbishop of Galveston-Houston) said, “Never before in our US History has the Federal Government forced citizens to directly purchase what violates our beliefs. At issue here… is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for conscience and religious liberty.”

Actually, never before has the Federal Government forced citizens to directly purchase anything. So to do so, the first time, by including something so repugnant to such a large number of Americans, violating the 1st Amendment explicitly, is a particularly painful twist of the knife after already stabbing us in the back.

I am imagining Obama’s confession: “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. Well, not really sinned; I just lied about what I was going to do. Well, not lied, really, I just changed my mind. Well, I didn’t really change my mind; I meant to do this all along. I just said that to appease and get consent, but they knew I didn’t mean it, because this whole government mandate thing only works when everyone is forced to participate. So, I just said what was expedient. No harm, really. I mean, if they just knew as much as I do, they’d see that being forced to pay for abortions is really a protection of women’s rights, and is really the right thing to do. So… About that 'forgive me' thing—that’s not really necessary, because I’m right. So glad we had this chat.”

Obama did this in an election year, with already abysmal approval ratings, and an economy on life support. The numbers by just about every measure are against him. [There’s a good collection of the data in this Sean Trende piece.] Yet he risks losing the sizable, traditionally Democrat, Catholic vote. I cannot come up with a politically savvy reason for this act. So I assume he is violating our first amendment rights of religious freedom (not to mention a number of other violations in Obamacare) because he actually believes, at his core, that forcing his will on us is a good thing.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m praying, as we go through this election year, for truth and clarity, for myself and all voters. Maybe this latest atrocity will help open more eyes to the truth.