How Civilizations Die - Book 15

Warning! The subject matter in this review is controversial!

Whoever has the most babies, wins! I have said that somewhat jokingly in debates over contraception, abortion and gay marriage. I'm socially conservative about these matters, but when I say that line, it usually kind of startles the other person, at least momentarily. The point I'm trying to make is that after one is done contracepting, aborting and exalting homosexual sex, the people who actually have babies will be taking over the world. Those would be the quiverful Christians, orthodox Catholics, Mormons and fundamentalist Muslims. People who are social liberals focus on 'rights' to the point where they can't see the forest for the trees. That's because they have so divorced sex from procreation they don't even see the two as connected anymore! I never knew if my own personal conclusions panned out in reality, except that I occasionally read about how Europeans are below replacement levels or that the Russians are begging people to have babies because they fear that in a few generations, their civilzation will be gone. So I was intrigued when I cam across this book, How Civilizations Die; And Why Islam is Dying too.

The author is David Goldman, an economist, someone I'd never heard of before (which isn't saying much since I am very ignorant about such things!) who apparently has made a name for himself in conservative circles under the pseudonym Spengler. He apparently was a major force behind the rise of The Asian Times for a period.

Since I don't know diddly squat about economics and demographics, I found all the statistics and number crunching and projections rather baffling. I have no way to really critique what the author asserts. However, I can understand what his premise is and that he is using all these stats to buoy up his predictions.

Goldman's premise is that civilizatons die when they decide not to produce enough children to continue their own culture. This decline in population usually follows the pattern where religious belief has fallen and a secular culture has arisen. European countries exhibit this pattern. Since most European countries are not reproducing enough children, this will lead to all kinds of horrible economic problems because you don't have enough workers, tax payers, etc to keep a country going. Not to mention the loss of that civilzation's culture. As I said, I've heard this particular viewpoint before.

What is surprising is that Goldman cites numbers that show a very sharp decrease in births in major Muslim countries. He specifically talks about countries like Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey. He goes on to analyze in great detail each country's particular plight. In Iran for example, the birth decline has been happening ever since the Shah in his attempt to secularize Iran and bring it up to compete with the modern West, focused on educating women. Turns out there is a direct correlation, pretty much everywhere, that the more women are educated the less children they have. This makes sense because if a woman is busy getting a degree, it is hard to be bearing children at the same time. But even after the Ayahtollah came back into power and imposed a theocracy on Iran, birthrates continued to decline and drug abuse, alcoholism, and prostitution, especially with the upper class (!) increased. Apparently, Iran has this thin layer of theocracy at the top, but everyone else is disillusioned by the oppression and has basically given up hope. Having children means you are invested in the success of your country/culture. Not having children means something has gone terribly wrong. Goldman goes through each country citing statistic after statistic to illustrate his point. And even further, countries that see themselves on the brink of extinction, as these dramatically falling birthrates play out into reality, means desperate nations willing to take out their 'enemies' as they go down themselves. So this fear of disappearing makes nations more unstable and more willing to do irrational and scary things like bomb everybody else into nuclear annihilation.

Goldman talks about the signifigance of religion in countries which do have more children, like Israel and the U.S. Goldman is a religious Jew and very pro-Israel. He's also very pro U.S. He analyzes both in light of what he considers to be the saving grace (if I may express it that way!) of the Judeo-Christian view of sacrifice and relationship with God vs. Islam's view of sacrifice and relationship with Allah. Of course, he sees Islam has being defective in these regards. Goldman thinks that Islam can not withstand the onslaught of modernity the way that Jews and Christians can. He goes into detail about the Koran and the cultural perspective it creates that makes it so brittle. In fact, the author really delves deeply into history itself, studying the decline of various civilizatons in the past. The reason why Greece fell is because it stopped reproducing enough people to support the armies it needed. The culture of pedestry and the idea that children belonged to the state (as in Sparta) both helped the decline in population. The reason why the Roman empire fell to hordes of Barbarians was because of the huge reliance on slavery and the cultural disincentives to produce many children. At the time, Romans were into homosexuality, infantcide, abortion. The rise of Christians and their rejection of these things, contributed to their growth in numbers. Of course, disease and warfare played a bit part too.

Goldman traces the decline of Europe's population back to the Thirty Years War and the rise of Nationalism. This is where he kind of loses me. I think I wasn't reading closely enough so I didn't quite get the connection. I feel the need to go back and reread this portion of the book. I keep telling my husband, whose degree is in economics and who loves statistics and graph charts, I want him to read the whole book so I can discuss it with him. I just felt like I missed so much in the book due to my own ignorance.

For me the elephant in the room for this book is the fact that the Earth has more people on it than ever before! While certain civilizations are on the decline, to little ole me, that pattern of rise and fall of various populations is probably pretty natural over the millenia of existence. I don't feel the need to panic quite so much. Perhaps this is because I'm Catholic rather than Jewish. Jews have always have to fight against possible extinction. That is the whole history of their people! However, again just for me personally, the best things about Western Civilization, whether it is Ancient Hebrew teachings, Greek philosophy, Roman justice, Medieval theology or Renaissance art is that it is all contained in the history, culture and teachings of the Catholic Church. If that Church is increasing in Africa and South America (which it is), then the world will be fine. The leadership might shift but I don't see annihilation, at least not due to decreasing population in the West, as a threat.

Goldman has great hopes for both Israel and the U.S. because these two Western nations are still having enough children. There were many dire predictions that Israelis would be outnumbered in time because the Muslims around them were having more children. Goldman quotes Arafat as saying that his greatest weapon is the Muslim womb. However, this has not happened. Births are actually decreasing in the Muslim world and the Israelis are having more children. In fact Orthodox Jews have the most children anywhere! By virtue of this fact, the Orthodox population is growing at a much faster rate than other types of Jews. The group that reproduces the least is the secular, liberal Jew.

While secular culture is rising in the U.S. there is still a solid portion of the population who cling to religious beliefs and these people are having enough children to keep our civilization going. I would say that Obama's policies of trying to make contraception and abortion so available is a scary development, but it jives exactly with the secular/religious divide on population. So in the end, I'm hopeful, because socially liberal people will simply not have enough children to continue to be a dominating force, once the baby boomers have passed away. Instead all those big families with lots of kids, and these by far tend to be religious, will eventually rise to dominance. I actually know at least three families where the mother is pro-choice and very socially liberal and yet these families do have at least 4 kids. The moms simply liked being moms so it was their 'choice' to have a 'big' family. However, I know a lot more conservative families that have six or more kids, so just from my own anecdotal sampling, I think Goldman is on to something.

Goldman is a really good writer. Throughout the book, he sprinkles witty aphorisms which he calls Spengler's Laws. This somehow reminded me a bit of G.K. Chesterton. The other thing that impressed me is just how smart Goldman must be! Apparently, not only is he great with numbers when it comes to finance and economics, but he also is fluent in a few languages and almost got a Ph.d in Music Theory! He also obviously knows his history very well. I read several reviews about this book on Amazon and someone called him a polymath. Yep! He is one smart guy! His writing isn't arrogant at all or anything like that, but just the depth of analysis of the material and the expanse of his knowledge is impressive.

All in all, I enjoyed this book. It was a bit over my head because of my own ignorance, but what I could glean from it was illuminating. I'd like to read it again, just to get a better handle on the subject matter.

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove - Book 14

It took me a long time to get into this book. I was about half way through before the author stopped getting on my nerves so badly. I had been so excited when I impulse-bought it. I'm on this homemaking kick and the idea of looking historically at how women have been cooking meals since way back when sounded wonderful! I love old cookbooks. I love doing things like going to colonial re-enactment parks and examining everything in the kitchen. But this book proved to be rather disappointing. The problem is the author's perspective struck me as superficial and her tone as preachy. And instead of giving in depth history in an engaging but objective way (like other popular historians) she kept injecting her own reactions and feelings. I really didn't care for her writing style. It struck me as being a sort of popular magazine kind of writing that doesn't do serious history well. This book won the James Beard Foundation Award (whatever that is; I recognize Beard's name as a big one in the cooking world). What kept me going is my interest in the topic Schenone was covering. And while I learned some interesting new bits of information, most of it was a survey of things I already knew. It was nice to have all the info packaged together in chronological order, though.

The book began all right. In the Preface, Schenone talks about her family heritage and what inspired her to want to write the book. All the personal stuff seemed appropriate there. The first chapter however, instead of being solid history, is Schenone's imagined understanding of 'All Woman', that is actually what the author calls the prehistoric women ancestors of North America. Everything is wildly romanticized in such a policitally correct way, it is nauseating. (In fact, I checked the reviews of this book on Amazon and while a lot of people gave it good reviews, some really panned it. And one person did mention how nausating All Woman was! Bingo! Exactly my reaction!) Then we move on to Native Americans and the paradise the women lived in, apparently, before the coming of the evil Europeans. I know that many, many terrible things were done to the Native Americans and that the appearance of the European settlers tolled the death knell for their culture in many terrible and profound ways, but Schenone's priggish lecturing on this history, instead of letting the history speak for itself, grated on my nerves to the point that I had to keep putting the book down. Instead of feeling sympathetic, I just felt annoyed. Here's the problem, I think. Schenone, instead of writing history that lets the reader process, evaluate and empathize, tends to emote her own judgemental opinions. In one line that inadvertantly made me laugh out loud (very inappropriately so!) she says, when talking about women raising funds for charity through church cookbooks, "I sadly report that the ladies of the Presbyterian Church of Houston did not include any recipes from the Mexicans or Indians who had lived there long before them." This is not a historian who tries to understand the mindset of those she studies. She looks back into history clucking her tongue and shaking her head over how blind and ignorant they were in the past. Unless this clucking wouldn't be politically correct. Then she practically gets all rhapsodic on you!


Perhaps if she was a better writer and historian, she could get away with interjecting her own opinion, but she is neither, and so she takes something that could be a serious study and laces it with her own personal reactions and p.c. self-righteousness. What's ironic is that Schenone decries this very sort of thing in the writing of Victorian cookbook authors who advised woman on how to run their households and maintain their family's health. Excuse me. You might have heard my loud derisive snort when I read Schenone's line about how Catharine Beecher was a prudish writer who annoyed Schenone. All I could think was: "Well, you're really bugging me, lady!" Anyway, am I reading Schenone's personal diary here or am I reading a history of women cooking in America?

Another thing I found annoying was the lack of footnotes. Schenone does have a bibligraphy for each chapter at the end of the book, but she doesn't tie assertions she makes to any authority. For example, at one point she states that 'rice was worshipped' in the Carolinas when rice plantations were at their peak. I doubt very much that rice was worshipped like the Native Americans might have worshipped corn or something. She means that production of rice was vital to the economy of that place and era. She uses that gushy word 'worship' though. She could have cited statements made by the plantation owners about how important rice was, maybe waxing poetic about its glory. That would have felt a bit more scholarly, to my mind. But there's nary a footnote anywhere to support the many statements of that sort Schenone is so prone to making.

About halfway through the book, I finally could ignore the author's tone and just read for the history content. Maybe her writing got better at that point. But again, I felt rather disappointed because there wasn't a whole lot of new material to me. I had not been aware of the food riots of 1917, but everything else was rather a rehash. In fact the last part of the book began to cover the same territory as Radical Homemaker but didn't go nearly as in depth or come to any sort of conclusion.

The thing that saves this book is that it is loaded with lots of drawings, paintings, posters, cookbook covers, advertisements, and photos of women at work preparing food. She also includes excerpts from letters, articles and books that reflect on women and their roles as cooks. These are fascinating. Schonere includes many recipes from different traditions and old cookbooks. These also are wonderful. The book is very visually enticing with big illustrations and recipes dominating the pages.

To me, this book is the kind that you might pick up and glance through for about 20 minutes while browsing at Barnes and Noble. That's all it is worth. Don't bother to buy it, though.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.