From time to time on Sunday mornings we'll review books Rantburg regulars might find interesting. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, grab a pastry and enjoy.
The Mods
By lotpCivilizations die. Sometimes they disappear -- these days nobody except a few historians knows or cares about the Hittites. Other times they collapse more slowly, unevenly, hints of their prior greatness strewn about like the armless statues and ruined temples that still remain from the Roman empire, or the Greek city states before them. But quickly or slowly, completely or with painful disintegration over time, civilizations die amid suffering, chaos and loss. And on occasion, several of them die at the same time.
In two recent books - It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You and How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too), both released this year - David Goldman argues that we are seeing the collapse of multiple civilizations and cultures today. This much is not news to most Rantburg readers, although the extent to which it is true has been significantly underplayed or ignored by our media, academics and most political leaders.
More controversially, Goldman argues that collapse is being chosen by these societies, as witnessed by deep and irreversible demographic changes.
And more controversially still, he argues that the reason for this choice is neither economic/technical nor military, but rather spiritual.
It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You is a collection of articles Goldman wrote as 'Spengler', sometimes reworked. The book is best read slowly. The chapters range over a wide variety of topics, with a few closely argued theses that tie them together. Rantburg regulars might want to savor (and ponder) Goldman's chapters on Tolkien's Ring trilogy as a deliberate answer to the Ring cycle of Wagner, on Wagner's deliberate destruction of Sacred Time in music, or the chapter on the equivalent destruction of meaning in modern art (titled, delightfully, "Admit it - you really hate modern art"). Others here might want especially to engage with Goldman's discussion of the American Civil War as a sacred war, or his closely reasoned rejection of Leo Strauss and neo-conservatism.
The heart of the book, however, is the lens through which Goldman sees these and other cultural phenomena. At root, he argues, there are only two attitudes towards life: paganism, with its (acknowledged or implicit) fear of death and the resulting desperate desire to propitiate a hostile universe, or faith that transcends the terror of individual death through membership in a community vouchsafed by the Creator. The 19th and 20th century history of Europe is precisely a rejection of Christianity's promise of such membership in order to once again embrace paganism -- explicitly in Wagner, philosophically in e.g. the existentialist philosophers. To embrace paganism is, at heart, to embrace despair.
Goldman asserts that there are only two "communities of blood" that can bring us out of pagan despair. The first community is made so literally by shared blood and is God's chosen people, i.e. the Jews. Goldman is Jewish by birth and returned to active worship as an adult. The second such community is Christianity, entry into which is made possible by the shedding of blood. In each case, faith that the community is called and protected by the Creator gives meaning to history, overcomes fear of death and makes the future of the community worth investing in -- or dying to protect.
Studies show that The United States and Israel produce the most babies and the most entrepreneurs per capita in the industrial world and are also the only two industrial countries in which religious faith still occupies the public square. ... There is a deep affinity among love of life, risk-friendliness, entrepreneurship and religious faith.
It is no accident, Goldman believes, that only in the Jewish state of Israel and "the last Christian nation" (the US), will current childbirth rates sustain long term demographic growth. In both Europe and the Islamic world childbirth rates are plummeting. Both the US and Israel were founded in the belief that they were called to bear a special destiny in response to God's will and Word. Only in these two nations, and perhaps among the growing churches of the global south, is despair (often combined with egocentric "will to power") rejected in favor of a faith which makes culture, society and the future worth investing in.
I'll postpone discussing Goldman's critique of Islam as paganism, and his analysis of the response of Western elites to Islamism, until next week's review of The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis by Robert Reilly. For now I'd like to close with a short discussion of Goldman's second book this year, namely How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). Here Goldman lays out in detail the demographic trends that he believes are driving both the self-extinction of Europe and also -- less well recognized -- the collapse of impoverished Islamic societies.
Goldman argues that we know of three times in history when multiple civilizations collapsed at once. We are, he says, in the midst of a fourth, with Europe and Islam at its center.
Will the fourth great extinction of nations sweep Israel and the US up in the destruction? Prediction is difficult, especially about the future. But Goldman argues that there is good reason to hope that these nations, founded at their core on faith, may outlast all the others if they re-affirm the morality of their own interests and of their two unique, inter-related identities.
Taken together, these two books offer a good deal to ponder and perhaps to debate. Goldman is well read, but more to the point is a serious thinker who lays out a deep, incisive and challenging analysis of the crisis we are living within. Not all, however, will find his core thesis palatable.
Next time: How Islam came close to dialogue with the West, how it closed its doors to critical thought, and how Islamicists are now in a dead-end trap from which despair is the only way forward.