Month: October 2001

Some Islamic extremists claim that the United States is doomed because of our cultural degeneration, best exemplified by the general toleration (if not formal legal sanction) of homosexuality and casual sexual relationships. Conservative author and columnist Maggie Gallagher agrees with much of this analysis, claiming that America’s biggest threat is its own internal cultural problems.

Gallagher writes,

Here is my best guess at honest self-examination: The Achilles’ heel of AmerEuropean civilization is our sexual culture, which even to many Americans looks not only deeply destructive, but ugly. Fatherless children, fragmented families, the demotion of sex into a product — these are the surface symptoms of an even deeper problem: a hollowing out of sexual meaning and purpose.

…

Sex has no deep-seated meaning, no public purpose beyond providing an enjoyable set of internal physical or emotional sensations. Sex is a consumer good. People who believe this end up having unstable marriages, fragmented families or no families at all.

Clearly social institutions still lag the advent of effective birth control and the ensuing sexual revolution it made possible, but to suggest that American and European civilizations are tottering on the edge of internal collapse is stretching this point into absurdity.

For Gallagher, the transformation of sex ties into another concern of conservative thinkers — the so called “depopulation bomb.” The 20th century saw a massive increase in the world’s population that affected pretty much every country of the world. Toward the end of the 20th century, however, the population of developed countries in Europe began to level off and, in countries such as Spain and Italy, the population actually began to decline. Today, the United States is the only developed nation whose population is still increasing, and a good deal of that increase is due to America’s relatively liberal immigration policies.

But in the developing world, population continues to grow, albeit at rates that continue to slow year by year. Some conservative columnists see an outright disaster in this trend of population decline in the developed world combined with large population increases in the developing world. Gallagher cites historian Paul Johnson who believes that the differing population growth rates of Islamic and Christian countries will inevitably lead to a clash between the two blocs.

Gallagher endorses this position, writing that,

For hundreds of years, traditional Islam has failed to produce a society that is attractive: regimes of secular corruption alternate with regimes of religious repression. But Islam remains a successful civilization because it fulfills the two minimum functions any culture must: It channels intense social energy of individuals into the two great sacrifices of self: war and babies. The children in Islamic societies suffer, and the women even more. But though individuals suffer, the family system itself works. The society perpetuates itself. …

The way forward is never the way back. Still, up until about 1970, Western civilization combined democracy, freedom, capitalism and neighborliness with a functioning family system. Who can now say the same?

This claim is even more absurd. Note that Gallagher first derides Americans and Europeans for not making necessary sacrifices for babies, but fails to note that many of the Muslim states she is referring to have dramatically failed their infants and children, with childhood mortality rates and other measures that would be considered intolerable if they persisted in the United States.

Similarly, while Gallagher claims that Islamic societies are mo re successful at perpetuating themselves, she forgets to mention that one of the things that Muslim extremists despise about the West is its culture that is steamrolling over traditional Islamic values, just as it steamrolled traditional Christian values. The emergence of Islamic extremism is simply the latest rebellion against the strongly individualist ideology that originated in the West and has been sweeping the globe over the past few centuries.

Source:

The Demographic Bomb. Maggie Gallagher, Yahoo!.Com, October 15, 2001.