I found “It’s the Demography, Stupid
via Arts & Letters Daily. The author argues that the importance of Western civilisation / liberal democracy is in decline in the world, and Muslims will be the new dominant group. A few decades from now Muslims will make up the majority of the population in Western European countries, and on a global scale “the Muslim world” will outnumber “the developed world”, due to differences in birth rates. As a result, society in those countries will also be increasingly dominated by Muslim values.

It’s an opinion piece (in the Wall Street Journal), so one shouldn’t have too high expectations regarding balanced views or supporting facts, and indeed the whole thing reads more like a rant than anything else. But one part caught my interest: his argument that the weakness of Western culture is its lack of confidence in itself. The notion of tolerance is sometimes being pushed to such extremes that it isn’t even acceptable to be intolerant of intolerance; “diversity” is taken to mean that every opinion is allowed, even those that violate the basic precepts of democracy. Saying that our way is better, on the other hand, is seen as unjust Western domination.

The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens – from terrorism to tsunamis – can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”

What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture?

Permanence is the illusion of every age. […] so-called post-Christian civilizations – as a prominent EU official described his continent to me – are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining “the great majority” in “the unseen world.” But if secularism’s starting point is that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it’s ever had.


Yes, I’m reading and writing blog posts at work… I’ve got a piece of long-running code – several, in fact – and while one of those is running, it takes up most of the resources on my PC, so simple reading / writing is about all I can do while I wait.