Gee’s Reviews > How Civilizations Die > Status Update

It appears that Germans and Japanese don’t breed in captivity. Having lost their Christianity to nationalism, and lost their nationalism to losing, the Europeans do not appear to want to be much of anything. Although the United States judiciously kept Japan’s Emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne, the Japanese have lost almost all connection to the Buddhist and Shinto religion of their past

Greek geographer and historian Strabo described Greece as “a land entirely deserted; the depopulation begun since long continues. Roman soldiers camp in abandoned houses; Athens is populated by statues.” Plutarch observed that “one would no longer find in Greece 3,000 hoplites [heavy infantrymen].”

What the universal practice of cousin marriage in the Muslim world makes clear, though, is the primacy of blood ties over the mere abstraction of Islamic universality. We observe the same power hierarchy in the practice of consanguineous marriage as in the matter of wife-beating: the Koran establishes the family as a miniature state with the paterfamilias as miniature caliph

Muslim culture is tribalism elevated to a universal principle. Islam presents itself as a universal religion, rising above tribe and nation. But in theology as well as practice, Islam sanctifies the petty tyranny of tribal society. This emerges most clearly in the Koran’s defense of wife-beating in Sura 4:34.

Spengler’s Universal Law #8: Wars are won by destroying the enemy’s will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women. The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II.

Literacy is the threshold that separates traditional society from modernity. The moment Muslims learn to read, family size falls below replacement. Literacy explains about 60 percent of the fertility differential across the Muslim world

Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the hope of immortality—not merely through genetic transmission but through inter-generational communication.
In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it