A New Dark Age? 
By Robert Mayanrd

According to a WCAX news report, it looks like "Climate Change" is at the top of the Democrats agenda again this year. We all remember how they ran in 2006 on the issue of affordability, but pulled a bait and switch once the session started and put issues like "Climate Change" and Impeachment at the top of the agenda. For now, I will let others chime in on how out of whack such priorities are when Vermont is headed for a fiscal train wreck.

If we are to insist that Vermont interject itself into national and international issues as a priority, why not take on a real issue? I have previously written about how the so-called man-made "Global Warming"/"Climate Change" claim is being pumped up with a lot of hot air. For that matter, so has John McClaughry and the Ethan Allen Institute. Instead of invoking a weakly supported theory as an excuse to control and regulate the entire global economy, perhaps we should examine the long term threat of fanatical Islam to our civilization.

In a book entitled "America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It", Mark Steyn points how just how big a threat to our civilization Radical Islam could become. At first glance this notion seems preposterous. We represent the most advanced civilization that the world has ever known, while radical Islam is stuck in primitive squalor. In the short run, this may seem so, but it is the long term trend which has already begun that Mr. Steyn is warning us of. The first part of the problem is one of demographics. The developed world is aging rapidly and not reproducing at a rate needed for continued growth. At the same time, the Islamic world is reproducing at a rate far above replacement level. America is about in the middle with a birth rate barely above replacement level. The result of this phenomenon is a rapidly changing demographic balance. In 1970 the developed nations made up 30 percent of the global population and the Muslim world made up 15 percent. That was a 2 to 1 difference. By 2000, a mere 30 years later, there was parity at about 20 percent each. If anything this trend seems to be accelerating.

The second issue is the level of confidence in one’s civilization. While we in the west are mired in nihilism, multicultural relativism and self-doubt, radical Muslims have a fanatical devotion to spreading their cause. This gives them a psychological strength that the welfare state societies of much of the developed world can not hope to match. 

These two factors are not unrelated. In fact, the first can be seen as a symptom of the latter. People who do not have confidence in their culture and the future, or have a sense of cause, are not likely to reproduce in high numbers. A big part of our problem is the welfare state and its entitlement mentality. As the state assumes the responsibilities of being an adult and caring for oneself and one’s family, a moral and psychological regression occurs in the people as they jettison such responsibilities. Our survival instincts become weak as we become like children waiting for someone to take care of us.

When Osama Bin Laden remarked that the Arab world will follow the "strong horse", he was not talking about military strength. He was talking about a strength of will, which he sees as gone among the west in general and America in particular. Indeed, some Islamic thinkers believe that they can achieve their goal of imposing a worldwide rule of a Caliphate under Islamic Law without resorting to terrorism. In fact, they view terrorism and violence as counter productive as it could wake the west up from our moral slumber and fill us with a sense of purpose. Why risk this when they see the developed world in a demographic and cultural decline while they are ascendant.

At this point one may ask whether it really is a matter of the survival of civilization if radical Islam does emerge victorious. After all, wasn’t Islam once the inspiration of an advanced and flourishing civilization? It is true that the territory now controlled by Islamic nations was once a vibrant and flourishing civilization. The problem is that it was so a long time before Islam arrived on the scene. When the Arab tribes invaded the lands of the eastern half of the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire, they took control of what was then the most advanced civilization of the day. The inhabitants of that civilization, Assyrian Christian, Byzantine Christian, Persian, Jew, etc., translated the Greeks works of Plato and Aristotle into Arabic for the new rulers and still engaged in research and cultural exploration. This civilization still flourished for centuries. See "What Arab Civilization?" 

Once these communities ceased to flourish and were reduced to a small minority in the lands that they one were the majority, this part of the world fell into a collapse of civilization from which it has never recovered. No matter which measure of civilization is used, the Islamic world ranks among the least advanced parts of the globe. From the development of the arts and science, to human rights, to economic progress the stagnation of this part of the world is staggering and the human misery it has created tragic. Steyn sees the coming of a global dark age of human misery ahead if radical Islam is able to emerge victorious in its cause. He sees America as the only obstacle in its way. In my next article, I will explore a trend that Mr. Steyn may have over looked and examine whether it to may be a mitigating factor in staving off such a dark age.
 

Robert Maynard is the Editor of the True North website