High Grade Analysis of Islam in the World.

Note: Niall Ferguson is a British Professor at Harvard University.Stephen Crittenden is the presenter of Radio Religion at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney.

This is part of an interview given in March 2006.






Stephen Crittenden: Niall, I want to get back to demographics. Is demographic decline necessarily a sign of decadence and collapse?

Niall Ferguson: Well not necessarily, and I think one shouldn’t equate these things, but it is of course pretty hard to separate out from - let’s call it the balance of power. I mean shifts in global population have big implications. In 1950, there were three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. Well, by 1995 the population of Iran was bigger than that of Britain; by 2050 it will be 50% larger than Britain. It would be a fantasy to pretend that this didn’t matter. Extraordinarily high birthrates of societies like Iran are going to have profound geopolitical consequences. We really shouldn’t delude ourselves about that. It’s funny how some people recognise very clearly the importance of demographics because they’re facing it, so to speak, day to day, eyeball to eyeball. Israelis understand this because as Ariel Sharon realised in the final part of his career, demographics made it absolutely impossible for Israel to sustain its position in the occupied territories. Indeed it’s going to be hard for Israel to sustain its position per se as the number of Palestinians or the number of Arabs, non-Jews inside Israel itself, begins gradually to rise to be equal to the number of Jews. So when you’re confronted with these demographic shifts so to speak, in your own street, you very quickly realise how much they matter. It’s easy for people on enclaves of relative prosperity, I can’t resist mentioning Cambridge, Massachusetts as one of these – to pretend that this isn’t going on, because we’re not living it.

Stephen Crittenden: Right. You make a very interesting point in relation to Iran in this respect. Military historians sometimes make the argument that when a leader like say Napoleon has a big enough cohort of soldiers, he has to go to war to give them something to do. And you make a similar point about Iran. You talk about the extraordinary surplus of young men and you say that they represent a generation which is ready to fight.

Niall Ferguson: Well Iran had an amazing population boom in the wake of its revolution, and the war it waged with Iraq only fuelled that boom. I mean if you go back just ten years, something like 40% of the population of Iran was aged 14 or younger. This was really quite an extraordinarily youthful society, the very antithesis of West European societies where the younger are a tiny minority increasingly. So this matters, but of course I would be very wary of any deterministic theory that said young societies always go to war. It’s true that in the French Revolution military expansion was a kind of a solution to the problem of unemployed and politically unruly young men, but it’s not an absolutely necessary consequence of society.

Stephen Crittenden: You also make the point of course that Islamic societies like Iran are full of youthful energy, because of this young population. I want to put it to you actually that when you go to places like Libya or Iran or Syria, the people may be young, but that isn’t the image overall. You still have the image of a stagnant backwater where nothing happens because the religion has decreed that nothing can happen.

Niall Ferguson: Well there’s a real tension in Iran between a youthful population and the dead hand of the theocratic state, and that tension manifests itself in sometimes contradictory ways. One of the more puzzling things that emerges when you survey opinion in Islamic countries, is that while they say they hate the United States, they like a lot of things that we tend to associate with American popular culture. And so you have the paradox really of the quasi-Americanised young, say, Palestinian, who might listen to Eminem but then becomes a suicide bomber. And I think this is something that’s really hard to grasp about what’s going on in these societies. If you’re a teenager in the Islamic world, you have a very, almost schizophrenic attitude towards the West. You may be attracted by its pop culture because so many aspects of it are irresistibly cool, but you have a tremendous sense of inferiority and under-achievement in terms of your national culture. And of course economically you’re doing pretty miserably. You may well be unemployed or in a lousy job, and you may think economically, ‘Gosh wouldn’t it be great to go to the Untied States and become part of the most dynamic and wealth-creating society on earth. And at the same time you feel God, how arrogant these Americans are, how I’d like to give them a bloody nose. I think perhaps the inherent tension which is at work here, and it could of course flip either way, I mean in a really happy ending type scenario, ultimately the attraction of the West is just more powerful than the sense of frustration and inferiority that pushes in the other direction. But right now, I don’t feel optimistic, it seems to me that the other tendency is gradually prevailing in conditions of relative economic instability.

Stephen Crittenden: Finally Niall, I want to turn to the issue of the decline of Christian religious faith in the West. You make the point that it’s not just a question of the decline of population, there’s also this decline of religious faith. And at one point you write, ‘Why have Britons lost their historic faith? To be frank, I have no idea, but I do know it matters’.

Niall Ferguson: Yes, it’s one of the least studies and most important questions for modern historians, why organised Christianity, both in terms of observance and in terms of faith, sail off a cliff in Europe sometime in the 1970s, 1980s. And the explanations that have been offered for this phenomenon so far are relatively weak and unconvincing. What’s clear is it’s got nothing to do with economic development because it hasn’t happened in the United States, where Christianity is alive and well in what is a modern, secular society in so many ways. So we have a real puzzle here: why is Christianity dying out in its traditional core heartland, what used to be called Christendom, why are Europeans becoming godless? And it’s such an important question because it makes Europe quite vulnerable (I hesitate to use your term ‘decadent’) but it makes it vulnerable to penetration by –

Stephen Crittenden: I thought it was your term?

Niall Ferguson: I mean to me this is one of the reasons why it’s quite easy for radical Islamists to make inroads in Western Europe because there isn’t in a sense, any religious resistance there. In a secular society where nobody believes in anything terribly much except the next shopping spree, it’s really quite easy to recruit people to radical, monotheistic positions. It’s just that the monotheism that’s making the running at the moment is Islam, rather than Christianity.

Stephen Crittenden: Some people would argue that all of this de-Christianisation in Europe has created a moral vacuum. I wonder however, whether the majority of people in the population aren’t basically pretty conservative, and whether those Christian values have seeped into the DNA of the culture and that on the whole those values have – we hear lots of alarm bells and alarmist talk - but basically those values are still reasonably intact.

Niall Ferguson: Well of course it’s hard to measure that kind of thing. Clearly religious values cannot become part of the human DNA, that is a metaphor but it doesn’t have any biological reality. What one does see in urban Europe, and it’s really quite striking, is a level of low intensity criminality that wasn’t there before. Social order is not in great shape in the typical West European city, and it’s really quite a striking contrast, when you go to oh, I don’t know, San Antonio, Texas.

Stephen Crittenden: And as an economic historian, is your sense that the reasons for that are not economic? That they really are, if you like, civilisational?

Niall Ferguson: I think there’s no question there’s a connection between religion and economic and social behaviour. Max Weber was not the first person to make an argument about the relationship between Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. I think more recent work, for example Robert Barrow, my colleague here at Harvard, has done some very interesting work on the relationship between religious belief, religious observance and social order and economic behaviour, and it’s actually quite striking, there do seem to be some important correlations here. I myself, although I was not brought up in a religious household, and I suppose if I were pressed, would have to admit to being a kind of incurable atheist, I’m nevertheless strongly convinced that religion performs important social functions in the transmission say, of ethical values between generations, and that a society that does away with it, that ceases to engage in any kind of formal religious instruction, is a society that’s likely to be less good at maintaining social order than one which maintains a measure of religious faith and observance. And that is based purely on historical observation. The experiments with atheism as the basis for political order, say in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, did not produce happy results. So I think one really does away with Christianity, or indeed one does away with God at one’s peril. Human beings do seem to behave better when they have some sense of moral authority in the world, and indeed some kind of formal system for inculcating good ethical behaviour.



Comment: The best comment on these words by Professor Ferguson would be for readers to send them to the persons on your email list.

Australia will need to strengthen its demographic base with persons who are part of Western civilization; supporters of it, and opposed to replacing it with inferior structures. Race has nothing to do with this, but religion most certainly does.