Our imploding demographics

"Which country is presently experiencing the most rapid rate of fertility decline ever recorded in world history? I’d love to draw out the suspense, but will cut to the chase: Iran. A lot must be going on beneath the surface when the total fertility rate in this Muslim country has fallen to a very European-like 1.5 children per woman. ...

St. Augustine felt that “in order to discover the character of any people, we only have to observe what they love,” his explanation for the fall of Rome or, indeed, for any nation. Goldman offers approvingly: “peoples fail because they love the wrong things.”...

Goldman’s analysis is more than a deft admixture of statistics and geopolitical considerations. In ways that open new horizons of thought, even for those already sympathetic to his arguments, he gets to the heart of the matter: the spiritual undercurrents of population implosion."

The Fall of Rome by Thomas Cole

  These gems are from the cool site the Catholic thing in an article titled Goldman on Dying Civilizations By Matthew Hanley. He reviews a book that I would love to read. I love demographics. And I love when they are examined with religion and cultural trends in mind. The "spiritual undercurrents" at the root of the West's population implosion are something that seems so obvious to us "spiritual" types, but are rarely talked about by the culture at large. I am no wide-eyed doomsday type, but lets face it, western culture has undergone rapid and catastrophic changes in it's demographics that simply will have a huge effect withing this century. For us Catholics who obey the Church, we will be riding some wild waves in the coming century as the zombie culture around us continue to fragment and dissolve not only spiritually and culturally, but demographically.