Late Night Laugh: Putin On The Ritz
June 30, 2008
It should be obvious that self help isn’t helping…
When Hassan Bakhtiar couldn’t find a job last year, his mother told him to pray and read the Quran.
Instead, the 25-year-old aerospace engineer dropped in on a packed appearance by Alireza Azmandian, Iran’s most famous motivational speaker and self-help guru. Now, he meditates by staring at a flickering candle and chants Mr. Azmandian’s inspirational catch phrases…
In other Middle East countries with similar demographics, like Egypt and Turkey, young people are increasingly turning back to their Muslim identity for solace. But Iran’s mostly well-educated youth are more likely to seek other remedies — such as self-help seminars, New Age theories, meditation and yoga.
“The regime presumed it could mold the society into whatever shape and form it wanted, but we are seeing the opposite take place,” says sociologist Hamid Reza Jalalipour. The younger generation is “turning away from conventional religion and tradition…”
Can water critics be far behind?
In Tokyo and Paris, you can now spend $5 a glass on special beverages selected by a professional sommelier.
Nothing surprising there, except the beverages being served are different brands of bottled water — with various “flavors” supposedly matched to different foods.
Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as “concentrated water” — at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to . . . water.
And from Tennessee, a company named BlingH2O — whose marketing imagery features a mostly nude model improbably balancing a bottle of water between her heel and her hip — is retailing its water at $40 for 750 milliliters, with special-edition bottles going for $480 — more than a million times the price of the liquid that comes from your tap.
The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.
In Tokyo and Paris, you can now spend $5 a glass on special beverages selected by a professional sommelier.
Nothing surprising there, except the beverages being served are different brands of bottled water — with various “flavors” supposedly matched to different foods.
Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as “concentrated water” — at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to . . . water.
And from Tennessee, a company named BlingH2O — whose marketing imagery features a mostly nude model improbably balancing a bottle of water between her heel and her hip — is retailing its water at $40 for 750 milliliters, with special-edition bottles going for $480 — more than a million times the price of the liquid that comes from your tap.
The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.
Happy Birthday, you 8 year old Nazi:
A school has confiscated an 8-year-old boy’s birthday party invitations after they were handed out during class because it said it had a duty to ensure against discrimination.
The boy handed out invitations to classmates at his school in Lund, southern Sweden, but did not invite two boys because they were not his friends, the Sydsvenskan newspaper reported earlier this week.
The school, 360 miles south of Stockholm, confiscated all the invitations, saying it objected because it had a duty to ensure against discrimination.
The report on Friday did not name the boy or his family. It said the boy’s father has filed a complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman.
The father told the newspaper that the two classmates were not invited because one had bullied his son and the other had not invited his son to the classmate’s birthday party.
“My son has taken it very hard,” the father told Sydsvenskan of the school’s decision. “It’s like taking someone’s mail.”
The parliamentary ombudsman has asked the school board to decide on the issue before Sept. 8.
Pot-holed roads, crumbling schools, litter-strewn streets – there’s no shortage of problem areas crying out for their attention.
But councils believe they have found a better use for their money: reducing the number of holes in chip shop salt shakers.
Research has suggested that slashing the holes from the traditional 17 to five could cut the amount people sprinkle on their food by more than half.
And so at least six councils have ordered five-hole shakers – at taxpayers’ expense – and begun giving them away to chip shops and takeaways in their areas.
Leading the way has been Gateshead Council, which spent 15 days researching the subject of salty takeaways before declaring the new five-hole cellars the solution.
Officers collected information from businesses, obtained samples of fish and chips, measured salt content and ‘carried out experiments to determine how the problem of excessive salt being dispensed could be overcome by design’.
They decided that the five-hole pots would reduce the amount of salt being used by more than 60 per cent yet give a ‘visually acceptable sprinkling’ that would satisfy the customer.
The Revenge Of The Shia
June 30, 2008
“…there would be no “total victory” over the Jews and Christians without a “total annihilation” of the Shia, whom he called the secret agents of Islam’s enemies. “If you can’t find any Christians or Jews to kill, vent your wrath against the next available Shia…”
In December 2004, as the United Nations Security Council began to grapple with the challenge of Iran’s nuclear ambitions and as Iraq started its slow topple into civil war, one of the closest and most trusted American allies in the Middle East began to warn publicly of the emergence of a “Shia crescent” in the region. Jordan’s King Abdullah, a Sunni who claims direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad, sounded the alarm that a vast swath of the region, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean and from the oil-rich Caspian Sea to the even richer Persian Gulf, was coming under the sway of the Shia branch of Islam. More ominously, he implied that this looming Shia empire would take its direction from Tehran. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt echoed this warning last year when he said, during an interview on al-Arabiya television, “Most of the Shias are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in.”
Abdullah and Mubarak, two of the most prominent Sunni leaders, have, along with senior Saudi officials, evoked the specter of a new Middle East divided along sectarian lines. It would set the long-downtrodden Shia against their traditional Sunni masters, rulers, and landlords. If the first battlefield was Iraq, the two leaders suggested, the next would be the oil-endowed regions of the Persian Gulf, southern Iraq, and Azerbaijan, where Shia happen to live. In this scenario, the ayatollahs of Shiite Iran could then secure control of the Iraqi, Saudi, and Caspian oil and gas fields by placing them under the protection of their own nuclear arsenal, thus establishing the first Islamic state to achieve great-power status since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.
A glance at the map suggests that this scenario is at least plausible. Although they are a minority of some 150 million in a region of almost 400 million and the larger Islamic community of 1.3 billion, the Shia dominate the region to the east of the Suez Canal. They are a strong majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Yemen, and Bahrain. The Shia now form the largest single Islamic community in Lebanon and cluster along the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. There are substantial Shia minorities in Kuwait (35 percent), Qatar (15–20 percent), the United Arab Emirates (six percent), Pakistan (15 percent), and Afghanistan (15 percent). Since the Alawites, who provide the current ruling dynasty of Syria, are an offshoot of the Shia sect, Jordan’s King Abdullah is only slightly stretching the truth to talk of a Shia crescent running from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut. From his vantage point in Amman, Abdullah’s little kingdom appears encircled, and as he looks eastward, he sees Shia majorities all the way to Pakistan. Watching from Riyadh, the Saudi monarchy may feel secure in the numerical dominance of Sunnis in the kingdom, but its restive Shia subjects are concentrated in the parts of the country where the oil fields lie.
For the first time in centuries, the Shia of the Arab world can taste the prospect of power, while the Sunni are experiencing the bitterness of being overthrown. The Shia of Iraq, long suppressed by the Sunni elite, who cooperated with the Ottoman and British empires, are now in a position to use their numerical majority to dominate the country’s politics. The Shia triumph in Iraq is constrained only by the Sunni resistance, which is fast approaching the dimensions of a full-scale civil war. At the same time, the fierce response of the predominantly Shia Hezbollah of Lebanon to the Israeli attacks of July 2006 has combined with the Shia’s numbers (slightly over 40 percent of Lebanon’s population of four million) and their presence in the government to give them a dominant voice in that Mediterranean state and frontline status in the Arab confrontation with Israel…
In a four-hour anti-Shia sermon, released on the Internet a week before his death in a U.S. bombing raid in June but apparently recorded two months earlier, Zarqawi ran through a list of Shia “betrayals” and cited a number of venomously anti-Shia tracts written by scholars in the fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam. He declared that there would be no “total victory” over the Jews and Christians without a “total annihilation” of the Shia, whom he called the secret agents of Islam’s enemies. “If you can’t find any Christians or Jews to kill, vent your wrath against the next available Shia,” Zarqawi said. He claimed that his fellow terrorists, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, were only pretending to oppose Israel, while in reality their mission was to protect Israel’s northern border. Zarqawi concluded with a formal declaration of war on the Iraqi Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr and his “bastards.” (Large parts of this bizarre and possibly unhinged outburst focused on defending the chastity of the Prophet’s wife Ayesha against Shia slurs, on discussing whether the Ayatollah Khomeini was a pedophile, and on assailing “wicked” Shia clerics who purportedly defended unusual sexual positions.)…
The grisly scenario that lay behind the concerns of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi leaders is that a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq could erupt into a wider Sunni-Shia war across the Arab world, a larger and later version of the Iran-Iraq War that lasted for most of the 1980s and bled, exhausted, and impoverished both countries. The most callous practitioner of realpolitik might see this as preferable to a war between Islam and the West in some lethal rendition of Samuel Huntington’s famous “clash of civilizations.” Such a conflict certainly cannot be ruled out, but the consequences for the region and the world’s oil supply, and even the potential for global suicide if Iran obtains nuclear weapons (or if Pakistan joins the fray), are almost too hideous to contemplate.
… Bush invited to the White House one of the best-known Arab academics and intellectuals, Fouad Ajami, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Ajami tried to counsel the president that the Shia resurgence was a historical process that would prove difficult and probably could not be stopped. In a subsequent meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ajami said, “The idea that the Shia will make their claim on political power in the affairs of the Arab world and that it will be peaceful is not really tenable. It will be a very, very contested political game. And we have to be willing to accept this. And we must not be scared off by what the Jordanians and the Egyptians and others are telling us. . . . We should not be frightened of radical Shiism; we should understand these things on their own terms. We should not jump when someone says to us ‘radical Shiism,’ for one interesting reason—right?—9/11. The 19 who came our way were not Shia. They were good Sunni boys, and we should remind the Arab regimes when they try to frighten us out of our skins that in fact we also have another menace, which is radical Sunnism.”
Ajami made a further point about the kind of social and political change the Shia resurgence could bring to the Arab and Islamic worlds, citing a Kuwaiti Shia friend who had suggested, “If you take Egypt out of the Arab world—and it’s a kind of outlier country, historically, culturally, in every way—there is no Sunni majority in the Arab world. . . . The region becomes a group—a multiplicity of communities and sects, and the place of the Shia in that landscape truly changes. So the region is being redrawn.”
King Abdullah of Jordan, Egypt’s Mubarak, and the Saudi monarchy all have their own very good reasons to protect their current positions in the Arab world and to be alarmed at the changes the new Shia role could bring. The question is whether their anxiety is shared by their own people or simply reflects concern that the empowerment of the Shia implies the empowerment of Iran to the detriment of the Sunni Arab establishment. There is no clear answer. The history of Sunni-Shia and Arab-Persian tensions points one way; but the rallying of Sunni public opinion behind the Shia resistance of southern Lebanon this past summer and the hailing of the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah as the new Saladin, the new pan-Arab hero, point to a different future, in which Arab and Islamic solidarity against Israel will trump the traditional Sunni-Shia enmities. The only safe conclusion is that the political situation is too dynamic and the ethnic and sectarian politics of the region are moving too fast for any easy prediction.
But look at the issue from a perspective that considers the catalytic role that has been played by the two American interventions in Iraq, in the wars of President Bush the elder in 1991 and of his son 12 years later. From the point of view of the Kurds, the 1991 war became—after Saddam Hussein’s postwar repression and the mass flight of refugees into Turkey—a kind of liberation, under the protection of the Anglo-American no-fly zone. The Kurds of northern Iraq enjoyed a regional autonomy that has been consolidated by the war of 2003. And for the Shia, despite the dreadful losses of Saddam Hussein’s repression after 1991 and the deaths by sectarian strife in the last three years, the American interventions have brought about an unprecedented era of empowerment and liberation. This is unlikely to produce the kind of gratitude that would see statues of the two Bushes erected in Kurdish Suleimaniya or in the Shia city of Basra, but the effect of this double liberation on the politics of Iraq and of the region has been revolutionary. The balance of power between Sunni and Shia, and (because of the empowerment of Iran through the departure of its old enemy Saddam Hussein and of the Sunni-dominated Iraq that he represented) between Arab and Persian, has been fundamentally shifted.
In a sense, the Islamic world is undergoing almost simultaneously its Renaissance, its Reformation, and its Enlightenment, and the Shia are living their version of the civil rights movement, all while reeling from the impact of economic and media revolutions. Considered in this light, the emergence of Al Qaeda might be seen as a particularly virulent symptom of this tumultuous Arab transformation and as a response not just to the perceived sins of the West, but also, in the case of Zarqawi, as an extreme Sunni reaction to the Shia resurgence. Of all the tectonic shifts now jarring the Middle East, the rise of the long-subdued Shia promises to be the most potent, and potentially the most destructive.
Shopping for God – Dwelling in a Land of Converts
June 30, 2008
Every conversion is a betrayal, even as we depict it as an act of higher loyalty. When we turn toward God, taking what we believe is the right path, we rationalize the switch as turning toward truth and submitting to the unassailable claims that eternal principlesmust, of necessity, make on our conscience. Here I stand; I can do no other, as Martin Luther put it to Johann von Eck and the Diet of Worms. And that was before he realized what he was getting himself, and Christendom, into.
Yet even as we embrace what we see as the greater good, we are, by definition, turning away from something we held dear from the tradition we were raised in, from ideas we once believed in, from friends, from family, from the tribe. And that rejection often brings conflict and pain, and ought to bring a desire to redeem, if not explain, the unsettling tensions that can accompany one of the most profound decisions in a person’s life. Well, I won’t see you in paradise, a lifelong friend said when I announced that I had converted to Catholicism. My friend is a faithful evangelical whose judgments are not to be dismissed lightly, even though a natural reflex against my disloyalty to what was once our shared tradition surely weighed heavily in her verdict. She has since come to an uneasy peace with my choice, and I suspect the evolution of her beloved Billy Graham on issues of denominational competition he was one of the great eulogizers of Pope John Paul II no doubt eased the way.
Still, more than fifteen years later, that naked confrontation of creeds and emotions continues to disturb my conscience, and to prompt considerations not only of my own religious choice but of our growing national penchant for conversion for continual religious reinvention that seems to mirror our national fascination with makeovers and our almost manic need for constant movement. A pilgrimage is one thing, having the goal of deepening faith through a long and rigorous journey of sanctification. But we are rapidly becoming a society of religious boulevardiers, always on the move, not as itinerant monks who bring our faith with us, but as God-shoppers on the lookout for the best deal. The reality is that conversion does not seem to trouble our nights nearly as much as it should, and to my mind this calls into question the depth of our newfound commitments; it also points to the common societal tendency to gloss over real differences, or, at the other extreme, to exalt combat as the only means to ideological clarity.
In the first scenario, religious conversion amounts to little more than psychotherapy chicken soup that could be served up any number of ways depending on one’s mood. In the second scenario, conversion is just another weapon wielded on the battlefield that is America’s public square today a way to prove that I am right and you are wrong, and wrong about everything, not just religion. Our conversion is affirmed only by demonstrating that our personal choice of what to believe is superior to all other beliefs, including those we ourselves once espoused. Neither rationale the therapeutic or the self-justifying addresses the claims of the religious community we leave or the one we join. The real disloyalty in these cases is to faith itself.
Historically, the ardor for conversion in America is understandable, though its contemporary expression is nothing short of revolutionary. We are a God-loving nation, defined spiritually by our revivalism, as we are politically by our republicanism. We do not want inherited truth any more than we want a hereditary monarchy. Yet sometime in the last few decades the quest for authenticity we were founded, after all, by Puritan pilgrims seeking the true faith got mixed up with our market-based love of reinvention, and thus the conversion industry was born.
In his classic work from 1955, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Will Herberg argued that some 96 percent of Americans continued to identify with the religious traditions they were raised in by and large one of the three religions examined in the book. If there was any significant shifting, it was within these groupings. Stasis characterized the American religious character. Three decades later, one of Herberg’s leading successors in the field, sociologist Robert Wuthnow, showed how much the landscape had changed: By 1985, Wuthnow reported, one-third of Americans had converted to another religion, and most likely the numbers have continued to rise since then. Not only that, but many Americans, in what sociologist Wade Clark Roof has called this generation of seekers, have converted several times.
So determined are Americans to choose their religious destiny that any opinion to the contrary is seen as, well, heresy. I once attended a seminar on Native American religion in which one of the panelists an American Indian was complaining about the appropriation of his traditions by white shamans, a lament that received nods of assent from the largely white crowd. But he elicited an audible gasp when he pointed out that people simply couldn’t choose to become a practitioner of Indian religion. The religion is so bound up with the tribe you are born into and the geographical area where that tribe lives, he explained, that plucked from this context the religion makes no sense. And conversely, it makes no sense for someone to pretend to be part of a world they cannot enter. Needless to say, his listeners were aghast.
What accounts for the shift? There are a number of factors, prominent among them the decline of institutions, the fraying of communal and ethnic bonds, and the rise in religious intermarriage. Once you marry someone from outside your faith or denomination, it becomes increasingly untenable to consign them to even the comfier upper rings of hell. (Mel Gibson, a traditionalist Catholic who has suggested that his Episcopalian wife is destined for perdition, may be exceptional in this regard.)
The increase in immigration has not diluted the predominantly Christian makeup of the nation as much as some contend, but it did significantly expand the menu of choices. Loosed from their bonds of familial and denominational loyalty, Americans have happily availed themselves of these choices the heretical imperative, as Peter Berger has called it. We remain a deeply spiritual, if not especially religious nation; most people feel they have to be something. (A man’s got to believe in something, W.C. Fields said. His punch line was, I believe I’ll have another drink, but the original sentiment still holds true.) In the abstract, this sort of religious freelancing should be a good thing. Sociologists like to differentiate between achieved and ascribed identities, the latter being the religious loyalty that one takes in with mother’s milk, together with the rites and traditions of old-world faiths. Achieved identities are those we discover for ourselves, often as we grow into adulthood.
In his book Paul the Convert, author Alan F. Segal reports that two-thirds of religious conversions are gradual, the result of intellectual and emotional quests, and only one-third are sudden. That kind of slow fermentation should I would think produce a deeper and richer religious faith. Yet the opposite seems typically to be the case, as religious conversion so often looks like spiritual faddism, with questing Americans snapping up all manner of spiritual snake oil and trading it in as soon as they realize they’ve bought just another placebo.
For many who discover a new spiritual home within a long-standing tradition, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency to proclaim their newfound allegiance, but without acquiring a corresponding grounding in the history and beliefs of their faith. That results in what both liberals and conservatives decry as an endemic religious illiteracy in America, or, perhaps worse, a simple lack of religious seriousness.
The opposite tendency, of course, is the more widely noted phenomenon of converts becoming the greatest zealots. Diving into the deep end of the religious pool can be as problematic as skimming the surface, however. William James famously described conversion as the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided or consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy becomes unified and consciously right, superior, and happy. It is a short step from there to triumphalism, and too many converts seem ready to take that step, perhaps in part out of a desire to compensate for their delayed enlightenment by trying to prove that they are purer in their beliefs, more Catholic, one might say, than the pope. This can produce all manner of tragic results, as each day’s news bears witness to.
The more common problem with the zealousness of the converted, I think, is that it is often rooted in a narcissistic desire to be right, which is then camouflaged as a proprietary monopoly on universal truth. One can believe in something that is true without being correct about everything else in one’s life. The humility required by the great religious traditions would never sanction the egotism of identifying one’s personal wishes with the universal truths of the faith. Separating the two is perhaps the greatest spiritual challenge for the deepest religious believers. It is a quest for what Richard Gaillardetz, a Catholic studies professor at the University of Toledo, has called eschatological humility. Eschatological humility, he wrote in Commonweal magazine, treasures divine truth as it is mediated through the received faith of the church but also recognizes that we do not so much possess divine truth as it possesses us.
Along with the penchant for zealotry, the newly converted are often strongly attracted by the idea of a historically grounded religious authenticity. One could argue that this has always been an incentive to, and a justification for, religious conversion. Go to the source for the real thing, we are told, so it’s no surprise that we follow this advice in our thinking about religion.
Several years ago I was invited by a rabbi friend to give a talk at Sabbath services. Naturally, I was a bit daunted by the prospect, especially when the rabbi encouraged me to talk about my experience of swimming the Tiber a story that I figured might be of interest to the audience, but not one pointing to common ground between us. When I had finished my tale of conversion and opened the floor for questions, an elderly woman in the front row shot up her hand and asked, So, you went from being a Protestant to a Catholic. Why didn’t you go all the way and become a Jew?
The line induced laughs, and my somewhat embarrassed rabbi quickly shifted the discussion to other areas. I actually thought it was a good question, perhaps because I recognize in my own psyche the lure of historical verisimilitude, which was certainly one of the factors in my own leap backward, beyond 1517. The motivation to make a clean break is understandable, and an integral part of the appeal of conversion. Islam, in fact, teaches that its newcomers do not convert per se but actually undergo a reversion, that is, a return to the place where we all started, Islam being the default set point of the soul in the Muslim view. By discovering one’s true self somewhere in the distant past, we needn’t contend with the hurt feelings of those living with us in the present, or with the idea that we ourselves have changed or betrayed anything. We were always right. We just didn’t know it.
Unfortunately, in America today this approach too often becomes an exercise in chronological, rather than theological, justification. It becomes what I call vintage religion, like shopping for retro furnishings that can recreate a world we were never part of and that we can then idealize through some soft-focus lens of nostalgia. The resuscitation of Celtic and Norse religions, along with resurgent neopagan faiths like Wicca and Heathenism, are manifestations of this trend. These modern versions of ancient traditions are often created out of whole cloth, but they offer the pleasure of enjoying an old-time religion without engaging one’s own past. It is the luxury of wearing a beautiful fur coat that was bought by someone else’s grandmother long before it was a sin to kill animals for fashion.
Underlying the entire conversion question is the loss of the fear of eternal damnation. In the old days, if you made the wrong choice you were doomed. Not anymore. Today, religious belief is pretty much, I’m OK, You’re OK. See you in heaven. In his 2003 book The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Practice Our Faith, Alan Wolfe aptly calls this phenomenon salvation inflation, and the numbers bear him out. One Gallup poll has shown that 75 percent of Americans say that there is a religion other than their own that offers a true path to God, and of that number a substantial majority believe that this other path to God is equally as good as their own. Additionally, although the vast majority of Americans say that there will come a day when God judges people and decides whether they will go to heaven or hell, the poll finds that 44 percent believe that a good person will go to heaven whether or not he or she believes in God.
This is seven centuries and an even longer distance theologically from Pope Boniface VIII declaring that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
The progress from a conversion of fear to one of mature choice would not seem to be such a bad thing. Converting out of the fear that we are dangling over a fiery pit with one foot on a banana peel, as Jonathan Edwards had it, is not exactly the most profound motivation for worshiping God. The problem, of course, is that if one religion or no religion is as good as another, why switch? In fact, why be anything at all? Many Americans seem to be asking the same thing, and the lack of any need to formally affiliate with a brand-name faith has contributed to the steep decline in membership in many denominations. It has also prompted the expenditure of millions of dollars in advertising by those denominations, in an effort to better market themselves.
Improving public relations, however, does not strike me as the best way to attract believers. In the end, meaningful beliefs attract the best believers, and the enduring appeal of conversion can be seen as evidence that many Americans do take their religious quests seriously. This can be salutary not only for them, but also for the faiths they embrace. I once heard the church historian Martin Marty recount his experience of acquiring three daughters-in-law, and his surprise at their fascination with the various Marty family rituals whose roots and significance the Martys themselves had begun to take for granted through decades of habit. It was thanks to these newcomers to the family, he said, that he began to rediscover the meaning and memories of the family traditions. In the same way, converts can hold up a mirror to the communities they join, perhaps reminding us of things we don’t like about ourselves, but also about the good things that attracted us in the first place, and above all about the why of who we are.
In American Catholicism adult converts 150,000 every year have been called the new immigrants, an apt label given the impact they are having on the church. Purdue University sociologist James Davidson has shown that the 10 percent or so of American Catholics who are converts are often more faithful in their observances than so-called cradle Catholics. Converts are more likely to believe there is something special about being Catholic; they are more likely to be registered in a parish (87 versus 67 percent); to read about the church (47 versus 34 percent); to share their faith (41 versus 29 percent); and to believe that their faith helps them with daily decisions (35 versus 21 percent).
Certainly much of this can be chalked up to the often short-lived zeal of the convert. It is the process of deepening the faith after conversion what the church calls mystagogy that is the true test of a conversion. The pilgrimage of sanctification after the moment of justification is an avenue by which bonds frayed by rejection of one tradition in favor of another can be healed.
In reflecting on his own faith journey on the eve of his retirement in 2004, Bill Moyers cited T.S. Eliot’s claim that no man has ever climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a believer in a particular religion, or at least a particular philosophy. Moyers then inverted the image of mountaintop enlightenment to one that is perhaps better suited to the nitty-gritty of real faith at work: As we dig deeper into our own religion, if we are lucky we break through to someone else digging deeper toward us from the core of their tradition, and on some transcendent level we converge….
This does not avoid the differences, or gloss over the difficulties, inherent in our religious choices. Rather, it is a call to plumb the depths of our faith to be truer to ourselves, and in doing so to discover connections with eternal truths and with other believers that may not have been visible under the aspect of a privatized or superficial life of faith. Conversion is popularly depicted as a sudden burst of inspiration enjoyed by a blessed individual. But the most firmly grounded conversion is one that transports an individual deeply into a community. In the end, true conversion is an ongoing process, and above all a challenge to ourselves as much as it is to those around us.
The Baby Drain
June 30, 2008
“Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future…”
…The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops. Rocco Falivena, Laviano’s 56-year-old mayor, strolled down the middle of the street, outlining for me the town’s demographics and explaining why, although the place is more than a thousand years old, its buildings all look so new. In 1980 an earthquake struck, taking out nearly every structure and killing 300 people, including Falivena’s own parents. Then from tragedy arose the scent of possibility, of a future. Money came from the national government in Rome, and from former residents who had emigrated to the U.S. and elsewhere. The locals found jobs rebuilding their town. But when the construction ended, so did the work, and the exodus of residents continued as before.
When Falivena took office in 2002 for his second stint as mayor, two numbers caught his attention. Four: that was how many babies were born in the town the year before. And five: the number of children enrolled in first grade at the school, never mind that the school served two additional communities as well. “I knew what was my first job, to try to save the school,” Falivena told me. “Because a village that does not have a school is a dead village.” He racked his brain and came up with a desperate idea: pay women to have babies. And not just a token amount, either; in 2003 Falivena let it be known he would pay 10,000 euros (about $15,000) for every woman — local or immigrant, married or single — who would give birth to and rear a child in the village. The “baby bonus,” as he calls it, is structured to root new citizens in the town: a mother gets 1,500 euros when her baby is born, then a 1,500-euro payment on each of the child’s first four birthdays and a final 2,500 euros the day the child enrolls in first grade. Falivena has a publicist’s instincts, and he said he hoped the plan would attract media attention. It did, generating news across Italy and as far away as Australia…
There are some indications that Falivena’s baby bonus is succeeding — the first-grade class has 17 students this year — but that figure may be misleading. As it turns out, many of the new parents who have taken advantage of the bonus are locals who planned to have a child anyway. (Ida Robertiello, another of the baby-bonus mothers who sang Falivena’s praises for me, admitted that she was already pregnant with her son Matteo when Falivena announced his scheme.) The main effect of the bonus money may be on the timing of births. Last year Falivena was out of office, and the temporary replacement canceled the payments. “I know several women in Laviano who are pregnant now,” Daniela told me, and her husband added, with a rakish grin, that couples got busy because they knew Falivena was coming back as mayor, with a promise to restart the payments.
But with close to 50 mothers now eligible, Falivena doesn’t know how long he can keep the baby bonus going. And Laviano is still losing population…
Demographically speaking, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”
To the uninitiated, “lowest low” seems a strange thing to worry about. A few decades ago we were getting “the population explosion” drilled into us. The invader species homo sapiens, we learned, was eating through the planet’s resources and irretrievably fouling and wrecking its fragile systems. Has the situation changed for the better since Paul Ehrlich set off the alarm in 1968 with his best seller “The Population Bomb”? Do current headlines — global food shortages, climate change — not indicate continuing signs of calamity?
They do, as far as some are concerned, but things have changed somewhat. For one thing, around the world, even in developing countries, birthrates have plummeted — from 6.0 globally in 1972 to 2.9 today — as populations have shifted from rural areas to cities and people have adopted urban lifestyles, and the drop has perhaps lessened the urgency of the overpopulation cry. Meanwhile, in recent years another chorus of voices has sounded. Yes, we’re straining resources, they say, and it’s undeniable that some parts of the globe are overrun with humanity. But other regions now confront a very different fate. In Europe, “lowest low” isn’t just a phenomenon of rural areas like Laviano. Cities like Milan and Bologna have recorded some of the lowest birthrates anywhere, in part because the high cost of living forces couples either to move or to have fewer children. After the term was invented, “lowest-low fertility” got the attention of leaders in Brussels and national capitals across the Continent — and by now everyone from Seville to Helsinki seems to be aware of it. In Greece, the problem is so well situated in the national psyche that it is conversationally compacted: people refer simply to “the demographic.” Putting the numbers in a broader world-historical context stirred a debate about Europe’s future. Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.
“Demographers and economists foresee that 30 million Europeans of working age will ‘disappear’ by 2050. At the same time, retirement will be lasting decades as the number of people in their 80s and 90s increases dramatically.” The crisis, they argue, will come from a “triple whammy of increasing demand on the welfare state and health-care systems, with a decline in tax contributions from an ever-smaller work force.” That is to say, there won’t be enough workers to pay for the pensions of all those long-living retirees. What’s more, there will be a smaller working-age population compared with other parts of the world; the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database projects that in 2025, 42 percent of the people living in India will be 24 or younger, while only 22 percent of Spain’s population will be in that age group. This, in the wording of a Demographic Fitness Survey by the Adecco Institute, a London-based research group, will result in a “war for talent.” And the troubles for Europe are magnified by other factors in the existing welfare states of many of its countries. Europeans are used to early retirement — according to the Adecco survey, only 60 percent of men in France between the ages of 50 and 64 are still working.
Then there is the matter of what kind of society “lowest low” will bring. How will the predominance of one- and two-child families affect family cohesion, sibling relationships, care for elderly parents? Imagine a society in which family reunions consist of three people, in which nearly all of a child’s relatives are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Laviano’s empty streets echo with something strange and seemingly new. As the social scientists Billari, Kohler and Ortega put it, Europe is entering “an uncharted territory in demographic history.”
…“Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good,” he said. “But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”
