Modernity is a virus

I had a good breakfast meeting this morning with David Berlinski, the mathematician and author (most recently) of "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions" -- reviewed here. David is a secular Jew and a born iconoclast. He argues in his new book that Richard Dawkins (for whom he has a lot of respect) and other New Atheists (for which he has a lot less respect) badly overstate what science can know. His book is not an apologetic for faith, but an attempt to remind scientific materialists that they are claiming too much, that science (and atheism) can't explain all they say it can.

I'm going to turn our interview into a piece for hte newspaper, so I won't quote any of it here. But I want to mention one part of our conversation that's lingered with me all day. Berlinski -- and I'm going to quote from memory here, because I haven't yet transcribed the recording -- anyway, Berlinski lives in Paris, and said that there's no question that Europe is thoroughly secularized -- and that this is killing them.

"Have you seen the birthrates?" he said. "None of them can replace themselves. None of them. There's even discussion that Italy is going to vanish. Russia? It's goodbye. You can look at the demographic tables and see what's going to happen, and in fact is happening right now!"

I asked Berlinski if he thought there was a connection between religion and fecundity. Of course there is, he said. But it's more complicated than that.

"Look at the Muslims," he said. "All around the world, they have decided to reject Western values as materialistic, disruptive and an affront to the deity. And yet, whenever they have real contact with modernity, they fall for it just like we do. In France, the second and third generations of Muslims have a birth rate just like all the other French."

Berlinski said nobody really understands why fertility falls off a cliff when people fully embrace modernity. But it does, and that is going to be fatal for entire cultures. As for Europe, he said, "We are living through the endgame of a grand experiment to see if scientific materialism is a good organizing principle for society. You want the answer? Look at the birth rates. That's a definitive answer, and the answer is no."

So what is the answer? I asked. How can we turn this around? Berlinski shrugged.

"Nobody knows," he said. "We are all caught in vast and deep currents of history that we can't really understand, much less control. All I do is write articles here and there pointing things out, doing what I can."