Crawling from the Wreckage (38 page)

In 1950, there was not a single country where the population was not growing rapidly, the average woman had more than five children in her
lifetime, and the birth rate was not dropping significantly anywhere. Then came the new birth-control technologies and the rise of women’s liberation ideologies, and in many Western countries the birth rate dropped by half in ten years. As recently as 1974, however, the median birth rate worldwide was still 5.4 children per woman, so the pessimists were still winning the arguments.

They believed that only literacy could spread the ideas and techniques that made birth rates fall, and that literacy would not grow fast enough. Well, literacy has grown a lot faster than they expected—between 1980 and 2000, literacy rose from 18 percent to 47 percent in Afghanistan; from 33 percent to 64 percent in Nigeria; from 66 percent to 85 percent in China; and from 69 percent to 87 percent in Indonesia. But birth rates have dropped even faster than literacy has risen: the global average is now 2.7 children per woman.

Some of the most startling recent drops have been in places where women’s illiteracy is still quite high—Bangladesh and parts of India, for example—so we clearly need a broader criterion than mere literacy. In fact,
any
form of mass media, including broadcast media that do not require literacy, seems to have the same effect on the birth rate. (Though purely local cultural factors also play a role: Pakistan and Bangladesh both had a birth rate of 6.3 in 1981; now Bangladesh’s is 3.3, while Pakistan’s is still 5.6.)

The global birth rate may be no more than a decade away from dropping to replacement level, 2.2 children per woman. Most developed countries have already dropped well below that rate. This does not immediately stop population growth, since all the children who have already been born will have a child or two themselves, and then live for another fifty years afterwards. It does not solve the environmental crisis either, since all of these seven or eight billion human beings will aspire to the kind of lifestyle now enjoyed only by the privileged billion or so.

But it does mean that populations almost everywhere will start greying within the next decade, and in due course, the old will come to outnumber the young. (The exceptions are almost all in African and Arab countries which together amount to only a tenth of the world’s population.) Based on historical precedent, countries where the average age is rising are unlikely to become aggressor nations. Peace through exhaustion, perhaps?

I ended the first bunch of articles on religion by saying that we shouldn’t even get into the relationship between religion and war, but you knew I wouldn’t be able to resist, didn’t you? So here it is. Or one little corner of it, anyway
.

It has been the longest goodbye in modern politics, and there are still another six weeks to go before Tony Blair finally hands the prime minister-ship over to Gordon Brown on June 27. After he finally leaves office, most people in Britain assume Blair will go off and make a living on the lecture circuit in the United States (where he is far more popular than he is at home). He won’t be much missed.

It is strange that a prime minister who has presided over an unprecedented surge of prosperity in Britain should be so deeply unpopular, but the reason why lies in a single word: Iraq. Support for that war in Britain is even lower than it is in the United States, and the popular conviction that the public was misled into invading Iraq by a leader who ruthlessly manipulated the “evidence” to get his way is even stronger. The argument is only about why he did it—and the consensus answer is that it was religion.

In “post-Christian Britain”—the phrase dates from the 1970s but is even truer today—Blair is what was once known as a “muscular Christian”: a person who believes that his faith requires him to act, and justifies his actions. Only a minority of British prime ministers in the past century have been Christian believers—Winston Churchill, for example, was a completely irreligious agnostic—and even the ones who were personally devout felt that religion should remain a private matter.

In terms of spin control, this phenomenon extended even into Blair’s government, as the prime minister was under strict instructions not to speak about his faith in public. “We don’t do God,” as spin master Alastair Campbell once put it. But in fact Blair did “do God,” and that is what led him into Iraq.

Columnist Geoffrey Wheatcroft got it exactly right in the
Independent
last Sunday: “In some ways [Blair] is more innately American than British. Blair may not have prayed with the born-again George Bush, but their shared faith was certainly a bond, and [Blair’s] wearing his faith on his sleeve would not have seemed too odd or embarrassing in the U.S., where more than half the population goes to church and where supposedly grown-up politicians can say they approach difficult problems by asking: ‘What would Jesus do?’ ”

The problem was that it
would
seem odd and embarrassing in Britain, where only 7 percent of the population regularly attend church or its equivalent. The notion that British foreign policy was being driven by one man’s faith would have inspired mass revolt if Blair’s motives had been made plain. But they weren’t: the spin machine did its job well.

From the time he took office in 1997 Blair talked about having a “moral” foreign policy, but it wasn’t clear at the time that this meant he believed in doing good by force. Then came a series of more or less legal military interventions abroad in which British troops did do some good: stopping the genocide against Muslims in Kosovo in 1999; ending the
civil war in Sierra Leone in 2000; and overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan after the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001.

These uses of military force all succeeded at a relatively low cost—the flare-up of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan today is due to the neglect of the country
after
2001—and it was flowers and champagne for Tony Blair each time. He was doing good by force, and he was doing very well by it politically, too. But the lesson Blair learned was that this sort of thing comes cheap and easy, and it was getting to be a habit. Then along came the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq.

It is clear, in retrospect, that Blair had agreed to commit British troops to the invasion by the spring of 2002, and it is hard to believe that he was so ignorant and ill-advised as to believe the nonsense about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his alleged links to the al-Qaeda terrorists. But it is very easy to believe that he leapt at another chance to do good—that is, rid the world of a wicked dictator—by force.

Blair’s perennial claim that “I have always done what I believe to be right” is no defence for his decision to join in the invasion of Iraq—do the rest of us usually do what we believe to be wrong?—but he firmly believes that his good intentions absolve him of responsibility for the outcome. The United Nations is a wreck, the reputations of the United States and the United Kingdom have never been lower, and Iraq is an almost measureless disaster, but no higher authority will ever officially hold Blair responsible for any of this, and so, in practical terms, he is quite right.

Enjoy the lecture circuit, Tony.

Recent research suggests that the word “sanctimonious” may have been invented specifically to describe Tony Blair (although certain questions about the temporal sequence remain to be resolved). Whereas you would never call Joseph Ratzinger “sanctimonious.” Arrogant, narrow-minded and rude, certainly, but not “sanctimonious.”

The Pope’s words have come back to haunt him, and so they should. The authorities at La Sapienza University in Rome had invited him to
come and speak this week at the inauguration of the new academic year, but the physics department mobilized in protest. It was at La Sapienza seventeen years ago that Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, declared that the trial and conviction of the Italian astronomer Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633 for asserting that the Earth goes around the Sun, was “rational and just.”

The scientists took this to mean that Ratzinger sees religious authority as superior to scientific inquiry, and seized the occasion of his return visit to make a fuss about it. Radical students then took up the cause, festooning the campus with anti-Pope messages, and on Tuesday the Vatican announced that the visit was off. It’s a tempest in a rather small teapot, but Ratzinger has stirred up a series of such tempests over the years.

Last year, during a visit to Brazil, Pope Benedict declared that the native populations of the Americas had been “silently longing” for the Christian faith that arrived with their conquerors and colonizers, and that it in no way represented the imposition of a foreign culture. Indigenous groups protested bitterly, but he stood his ground.

In 2006, speaking at the University of Regensburg, he quoted, with seeming approval, a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor’s comment: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

When Muslims protested, Pope Benedict took refuge in the claim that he was just quoting somebody else, not saying it himself. (You know how those quotes from Byzantine emperors just pop into your mind unbidden.) His defence of the Church’s treatment of Galileo all those years ago was done in just the same style: an outrageous proposition delivered in what he seemed to think was a deniable way.

Galileo was the first man in Italy to build a telescope, through which he discovered the moons of Jupiter—and the sight of them rotating around a much larger planet set him to thinking about the relationship between the Earth and the Sun. Copernicus had published his book asserting that the Earth rotated about the Sun more than half a century before, and a “Copernican” had been burned at the stake for his heretical views in 1600, so Galileo approached the matter carefully. On the other hand, unlike Copernicus, he had a telescope, so he could
see
what was going on.

Galileo was summoned to Rome in 1616 and ordered not to write about the Copernican theory any more, but, in 1623, a man he saw as a patron and sympathizer, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, was chosen as Pope Urban VIII. He travelled to Rome again, and believed that he had been given permission by Pope Urban to discuss the Copernican theory in public, provided he presented it as only a hypothesis. Unfortunately, either the political balance in the Vatican subsequently changed, or else Galileo simply misunderstood what he had been told.

When he published his book in 1632 it was banned. In 1633, he was interrogated in Rome under threat of torture, and condemned for “following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture.” He recanted his views to save his skin, but they sentenced him to life imprisonment anyway.

But there is a story, perhaps untrue, that as Galileo was led away he muttered defiantly under his breath “Eppure si muove” (And yet the Earth moves). True or not, scientists continue to view this scene as the great defining moment in the conflict between authority and truth—or, if you like, between faith and reason. Clearly, so does Joseph Ratzinger, which is presumably why he felt compelled, back in 1990, to take one more kick at Galileo.

Speaking at La Sapienza, Rome’s most prestigious university, he declared that the Church had been quite right to try and punish Galileo. Or rather, in a typical Ratzinger ploy, he quoted the maverick Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who said: “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.” God knows what Feyerabend actually meant by that, but that was the quote that Ratzinger chose to use.

If you pay attention to what Pope Benedict has been saying all these years, it’s clear that he does see Catholicism as superior to other religions and faith as superior to reason. There is nothing surprising about this. After all, he is the head of the Catholic Church, and many, if not most, committed Catholics do believe these things.

But he does go a little further than most. In the circumstances, you can see why the scientists at La Sapienza University were not all that keen on a return visit.

There are certain things that you can’t do in a column that is read by people in many different countries, most of whom follow one religion or another, and one of them is to mock their beliefs. Fair enough: common courtesy would require that, even if self-interest didn’t. But sometimes things come by that you really want to highlight, and there is one in the third paragraph of the next piece
.

Tim Bleakley of CBS Outdoor in London says that the sponsors of his advertising campaign couldn’t put the flat statement “There is no God” in their ads because it “would have been misleading” for religious people. Does that mean that the believers would have lost their faith if they had seen that written on the side of a bus, Tim? Or what?

If the objective was to undermine people’s belief in God, then turning the atheist buses loose in Britain was largely a waste of time, because most British people don’t believe in God anyway.

The atheist buses are all over London and some other big British cities by now, with a large ad running down the sides saying: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” But you have to ask: if the sponsors of the ad, the British Humanist Association, felt strongly enough about it to spend £35,000 ($50,000) to put the signs on all those buses, why did they only say “
probably
no God”?

It’s not their fault. Tim Bleakley, managing director for sales and marketing at
CBS
Outdoor in London, which handles advertising for the bus system, explained that advertisements saying flatly that there is no God “would have been misleading” for religious people. “So as not to fall foul of the code, you have to acknowledge that there is a grey area.”