Description:
Major changes are taking place in the Western world. The end twenty-five ago of the cold war and the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc over which it held sway gave birth to what now appear to be absurdly premature celebrations of the End of History, the victory of liberal democracy, and the commencement of an era of peace and prosperity in which alternatives to liberal capitalism no longer existed.
This course explores only a few but profound developments that threaten to give the lie to these more optimistic scenarios of our future. Among these are mass population movements, demographic trends, and religious/cultural conflicts that promise to intensify old cleavages and sharpen new ones. Briefly, migration of populations from the third world into the rich democracies of Europe, North America, and Australasia are bringing about enormous changes that, when conjoined to declining birth rates in the West and exploding fertility in immigrant source countries, amount to “replacement migration” that inevitably will result in the fundamental alteration of the ethnic, religious, cultural, and political composition of Western democracies. The common assumption that Western nations were embarked on an irreversible journey to secularism and the marginalization of religion has run up against a religious revival among Christians and a serious challenge from Islam that has flourished in the wake of immigration and demographic realities. Immigrants to the west bring with them political traditions that bear scant resemblance to democratic institutions considered the highest achievement of Western governance.
These developments undermine many cherished assumptions about the nature of modernity, which in their own way both soviet communism and liberal capitalism had claimed as their own.
Grading criteria: 3 exams, a mix of short answer and essay, each accounting for 25% of your grade; a term paper that accounts for the remaining 25%.
Texts: there will be no texts for this course. Instead, excerpts available on line will be assigned so that text expenses should be nil.
Readings will come from sources of the following sort:
Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations
Kaufmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?
Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis
Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
Scheffer, Immigrant Nations
Hampshire, The Politics of Immigration
Kenworthy, Social Democratic America
Collier, Exodus: How MIgration is Changing the World
Wright, The Moral Animal
Wright, Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny
Wright, The Evolution of God
Gray, Al Quedda and What it Means to be Modern
Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
Gray, False Dawn
Gray, Straw Dogs
Gray, Black Mass
Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility
Siedentop, Democracy in Europe
Lacorne, Religion in America: a Political History
Flannery, The Future Eaters
Scruton, The West and the Rest
Sruton, England: An Elegy
Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration
Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology
Minogue, The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
Savianio, Gommorah
Dyson, Disturbing the Universe
Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride
Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
Kagan, Of Paradise and Power
Leonard, Why Europe will run the 21st Century
Ramadan, Western and athe Future of Islam
Hirsi Ali, Nomad
Goodhart, The British Dream
Piketty, Capital
Emmott, 10 Billion
Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power