This week, I completed the recent translation of Emmanuel Todd's "After The Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order", the demographer's ruminations on the decline of American 'imperialism'. The quote marks are advisory. In summary, the text is a wishlist of the French to the United States and globalisation: points that I will come back to in a later post.
The first point that Todd addressed was the explosive consequence of an increase in literacy around the developing world. The demographer tracked two effects of this: one was political upheaval, once a significant proportion of the population experienced the psychological disruption of literacy; the other was the decline in birth rates as literacy took hold amongst the female population. According to Todd, the forms of political disruption were conditioned by the kinship patterns of each society leading to egalitarian universalism (France, Russia) or fraternal ties (Arabic terrorist groups). Anomalies like the totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein or the modern political party of Congress in India are ignored.
Todd's account of literacy as a factor in political upheaval is important, and provides a valuable precondition for the dissemination of the Salafist ideology. A new breed of literate Islamists have proved the bedrock of the madressehs over the last twenty years. Yet, the rote learning and narrow constitution of the education does not lead to the development of a political movement predisposed towards Islamist solutions. The lack of alternative political outlets and the neutering of traditional tribal, national and cultural identities may play a far bigger role. The inability to find a job the biggest one of all.
Todd's understanding of demographic structures and their role in fostering political change is important. Yet, his theoretical extrapolations from kinship to ideology, stretch any possible relationship far beyond the foundations of data. What is left is still important: a growing wave of dispossessed Muslim youth, increasingly literate, denied economic opportunity and prone to follow the calls of their heroic cause, Salafist jihad.