Our country continues to progress through the Sexual Revolution:

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

When I was growing up in my hometown, one unspoken but clear divide between blacks and whites here was over the social acceptance of illegitimacy. Half the kids in our school were black, and many of them — I would say most, but I can’t be sure — had no fathers in the home. This was completely normal in their culture; there was no stigma at all. I remember being in eighth or ninth grade and going to a school program one night, and being shocked to see how many of the black girls I saw every day in the hallway at school were there with their babies. We all understood that sometimes white girls got pregnant, but the strong sense among the white community in that place and time was that illegitimacy was a black thing, that it was taboo for white people. The sense was that this behavior had wrecked their families and community, and we couldn’t let it happen to ours. The thing is, I don’t recall that there was much concern that it could happen to white people; the mainstreaming of illegitimacy was, at that time (1970s, 1980s), so completely identified in my community as a black thing that it was hard even to imagine it becoming a problem among whites.

Why is this? My memory may be fuzzy, but I can’t recall any white person applying an economic analysis to this abandonment of traditional familial standards; it was rather seen as a sign of religious and moral collapse. Of course that religious and moral collapse has profound economic consequences for individuals and communities caught up within it. This is one reason why the taboo arose to begin with. I mean, if you are a Christian, you would say that God laid down right and wrong in these matters. If you are not, you would say, or could say, that the religious prohibitions against sex and childbearing outside of wedlock arose for evolutionary reasons — namely, to keep the tribe strong.

In his book “Coming Apart,” Charles Murray produces a chart showing the white nonmarital birth rates from 1917-2008. They were consistently low — below five percent — until 1960, when they began to climb steeply. The real upward acceleration began around 1975. In 2010, the rate was nearly 30 percent. All this, within a single generation. Murray writes: “For the first time in human history, we now have societies in which a group consisting of a lone woman and her offspring is not considered to be sociologically incomplete — not considered to be illegitimate … .” This might be an overstatement, but it is certainly the case that the normalization of illegitimacy is practically unprecedented.

Further in the book, Murray quotes John Adams on the importance of marriage as a social institution. “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families,” Adams wrote in his diary. “How is it possible that children can have any just sense of the sacred obligations of morality or religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their mothers?” Murray goes on to say that however unorthodox the Founders were in their religious beliefs, they all believed strongly that the nation could not be free without virtue, and that virtue is impossible to maintain without religion. Remember Adams’s lines: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Which came first, the decline of religion, or the rise of illegitimacy? It’s hard to say, but I find it impossible to believe that they are unconnected. I am reminded of this passage I once wrote about Philip Rieff’s cultural ideas:

The late sociologist Philip Rieff was not a religious man, but he was a chronicler of the cultural revolution and a prophet of it. Rieff’s theory of culture, put simply, is that a culture is shaped by what it forbids (in his term, “remits”). In his 1966 classic “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” Rieff identified Christianity’s teaching about sexuality (that it is only licit when expressed between one man and one woman, in a state of holy matrimony) as a core principle of Christian civilization. “Historically, the rejection of sexual individualism (which divorces pleasure and procreation) was the consensual matrix of Christian culture,” Rieff writes. He goes on to say that what is “revolutionary” in modern culture is the complete abandonment of the idea that renunciation (of whatever kind) is necessary, toward the belief that impulses should be released. Christianity never preached crude renunciation of sexuality, but rather developed a sophisticated way of spiritualizing it — and built an entire civilization around theories of the human person, and human purpose, that all depended on Christian sexual ethics.

That’s over now. It’s done. Rieff, who writes as a sociologist, points out that the West has abandoned the Christian sexual ethic; therefore, what we can rightly call Christian culture and civilization is also on the way out.

My sense is that though social conservatives may not be able to articulate it in quite this way, they intuit that if we lose the family, we lose far more. It could be that secular or lightly religious elites have a narrower way of viewing these things, seeing avoiding illegitimacy mostly or entirely as a way of maintaining economic stability — as it certainly is. But there is far more at stake, socially, politically, religiously, and indeed, as the non-believing Rieff held, civilizationally.

I think the idea that it’s okay to have children without being married is a meme — an idea that behaves like a virus. Given that white illegitimacy rates have at least quadrupled since my childhood, it does not surprise me in the least that certain people — middle-class, educated, religious, however you want to identify them — wish to separate their children from a population infected by that meme, as a way to protect their children from it, and the disastrous consequences of that bad idea. Murray writes in his conclusion:

For many years, I have been among those who argue (as I have in this book) that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe. But while those of us who take this position have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, no one has been able to prove that alternative could not work as well. And so the social planners keep coming up with the next ne ingenious program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.

I am predicting that over the next few decades advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, leading to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and to hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is, and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the live-in male is not the married biological father. These same reasons explain why society’s attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don’t work and never will work.

There is no reason to be frightened of such knowledge. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. Social democrats may be able to design some outside interventions that do some good. But they will have to stop claiming that the traditional family is just one of many equally valid alternative. They will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth.

The ideology of the Sexual Revolution, and of the belief that sexual autonomy is the absolute telos of our liberty, will take decades to be defeated. In the meantime, what of us trying to raise children to resist the catastrophic and signal disorder of our time and place? How do we do so while at the same time affirming that all children are to be loved and valued, and not stigmatized because of the accident of their birth? I’m not writing this from a position of remove; my family, like many families, has dealt with this issue.  It’s a struggle, because while you absolutely don’t want your kids to do this, you also absolutely will not reject them or their children if they do. At least, you won’t if you are any kind of Christian. I know well the pain that social stigma can cause, and I am not sorry that children born today won’t suffer it as previous generations have suffered. And yet, there can be no denying that the erosion of the taboo has had, and will have, enormously important consequences for individuals, and for society. How do we uphold a vitally important standard while being compassionate towards those who fail to meet it. It’s a difficult challenge, one that cannot be avoided. I wish I knew the answer.

Still, from a macro level, at a certain point, you have to realize that the rain is not going to stop, and you have to get onto the ark with your family if you all aren’t going to drown. Sauve qui peut from this meme is a harsh response, but what is the alternative?

Santorum warns a North Dakota crowd that the Muslim terrorists are coming for them too. And, via Sullivan, here’s an excerpt from a 2008 speech in which he told college students that Satan is systematically destroying America. Just what we need in the White House: a paranoid, religiously-motivated hyper-hawk eager to go to war with Iran.

Meanwhile, how completely pathetic is this clip from a Romney speech? The man comes from Remulak, but has somehow managed to conceal his conehead:

It’s time to start drinking. Hard.

MSNBC has kicked Pat Buchanan off its network. Pat writes about this disgraceful episode:

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, “so long as reason is left free to combat it.” What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American. Consider what it is these people are saying.

They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin’s, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News, and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity.

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs, and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism? How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, “The End of White America?” from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America’s white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050. Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject?

That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral has been doctrine in the Catholic Church for 2,000 years. Is it now hate speech to restate traditional Catholic beliefs?

Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture, and ideology and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century’s end. Are such subjects taboo? Are they unfit for national debate?

Read Pat’s entire column.  I was going to write about this later today, but am prompted to do so now because of Andrew Sullivan’s ringing defense of the man, and denunciation of MSNBC’s blacklisting of him. Excerpt:

He is not a propagandist. He is a passionate writer who loves nothing more than a good argument with a worthy opponent – and he has a serious sense of humor to boot. That his ideas are often repelling should precisely be why he should stay on MSNBC and defend his views against the smartest critiques that can be found. We should stop silencing people and keep debating them.

The idea that he was not the target of much subterranean leftist outrage and pressure to fire him, as my colleague Howie Kurtz reports, seems highly unlikely to me. Yes, as Howie rightly reports, Buchanan’s latest inflammatory book was the casus belli. But Phil Griffin’s views of the book and an underground campaign to fire him from the professional left are not mutually exclusive explanations. I believe Pat on this. The pressure on MSNBC management to get rid of this fly in their propagandistic ointment must have been intense – and came in part from two of the more pernicious liberal interest groups in DC, the Gay Human Rights Campaign and the ADL. Replacing him with Michael Steele – who makes Sarah Palin look like Susan Sontag – is to add insult to injury. In many ways, I admired MSNBC for keeping him on for so long. Fox has not a single liberal of his intelligence, experience and background. But they are pure propaganda. MSNBC is, in this move, now completely indistinguishable from Fox in that respect.

You’ve got to read Andrew’s entry to learn something private that Buchanan did for him that may shock you in its generosity. A few years ago, I learned from a friend of a similar mercy Andrew showed to someone in dire need, an act so startling (and hidden) that it made me conclude that no matter how bitter our public disputation ever became, no matter how outrageous and unfair I might consider things he writes at times (and vice versa), Andrew Sullivan was at his core decent man, and that I mustn’t forget that.

Anyway, back to Buchanan. I can’t improve much on what Andrew has said, and what Pat has said in his own defense. I would only add that this tendency we have in our political culture to blacklist people is appalling, anti-democratic, and anti-intellectual. You never learn anything from 95 percent of the people you see on television, or 90 percent of the people you read in the papers. Why not? Because they are safe. On both the left and the right, we have become a nation of pathetic babies who cannot stand to hear a considered opinion that violates our own personal orthodoxies. We rarely allow our own ideas to be tested, because to be compelled to hear the dissenting views of others hurts our feelings or offends what we hold sacred. This magazine, TAC, came into existence in part because the official Right-Thinking Right Wing anathematized anti-war conservatives (“unpatriotic” they were called, and to my later shame, I believed this too) during the march-up to the disastrous Iraq War.

Some people’s feelings, of course, are more valuable than others. For example, as Pat writes, it is fine to discuss the demographic decline of white America as long as you are approving of it (e.g., Hua Hsu, Bill Clinton), but not if you lament it. No doubt lines have to be drawn. Not every voice deserves to be heard, not every opinion aired. I moderate comments here for a reason. Overall, though, it seems that we keep narrowing the noose around tolerable speech in this country, such that nobody can say anything that might remotely offend some interest group without putting his or her career at risk. It happened to Octavia Nasr at CNN, for saying something stupid. It happened to Roland Martin more recently at CNN, for a penny-ante tweet that pissed off homosexuals. I don’t feel sorry for Roland Martin, who has made a point of hating on me for over a decade for an ill-considered column I wrote back in 2001; but what the cowardly CNN did to him was wrong.

To be clear, I don’t say people shouldn’t take umbrage at what this or that commenter says. I do it all the time. But being angered or offended by something someone has said is a very different thing from declaring that they have no right to say it, or that by saying it they should lose their livelihood. One reason American newspapers and television news programs are so damn boring is because they are for the most part run by people who are afraid.  If you never print or broadcast something that stands to offend someone, you are almost certainly not printing or broadcasting much that stands to enlighten, or even interests people.

Back when Spike Lee actually made movies people wanted to see, he gave an interview saying that black people needed to “control” their image in Hollywood. The black critic Stanley Crouch denounced that attitude, and said the better approach is to expand the range of portrayals of blacks in film. So much of today’s mainstream media, driven by thoughtless activists, takes the Spike Lee approach. In fairness, they are responding in a way to audience pressure. We ourselves aid and abet this cowardice and mediocrity by becoming the kind of people who demand never to be confronted by an opinion with which we might disagree strongly.

I should probably be more clear when I complain, as I regularly do, about the New York Times’s liberal bias. It’s not that I don’t want them to publish stories and commentary from a left-liberal point of view. I find that interesting, usually, and valuable to the making of my own perspective. What I most object to is the way they consistently ignore or caricature people, institutions, and ideas that don’t align with its own narrow orthodoxies. My hope for the Times is not that they stop publishing articles that tick me off, but that they expand their vision, and their range of voices. Nevertheless, God forbid that I should ever call for a writer or broadcaster to be fired for stating an opinion I found offensive. Every time an outfit like CNN and MSNBC fires someone like Pat Buchanan, or suspends someone like Octavia Nasr and Roland Martin, they send a powerful signal to up-and-coming journalists: don’t ever step out of line or take a risk, or say anything that could offend religious, political, or victim-group loudmouths, or your career could be over.

UPDATE: I’ve changed the subject line from “Blacklisting” to “Firing.” It’s more accurate.

Excellent advice from Emily, who has been re-reading letters she sent home years ago from architecture school to her family:

Of all the amazing moments in the fascinating and weighty American Beauty, it’s Lester Burnham’s last words that I recall most often: “Man, oh man.  Man, oh man, oh man, oh man.”  He’s looking at a photo of his family that seems untouched by the psychosis and pain that’s haunted them throughout the film.  They are young, happy, united.  His words are at once a meditation on the depraved and surprising nature of humanity, and a simple inability to express one’s feelings about said nature.  In this state of transcendent meditation, his life is cut short, and the movie effectively ends.  This is its thesis statement.

I feel something similar when I look at my own life, or at least at the period about which I wrote so much in those letters I republished last month.  It’s hard to read them, in part, because I see so many failings in them. Failure to see things as they really were: I was foolishly optimistic about the situation there for far too long. Failure to see almost anything beyond myself: I wanted to leave the letters untouched, but couldn’t bring myself not to edit out the most navel-gazingly offensive passages.  Failure, above all, to see that what mattered most was very far from what I spent most of my time trying to do.

… Two things inspired me about this experience.  The first was the similarity of my seventeen-year-old self with my only-very-slightly-younger students of today.  As the age gap between us grows (I am now roughly twice their age) I find it harder and harder to relate to them, and I can be especially unforgiving of shallow self-centeredness. But reading my own entries from that time has reminded me that this is how teenagers are, and I was like that too. So if I don’t rush too quickly to judgment, my own students may follow a similar path to a greater understanding of the world.

I needed to read that today.

You know what I love most about getting older? The gift of perspective. If I had had half as much passion, and only a quarter more perspective, my teenage years and my twenties would have been far more bearable. But some things you only acquire with the passage of time.

How strange and sad for the NYT correspondent Anthony Shadid, who survived being kidnapped last year by a Libyan militia, to die in northern Syria from an asthma attack. From the Times’ story:

Mr. Hicks said they squeezed through the fence’s lower portion by pulling the wires apart, and guides on horseback met them on the other side. It was on that first night, Mr. Hicks said, that Mr. Shadid suffered an initial bout of asthma, apparently set off by an allergy to the horses, but he recovered after resting.

On the way out a week later, however, Mr. Shadid suffered a more severe attack — again apparently set off by proximity to the horses of the guides, Mr. Hicks said, as they were walking toward the border. Short of breath, Mr. Shadid leaned against a rock with both hands.

“I stood next to him and asked if he was O.K., and then he collapsed,” Mr. Hicks said. “He was not conscious and his breathing was very faint and very shallow.” After a few minutes, he said, “I could see he was no longer breathing.”

Did you see Russell Shorto’s informative piece about everyday life amid economic collapse in Greece? It’s worth a look. For example:

By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people signed up. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards. One banker, part of whose job these days is persuading people to keep their money in the bank, said to me, “Who would trust a Greek bank?”

Shorto found some pretty interesting people to talk to, and some hopeful stories. Some Greeks have managed to get out of the cities, and are eking out a decent existence in the countryside. One Greek entrepreneur offered this diagnosis of what happened to his country:

“This is a country with 300 days of sunshine per year,” he began, proceeding into a rambling, fast-paced discourse, the central point of which was that in buying into the euro, Greece tried foolishly to mimic other countries and in so doing shifted away from its natural advantages and way of life. “Working in offices is good in countries where there is lots of rain,” he said. “Greeks don’t need to be in offices. Athens has doubled in size in a couple of decades — it’s now half the population of the country! Two-hour traffic jams, man! After we joined the euro, the mentality totally changed. Suddenly it was like if you still live in the small village where you were born, you must be retarded. So Greeks left their islands and their villages and moved to the city, and they became maniacs. They started expecting loans and handouts.”

The modern Greek mentality, according to Evmorfidis, is a hyped-up version of the debt-ridden American consumerism of recent memory. “Greek people would take out a loan to buy a luxury car so they could say, ‘I have money,’ ” he said. “Crazy! I would run into someone I used to know, and suddenly he’s talking to me about the stock exchange. I say: ‘Come on, man! What do you know about the stock exchange? Let’s talk about apples and olives!’ ”

A gobsmacked reader, a Catholic academic, sent along this column from the New York Times’s website, saying that she’s embarrassed that its author, philosophy professor Gary Gutting, teaches at Notre Dame. Why? Because in the essay about the contraception controversy, Gutting argues that individual Catholics have the right to decide religious truth, not the bishops. Excerpt:

In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as authorized by God.  They may be wrong, but their judgment is answerable to no one but God.  In this sense, even the Catholic Church is a democracy.

But, even so, haven’t the members of the Catholic Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine the teachings of the Church?  By no means.  There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines.  Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone.

Result? Says Gutting:

The bishops’ claim to authority in this matter has been undermined because Catholics have decisively rejected it. The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church.

Just like that, the Notre Dame philosophy professor throws out centuries of authoritative Catholic tradition, and declares that the Roman church is now wholly Protestant.

You want to know a big reason why the Catholic Church in America is in such a dire condition? Catholic professors like Gary Gutting.

Ross Douthat, who has been critical of “Coming Apart,” lists what he thinks Charles Murray gets right in his analysis of the breakdown of the white working class. Excerpt:

Finally, Murray makes a very convincing case — one that I don’t think his more deterministic critics, Frum included, have done enough to reckon with — for the power of so-called “traditional values” to foster human flourishing even in economic landscapes that aren’t as favorable to less-educated workers as was, say, the aftermath of the Treaty of Detroit. Even acknowledging all the challenges (globalization, the decline of manufacturing, mass low-skilled immigration) that have beset blue collar America over the last thirty years, it is still the case that if you marry the mother or father of your children, take work when you can find it and take pride in what you do, attend church and participate as much as possible in the life of your community, and strive to conduct yourself with honesty and integrity, you are very likely to not only escape material poverty, but more importantly to find happiness in life. This case for the persistent advantages of private virtue does not disprove more purely economic analyses of what’s gone wrong in American life, but it should at the very least complicate them, and suggest a different starting place for discussions of the common good than the ground that most liberals prefer to occupy.

This brought to mind Robert D. Kaplan’s geopolitical travel book from the 1990s, “The Ends of the Earth,” which began as an essay in The Atlantic. Kaplan contrasted the squalid, chaotic poverty of West Africa with the ordered poverty of Egypt. People in both places were terribly poor. But they were immeasurably better off in Egypt. Why? Islam, and the sense of internal and social order it brought. He writes that though Islam and Christianity both exist in West Africa, they are held lightly by the people there, many of whom remain essentially animist. He then went to a massive slum in Istanbul:

Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital, exude visual drama. Altindag, or “Golden Mountain,” is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward heaven—the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere else on the planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man’s striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one.

To see the twenty-first century truly, one’s eyes must learn a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. There are far too many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real—whose raw energies and desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the future into something frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns are not all bad.

Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler’s checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home—order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.

My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

This is great: