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Notes -
A beginner overview
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/iran-secular-shift-gamaan.html
A study
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/5/592
People have been saying this since the late 1980s. The IRGC and mullahs’ grip on power is too strong. There is a fed up secular elite but their casualty tolerance is extremely low and as long as they can take their money in and out and vacation in the many countries where they can drink/fuck/etc (and they largely can) they won’t be a threat. The regime essentially banned dog ownership a few weeks ago just because it started trending on their social media and some scholars consider it un-Islamic; not the behavior of a regime desperately accepting some liberalization. The same happened after the hijab protests, they didn’t give an inch even if enforcement remains somewhat lax in Tehran (which it was before too). In the 1990s (the last major liberal turn) they assassinated a bunch of people effectively openly and then even semi-admitted it (politicians, businessmen, authors, journalists, public intellectuals) until the PM backed out of all his promises.
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Wishcasting, as has been going on with respect to Iran since the waning days of the Reagan administration. Most likely they're reaching a non-representative set, with religious Iranians being more likely to eschew their survey. Islam tends to the more strict, not less, from the bottom up; any moderating influence comes from a "degenerate" (or Westernized) elite, which Iran lacks (largely because they killed them or drove them out in the Revolution)
What metric would you trust?
TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam
Hijab is becoming less common. The requirement is for the veil to fully cover the hair, but from watching any video of Iranian streets most women totally ignore this — it just barely covers the back of their hair
a majority of Iranians use VPNs
The Iranian people were always pretty secular. They never had a grassroots Wahhabist movement like the Arab states did. It’s like the Soviet ‘20s where the state is ideological but the people are mostly indifferent.
They didn't have a grassroots Wahhabist movement because Wahhabism is Sunni and they're Shiite. They did have a popular Islamic revolution which resulted in the current regime.
The Islamist faction didn’t have huge popular support, it was (again, like the Bolsheviks) a minority faction that was very well organized and coordinated compared to the fractious mass of the other revolutionary factions. That’s why the current administration has such a domestic siege mentality and has to exercise a lot of top down force compared to say, Saudi Arabia.
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TFR is going down in almost every country. In Iran, which had a brief 1970s baby boom under the Shah, TFR has declined almost every year since the Islamic Revolution, even when it was rapidly becoming more conservative.
Yeah.
Any argument based on "TFR is going down, which clearly shows that X is the cause" is trivially defeated by the fact that every country has this same outcome regardless of the cultural starting point.
Its almost legitimately bad faith to deploy that argument.
If the argument is “Iran is a religious extremist country”, then we should see religious extremist TFR, which coincides wherever there is religious extremism, always. In such diverse places as
Minnesota, where the Salafi-infused Muslim households have a TFR of 5, and the women wear niqab with more frequency than Iran
Brooklyn New York, where the Haredim have a TFR of 6
The rare regions of traditional Catholicism in France
TLM-attending Catholics throughout America (simply represents the most extremist branch of Catholicism)
If you’re telling me that Iran has a religious extremist problem, and yet they can’t manage to get their women to have more than 2 kids or wear a veil property, I am going to conclude someone has lied to you. Because this is the hallmark, textbook sign of a society filled with Abrahamic conviction. Especially among Muslims, where the particular sphere of women has always been greatly delineated. Religious extremism means “clerics tell me what to do and I obey”, and if not even the women obey then no one cares. So I conclude that there is no extremism, based upon this fact in addition to other facts.
I remember filling out the Latin mass survey. To note-
The population filling out the survey is not the same population attending the TLM today. The average TLM grew by 40% over the covid freakout. Obviously, these aren't unselected new arrivals- they're covid-skeptics who agree with large parts of the rad trad program. But still, those numbers are super duper outdated.
The rad trad fertility advantage is 100% due to the serious prohibition on birth control(which Shia Islam does not have). I don't know that much about Iranian social norms, they might be very similar to what rad trads have, they might not be. But 1.6 or whatever doesn't seem like an obviously out of bounds estimate for the TFR rad trads would have if we thought birth control was A-OK. It's not hard to find unhappily single people of either gender at the TLM- most of them conventionally eligible for marriage. The stereotype that our women marry at 19 is really only true for very extroverted, fairly bold, girls from very conservative families. For obvious reasons that's a visible demographic but it doesn't reflect the average experience(which is much shyer with everything that implies for one's love life, sends the girls to college and expects them to get at least some of it under their belt before seriously pursuing marriage[yes, really, rad trads are negative on dating during college], etc). Yes this is an example of the clerics telling people what to do and the people obeying(Humanae Vitae will never have anything negative said about it in our circles, ever- despite coming after Vatican II). But twelver shia islam doesn't have an equivalent to Humanae Vitae.
Getting women, especially young unmarried women, to follow dress code rules which are annoying is simply a hard problem to solve. It doesn't shock me that even genuinely pious Muslim women in Tehran wear their veils improperly most of the time because veils are probably a bit annoying and uncomfortable when worn 'correctly', and when everyone else is doing it wrong it clearly isn't that important.
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The starting point may differ, but do those countries share any cultural drift? For instance, is there any country that has a lowering TFR over a span of time where women's education and liberty are reduced? I think there's a strong argument that globally, TFR is falling anywhere where women are getting more empowered. The degree and rate of empowerment might differ, of course, but as far as I can tell the root cause everywhere is women in higher education and the workforce.
My 'deep dive' into the question shows that it is multifactor, although there's some overlap/common causes behind certain factors.
Like, its almost ridiculous how many disparate pressures appear to make women less prone to producing kids (that's a slightly unfair way to put it, but it captures the problem, I think).
Chemicals they randomly encounter in the modern environment, chemicals they intentionally put in their body, social expectations shifting, economic incentives shifting, the (short term) opportunity cost of kids, the increase in immigration rates, the advent of social media, increasing concentration of people in urban areas, and yeah, the fact that women are now solely responsible for choosing their mates and there are zero restrictions left on their decision process... so they decide to not decide.
I don't think all of these factors are downstream of female liberation.
And many of these pressures are only possible thanks to technological developments of the last century. Which is also true of female liberation itself.
As I put it:
A lot of these same pressures show up in subcultures that still manage a superior TFR, though. What changes is how empowered the women in them are. Or do you see something else?
Economic incentives shift the paradigm for men, too.
Simple example, if you owned a family farm, popping out a ton of kids was helpful IF ONLY for the cheap labor that couldn't easily unionize.
But if you have a job as a doctor, lawyer, finance bro, whatever, ESPECIALLY if you're living in a small, expensive apartment in a high COL area, the prospect seems irrational up front. No need for extra hands, and definitely have to worry about feeding those extra mouths.
You may want kids, eventually, but you want sex NOW, so hey, why not shack up with as many women as possible then find 'the one' when you're economically established.
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TFR is closely tied to religious conservatism everywhere in the world. Iran’s TFR has been down since 1984. Their small blip from 1974->1980 is even less than than 1945 to 1957 America and its decrease coincides with an economic slump. The fact that the Iranian revolution even happened disproves the idea that a majority of Iranians were even on board with the secularization trend.
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