Did I somehow imply that I would resume my argument contra Todd on Friday? I meant Sunday�Friday was not a convenient day for critiquing the Weltanschauung of a leading French intellectual.To recap: Emmanuel Todd in After the Empire has introduced us to this strange little device for predicting the shape of societies as they enter modernity�as goes the family, so goes the state. I quote from pages 102-103 of the paperback:�Peoples with an egalitarian conception of family relations, as is the case for Rome, China, the Arab world, Russia, and northern France, tend to perceive men and peoples as equal. [�] Peoples whose traditional family structures do not include a strict definition concerning the equality of brothers, as was the case in Athens and even more clearly in Germany, do not succeed in developing an egalitarian attitude toward other men and peoples�As pointed out in the previous post, I don�t think this kind of sweeping anthropological gimmick can simultaneously explain both the Athens of Pericles and the Germany of Hitler.And apparently the Anglo-Saxon mindset hovers between the Universalism* of France & Russia and the exclusionary attitudes of Athens/Germany�with it tilting toward the latter in recent decades. To back up his arguments that Universalism is ebbing away, Todd deploys statistics that apparently show that the rates of mixed marriages, which had been increasing up until the mid-1990s, have been static ever since. Todd takes a rigid statist line in explaining this failure:�In a society that has replaced the glorification of equal rights with the worship of �diversity��of origins, cultures, races�known as �multiculturalism,� is it really surprising to witness a failure of integration?�I can think of plenty of reasons why ethic groups in the United States may not be mingling as freely as they might�most of them economic�but I wouldn�t have reached for a worship of diversity as one of them.And in passing, France�s �Universalist� approach doesn�t seem to be paying off handsomely in the simmering banlieux. As for Russia’s egalitarian approach in Chechnya…As well a retreat of the Universalist generosity to other races in the heart of the empire, the exclusionary perspective now applies to the �subjects� of the empire. This, in Todd�s view, explains the growing criticism of Islam in the West. And guess what? American women are to blame:�In the United States, feminism has become over the years increasingly dogmatic and aggressive, and genuine tolerance for the real diversity is forever waning. Thus it was in a sense destined to come into conflict with the Arab world and the rest of the Muslim world where family structures resemble those in the Arab world[�] On one side America, the country of castrating women�on the other Bin Laden, a polygamous terrorist with countless half-brothers and half-sisters.� [Pages 136-137]One can imagine Todd queasily crossing his legs in the seminar room of some American University as a shrill female whines on about, say, honour killings in Pakistan. To cut to the chase, Todd goes someway in the right direction in identifying the symptoms of whatever might be ailing the United States (although the country still seems to be heartily defying the sceptics who wait impatiently for it to keel over). Yet, to extend the metaphor, his etiology is all over the place. His deep causes, aside from the economic reasons that can be found in any recent copy of The Economist or Business Week, can be found in kinship relations, a worship of diversity, and radical feminism�but does this hotchpotch of theories, stats, and prejudices actually cut it in French academe? *Todd is sane enough to point out that Universalism is not an automatic good. Bolshevik Russia or the France of 1790 was willing to accept others, so long as you fully lived up to the Platonic ideals of the Revolution. If you failed, then it was off to the Gulag or guillotine. Indeed, as Anne Applebaum in Gulag has shown, the treatment of indigenous Russians in the camps was as bad if not worse than that doled out to those from the periphery of the empire.