This essay is a long read but it is worth it. I find it quite
provocative. Though I do believe the author's unqualified adulation of
the West is unfounded and many of his views overly racist, his article
raises some interesting questions. The paper speaks to questions of
moral relativism, the liberal challenge of tolerance toward the
intolerant, and its consequence for our way of life here in the US. I
urge you to read it and respond. Is the Western way of life inherently
superior?
I am eager to get your feedback
Michelle
-------------------------
THE CENTURY AHEAD
It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.
BY MARK STEYN
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out
as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world
will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively
disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western
European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on
the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--/probably/--just as in
Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But
it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real
estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be
designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon
Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to
figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election
campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political
platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much
all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would
call the secondary impulses of society--government health care,
government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing),
government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've
prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national
defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive
activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be
able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like
cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest
of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most
Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious
politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the
health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a
promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it
requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian
hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than
Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to
ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century
variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from
reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.
The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their
weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why
they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people
and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe
don't accept that proposition--then what exactly is the war about?
We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a
war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith,
whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for
the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as
a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the
participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in
Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in
Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs.
backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys
think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about.
Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the
HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too
weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S.
military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this
were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours
facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very
quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they
can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent
chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses
in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational
confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations
die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the
Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social
welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the
real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about
multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about
other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of
Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other
cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was
subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that
all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced
Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some
wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of
getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your
holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American
spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have
to live in an African or Native American society. It's a
quintessential piece of progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just
about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President
Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United
Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of
Ontario didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit
to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he
didn't. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time,
prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to
the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for
whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule.
Ontario's citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams
took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the
Commonwealth Games. So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big
meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a
mosque and, as the Toronto Star's reported it, "to provide them with
reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the
enemy."
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it
set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old
definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light
changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new
definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press
release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against
Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly
bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by
scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say,
there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the
West is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim
Blair's Web site in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody
of a Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash
from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders
have the measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all
along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British
barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September
11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to
disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too
often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look
at our own fundamentalisms."
Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western
liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready
to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the
intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam.
And I'm not sure that's true."
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own
tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance,
which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become
the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to
gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like
that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense
/frisson /of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words,
just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to
the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the
most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home,
to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the
son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the
Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he
was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks
in al Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that
the Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on
terror. Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being
judgmental) but no one can argue that they aren't in the thick of
things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after
killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at
Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier
in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with
Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't
doing our bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son
was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison
hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto
so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care.
"I'm Canadian, and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow
Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."
As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given
the circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only
was he providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he
was, in fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian
Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment and other Canucks have been
participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the
Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side.
Nonetheless, the prime minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims
on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to
demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked
about the Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once
you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and
to disagree."
That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose
which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card
arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The
Canadian prime minister is a typical late-stage Western politician:
He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know
many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to
provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more
than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and,
while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away
with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a
wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state.
Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister
will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the
forces of intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad
and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror
groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their
targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British
had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they
knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could
never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only
difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now
have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the
Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of
Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire
civilization lacks the will to see them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites,
and we're right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have
behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were
just a problem with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: The mob
could rise up and hang 'em from lampposts--a scenario that's not
unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes
way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of
most of the key responsibilities of life--child-raising, taking care
of your elderly parents--has profoundly changed the relationship
between the citizen and the state. At some point--I would say
socialized health care is a good marker--you cross a line, and it's
very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government
largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue
with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with
conservative audiences: "A government big enough to give you
everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."
Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government
big enough to give you everything you want still isn't big enough to
get you to give anything back. That's what the French and German
political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has
held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy
about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and the
Nigerians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians
and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us
a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say
"sleepwalk," it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary,
one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much
energy worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared
Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed," you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island
going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently
that's why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council.
Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious
choices of "societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much
every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with
the trees. (Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing
reforestation.) One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by
choosing what to worry about. The Western world has delivered more
wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other
civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great cult
of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his
bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul
Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo
famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to
death." In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the
Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981,
of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and
copper, lead and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is
happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running
out of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which
none of the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's
the largest country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet
it's dying--its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from
terrorism to tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the
perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote,
"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and
does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom
blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that 30
years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended
estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the
United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the
destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass
extinction of species. . . . More than half the world will be
afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle
East with severe problems . . . 25 percent of all species of mammals
and 10 percent of birds will be extinct . . ."
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as the Guardian
headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the
world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty
darn good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover.
It's the Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the
loss of their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide
emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying
about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about
things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the
things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless
wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the
very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly
jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing
dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a
hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably
possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any
Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by
it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry
about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral,
primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is
a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the
peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First
World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural
China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is
killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane.
That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and
Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis
have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant
strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and
successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam,
Manchester, Buffalo . . .
What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers
and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of
its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is
the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born
in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in
2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing
their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data
on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot
faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the
number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any
bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some
countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia,
is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those
nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders
and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at
replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New
Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to
1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the
brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1,
about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is
halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have
fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America,
demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for
honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won
the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26
states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer
Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state
Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of
Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever
been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going
out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways.
Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election
results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that,
while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're
unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their
government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a
generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously
reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from
a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers.
It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction
of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem.
The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than
his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain
electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful
way.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World
and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one
wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the
U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that
liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns,
they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If
Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious
allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second
World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free
world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone
else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of
nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little
wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public
health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer.
And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them
ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are
declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet
may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby
at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing.
The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge
advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have
understood that their so-called population explosion was really a
massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population
between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of
it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000,
the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's
population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about
15% to 20%.
Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many
of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your
pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less
groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the
layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand
names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different.
Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in
your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald
statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of
the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they
were the same: each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back
then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic,
having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims
(officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European
Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the
fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than
Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having
consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent
after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing,
but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a
remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or
ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On
the one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America
will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than
M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's
track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this
is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough
suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to
topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and,
given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the
emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying
planes into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by
waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock
'em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations
follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence,
extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages
because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age
with a sly, self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the
future of all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully
mocking Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over
everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of
the rest of the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society
that has no children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought
the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone
within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who
dismissed Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase)
assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA
analysts' position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest
economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts
predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and
the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents,
so-called post-Christian civilizations--as a prominent EU official
described his continent to me--are more prone than traditional
societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature.
Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future,
as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great
majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point
is that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or
not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of
endurance than it's ever had. The idea that progressive
Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development
was always foolish; we now know that it's suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants
at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting
the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA's got pretty much
everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a
shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop
spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU
collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that
within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal
contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way,
and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots
and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they
avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America
militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there
will be 500 million Americans, and what's left in Europe will either
be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its
population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of
a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan
be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Koreans and Filipinos?
Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by Algerians? That's a
trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish
tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot
sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the U.S. Congress, Tony Blair remarked:
"As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible
but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave
behind?"
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the
unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the
Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of
the key regional players in the world today--Australia, India, South
Africa--and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the
Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will
be because the People's Republic learns more from British Hong Kong
than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the
dominant power of our time derives its political character from
18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further
than the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and
end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question
is more urgent than most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is
dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s?
If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean
the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60,
etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits
the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the
Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by
2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of
population growth in English cities. Can a society become
increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming
increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not
entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to
beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses
like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big
thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain
that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic
in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going
to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if
one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to
resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria,
it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting
much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.
I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where
Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep
your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent
of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's
right to choose," Western women are delivering their societies into
the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If
any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have
babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl
born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance
around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands
off my bush!"
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst
Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was
at stake:
"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our
bodies. . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote.
But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised
Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote."
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She
lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even
move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 presidential election as a referendum
on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men
enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In
his book "The Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will the
children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from
people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if
sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven,
individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market
culture dominated by fundamentalism--a new Dark Ages."
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John
Ashcroft out there.
Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western
liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there
will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy
a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what
proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and
inappropriate. But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100%
of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it
doesn't matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if
one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy
and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance
whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%,
45%.
Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan
to promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable
"progressives" have routinely asserted that there's no evidence
Muslims want liberty and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with
democracy. If that's true, it's a problem not for the Middle East
today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll
taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under
Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If a population "at odds with the
modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on the planet--if there
are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those
nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more
and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational
institutions--how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world"?
Not good.
"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be
very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the
midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories
that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old
buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only
legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those
lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's
the demography, stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change
course, then "What do you leave behind?" is the only question that
matters.
/Mr. Steyn is a syndicated columnist and theater critic for The New
Criterion[5], in whose January issue this article appears./
Links:
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[1] http://www.wsj.com/?jopinemaowsj
[2] http://opinionjournal.com/
[3] http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id 0007760
[4] http://opinionjournal.com
[5]
https://www.ezsubscription.com/cgi-bin/formgen.exe/add?db=CRITERIO&key=7WWW06
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