Annie
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- Nov 22, 2003
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This is LONG, but interesting. Unlike the regular newspaper columns, he is able to ramble a bit, some of it's quite stream of consciousness, but good:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the-demography/
http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/24/01/its-the-demography/
Its the demography, stupid
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 survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. Therell probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands probablyjust as in Istanbul theres still a building called St. Sophias Cathedral. But its not a cathedral; its 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 the fact 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 societygovernment health care, government day care (which Canadas thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britains just introduced). Weve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activityGo forth and multiply, because if you dont you wont be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes dont 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 dont think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.
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Yet while Islamism is the enemy, its not what this things about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: its not the HIV that kills you, its the pneumonia you get when your bodys too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they loseas 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 theres an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
Thats what the wars about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: Civilizations die from suicide, not murderas can be seen throughout much of the western world right now. The progressive agenda lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalismis collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesnt involve knowing anything about other culturesthe capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures.
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Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In The Survival of Culture, I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, QC. 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 dont 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 Im not sure thats true.
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other peoples intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So youre 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.
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Whats 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 birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, its 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 theyre running out a lot faster than the oil is. Replacement fertility ratei.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smalleris 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 youll 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 Canadas 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. Thats to say, Spains population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italys population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgarias by 36 percent, Estonias by 52 percent. 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 sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americansand mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get olderand 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 businessunless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I dont think so. If you look at European election resultsmost recently in Germanyits hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, theyre 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. Its presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that thats somebody elses problem. The average German worker now puts in 22 percent 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.
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So the worlds 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 UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another thirty 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, theres something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given Europes 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 theyre flying planes into buildings for theyre 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 dont notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually theres a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding sloganlike Bill Clintons Its about the future of all our children. We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Clintons tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the west cant 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 Cliffords 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 civilizationsas a prominent EU official described his continent to meare 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 secularisms starting point is that this is all there is, its no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than its ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that its 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 CIAs 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 well 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...
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