by Mark Steyn
But what if it doesn’t work out like that? In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House’s survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest “freedom” score were Muslim. Of the forty-six Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the sixteen nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 percent of the population, only another three were ranked as free: Benin, Serbia and Montenegro, and Suriname. It will be interesting to follow France’s fortunes as a fourth member of that group.
We can argue about what consequences these demographic trends will have, but to say blithely they have none is ridiculous. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman writes:
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.
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 agitate about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race; it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent 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 percent of the population or only 60 percent, or 50, or 45 percent. Which is why that question lies at the heart of almost any big international news story of recent years—the French riots, the attacks on Danish embassies and consulates over the publication of cartoons of Mohammed, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Turkey’s membership in the European Union, Pakistani riots over Newsweek’s Koran-down-the-toilet story. Whenever I make that point, lefties always respond, “Oh, well, that’s typical right-wing racism.” In fact, it ought to be the Left’s issue. I’m a “social conservative.” When the mullahs take over, I’ll grow my beard a little fuller, get a couple extra wives, and keep my head down. It’s the feminists and gays who’ll have a tougher time. If, say, three of the five judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court are Muslim, what are the chances of them approving “gay marriage”? That’s the scenario Europe’s looking at a few years down the road.
The basic demography explains, for example, the critical difference between the “war on terror” for Americans and Europeans: in the U.S., the war is something to be fought in the treacherous sands of the Sunni Triangle and the caves of the Hindu Kush; you go to faraway places and kill foreigners. But in Europe it’s a civil war. Neville Chamberlain dismissed Czechoslovakia as “a faraway country of which we know little.” This time around, for much of Western Europe it turned out the faraway country of which they knew little was their own.
As for America, Shelby Steele sees the tentativeness of our performance in Iraq as a geopolitical version of “white guilt,” a “secular penitence” for the sins of the past. Even while waging war, our culture has internalized the morbid syndromes of the age: who are we to liberate the Iraqis? We represent imperialism and all the other evils.
On that point, I wish we did represent imperialism, at least to this extent: there’s a lot to be said for a great nation that understands its greatness is not an accident and that therefore it should spread the secrets of its success around; conversely, there’s not much to be said for a great nation that chooses to hobble itself by pretending it’s merely one vote among co-equals on international bodies manned by Cuba and Sudan—the transnational version of “affirmative action,” to extend Shelby Steele’s thought.
As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war—wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers. Everything else it requires it can pick up at Radio Shack: cell phones and laptops, which, along with ATM cards and some dime-store box-cutters, were all it took to pull off September 11.
For this to be an existential struggle, as the Cold War was, the question is: are they a credible enemy to us?
For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: are we a credible enemy to them?
You may recall a pertinent detail during the bogus controversy over the “torture” of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay: U.S. guards at Gitmo are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as “unclean.” But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them—and, by doing so, to validate their bigotry. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The U.S. military hands each jihadist his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship the Times of London. It’s not just unbecoming to buy in to Muslim psychoses; in the end, it’s self-defeating. And our self-defeat is their surest shot at victory. Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration began promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a good sign. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths. Even a loser can win when he’s up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western Civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, the jihadists figure: hey, why not us?
The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it’s a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic, and geopolitical odds. By “demographic,” I mean the Muslim world’s high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By “economic,” I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable with their post-Christian birth rates. By “geopolitical,” I mean that if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
I said above that there is one difference between me and the other doom-mongers. For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it’s global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizen to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby. Not only does this not solve the problem, it is, in fact, a symptom of the real problem: the torpor of the West derives in part from the annexation by government of most of the core functions of adulthood. Even in America, too many Democrats take it as read that the natural destination of an advanced Western democracy is Scandinavia. If it is, we’re all doomed. Every successful society is a balancing act between the private and the public, but in Europe and Canada the balance is way out of whack. When the foreign policy panjandrums talk about our enemies, they distinguish between “rogue states” like Iran and North Korea and “non-state actors” like al Qaeda and Hezbollah. But those distinctions apply on the home front too. Big governments are “rogue states,” out of control and lacking the wit and agility to see off the threats to our freedom. Citizens willing to be “non-state actors” are just as important and, as we saw on Flight 93, a decisive part of our defense, nimbler and more efficient than the federal behemoth. The free world’s citizenry could use more non-state actors.
So this is a doomsday book with a twist: an apocalyptic scenario that can best be avoided not by more government but by less—by government returning to the citizenry the primal respo
nsibilities it’s taken from them in the modern era.
The alternative is stark: Europe has all but succumbed to the dull opiate of multiculturalism. In its drowsy numbness, it stirs but has no idea what to do and so does nothing. One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they’ll marvel at how easy it all was. You don’t need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that’s a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural “sensitivity,” the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want—including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, during the Danish “cartoon jihad” of 2006, Jack Straw, then British foreign secretary, hailed the “sensitivity” of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending representations of the Prophet.
No doubt he was similarly impressed by the “sensitivity” of Burger King, which withdrew ice cream cones from its British menus because Mr. Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word “Allah” in Arabic script. I don’t know which sura in the Koran says, “Don’t forget, folks, it’s not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name,” but ixnay on both just to be “sensitive.”
And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciated the “sensitivity” of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And maybe he even admires the “sensitivity” of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and sharia. As a famously sensitive non-cartooning Dane once put it: “To be or not to be: that is the question.”
And, in the end, the answer to that question is the only one that matters.
Part I
The Gelded Age
DEMOGRAPHY, DEMOCRACY, DESTINY
Chapter One
The Coming of Age
BIRTHS VS. DEARTHS
Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE, A STUDY OF HISTORY (1934–1961)
My old—very old—friend George Abbott, the director of On the Town, Damn Yankees, and Pal Joey, died in 1995 at the age of 107 while working on a revival of The Pajama Game. A few years earlier, in his late nineties, he’d given up playing tennis because all his partners had died. That’s the position America is facing in respect to its transnational social life: it’ll be turning up to the G-8, NATO, and the EU-US summit only to find that all its partners have died.
The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population—i.e., no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010—you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That’s what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than any of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handguns, more UN peacekeepers, etc.) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38; Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries—or, more precisely, these people—are going out of business.
There’s nothing wrong with old folks: speaking for myself, if I’m at some soiree, I’d much rather Doris Day provided the evening’s musical entertainment than the latest caterwauling gangsta rapper; I’d rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society’s health—about its innovative and creative energies—are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill’s closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have—managing growth or managing decline?
So what happens when the whole nation—and in Europe the entire continent—has a profile closer to the decrepit mill town than to the Sun Belt suburb?
And, if you’re anti-capitalist, don’t console yourself with the thought that you don’t need all those businesses anyway. Big Government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the U.S. Social Security system assumes a 30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you’re Spain and you’ve got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that’s going to be halving every thirty-five years. The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital—and that’s before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.
True, birth rates are falling all over the world, and it may be that eventually every couple on the planet decides to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage—and those societies with expensive social programs dependent on mass immigration will be in the worst predicament. It’s no consolation for the European Union, with its deathbed birth statistics, if the Third World’s demographics are also falling: they’re your nursery, they’re the babies you couldn’t be bothered to have; if their fertility rate goes the same way yours has, that will be a problem for you long before it’s a problem for them. Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, 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. By the next century, German will be spoken only at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering’s Monday night poker game in Hell. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by “rising sea levels” every Spaniard and Italian will be six feet under. But sure, go ahead and worry about “climate change.”
More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.
In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear—in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.
THE MATH OF THE MAP
My interest in demography dates back to September 11, 2001, when a demographic group I hadn’t given much thought to managed to get my attention. I don’t mean the, ah, unfortunate business with the planes and buildings and so forth, but the open cheering of the attacks by their coreligionists in Montreal, Yorkshire, Copenhagen, and elsewhere. How many of us knew there were quickly growing and culturally confident Muslim populations in Scandinavia?
Demography doesn’t explain everything, but it accounts for a good 90 percent—including the easy stuff, like why Jacques Chirac wasn’t amenable to Colin Powell’s schmoozing on Iraq: if the population of your cities was 30 percent Muslim, with spectacularly high youth unemployment rates and a bunch of other grievan
ces, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Great Satan? Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map, near or far: the “who” is the best indicator of the what-where-when-why. Remember how it was when you watched TV in the eighties? You’d be bombarded with commercials warning that the Yellow Peril was annexing America and pretty soon they’d be speaking Japanese down at the shopping mall. It didn’t happen and it’s never going to happen. In the nineties, I tended to accept the experts’ line that Japan’s rising sun had gone into eclipse because its economy was riddled with protectionism, cronyism, and inefficient special-interest groups. But so what? You could have said the same in the sixties and seventies, when the joint was jumping. The only real structural difference between Japan then and Japan now is that the Yellow Peril got a lot wrinklier. What happened in the 1990s was what Yamada Masahiro of Tokyo’s Gakugei University calls the first “low birth-rate recession.” It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the stupidity, economists—the stupidity of thinking you can ignore demography. Japanese society aged, and aged societies, by their nature, are more cautious and less dynamic: old people weigh exposure to risk more than potential for gain.
Another example: will China be the hyperpower of the twenty-first century? Answer: no. Its population will get old before it’s got rich.