America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

by Mark Steyn

  Another: why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

  The literal facts of life are also what underpinned the so-called “cartoon jihad” of early 2006. It was a small portent of the future: the publication by one Danish newspaper of various cartoonists’ mostly very mild representations of the Prophet Mohammed was the pretext for weeks of protests, lawsuits, death threats, rioting, torching, razing, and killing by disaffected Muslims from Calgary to Islamabad, London to Jakarta. On September 10, 2001, not many of us thought it would soon seem perfectly routine to hear news announcers read headlines like: “The Danish cartoon death toll is now up to nine.”

  No laughing matter, especially as that number multiplied into double and triple figures. But it’s remarkable how quickly we’ve internalized the underlying demographic reality. Like all the mini-crises afflicting the Continent since September 11, its subtext derives from the belated realization among Europeans that they’re elderly and fading and that their Muslim populations are young and surging, and in all these clashes the latter are putting down markers for the way things will be the day after tomorrow, like the new owners who have the kitchen remodeled before moving in. When it came to those cartoons, every Internet blogger was eager to take a stand on principle alongside plucky little Denmark. But there’s only five million of them. Whereas there are twenty million Muslims in Europe—officially. That’s the equivalent of the Danes plus the Irish plus the Belgians plus the Estonians. You do the math.

  What’s the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What’s the most popular baby boy’s name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmö, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular baby boy’s name in the United Kingdom. Yet most Europeans weren’t even aware of the dominant demographic trend until September 11, and subsequent events in Madrid, Paris, and London.

  Or to put it at its most basic: Why is the world we live in the way it is? Why is this book written in the language of a tiny island off the coast of northern Europe? Why is English the language of global business, of the Internet, of the paramount power of the age and of dozens of other countries from Belize to Botswana, Nigeria to Nauru? Why does Canada share its queen with Papua New Guinea? Why does a quarter of the world’s population belong to the British Commonwealth and enjoy to one degree or another English Common Law and Westminster parliamentary traditions?

  Because in the early nineteenth century the first nation to conquer infant mortality was England. Hitherto, the British Isles had been like the rest of the world: you had a big bunch of kids and a lot of them died before they could be of economic benefit to you or to society. But by 1820 medical progress and improvements in basic hygiene had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of fifteen. In sheer numbers, the country was still a pipsqueak cluster of North Atlantic islands with 28 million people compared to China’s 320 million. But it was the underlying demographic trend that proved decisive in the century ahead. Britain had the surplus manpower not just to settle Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but also to provide the administrative and business class in the West Indies, Africa, India, and the Pacific. And, fortunately for the world, this demographic transformation occurred in a culture that even then had a long-established system of law, property rights, and personal freedom.

  Imagine what the planet would look like if the first country to conquer infant mortality had been a country with a less sustained tradition of individual liberty—China, say, or Japan or Russia or Germany. The “what,” “where,” and “when” are important, but the “who” is critical. It’s hard to have a big influence in the world when there’s just a few of you and you’re all getting on in years.

  So who’s in the situation of England at the beginning of the nineteenth century? What country today has half its population under the age of fifteen?

  Spain and Germany have 14 percent, the United Kingdom 18 percent, the United States 21 percent—and Saudi Arabia has 39 percent, Pakistan 40 percent, and Yemen 47 percent. Little Yemen, like little Britain two hundred years ago, will send its surplus youth around the world—one way or another. Cultural relativists who sneer at the idea of English civilization should try to imagine what the world would be like if the U.S. Supreme Court and the Indian parliament and the Australian legal system, not to mention Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge, had been built on Yemeni values.

  The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason—rising sea levels—and in the real problems we pay no heed to. So David Remnick, editor of the famously fact-checked-to-death New Yorker, declares to the magazine’s readers that the earth will “likely be an uninhabitable planet.” In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it’s uninhabitable. Yet environmentalists couldn’t be less interested in the politics of people—people who need people. Pace Barbra Streisand, they’re the unluckiest people in the world—as we’re about to find out. When my second child was born, a neighbor said, “Well, you’ve got two. You can stop now.” She was being enlightened and responsible. After all, for her entire adult life, the progressive-minded have worried about “overpopulation.” And this view became so pervasive that, in an age of hysteria about “dwindling resources,” it became entirely normal to look on our greatest resource—us—as a liability. So today we’re the dwindling resource, not the oil. We’re the endangered species, not the spotted owl. The “population explosion” is a prop of the Western progressive’s bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place. As Dr. Sue Blackmore wrote (in Britain’s Guardian) in an unintentional side-splitter of an enviro-doom column:

  In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more…. If we take the unselfish route and try to save everyone the outcome is likely to be horrific conflict in the fight over resources, and continuing devastation of the planet until most, or all, of humanity is dead.

  If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.

  Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population—weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example.

  Hmm. On the one hand, Dr. Sue Blackmore and the bloke from Cold-play. On the other, Dick Cheney. I think we can all agree which people would be “needed”—Al Gore, the board of the Sierra Club, perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly endives from once fashionable eateries.

  Curiously, those environmentalists calling for a dramatically smaller population never seem to lead by example, and always manage to give the impression that no matter how small the ark is they’re a shoo-in for a first-class stateroom. But, as it happens, Dr. Blackmore won’t have to worry about whether to sacrifice Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin in order to save Sting and Bono. Given the plummeting birth rates in Europe, Russia, Japan, etc., a large chunk of the world has evidently decided to take pre-emptive action on climate change and opt for societal suicide. The crisis we face today is the precise opposite of “overpopulation”: the developed world’s population is
shrinking faster than any human society not in the grip of war or disease has ever shrunk. Does the environmental movement sicken itself only over the black rhino and the green-cheeked parrot? Aren’t people part of the environment? They certainly have environmental implications. For one thing, there’ll be far fewer environmentalists around. By the end of this century, the demographically doomed Italians and Spaniards will be so few in number there won’t be enough Continental environmentalists left to man the local Greenpeace office. The Belgian climate-change lobbyist will be on the endangered species list with the Himalayan snow leopard. And, from an American point of view, the blue-state ecochondriacs of Massachusetts and California will be finding the international sustainable-development conferences a lot lonelier.

  As for the merits of scientists and artists over politicians, those parts of the world still breeding are notable for their antipathy to music, haven’t done much in the way of science for over a millennium, and politics-wise incline mostly to dictators and mullahs, nuclear or otherwise. Scrap Scarlett Johansson’s fur-trimmed bikini and stick her in a waterlogged burqa.

  Most twenty-year projections (on economic growth, global warming, etc.) are laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are too. The eco-doom-mongers get it wrong because they fail to take into account human inventiveness: We can’t feed the world! they shriek. But we develop more efficient farming methods with nary a thought. The oil will run out by the year 2000! they warn. But we develop new extraction methods and find we’ve got enough oil for as long as we’ll need it.

  But human inventiveness depends on humans—and that’s the one thing we really are running short of, at least in the self-flagellating developed world.

  THE WEST RUNS OUT OF STOCK

  Take an alphabetical list of nations of the world and start at the beginning:

  Afghanistan. In 2005, the rate of births per 1,000 people in the country was 47.02.

  Albania. In 2005, the rate of births per 1,000 people in the country was 15.08.

  That means Albanians are breeding at a third of the rate of Afghans. As noted above, “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, Niger, is 7.46; Mali, 7.42; Somalia, 6.76; Afghanistan, 6.69; Yemen, 6.58. Notice what those nations have in common? Starts with an I, ends with a slam. As in: slam dunk.

  Go back to that Albanian fertility rate. It looks low compared to Afghanistan but it’s the highest in Europe. And why would that be? Because it’s Europe’s only majority Muslim country. At the moment.

  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 2.11 births per woman. New Zealand’s just below; Ireland’s at 1.9; Australia, 1.7. 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. So Spain’s population is halving with every generation. Two grown-ups have a total of one baby. So there are half as many children as parents. And a quarter as many grandchildren as grandparents. And an eighth as many great-grandchildren as great-grandparents. And after that there’s no point extrapolating, because you’re over the falls and it’s too late to start paddling back. I received a flurry of letters from furious Spaniards when the government decided to replace the words “father” and “mother” on its birth certificates with the less orientationally offensive terms “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B.” This was part of the bureaucratic spring-cleaning of traditional language that always accompanies the arrival in law of “gay marriage.” But with historically low numbers of progeny, the designations of the respective progenitors seem of marginal concern. No point renaming the teams if you no longer play the game. They might at least encourage young Spaniards to wander into the Barcelona singles bars and try out the line: “Do you want to come back to my pad and play Progenitor A and Progenitor B?” “Well, okay, but only if I can be Progenitor A…”

  Just as revealing, in 2006 Spain’s ruling Socialist Party introduced a bill in parliament legislating that apes be included in “the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The party’s argument was that human Spaniards do, after all, share 98.4 percent of their genes with chimpanzees, 97.7 percent with gorillas, and 96.4 percent with orangutans. Unfortunately, the 2 percent Spaniards don’t share apparently includes the urge to reproduce. For the new Europe, instead of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, maybe someone should write Gibbons’ Rise and Triumph. But why stop there? Why not give sheep the right to an abortion? Or allow gerbils to contract gay marriage? With a cockatoo? Why does the king of Spain not simply declare that henceforth, by royal proclamation, pigs shall fly?

  By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent—or more. Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility: 1.3 births per woman. In theory, those countries will find their population halving every thirty-five years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there’s no point sticking around a country that’s turned into an undertaker’s waiting room. Not every pimply burger flipper wants to support entire old folks’ homes single-handed and, aside from the economic argument, there are cultural factors too: I love going into Viennese record stores where the main floor’s full of waltzes and operetta, and the hip-hop section’s one tiny bin down in the back of the basement. But if you’re young and fancy a burg with more of a buzz on the cutting edge of the zeitgeist you’re unlikely to find it in Western Europe circa 2020.

  As for America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU; in the 2004 election, the Bush-voting states had fertility rates 12 percent higher than Kerry-voting states. Barring a sudden change in electoral fortunes, Democrats are going to be even more depressed after the 2010 and 2020 reapportionments. Those who pooh-pooh the United States’ comparatively robust demographics say they reflect nothing more than the fecundity of Hispanic immigration—it’s the legions of the undocumented who are filling the maternity wards. In fact, white women in America still breed at a greater rate—1.85 or so—than white women in Europe or Canada. And, from the Democrats’ point of view, as they preside over dwindling school enrollments from San Francisco to rural Vermont, the reality is that red-state white Americans breed above replacement rate. In demographic terms, the salient feature of much of the “progressive agenda”—abortion, gay marriage, endlessly deferred adulthood—is that, whatever the charms of any individual item, cumulatively it’s a literal dead end.

  As fertility dries up, so do societies. Demography is the most obvious symptom of civilizational exhaustion, and the clearest indicator of where we’re headed. These countries are fading to oblivion unless they can change their ways, or train those orangutan citizens to serve the food at the seniors’ community center. The tax revenues that support the ever-growing numbers of the elderly and retired have to be paid by equally growing numbers of the young and working. The design flaw of the radically secularist Eutopia is that it depends on a religious-society birth rate.

  So, if Europeans and Canadians can no longer be bothered to have children, where’s that workforce going to come from?

  Easy, say the complaceniks at Toronto’s Globe and Mail. In 2004, reacting to the lowest Canadian fertility rate since records began and a 25.4 percent fall since 1992, the Globe’s editorialists wrote: “Luckily for our future economic and fiscal well-being, Canada is well-positioned to counter the declining population trend by continuing to encourage the immigration of talented people to this country from overcrowded parts of the world.”

  Phew! So there’s nothing to worry about, eh?
Thank goodness for that. Canadians can all go back to sleep while reading the “Celebrate Diversity” booklet from the Department of Multiculturalism.

  But hang on a minute: “talented people” from “overcrowded parts of the world”? Okay, name some.

  The “experts” of the Western world are slower to turn around than an ocean liner, and in Europe they were still yakking about the “population explosion” even as their 1970s schoolhouses, built in anticipation of traditional Catholic birth rates, were emptying through the nineties and oughts. In the ne plus ultra of doomsday tracts, The Population Bomb (1968), Paul Ehrlich begins with a blithely snobbish account of trying to reach his hotel in Delhi through the teeming hordes of humanity:

  People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, people arguing and screaming. People thrust their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.

  But in the twenty-first century, even Delhi’s running out of people. Even Paul Ehrlich’s hellhole of choice doesn’t have a high enough birth rate to maintain its population in the long term. Yet the complaceniks cling to the long-held Euro-Canadian policy of using the Third World as a farm team and denuding developing societies of their best and brightest. In the 2004 election, John Kerry and John Edwards made a big hoo-ha about “outsourcing”—i.e., American companies setting up a customer call center in Ireland or India. Outrageous! Yet most of the West has outsourced its entire future to the Third World. Just as America relies on the Chinese to make cheap Elmos and Poohs, so Canada relies on them to make cheap human beings—the children that domestic manufacturers in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere have concluded are prohibitively expensive to produce at home. Personally, I’ve never seen what’s so liberal and enlightened, rather than lazy and selfish, about fleecing the Third World of its doctors and engineers. But, even if you approve of it, it won’t be an option much longer. The UN’s most recent population report has revised the global fertility rate down from 2.1—i.e., replacement rate—to 1.85—i.e., eventual population decline. World population will peak in about 2050 (I’d hazard earlier) and then fall. For Europeans too self-absorbed or over-taxed to breed, the fallback position for their own barrenness—use the Third World as your nursery—is also dead.