by Mark Steyn
Post-Christian hyper-rationalism turns out to be, 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 twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.
Birth rates in the so-called “overcrowded” parts of the world are already 2.9 and falling. India has a quickly growing middle class and declining fertility. In 2020 “talented people” will be much sought after by all countries within the developed-but-depopulating world: how sure can Canadians be that an educated Indian will prefer a high-tax, low-temperature jurisdiction to America or Australia? Or, come to that, to his own economically booming country, where the fruits of his labor won’t be shoveled straight into paying the debts run up by the wheezing boomers. The Third Worlders being born now in all but the most psychotic jurisdictions will reach adulthood with a range of options. By 2015, a smart, energetic Chinaman or Brazilian will be able to write his own ticket anywhere he wants. How attractive will the prospect of moving to the European Union and supporting a population of geriatric ingrate Continentals be? If that ratio of workers to retirees keeps heading in the same direction, the EU will have the highest taxes not just in the Western world, but in most of the rest. A middle-class Indian or Singaporean or Chilean already has little incentive to come to the Continent. If the supposedly insane neocon plan to remake the Middle East comes off, even your wacky Arabs may stay home.
EAST MEETS WEST
There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called “population explosion” was really a massive population adjustment. The world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “Western.” Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Europe and North America: in the United Kingdom, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week. Meanwhile, in areas of traditionally moderate Islam, from the Balkans to Indonesia, Muslims are becoming radicalized and fiercer in their faith.
If a society chooses to outsource its breeding, who your suppliers are is not unimportant. “I’ve heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child,” said Lyn Allison of the Australian Democrats, after a political opponent, Danna Vale, warned that the country could be swamped by Muslims. “If it wasn’t the Greeks, it was the Italians…or it was the Vietnamese.” But those are races or nationalities. Islam is a religion, and an explicitly political one—unlike the birthplace of your grandfather, it’s not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for many of its adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression—a pan-Islamic identity that transcends borders. “You can’t find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad,” said the Aussie prime minister, John Howard, stating the obvious in a way most political leaders can’t quite bring themselves to do. “There is really not much point in pretending it doesn’t exist.”
Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans, and currently the second biggest supplier of new Canadians. So it’s worth mulling over the question John Howard suggests: What proportion of Western Muslims is hot for jihad? Five percent? Ten, 12, 20 percent? The years roll by since September 11, and for the most part we’re none the wiser. Nonetheless, except for the willfully blind, the distinctions between Ms. Allison’s “Greeks and Italians and Vietnamese” and Muslim immigration are clear. Instead of a melting pot, there’s conversion: a Scot can marry a Greek or a Botswanan, but when a Scot marries a Yemeni it’s because the former has become a Muslim. In defiance of normal immigration patterns, the host country winds up assimilating with Islam: French municipal swimming baths introduce gender-segregated bathing sessions; Australian hospitals remove pork from the cafeteria menu.
It’s fair to point out that in much of the West “Western Civilization” has been only recently acquired. Until the 1970s, southern Europe was mostly dictatorships—Portugal, Spain, Greece. A generation earlier, Italy was a gangster state and Germany a genocidal one. The Muslim critique of the West—that we’re decadent vulgar narcissist fornicating sodomites—is not without more than a grain of truth. But when the fastest-breeding demographic group on the planet is also the one most resistant to the pieties of the social-democratic state, that presents a severe challenge, at least for the Left. In their bizarre prioritization of “a woman’s right to choose,” feminists have helped ensure that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn’t accord women the right to choose anything. Non-Muslim females in heavily Muslim neighborhoods in France now wear headscarves while out on the streets. Yes, yes, I know Islam is very varied, and Riyadh has a vibrant gay scene, and the Khartoum Feminist Publishing Collective now has so many members they’ve rented lavish new offices above the clitorectomy clinic. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, except when I’m being interviewed live on TV. But that’s better than pretending that there aren’t even any questions.
Forget the Jews and the gays and the women and reduce it to its most basic: in most Muslim jurisdictions, there is simply no culture of inquiry. No notion that challenging, questioning, testing the assumptions of that society has any value. This isn’t a recent development. For Islam’s first two or three centuries, scholars busied themselves figuring out what the divine revelations of the Koran actually meant for the daily routine of believers. But by the eleventh century all four schools of Islamic law had concluded they were pretty much on top of things and there was no need for any further interpretation or investigation. And from that point on Islam coasted, and then declined. The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report—more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand—suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed world. What books are among the few they do translate? Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, both of which are prominently displayed bestsellers in even moderate Muslim countries—and, indeed, even in the Muslim stores on Edgware Road in the heart of London. No Islamic nation could have flown to the moon or invented the Internet, simply because for a millennium the culture has suppressed the curiosity necessary for such a venture.
You don’t have to subscribe to the view that every Muslim is a jihadist nutcake eager to hijack a 747 and head for the nearest tall building to acknowledge that at the very minimum these population trends put a large question mark over the future. Let me pluck two interesting numbers:
In the fall of 2001, the Ottawa Citizen conducted a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams and found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in September 11. Oh, well. It was just a few weeks after the attacks; everyone was still in shock. Perfectly understandable in its way.
Five years later, in the summer of 2006, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 percent of British Muslims believed there was any Arab involvement in September 11.
Anyone who’s traveled in the Middle East will recognize that moment—not with the wacky death-to-the-Great-Satan guys but with the hot-looking Westernized Bahraini lady doctor you’re enjoying a little incendiary flirting with. And then—ten, twenty, forty-five minutes into the conversation—she says something nutty. Often what’s nuttiest is that it’s completely illogical: in the spring of 2002, I met many Arabs who believed simultaneously that (a) September 11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim people.
What that British poll suggests is that the same syndrome is very advanced among Western Muslims. You can be perfectly assimilated when it comes to clothes, sports, pop music, the state of the economy, the need for transport infrastructure spending, and a million other issues, but on one of the central questions facing the world today 83 percent of the fastest-growing demographic in the United Kingdom does n
ot accept the same reality as their fellow British subjects. And competing versions of reality is never a good recipe for social stability. Western Muslims are playing their own 24/7 version of the children’s game “Opposite Land.”
So if a population “at odds with the modern world” (in Philip Longman’s phrase) is the fastest-breeding group on the planet, how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”? The principal challenge to the United States in the years ahead is to avoid winding up the lonesomest gal in town. Given that most of its old allies—the ones John Kerry places so much stock in—are unlikely to conjure up the will to save themselves, it’s important that new allies are found among the emerging nations. I’m a supporter of the Bush Doctrine, of bringing liberty to the Middle East. It’s a long shot, but, whatever their problems, most Islamic countries have the advantage of beginning any evolution into free states from the starting point of relative societal cohesion. By contrast, European nations face the trickier task of trying to hold on to their freedom at a time of cultural disintegration. Many of them won’t make it. Watching the scenes of the anti-Danish protests on TV, as angry implacable crowds marched through the streets denouncing freedom as “Western terrorism” and pledging that “the enemies of Islam” would “drown in their own blood,” I thought back to those times I’ve been in the Arab world and rounded a corner and found something scary going on—excitable men prancing around the streets doing the old “Death to the Great Satan” dance. In the Middle East, you quickly learn the art of backing out of the room without catching the crazy guy’s eye. The problem for Europe is that it’s their room the crazy guys are now in.
THE SEVENTH AGE
A good way to look at what’s happening is via Shakespeare’s seven ages of man:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits and their entrances…
And right now some of us are a lot closer to the exits and some of us are still pouring through the entrances. Look at the Bard’s various “ages”:
…Then the soldier.
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth.
They’re the foot soldiers of the jihad, the excitable young men you see on the news jumping up and down in the streets of Gaza and Islamabad torching the Stars and Stripes—and also (and more important) the ones who take flight training so they can plough jets into skyscrapers, who take whitewater rafting breaks in Wales so they’ll be at the peak of fitness when they self-detonate on the London Tube, the ones who define courage as the ability to look a seven-year-old Beslan schoolgirl in the eye and kill her: full of strange oaths, seeking the bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth, or even the canon’s mouth—the incendiary imam urging them on to martyrdom. Over the next generation, that population of excitable young men will explode—demographically I mean, though very literally if the more severe mullahs have their way. By 2050, Muslim fertility rates will be in decline, as they already are in some of the more developed Islamic countries. But they’ll be beginning their decline much later than Europe’s, or Canada’s, or Vermont’s, and so they will have a huge demographic advantage. And given that that’s the sole advantage they’ll have—the Middle East’s only other resource, oil, will be a fast-evaporating pool by mid-century—this is Islam’s demographic moment and they have to make the most of it. If they’re serious about the new caliphate and making the whole world part of the Dar al-Islam, they have to pull it off in the next quarter century.
What of America? The hyperpower, demographically, is in Shakespeare’s middle age:
In fair round belly with good capon lined…
Full of wise saws and modern instances…
or, more accurately, divided between the two: blue-staters taking refuge in too many “modern instances,” but with sufficient red-staters who still live by the “wise saws.” The United States has demographic challenges of its own, but, even if one accepts the dubious proposition that its population’s ability to maintain “replacement rate” fertility is largely dependent on Hispanic immigration, its native birth rate is still the highest in the developed world. So the United States’s relatively healthy demographic profile is merely the latest example of American exceptionalism.
What of Europe?
…The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards the childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound…
That’s the situation the Continent’s in. In constructing the European Union, they’ve built a world too wide for their shrunk shank. Worse, it’s constructed in a particular fashion: since 1945, the big manly voices of the perpetually warring Germans and French and Italians have been turned to socialized health care and welfare and paid vacations that enable modern European man to live his entire life in the childish treble. Unfortunately, such a society is hideously expensive to maintain, so Europe’s aging population requires ever more and ever younger immigrants to prop up the system.
How does Shakespeare conclude?
…Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
That’s Russia today: “the sick man of Europe,” with falling life expectancy, riddled with HIV and tuberculosis and heart disease, its infrastructure crumbling, its borders unenforceable, and its wily kleptocracy draining its wealth Westward—a nation all but “sans everything.”
How does Shakespeare begin?
…At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms…
Go to any children’s store in Amsterdam or Marseilles or Vienna or Stockholm. Look at the women in headscarves or full abaya. That’s the future.
Chapter Two
Going…Going…Gone
DEMOGRAPHY VS. DELUSION
Like a lecherous stud suddenly stricken with impotence, we are humiliated at the very heart of our faith in ourselves. For all our knowledge, our intelligence, our power, we can no longer do what the animals do without thought.
P. D. JAMES, THE CHILDREN OF MEN (1993)
The words are those of Theodore Faron, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, in the first chapter of Baroness James’s novel, set in 2021, when the human race is unable to breed. We seem to be approaching that situation a little ahead of schedule. The only difference between Lady James’s dystopian fantasy and our current reality is that, in the fictional version, man is physically impotent.
In real life, we appear to be psychosomatically barren—at least in the non-red-state parts of the developed world. Almost every geopolitical challenge in the years ahead has its roots in demography, but not every demographic crisis will play out the same way. That’s what makes doing anything about it even more problematic—different countries’ reactions to their own particular domestic circumstances will impact in destabilizing ways on the international scene. In Japan, the demographic crisis exists virtually in laboratory conditions—no complicating factors; in Russia, it will be determined by the country’s relationship with a cramped neighbor, China; and in Europe, the new owners are already in place—like a tenant with a right-to-buy agreement.
Let’s start in the most geriatric jurisdiction on the planet. In Japan, the rising sun has already passed into the next phase of its long sunset: net population loss. 2005 was the first year since records began in which the country had more deaths than births. Japan offers the chance to observe the demographic death spiral in its purest form. It’s a country with no immigration, no significant minorities, and no desir
e for any: just the Japanese, aging and dwindling.
At first it doesn’t sound too bad: compared with the United States, most advanced societies are very crowded. If you’re in a cramped apartment in a noisy, congested city, losing a couple hundred thousand seems a fine trade-off. The difficulty, in a modern social-democratic state, is managing which people to lose: already, according to the Japan Times, depopulation is “presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labor force.” For one thing, the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians. Why would any talented, ambitious med school student want to go into a field in such precipitous decline? As a result, if you live in certain parts of Japan, childbirth is all in the timing. On Oki Island, try to time the contractions for Monday morning. That’s when the maternity ward is open—first day of the week, 10 a.m., when an obstetrician flies in to attend to any pregnant mothers who happen to be around. And at 5:30 p.m. she flies out. So if you’ve been careless enough to time your childbirth for Tuesday through Sunday, you’ll have to climb into a helicopter and zip off to give birth alone in a strange hospital unsurrounded by tiresome loved ones. Do Lamaze classes on Oki now teach you to time your breathing to the whirring of the chopper blades?