by Gwynne Dyer
At the same time, Putin doubled the state benefit for a first child to $55 a month, while women who have a second child will get an extra $110 a month, plus financial help with child care. Have three children, and you will get close to the minimum wage without working at all. That should be enough to stabilize the population. Get the alcohol problem under control—one third of male deaths in Russia are alcohol-related, and life expectancy for men is only fifty-nine—and Russia’s population might even start growing again.
Not that the world actually needs more Russians or French or Japanese, of course. There are already ten times as many of them as there were five hundred years ago, and that’s probably already more than the planet can bear over the long run.
The first time I went to Russia—back in the early eighties, when it was still the Soviet Union—I knew something was wrong beyond the obvious things like no commercial advertising and a pervasive glumness, but it took me three or four days to figure it out. And then, suddenly, I realized what it was: with the exception of a few conscript soldiers from the Central Asian republics absolutely everybody on the streets was white.
All the Soviet-bloc countries were like that. They simply hadn’t had any immigration because who in their right mind would have wanted to move there? Even today they are still the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the West (on the assumption that they are all really part of the greater “West,” which I think is fair). That’s probably why they are the most racist part of the West, too. The ethnically more complex societies are also the more tolerant ones.
January 29, 2009
MULTIRACIAL BRITAIN
If you are the head of something called the Equality and Human Rights Commission, your job is to complain about the racism, gender discrimination and general unfairness of the society you live in. So Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain’s EHRC, broke with tradition when he said last week that Britain is “by far—and I mean by far—the best place in Europe to live if you are not white.”
Phillips, whose own heritage is black Caribbean, made his remarks on the tenth anniversary of a report on the murder of a young black Londoner, Stephen Lawrence, that condemned the British police as “institutionally racist.” So they were, at the time—but having lived in London half my life, I think Phillips is right. Things have changed.
Lucinda Platt of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Essex University thinks so, too. She has just published a report revealing that one in five children in Britain now belongs to an ethnic minority—and one in ten lives in a mixed-race family. The first statistic might merely confirm Enoch Powell’s fears of forty years ago. The second proves that he was utterly wrong.
Enoch Powell was the Conservative politician who made a famous speech in 1968 predicting a race war if the United Kingdom did not stop non-white immigration from the former empire. He dressed it up with quotes from the classics, but the message was plain: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ”
“That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic,” Powell went on, referring to the race riots that devastated many large American cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, “ … is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, [the non-white part of the British population] will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.”
Powell was promptly expelled from the shadow cabinet, but an opinion poll soon afterwards showed that 74 percent of the British population shared his fears. The general opinion at the time in Europe, based mainly on observation of the American experience, was that different races could not live comfortably together.
Fast-forward forty years, and Britain is more or less as Powell predicted: the proportion of non-whites among its citizens is almost the same as it is in the United States. But the next generation of British are not fighting each other, as Powell predicted; they are marrying each other.
Among British children who have an Indian heritage, 11 percent live in families with one white parent. Among kids with a Chinese heritage, 35 percent have one white parent. Among children with a black Caribbean heritage, 49 percent do. Including my next-door neighbours.
Among Muslim Britons, the rate is much lower (only 4 percent for kids of Pakistani heritage), but the younger generation of British people is largely blind to ethnicity and religious differences, all the old shibboleths. And apart from some former mill towns where unskilled immigrants from a single ethnic group confront the old white working class, both of them now unemployed, there are few racially segregated ghettoes in Britain.
Of London’s thirty-two boroughs, none is less than 10 percent non-white. On the other hand, only three reach 50 percent non-white, and those just barely. Despite the happy-ever-after inauguration of Barack Obama, the urban scene in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago is dramatically different.
This does not prove that British people are more virtuous than Americans. It just shows that people of different races can live comfortably together, can even come to see race as essentially irrelevant to their choice of mate, provided that there is no heritage of race-based slavery.
The French “race riots” of 2005 and 2007 occasioned much discussion of France’s failure to integrate its immigrants, but lots of angry white kids took part in those riots, too. The same was true of the Brixton “race riots” in London in 1981. They were actually anti-police riots, and whites were welcome to join. Many did.
Eastern Europe is different: it has far fewer non-whites, and so it is far more racist. But Britain, and to a lesser extent France, is rather like Canada, another country that was 98 percent white only fifty years ago, but now has a racial diversity that equals or exceeds that of the United States. Yet it simply isn’t an issue for most of the young. Indeed, London and Toronto are probably the two best cities in the world in which to bring up mixed-race kids.
None of this detracts from the historic achievement of Americans in electing a black (well, all right, mixed-race) president. It’s just to say that it was much harder to do that in the United States because of the malign influence of history.
All the more credit to Americans for doing it anyway; and full marks to the British and the Canadians for showing that race really doesn’t matter when history doesn’t get in the way.
The biggest demographic change of the current era, by now visible in every continent except Africa, is the greying of the planet. People are living longer and the birth rate is dropping, so the old will soon outnumber the young. This has an intriguing implication: an older population is probably also a more peaceful one.
December 27, 2004
GENERATION CHANGE
“The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a new and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow.”
—Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1945
That’s history for you. King Lear was an exception, but most of Shakespeare’s kings and princes were under thirty, many under twenty. Their hormones were still raging, so of course they committed murders, massacres and the like. In a world where the average life expectancy was thirty and most people didn’t even survive childhood, politics was bound to be pretty turbulent. It was always the same, in every part of the planet—but what if all the nations grew up together?
At the end of a discouraging year, here is an encouraging thought: the world is growing up. The average age in the world today is twenty-eight. (In Shakespeare’s time, it was around fifteen.) By 2050, it will be forty. At the age of forty, calculations of long-term self-interest have largely prevailed over hormones. Aging doesn’t necessarily make people nicer, but it certainly makes them more careful.
When experts play around with population growth statistics they are mostl
y concerned about overpopulation, pressure on resources and the environment, all the usual worries—and they are right to worry about those things. They pay less attention to the political effects because they are less easy to trace, but they are there, and they are very important.
There has been a steady run of good news on the population front in the past few decades. In 1968, the United Nations Population Division predicted that the world population would grow to twelve billion by 2050. By 1992, the same office was predicting ten billion people by 2050. Last month, it predicted that the world’s population would peak at 8.9 billion, and not until 2300—although it will already be pretty close to that figure by 2050.
In reality, even this is probably a pessimistic prediction. All these projections have been based on an assumption that birth rates will continue to fall—a straightforward projection of the world’s population based even on today’s birth rate would yield a total of around fifteen billion people by 2050—but the assumptions about how fast they will fall have consistently been too conservative.
You can see why the forecasters tended towards pessimism: the recent history of human-population growth has resembled an avalanche. It took almost all of human history to reach a total of two billion people, around 1927. It took less than fifty years to add the next two billion, by 1974. It took less than twenty-five years to add another two billion, by 1999. And we’re still growing at seventy-six million a year: an extra two Canadas every year.
In 1950, there was not a single country where the population was not growing rapidly, the average woman had more than five children in her lifetime, and the birth rate was not dropping significantly anywhere. Then came the new birth-control technologies and the rise of women’s liberation ideologies, and in many Western countries the birth rate dropped by half in ten years. As recently as 1974, however, the median birth rate worldwide was still 5.4 children per woman, so the pessimists were still winning the arguments.
They believed that only literacy could spread the ideas and techniques that made birth rates fall, and that literacy would not grow fast enough. Well, literacy has grown a lot faster than they expected—between 1980 and 2000, literacy rose from 18 percent to 47 percent in Afghanistan; from 33 percent to 64 percent in Nigeria; from 66 percent to 85 percent in China; and from 69 percent to 87 percent in Indonesia. But birth rates have dropped even faster than literacy has risen: the global average is now 2.7 children per woman.
Some of the most startling recent drops have been in places where women’s illiteracy is still quite high—Bangladesh and parts of India, for example—so we clearly need a broader criterion than mere literacy. In fact, any form of mass media, including broadcast media that do not require literacy, seems to have the same effect on the birth rate. (Though purely local cultural factors also play a role: Pakistan and Bangladesh both had a birth rate of 6.3 in 1981; now Bangladesh’s is 3.3, while Pakistan’s is still 5.6.)
The global birth rate may be no more than a decade away from dropping to replacement level, 2.2 children per woman. Most developed countries have already dropped well below that rate. This does not immediately stop population growth, since all the children who have already been born will have a child or two themselves, and then live for another fifty years afterwards. It does not solve the environmental crisis either, since all of these seven or eight billion human beings will aspire to the kind of lifestyle now enjoyed only by the privileged billion or so.
But it does mean that populations almost everywhere will start greying within the next decade, and in due course, the old will come to outnumber the young. (The exceptions are almost all in African and Arab countries which together amount to only a tenth of the world’s population.) Based on historical precedent, countries where the average age is rising are unlikely to become aggressor nations. Peace through exhaustion, perhaps?
24.
RELIGION II
I ended the first bunch of articles on religion by saying that we shouldn’t even get into the relationship between religion and war, but you knew I wouldn’t be able to resist, didn’t you? So here it is. Or one little corner of it, anyway.
May 13, 2007
BLAIR: WHY DID HE DO IT?
It has been the longest goodbye in modern politics, and there are still another six weeks to go before Tony Blair finally hands the prime minister-ship over to Gordon Brown on June 27. After he finally leaves office, most people in Britain assume Blair will go off and make a living on the lecture circuit in the United States (where he is far more popular than he is at home). He won’t be much missed.
It is strange that a prime minister who has presided over an unprecedented surge of prosperity in Britain should be so deeply unpopular, but the reason why lies in a single word: Iraq. Support for that war in Britain is even lower than it is in the United States, and the popular conviction that the public was misled into invading Iraq by a leader who ruthlessly manipulated the “evidence” to get his way is even stronger. The argument is only about why he did it—and the consensus answer is that it was religion.
In “post-Christian Britain”—the phrase dates from the 1970s but is even truer today—Blair is what was once known as a “muscular Christian”: a person who believes that his faith requires him to act, and justifies his actions. Only a minority of British prime ministers in the past century have been Christian believers—Winston Churchill, for example, was a completely irreligious agnostic—and even the ones who were personally devout felt that religion should remain a private matter.
In terms of spin control, this phenomenon extended even into Blair’s government, as the prime minister was under strict instructions not to speak about his faith in public. “We don’t do God,” as spin master Alastair Campbell once put it. But in fact Blair did “do God,” and that is what led him into Iraq.
Columnist Geoffrey Wheatcroft got it exactly right in the Independent last Sunday: “In some ways [Blair] is more innately American than British. Blair may not have prayed with the born-again George Bush, but their shared faith was certainly a bond, and [Blair’s] wearing his faith on his sleeve would not have seemed too odd or embarrassing in the U.S., where more than half the population goes to church and where supposedly grown-up politicians can say they approach difficult problems by asking: ‘What would Jesus do?’ ”
The problem was that it would seem odd and embarrassing in Britain, where only 7 percent of the population regularly attend church or its equivalent. The notion that British foreign policy was being driven by one man’s faith would have inspired mass revolt if Blair’s motives had been made plain. But they weren’t: the spin machine did its job well.
From the time he took office in 1997 Blair talked about having a “moral” foreign policy, but it wasn’t clear at the time that this meant he believed in doing good by force. Then came a series of more or less legal military interventions abroad in which British troops did do some good: stopping the genocide against Muslims in Kosovo in 1999; ending the civil war in Sierra Leone in 2000; and overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan after the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001.
These uses of military force all succeeded at a relatively low cost—the flare-up of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan today is due to the neglect of the country after 2001—and it was flowers and champagne for Tony Blair each time. He was doing good by force, and he was doing very well by it politically, too. But the lesson Blair learned was that this sort of thing comes cheap and easy, and it was getting to be a habit. Then along came the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq.
It is clear, in retrospect, that Blair had agreed to commit British troops to the invasion by the spring of 2002, and it is hard to believe that he was so ignorant and ill-advised as to believe the nonsense about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his alleged links to the al-Qaeda terrorists. But it is very easy to believe that he leapt at another chance to do good—that is, rid the world of a wicked dictator—by force.
Blair’s perennial claim that
“I have always done what I believe to be right” is no defence for his decision to join in the invasion of Iraq—do the rest of us usually do what we believe to be wrong?—but he firmly believes that his good intentions absolve him of responsibility for the outcome. The United Nations is a wreck, the reputations of the United States and the United Kingdom have never been lower, and Iraq is an almost measureless disaster, but no higher authority will ever officially hold Blair responsible for any of this, and so, in practical terms, he is quite right.
Enjoy the lecture circuit, Tony.
Recent research suggests that the word “sanctimonious” may have been invented specifically to describe Tony Blair (although certain questions about the temporal sequence remain to be resolved). Whereas you would never call Joseph Ratzinger “sanctimonious.” Arrogant, narrow-minded and rude, certainly, but not “sanctimonious.”
January 15, 2008
EPPURE SI MUOVE
The Pope’s words have come back to haunt him, and so they should. The authorities at La Sapienza University in Rome had invited him to come and speak this week at the inauguration of the new academic year, but the physics department mobilized in protest. It was at La Sapienza seventeen years ago that Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, declared that the trial and conviction of the Italian astronomer Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633 for asserting that the Earth goes around the Sun, was “rational and just.”
The scientists took this to mean that Ratzinger sees religious authority as superior to scientific inquiry, and seized the occasion of his return visit to make a fuss about it. Radical students then took up the cause, festooning the campus with anti-Pope messages, and on Tuesday the Vatican announced that the visit was off. It’s a tempest in a rather small teapot, but Ratzinger has stirred up a series of such tempests over the years.