Mark Steyn - America Alone

Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a license to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you’d grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It’s like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages. The relevant comparison is not with England’s early nineteenth-century population surge but with England’s industrial revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional — and indeed, if most of the available manpower’s Muslim, it’s actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

So perhaps the ever more elderly Japanese will go on — and on and on, like the joke about the gnarled old rustic and the axe he’s had for seventy years: he’s replaced the blade seven times and the handle four times, but it’s still the same old trusty axe. We will have achieved man’s victory over death, not in the sense our ancestors meant it — the assurance of eternal life in the unseen world — but in the here and now. Which is what it’s all about; isn’t it? An eternal present tense.

Think I’m kidding? Compare the suspicion and demonization of genetically modified foods to what’s mostly either enthusiasm for or indifference to genetically modified people. Mess with our vegetables, we’ll burn down your factory. Mess with us, and we pass you our credit card. And by the time we wonder whether it was all such a smart idea it’ll be the clones who have the Platinum Visa cards.

If that creeps you out, there is a third option. Unlike the Europeans, many of whom will flee their continent as Eutopia evolves into Eurabia, the Japanese are not facing ethnic strife and civil war. They could simply start breeding again. But will they? Fifty-one percent of all Japanese women born in the early 1970s were still childless by their thirtieth birthday. Reporting the latest set of grim statistics, the Japan Times observed, almost en passant,

“Japan joins Germany and Italy in the ranks of countries where a decline in population has already set in.”

Japan, Germany, and Italy, eh? If the Versailles Treaty was too hard on our enemies, the World War Two settlement was kinder but lethal.

Japan is the most benign example of demographic decline — a problem for the Japanese but not for the rest of us. Elsewhere around the world, America is threatened by rival powers not because of their strength but because of their weakness: for one thing, a flailing, fast-declining power is less bound by maxims of prudence. Russia, for example, is in an accelerating vortex and, for Washington and other interested parties, the question is what Moscow will try to grab on to in order to slow the descent.

From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, Russia will be down below 130 million by 2015, thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century, a third of what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union. It needn’t decline at a consistent rate, of course. But I’d say it’s more likely to be even lower than 50 million than it is to be over 100 million. In fact, the worst projections show Russia falling to around 85 million by mid-century. The longer a country goes without arresting the death spiral, the harder it is to pull out of it. Russia has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world — 1.2 children per woman — and one of the highest abortion rates. When it comes to the future, most Russian women are voting with their fetus: 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated.

Allen C. Lynch of the University of Virginia recalls visiting the country when the American pro-life film The Silent Scream was shown on TV there. The film is very graphic and unsparing in its examination of the effects on the fetus, its object being to prompt in the viewer revulsion and disgust at the procedure. “It turned out that more Russian women,” wrote Professor Lynch, “became more positively attuned to the idea after having watched the film.” Instead of the baby’s pain, Russian viewers noticed the clean hospitals, the state-of-the-art technology, the briskly professional doctors and nurses. Women marveled: “Wouldn’t it be great to have an abortion in the West?” After seven decades of Communism, the physical barrenness is little more than a symptom of the spiritual barrenness. The culture of death is having a ball at the other end too. If you’re a male born in Russia in 2000, you can expect to live 58.9 years. While its womenfolk have a life expectancy comparable to their American counterparts, sickly Russian men now have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis — not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages but because, if he had four legs and hung from a tree in a rain forest, the Russian male would be on the endangered species list. The decline in male longevity is unprecedented for a (relatively) advanced nation not at war, and with many attendant social and economic consequences. So far, in this first large-scale experiment on the dispensability of men, it appears that, pace Gloria Steinem, fish do indeed need bicycles. Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. There are severe outbreaks of viral hepatitis; tuberculosis is the country’s leading fatal infectious disease, with a proliferating number of drug-resistant strains. It has the fastestgrowing rate of HIV infection in the world. In the first five years of the new century, more people tested positive in Russia than in the previous twenty in America. The virus is said to have infected at least 1 percent of the population, the figure the World Health Organization considers the tipping point for a sub-Saharan-sized epidemic. So at a time when Russian men already have a life expectancy that doesn’t make it beyond middle age, they’re about to see AIDS cut them down from the other end, felling young men and women of childbearing age, and with them any hope of societal regeneration. By some projections, AIDS will soon be killing between a quarter and three-quarters of a million Russians every year. Along with those extraordinary rates of drug-fueled Hepatitis C, heart disease, and TB, HIV is just one more symptom of what happens when an entire people lacks the will to rouse itself from self-destruction.

Russia will become a nation of babushkas, unable to deploy enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy, or enough young families to secure its future. And, if its export of ideology was the biggest destabilizing factor in the history of the last century, the implosion of Russia could be a major destabilizer of this one. Iran’s nuke program is merely one of the many geopolitical challenges to America in which there’s a large Russian component somewhere in the background. There are districts that are exceptions to these baleful trends, parts of Russia that have healthy fertility rates and low HIV infection. Of the country’s eighty-nine federal regions, twelve are showing substantial population growth. Any ideas as to which regions they are?

Once again, starts with an I, ends with a slam. The allegedly seething “Arab street” that the West’s media doom-mongers have been predicting since September 11 will rise up in fury against the Anglo-American infidels remains as seething as a Westchester County cul-de-sac on a Wednesday afternoon. But the Russian Federation’s Muslim street is real, and on the boil. And even its placid quartiers have no reason to prop up the diseased Russian bear. So the world’s largest country is dying and the question is how violent its death throes will be. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has AIDS, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: a potentially African-level AIDS crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting atop the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. Of course, the nuclear materials are all in “secure” facilities. Probably.