Mark Steyn - America Alone

Another constraint on family size is available housing. Acre for acre, America is the cheapest developed country in which to buy a big home with plenty of space for plenty of kids. That helps explain why Canada’s fertility rate is so European: partly for reasons of climate but partly because of more recent Trudeaupian social developments and immigration trends, the Northern Dominion’s population is more concentrated than America’s — i.e., more urban. If you were designing a “master plan” for Canada, you’d want to provide some way of encouraging still fecund young couples to move from their poky Toronto and Vancouver apartments to the great outdoors. In Western Europe, the cost of housing is extraordinarily high. Whenever I read about the ever-larger number of Italians in early middle age still living with mom and dad, I’m reminded of an old Benny Hill sketch in which he and his dolly bird are bikers who can’t get public housing. The BBC interviewer says, “Why don’t you move back in with your parents?” Benny grunts, “We would do, but they’ve moved back in with theirs.”

That gets closer to the nub of the matter. It’s not just a question of tax breaks and affordable housing. The chief characteristic of our age is “deferred adulthood.” All over North America and Europe there are millions of people going to college for no good reason. Certainly, there’s no reason why the sum of knowledge the average American has accumulated by the time he’s completed a bachelor’s degree should take twenty years to inculcate. We need to redirect the system to telescope education into a much shorter period. Instead, we’ve implicitly accepted that our bodies mature much earlier than our greatgrandparents’ but that our minds don’t. We enter adolescence much sooner and leave it much later — in some cases, not until middle age. We’ve created a world where a thirty-oneyear-old European male can stroll into a nightclub, tell the babes he lives at his mom and dad’s place in the same bedroom he’s slept in since he was in diapers — and he can still walk out with a hot-looking date. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.

The state and its citizens would be better off if we gave students a terrific high school education and then let ’em get on with earning money so they can afford to have two or three kids in their twenties instead of one fertility-treatment special delivery in late middle age. It won’t be easy to do that, particularly in America, where schools are a bastion of overunionization dedicated to expanding their privileges and protections at the expense of their pupils. But our refusal to rein in deferred adulthood is one reason why developed societies are ever more dependent on unsustainable levels of immigration. That includes the United States, where the Hispanicization of large parts of the country is setting up America for the most destabilizing aspects of bicultural and bilingual societies.

By 2015, almost every viable political party in the West will be natalist, and the cannier ones will be supporting policies — like a flat tax — that help restore the societal architecture vandalized by careless governmental social engineering. As much as Europe and Islamism, social and fiscal policy are now a matter of national survival. In the end, it’s not about cash: after all, materialism and self-gratification are why Eutopians gave up on the future in the first place. The best reason to diminish social programs is not to put more money in people’s pockets but to put more responsibility in people’s pockets.

Because, if we don’t, the unthinkable solutions are the only ones left. In his final book, the distinguished British commentator Anthony Sampson claimed that after September 11 “the fear of terrorism strengthened the hands of all governments.” It certainly shouldn’t have. In Hans Monderman’s Netherlands, they show some signs of acknowledging that the multiculti pieties of the last thirty years were a dangerous fantasy; in the rest of the developed world, they’re still larding it on. If America is to avoid the Continent’s fate, she needs to talk up self-reliance and individual innovation instead of being sheepish (as Democrats often sound) that their Neanderthal citizenry aren’t more enlightened and European. Free citizens have a shot at winning this existential struggle; nanny-state charges don’t. The road ahead will be difficult enough; cluttering it up with “no parking” signs isn’t going to make it any safer.

This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.” India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really do believe that. Nonjudgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live’ in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. But if you think you genuinely believe that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

The rest of us — the ones who think you can make judgments about competing cultures on liberty, religious freedom, the rule of law — need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated.

Instead, as his first reaction to the controversy over those Danish cartoons, the EU’s justice and security commissioner, Franco Frattini, said that Europe would set up a “media code” to encourage “prudence” in the way they cover, um, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, “The press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression…. We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”

“Prudence”? “Self-regulate our free expression”? No, I’m afraid that’s just giving the Muslim world the message: you’ve won, I surrender, please stop kicking me. But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his novel Prayers for the Assassin, “A falling camel attracts many knives.” In Denmark and France, the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him.

Or as Simeon Howard said in a sermon preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston in 1773: