Mark Steyn - America Alone

So this is a doomsday book with a twist: an apocalyptic scenario that can best be avoided not by more government but by less — by government returning to the citizenry the primal responsibilities it’s taken from them in the modern era.

The alternative is stark: Europe has all but succumbed to the dull opiate of multiculturalism. In its drowsy numbness, it stirs but has no idea what to do and so does nothing. One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they’ll marvel at how easy it all was. You don’t need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that’s a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural “sensitivity,” the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want — including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, during the Danish “cartoon jihad” of 2006, Jack Straw, then British foreign secretary, hailed the “sensitivity” of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending representations of the Prophet. No doubt he was similarly impressed by the “sensitivity” of Burger King, which withdrew ice cream cones from its British menus because Mr. Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word “Allah” in Arabic script. I don’t know which sura in the Koran says, “Don’t forget, folks, it’s not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name,” but ixnay on both just to be “sensitive.” And doubtless the British foreign secretary also appreciated the “sensitivity” of the owner of France-Soir, who fired his editor for republishing the Danish cartoons. And maybe he even admires the “sensitivity” of the increasing numbers of Dutch people who dislike the pervasive fear and tension in certain parts of the Netherlands and so have emigrated to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there’s very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and sharia. As a famously sensitive noncartooning Dane once put it: “To be or not to be: that is the question.”

And, in the end, the answer to that question is the only one that matters.

My old — very old-friend George Abbott, the director of On the Town, Damn Yankees, and Pal Joey, died in 1995 at the age of 107 while working on a revival of The Pajama Game. A few years earlier, in his late nineties, he’d given up playing tennis because all his partners had died. That’s the position America is facing in respect to its transnational social life: it’ll be turning up to the G-8, NATO, and the EU-US summit only to find that all its partners have died.

The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population — i.e., no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 — you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That’s what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than any of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handguns, more UN peacekeepers, etc.) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38; Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries — or, more precisely, these people — are going out of business.

There’s nothing wrong with old folks: speaking for myself, if I’m at some soiree, I’d much rather Doris Day provided the evening’s musical entertainment than the latest caterwauling gangsta rapper; I’d rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society’s health — about its innovative and creative energies — are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill’s closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have — managing growth or managing decline?

So what happens when the whole nation — and in Europe the entire continent — has a profile closer to the decrepit mill town than to the Sun Belt suburb?

And, if you’re anti-capitalist, don’t console yourself with the thought that you don’t need all those businesses anyway. Big Government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the U.S. Social Security system assumes a 30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you’re Spain and you’ve got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that’s going to be halving every thirty-five years. The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital — and that’s before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems. True, birth rates are falling all over the world, and it may be that eventually every couple on the planet decides to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage — and those societies with expensive social programs dependent on mass immigration will be in the worst predicament. It’s no consolation for the European Union, with its deathbed birth statistics, if the Third World’s demographics are also falling: they’re your nursery, they’re the babies you couldn’t be bothered to have; if their fertility rate goes the same way yours has, that will be a problem for you long before it’s a problem for them. Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. By the next century, German will be spoken only at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering’s Monday night poker game in Hell. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by “rising sea levels” every Spaniard and Italian will be six feet under. But sure, go ahead and worry about “climate change.”

More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent’s population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear — in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.