Mark Steyn - After America

A famous American First Lady wrote a bestseller called It Takes a Village (to raise a child)—an African proverb, supposedly. Why our leaders should have been commending tribal life as a model for advanced societies is a mystery. But even Africans didn’t want to raise their children in an African village. They abandoned them for shanties in what (if you flew over West Africa by night) looked like one giant coastal megalopolis. And, with respect to child-rearing, they left behind most of their traditions, too. We are a planet without a past—or, at any rate, memory. Like the European trans-nationalists wedded to their Ponzi welfare state, like the American spendaholics burning through trillions as if it was still 1950 and they were the only economic power on earth, like the Singularity post-humans revolving on themselves without repose, reprimitivized man lives in an eternal present tense, in the dystopia of the moment. In The Atlantic Monthly a few years back, casting around for a phrase to describe the “citizens” of such “states,” Robert D. Kaplan called them “re-primitivized man.” 73Demographic growth, environmental devastation, accelerated urbanization, and civic decay have reduced them to a far more primitive state than their parents and grandparents. As Andrew McCarthy wrote: “Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil.

It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.” 74

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Liberia, the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea were all less “civilized” than they had been a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense many of them had made undeniable progress: they had globalized their pathologies.

Somali pirates seized container ships flying the ensigns of the great powers. Iranian proxies ran Gaza and much of Lebanon. North Korea’s impoverished prison state had provided nuclear technology to Damascus and Teheran, and Teheran had agreed to station missiles in Venezuela. Even the nude warlords of west Africa had managed to destabilize on a scale no second-tier western power could contemplate. Celebrating diversity unto the end, wealthy nations that could no longer project meaningful force to their own borders watched the two-bit basket-cases nuclearize, and assumed this geopolitical diversity would have no consequences. By 2005, Iran was offering to share its nuclear technology with Sudan. 75

Sudan? Oh, surely you remember: the other day I found a program for a “Save Darfur” interpretative-dance fundraiser in the attic. Massachusetts, I think. Perhaps you attended. Someone read out a press release from the activist actor George Clooney, and everyone had a simply marvelous time.

Meanwhile, back in Sudan, the killing went on: hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. With machetes. That’s pretty labor-intensive.

But a nuclear Sudan would supposedly be a model of self-restraint?

The mound of corpses piled up around the world at the turn of the century was not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. Yet the Pansy Left (in George Orwell’s phrase) continued to insist that the problem was technological, a question of nuclear “proliferation.” Even from a post-American world, it seems sad to have to point out that the problem was not that America had nukes and that poor old Sudan had to make do with machetes. It’s that the machete crowd were willing to kill on an industrial scale and the high-tech guys could not muster the will to stop them. To horrified western liberals, nuclear technology was bad in and of itself. But nukes are means. What you do with them depends on your ends.

And if, as in the Congo and Sudan, killing is your end, then you will find the means. Perhaps it was only sensitivity to cultural diversity that prevented President Obama taking up a machete non-proliferation initiative.

There is a fine line between civilization and the abyss. North Korea had friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protected one-man psycho states. And one-man psycho states provided delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. And apocalyptic ideological states funded non-state actors around the world. And in Somalia and elsewhere non-state actors were constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.

As America should have learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don’t care who they kill can inflict a lot of damage on the technologically advanced highly trained warriors of civilized states. As one of Nick Berg’s kidnappers explained both to his victim and to the world in the souvenir Islamic snuff video, “You know, when we behead someone, we enjoy it.” 76Thus, “asymmetric warfare” on a planet divided into civilized states with unusable nuclear arsenals and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever’s to hand. We had moved into a world beyond American order, but in which, as large swathes of the map reprimitivized, the shrinking superpower would remain the most inviting target.

Many westerners were familiar with Nietzsche’s accurate foretelling of the twentieth century as an age of “wars such as have never happened on earth.” 77This was a remarkable prediction to make from the Europe of the 1880s, a time of peace and prosperity. But too many forget the context in which the philosopher reached his conclusion—that “God is dead.”

Nietzsche was an atheist but he was not simply proclaiming his own contempt for faith, as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other bestselling atheists would do in our own century. “God is dead” was not a statement of personal belief, but a news headline—in the author’s words, a “tremendous event.” If, as he saw it, educated people had ceased to believe in the divine, that entailed certain consequences. For God—or at any rate the Judeo-Christian God whose demise he was reporting—had had a civilizing effect during his (evolutionarily speaking) brief reign. Without God, Nietzsche wondered, without “any cardinal distinction between man and animal,” what constraints are there? In the “arena of the future,” the world would be divided into “brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.” That was the purpose of his obituary announcement: “The story I have to tell,” he wrote in 1882, “is the story of the next two centuries.”

We know he called the twentieth century right. So what did he have to say about the twenty-first? He foresaw a time even worse than the “wars such as have never happened,” wars that were after all still fought according to the remnants, the “mere pittance” of the late God’s moral codes. But after that, what? The next century—our century—would see “the total eclipse of all values.” Man would attempt a “re-evaluation,” as the West surely did through multiculturalism, sexual liberation, eco-fetishization, and various other fancies. But you cannot have an effective moral code, Nietzsche pointed out, without a God who says “Thou shalt not.”

Thou shalt not what? Eat pygmies? Rip out children’s hearts? Wire up your own infant as a bomb? Express mild disapproval of the cultures that engage in such activities? Multiculturalism was the West’s last belief system. Its final set of values accorded all values equal value. Which is to say that it had no values—for, if all values have equal value, what’s the point?

There was still enough of the “mere pittance” of the old values for skanky tweens in hooker chic or burqaed women escorting their daughters to the FGM clinic to cause feminists some momentary disquiet. But they could no longer summon up a moral language to object to it. They valued all values, and so relentlessly all values slipped into eclipse—and then a valueless age dawned.