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July/August 2007 -- Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2006), 214 pp., $27.95.
What is the importance, to an individualist, of his people, his culture, his nation, and his country—and what, for an individualist, is the importance of the future of those things?
These are questions raised by Mark Steyn’s new book, America Alone, and they confront the individualist most poignantly. For it is Steyn’s contention that the Enlightenment world our forebears secured for us is a world that we, living to optimize our individual happiness, have failed to secure for our progeny, if indeed we have bothered to produce any.
In the last half-century, prophets of doom have arisen to predict catastrophe for mankind, arguing that over-population must cause food shortages, or energy shortages, or mineral shortages, or land shortages, or global warming. And yet, one after another, the predictions have failed and the prophets have been proved false, as men stepped forward to solve the difficulties confronting them. Finally, in the 1980s, Julian Simon summed up the lesson to be drawn from such failed prophecies: An increasing population is not a problem; it is the answer to problems, for the human mind is the “ultimate resource.”
In the introduction to his new book, Steyn mocks our era’s failed apocalypses but then self-consciously joins the ranks of doomsayers—distinguishing himself in one notable way. Rather than ignoring Simon’s insight, he employs it. Human inventiveness is indeed the ultimate resource, but “human inventiveness depends on humans—and that’s the one thing we really are running short of, at least in the self-flagellating developed world.” This explains the subtitle of Steyn’s book: The End of the World As We Know It. The only major exception to the Western population implosion is America—and that explains the main title of the book: America Alone.
The human mind is the “ultimate resource.”
For a population to remain stable, the number of births per woman must average out to 2.1. So, what is the situation in the extended West? “The United States [is] hovering just at replacement rate with 2.11 births per woman. New Zealand’s just below; Ireland’s at 1.9; Australia, 1.7. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria [and Greece] are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy at 1.2; Spain, 1.1—about half replacement rate. So Spain’s population is halving with every generation.” The figure for Europe as a whole is 1.4; for Japan, 1.3, “which is what demographers call the point of ‘lowest-low’ fertility from which no human society has ever recovered.”
Look at it this way, Steyn urges: The great plagues of the 1300s are thought to have killed between a third and a half of Europe’s population, cutting it from 75 million to something between 35 and 50 million. Today, not because of plague or famine or war but because of personal decisions—because of “lifestyle,” as we say—the developed countries of the West are facing a decline in population equal to that of the Black Death. Moreover, because the current population implosion results not from cataclysm but from a combination of technological options and cultural choices, there is no reason to expect a reversal such as Europe enjoyed following the 1300s.
So what? If population is shrinking rapidly, one might imagine, increasing amounts of capital will descend to working-age adults. Later in the century, one might suppose, each Spanish worker will be inheriting the accumulated surpluses of two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Productivity will boom. We won’t need so many people.
But of course Western welfare states have arranged matters to run in reverse, with public-pension systems that require present workers to support the retired. “In America,” Steyn writes, “politicians upset about the federal deficit like to complain that we’re piling up debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. But in Europe the unaffordable entitlements are in even worse shape: there are no kids and grandkids to stick it to.”
Canada, for instance, is a country in the extended West with a demographic profile more like Europe’s than America’s. “In 2000, oldsters formed 16.3 percent of America’s population and 17 percent of Canada’s—close enough. In 2040, they’ll form 26 percent of America’s population and 33.3 percent of Canada’s. And there’ll be a lot fewer young Canadians to stick with the bill for increased geriatric care.” As the number of producers shrinks relative to the number of pensioners, the state’s liabilities will take an ever greater percentage of the GDP and of the average workers’ income. “For purposes of comparison,” Steyn tells us, “by 2050 public pension expenditures are expected to be 6.5 percent of GDP in the United States, 16.9 percent in Germany, 17.3 percent in Spain, and 24.8 percent in Greece.”
The obvious solution to this plunging birth rate is immigration. In 2004, according to Steyn (who is Canadian, though living in New Hampshire), the Toronto Globe and Mail ran an editorial taking a sanguine view of demographic collapse: “Luckily for our future economic and fiscal well-being, Canada is well-positioned to counter the declining population trend by continuing to encourage the immigration of talented people to this country from overcrowded parts of the world.” To which Steyn responds: Okay, name some. “Birth rates in the so-called ‘overcrowded’ parts of the world are already 2.9 and falling. . . . In 2020 ‘talented people’ will be much sought after by all countries within the developed-but-depopulating world: how sure can Canadians be that an educated Indian will prefer a high-tax, low-temperature jurisdiction to America or Australia? Or, come to that, his own economically booming country, where the fruits of his labor won’t be shoveled straight into paying the debts run up by the wheezing boomers?”
“Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century."
So where will the West acquire the immigrants to shore up its falling population and workforce? Steyn thinks the answer is obvious. There is only one part of the world able and willing to provide Europe and the extended West with immigrants in massive numbers: the Islamic countries. Many of these countries, Steyn notes, are well above the 2.1 replacement level of fertility: “The global fertility leader, Niger, is 7.46; Mali, 7.42; Somalia, 6.76; Afghanistan, 6.69; Yemen, 6.58. Notice what those nations have in common? Starts with an I, ends with a slam. As in: slam dunk.” The result: “Islam is now the principal supplier of new Europeans, and currently the second biggest supplier of new Canadians.”
What will this mean for the West? Some may suppose it will mean merely that Islamic people of different ethnic origins will displace the older European ethnic groups, while absorbing Europe’s culture and making only minor modifications. But Steyn doubts it. “The famous United Nations statistic from a 2002 report—more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand—suggests at the very least an extraordinarily closed world.”
If assimilation is unlikely, the more probable alternative is transformation. Hence, Steyn’s main thesis: “Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries.” Long before Muslims reach a majority of the European population, Steyn believes, the process of Islamification will be far advanced, as pusillanimous, multicultural nations yield to a demanding Islam. “The modern multicultural state is too watery a concept to bind huge numbers of immigrants to the land of their nominal citizenship.”
But Muslims are not merely a cultural influence in the areas where they congregate, for Islam is, self-consciously, a political creed. And the point is not just theoretical. In practice, the presence of a large Islamic population tends to have an effect on a country’s politics. “In the 2005 rankings of Freedom House’s survey of personal liberty and democracy around the world, five of the eight countries with the lowest ‘freedom’ score were Muslim. Of the forty-six Muslim majority nations in the world, only three were free. Of the sixteen nations in which Muslims form between 20 and 50 percent of the population, only another three were ranked as free.”
Nor do Muslims who have experienced Western freedom seem much interested in forsaking the political patterns they left behind. “According to one poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom.” And the process has already begun: “When Martine Aubrey, the mayor of Lille, daughter of former prime minister and EU bigwig Jacques Delors…held a meeting with an imam in Roubaix, the gentleman demanded that it take place on the edge of the neighborhood—in recognition that his turf was Muslim territory which she was bound not to enter. Mme. Aubrey conceded the point, as more and more politicians will in the years ahead.” Not all Europeans will be so spineless, of course. But “the brave figures who draw attention to these trends—men and women such as Theo van Gogh, Bat Ye’or, and Oriana Fallaci—are either murdered, forced to live under armed guard, driven into exile overseas, or sued under specious hate crime laws.”
At the end of America Alone, Mark Steyn offers a ten-point program for fighting foreign jihadists, and at first that seems very strange. His book, after all, is about the Islamification of Europe and the danger of internal terrorism. But his title, America Alone, clarifies the paradox: a ten-point program for Europe would be pointless.
In Steyn’s telling, the West faces two mortal threats during the twenty-first century: one external, one internal. The foreign threat is what Norman Podhoretz has called World War IV: the war against foreign-sponsored, foreign-based jihadism. It is, by default, America’s war, for Europeans have shown scant interest in joining it. By contrast, the interior threat—Islamification and domestic jihad—is largely a European concern. But the threat’s sources are so deeply rooted in the infantilized sentiments produced by European welfare states as to lie beyond obvious remedy. “It’s hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europeans to the belief that life is about sleeping-in.” Even the imminent loss of national identities seems no motive. Why should it? “If you think that a nation is no more than a ‘great hotel’ (as Canadian novelist Yann Martel approvingly described his own country), you can always slash rates and fill the empty rooms—for as long as there are any would-be lodgers out there to move in.”
And so we return to the question with which I began: What is the importance, to an individualist, of his people, his culture, his nation, and his country—and what, for an individualist, is the importance of the future of those things?
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