CIVILIZATION'S SAVIOR:

Only Bush can save Europe: the US President’s ‘transformational’ response to Muslim fundamentalism can save the Old World; European ‘managerialism’ can’t (Mark Steyn, 4/24/04, The Spectator)

Most European politicians see Islamist terrorism as a managerial problem. After September 11th, George W. Bush opted to approach it transformationally. Around the world Islam is expanding, and around the Islamic world a radicalised form of Islam is expanding. Bush determined to tackle the problem at source: he decided — as I heard Condi Rice say last week at the US Naval Academy — to turn the map of the Middle East ‘upside down’. He would bring liberty to a region that had never known it. [...]

National Review’s John Derbyshire wrote last week about a ‘1945 solution’ for Iraq. This is shorthand for the bombing of Dresden, the nuking of Hiroshima, etc. — the sort of stern measures that let an enemy know he’s well and truly whipped. But, as Mr Derbyshire points out, war abroad is determined by culture at home, and if we were fighting the second world war today, we wouldn’t nuke Hiroshima or even intern Japanese-Americans: the culture will not permit it. Nor will it permit old-school imperialism. Culturally sensitive nation-building is as aggressive as you can get these days. So Bush has gone for the only big-picture scenario available.
The Bush ‘transformational’ approach to terrorism may fail. The EU ‘managerial’ approach certainly will. It’s fine for small, contained, stable populations like Ulster, Corsica or the Basque country. But not for the primal demographic forces sweeping the Continent.

Last week Niall Ferguson called me ‘the Pangloss of Republican humourists’. I wish I was. But I’m not at all Panglossian these days, and I was interested to see that Ferguson, in a recent speech, has become a somewhat belated convert to the Eurabian scenario I’ve been peddling in these pages for a couple of years now. Perhaps he’ll have better luck with it than I’ve had. Meanwhile, in the current issue of Fortune, Philip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, is even more apocalyptic: ‘So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world,’ he writes. ‘Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an antimarket culture dominated by fundamentalism — a new Dark Ages.’ That ten-year-old girl could have a lot more to worry about than gloomy Blair speeches.

‘What do you leave behind?’ asked the Prime Minister. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the mid-point of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings, in the way that the great cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum run by the Turkish government? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? The Bush vision is the best shot.

The hardest truth for many ion the West to bear is that in the long run Islam affords a better basis for the future of mankind than does Europe's secularism.

MORE:
-Which Nations Will Go Forth and Multiply?: Declines in fertility have spread to every corner of the globe. (Phillip Longman, April 5, 2004, FORTUNE)

When asked how long it will take for the world's population to double, nearly half of all Americans say 20 years or less. That's hardly surprising, given the crowding many of us encounter in everyday life and the reports we hear of teeming Third World megacities. Yet forecasts by the United Nations and others show that world population, currently at a little over six billion, is unlikely to double—ever. Indeed, demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a nongovernmental research organization in Laxenburg, Austria, predict that world population will peak at nine billion within the lifetime of today's Gen Xers and then start shrinking. Meanwhile, the average age of the world's citizens will advance dramatically. This aging will happen fastest not in the developed world, where we are used to fretting about the graying of society, but, astonishingly, in the Middle East and other underdeveloped regions. By the end of this century, even sub-Saharan Africa will probably grow older than Europe is today.

These predictions come with considerable certainty. The primary reason, confirmed in late March by a U.S. Census Bureau report, is a fall in fertility rates over the last generation that is spreading to every corner of the globe. In nations rich and poor, under all forms of government, a broad social trend is absolutely clear: As more and more of the population moves to urban areas in which children offer little or no economic reward to their parents, and as women gain in economic opportunity and reproductive control, people are producing fewer and fewer children. [...]

The implications for world economic growth are stark. Japan developed its export-driven economy at a time when the number of consumers in Western Europe and the U.S. was still growing robustly. By contrast, when today's developing nations look for long-term export markets, they find most rich countries on the brink of absolute population decline and deeply encumbered by the cost of their health and pension programs. We may all be facing a diminished old age.

Even more sobering are the implications for modern civilization's values. As urbanization and globalization continue to create a human environment in which children become costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this environment will tend not to reproduce. Many others who are not so successful will imitate them. So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world—who either "don't get" the new rules of the game that make reproduction an economic liability, or who believe they are (or who in fact are) commanded by a higher power to procreate.

Such a higher power might be God, speaking through Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, or some latter-day saint, or it might be a totalitarian state. Either way, such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an antimarket culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new dark ages. History records a similar shift in third-century Rome, when pagan fertility collapsed, while that of early Christians did not. If modern secular societies are to survive, they must somehow enable parents to enjoy more of the economic value they produce for everyone when they sacrifice to create and educate the next generation.

Which somehow manages to miss the point entirely: secular society can not and should not be preserved. It is anti-human.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 24, 2004 11:17 PM