America Alone (4 page)

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
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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.

THE MATH OF THE MAP

My interest in demography dates back to September 11, 2001, when a demographic group I hadn't given much thought to managed to get my attention. I don't mean the, ah, unfortunate business with the planes and buildings and so forth, but the open cheering of the attacks by their coreligionists in Montreal, Yorkshire, Copenhagen, and elsewhere. How many of us knew there were quickly growing and culturally confident Muslim populations in Scandinavia?

Demography doesn't explain everything, but it accounts for a good 90 percent--including the easy stuff, like why Jacques Chirac wasn't amenable to Colin Powell's schmoozing on Iraq: if the population of your cities was 30 percent Muslim, with spectacularly high youth unemployment rates and a bunch of other grievances, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Great Satan? Stick a pin almost anywhere in the map, near or far: the "who" is the best indicator of the what-where-when-why. Remember how it was when you watched TV in the eighties? You'd be bombarded with commercials warning that the Yellow Peril was annexing America and pretty soon they'd be speaking japanese down at the shopping mall. It didn't happen and it's never going to happen. In the nineties, I tended to accept the experts' line that Japan's rising sun had gone
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into eclipse because its economy was riddled with protectionism, cronyism, and inefficient special-interest groups. But so what? You could have said the same in the sixties and seventies, when the joint was jumping. The only real structural difference between Japan then and Japan now is that the Yellow Peril got a lot wrinklier. What happened in the 1990s was what Yamada Masahiro of Tokyo's Gakugei University calls the first "low birth-rate recession." It's not the economy, stupid. It's the stupidity, economists--the stupidity of thinking you can ignore demography. Japanese society aged, and aged societies, by their nature, are more cautious and less dynamic: old people weigh exposure to risk more than potential for gain.

Another example: will China be the hyperpower of the twenty-first century? Answer: no. Its population will get old before it's got rich.

Another: why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44

percent. In a democratic age, you can't buck demography--except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out--as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.

The literal facts of life are also what underpinned the so-called "cartoon jihad" of early 2006. It was a small portent of the future: the publication by one Danish newspaper of various cartoonists' mostly very mild representations of the Prophet Mohammed was the pretext for weeks of protests, lawsuits, death threats, rioting, torching, razing, and killing by disaffected Muslims from Calgary to Islamabad, London to Jakarta. On September 10, 2001, not many of us thought it would soon seem perfectly routine to hear news announcers read headlines like: "The Danish cartoon death toll is now up to nine." No laughing matter, especially as that number multiplied into double and triple figures. But it's remarkable how quickly we've internalized the underlying demographic reality. Like all the mini-crises afflicting the Continent since September 11, its subtext derives from the belated realization among Europeans that they're elderly and fading and that their Muslim populations are young and surging, and in all these clashes the latter are putting down markers for the way things will be the day after tomorrow, like the new owners who have the kitchen remodeled before moving in. When it came to those cartoons, every Internet blogger was eager to take a stand on principle alongside plucky little Denmark. But there's only five million of them. Whereas there are twenty million Muslims in Europe--officially. That's the equivalent of the Danes plus the Irish plus the Belgians plus the Estonians. You do the math.

What's the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What's the most popular baby boy's name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden?

Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular baby boy's name in the United Kingdom. Yet most Europeans weren't even aware of the dominant demographic trend until September 11, and subsequent events in Madrid, Paris, and London.

Or to put it at its most basic: Why is the world we live in the way it is? Why is this book written in the language of a tiny island off the coast of northern Europe? Why is English the language of global business, of the Internet, of the paramount power of the age and of dozens of other countries from Belize to Botswana, Nigeria to Nauru? Why does Canada share its queen with Papua New Guinea? Why does a quarter of the world's population
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belong to the British Commonwealth and enjoy to one degree or another English Common Law and Westminster parliamentary traditions?

Because in the early nineteenth century the first nation to conquer infant mortality was England. Hitherto, the British Isles had been like the rest of the world: you had a big bunch of kids and a lot of them died before they could be of economic benefit to you or to society. But by 1820 medical progress and improvements in basic hygiene had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of fifteen.

In sheer numbers, the country was still a pipsqueak cluster of North Atlantic islands with 28 million people compared to China's 320 million. But it was the underlying demographic trend that proved decisive in the century ahead. Britain had the surplus manpower not just to settle Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but also to provide the administrative and business class in the West Indies, Africa, India, and the Pacific. And, fortunately for the world, this demographic transformation occurred in a culture that even then had a longestablished system of law, property rights, and personal freedom. Imagine what the planet would look like if the first country to conquer infant mortality had been a country with a less sustained tradition of individual liberty--China, say, or Japan or Russia or Germany. The "what," "where," and "when" are important, but the "who" is critical. It's hard to have a big influence in the world when there's just a few of you and you're all getting on in years.

So who's in the situation of England at the beginning of the nineteenth century? What country today has half its population under the age of fifteen?

Spain and Germany have 14 percent, the United Kingdom 18 percent, the United States 21 percent--and Saudi Arabia has 39 percent, Pakistan 40 percent, and Yemen 47 percent. Little Yemen, like little Britain two hundred years ago, will send its surplus youth around the world--one way or another. Cultural relativists who sneer at the idea of English civilization should try to imagine what the world would be like if the U.S. Supreme Court and the Indian parliament and the Australian legal system, not to mention Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge, had been built on Yemeni values.

The state of our civilization manifests itself both in the non-problems that terrify us beyond all reason--rising sea levels--and in the real problems we pay no heed to. So David Remnick, editor of the famously factchecked-to-death New Yorker, declares to the magazine's readers that the earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet." In reality, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable. Yet environmentalists couldn't be less interested in the politics of people--people who need people. Pace Barbra Streisand, they're the unluckiest people in the world as we're about to find out. When my second child was born, a neighbor said, "Well, you've got two. You can stop now." She was being enlightened and responsible. After all, for her entire adult life, the progressiveminded have worried about "overpopulation." And this view became so pervasive that, in an age of hysteria about "dwindling resources," it became entirely normal to look on our greatest resource--us--as a liability. So today we're the dwindling resource, not the oil. We're the endangered species, not the spotted owl. The "population explosion" is a prop of the Western progressive's bizarre death-cultism. We are so bad, so polluting, so exploitative, so violent, so destructive that we owe it to the world not to be born in the first place. As Dr. Sue Blackmore wrote (in Britain's Guardian) in an unintentional side-splitter of an envirodoom column:
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In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more ..... If we take the unselfish route and try to save everyone the outcome is likely to be horrific conflict in the fight over resources, and continuing devastation of the planet until most, or all, of humanity is dead.

If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved. Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population-weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example.

Hmm. On the one hand, Dr. Sue Blackmore and the bloke from Coldplay. On the other, Dick Cheney. I think we can all agree which people would be "needed"--Al Gore, the board of the Sierra Club, perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly endives from once fashionable eateries.

Curiously, those environmentalists calling for a dramatically smaller population never seem to lead by example, and always manage to give the impression that no matter how small the ark is they're a shoo-in for a first-class stateroom. But, as it happens, Dr. Blackmore won't have to worry about whether to sacrifice Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin in order to save Sting and Bono. Given the plummeting birth rates in Europe, Russia, Japan, etc., a large chunk of the world has evidently decided to take pre-emptive action on climate change and opt for societal suicide. The crisis we face today is the precise opposite of "overpopulation": the developed world's population is shrinking faster than any human society not in the grip of war or disease has ever shrunk. Does the environmental movement sicken itself only over the black rhino and the green-cheeked parrot? Aren't people part of the environment? They certainly have environmental implications. For one thing, there'll be far fewer environmentalists around. By the end of this century, the demographically doomed Italians and Spaniards will be so few in number there won't be enough Continental environmentalists left to man the local Greenpeace office. The Belgian climate-change lobbyist will be on the endangered species list with the Himalayan snow leopard. And, from an American point of view, the blue-state ecochondriacs of Massachusetts and California will be finding the international sustainable development conferences a lot lonelier. As for the merits of scientists and artists over politicians, those parts of the world still breeding are notable for their antipathy to music, haven't done much in the way of science for over a millennium, and politics-wise incline mostly to dictators and mullahs, nuclear or otherwise. Scrap Scarlett Johansson's fur-trimmed bikini and stick her in a waterlogged burqa.