The West, Pre-Eulogized

Hugh Hewitt has solicited perusal and analysis of Mark Steyn's New Criterion piece on the impending suicide (long or slow) of Western civilization. I'd probably do it just for the link, but I love Steyn's work, and he's never been more on-target (unfortunately) than he is here.

Distilled to a single sentence, his conclusion is that liberalism is killing the West.

Selected excerpts:

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths - or, at any rate, virtues - and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

I'm not one of those dill pickle-suckers who insist that the only purpose for sex should be procreation. Within the bounds of holy matrimony I say "anything goes". But the secularists have gone to the other extreme of amputating procreation from sex altogether. Hence the ever-present blizzards of condoms in public schools, abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, and legal recognition of marriage "alternatives" like cohabitation and now sodomarriage. The notion of having children for its own sake is an afterthought anymore, and the heretofore linked notion of the family unit in which to "raise them up in the way they should go" - and the Judeo-Christian system that created and institutionalized it over a period of several millenia - has never been under greater assault. Small wonder that Western birth rates have been declining for years and in Europe have sunk beneath replacement levels. Ditto that the Continent is being overrun by devout Muslims who don't share those views on making "buns in the oven."

And, I might add, that they are not being assimilated into an existing culture in which European elites long since stopped believing themselves:

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"- as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda - lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism - is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did....Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims....

Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.

Only now there is an enemy ready, willing, and eager to exploit that agenda. It is, to employ a Muslim word, pre-emptive dhimmization, a neurotic compulsion to prostrate yourself before an enemy to obtain his approval. It resembles nothing so much as battered wife syndrome, where the woman in an abusive marriage turns her negative feelings inward and starts blaming herself for her husband's abuse as though she "has it coming." Sometimes the wife ends up dying from one beating (or worse) too many. The difference is that in the GWOT, the "wife's" death is the whole point.

Thus we get spectacles like this one:

That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian prime minister is a typical late-stage Western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

Or, to roll over Golda Meir's famous adage, "many enlightened Western leaders" would rather they and their peoples die than that their enemies think lesser of them. Except that bald reality never penetrates the barrier of self-righteous self-delusion that assures them otherwise and without which they couldn't commit such acts of rank stupidity.

And it extends across the board, in every policy area. Prosperity breeds guilt which begats manufactured anxieties to worry about that never happen (insert environmental hysteric de jour here) while plunging birth rates, graying demographics, and unaffordable cradle-to-grave entitlements that, in Dave Barry's classic phrase, will have millions of geezers trying to pry their government pensions out of fifty-three Burger King employees with their canes-of-life - an all too real crisis in the making - get studiously and stridenly ignored because it grows out of what passes for the secularist "ethic," which by self-definition can never be wrong.

Steyn argues convincingly that the reason the rot is so much more advanced in Europe is because we essentially relieved them of the core responsibilities of nationhood - i.e. national defense. And while it's had the virtue of preventing another general war on the Continent, it has also rendered our "allies" there worthless in the civilizational struggle in which we, and they, are now engaged.

And yet for all the suicide bombers and al Zarqawis we come back to the centrality of demographics. In fact, it may be no more complicated than this:

Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%....Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?....Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? 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. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

And then this kicker:

A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent than most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

What will London - or Paris, or Amsterdam - be like in the mid-'30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character? [emphasis added]

And what does it mean for the future of the "modern world"?

[I]t's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.

Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine - the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world - innumerable "progressives" have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah - in the United Kingdom. If a population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on the planet - if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions - how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world"?

To say nothing of the left-wing social nostrums that our dhimmized elites value so highly.

If Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself," that leads inexorably to T.S. Eliot's, "This is the way the world ends....not with a bang, but a whimper."

What an amazing irony: for all the fears of nuclear war and plague and terrorism, what will end up doing in modern civilization if it survives all of those dangers is modernity, or post-modernism - or let's be honest, liberalism - itself.

Let Republicans run on this national slogan from here on out: "Vote for me....if you want to live." Politics will never get more honest than that.