Posted on 02/15/2006 10:15:37 AM PST by Wombat101
MY interest in demography dates back to September 11, 2001, when a demographic group I hadn't hitherto given much thought 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 co-religionists in Montreal, Yorkshire, Copenhagen and elsewhere. How many people knew there were fast-growing and culturally confident Muslim populations in Scandinavia?
Demography doesn't explain everything but it accounts for a good 90 per cent. The "who" is the best indicator of the what-where-when-and-why. Go on, pick a subject. Will Japan's economy return to the heady days of the 1980s when US businesses cowered in terror? Answer: No. Japan is exactly the same as it was in its heyday except for one fact: it stopped breeding and its population aged. Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it gets rich.
Check back with me in a century and we'll see who's right on that one. But here's one we know the answer to: Why is this newspaper published in the language of a tiny island on the other side of the earth? Why does Australia have an English Queen, English common law, English institutions? Because England was the first nation to conquer infant mortality.
By 1820 medical progress had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of 15. Britain had the manpower to take, hold, settle and administer huge chunks of real estate around the planet. Had, say, China or Russia been first to overcome childhood mortality, the modern world would be very different.
What country today has half of its population under the age of 15? Italy has 14 per cent, the UK 18 per cent, Australia 20 per cent - and Saudi Arabia has 39 per cent, Pakistan 40 per cent and Yemen 47 per cent. Little Yemen, like little Britain 200 years ago, will send its surplus youth around the world - one way or another.
So, whether or not her remarks were "outrageous" (the Democrats' Lyn Allison), "insensitive" (the Greens' Rachel Siewert), "offensively discriminatory" (Sydney's Daily Telegraph) and "bigoted" (this newspaper), I salute Danna Vale. You don't have to agree with her argument that Australia's aborting itself out of recognition and that therefore Islam will inherit by default to think it's worth asking a couple of questions:
* Is abortion in society's interest?
* Can a society become more Muslim in its demographic character without also becoming more Muslim in its political and civil character?
The first one's easy: One can understand that 17-year-old Glenys working the late shift at Burger King and knocked up by some bloke who scrammed 10 minutes after conception may believe it's in her interest to exercise "a woman's right to choose", but the state has absolutely no interest in encouraging women in general to exercise that choice.
Quite the opposite: given that today's wee bairns are tomorrow's funders of otherwise unsustainable social programs, all responsible governments should be seriously natalist. The reason Europe, Russia and Japan are doomed boils down to a big lack of babies. Abortion isn't solely responsible for that but it's certainly part of the problem.
In attempting to refute Vale's argument, this newspaper praised the nation's maidenhood for lying back and thinking of Australia and getting the national fertility rate up from 1.73 births per woman in 2001 to 1.77, "well above rates in developed nations such as Italy, Spain, Japan, Germany and South Korea".
Well, pop the champagne corks! That's like saying Mark Latham's political prospects are better than Harold Holt's. The countries cited are going out of business. Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility - 1.3 births per woman, the point at which you're so far down the death spiral you can't pull out.
In theory, those countries will find their population halving every 40 years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there's no point sticking around a country that's turned into one big undertaker's waiting room: not every pimply burger flipper is going to want to work himself into the ground to pay for new shuffleboard courts at the old folks' home.
In 2005, some 137 million babies were born around the globe. That 137 million is the maximum number of 20-year-olds who'll be around in 2025. There are no more, no other sources; that's it, barring the introduction of mass accelerated cloning (which is by no means an impossibility). Who that 137 million are will determine the character of our world.
The shape's already becoming clear. Take those Danish cartoons. Every internet blogger wants to take a stand on principle alongside plucky little Denmark. But there's only five million of them. Whereas there are 20 million Muslims in Europe - officially. That's the equivalent of the Danes plus the Irish plus the Belgians plus the Estonians.
You do the mathematics. If you want the reality of Europe in a nutshell, walk into a supermarket belonging to the French chain Carrefour. You'll be greeted by a notice in Arabic: "Dear Clients, We express solidarity with the Islamic and Egyptian community. Carrefour doesn't carry Danish products." It's strictly business: they have three Danish customers and a gazillion Muslim ones. Retail sales-wise, they know which way their bread's buttered and it isn't with Lurpak.
That's Vale's second point. If a society chooses to outsource its breeding, who your suppliers are is not unimportant. "I've heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child," says Allison.
"If it wasn't the Greeks, it was the Italians or it was the Vietnamese."
Those are races or nationalities. But Islam is a religion, and an explicitly political one - unlike the birthplace of your grandfather it's not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for its adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression - a Pan-Islamic identity that transcends borders.
Instead of a melting pot, there's conversion: A Scot can marry a Greek or a Botswanan, but when a Scot marries a Yemeni it's because the former has become a Muslim. In defiance of normal immigration patterns, the host country winds up assimilating with Islam: French municipal swimming baths introduce non-mixed bathing sessions; a Canadian Government report recommends the legalisation of polygamy; Seville removes King Ferdinand III as patron of the annual fiesta because he played too, um, prominent a role in taking back Spain from the Moors.
When the fastest-breeding demographic group on the planet is also the one most resistant to the pieties of the social-democratic state that's a profound challenge. Yes, yes, I know Islam is very varied, and Riyadh has a vibrant gay scene, and the Khartoum Feminist Publishing Collective now has so many members they've rented lavish new offices above the clitorectomy clinic. I don't claim to have all the answers, except when I'm being interviewed live on TV. But that's better than claiming, as most of Vale's disparagers do, that there aren't even any questions.
Where she goes wrong is in consigning the Lucky Country to the same trash can of history as Old Europe. For Australia, this is not hail and farewell - or, as the Romans put it, ave atque (Danna) vale. Japan is unicultural: a native population ageing and dying. Europe is bicultural: a fading elderly population yielding to a young surging Islam.
But Australia, like the US, is genuinely multicultural, at least in the sense that its immigration is not from a single overwhelming source. The remorseless transformation of Eutopia into Eurabia is already prompting the Dutch to abandon their country in record numbers, for Canada and New Zealand.
In the years ahead, North America and Australia will have the pick of European talent and a chance to learn the lessons of its self-extinction, as they apply to abortion and much else.
In the '70s and '80, Muslims had children - those self-detonating Islamists in London and Gaza and Bali are a literal baby boom - while westerners took all those silly books about overpopulation seriously. A people that won't multiply can't go forth or go anywhere. Those who do will shape the world we live in.
Mark Steyn, a columnist with the Telegraph Group, is a regular contributor to The Australian's Opinion page.
Steyn is not pointing at you personally. He is pointing at the evolving systems in the Western countries that are to some extent welfarist. It applies to the US, also. We have a welfare state and our current economic difficulties with Social Security and medicare, etc, are precisely the target. It is very well argued. I don't think Mr. Steyn even knows who you are and your disapproval of the welfare state is not likely to change it a whole lot. If you work in the economy you are paying SS taxes to support an ever growing cohort of recipients and you will be/are already affected by demographic slow growth and growing longevity.
bump
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Yes. Of all the large religious groupings only Islam specifically advocates violence and compulsion against unbelievers as a religious duty. Our "leaders" apparently do not believe this or are too frightened of the backlash that openly stating this would bring about. But that's OK. Inevitably the followers of Islam make their determination known to all. The only question is when the rest of the world will decide to stand up to them. Sooner would be much, much better than later. If the non-Islamic world dithers much longer we will find that containment of this creed will be more costly than anyone now imagines. Iran with nukes and the means to deliver them (by missile or by terrorist) is a real nightmare.
It is easier to restrict/end Muslim immigration then to hope that European women will all of a sudden go from having 1-2 children to 3-4 children, which they would need to do now to even begin to compete.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Pope Paul VI was right all along.
We are well aware of the serious difficulties experienced by public authorities in this regard, especially in the developing countries. To their legitimate preoccupations we devoted our encyclical letter Populorum Progressio. But with our predecessor Pope John XXIII, we repeat: no solution to these difficulties is acceptable "which does violence to man's essential dignity" and is based only on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and of his life. The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values.[26] Neither can one, without grave injustice, consider divine providence to be responsible for what depends, instead, on a lack of wisdom in government, on an insufficient sense of social justice, on selfish monopolization, or again on blameworthy indolence in confronting the efforts and the sacrifices necessary to ensure the raising of living standards of a people and of all its sons....Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy...
Consequently, if the mission of generating life is not to be exposed to the arbitrary will of men, one must necessarily recognize insurmountable limits to the possibility of man's domination over his own body and its functions; limits which no man, whether a private individual or one invested with authority, may licitly surpass.
On the Regulation of Birth (1968)
Won't argue with you on that point, but will European governments and their pampered citizens actually find the collective will to make it happen? Not if it means I can't retire at 55 with a government-sponsored maid service in LaHavre.
Societies must make tough choices in this regard: it is the choice between self-indulgence and self-destruction. Human nature being what it is, the need to feel special and "taken care of"(even by an impersonal State apparatus) will override common sense. The change that would have to take plac e on a societal level would change Europe (and the US) in ways that would infringe upon our personal freedoms and endanger what we consider our "rightful" benefits.
I for one, don't mind working until 70, if it means we don't have to import more software developers from Pakistan or Red China.
but more important than how long I extend my working life or how much I can depend upon my government for my welfare in my old age, is what kind of scoeity, what kind of environment, will we be creating when we import millions of people who a) can't be assimilated, b) don't want to be assimiliated and c) follow an ideology in which they are the rightful inheritors of everthing they set eyeballs on?
Even Mark Steyn is tip-toeing around the root of the issue, birth control. Abortion is simply the rotten fruit from the birth control tree.
The turning point came in 1929 when, at the Lambeth Conference, the Church of England became the first Christian denomination to approve the use of artificial means of birth control (in grave circumstances). The rest is history.
From Wikipedia:
ChristianityI italicized the phrase because it sends chills down my spine.Main article: Christian views on contraception Since the 1930 approval of contraception (in limited circumstance) by the Anglican Communion, most Protestant groups have come to approve the use of modern contraceptives when couples do not desire children.
Like pre-20th century Protestantism, the Catholic Church Church is morally opposed to contraception and orgasmic acts outside of the context of fully natural marital intercourse. In some circumstance, the Catholic Church does approve of preventing pregnancy by use of natural family planning, but all artificial forms of contraception are condemned.
I don't believe Steyn was making a dogmatic or religious case, merely pointing out the less-obvious effects on the Western Tradition. Despite what some might think, Western Civilization is mankind's greatest achievement and it must be preserved and advanced, at all costs.
Alas, you may be right. The lure of publicly financed idleness may be too much to resist.
I for one, don't mind working until 70, ....
And I for one hope to keep working long past 70, ....
Yeah, come to think of it, idleness doesn't seem all that appealing. Maybe by that age I'll have the time to write that novel or something.
bttt
steyn pinger
That is also on my list of things to do.
I'd settle for finishing my thesis, though. Other than my tombstone, it'll be the only thing with my name on it that might survive me, albeit in some dusty library and probably unread...lol
Fine post.
Not at all. Stein's arguments in this piece are purely demographic -- and from a demographic perspective, abortion has significant effects.
The moral aspects of abortion are as you say they are. And I believe Steyn is in our court on that. But again -- that's not what he's talking about here.
By pretending that the fundamental distinction between freely chosen actions and coerced actions does not exist, this document veers into la-la land incoherence.
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