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.
This assumes that the rationale behind low birth rates is primarily economic, but it's probably not.
Rather, I think the primary driver is the freedom of women to forego pregnancy in preference to other pursuits. A lot of women would rather not be mothers right away, but would rather do as us men do: have a rewarding career, and to do pretty much what we want to do. And then have a kid, as a matter of personal fulfillment.
This mindset is enabled by easy access to birth control and abortion, but those are merely enablers to the underlying mindset.
The solution is easy to describe, if beastly difficult to make happen (because it's a cultural change): having several children has to become an attractive goal for women.
Steyn should also do a rethink on the concepts of "universalism" while he is at it. He and his "liberal"
cohorts think about the same line, and that is the radical egalitarian concept of man is the same everywhere.
What????
Are you smokling something that should be (and probably is) banned?
"Universalism"? Where, please, tell me where Mr. Steyn's reasoning had any all-encompassing,touchy-feely ideology that was mentioned, alluded to or even implied, in this article? Other than advancing the concept of the Anglosphere, I can hardly remember Mr. Steyn putting forward anything that could be considered "universal".
"Radical egalitarian concept of man"? Did you copy that from your sociology textbook? Are you repeating something your hippie professor told you? If you're referring to the concept (created and advanced by many of the European societies that are now dying because of it) that inside "every Arab, Bushman and Coolie is an Englishman (or Frog or German) just dying to get out", you're seriously mistaken. Mark Steyn has never taken those kinds of positions, that I'm aware of atall.
The concept of the "Noble Savage" died a grisly death many centuries ago. That it is still taught in Western universities has more to do with wishful thinking and a sense of the romantic than it does with actual history. Or reality.
The question Steyn asked, in a nutshell: are you, Westerners, prepared to defend your culture against a force virulently inimical to it, or, are you going to continue to kow-tow to it? He's simply outlined one of the prinicpal facts in this battle: you're (Westerners) outnumbered, so you'd better think of something else. The current plan (cultural retreat) is a loser.
I'd hardly call that "Universalism" or "radical egalitarian" anything.
Steyn needs to do his homework. The populations of many of the nations conquered by Britain (e.g. India, and to all intents and purposes China) dwarfed that of the imperial homeland.
What transformed Britain into an empire was not medical progress (the work of Semmelweis, Pasteur, etc was still a generation in the future), but the Industrial Revolution. One soldier equipped by a factory economy is worth a dozen armed with handcrafted pointy sticks.
As far as I know, nobody has proposed that we "fight fair" in the sense of insisting that the foe shall be met hand-to-hand in single combat and shall be given all the same advantages of technology, training, etc. Thus, it's not an issue of numbers.
Addendum: Immediately after this message, it occurred to me that, yes, some people on the looney left have, in fact, whined that it's "unfair" that we can kill the terrorists with Predator drones, but if they want to kill us they have to get more up close and personal. I presume that you agree that sane people do, and should, ignore such nonsense.
I'm not arguing that this is a battle of numbers. Nor about medical science, since this is not my field of expertise. My only argument here is that there is a message "between-the-lines". That message is: you're in danger of letting your culture be destroyed from within by rampant immigration by unassimilable masses with a more energetic ideology.
The simple expedient of "outbreeding" your opponent, and thus checking his worst outrages by means of politics and stigma, has been taken away by modern ideology (feminism, for the most part, and espousal of the philosophies that elevate personal gratification above all else). Europe's democracies will be destroyed by simple democratic process; there's simply will be more Muslims to guarentee by vote that which they cannot gain by terror and demonstrations. Multi-cuturalism (another philosophy) stresses that such things are "just the breaks. Live with it and respect it".
So, if you're interested in protecting your native culture and heritage, you are, before a shot is fired, fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
The second point along these lines is that there is no energy in European culture. It is stagnating because that is the general trends of aging populations: maintaining the status quo. In simple mathematical terms, this is becoming more and more improbable without a new crop of replacement workers (and more importantly; VOTERS raised and educated in the Western tradition).
The current trend of immigration, especially in Europe, is to bring in enough people to pay the taxes to support a flabby European society, but don't attempt to assimilate the imports. In fact, so long as they merely labor anonymously and pay taxes, no one should care what they do or give a second thought as to what they want.
The problem is that the imports are now there in sufficient numbers that what they do and what they want DO matter. They are no longer just out-of-sight-out-of-mind taxpayers.
They are now out-of-sight-out-of-mind welfare recipients, voting blocs, and, increasingly, revolutionaries.
Addendum: The British Empire was just as much created by the fencing in of the English countryside, and the accumluation of formerly public lands in a private hands as it was the Industrial Revolution.
The loss of of farmland produced the excess bodies, the Industrial Revolution merely ensured they had the tools in sufficient quantity. Had not both arrived at approximately the same time, there would have been no Empire.
You're right, of course. But Steyn, in his normal half tongue in cheek half short sharp shock to the throat, is arguing what's in the state's interest. To any rational and moral person the question of the wrongness of abortion is a given. The state has interests of its own, the main one being perpetuating its existence and the phony baloney jobs (most of) its employees perform.
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. Like Mark said, do the math.
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.
Good point (see my tagline), but these numbers are set now.
That is good to hear, but at times the man can sound a bit squishy. But I agree he is no Mrs. Jellaby.
I forget, was Mrs. Jellaby in Nicholas Nickleby or Bleak House?
Anyways, Dickens aside, I think a more appropriate writer for this sort of thing would be Orwell (not the 1984 Orwell, the Lion and the Unicorn Orwell, although both are relevant). Espcially when he wrote something along the lines of "the well-being of the English dividend drawer is dependant on the sweating of Indian coolies". You know, that sort of thing.
It certainly sums up what's happening in France.
Amazing how many people have forgotten Orwell. He predicted many of the political and social problems we face today as far back as 1940.
Steyn bump
Boomkark
Another excellent but sobering article by Steyn.
bttt
If the Muslims are breeding at twice the rate of nativeborn Europeans, it doesn't take higher math to tell you that there is no OBVIOUS solution that will prevent Muslim population surpassing the locals in X years.....except deportation back to from whence they came.
Missing that point means that you missed the point of Steyn's editorial on demographics. Mark Steyn is hardly a " pro 3rd world immigration (legal or not) Multiculturalist" as you charge.
Well there is no sense in deporting them if you're still letting them in.
Stopping their immigration is first priority.
Then rounding up the illegals ones and shipping them out.
Then rouding up the legal ones, then shipping THEM out.
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