Review: America Alone

In Mark Steyn's very entertaining book, America Alone, the idea behind his central thesis is that demography is our best tool for understanding the course of future events. After demography, Steyn focuses on two other ideas: (1) the will, as in the will of a people to survive, and (2) the unsustainability of the socialized state. In Steyn's view, America stands alone because of its birth rate in combination with the potential to summon the will to avoid the onset of something like the next dark ages.

Steyn likes to say that while demography isn't everything, it's a good 90%. It's the demography of the developed world which threatens the next dark ages because the population of the developed world, unmolested by war, famine, or disease, is in decline. To put the point very simply, folks ain't havin' kids no more. This kind of decline is unprecedented in the history of the world; it is the ultimate manifestation of a culture of death, or more accurately, of a death cult. Everyone drinks the Kool-Aid and waits for the aliens - it's horrifying when we see this on the news, but this is something akin to the reality across the entire developed world. Instead of Kool-Aid and cyanide, we're being done in by abortion, contraception, selfishness, and a general lack of will to raise the next generation.

Japan has been going down this road for some time now. Moreover, because the Japanese population is largely unaffected by immigration (as we are in Europe and America), the demographic death spiral can be viewed in laboratory-like conditions. Russia is deathly ill with something like 60% of pregnancies ending in abortion and a birth rate of 1.28 children per woman. Both Russia and Europe, which has similarly low birth rates, though it varies from country to country, are threatened in another way by demographics: the Muslims are reproducing, and thus the post-Christian population grows older while the "youths" are more and more Muslim by percentage.

When Steyn draws attention to these facts in writing, he's commonly accused of racism. People say: "this is what the 'native' population in America said about the latest wave of immigrants from Greece, Italy, Ireland, Germany, that they have too many babies and that they're going to overrun the place." At a pub in Oxford the other night, I myself heard the very same thing from my enlightened liberal friends.

The difference the liberals are missing is that those immigrant populations which came to America were eager to assimilate, to learn the language, and to work hard in a land of opportunity. Even if we have a problem in America today because Spanish seems to have become an official second language, there is at least the positive fact that the Hispanic immigrants share the common cultural heritage of Christian civilization. Though the Freemasons brutally devastated and oppressed Mexico, the Catholic Church is alive and well there to this day. The immigrants who came to America became Americans; in Europe today, the multi-cultural state with its lack of religion, good or bad, its ideology of diversity and tolerance, good or bad, doesn't offer an identity strong enough to unify an ethnically and religiously diverse population. On the other hand, Islam offers a sense of belonging and an identity, and so a home for those who would otherwise feel adrift in post-modern Europe.

Do you remember hearing about all of those Irish immigrants who came to America hot for jihad? Don't you remember hearing the stories from your great-grandparents? If a religion makes folks feel at home - good for them, the liberal will say; but everyone, liberal or conservative, has to worry when the religion making the young men of Europe feel good about themselves is, at least in name, the force behind suicide attacks aimed at infidels from Manhattan and Bali to Madrid and Jerusalem. Liberals persist in thinking of Islam as just another religion, as a religion of peace and flaccid happiness. But at the end of the day, aren't we all more interested in what someone like Mohammed Atta understands Islam to be and believe than in what the columnists at the New York Times think?

What's the way out of this mess, especially in the case of Europe? This is where the question of will comes into the picture. If the response of the Spaniards after the Madrid bombings is any indication of the kind of will the Europeans can summon, Europe is done. Didn't the Spanish ever see a Bruce Willis movie? Any idiot American kid can tell you that you don't let yourself get shot by the bad guy and then, post-mortem as it were, also accede to all of his demands! At the very least, you give in to the bad guy's demands only to save your own skin; and the characters who do that generally don't get the hot chick at the end of movie. As Steyn writes in American Alone, not the day of the Madrid bombings, but the day the Spaniards voted in the Socialist, yellow-belly government is the day that will live in infamy.

But Europe has bigger problems than fighting in Iraq. First, they have to worry about their own unassimilated Muslim populations at home; second, Europeans who are capable of preserving European culture must begin to have children again. For anyone that's listening: that means 2.1 children per woman, i.e. not just 2 and a white picket fence! Amazingly, there are some people so ignorant as to think that the problem is a lack of libido: those undeveloped folk sure love to get it on, but the rich, developed guys, how indolent in bed and no romance! Contraception, abortion, and sterilization - the bare technologies or methods - aren't entirely to blame either; pace the case of China, which will grow old before it can grow powerful (so Steyn argues), these methods and technologies aren't impositions, but choices which people make. I choose to contracept or to have an abortion; these aren't things that happen to me.

In its commentary on the second graph on this page, the US Census Bureau claims that "Growth rates [in population] . . . started to decline due to rising age at marriage as well as increasing availability and use of effective contraceptive methods." Oh, was that it? This might sound nice in a report no one reads, but if someone stops to ask the evidence for that claim, it's bound to be wanting. If the explanation for the population being cut in half is a deadly disease which ravages 1 in 2 persons, it's a good explanation, even if it might not be altogether air-tight. But as far as the Census Bureau's explanation is concerned, I might just as well say that birth rates began to decline in the 1960s because my favorite beverage, Coke, was spreading rapidly around the world. Of course there may well be a correlation in the numbers with a rise in contraceptive technology, but this isn't the ultimate cause of the decline.

So then what has sapped the will of Japan, Russia, Europe and the blue states to reproduce and raise the next generation? Steyn lays part of the blame at the feet of the modern, socialized state, a system of government which holds the population in permanent childhood. The state will take care of everything, the state will provide healthcare, old folks care, young folks care, this, that, and the other. The one thing that the state can't provide is more warm bodies who can work and pay taxes in order to keep the cycle of enfeeblement rolling along. If half the population is over 65, retired, and living off a government pension, the tax burden on the remaining workers must grow. Listen to one of the brilliant minds they have working on this problem in Japan:

Japan already has the highest number of elderly people and the lowest number of young as a percentage of its population. The imbalance is threatening future economic growth and raising fears over whether the government will be able to fund pensions.

But Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said: "It's impossible for the pension system to collapse due to the declining birth rate because we will adjust the amount of money put into it."

Did they teach him that kind of mathematical genius at Princeton? Or maybe he learned how to manage finances like that at Cambridge? If you have no money, just get more money. Okay.

Yet the modern socialist state can't be the whole of the explanation behind the lack of will to reproduce. In theory, at least, there's nothing hindering the couple determined to have 12 children from living well in a socialized state - as long in the redistribution of wealth, families with more children have enough money coming to them through the relevant government programs. Today, in fact, in places like Germany and Australia, the government is providing incentives for couples to have more children. Yet while this BBC article celebrates the "baby boom" in Australia, for which the government is taking credit, the 2006 estimate for fertility rate in Australia is still only 1.76 children per woman. Hey, that beats Russia and Japan! but Australia is hardly out of the woods.

Remember when considering the birth rate that though the government may care (for a time) only about warm bodies to man the factories and pay the taxes, there's a big difference between a healthy fertility rate across the population and a booming fertility in certain limited segments of the population. Steyn tells us that in Russia, too, there are districts of growth, despite an overall birth rate at death spiral levels; and what's the predominant religion in all of these growing districts? You guessed it - Islam.

As I was saying, I don't think that a socialist state is the whole of the problem in Europe. Faithful Catholics are going to have children, and lots of them, whether they live in America or Italy. But consider the estimated 2006 birth rates for Italy, Spain, and Austria, once three of the most Catholic countries in Europe: 1.36 in Austria, 1.28 in Italy, and 1.28 in Spain. Whether these countries are waiting for the aliens or not, get the morgue ready: less than 1.3 children per woman is considered "lowest low fertility", from which a population cannot recover. Remember, again, these numbers say nothing about which portions of the population in Spain, Austria and Italy are having children and which are not.

What happened in Spain and Italy? When people began paying heavy taxes and receiving "free" health care, did they also give up on the idea of having children? I don't find this explanation plausible, though it may be a contributing factor. I think that the moral and religious formation of a nation is a more likely explanation of the will or lack thereof to raise a family. Steyn frequently mentions the fact that Euorpe is "post-Christian". More accurately, though, all of Europe is "post-Catholic", a condition in which parts of Euorpe have been for different amounts of time. I'm inclined to believe that it was the success of an ideology which some will associate with the Freemasons and others will call "secularism" in places like Spain and Italy which contributes in large part to Europe's present demographic crisis. Why blame secularism? because it was this ideology which conquered all of Europe - not to mention Japan and Russia (in a more extreme form) - not always by force of arms, but always in a way which sought to sever the Church from the state and the formation of the young.

Through the reign of Pius XII, this separation of Church and state happened by a violence done to the then current arrangement of things, especially in France. But after the Second Vatican Council, it was the Church Herself, or rather, certain wicked members of her, tares among the wheat, even though ennobled with the office of the bishop, who precipitated the separation and hurried civil leaders down roads which have lead to today's demographic crisis.

Abortion was preceded by contraception which was preceded by divorce. There is one Church in the world which has always opposed all three, but this opposition, in the public square, at least, melted away before the dictates of modern European sensibilities. Romano Amerio writes at length in Iota Unum about the missed opportunities and deliberate withdrawls of the Church, especially in Italy, over matters such as religious education, divorce, and abortion. Benedict XVI and Cardinal Ruini are doing what they can to reinject the Church into the "public square" of Italy, but they cannot regain in a short time the ground that was lost over many decades. Yet Benedict also seems to have accepted the multi-cultural, religious state, even in Europe, even in Italy, as a fait accompli in which the atheist, the Catholic, and the Muslim all have a voice. But when - given the demographic numbers today - Muslims can begin to accomplish the overthrow of old Europe by recourse to democratic institutions, what voice will the Church have and for how long?

Besides, the damage may be irreversible, by which I mean that the dire consequences of a dwindling population living in a socilaized state may have taken place before the trends in reproduction can be reversed. And how, after all, does one reverse trends in demographics? As I quoted above, the Australian government claims to have done so by providing tax incentives and even cash handouts for each new born child. But the numbers belie this short-term success: the nation as a whole still has a sickly birth rate. Will cash from the government make your average Joe and Jane more generous in raising children? Will they marry earlier and contracept less because their tax advisor says it will be a good thing? This doesn't seem likely.

Or will people be convinced to have more children because Uncle Sam asks it? When discussing this question with Catharina Oxoniensis, she thinks that such a turnaround wouldn't be impossible in a place like Corea, because of the "collective culture" mentality there. Once upon a time, the government of Corea said "We all need to have fewer children!" and the nation listened. Today, the birth rate is below lowest low at 1.27 births per woman.

But in the Western world, which seems to pride itself on something the very opposite of the collective culture mentality, will couples have another child on the basis of a "take one for the team" mentality? Instead, like many other things in life, won't they say: "Why is it my problem? We've had one or two and that's good enough." Indeed, it's a problem of collective action, for any one family can truly say that the solution of the problem isn't up to them, even if they do have 16 kids.

In our lifetimes, we'll be able to see whether the demographic doom-mongers, like Steyn, were right to worry. I'm convinced that they are.


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