A Deficit of Babies

“Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries.”

Thus the brilliant Mark Steyn began his remarkable piece in The New Criterion reprinted yesterday by the online Opinion Journal. His story of demographics, Islamic radicalism, and Western weakness is a must read for us all. I’ve excerpted several of Steyn’s paragraphs in an effort to summarize his powerful arguments.

The basic problem is that Western nations are largely concerned about the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care, government paternity leave instead of the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity. "Go forth and multiply," is fundamentally important because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulses, like cradle-to-grave welfare.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it, and secondary-impulse societies are truly feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam. "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"—as Arnold Toynbee put it. Thus, while Islamism is the enemy, this war is really about our lack of civilizational confidence.

The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life--child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents--has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point--I would say socialized health care is a good marker--you cross a line, and it's very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back.

But how does a country pay for all those benefits? In Western societies the model has been that those who work fund the benefits for those who do not –- children, the sick, and the elderly. It’s obvious that the social welfare system only works if you have a goodly supply of workers. But workers start our as babies and the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is.

"Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Now look at the Western world. The United States hovers just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation.

By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans. (In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.)

Demographics is a game of last man standing. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from 30% of the world's population to 20%, while the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%. Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially). What will Europe be like at the end of this process?

The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, they're likely to wind up with dominance just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over? The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. But by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations in Europe on the network news every night.

In his book "The Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism--a new Dark Age."