Steyn on civilisation

America Alone:  The end of the world as we know It
by Mark Steyn
(Regnery Publishing, 2006, 224 pages)

Mark Steyn has for many years been building a reputation as one of the finest conservative columnists in the world.  His new book, America Alone, confirms this well-earned reputation.  Because he is such a skilled and funny polemicist, there is a risk that one might not take his arguments as seriously as if they had been written in a more scholarly manner.  This would be a dreadful mistake, however, for the issues he raises in this book are the most serious imaginable.

America Alone is at its core a book about the future of Western civilisation, and whether that civilisation and the culture it has bequeathed to us has the will to survive.  Steyn hopes that the answer is "yes", but gives us plenty of reasons to think that the answer might be "no".  He suggests that most citizens of the West have yet to wake up to the fact that the comfortable world they have been living in over recent decades is but a tiny blip in history -- the world that future generations will face may possibly be somewhat less pleasant.

At the heart of Steyn's thesis is a paradox -- the West, which has long enjoyed military power and economic prosperity to an extent perhaps unrivalled in history, seems to have horribly lost its direction and confidence in itself.  Many Western nations are suffering from demographic collapse and failing to reproduce themselves.  Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and filling it is a resurgent, youthful and culturally confident militant radical Islam that threatens to change these societies in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few decades ago.

Steyn believes that the key to understanding how this situation has arisen is the growth of big government in Western nations, which has elevated the secondary impulses of society (such as government health care, government child care, lifelong welfare) over the primary impulses of society (such as self-reliance, national defence, and reproductive activity).  The result of this has been to infantilise the citizenry of those nations, whose lives have been largely reduced to pleasure-seeking and the prolonging of adolescence, but which are otherwise devoid of meaning and direction, thus destroying the primal instinct for survival.  Steyn gives an example of this problem -- the growing tendency for Western elites to worry in apocalyptic terms about environmental issues that do not constitute an immediate threat to civilisation, while down-playing politically difficult issues such as the rise of militant radical Islam that might constitute such a threat.  The point we are meant to take from this discussion is that socialist policies constitute not only a threat to economic prosperity, but also to national security through the impact they have on people's fundamental beliefs and values.

The negative impact of big government socialism has been most obvious in Europe, where many nations are now in demographic freefall, having lost the fundamental desire to reproduce themselves.  The new workers that will be required to support the welfare state so beloved of Europe's rapidly ageing population are increasingly becoming few and far between.  As a result, European nations have had little choice but to massively increase immigration, which has taken place largely from Muslim countries.  These high immigration rates taken together with fertility rates that are substantially higher for European Muslims than for the original population mean that Europe is rapidly becoming more Islamic in character.

In the past, it has normally been assumed that immigrants would eventually assimilate into the dominant or native culture.  However, the reverse is largely happening in Europe, where the native citizens are increasingly being expected to assimilate towards (the still as yet minority) Islamic culture.  This has been brought about largely as a symptom of the decline of self-confidence by Western societies alluded to earlier, a major outcome of which has been the rise of the ideology of multiculturalism, which is memorably described by Steyn as a "kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome -- a desperation to identify with anything that comes along other than your own".

The multicultural preaching of tolerance at any cost, including tolerance of the intolerant, has allowed radical Islam to gain numerous footholds right in the heart of Europe.  Large numbers of immigrants and even growing numbers of native-born have become increasingly alienated from the society that surrounds them, a process that has been hastened by official policies that have the practical effect of all but encouraging them to feel contempt and even hatred for the dominant culture.  It is thus not surprising to find that growing numbers of people are finding their meaning and identity in radical Islam, which at least offers a strong and coherent worldview for its followers.  The growing impact of Islamic radicalism in Europe, however, is troubling to say the least.

Much of Europe is now finding itself under increasing threat from home-grown terrorism, as can be seen by the Madrid train bombings or the London tube bombings to give just two spectacular examples.  It has been revealed that the security service in the United Kingdom was aware of close to 30 separate plots to kill people and damage the economy in the UK alone.  Furthermore, those that seek to question the growing influence of radical Islam in Europe sometimes face death threats and are forced into hiding, perhaps the most famous recent example of which is Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  The well-known film maker Theo van Gogh was actually murdered.

Steyn draws attention to surveys suggesting that only 17 per cent of British Muslims believed that there was any Arab involvement in the September 11 terrorist attacks.  To be fair, however, they are not exactly on their own in Europe at the moment, as is indicated by another survey suggesting that approximately one-third of Germans under the age of 30 think that the US Government was responsible for carrying out the September 11 attacks.  Both of these polls give a sense of the air of unreality that has descended over large parts of Europe in recent times.  Another poll that is mentioned indicates that 60 per cent of British Muslims want to live under Shariah law, and numerous examples are given showing how parts of Britain are now rapidly changing in small but significant ways.  These range from public authorities showing an increased sensitivity to images of pork to the growing prevalence of non-Muslim women heavily covering themselves up when going out in public in largely Muslim areas.

Steyn suggests that this is how nations die -- not by way of conquest, but by a thousand seemingly trivial concessions.  As suggested by the title of this book, he believes that, within the space of only a few decades, the US along with Australia may be the only outposts of traditional Western civilisation remaining in the world.

Unfortunately, America Alone will be difficult to find in most Australian bookstores, which tend to be heavily stocked with the titles of somewhat less insightful commentators.  If you are looking for books by Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, you'll have no problem.  Authors who buck the prevailing trendy left-wing view of the world such as Mark Steyn, however, often tend to get far less of a run, meaning that those who wish to buy a copy will probably have to go searching on the Internet.

But few of those who take the trouble to order America Alone over the Web will regret it.  It is difficult to think of such a funny book written about such a depressing subject, but the combination makes it a book that is very difficult to put down.