Mark Steyn has a new book out, America Alone, which, like everything Steyn writes, is really, really funny. It’s about the global political implications of the birth dearth in Europe, which you might not think is something to laugh about. Steyn proves that it is. As he himself writes:
IN the globalized pre-9/11 world, we in the West thought in terms of nations – the Americans, the French, the Chinese – and, insofar as we considered transnational groups, were obsessed mostly with race. Religion wasn’t really on the radar. So an insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. And you don’t need “deep cover”: You can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won’t even notice it. And when we do – as we did on 9/11 – we still won’t do anything about it, because, well, it’s a religion, and modern man is disinclined to go after any faith except perhaps his own.
But Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke “the Muslim world” would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to “the Christian world.” When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. Thus, it’s not merely that there’s a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project – and, in fact, an imperial project – in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not.
Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith, in which whatever’s your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. (Yes, Christianity has had its blood drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, still a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.)
So we have a global terrorist movement, insulated within a global political project, insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight.
NOT long after 9/11, I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammad.
A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammad Atta.
A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John Allen Muhammad.
A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.
A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet.
A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed.
A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammad Hanif.
A terrorist cell bombs the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed.
A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney, Australia? Mohammad Skaf.
Okay, I guess that isn’t all that funny, and it’s not really about the birth dearth either. But you should still read the book, Because a lot of it is.
Here’s another article called Breeding for God, which uses a lot of the same data (I’m guessing) to indicate that the coming religious revival will be based as much on this-world-demographics as on spiritual values. As the author himself writes:
Perhaps we are entering a new stage in history in which the demographic flaws in liberalism will become more apparent, paving the way for the return of a communitarian social model. This may still leave democracy, liberalism and mixed capitalism intact. But it will challenge modernism, that great secular movement of cultural individualism which swept high art and culture after 1880 and percolated down the social scale to liberalise attitudes in the 1960s. Cultural modernism has accompanied technological modernisation in the west, while the non-western world has usually modernised its technology rather than its values. Daniel Bell prophesied that modernism’s antinomian cultural outlook would prompt a “great instauration” of religion as people sought spiritual solace from the alienation of modern life. Bell has so far been proved wrong, but history may yet vindicate him as we bear witness not to spiritual revival, but to a religious reconquista based, ironically, on the nakedly this-worldly force of demography.
I’m not judging here, just reporting. Anyway, it’s Friday night. Time to get busy.
Thanks! I’ll read it.