The Coming Darkness

In what has to be one of the most depressing articles I've read in a while, Mark Steyn of "The New Criterion" (which appears to be a Conservative journal of some sort) has penned an essay entitled "It's the demography, stupid", in which he twists around Clinton's anthem into a dire assessment of the future of the Western World.

According to Steyn, it hasn't got one. His reasoning is very simple:

1. Western societies are busy putting their resources into comforts for the aged instead of sustaining their populations.
2. Western societies are making up the population differences via immigration.
3. Western societies, in order to be multi-culti &c, are tolerating the intolerance of immigrant populations, especially the intolerances endemic to Islam, rather than forcing them to adopt the "native" culture.
4. As a result of reproduction rates anywhere from 1.1 to 1.87, mostly on the low end (with the U.S. as a temporary stand-out at 2.07, thanks mostly to Mexican Catholics), the proportion of Western societies which value Western values, especially human rights, democracy and the rule of law, is declining -- inexorably declining for Europe, whose highest "native" reproduction rate is 1.5 and falling.
5. As a result, within one or two generations, most of Western societies will be populated by people who actively disdain all that the West stands for. When even in England, the majority of Muslims want to live under Sharia, you know that doesn't auger well for anyone.
   

I have a really hard time refuting the basic premise; the Western world isn't breeding enough, and, even if Western governments wanted to create incentives to breed, they won't "disenfranchise" their elderly "Grey Panthers" in order to do so. Forget about abortion-rights -- if Western women don't start breeding more, and soon, they'll be under a system designed to make rape unpunishable!* Then, of course, you've got all the other brutalities associated with any random Islamic country you can name --not in parts of the world where there's never been anything except tyranny, but bestride the grave of Western civilization, the birthplace of freedom.

Dark indeed.



* Under Sharia, a rape victim needs to find four male witnesses to testify on her behalf, otherwise seeking justice opens her up to indefensible slander charges, since as a woman her testimony doesn't count. It's worse if she gets pregnant: if she does, then that's proof of adultery & she's stoned or hanged -- or, if she's lucky enough to live in a country with "liberal", "tolerant" Islam, she gets to suffer 100 lashes.