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: - Western societies are busy putting their resources into comforts for the aged instead of sustaining their populations.
- Western societies are making up the population differences via immigration.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Here I offer you a very simple illustration of why Buddhism in the West will become its own school. Let your mind drop into low gear, then look at the following picture, that's been making the rounds on the web lately:
What's going on here? The internal dissonance you're feeling isn't due to any artifact of mind at all; it's purely a result of the established mechanisms by which your brain works. This is important, because it illustrates that while the West has a lot to learn about why what it knows is important*, it also directly shows how the philosophy of the East needs to learn to incorporate mechanisms beyond functional analysis. The functional analysis of the East is fantastic, yielding ideas such as the widely misunderstood term "chi", that the West could never have come up with. Sadly, though, it has its own inherent blinders. A Buddhist might tell you that fundamentally, "all [is] consciousness". The Tibetan Buddhists go so far as to make this an actual cosmological statement. But, "all consciousness" is only true from the perspective of consciousness. It's like trying to understand chemistry when your only instrument is a Geiger counter -- it doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell you the truth either. Nothing in Buddhism will tell you what's happening to you when you see this picture (although it can speak to what happens to you when you react to what happens when you see the picture), but works of modern cognitive science such as Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Hypothesis" (which I happen to think is correct) can do so.East and West have much to learn from each other. For Western students of Buddhism, this means that while it's important to read the sutras, it's also important to read Western philosophy as well. Sure, it's full of dualisms and often misses the point; but it also speaks on subjects outside the purview of observation, and thus accesses wisdom that we can ill afford to do without.
* I had an interesting conversation with my brother on Christmas in which I stated my discovery of the general truth "the experience of mind is the same". His reaction, as a student of Western history & philosophy, was "duh, we've known that for centuries". There's a lot that the West knows, but that it may not realize is terribly important. In this example, this little truth may not be seen as widely important to Western audiences given the applications of the time, but to a Buddhist, it's one of the "Keys to the Kingdom", if you'll pardon the metaphor.
