His recent book, “America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It“, is really a book about demography, or, to be more precise: demographic decline in Europe, the rise of Islam in Europe,  and its consequences for both Europe and the United States.  I don’t think it is a stretch to say that Steyn is a student of Oriana Fallaci… its clear he has at least familiar with her book “The Force of Reason”… and draws on similar themes.  This isn’t to say that I am in full agreement with either author, but the parallels were immediately clear.  As Christopher Hitchens might say: there is something just a bit disconcerting about an obsession with the birth rates of any particular people group.

Nevertheless, even with a healthy skepticism of the practical limits of demographic study, I find that Steyn makes some rather persuasive arguments.  He first points out the dramatic, unsustainable birth rates in most of Europe: Ireland is in first with 1.9 children per woman; Canada only has 1.5; Germany and Austria are at 1.3; Russia and Italy, 1.2; and Spain, 1.1.  When the replacement level is 2.1 children per woman, I think it goes without saying that this poses serious problems for Europe’s future.  As Steyn points out:

By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent–or more… In theory, those countries will find their population halving every thirty-five years or so.  In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there’s no point sticking around a country that’s turned into an undertaker’s waiting room.  Not every pimply burger flipper wants to support entire old folks’ homes single-handed…

One of the things Steyn tries to accomplish in this book is to explain WHY these countries are in free-fall.  The primary culprit?  European Social-Welfare systems.  It turns out that when you live in a social-welfare system… where all responsibilities of adult life are subcontracted to the state… there is very little incentive to actually grow up:

The real issue, though, is not whether you like Euro-statism.  Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s kaput.  The un-American activities in which Europe has invested its identity are deeply self-destructive.  Secondary-impulse states can be very agreeable–who wouldn’t want to live in a world where the burning political priorities are government subsidized care, the celebration of one’s sexual appetites, and whether mandatory paid vacation should be six or eight weeks?  But they’re agreeable only for the generation or two they last.  And, as we’re about to see in demographically barren, economically ossified Europe, for good or ill it’s the primal impulses that count. Europe’s belief that you can smooth off the rough edges of Anglo-American capitalism and still remain wealthy has trapped it in societal structures predicated on false arithmetic whose disastrous consequences can’t be postponed much longer.  Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense:  the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the Government.

This raises the obvious question: from what does Europe need to defend itself against?  Well, nothing… YET.  But behind the rather peaceful facade of modern politics, Steyn sees very troubling signs of a culture war in the making: a war between western, enlightened values, and 7th century values of radical Islam.  And to a certain degree, that makes sense: if Europeans are dying off… and Islamic couples in Europe are vastly out-producing European couples (he claims the birth rate for muslim women in the EU is 3.5 children) than it is quite forseeable that the majority of the French or Germans could be Muslim at some point in the future.  And perhaps it is at this point where I am the most critical of the book:  Steyn doesn’t provide any citations for these figures… and does not address the great difficulties in calculating these figures… so we have no idea whether his figures are on the high or low end of the spectrum.  It is often frustrating to simply “take his word for it”.

But lets assume that Steyn is right and that the muslim birth rate is far higher than that of western women.  SO WHAT!?  What’s so bad about a religion of peace?  Most Muslims don’t buy the whole “jihad” thing, right?  Well, Steyn doesn’t buy this argument:

[I]slam 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….

So it’s not merely that there’s a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project…

And not only is Islam a political project, but Europe is the perfect petri-dish for its growth:

While its not true that every immigrant on welfare is an Islamic terrorist the vast majority of Islamic terrorists in Europe are on welfare, living in radicalized ghetto cultures with nothing to do but sit around the flat plotting the jihad all day at taxpayer’s expense…

Abu Qatada, a leading al Qaeda recruiter, became an Islamist big shot while on welfare in Britian, and only when he was discovered to have £150,000 in his bank account did the Department for Work and Pensions turn off the spigot

This notion of a “nanny-state” seems to be a central component of Steyn’s argument throught the book: with it, society crumbles, without it, society becomes stronger.  In fact, in the last chapter of the book, Steyn is rather critical of the American slide into dependency.  The more responsibilities we turn over to the State, the less able we are to fend for ourselves:

[T]he only reason “a box-cutter can bring down a tower” is because on September 11 our defenses against such a threat were exclusively the province of the state. If nineteen punks with box-cutters had tried to pull some stunt in the parking lot of a sports bar, they’d have been beaten to a pulp.  The airline cabin, however, is the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the ski-high versions of the wildest dreams of big government… So on September 11 on those first three flights the cabin crews followed all those Federal Aviation Administration guidelines from the seventies.  By the time the fourth plane got into trouble, the passengers knew the government wasn’t up there with them.  And, within ninety minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93  had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it.  That’s been my basic rule of thumb since September 11:  anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing, not just for the war on terror but for the national character in a more general sense.

There is obviously much more in his book, I merely hit the major points.  While I think many perceive the book as anti-Islamic, I think it perhaps better to say the book is a warning to the West… a warning against complacency and dependency.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.“

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom.“

This belief in the American cause and its people has slowly been replaced, on the left, with a hatred for these very principles. The Left did not see the Soviets were not evil… they were victims of American provocation…

Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and “inordinate fear of communism” represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America’s fault.

But before I reprint the article in its entirety, head over to WSJ.com and read it for yourself.

I must admit; it feels a bit odd to find myself finding such common ground with former Democratic presidents. Does this make me some kind of Neo-Democrat… or does this say more about the lengths the Democratic party has moved left?… I would tend to think it’s the latter.

Michelle Obama has left little doubt about her views on American society, and its people… the wife of the candidate told crowds that she was, for the first time in her life, “proud” of her country… It was obvious, nontheless, that this was no blip, no failure to express her real thought.  She said exactly what she’d wanted to say… The comment reflected her deeply held, grim view of American society, one she was accustomed to sharing with others who thought likewise.

She recently waxed irate over the American attention to security interests, arguing that we should be “changing the conversation” and building diplomatic relations “instead of protecting ourselves against terrorists“.  

A New Yorker profile published last week quotes numerous stump speech pronouncements, among them Mrs. Obama’s assertion that most Americans’ lives have gotten worse since she was a girl.  ”So if you want to pretend like there was some point in the last couple decades when your life was easy, I want to meet you.“

In short, not only is existence in America a deserate proposition for most citizens –anyone claiming to have led a satisfactory one not sunk in the hell that is American life is, quite simply, lying.  America is, she has elsewhere informed audiences, a nation whose “souls are broken“.

Whatever America’s faults, we are certainly not a nation of “broken souls”, a nation where every day is some impassable hurdle, a nation needing the generous hand of some benevolent Democrat dictator.  It is almost beyond explanation how someone who has done so well in this country can still have such a pessimistic attitude toward it’s people and government.  

And what are we supposed to make of her “I want to meet you” quote?  Does she really WANT to meet someone who has had easy times in their lives?  She might want to spit in their face to spite them; no other reason seems that plausible. But this really begs the question: why is a hard life so unbearable for her?  Playrights have been exploring the tragedy of the human condition for Centuries… wouldn’t an educated woman such as Ms. Obama would have been sensible enough to grasp this fundamental truth instead of ‘hoping’ that her husband can change the human condition?  

Is a Government pouring money on our problems (which is all it can do for people)… going to make us Happier?  Is our life now really comparable to the lives our grandparents experienced during World War II?  Is it really of such a nature to complain about? 

Well, Michelle, Feel free to come and meet me anytime. If you Vant… I am here*.  I have had a few easy times over the past couple decades and would be more then happy to tell you what a great country I live in.

*[wait for it... it's worth it] 

What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imagry, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doind, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.  This is the special effect of our times.  The ecstasy of the polaroid is of the same order:  to hold the object and its image almost simultaneously as if the conception of light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was thought to secrete doubles or negatives of itself that we pick up with our eyes, has become reality.  It is a dream.  It is the optical materilization of a magical process.  The polariod photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.

‘LIVE OR DIE’: the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death.  If you live, you live, if you die, you die.  It is like saying ‘be yourself, or don’t be!’  It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic.  You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal.  Following the model of ‘pay or die!’, ‘your money or your life!’, it would become ‘your life or your life!”.  Stupid again, since you cannot exchange life for itself.  And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood.  In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: ‘ if you get more stupid than me, you die!’

I like how he doesn’t see a need for some ultimate conclusion on the meaning of the statement… nothing irks me more then philosophers who get caught up in the meaningless questions.  Even so, it seems he contemplates the statement long enough to expose it for what it is–and in doing so causes his reader to view the common and banal with a fresh perspective.  And you wondered why I like this guy so much… 

Here is part 2 of my installment on Jean Baudrillard’s book, “America“.  In this portion, Baudrillard really starts ‘drawing the boundaries’, if you will; clearly defining the fundamental elements of society – elements by which we distinguish ourselves from Europe and the rest of the world.   I find great importance in his explanation;  primarily because it reaffirms the fact that we are unique… it carries with it a certain form of identity–an identity we so easily miss without the perspective of a foreigner.  

The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochment as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift.  There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.  You are born modern, you do not become so.  And we have never become so…

Every country bears a sort of historical predestination, which almost definitively determines its characteristics.  For us, it is the bourgeois model of 1789 – and the interminable decadence of that model – that shapes our landscape.  There is nothing we can do about it:  everything here revolves around the nineteenth-century bourgeois dream.

As an initial matter, I find Baudrillard’s fatalistic point of view fascinating; the differences we have with Europe are not simply skin deep but amount to an insurmountable hurdle.   His phrase, ”a chasm of modernity”, is particularily important in this regard; it implies an inescapable difference in values — values that appear impossible to change.   When he writes, It is almost as if he wishes he could have been born modern; but realizes it would be an futile attempt to become so.  

Now, this begs the question:  what are these modern traits that differentiate us from our European counterparts?   Although Baudrillard discusses a number of different alternatives, I found his explanation of pragmatism to be the most interesting:

America is neither dream nor reality.  It is a hyperreality.  It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved.  Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too.  It may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European, since he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum – that of the immanence and material transcription of all values.  The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation.  They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language to describe it, since they themselves are the model.

We shall remain nostalgic utopians, agonizing over our ideals, but baulking, ultimately, at their realization, professing that everything is possible, but never that everything has been achieved.  yet that is what America asserts.  Our problem is that our old goals – revolution, progress, freedom – will have evaporated before they were achieved, before they became reality.  Hence our melancholy. 

This is perhaps the most generous portion of his book; one can omly imagine the nasty letters he must have recieved back home after daring publish such an idea.  After all, one would hardly expect a Frenchman to use the term “utopia” and “America” in the same sentence… but perhaps we do not give the French enough credit…

I expect Baudrillard is not entirely correct on this point; we may exert the appearance of a utopian society… but it may be so only by appearance.  We have beautiful neighborhoods, grand cities, open prairies, beautiful mountains… but this is not by any stretch a completely accurate picture.  Cities slip into slums, neighborhoods merge into industrial areas, and beautiful parks must have a nearby landfill.  And behind every white picket fence exist abuses, quarrels, depression,  all the problems inherent with all societies.  Is a society utopian in appearance alone truly a utopian society?   Does it matter?

The Pragmatism of the U.S. is also a very interesting concept; we do not attempt to invent a better mousetrap, we only insist that we build the best one.  We are not satisfied to merely imagine concepts but to realize those concepts in very practical forms.  

Our Constitution is, in many ways, a perfect example of this.  Never before in history (that I am aware) was a legitimate government created solely by the power of the people (i.e. “We the people…”).  Instead of worrying about the feasibility of such a government, the founding fathers simply assumed a priori that the people had power to establish their own government, and that the resulting sovereign would be legitimate by definition.  Instead of theorizing where rights come from, it was simply stated as fact that such rights exist… end of discussion (“We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all men are created equal”).  It would be as if the founding fathers said, “unicorns hereby exist”… and a unicorn materialized before their very eyes.  Very perceptive to say the least.

Having laid the groundword, so to speak, Baudrillard then turns to the attitudes of Europe and offers an interesting reprimand of sorts:

 We criticize Americans for not being able to either analyze or conceptualize.  But this is a wrong-headed critique.  It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized.  Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite:  it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them…  Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other.  They build the real out of ideas…

It’s funny how knowledge affects your perception of information;  it wasn’t even a day after I had read this passage that I was listening to Rush Limbaugh on the drive home and overheard him say, “I don’t search for the deeper meaning of reality… reality is enough for me”.  Like him or not, I think he represents the mindset of a very large portion of our society.  Upon reflection of his quote, it really hit me how grounded in reality we are as a society… how we look at everything in terms of it’s immediate consequences and practical ramifications.  We are not a country of day-dreamers… but a country of do-ers.  We all want to be involved with something… be that another person, an organization,  politics, career, a hobby–we all want the experience of reality; we want to participate in it as much as possible; whether or not this is a uniquely American characteristic or not is anyone’s guess; perhaps it is more a human trait then anything else.  

Well, I’m all blogged out…  more to come!  Any thoughts?

Being this is my first post in the `America` series, I must say I’m somewhat without a clear format to follow.  I must say, Baudrillard’s words speak for themselves… what little I may add is certainly secondary… so I suppose the best approach is to let Baudrillard speak first and then I’ll comment below.

At issue in this particular post is Baudrillard’s more general insight on America’s financial system… it’s capitalist system… its insistence on complete fluidity of capital, it’s dependence on credit, investment, and security.  I particularly like his “parishioner/priest” analogy.

It is true that ownership of money burns your fingers, like power.  We need people to take this risk for us and we should be eternally grateful to them.  This is why I hesitate to deposit money in a bank.  I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again.  

When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?  And the yet the atmosphere in a bank is that of the confessional (there is no more kafkaesque situation):  admit that you have money , confess that this is not normal.  And it is true:  having money is an awkward situation, from which the bank is only too happy to deliver you:  ’Your money interests us‘ == the bank holds you to ransom, its greed knows no bounds.  Its immodest gase reveals your private parts to you, and you are forced to hand your money over to appease it.  

One day I tried to close my account, taking all the money out in cash.  The teller would not let me go with such a sum on me:  it was obscene, dangerous, immoral.  Would I not at least take travelers’ cheques?  ’No, the whole lot in case’.  I was mad.  In America, you are stark raving mad if, instead of believing in money an its marvelous fluidity, you want to carry it round on you in banknotes.  Money is dirty;  that you must admit.

Its interesting that he parallels ownership of money with a sin we must be absolved of — rather successfully using the priest and confessional example.  What is more interesting is that this feeling is a universal one as near as I can tell.  I wouldn’t dare think of carrying over $100 cash on me at a given time–never mind the fact that I’ve never had my wallet stolen nor have any fears that it might soon be lost.  I have been conditioned to believe that the bank is the only reasonable place wherein my cash belongs – conditioned into believing that missing out on that 3% interest rate on a grand is the first mis-step in a life doomed to poverty.  After all, if I don’t put that next check right into the bank… I might (gasp!) SPEND it!  Save, Save, Save!  and by no means, don’t trust yourself with that responsibility!  The temptation will be too great to bear if you can feel those bills with your own two fingers; you MUST banish it from your presence… only by forgetting it exists can you be responsible with it.  (but such is the way I was raised).

In some ways it is truly a backwards culture we live in; only by forgetting and removing something from our top-of-mind awareness can we effectively ‘use’ it.

How much more bizarre is it then, that Americans live off credit cards… charging this and that… and frequently incurring debt greater then their cash savings (and paying 20%+ in interest).

What is even more interesting to me — and not directly addressed by Baudrillard — is the systematic devaluation of cash as a means of exchange.  As technology makes things more convenient, we are always turning to non-cash alternatives to procure goods and services (and pay them off for that matter).  If I had my way, I wouldn’t pay with cash at all;  the magical numbers residing on some bank server somewhere gratiously allowing me a modest balance seems more preferable to me –even in its abstractness — then a wadfull of cash ever would.

Is this some universal preference?  or am I just the one crazy person!

Although not a particularly recent book, “America” it is still a very insightful look into American culture and opinion as a general matter.  Baudrillard’s genius is the ability to ascertain causes–to determine why things exist in their current form.  Much of the book spends time exploring the reasons WHY the US is different then Europe –Culturally and Politically — often with a surprisingly positive conclusions.

Over the next month, I will be exploring a number of different topics addressed by Baudrillard–sparing you the time required to read the book in its entirety, but allowing you to think about the important issues he raises. 

If you are looking for stimulating reading without weeks of commitment, I highly suggest picking this book up at your local amazon.com retailer.