Mark Steyn is really an interesting character.  Whether its discussing rather obscure points of british cultural humor on national radio or just zinging one-liners at liberals… he is one of the most enjoyable personalities in media today.  He’s the kind of guy who finds the irony in everything… which tends to make his humor a bit dry… but that’s the way I like my humor these days… extra dry.

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.