We're doomed
Monday, 14 March 2005
Mark Steyn
It's in the nature of things that a conservative columnist in Trudeaupia spends much of his time lowering his readers into the abyss of despair. And, to be honest, I get a little disheartened by the amount of correspondence I get beginning, "Great piece on the Martin Liberals! Right on the money!! Do you have any information on emigrating to the U.S.? Or maybe one of those eastern European countries with the 16 per cent flat tax?â ?
Which I suppose gets to the heart of the matter: is Canada doomed?
A lot of places are. Russia, for example. It's midway through its transition from "superpowerâ ? to ghost town. Russian men already have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis; not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages, but because being a Russian male is to belong to an endangered species. By 2025, the country's population will have fallen by a third. By mid-century, vast, empty Russia will have a smaller population than tiny Yemen. The decline in male longevity is unprecedented for a (relatively) advanced nation not at war. Russia has a serious AIDS problem, though not as bad as Africa's, and it's a measure of the nation's decline that for once nobody seriously thinks the HIV pandemic can be solved with free condom distribution. AIDS, along with extraordinary rates of drug-fuelled hepatitis C, heart disease and TB, is just one more symptom of what happens when an entire people lacks the will to rouse itself from self-destruction.
Immediately after his retirement, you may recall, Pierre Trudeau took his sons to Siberia, because that was "where the future is being built.â ? Any future being built in the outlying parts of Russia belongs to Muslims and Chinese in need of lebensraum, and drug cartels and terrorist networks eager to take advantage of remote areas in a state lacking sufficient reliable manpower to police its borders. Despite M. Trudeau's enthusiasm, Canada is not Russia. But the fate of the post-Communist motherland is an instructive example of what a dead end radical secular statism is: after seven decades of the government making every big decision for them, Russia's menfolk seem incapable of functioning as adults.
Canada, unfortunately, has embarked on a much suppler, more slippery form of radical secularism: you don't ban religion, you just subject it to the ever-sterner strictures of "toleranceâ ?; you don't forbid private enterprise, you just create a business climate where almost all successful ventures wind up dependent on state patronage and run by good friends of the ruling party; you don't turn the people into wards of the state overnight, you just use an incremental accumulation of ostensibly benign measures, from government health care to government day care, to redefine the relationship between the "citizenâ ? and his rulers. The soft totalitarianism of the Trudeaupian state is a much harder target to take aim at than the obvious wasteland of Andropov-era Soviet Communism.
The lesson of Russia's death spiral is a simple one: as Mrs. Thatcher likes to say, "The facts of life are conservative.â ? The nation that tried to buck them the most thoroughly is falling the fastest. We won't learn that lesson because, M. Trudeau's effusions notwithstanding, we don't see ourselves as sharing any of Russia's characteristics.
So what about Europe? Canadians are, at least psychologically, an honorary member of the EU: we take the "progressiveâ ? Euro-view on Kyoto, cradle-to-grave welfare, abortion, a bloated "public sectorâ ? workforce, confiscatory taxation, joke prison sentences, and just about everything else. But, as I've noted here before, the design flaw in the Euro-Canadian secular welfare state is that it needs a traditional religious-society birthrate to sustain it. In the EU, the fertility rate is now 1.46 children per childbearing woman--well below "replacement rate,â ? and well below what an aging population entitled to lavish state benefits needs. Thus, to avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. I think that's rather a cautious estimate, myself. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on The National every night. I think it will be much harder for the Canadian Liberal party's parochial multiculturalists to argue that the collapse of Holland or the disintegration of Germany has no lessons for us.
And even if they did, south of the border the lessons will be learned. For a good three decades, the Democratic party has been running on fumes, except in the Clinton era, when it was running on semen. But, either way, the tank's on empty and, with the exception of Senator Rodham, most of the folks in the car--Ted Kennedy, Robert C. Byrd--look like a shuffleboard outing rather than the cutting edge of political dynamism. For the foreseeable future, America will get more conservative, there will be fewer blue states, and outside the coastal cities and a few college towns, an intellectually barren Democratic party faces remorseless decline--unless, as Mrs. Clinton is currently doing (or at least pretending to do), it moves right. So Trudeaupia will be even less like its neighbour and principal trading partner, but a lot more like the Europe whose Conflagration of the Day Lloyd Robertson will be benignly presiding over every evening.
The question, then, is: at what point does the penny drop? Last year, the British historian Niall Ferguson argued that the Anglo-American "special relationshipâ ? was over. "The typical British family,â ? he wrote, "looks much more like the typical German family than the typical American family. We eat Italian food. We watch Spanish soccer. We drive German cars. We work Belgian hours. And we buy second homes in France. Above all, we bow before central government as only true Europeans can.â ?
But so what? Canadians eat American food, watch American sports, drive American cars, work American hours (more or less), and buy second homes in Florida. But we still bow down before central government as only true Europeans can. A shared taste in Dunkin' Donuts or Celine Dion CDs is no proof of geopolitical compatibility. In the things that matter, Canadians are more foreign to Americans than we've ever been.
Indeed, the Liberal party has deployed all the Boston Crème Timbits as a useful cover, a kind of pop-culture neutron bomb: walk down a Canadian Main Street and the landscape of our lives looks very American--Wal-Mart, Burger King, Spider-Man at the multiplex. But scratch the surface and everything is as different than America as it's ever been. The Grits made the same calculation Ibn Saud did when he met with Colonel Eddy, the first U.S. emissary to Saudi Arabia: the Americans would prioritize the economic relationship, and "leave our faith aloneâ ?--in Ibn Saud's case, Wahhabism; in ours,Trudeaupian statism.
Yet, just as the cost-benefit analysis has changed vis-à-vis the Saudis, so it will with Canada. The U.S. has quietly decided it cannot save Europe from itself. But I doubt they'll demonstrate the same equanimity about their northern neighbour.
The illusion of permanence is the curse of post-Christian civilization. Religious societies have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great majorityâ ? in "the unseen world.â ? But if secularism's starting point is that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it's ever had. The idea that progressive Euro welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it's suicidally so.
The collapse of half the western world is a tragedy--in the true, Greek sense--but every cloud has a silver lining, and, given that Europe's rendezvous with destiny is a few years ahead of ours, their fate gives us the opportunity to avoid winding up sharing it: their self-immolation may yet be our salvation. The wobbling blancmange that is Paul Martin may not be up to the task, but the resistance of a big chunk of Liberal voters to gay marriage suggests the party's grassroots may start to sober up long before the leadership. The facts of life remain conservative, and the liberal fantasy erected in their place is, as we're about to see in Spain and Belgium and Sweden, a death cult.
On the other hand, if the news from Europe over the next decade doesn't serve as a wake-up call for Canada, we deserve to sleepwalk to the same grim end.
you's!
