Steyn on demography and the end of the West

I read Mark Steyn’s sobering piece in The New Criterion a few days back and thankfully, it has been released to a larger audience via the Wall Street Journal. It really took me aback when I first read it, and it’s something that will likely stick with me for a while. Read the whole thing, I’ll wait.

(I found the WSJ version more readable. By the way, Steyn is not for the faint of heart.)

A variety of bloggers are looking at different parts, and Steyn makes his case far better than I can recite. I will focus on Steyn’s points that liberals are really taking themselves out of the argument here. In a nutshell, the key battlegrounds on the left (global warming, CIA leaks, even abortion) are ephemera compared to the observable realities of the near future.

Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.

...

If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"

He calls these issues “secondary impulses” -- things that comfortable people concern themselves with when their primary needs are assured. It is essentially an argument around Maslow’s hierarchy.

I have often wondered why, with much of the world unable to transcend the first two levels of Maslow’s pyramid, so many well-meaning people expend such disproportionate amounts of energy on things that really don’t matter. Organic foods. Scooter Libby.

Frivolity is a danger of rich and comfortable societies, and I am certainly guilty of it. But I remain hungry to improve my standing on that pyramid, as everyone should. There are much hungrier people waiting in the wings.

Frankly, I do not think the future is as gloomy or dramatic as Steyn imagines. Forces such as India and China are much more fundamental and are a great bulwark against what he describes. (Islamists seem to know this too.)

The U.S., and the globalizing free-trade world, are the best hope for climbing that pyramid and peacefully integrating diverse cultures. Steyn asks if and how western culture will continue to raise people up, and therefore save itself.

Update: The Solid Surfer takes a closer look.