The blogosphere is all a twitter about this Mark Steyn article, It's the Demography, Stupid. This Lileks Screed is a good example:

I defy anyone to find anything in a modern newspaper as bracing or blunt – or as long, for that matter – as this much-discussed Mark Steyn piece on the decline of the West. . .

The telling line in Steyn's piece quotes that fine Gaul Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." I’ve read a lot of Revel; a great man and a profound, clear thinker. Lucky for him, he is old, and will not see his fears made manifest. Guilt is a problem, but it’s not the entire enchilada. It’s guilt married to a peculiar belief that Western Civilization is unique only in its sins. The only thing Western Civ really gave the world was slavery, imperialism, war, and capitalism; the fact that we have eliminated or diminished or abbreviated those sins is due not to anything inherent in Western Civ but some overarching, free-floating Enlightenment unmoored from the cultures that produced it. The world began in 1968, and owes nothing to what came before; if we wish to combat the regrettable enthusiasms of some other cultures whose animus appears religious, we should deconsecrate the cathedrals in order to set an example and light the way. Religion is the enemy to the transnational progressives, because religion holds up laws and codes and rules the wise burghers of Belgium cannot amend.

Steyn's launching pad is the decline of fetility rates in Europe below replacement level. His concern isn't just the socio-economic time-bomb this represents for welfare states though that's part of it, they won't be able to pay their bills because the population is growing older and sparser.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.

His real gripe is that we are consumed by what he calls the secondary issues of life while blithely ignoring the primary issues, the real threats.

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .

The image at the right is an artist's conception of a proposed mosque.

A MASSIVE mosque that will hold 40,000 worshippers is being proposed beside the Olympic complex in London to be opened in time for the 2012 Games.

The project’s backers hope the mosque and its surrounding buildings would hold a total of 70,000 people, only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium. Its futuristic design features wind turbines instead of the traditional minarets, while a translucent latticed roof would replace the domes seen on most mosques. The complex is designed to become the “Muslim quarter” for the Games, acting as a hub for Islamic competitors and spectators.

“It will be something never seen before in this country. It is a mosque for the future as part of the British landscape,” said Abdul Khalique, a senior member of Tablighi Jamaat, a worldwide Islamic missionary group that is proposing the mosque as its new UK headquarters.

Tablighi Jamaat has come under scrutiny from western security agencies since 9/11. Two years ago, according to The New York Times, a senior FBI anti-terrorism official claimed it was a recruiting ground for Al-Qaeda. British police investigated a report that Mohammad Sidique Khan, leader of the July 7 London bombers, had attended its present headquarters in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. In August, Bavaria expelled three members of the organisation on the grounds that it promoted Islamic extremism.

Defenders of Tablighi Jamaat say that it is not political and confines itself to humanitarian work. It was founded in India under the British Raj and has many members in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Steyn thinks that this is a primary issue.

What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common? . . .

Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

An earlier post, Prove It, ended with a drive-by reference to Arthur Herman's book, The Idea of Decline in Western History that seems entirely apposite at this point. Stewart Brand summarizes:

Big pessimism has a sordid lineage. When 19th century romanticism turned gloomy and escapist in response to the failure of the French Revolution, the rejection of the Enlightenment turned increasingly toward rejection of contemporary civilization and commerce. From then to now, elaborate, often racist, theories of history were conjured up to show how the decline of society was inevitable, being destroyed from within by Jews, or blacks (later whites), or crass bourgeois, or wimpy liberals, or businessmen, or technology, or whatever. Leading intellectuals of Europe and America adopted the pose and the notions--Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Henry Adams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and on to Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, Fanon, and many of my fellow environmentalists.

Perhaps Steyn would call this all little pessimism about secondary issues, the wanking of irrelevant intellectuals? It's an odd thought isn't it? All the blood, horror and insanity from the French revolution through communism and fascism was small beer compared to the replacement of European civilization by a very different culture. It isn't just cultural change, it's population change too. Europeans check out, Islam checks in. And it will be accomplished with comparatively little bloodshed - just a few terrorist incidents.

Whatever, big or little I think the pessimism fails to reason from good evidence. The European gene pool is larger than it has ever been when you consider that it's spread all over the world. The ideas and information, the memepool by rough analogy, is similarly wide spread. Even if European geography is home to Islamic culture nothing much is lost and something is gained. It's different but is it worse? It's too soon to tell. Besides, China and India are poised to become more dominant in the world too. Things will be very different even if European women start breeding like flies. And let's face it: Europe has some reason to self-destruct. The past 500 years haven't exactly been something to be proud of, and if they are filled with self-loathing and refuse to perpetuate their genes and culture it is understandable in a way. One could argue that they have a right to suicide.

But I think that too is unlikely. Isn't this just the next phase of little pessimism, garden variety western declinism that casts Moslems in the role held by Jews for so long? As Brand noted: "From then to now, elaborate, often racist, theories of history were conjured up to show how the decline of society was inevitable, being destroyed from within by Jews, or blacks (later whites), or crass bourgeois, or wimpy liberals, or businessmen, or technology, or whatever."

I don't care. People are people in my book. I see our task as being little more than sticking to the knitting - figuring out how to feed, clothe, educate and entertain a few billion folks without wrecking the planet. They all have weird cultures and values based on shared neuroses rather than reasoned from evidence. Could the Arabs be more violent and insane than the Europeans have been? It's possible, but unlikely I think, at least for many decades. By then it is possible, predicted by many, that we will have sufficiently advanced technologies that our current concerns no longer apply.