by Mark Steyn
And so the Japanese helped us end our days with our very own French maid and English butler, the real thing being all but extinct by then. Even the early models felt human when you touched them—or, anyway, as human as your average pair of silicone implants feel, and, in Beverly Hills and beyond, the rich soon got used to those.
Even as millions upon millions of poor brutalized Africans attempted to reach the West, a new conventional wisdom developed that the advanced world was running short of emigrants to be our immigrants. Given their citizens’ withered birthrates and disinclination to work and their worsening of the already calamitous demographic distortion by using “GRIN” (genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology) to extend their lives into the nineties and beyond, the state likewise found such technology too seductive to resist. The lazier elected officials soon fell back on the platitude that we need roboclones to do “the jobs that humans won’t do”—or can’t do. Just as abortion, contraception, and low birthrates were advanced by the demand for women to enter the workforce in massive numbers, so genetic evolution would be advanced by the demand not just for men, women, immigrants, but anything to enter the workforce and save the progressive social-democratic state from total collapse. For Japanese and European governments, it was asking too much to expect them to wean their mollycoddled populations off the good life and re-teach them the lost biological impulse. Easier to give some local entrepreneur the license to create a new subordinate worker class.
For years the futurologists had anticipated the age of post-humanity—or super-humanity: the marriage of man to his smartest machines in what Ray Kurzweil had called “the Singularity,” a kind of computerized Rapture, in which believers would be digitized and live not forever but as long as they wished, as algorithms in a new form.61 If you combined the increasing antihumanism of western environmentalism with western welfarism’s urge to hold the moment, to live in an eternal present, as Europe and parts of America seemed to want, the Singularity would seem to be the perfect answer. Instead of dying out because we had no children, we would live our children’s and grandchildren’s and great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lives
You’re probably wondering what these first supermen do? Nothing super, I regret to say. A consistent theme of western twilight, from the grade-school poster of clapping hands circled around the words “We applaud ourselves!” to the woman in Starbucks Blackberrying and Facebooking and Twittering to herself, was of humanity turned inward, “revolving on themselves without repose,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. The prototype Singulars, pioneering a form of immortality that extends the moment forever, are similarly self-preoccupied, Tweeting into Tweeternity—while physical labor falls to the Welfare Robots, doing the jobs Post-Humans are too busy self-uploading to do.
And so the last generation of ever more elderly westerners goes on—and on and on, like the joke about the gnarled old rustic and the axe he’s had for seventy years: he’s replaced the blade seven times and the handle four times, but it’s still the same old trusty axe. They have achieved man’s victory over death, not in the sense our ancestors meant it—the assurance of eternal life in the unseen world—but in the here and now. Which is what it’s all about, isn’t it? An eternal present tense.
You would be surprised by how fast demographic destiny, economic reality, and technological escape-hatches intersect. Compare the turn-of-the-century’s suspicion and denigration of genetically modified foods with what was either enthusiasm for or indifference to genetically modified people. Mess with our vegetables and we would burn down your factory. Mess with us, and we passed you our credit card. And by the time we wondered whether it was all such a smart idea it was the robots that had the Platinum Visa cards.
THE SOMALIFICATION OF THE WORLD
The world after America is more dangerous, more violent, more genocidal. The fulfillment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions was more than simply the
What changed? At first, it seemed that nothing had. When a year or two went by without Israel getting nuked, people concluded that there had been no reason to worry in the first place. Washington’s “realists” said it demonstrated that “containment” (the fallback policy) worked. If the destruction of the Zionist Entity and, indeed, the West as a whole were Iran’s goals, they were theoretical—or, at any rate, not urgent. Pre-nuclear Iran had authorized successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, and blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, and acted extraterritorially to the full extent of its abilities for a third of a century, suggesting at the very minimum that it might be prudent to assume that when its abilities go nuclear Iran would be acting to an even fuller extent. But to acknowledge that simple truth would have asked too much of the “great powers,” preoccupied as they were with health care reform, and gays in the military, and universal nuclear disarmament.
Everything changed, instantly. But we pretended not to notice. At a stroke, Iran had transformed much of the map—and not just in the Middle East, where the Sunni dictatorships faced a choice between an unsought nuclear arms race or a future as Iranian client states. The “realists” argued that Iran was a “rational” actor and so, because blowing Tel Aviv off the map was totally “irrational,” it obviously couldn’t be part of the game plan. Whether or not Iran was being “contained” from killing the Jews, there was no strategy for “containing” Iran’s use of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for “containing” the mullahs’ generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology. It should have been obvious that, even before obliterating Israel, Teheran intended to derive some benefit from its nuclear status. Entirely rational leverage would include: controlling the supply of Gulf oil, setting the price, and determining the customers; getting vulnerable emirates such as Kuwait and Qatar to close
Saudi Arabia began its own nuclear acquisition program, and continued with it even after it became clear that, on balance, Shia Persian nuclearization worked, like so much else, to Wahhabi Arab advantage. It clarified the good cop/bad cop relationship. The Saudi annexation of the West was now backed by Iranian nuclear muscle.
For the most part, China stands aloof from these disputes. It has no pretensions to succeed America as the global order maker, and, while preferring likeminded authoritarian regimes, is happy to do business with whomsoever finds themselves in power in Africa, South America, or anywhere else. For their part, China’s trading partners have no desire to provoke Beijing, not with all those surplus young men it’s so eager to dispatch abroad. In a world in which American battleships no longer ply the Pacific, Australia understands that it lives on a Chinese lake. How silly was the assumption that “globalization” meant “westernization” or even “Americanization”—for little reason other than that, when a Danish businessman conversed with his Indonesian supplier, he did so in English. There have always been lingua francas—Latin, French—and their moments came and went. In 1958, just under 10 percent of the world’s people spoke English and 15.6 percent spoke Mandarin.62 By 1992, Mandarin was 15.2 percent, and English was down to 7.6. Today, business computers from Canada to New Zealand have keyboards in Roman and Chinese characters.
Even as it de-anglicizes, so the world after America is reprimitivizing, fast. In the early years of the century, in many columns filed from the VIP New York Times, had an analogy to which he was especially partial. From December 2008:Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.63
And it wasn’t just space-age Hong Kong! From May 2008:In JFK’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons.64
And it wasn’t just stone-age JFK! From 2007:Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying fro
m the Jetsons to the Flintstones.65
I gather that “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” were two popular TV cartoon series of the mid-twentieth century. If you still have difficulty grasping Mr. Friedman’s point, here he is in 2010, bemoaning the “faded, cramped domestic terminal” in Los Angeles, yet another example of America’s, er, terminal decline:Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones.66
More fool them. Scholars of twentieth century popular culture say you’d have made a ton more money if you’d invested in “The Flintstones,” which was a classic, instead of “The Jetsons,” which was a stale knock-off with the New York Times’ cartoon thinker, from January 2002, when Americans were, for once, the Jetsons:For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones—and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.67
But they didn’t, did they? To reprise the old Taliban saying: “Americans have all the watches, but we’ve got all the time.” The American Jetsons had all the high-tech gizmos, but the Afghan Flintstones had the string and fertilizer. The United States had accounted for almost half the world’s military expenditures. But somehow it didn’t feel like that. In Afghanistan, a few illiterate goatherds with IEDs had tied down the hyperpower for over twice as long as it took America to win victory in the Second World War. To be sure, counterinsurgency campaigns are difficult. But D-Day difficult? Liberatinga-continent difficult? Liberating a continent from a serious enemy with well-trained troops and state-of-the-art technology?
If the jihadists’ problem was an inability to forget the Crusades, perhaps the West suffered from an inability to remember. After Muslim provocations against Christians, Pope Urban II spoke to the Council of Clermont in 1095 and called for what we now know as the First Crusade. Within four years, an army had been raised, got to the Middle East (on foot for most of the journey), liberated the Holy Land, and established a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem that lasted for two centuries. Four years, eight years, twelve years after George W. Bush spoke in the rubble of Ground Zero, Ground Zero was still rubble, and all the smart thinkers insisted that it was a waste of time to discuss whatever it was America was doing in Afghanistan in terms of outmoded concepts such as “victory.” Nobody had any desire to be in Kabul for another two centuries, or even another two years.
Well, the First Crusade was too long ago, and so was D-Day, and the wars were different now: America had more ships and more planes than anybody else on the planet. So, entirely reasonably, nobody wanted to get into a dogfight or a naval battle with them. Instead, the geopolitical Gulliver was up against legions of Liliputians—fiercely motivated youths generated by an ideology with all but unlimited manpower. It had been that way since Somalia in the early Nineties. The Americans made a film on the subject (Black Hawk Down) and then never gave it another thought. And so, two decades on, the world’s most luxuriously funded military showed no sign of having adapted to the world it was living in. Its enemies had: an IED was an “improvised” explosive device. Why couldn’t America improvise? In the early stages of its wars, IEDs were detonated by cell phones and even garagedoor openers. So the Pentagon jammed them. The enemy downgraded to more primitive detonators: you can’t jam string. In 2010 it was reported that the Taliban had developed metal-free IEDs, which made them all but undetectable: instead of two hacksaw blades and artillery shells, they began using graphite blades and ammonium nitrate.68 If you had tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you were too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you had string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you could tie him down for a decade. America had fallen for the Friedman thesis: in Afghanistan, the Taliban had invested in “The Flintstones,” while the West had invested in “The Jetsons,” and we were the ones desperate to negotiate our way out.
So, in the fall of 2001, the Jetsons toppled the Flintstones. And the Flintstones bided their time, and quickly figured out that the Jetsons didn’t have the stomach to do what it takes, and their space-age occupation of Bedrock would rapidly dwindle down into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation for which the citizenry back on the home front in Orbit City would have no appetite. Jetson-wise, the West was all jets and no sons. The sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn pointed out that 1,000 German men had 480 sons, while 1,000 Afghan men had 4,000 sons.69 To lose your only son in a distant war is devastating. For your third, fourth, and fifth sons, what else is there for them to do?
The Pentagon was post-human before post-human was cool. Having pioneered unmanned drones to zap the natives from the skies, it developed more sophisticated models—drones that flew in the exosphere, and were even more invisible to the goatherds far below. When you’re dependent on technology in an age of globalized computerization, it’s hard to make everything “secure,” and certainly not as secure as a group of inbred jihadists sitting around a camp fire. The unceasing Chinese cyber-probing grew more and more probing, and daring. Drones would suddenly drop from the skies for no apparent reason. Nobody minded: if it was a casualty of war, it was not one to be memorialized or exploited for political gain. Eventually the cost of replacing them became prohibitive. The land of the unmanned drone gradually abandoned the drone, while remaining unmanned.
Recall H. G. Wells’ Time-Traveler. When he makes his first foray into the Morlocks’ subterranean lair, he is impressed to find that, unlike the effete Eloi, they are not vegetarian. On the other hand, he is not clear exactly what large animal it is that they’re roasting on the spit.
And then the penny drops.
“Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—far less than any monkey,” he reflects. “His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men—!”
He calms himself and tries to look at it in a scientific spirit. “After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago.”
I gather that, for TV comics and newspaper cartoonists of your time—the mid-twentieth century—there were few more reliable laughs than putting a white man wearing a pith helmet in a big pot surrounded by dancing natives. Yet, oddly enough, there was virtually no empirical basis for such a persistent stereotype. “The rest of the world had always believed that there was cannibalism in Africa,” wrote Charles Onyango-Obbo in The East African in 2003, “but there wasn’t much hard evidence for it.”70
Yet by the early days of the twenty-first century, when the PC enforcers would clobber you for even the mildest evocation of the old cooking-pot gag, cannibalism was flourishing. Mr Onyango-Obbo had been reporting that the Congolese Liberation Movement was slaughtering huge numbers of people and feeding the body parts to their relatives. In North Kivu, a group called les Effaceurs (the Erasers) had wanted to open up the province’s mineral resources to commercial exploitation and to that end had engaged in ethnic cleansing by cannibalism. The Congo Civil War raged for most of the first decade of this century uncovered by CNN and the New York Times for want of any way to blame it on George W. Bush. Among the estimated six million dead, many were eaten. The two parties to the conflict agreed on very little except that pygmies make an excellent entrée. Both sides hunted them down as if they were the drive-thru fast-food of big game. While regarding them as sub-human, they believed that if you roasted their flesh and ate it you would gain magical powers. In return, the pygmies asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity, for all the good that did.71
After all, a society that will resume cannibalism is unlikely to observe any UN resolutions. As Mr. Onyango-Obbo saw it, the resurgence of the two-legged menu option was a function of Africa’s reprimitivization. “Cannibalism,” he wrote, “happens commonly where there is little science, and people don’t see themselves as creatures of a much higher order than other animals around them. When you have gone to the moon, you consider yourself and other humans to be very different from the chimp at the zoo.”
But in
the twilight of the West, Americans no longer went to the moon, and environmental activists loudly proclaimed that man was no different from the chimps (who by the way shouldn’t be in the zoo).
The state of nature made huge advances in the early years of the century. Why did we never wonder what might happen when such forces went nuclear? Ah, well. The transnational jet set had other filet o’ fish to fry. They had convinced themselves that economic and technological factors shape the world all but exclusively, and that the sexy buzz words—“globalization,”
Another thinker, Thomas P. M. Barnett, the widely admired author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century and Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating, liked to divide the world into a functioning “Core” and a “Non-Integrating Gap.”72 He favored using a “SysAdmin” force—a “pistol-packin’ Peace Corps”—to transform the “Gap” countries and bring them within the “Core.” Like many chaps who swan about dispensing high-end advice to international A-listers, he viewed the world’s problems as something to be sorted out by more effective elites—better armed forces, international agencies, that sort of thing. The common herd was noticeable by its absence from his pages. If he had given them any thought, he might have realized that his vision of a “SysAdmin” force—European allies that would go into countries after American hard power has liberated them—was simply deluded. Whatever the defects of the Continent’s elites, the real problem was not the lack of leaders but the lack of followers.
It soon became clear that Professor Barnett was holding his thesis upside down. Rather than Europe’s leadership class helping move countries from the Non-Integrating Gap to the Core, it would have its work cut out preventing large parts of the Core doing a Bosnia and moving to the Non-Integrating Gap. For all the economic growth since World War II, much of
