by Mark Steyn
The last local obstetrician left the island in 2006 and the health service isn’t expecting any more. Doubtless most of us can recall reading similar stories over the years from remote rural districts in America, Canada, or Australia. After all, why would a village of a few hundred people have a great medical system? But Oki has a population of 17,000, and there are still no obstetricians. Birthing is a dying business.
So what will happen? There are a couple of scenarios. Whatever Japanese feelings are on immigration, a country with great infrastructure won’t empty out for long, any more than a state-of-the-art factory that goes belly up stays empty for long. At some point, someone else will move in to Japan’s plant.
And the alternative? In P. D. James’s The Children of Men, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that’s no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country’s toymakers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn’t have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel—a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as a companion for the elderly. He says not just the usual things—“I wuv you”—but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask, if you had any: “Why do elephants have long noses?” Yumel joins his friend the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year-old child, which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social-democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.
And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever-smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever-greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what’s easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a license to become the Cloney Corporation? If you need to justify it to yourself, you’d grab the graphs and say, well, demographic decline is universal. It’s like industrialization a couple of centuries back; everyone will get to it eventually, but the first to do so will have huge advantages. The relevant comparison is not with England’s early nineteenth-century population surge but with England’s industrial revolution. In the industrial age, manpower was critical. In the new technological age, manpower will be optional—and indeed, if most of the available manpower’s Muslim, it’s actually a disadvantage. As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.
So perhaps the ever more elderly Japanese will go 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. We will 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.
Think I’m kidding? Compare the suspicion and demonization of genetically modified foods to what’s mostly either enthusiasm for or indifference to genetically modified people. Mess with our vegetables, we’ll burn down your factory. Mess with us, and we pass you our credit card. And by the time we wonder whether it was all such a smart idea it’ll be the clones who have the Platinum Visa cards.
If that creeps you out, there is a third option. Unlike the Europeans, many of whom will flee their continent as Eutopia evolves into Eurabia, the Japanese are not facing ethnic strife and civil war. They could simply start breeding again. But will they? Fifty-one percent of all Japanese women born in the early 1970s were still childless by their thirtieth birthday. Reporting the latest set of grim statistics, the Japan Times observed, almost en passant, “Japan joins Germany and Italy in the ranks of countries where a decline in population has already set in.”
Japan, Germany, and Italy, eh? If the Versailles Treaty was too hard on our enemies, the World War Two settlement was kinder but lethal.
RED SALES IN THE SUNSET?
Japan is the most benign example of demographic decline—a problem for the Japanese but not for the rest of us. Elsewhere around the world, America is threatened by rival powers not because of their strength but because of their weakness: for one thing, a flailing, fast-declining power is less bound by maxims of prudence. Russia, for example, is in an accelerating vortex and, for Washington and other interested parties, the question is what Moscow will try to grab on to in order to slow the descent.
From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, Russia will be down below 130 million by 2015, thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century, a third of what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union. It needn’t decline at a consistent rate, of course. But I’d say it’s more likely to be even lower than 50 million than it is to be over 100 million. In fact, the worst projections show Russia falling to around 85 million by mid-century. The longer a country goes without arresting the death spiral, the harder it is to pull out of it. Russia has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world—1.2 children per woman—and one of the highest abortion rates. When it comes to the future, most Russian women are voting with their fetus: 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated.
Allen C. Lynch of the University of Virginia recalls visiting the country when the American pro-life film The Silent Scream was shown on TV there. The film is very graphic and unsparing in its examination of the effects on the fetus, its object being to prompt in the viewer revulsion and disgust at the procedure. “It turned out that more Russian women,” wrote Professor Lynch, “became more positively attuned to the idea after having watched the film.” Instead of the baby’s pain, Russian viewers noticed the clean hospitals, the state-of-the-art technology, the briskly professional doctors and nurses. Women marveled: “Wouldn’t it be great to have an abortion in the West?” After seven decades of Communism, the physical barrenness is little more than a symptom of the spiritual barrenness.
The culture of death is having a ball at the other end too. If you’re a male born in Russia in 2000, you can expect to live 58.9 years. While its womenfolk have a life expectancy comparable to their American counterparts, sickly Russian men now have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis—not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages but because, if he had four legs and hung from a tree in a rain forest, the Russian male would be on the endangered species list. The decline in male longevity is unprecedented for a (relatively) advanced nation not at war, and with many attendant social and economic consequences. So far, in this first large-scale experiment on the dispensability of men, it appears that, pace Gloria Steinem, fish do indeed need bicycles.
Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. There are severe outbreaks of viral hepatitis; tuberculosis is the country’s leading fatal infectious disease, with a proliferating number of drug-resistant strains. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. In the first five years of the new century, more people tested positive in Russia than in the previous twenty in America. The virus is said to have infected at least 1 percent of the population, the figure the World Health Organization considers the tipping point for a sub-Saharan-sized epidemic. So at a time when Russian men already have a life expectancy that doesn’t make it beyond middle age, they’re about to see AIDS cut them down from the other end, felling young men and women of childbearing age, and with them any hope of societal r
egeneration. By some projections, AIDS will soon be killing between a quarter and three-quarters of a million Russians every year. Along with those extraordinary rates of drug-fueled Hepatitis C, heart disease, and TB, HIV is just one more symptom of what happens when an entire people lacks the will to rouse itself from self-destruction.
Russia will become a nation of babushkas, unable to deploy enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy, or enough young families to secure its future. And, if its export of ideology was the biggest destabilizing factor in the history of the last century, the implosion of Russia could be a major destabilizer of this one. Iran’s nuke program is merely one of the many geopolitical challenges to America in which there’s a large Russian component somewhere in the background.
There are districts that are exceptions to these baleful trends, parts of Russia that have healthy fertility rates and low HIV infection. Of the country’s eighty-nine federal regions, twelve are showing substantial population growth. Any ideas as to which regions they are? Once again, starts with an I, ends with a slam. The allegedly seething “Arab street” that the West’s media doom-mongers have been predicting since September 11 will rise up in fury against the Anglo-American infidels remains as seething as a Westchester County cul-de-sac on a Wednesday afternoon. But the Russian Federation’s Muslim street is real, and on the boil. And even its placid quartiers have no reason to prop up the diseased Russian bear.
So the world’s largest country is dying and the question is how violent its death throes will be. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has AIDS, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: a potentially African-level AIDS crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting atop the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. Of course, the nuclear materials are all in “secure” facilities. Probably.
Russia is the bleakest example of misdirected worrying: there are too many people and too few resources! Exactly backward: poor old Russia is awash in resources but fatally short of Russians—and, yet again, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource. What would you do if you were the fellows in the Kremlin? What assets have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player? You’ve got nuclear know-how—which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in. You’ve got an empty resource-rich eastern hinterland—which the Chinese are going to wind up with one way or the other. That was the logic behind the sale of Alaska: in the 1850s, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of Alexander II, argued that the Russian Empire couldn’t hold its North American territory and that one day either Britain or the United States would simply take it, so why not sell it to them first? The same argument applies today to the two thousand miles of the Russo-Chinese border. In the ever emptier Russian east there are sixteen million people and falling. In China, there are 1.5 billion and they need to stretch their legs. China is resource-poor; the Russian east contains 80 percent of that country’s resources. Given that even alcoholic Slavs with a life expectancy of fifty-six will live to see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei, Moscow might as well flog it to Beijing instead of having it snaffled out from under. Facing extinction, Moscow doesn’t have much to barter with—except dangling the Chinese an offer that could solve several of their structural problems.
In fact, Russia might offer a solution to the People’s Republic’s most distinctive structural flaw: the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun—“bare branches.” Since China introduced its “one child” policy in 1978, the imbalance between the sexes has increased to the point where in today’s generation there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. The pioneer generation of that male surplus is now in its twenties. Unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to those young men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are useful for manning the nuttier outposts of the jihad but not for much else. So, given Russia’s own imbalance—between sickly men of low life expectancy and long-lived robust women—it’s not hard to see some mutual advantage in a bilateral mass hook-up for Slav women and Chinese men, even if the boys are a bit callow and the chicks somewhat long in the tooth.
That’s not the death whimper of their Tsarist/Communist dreams most Russian nationalists would have predicted. But then they’ve never been shrewd assessors of their own defects. One reason why al Qaeda seriously thinks it can destroy the West is because it believes that in Afghanistan, it—and not the United States—brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union. It will be Russia’s fate to have large chunks of its turf annexed by the Islamic world, and much of what’s left fall to the Chinese.
That’s the danger for Washington—that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to U.S. interests. In its death throes, it could bequeath the world several new Muslim nations, a nuclear Middle East, and a stronger China. In theory, America could do a belated follow-up to the Alaska deal and put in a bid for Siberia. But Russia’s calculation is that sooner or later we’ll be back in a bipolar world and that, in almost any scenario, there’s more advantage in being part of the non-American pole. If a Sino-Russian strategic partnership has a certain logic to it, so, in a darker way, does a Sino-Russo-Euro-Muslim alliance of convenience. I get a surprising amount of mail from Americans who say, aw, we’re too big a bunch of politically correct blue-state pussies to kick Islamobutt but fortunately the Russkies and the ChiComs have their own Muslim wackjobs and they won’t be as squeamish as us wimps when it comes to sorting them out once and for all. Maybe. One day. But right now they figure the jihad is America’s problem and it’s in their interest to keep it that way. Hence, Russo-Chinese support for every troublemaker on the planet, from Iran’s loony president to Hugo Chavez in America’s backyard.
So a combination of factors is bringing about a remarkable event: the death of a great nation not through war or devastation but through its inability to rouse itself from its own suicidal tendencies. As Mrs. Thatcher likes to say, “The facts of life are conservative.” The nation that tried to buck those facts of life the most thoroughly is falling the fastest. Churchill didn’t know the half of it: Russia is a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss.
LES FEUILLES MORTES
Demographic origin need not be the final word. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Joseph Priestley suggesting a mutual English friend might like to apply his mind to the conundrum the Crown faced:
Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20000 a head…. During the same time, 60000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and the expense necessary to kill us all.
Obviously, Franklin was oversimplifying. Not every American colonist identified himself as a rebel. After the revolution, there were massive population displacements: if you’ve ever driven along the Loyalist Parkway east of Toronto to Kingston, you’ll know that large numbers of New Yorkers left the colony to resettle in what’s now Ontario. Some American Negroes were so anxious to remain subjects of King George III they resettled as far as Sierra Leone. For these people, their primary identity was not as American colonists but as British subjects. For others, their new identity as Americans had supplanted their formal allegiance to the Crown. The question for today’s Europe is whether the primary identity of their fastest-growing demographic is Muslim or Belgian, Muslim or Dutch, Muslim or French.
That’s where civilizational confidence comes in: if “Dutchness” or “Frenchness” seems a weak attenuated thing, then the stronger identity will prevail. One notes other similarities between revolutionary America and contemporary Europe: the United Empire Loyalists were older and wealthier; the rebels were younger and poorer. In the end, the former simply lacked the latter’s strength of will.
Europe, lik
e Japan, has catastrophic birth rates and a swollen pampered elderly class determined to live in defiance of economic reality. But the difference is that on the Continent the successor population is already in place and the only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be.
If America’s “allies” failed to grasp the significance of September 11, it’s because Europe’s home-grown terrorism problems had all taken place among notably static populations, such as Ulster and the Basque country. One could make generally safe extrapolations about the likelihood of holding Northern Ireland to what cynical strategists in Her Majesty’s Government used to call an “acceptable level of violence.” But in the same three decades as Ulster’s “Troubles,” the hitherto moderate Muslim populations of south Asia were radicalized by a politicized form of Islam; previously formally un-Islamic societies such as Nigeria became semi-Islamist; and large Muslim populations settled in parts of Europe that had little or no experience of mass immigration.
