August 31, 2006
The journalist, Mark Steyn--- the current pin up boy of Australian conservatives---is a bit of a puzzle isn't he. This is what he says about why the West is in decline at the CIS Big Ideas Forum, which dealt with the challenges confronting the West:
...we’re losing the consensus within our populations on what it means to be a citizen of a pluralist society. Multiculturalism, I believe, was conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own and in that sense it’s the real suicide bomb. Islam and terrorism would not be a threat to the Western world if the Western world weren’t so enervated that it gives the impression that it’s basically just dying to keel over and to surrender to somebody.
The puzzle is this. Steyn's key thesis in the lecture at the IPA was demography is destiny. How do we connect the two---a lefty liberal culture that loathes the West and demography as destiny? If the cause of the rot and decay is the agenda of contemporary liberalism, then how does demographics fit in? A self-loathing progressive liberal culture causes the decline in birth rates in the West?
Secondly, Steyn says he is a conservative as opposed to a liberal. So what has happened to the traditional conservative perspective on the destructive consequences of capitalism; a mode of production that is melts all that is solid into air and so undermines the conservative values of stability, order and authority? Conveniently forgotten?
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I am intrigued that the "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" (the decline [twilight] of the West) meme had an earlier circulation. Oswald Spengler's thesis followed the First World War, which Owen Harries described as a European civil war. Perhaps, despite everything, there has been progress?
Secondly, if the the West was never a monolith, then it may be equally true that Islam is not either, it is just that many of us do not understand that religious topography.
Could it be that Capitalism is the cause of the rate of population, and might that not be a good thing from a global perspective?