In 2004, Debrah Cornthwaite gave birth to twin boys at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton. That’s in Alberta. Mrs. Cornthwaite had begun the big day by going to her local maternity ward at Langley Memorial Hospital. That’s in British Columbia. They told her, yes, your contractions are coming every four minutes, but sorry, we don’t have any beds. And, after they’d checked with the bed-availability helpline “BC Bedline,” they brought her the further good news that there was not a hospital anywhere in the province in which she could deliver her babies. There followed seven hours of red tape and paperwork. Then, late in the evening, she was driven to the airport and put on a chartered twin-prop to Edmonton. In the course of the flight, the contractions increased to every two and a half minutes—and most Lamaze classes don’t teach timing your breathing to turbulence over the Rockies. How many Americans would want to do that on delivery day? You pack your bag and head to your local hospital in Oakland, and they say: Not to worry, we’ve got a bed for you in Denver.
Euro-Canadian socialized health care is, in essence, subsidized by American taxpayers: since the end of World War Two, Washington has assumed the defense costs of its allies, thereby freeing up those countries to spend their tax revenues on lavish social programs. But, if America follows the Hutton plan and “joins the world,” it will reduce its defense expenditures to Euro-Canadian levels. So the next time a tsunami hits Sri Lanka or Indonesia there will be no carrier groups to divert and save lives. So more people will die, waiting the weeks and weeks it took the sleepytime gals at the United Nations to arrive. Were America to “join the world,” it would have to reduce its funding of the UN and other world bodies to European levels. And it might have to scale back its domestic agencies so that they’re no longer able to serve in effect as international ones. Which will be tough when some kid in some village on the other side of the world comes down with some weird illness no one’s seen before and they want to FedEx the test tube to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta to figure out what’s going on. Indeed, even relatively advanced societies admired by the likes of Will Hutton take it as routine that the CDC is a kind of Health Ministry of last resort. When SARS leapt from China to infect Toronto’s hospitals in 2003, the principal contribution of the WHO (World Health Organization) was to issue a travel advisory warning visitors to steer clear of Ontario, leaving it to the CDC to provide advanced and practical analysis of the problem. Toronto’s mayor, Mel Lastman, had a hard time keeping track of all the acronyms, and in one press conference launched into a bitter attack on the damaging effects of the travel advisory issued by the CDC.
The doctor next to him tried to correct him: “Who,” she said.
“The CDC,” he repeated.
“Who,” she said.
“The CDC,” he repeated, wondering why she hadn’t heard his answer to the question the first time. This diseased version of the Abbott and Costello routine went on a while longer, before the doc realized she had to spell it out: W-H-O, the World Health Organization.
“Oh, yeah. Them, too,” said Hizzoner.
Yet under the who’s-on-first shtick lay an important truth: if an infection shows up in an Atlanta hospital, no American doctor looks for guidance from a Canadian government agency. But if it shows up in a Toronto hospital, the Ontario health system takes it for granted that the best minds of the CDC in Atlanta will be staying late at the office trying to work out what’s going on.
The answer to that Canadian doctor’s vaudeville feed—“Who’s on first?”—is America. When something goes awry, in a Sri Lankan beach resort or a Toronto hospital, it’s the hyperpower who shows up. America doesn’t need to “join the world”: it already provides a lot of the world’s infrastructure. What Hutton means is that he wants the United States to stop being an exception and make like Europe. What would that mean? Well, it would mean more government, less religion, and a collapsed birth rate.
One should be cautious seeking correlations between social structures and fertility rates. They’re falling around the world and no expert knows how to reverse them. Is it lack of religion? Whoa, steady: in Europe, the highest levels of church attendance are in those Mediterranean countries with the most wholly kaput birth rates, while Scandinavian nations with all but undetectable levels of religious observance have some of the healthiest—or, at any rate, least unhealthy—fertility rates on the Continent: 1.64 births per couple in Sweden versus 1.15 in Spain.
Likewise, of the fiercely Islamist nations causing the world so much woe, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have birth rates of 5.08 and 4.53, while Iran’s has plummeted since its long war with Iraq to 2.33.
What about economic liberty? Taking the fourteen core pre-expansion EU economies, four of the five healthiest fertility rates belong to four of the five countries that also score highest for economic freedom: Ireland, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. The fifth highest fertility rate(1.89) belongs to France, which has one of the lowest rankings on economic liberty. But France is also the country with the highest Islamic population, and the evidence suggests a third of all births there are already Muslim. If one were to adjust accordingly, you could make a case for close correlation in Europe between economic freedom and fertility rates. The three lowest birth rates belong to the countries at the bottom of the economic-liberty indicators: Greece, Italy, Spain.
On the other hand, in the rest of the world, territories with high economic liberty—Hong Kong, Singapore—are nose-diving into the demographic asphalt. So how about the marriage rate?
2002 marriage rate per 1,000 population 15–64
2005 total fertility rate
United States
11.7
2.11
Denmark
10.4
1.77
Netherlands
7.7
1.72
UK
7.3
1.6
France
7.2
1.89
Germany
7.1
1.35
Italy
6.9
1.23
That’s close enough to suggest that, when your tax and social policies encourage non-traditional family models, one consequence is fewer children. Yet again, though, that doesn’t apply to Japan, which still has a higher marriage rate than most European countries.
Or maybe it’s speaking English. In the core “Western world,” compare the Anglo-Celtic-settled Anglophone democracies with the rest of the G-8:
United States
2.11
New Zealand
2.01
Ireland
1.9
Australia
1.7
United Kingdom
1.6
Canada
1.48
France
1.89
EU average
1.38
Germany
1.35
Japan
1.32
Italy
1.23
Russia
1.14
Or maybe it’s already the Muslim populations that are keeping European maternity wards going. Insofar as one can penetrate the multiculti obfuscation on the issue, the five Continental nations (excepting war-ravaged Bosnia) with the highest proportion of Muslim citizens are also the five Continental nations with the highest fertility rates—Albania, Macedonia, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
But at one level this is overthinking it. Everyone writes about the differences within “the West” these days—specifically the differences between America and everybody else. In 2004, Niall Ferguson, a Brit history prof at Harvard, pronounced the Anglo-American “special relationship” doomed. “The typical British family,” he wrote, “looks much more like the typical German family than the typical American family. We eat Italian food. We watch Spanish soccer. We drive German cars. We work Belgian hours. And we buy second homes in France. Above all, we bow before central government as only true Europeans can.”
/> He has a point, though cultural similarities are not always determinative: Canadians eat American food, watch American sports, drive American cars, work American hours (more or less), and buy second homes in Florida. But they still bow down before central government as only true Europeans can.
What’s more relevant surely are not the differences but the result of those differences: America’s population growth is secure and Europe’s is in precipitous decline. The United States and Canada make a useful study in this respect: neighboring nations that speak the same language (mostly), have an integrated economy and a shared taste in everything from Dunkin’ Donuts to the Celine Dion Christmas album. But: America’s marriage rate per 1,000 is 11.7; Canada’s is 6.8.
Her Majesty’s chilly Dominion is the land where the straights live in common-law partnerships and the gays get married. And the upshot is: America’s fertility rate is 2.11; Canada’s is 1.48.
And where does that lead? Canucks are aging faster than the Yanks. In 2000, oldsters formed 16.3 percent of America’s population and 17 percent of Canada’s—close enough. In 2040, they’ll form 26 percent of America’s population and 33.3 percent of Canada’s.
And there’ll be a lot fewer young Canadians to stick with the bill for increased geriatric care. Take the “aged dependency ratio”—the number of elderly people receiving state benefits relative to the working-age adults slogging away each day to pay for them. In 2000, America, Australia, and Canada all had 0.26 seniors for every working stiff. In 2040, America will have 0.47 seniors for every worker, Australia 0.56, Canada 0.63.
Across the developed world, we’re at the beginning of the end of the social-democratic state. The surest way to be in the demographic death spiral is to be a former Communist country in Europe: the five lowest birth rates in the world are Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Russia, and Ukraine. But the next surest way is just to be in Europe: nineteen of the lowest twenty birth rates in the world are on the Continent (the twentieth is Japan). Conversely, the only advanced nation with a sizeable population reproducing at replacement rate is the United States. True, there are significant variations from red state to blue state, immigrant to native-born, and in other areas: Mormons in Utah have one of the highest fertility rates on the planet, while the city of San Francisco could easily be mistaken for an EU capital, though in fairness to the good burghers of that town they had to embrace homosexuality to achieve levels of childlessness the Continentals have managed to achieve through ostensibly conventional sexual expression.
But the fact remains: Europe is dying and America isn’t. Europe’s system doesn’t work and America’s does, just about.
So here’s a radical thought for Will Hutton and the Europeans: instead of calling for America to “join the world,” why not try calling on Europe to rejoin the real world? Otherwise, you’ll be joining what we used to call “the unseen world.”
Or here’s an even more radical thought: why doesn’t “the world” try joining America?
That sound you hear is Will Hutton, Jacques Chirac, and the Belgian cabinet rolling on the floor howling with laughter.
Part II
Arabian Night
BELIEVERS, CONVERTS, SUBJECTS
Chapter Four
Flying the Coop
BIG MO VS. BIG MAC
People in Najd at that time lived in a condition that could not be approved by any believer. Polytheism had spread widely; people worshiped domes, trees, rocks, caves, or any persons who claimed to be Awliya (saints). Magic and soothsaying also had spread. When the Shaikh saw that polytheism was dominating the people and that no one showed any disapproval of it or no one was ready to call people back to Allah, he decided to labor singly and patiently in the field. He knew that nothing could be achieved without Jihad, patience and suffering.
SHAIKH ABDUL AZIZ IBN ABDULLAH IBN BAZ, IMAAM MUHAMMAD IBN ABDUL WAHHAB—HIS LIFE AND MISSION (1996)
In 2005, I had lunch with someone who’d just bought a photograph of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural. “There they all are,” he said. “Look.” And he pointed to a vaguely familiar figure in the crowd just a few feet from the president: John Wilkes Booth. And then his finger zipped over the photo, picking out the other conspirators standing around Lincoln and already well advanced in what was then a plot merely to kidnap him. March 4, 1865, a rainy Saturday in Washington, and the chief of state is giving his speech unaware that he’s in the last six weeks of his life and that he’s surrounded by the group of men who will end it.
Proximity is all. If they can’t get to you, they can’t get you. Most of us locate our fears on the far horizon—like the old maps where the known world dribbles away and the cartographer scrawls “Here be dragons.” Sometimes, as Lincoln learned, the problem’s right there standing next to you.
A couple of weeks after seeing that photograph, I was passing through London and discovered that Britain was in the grip of bird flu fever: any minute now there would be toxic cockatoos over the white cliffs of Dover, and the East End would be reeling under a blitzkrieg of sneezing parakeets. Those less easily panicked argued it was nutty and way out of proportion, One Flu Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stuff—business as usual from a government that spent the years after September 11 warning of chemical attacks on the Underground and Saddam nuking the British bases on Cyprus. Avian flu? Just the usual Tony Blairy phony-scary rigmarole.
But then again, the Tube did eventually get bombed: just because the government says something will happen doesn’t mean it won’t. In rural China pigs are valued possessions and sleep in the living room. That’s why hundreds of members of a Catholic charismatic group from New York state had to go into isolation for a hitherto unknown respiratory disease in April 2003. A doctor from SARS-riddled Guangdong province went to a wedding at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong, where he managed to infect sixteen other guests with rooms on the same floor, including Kwan Sui Chu, an elderly lady staying there for one night. She flew home to Toronto and died, her death being attributed to a “chest infection.” Her son Tse Chi Kwai went to Scarborough Grace Hospital and, as is traditional in Canada, was left on a gurney in Emergency for twelve hours exposed to hundreds of people. Lying next to him was Joe Pollack, who was being treated for an irregular heartbeat and whose wife wandered around the wards and came across an eighty-two-year-old man from a Catholic charismatic group. Mr. Pollack, Mrs. Pollack, the octogenarian charismatic, and his wife all died, and their sons infected at least thirty other members of their religious group plus a Filipina nurse, who flew back to Manila and before her death introduced SARS to a whole new country.
The fellow with the irregular heartbeat, the Catholic charismatics, the Filipina nurse: none of these people went anywhere near rural China. They didn’t have to. They were like Lincoln in that photograph: they didn’t know the infected doctor from Guangdong was, metaphorically, standing next to them.
In a globalized economy, the anti-glob mob and the eco-warriors want us to worry about rapacious First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. But globalization cuts both ways, and the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the metropolis just because someone got on a plane. The African mosquito who hitched a ride on a U.S.-bound flight and all by himself introduced West Nile virus to North America is merely the high-altitude heir to those flea-bitten rats on the Italian ships home-bound from the Orient who brought the Black Death to Europe in the 1340s. That too was a globalization quid pro quo: the Continent’s success in opening up trade with the East also opened it up to disease from the East.
That’s the lesson of September 11: the dragons are no longer on the edge of the map. When you look at it that way, the biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Microsoft but Islamism: the Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Ata and Groz
ny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency. In 2006, Danes reeling from the Muslim world’s cartoon-provoked commercial boycott could only dream of boycotting Islam’s products half so effectively.
As a bleary Dean Martin liked to say, in mock bewilderment, at the start of his stage act: “How did all these people get in my room?” How did all these jihadists get rooms in Miami and Portland and Montreal? How did we come to breed suicide bombers not just in Gaza but in Yorkshire? In the globalized pre–September 11 world, we in the West thought in terms of nations—the Americans, the French, the Chinese—and, insofar as we considered transnational groups, were obsessed mostly with race—whites, blacks, Hispanics. Religion wasn’t really on the radar. So an insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. You don’t need “deep cover” as a “fifth columnist”: you can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won’t even notice it. And when we do—as we did on September 11—we still won’t do anything about it, because, well, it’s a religion, and modern man is disinclined to go after any faith except perhaps his own.