![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4lifeThis post contains some dubious peripheral arguments, but its central thesis is much less dubious. In fact, it's a tautology obvious to any student of population ecology: the population within a species that grows fastest will come to dominate that species. In humanity's case, Muslims are at or near the top of that list, while more secular affluent populations in Western countries are near the bottom. In short, demography rather than terrorism will bring about the global dominance of Islam, unless we Westerners do something about it.
This thesis should be of interest to liberal environmentalists for three reasons. First, convincing people to have smaller families is an uphill battle because the populations we haven't convinced yet are constantly getting larger. Secondly, a minor corollary of the thesis is that religious conservatives in America, who tend to have relatively large families, will continue to outvote secular liberals by increasingly wide margins. Third, while we may disparage conservatives for taking overly drastic measures against terrorism (perhaps partly because we're defensive about our ideological association with "ecoterrorists"), these population trends are a much larger global issue, one that forces us to think about our position on Islam and its various sects.
Mr. Steyn doesn't really propose "solutions" directly, but four obvious ones come to mind:
This thesis should be of interest to liberal environmentalists for three reasons. First, convincing people to have smaller families is an uphill battle because the populations we haven't convinced yet are constantly getting larger. Secondly, a minor corollary of the thesis is that religious conservatives in America, who tend to have relatively large families, will continue to outvote secular liberals by increasingly wide margins. Third, while we may disparage conservatives for taking overly drastic measures against terrorism (perhaps partly because we're defensive about our ideological association with "ecoterrorists"), these population trends are a much larger global issue, one that forces us to think about our position on Islam and its various sects.
Mr. Steyn doesn't really propose "solutions" directly, but four obvious ones come to mind:
- Assume that it's not a problem, because as Muslims gradually take over the European population (for instance), they will have to increasingly adopt European values (as opposed to, for instance, suddenly deciding to lob England's and France's nukes at America, which to his credit Mr. Steyn doesn't predict).
- Start having a lot more babies, which, in addition to being hard for middle-class people to pay for, will exacerbate the overpopulation problem that conservatives like Mr. Steyn can currently afford to ignore.
- Get Muslims to stop having so many babies, which would require either lots of economic improvement in poor Islamic nations (the so-called demographic transition) or lots of wars.
- If we don't like 2 or 3 but are still worried about the spread of the more constricting aspects of Muslim law, try to gradually convince Islamic religious leaders to change those laws.
