When Steyn starts to talk about his hypothesis of "Islamification" of the West, extreme muslim population growth and western population decline, it makes you wonder about the issue of population growth in general. Though yes, western populations seem to be in decline, the general world population has been growing throughout the years at an apparently exponential rate. Take a look at graphs of human population and you can see for yourself. Does this pose a problem for Americans? For the environment? For the entirety of the world? Steyn believes that it is not a major problem, and rather, the major problem is that the West is not creating enough babies. He writes, "The 'experts' of the Western world are slower to turn around than an ocean liner, and in Europe they were still yakking about the 'population explosion' even as their 1970s schoolhouses, built in anticipation of traditional Catholic birth rates, were emptying through the nineties and oughts" (13). He then cites a "blithely snobbish account...in Dehli" in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), a book about the exponential growth of the world population: "People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, people arguing and screaming. People thrust their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people" (Ehrlich). In response to this passage, Steyn retorts, "But in the twenty-first century, even Dehli's running out of people. Even Paul Ehrlich's hellhole of a choice doesn't have a high enough birth rate to maintain its population in the long term. Yet the complaceniks cling to the long-held Euro-Canadian policy of using the Third World as a farm team and denuding the developing societies of their best and brightest" (13). Steyn denies the existence of a "population bomb." "There is no 'population bomb,' Steyn says. "There never was. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called "population explosion" was really a massive population adjustment. The world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less 'Western'" (15).
This statement is a strong one, and for the most part, I agree with what Steyn says here. I think the reason that western countries' populations are in decline is because of people like Paul Ehrlich that publish scary books about population growth. Most western countries are developed enough to know that the world population is rapidly growing. World population growth is a fact. Heck, China has a one-child policy to prevent overpopulation. Thus, perhaps these more developed countries are dissuaded from having too many children, when they should be having as many as possible right now. On the other hand, people in third world countries have vastly different cultures, are not as educated and may not understand population dynamics, so they may be naturally inclined to have lots of children. Western population decline and Islamic population growth is a problem, but I will go more in depth about Islam in a future post. However, does the importance of Western population growth supersede the importance of controlling the world population? I say yes. At this rate, the world population is uncontrollable, so there's really no purpose in trying to not have children. Besides, we will eventually run out of space, which probably will naturally control the population. So why not encourage population growth? Western population is declining, but the population of Muslim extremists is growing by the day. There's power in numbers. It doesn't look good to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment