It's breeding obvious, mate

These excerpts from Mark Steyn's recent C. D. Kemp lecture to the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) grabbed my attention. The lecture was published in The Australian (18/8/06) as "It's breeding obvious, mate: Australia and the US can avoid the bleak future awaiting dying old Europe".^*

None of these pillars of what we used to regard as conventional society [businessmen, bank managers, kindergarten teachers, even Anglican clerics] is quite as sturdy as it was, and most of them have collapsed. Many mainstream Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political cliches. In this world, if Jesus were alive today he’'d most likely be a gay Anglican vicar in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally- friendly car with an “Arms Are For Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams...

The next quote is a change of tack, but worth repeating.

In those 17 Europeans countries which have fallen into “lowest-low fertility” [i.e. 1.3 births per woman, the point at which you’re so far down the death spiral you can’t pull out], where are the children?

In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod. Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912, – before teenagers or record collections had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of a softened state is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies at the video store, and millions of porn sites on the Internet, yet think it perfectly to demand that the state take care of their elderly parents and their young children while they’re working – to, in effect, surrender what most previous societies would have regarded as all the responsibilities of adulthood.

What do you think of Steyn's comments? Too harsh? Or on the money?

^* (1) Thanks to Cameron for sending this article to me. I can't find a web version of it, but would be happy to email you a copy. (2) When I was studying undergraduate economics, I spent a summer 'working' at the IPA in Perth, which isn't, I'm sure, a conflict of interest.