After America

If the tsunami doesn’t get you, the relief operation usually does the trick.

In 2010, an earthquake hit Haiti, and the UN dispatched peacekeepers, including cholera-infected Bangladeshi troops. So Haiti had a cholera epidemic introduced to the island by the transnational body supposedly rescuing it from the previous catastrophe. That was the test run for a world of hemisphere-hopping disasters. The Russians are pressuring the Chinese to develop a form of airborne quarantine: unmanned drones would spray the infected megalopolis from the skies, the way early morning aerial maintenance crews used to zap your DisneyWorld with bug spray from the heavens each dawn.

The world after America is a poorer place. The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of “a new world middle class,” as Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin called them in his study The World Distribution of Income. This class was made up of some 2.5 billion citizens of the developing world whose standards of living were rapidly approaching those of the West.¹ By the beginning of the twenty-first century, as Virginia Postrel reported in the New York Times, “the largest number of people earned about $8,000—a standard of living equivalent to Portugal’s.”² Not everybody was part of this success story: In your time—the 1950s—Egypt and South Korea had had more or less identical per capita incomes. By the first decade of the new century, Egypt’s was less than a sixth of South Korea’s.³

Which of these models would prevail in the years ahead? Access to western markets had given South Korea a western lifestyle, complete with western-sized families: soon, like many of the so-called “Asian tigers,” they had one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. They were tigers without cubs. Whereas Egypt, like most of the Muslim world, was in a demographic boom and its poverty helped export its surplus population, either in the express lane (a gentleman called Mohammed Atta flying through the office window on a Tuesday morning) or through less dramatic but relentless mass immigration. (I believe they have a new “community center” named after Mr. Atta in Tower Hamlets, East London.) The collapsed birth rates of Europe and the Asian tigers left an insufficient domestic market for economic growth. They were ever more dependent on access to the U.S. market, even as the American consumer became too broke to go to the mall. As for the rest of the planet, sub-Saharan Africa doubled its population between 2010 and 2030. Unlike enviro-feminists in London fretting about “overpopulation,” the Africans were in no hurry to tie their tubes, and the West’s ecochondriacs declined to hector them. Why, sub-Saharan babies “consumed” fewer resources. Which was true. They still do, man for man. Excepting South Africa, the Dark Continent’s per capita income averaged $355 in 2004, but had fallen below $275 by 2030.⁴ Good for the planet? Well, it depends how you think about it. A few years earlier, a Unicef report had found that more than one billion children in the developing world were suffering from the most basic “deprivations”—lack of food, lack of education, lack of rights.⁵ Yet by 2020 each of them—or at any rate the half who were girls—had had an average of three children each.

Who in turn lacked food and education and much else, and had a much higher incidence of genetic disorders. It would have been asking an awful lot for them to remain in the teeming, pathogenic shanty megalopolises into which the Third World’s population was consolidating—rather than simply to sail over to Spain or Italy or the Cote d’Azur.

But never mind African-Asian or Cairo-Seoul comparisons, and consider the available models within Korea itself: in the south, a prosperous, educated, advanced nation; to the north, a dark, starving, one-man psycho-state tyranny that exported nothing but knock-off Viagra and No Dong.

The former is an erectile dysfunction treatment, the latter sounds like one but is in fact a long-range missile the Norks made available to interested parties such as Iran. Seoul was always vulnerable: it could be flattened by Pyongyang within minutes. Why ever would the Norks do that? Well, why in 2010 did they loose a couple hundred artillery shells at South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, killing four civilians and injuring many more?⁶ Who knows? No analyst was able to articulate a rationale. Because a rationalist needs a rationale, but a psycho- state doesn’t.

This peripheral peninsula was a snapshot of the world to come: South Korea had one of the highest GDPs per capita on the planet, yet was all but defenseless without American military protection.⁷ North Korea had a GDP per capita that was all but unmeasurable, down in Sub-Basement Level Five with Burundi and the Congo—and yet it was, after a fashion, a nuclear power. In the years ahead, these contradictions would resolve themselves in entirely predictable ways.

IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY

The future belongs to those who show up for it. Yet in the multicultural West the question of human capital was entirely absent from most futurological speculation. “A growing number of people,” wrote James Martin in The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future (2006), “will think of themselves as citizens of the planet rather than citizens of the West, or Islam, or Chinese civilization.”⁸

Mr. Martin provided no evidence for his assertion, and it should have been obvious even then that it was (to use a British archaism I rather miss) bollocks on stilts: the notion that an identity rooted in nothing more than the planet as a universal zip code would ever be sufficient should have been laughable. Yet nobody laughed, and certainly none of the experts so much as giggled even as the opposite proved true. The more myopic westerners promoted the vacuous banality of post-nationalist identity—what Mr Martin called “multicultural tolerance and respect”—the more people looked elsewhere and sought alternatives. Islam and “Chinese civilization” (to return to the author’s specific examples) both did a roaring trade, while “citizens of the planet” degenerated to a useful designation for the millions of unfortunates in collapsed cities and regions who fell between the cracks of the hardening ideological blocs. “Stateless persons,” we would once have said.

It is only human to wish to belong to something larger than oneself, and thereby give one’s life meaning. For most of history, this need was satisfied by tribe and then nation, and religion. But by the late twentieth century the Church was in steep decline in Europe, and the nation-state was abhorred as the font of racism, imperialism, and all the other ills. So some (not all) third-generation Britons of Pakistani descent went in search of identity and found the new globalized Islam. And some (not all) 30th-generation Britons of old Anglo-Saxon stock also looked elsewhere, and found “global warming.” What was it they used to say back then? “Think globally, act locally”? It worked better for jihad than for environmentalism.

Adherents of both causes claimed to be saving the planet from the same enemy—decadent capitalist infidels living empty consumerist lives. Both faiths insisted their tenets were beyond discussion. As disciples of the now obscure prophet Gore liked to sneer, only another climate scientist could question the climate-science “consensus”: busboys and waitresses and accountants and software designers and astronomers and physicists and mere meteorologists who weren’t officially designated climatologists were unqualified to enter the debate. Correspondingly, on Islam, for an unbe-liever to express a view was “Islamophobic.”

As to which of these competing global identities was more risible, the 44th President of the United States promised to lower the oceans, while Hizb ut-Tahrir promised a global caliphate; The Guardian’s ecopalyptic correspondent Fred Pearce declared that within a few years Australia would be uninhabitable,⁹ while Islam4UK declared that within a few years Britain would be under sharia.¹⁰ I was never a betting man, even when it remained legal in Europe, but, if I had been forced to choose one of these scenarios, and had found an obliging bookie, I could have made a tidy sum…

So here we are with the oceans more or less exactly where they were, and Australia still habitable, and everything else utterly transformed. How pathetic it seems to have to state the obvious—that pseudo-identities cannot stand up to genuine identities. The “international community” proved to be fake, and hardheaded Russian and Chinese nationalism all too real.

The collective “European” consciousness promoted by the European Union shimmered and dissolved like a desert mirage, unlike the collective Islamic consciousness of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. When push came to shove, when bailout came to bankruptcy, there was no “Europe” beyond the official fictions of the Eurocrat elite. But, notwithstanding Sunni loathing for Shia, and Turk for Arab, and Arab for Persian, and Persian for Pakistani, Pakistani for black, Wahhabi for “moderate,” and fervent jihadist for non-observant semi-apostate, most