After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (45 page)

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and progressive opinion and the press were entirely indifferent. Why were Miss Almaleki and Mrs. Hassan not as famous as Matthew Shepard? They weren’t living in up-country villages in the Pakistani tribal lands. They were Americans—and they died because they wanted to live as American women.

But, in an “Islamophobic” West, the new ground rules were quickly established: Islam trumped feminism, trumped homosexuality, trumped everything. In speeches around the globe, the 44th President of the United States affected a cool equidistance between his national interests and those of others. He was less “the leader of the Free World” than the Bystander-in-Chief, and thus the perfect emblem of a western world content to be spectators in their own fate.

The world after America is more violent. In 2011,
Der Spiegel
reported: Young Muslim women are often forced to lead double lives in Europe. They have sex in public restrooms and stuff mobile phones in their bras to hide their secret existences from strict families. They are often forbidden from visiting gynecologists or receiving sex ed. In the worst cases, they undergo hymen reconstruction surgery, have late-term abortions or even commit suicide.53

This is “living”?
Der Spiegel
’s vignette suggests less a “double life” than a double non-life—westernized slut by day, body-bagged chattel by night.

“Forgetfulness occurs,” Lee Harris wrote, “when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.”54 They would soon be reacquainted.
Der Spiegel
was fretting over the internal contradictions of sexual hedonism in a multicultural age: Can you have thousands of young men in northern England in loveless marriages to women they never previously knew from their families’ home villages back in Mirpur after 307

living alongside underdressed Brit slatterns staggering around in mini-skirts and fishnets?

Not without consequences, not for a while. As a culture of unbounded sexual license for women surrendered to one of greater constraints, the sex ed and restroom copulation and hymen reconstruction faded from the scene in Berlin and Amsterdam and Yorkshire. But a world full of male frustrations will always find a market for sex slavery. As the western cities where once they’d procured their blonde “escorts” became Islamized and as erotically enticing as Riyadh, Saudi princes proved a rich market for

“European companions,” voluntary or conscripted.55 In China, there would be millions of young men for whom (as a consequence of the government’s

“one-child” policy) there were no women, and to whom even the sad, dead-eyed trollops of northern England looked good. We were returning to an age where crops are stolen and children enslaved.

As a headline in the impeccably non-far-right
Spiegel
wondered: “How Much Allah Can the Old Continent Bear?”56

In the interests of managing this transformation, Europe and Australia and Canada had enthusiastically constrained ancient liberties. At first, it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance professed to be pro-gay, pro-feminist, pro-whatever’s-your-bag secularists; the other half were homophobic, misogynist, anti-any-groove-you-dig theocrats. Even as the tatty bus’n’truck roadshow version of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, it made no sense. But in fact what they had in common overrode their superficially more obvious incompat-ibilities: both the secular Big Government progressives and political Islam recoiled from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own space, assume his responsibilities, and exploit his potential. But there was a central difference: Islam meant it, and its sense of purpose would be of an entirely different order from the PC statists. And so, as some segments of American and western life sputtered and failed, others would strengthen, growing ever more fiercely self-segregating, demanding 308

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at least acquiescence from those they regard as inferior—and using PC

institutions to advance their goals.

As Islam well understood, for an enfeebled West, incremental preemptive concession was the easiest option. To do anything else would have been asking too much. Appearing before Congress in 2010, the Attorney General of the United States denied repeatedly that the Times Square Bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and other wannabe jihadists were motivated by “radical Islam.”57 Listening to America’s chief law enforcement officer, one was tempted to modify Trotsky: You may not be interested in Islam, but Islam is interested in you. The Saudis, having already bought up everything they needed to buy in Christendom, had created a climate that would strangle free speech, even in America. And that was only the beginning. Just as the left had embarked on its long march through the institutions, so too had Islam. Its Gramscian subversion of transnational bodies, international finance, human rights institutions, and the academy would soon advance to such pillars of the American idea as the First Amendment.

Liberty and pluralism do not fall in an instant, in America any more than in Nigeria. Nor does sharia triumph overnight. But Islam’s good cop was cannier than its bad: Millenarian Iran wanted to nuke us. Wahhabist Saudi Arabia wanted to own us. Stealth jihad and creeping sharia were to prove more effective.

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What was left of the “developed” world thought it could live as a Greater Switzerland, albeit without the federalism and the gun ownership: like the Swiss, the West was prosperous but neutral, even about itself. Like Geneva, it was attracted to transnational institutions. As the Swiss had lived off banking and chocolates, so the West thought it could live off high finance and delicacies. Switzerland was a place where once one went to prolong life—in expensive sanatoria—but by the twenty-first century had after 309

diversified into a one-stop shop for state-of-the-art assisted suicide, both for the terminally ill and for any next of kin in robust physical health who nevertheless were sufficiently depressed to wish to join their loved ones in the express check out.

As Africa and the Muslim world got younger, the West got older. Once America fell apart and it became clear that there was no longer a U.S. cavalry to ride to the rescue, many around the world slumped into fatalism. In the new Europe, death was a living, and euthanasia clinics (the “dignified departure” lounges) boomed. For those less despondent, the trickle of Muslim

“reversions” became a flood, as the middle class did what was necessary to get by. One day the office in which you work installs a Muslim prayer room, and a few of your colleagues head off at the designated times, while the rest of you get on with what passes for work in the EU. A couple of years go by, and it’s now a few more folks scooting off to the prayer room. Then it’s a majority.

And the ones who don’t are beginning to feel a bit awkward about being left behind. What do you do? The future showed up a lot sooner than you thought.

If you were a fundamentalist Christian like those wackjob Yanks, signing on to Islam might cause you some discomfort. But, if you’re the average post-Christian Eurosecularist, what does it matter? Who wants to be the last guy sitting in the office sharpening his pencil during morning prayers?

The rowdier remnants of the old working class clutched at new political straws, variously neo-nationalist, quasi-fascist, and downright thuggish.

The death-cult left plowed on, insisting that the world was overpopulating and the best thing you could do to save “the planet” was tie your tubes and abort your babies—or kill yourself. Nobody believes the planet-saving bit anymore, but they still abort their babies, out of a more general malaise.

Even if you’re not suicidal, hospitals are prone to sudden power failures, tragic but economically beneficial: if you thought seniors were expensive at the turn of the century, wait until they’re demanding replacement organs grown by nanotechnology.

Untroubled by immigrants, unburdened by grandchildren, dying alone and unloved, the aging Japanese were the first to take a flyer on the 310

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post-human future. By the dawn of the new century, they were living longer than ever. The only glitch was that, as the Japanese got older, their young got fewer: the land of the setting sun was already in net population decline, and octogenarians aren’t the demographic you turn to to maintain your roads, police the subways, work the supermarket checkout—or look after you in the old folks’ home.58

A few years earlier, Japan Logic Machine had developed the Yurina—not the most appealing name, especially for a robot that spreads your legs and changes your diaper.59 But it was a huge success with the elderly and bedrid-den. It could turn down your bed, run your tub, and then lift you up and carry you over to it for an assisted bath. It wasn’t like the old robots of early sci-fi, with cold metallic claws pinching your aged, withered flesh. The Yurina’s hands were soft, softer than the calloused digits of the harassed human nurse one saw less and less of.

Saitama University developed an advanced model—a robot that could anticipate your wishes by reading your face.60 It could tell you were looking at it, and knew enough about you to understand whether a particular facial expression meant you’d like a cup of tea or a tuna sashimi. Professor Yoshinori Kobayashi said this new “humanoid” (his term) was not just for senior centers, but for Tokyo restaurants, too. After all, an aging society has plenty of seniors who like to eat out on wedding anniversaries, but a smaller and smaller pool of potential waitresses. Professor Kobayashi’s prototype dressed like a French maid with white pinafore, cap and gloves, and black dress. A full wig of hair framed her wide-eyed Manga features. There are worse ways to end your days than as the surviving human element in an anime/live-action feature.

The Japanese called these humanoids “welfare robots.” And I suppose, if you look at it like that, it was a more cost-effective welfare operation than the ugly bruisers of America’s public sector unions with their unaffordable benefits and pensions. But it was a melancholy comment on the
fin de
civilisation
West that even this most futuristic innovation was driven by the fact that there were too many members of the dependent class and not enough people for them to depend on.

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And so the Japanese helped us end our days with our very own French maid and English butler, the real thing being all but extinct by then. Even the early models felt human when you touched them—or, anyway, as human as your average pair of silicone implants feel, and, in Beverly Hills and beyond, the rich soon got used to those.

Even as millions upon millions of poor brutalized Africans attempted to reach the West, a new conventional wisdom developed that the advanced world was running short of emigrants to be our immigrants. Given
their citizens’ withered birthrates and disinclination to work and their worsening of the already calamitous demographic distortion by using “GRIN” (genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology) to extend their lives into the nineties and beyond, the state likewise found such technology too seductive to resist. The lazier elected officials soon fell back on the platitude that we need roboclones to do “the jobs that humans won’t do”—or can’t do. Just as abortion, contraception, and low birthrates were advanced by the demand for women to enter the workforce in massive numbers, so genetic evolution would be advanced by the demand not just for men, women, immigrants, but
anything
to enter the workforce and save the progressive social-democratic state from total collapse. For Japanese and European governments, it was asking too much to expect them to wean their mollycoddled populations off the good life and re-teach them the lost biological impulse. Easier to give some local entrepreneur the license to create a new subordinate worker class.

For years the futurologists had anticipated the age of post-humanity—

or super-humanity: the marriage of man to his smartest machines in what Ray Kurzweil had called “the Singularity,” a kind of computerized Rapture, in which believers would be digitized and live not forever but as long as they wished, as algorithms in a new form.61 If you combined the increasing anti-humanism of western environmentalism with western welfarism’s urge to hold the moment, to live in an eternal present, as Europe and parts of America seemed to want, the Singularity would seem to be the perfect answer.

Instead of dying out because we had no children, we would live our children’s and grandchildren’s and great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lives 312

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for them. Kurzweil himself planned on living 700 years: his would be both the last generation of humanity, and the first of super-humanity.

You’re probably wondering what these first supermen do? Nothing super, I regret to say. A consistent theme of western twilight, from the grade-school poster of clapping hands circled around the words “We applaud ourselves!”

to the woman in Starbucks Blackberrying and Facebooking and Twittering to herself, was of humanity turned inward, “revolving on themselves without repose,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. The prototype Singulars, pioneering a form of immortality that extends the moment forever, are similarly self-preoccupied, Tweeting into Tweeternity—while physical labor falls to the Welfare Robots, doing the jobs Post-Humans are too busy self-uploading to do.

And so the last generation of ever more elderly westerners goes on—and on and on, like the joke about the gnarled old rustic and the axe he’s had for seventy years: he’s replaced the blade seven times and the handle four times, but it’s still the same old trusty axe. They have achieved man’s victory over death, not in the sense our ancestors meant it—the assurance of eternal life in the unseen world—but in the here and now. Which is what it’s all about, isn’t it? An eternal present tense.