MORAL INFANTILISM, CULTURAL SUICIDE: The problem with a generous, all-embracing government is that it makes moral infants of citizens. Key moral decisions are taken away from the individual: how to raise one's children, how hard one wishes to work, how to take care of aging Mom and Dad. That is the situation in Europe today. The result, Mark Steyn observes in the latest issue of New Criterion, is a popular obsession with "secondary impulses" among the Europeans: condemning American injustice, finding ever more unlikely minorities and victim groups to sympathize with, demanding expanded coverage from government health programs, and such. Meanwhile, the primary questions that free men and women must grapple with are shrugged off to the bureaucrats: family life, national defense, crime and punishment.
The problem with rational secularism is that, rationally, its practitioners are given nothing to live for beyond immediate comforts and pleasure. The result is a community totally focused on the moment. The result of that is a disintegration of the family: sex and companionship are fine, but there's no point to marriage, and children are an irrational trouble and expense when compared to, say, a poodle. Moral infants will see no need for real infants. This is what Steyn calls "cultural suicide": in truth, a moral disorder that defines the good life in terms that make it possible for only a single generation to enjoy.
It's probably not an accident that all-embracing government and rational secularism are found together in much of what used to be called "the West." Large governments must be erected to baby-sit people with infantile moral ambitions. Populations that love to posture about "sustainable economics" are mired in unsustainable demographics.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths - or, at any rate, virtues - and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam. [. . .]
What will London - or Paris, or Amsterdam - be like in the mid-Thirties? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable thirty-five-hour weeks, retirement at sixty, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
When a moral scheme - a shared approach to the good life - fails, it will be replaced by another. In Europe, rational secularism will be challenged, and possibly replaced, by Islam. Their very focus on the immediate makes Europeans blind to this development; but if they wish to grasp the consequences of the coming "transvaluation of Western values," they need only read the following report, conveyed by the Egyptian blogger, Sandmonkey.
A man on December 25 allegedly killed his four daughters by slitting their throats while they slept in their home in eastern Pakistan, after the eldest married a man of her choice, police said.
"The man came to a police station to court arrest after killing his four daughters on Saturday," senior police officer Mukhtar Iqbal Tikka said.
Nazeer Ahmed, who worked as a laborer near Burewala, some 110 kilometers (68 miles) east of Multan, had resented his eldest daughter's love marriage and killed the three others, fearing they might follow her, Tikka said.
Ahmed apparently told police his eldest daughter Muqadas Bibi, 25, had married a man of her choice against his wishes and her act had tarnished the family's honour so he plotted to kill her and his other daughters.
While she was asleep with her sisters Bano Bibi, 12, Sumera Bibi, 8, and Humera, 6, he allegedly cut their throats with a sharp knife, Tikka said.
Nothing more needs to be said.
1:18:38 PM 
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