Book Review: Mark Steyn's After America: Get Ready For Armageddon

I’m reading Mark Steyn’s latest book: After America, Get Ready for Armageddon. If you’re unfamiliar with Steyn, know that his talent is twofold (in my opinion). First he can make complicated topics much more understandable. And second, he has a wonderfully witty style that makes even reading about the end of Western Civilization enjoyable.

I heartily recommend this book, as well as his America Alone: The End of The World As We Know It

Here’s an excerpt where Styen elaborates on a quote from Tom Wolf’s essay The Me Decade:

[Wolf] “Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors' lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.”

[Steyn] "Europe climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: the state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for; it’s no longer a stream but a stagnant pool. How fair thou hast been – but only for the moment, and the moment is passing. Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis: What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-nationalist, post-modern Europe has no answer to this question, and so it has 30 year old students and 50 year old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up."