Mark Steyn: Oh God, am I just being neurotic?

Mark Steyn dissects and then disposes of two authors whose view of the future is remarkable for its stupidity.

There's a similar omission in James Martin's new book The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future. Perhaps Mr. Martin got "blueprint" from Barnett's title -- it's one of those buzzwords appealing to the happy futurologist -- although an alternative edition bears the subtitle "An Urgent Plan for Ensuring Our Future." In fact, Martin has produced neither a vital blueprint nor an urgent plan nor an urgent blueprint, vital plan, planned blueprint or blue vitals (a side effect of global cooling?). Rather, his book is a flibbertygibberty gambol through global warming, poverty, nanotechnology, terrorism, hydroponics, transhumanism and anything else that tickles his fancy for a paragraph or two. The author is a distinguished computer scientist and he's big on the big picture: "Every year, because of our misuse of the earth's resources, we lose 100 million acres of farmland and 24 billion tons of topsoil, and we create 15 million acres of new desert around the world . . . One-third of the world's forest areas has disappeared since 1950."

The obvious question here is: who's this "we" you keep banging on about? My small town is more forested than it was either a century or two centuries ago. So clearly the "we" in my part of the world does things differently than the "we" in Sudan or Rwanda or the Brazilian rainforest. But the possibility that political, cultural or civilizational factors might be determinative is one to which Mr. Martin is fiercely resistant. The idea that the human species -- rather than Belgians or Saudis or Fijians -- is responsible for this or that environmental crisis is deeply appealing to the eco-doom-mongers because it casts the problem as a moral failure.

When Martin moves on from these technical problems (which is how we would look at them if we wanted to solve them rather than use them as opportunities for societal self-flagellation), the alleged great thinker retreats into happy-face banality. His section on Islam is the most godawful pileup of Pollyanna generalities punctuated by absurdly overinflated anecdotal evidence, like the fact that the emir of Qatar has opened up a branch of Cornell medical school in his "Education City." "There are aspects of civilization that are common," Martin writes breezily. "Common ethics, the international legal system, networks for commerce . . . " Whoa, hold it there. Has he ever tried doing business in Nigeria or Syria? Not to worry, says Martin. "A growing number of people will think of themselves as citizens of the planet rather than citizens of the West, or Islam, or Chinese civilization." He provides no evidence for this assertion, and I would wager that it is, as they say in Britain, bollocks on stilts: the idea that an identity rooted in nothing more than the planet as a kind of universal zip code will ever be sufficient is laughable. The opposite is more likely to prove true: the more types like Martin promote the nullity of post-nationalist identity -- what he calls "multicultural tolerance and respect" -- the more people will look elsewhere, to pan-Islamism and much else.

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