August 28, 2006

Mark Steyn: It's breeding obvious, mate
Australia and the US can avoid the bleak future awaiting dying old Europe
18aug06

I’M honored to be asked to give the C D Kemp lecture before members of the Institute he founded and which lives on after him. I’ve been in Australia for a couple of weeks on what I like to think of as my “Head for the hills! It’s the end of the world!” tour. But don’t worry, it’s like Barbra Streisand’s farewell tour, I’ll be back to do another end-of-the-world tour in a year or two.

Whether or not the western world is ending, it’s certainly changed. It’s a very strange feeling from the perspective of four decades on to return to a famous book C D Kemp wrote in 1964, Big Businessmen, a portrait of a now all but extinct generation of Australian industrialists. They were men whose sense of themselves in relation to the society they lived in was immensely secure. They had an instinctive belief in the culture that raised them and enriched them. To have pointed out such a fact at the time would have seemed superfluous: it was still shared by many forces in society – bank managers, kindergarten teachers, even Anglican clerics.

(Editor's Note: This is a very long article, but has many very important things to say about our current society and the direction it is headed.