“All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
One of the features of the “culture wars” is the back-and-forth about whether our country, and our civilization (the one called “Western”) is in decline: economic, military, moral and cultural.
Heinlein once said, “If you can’t put numbers on it, it’s not science, it’s opinion.”
I have some reservations about this, but another time. Here’s some numbers courtesy of Mark Steyn who’s famous for supporting his contentions with hard stats.
It’s from a review of James Cameron’s “Titanic” of all things. I wrote an unpublished review of the movie some time back, condemning it for slandering the reputation of the courageous dead. Contrary to Cameron’s dreck, all accounts say the wealthy passengers met their fate as any man who is a man would wish to.
“Mr Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise: Over three-quarters of the women – and only 20 per cent of the men (survived.) On a luxury liner sailing between two technologically advanced societies, the chaps had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats and sail off without them. The social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure.
“Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our “gender-neutral society”, there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, or round about the time Cameron began working on his film, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under 15 or over 65 made it. Only five per cent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three per cent of men aged 20-24 lived.”
Any questions?
“Where there are no men, be thou a man.” – Rabbi Hillel
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