Given recent events, it is perhaps timely and proper to complain about the passivity and the lack of manliness that exist today in the world’s prosperous democracies and the MSM. Mark Steyn did so in a piece entitled A Culture of Passivity:

I…found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage…saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Point two: The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage)…

I have always believed America is different.

Mark Steyn makes some good points. However, the question is: so what are you going to do about it? What policies or programs do you want to put into place to change things around, and is there a glimmer of hope that any such proposals could win majority support today?

Here’s an exercise: try to name a prosperous democracy anywhere in the world that broadly possesses and inculcates the virtues of manliness and self-sufficiency that Steyn seeks. It’s a pretty short list, isn’t it (can you think of even one)? Now try to make a list of countries that teach war and subjugation of their ideological foes, and school their children to fight and to prefer death to dishonor. That’s rather a longer list, isn’t it? Note that the countries on your second list are generally poor and repressive (though a few have pockets of wealth, and a couple are even democracies).

It might not be fair to conclude that capitalist-welfare state prosperity creates sissy societies, but there is certainly a high correlation, is there not? So what is to be done about it? Universal military service? Summer camps that train children in how tough life used to be, how far we’ve come in 130 years, that prosperity isn’t inevitable, and how vigilance is required to maintain the virtues and vouchsafe the legacy of those on whose shoulders we stand? We’re open to all suggestions as to what would reverse the trends that Mark Steyn describes above. Unfortunately, we don’t see any such policies or programs that stand a chance of gaining clear majority support in any prosperous democracy today.

UPDATE

In a discussion of the rather passive prosperous democracies versus those societies that aggressively school their children in war and honor, it would be inappropriate to ignore the economic power and participation of women in the one type of society versus the other. Bill Gates said something very interesting the other day in Saudi Arabia. AP:

On one side of an auditorium sat men. On the other side of a large partition was a “sea of black,” Gates said — women in full-length abayas that cover their faces, as required in Saudi Arabia. A questioner asked if he thought Saudi Arabia could meet its ambitious goal of becoming one of the world’s most competitive economies by 2010, Gates said. “I said, ‘Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get too close to the top”‘…

Gates is correct, of course. Saudi Arabia has a 5.4% labor force participation by women. Half of Arab women cannot read. In Iran, women comprise only 11% of the workforce, though they comprise 70% of university students. In the US by contrast, women are more than 45% of the workforce, and are approaching parity with men in many demographic groups. In some EU countries, these trends are more advanced and have been in place for a longer time.

The correlations are clear enough. The poor, repressive, macho societies have low female participation in economic life. The prosperous, rather passive, democracies are those in which women are nearly as fully engaged in economic life as men. If the desire for economic prosperity trumps the religious/ideological need for manly conquest in the West’s adversaries, then great conflict might be avoided. (Some commentators think the countries like Iran have a very limited time to sort these matters out.) If religious ideology continues to trump economic interest, however, conflict, perhaps on a large scale, would appear quite likely. In such an event, the West’s passivity and its downplaying of the martial virtues that helped purchase its freedom and prosperity would likely greatly increase the price that the West must pay to purchase them again.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 8:56 am and is filed under General, Iran, Religion, War, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.