After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (27 page)

From time to time, many ambitious regimes find themselves minded, as Bertolt Brecht advised, to elect a new people. The immigration policies of most western nations seem intended to accomplish that goal. But you can also change the existing people, in elemental ways and over a surprisingly short space of time. Give me a boy till seven, said the Jesuits, and I will show you the man. Give me a boy till seventh grade, say today’s educators, and we can eliminate the man problem entirely.

Men are no longer hunter-gatherers, and have now ceased to be bread-winners. It isn’t such a bad deal. Though discriminated against in matters such as child support, the average male—if he retains enough of the wily survival instinct from the caveman days—can still have a pretty good time.

Most of these new-type gals still like a good old-fashioned shagging every now and again, and there’s no obligation to marry them anymore, or even pretend you’re dating seriously. You certainly don’t have to meet their parents, and, if the stork decides to spring a little unwanted surprise on you, there’s always your friendly local abortionist. After all, being “pro-choice”

is a good way to show these babes what a sensitive new man you are.

So, even if constrained in all other rowdy boyish inclinations more or less since nursery school, guys are still free to abandon women in greater numbers than ever before. In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old white men were married. By 2000, it was 33 percent.116 The remainder don’t have wives, kids, homes—in the sense of mow-the-lawn wash-the-car paint-the-spare-bedroom homes. So what do they do? Well, they drink, they decline 183

listen to music, they hook up, they lead teenage lives on an adult salary.

Males 18 to 34 years old play more video games than kids: according to a 2006 Nielsen survey, 48.2 percent of men in that demographic amused themselves in that way for an average of two hours and forty-three minutes every day—that’s thirteen minutes longer than the 12- to-17-year-olds.117

When these games were first produced, parents used to fret that they were taking boys away from baseball and tree-climbing and healthy outdoor activities. Now they’re taking men away from . . . what? their midlife crisis?

“For whatever reason,” concluded Kay Hymowitz in
City Journal
, “adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state.”118 Anthropologists are generally agreed that wherever you go on the planet, what suppresses (to use an unfashionable concept) adolescence and turns boys into men is marriage and children. When you marry ever later and have children ever later, manhood also comes much later—if at all. “The conveyor belt that transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down,” declared Dr.

Frank Furstenberg after studying the “adultescence” phenomenon.119 But the belt didn’t really “break down.” It was systematically slowed down, then cut up and recycled into extra-strength condoms. Among the general, swift, and transformative re-ordering of social structures, the percentage of homes with two parents and children has fallen by half since 1972, while the percentage of homes with unmarried, childless couples has doubled.120

As Gloria Steinem proclaimed, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Today, in our feminized aquarium, we have all but eliminated the bicycle, save for a few rusting barnacle-encrusted spokes on the bottom. The full impact of our endlessly deferred adulthood is not yet known, although its contours can already be discerned. What kind of adults emerge from the two-decade cocoon of modern adolescence? Even as the western world atrophies, not merely its pop culture but its entire aesthetic seems mired in arrested development. In his book
Men to Boys: The Making of Modern
Immaturity
, Gary Cross asks simply: “Where have all the men gone?”121

Like George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, and others who’ve posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square.

But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.

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★ ★ ★ ★ ★

no man’S Land

“It is easier,” said Frederick Douglass, “to build strong children than to repair broken men.” But what if, as a matter of policy, we’re building our children to be broken men? And broken not just psychologically but biologically. Headline from the
Daily Mail
, 2004: “Concern as Sperm Count Falls by a Third in UK Men.”122

Don’t ask me why: I’d blame Tony Blair’s cozying up to Bush were it not for “Sperm count drops 25 % in younger men”123 (
The Independent
, 1996), so maybe it was John Major pulling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Do we still need sperm? Oh, a soupçon here and there still has its uses.

In 2009, a shortage of the stuff was reported in Sweden.124 There had been an unexpected surge in demand, from lesbian couples anxious to conceive.

So they headed off to the sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem of male inability to satisfy it. The problem seems to be higher than usual levels of non-functioning sperm. Even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant
fin de civilisation
image than a stampede of broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ Meyer.

H. G. Wells’ Time-Traveler writes of the softened Eloi: It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their eyes.

decline 185

Instead, it is Wells’ Victorian gentleman who leaps in the river, rescues the poor girl, and brings her back to land. He did what any man would have done, didn’t he?

Are you sure about that? As I say, the author’s dystopian vision is off only insofar as the world he predicted showed up 800,000 years ahead of schedule. In Wells’ Britain in the early twenty-first century, men routinely stand around watching girls drown.

In May 2010, a 37-year-old woman was drowning in the River Clyde while police officers called to the scene stood on the bank and watched.125

“As a matter of procedure it’s not the responsibility of the police to go in the water,” explained a spokesperson, sniffily, “it’s the Fire and Rescue Service.” And, as they weren’t there yet, tough. The woman would have died had not three Glasgow University students jumped in to save her. Needless to say, the students were in complete breach of “matters of procedure.”

In February 2010, a 5-year-old girl was trapped in a car submerged in the icy River Avon for two hours while West Mercia Police stood around on the bank watching.126 They were “prevented” from diving in to rescue her by “safety regulations.” In 2007, two police officers watched as a 10-year-old boy, Jordon Lyon, drowned in a swimming pool in Wigan.127 The same year, fireman Tam Brown dived into the River Tay to rescue a drowning girl and got her back to shore, only to find he was now subject to a disciplinary investigation by Tayside Fire Service.128

In 2008, Alison Hume fell sixty feet down an abandoned mine shaft. An 18-strong rescue crew arrived, but the senior officer said that a recent memo had banned the use of rope equipment for rescuing members of the public.

It could only be used to rescue fellow firefighters. So Alison Hume died, in compliance with the memo.129

Could this sort of thing happen in America? Oh, it already does. In 2010, KING-TV in Seattle broadcast footage of three “security guards” at a downtown bus station standing around watching while a 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten for her purse, phone, and iPod.130 But it’s okay, the “guards”

were “just following orders not to interfere.” The victim later told police 186

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that she had deliberately stood next to the “guards” while waiting for her bus thinking it would be the safest place. As the video shows, she was punched and slammed against the wall while standing adjacent to so-called “security”—and still they did nothing. And King’s County Sheriff’s Department congratulated the “men” on their forbearance: “The guards were right to follow their training.”

You have to be “trained” to stand around doing nothing?

Recall Harvey Mansfield’s definition of manliness—“confidence in the face of risk”—and then look at the helmets grown men wear to take a Sunday bicycle ride ’round a suburban park. As for Plato’s concept of

“thumos”—an animal instinct to bristle at the sense of danger—the instinct seems all but lost.

To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal’s École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.131

To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc Lépine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in all men, and which all must acknowledge.

For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite meaning: Marc Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater. And no, I’m not suggesting he’s typical of Muslim men or North African men: my point is that he’s not typical of anything, least of all what we might call (if you’ll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood. The defining image of contemporary maleness is not Monsieur Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obeyed, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate—an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did decline 187

nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

In 2009, the director Denis Villeneuve made a film of the story,
Polytechnique
. “I wanted to absolve the men,” he said. “People were really tough on them. But they were 20 years old. . . . It was as if an alien had landed.”132

But it’s always as if an alien had landed. When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed
Titanic
, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It’s supposed to be “women and children first,” but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship—the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger.

(The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer’s home town in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.)133 Mr. Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. “An alien landed” on the deck of a luxury liner—and men 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
, 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.134 But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the
Titanic
. Women and children first?

No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5 percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.

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No two ship disasters are the same, but the testimony from the MV
Estonia
provides a snapshot of our new world: according to the Finnish Accident Investigation Board’s official report, several survivors reported that “everyone was only looking out for himself.” According to a Swedish passenger, Kent Harstedt, “A woman had broken her legs and begged others to give her a life jacket, but it was the law of the jungle.”135

“Some old people had already given up hope and were just sitting there crying,” said Andrus Maidre, a 19-year-old Estonian. “I stepped over children who were wailing and holding onto the railing.”

You “stepped over” children en route to making your own escape? There wasn’t a lot of that on the
Titanic
. “There is no law that says women and children first,” Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told
Time
magazine. “That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean the early twentieth century.

As I said, no two maritime disasters are the same. But it’s not unfair to conclude that had the men of the
Titanic
been on the
Estonia
, the age and sex distribution of the survivors would have been very different. Nor was there a social norm at the École Polytechnique. So the men walked away, and the women died.

Whenever I’ve written about these issues, I get a lot of emails from guys scoffing, “Oh, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. You’d be pissing your little girlie panties,” etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it: “When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”136

I prefer the word passivity—a terrible, corrosive passivity. Even if I’m wet-ting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the
Titanic
and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.