Chilling piece from Joe Carter in Culture11 about how China and India, among other countries, are exterminating shocking numbers of baby girls in the womb. Hey, if abortion is legal and accepted, what right do any of us have to tell Indian and Chinese mothers they may not kill their baby daughters -- sorry, female fetuses -- because they'd prefer to have boys? Right, feminists?
Beyond the confluence of feticide and sexism, Carter foresees violence in the womb leading to violence elsewhere:
Even if we set aside the moral horror of a world that is killing its daughters, this oft-ignored trend of female feticide could pose a greater threat than many of the high-profile concerns that are touted by the media. For instance, the Chinese government says that by the year 2020 the men in that country will outnumber women by 300 million--roughly the entire population of the United States.Imagine hordes of men, numbering in the hundreds of millions, who will never be able to have sexual contact with a woman, never be able to marry, and never leave a descendant to carry on their lineage. Think about the level of anger and frustration that will be generated. Now consider the fact that the number of males fit for military service (ages 18-49) in the U.S. is currently and remains steady at 54 million.
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That doesn't mean I appreciate all the self-appointed culture warriors who daydream of a catastrophe that would give them a chance to put me back in my place.
Let me be clear here, I am NOT one of those daydreamers. I see it more as a nightmare. I can't stand the idea of tyrannizing over my wife or seeing any of nieces tyrannized. That's why I'm very leery of tinkering with cultural norms. Our society is an historical exception and it needs to be safeguarded.
If it actually meant uncritically considering all cultural ideas and behaviors as value-neutral, I would not agree with it either.
But that is what has translated into. It's not just "some people", it's whole governing institutions. At some point you have to assert some sort of superiority. That doesn't mean infallibility, of course, but I don't think it's an earth-shattering falsehood to say western civilization provides the best living on this planet and the rest have far, far, FAR more to learn from us than the other way around.
"But perhaps I am a multiculturalist in the sense that I don't believe any one culture is God's holy anointed and perfect society with nothing left to learn."
No culture can meet that description.
Though I think there are some cultures (or at least aspects of any culture) that can be said to be antithetical to God's will
Again, I agree with you, Derek. My comment about culture warriors was not pointed at you, but I appreciate your disavowal of such wishes. I also agree with your last paragraph. I think my comments here have made it pretty clear that I don't accept all culturally-mediated behavior as equally good!
Karen Brown : "It doesn't seem that scrawny men have less social standing than strong men."
This is a good point, but I wouldn't be so sure that smaller men had equal standing as larger men in pre-industrial societies. Even today taller men get a small wage premium, so things are not totally equal today.
I did read the Confucius post, but that is why I mentioned muscle power as the means of warefare as well.
As Derek pointed out recent Western societies are a historical exception. So the natural question is what caused that exception and will it happen elsewhere?
Part of it is very likely simply faster industrialization. After all.. we are talking mostly PRE-industrial societies.
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