I believe this theory was first extrapolated on for the general public in the 1967 movie "Mars Needs Women".

Why not turn homosexual advocates loose on them? Sure seems like fertile ground, so to speak.

Goldstein probably has no quarrel with the idea that the Crusades were driven, in large part, by a surplus of second and third sons with no inheritance. But obviously, they were European, so it's different.

This is about as close as one can come to a true statement of social science: A surfeit of young men is a problem that will solve itself.

"Mr. Goldstein and Ms. Parikh also worry that the Bare Branches argument leans too heavily on what they regard as crude evolutionary models of male behavior. "The authors seem to completely lack empathy for these low-status rootless men," says Ms. Parikh. "These guys are the victims of development, and they call them criminals and potential criminals. This is so appalling.""

Lack empathy? Is it lacking in empathy to point out a problem that could seriously impair these men's security and standard of living? What contortions of logic and common sense it takes to maintain a politically-correct worldview.

"Males cause trouble," he says.

Duh!! Why is this even debatable?

More fun if we solve it.

Robert:

Sexist pig--you should be castrated.

China's not the only one doing this. Some districts in India also have statistically significant high concentrations of males over females. Looks like the two countries will be having mutual problems, and may be thinking of mutual solutions.

Y'know what's even MORE politically correct? The bobbing and weaving to avoid naming ABORTION as the enabling technology.

Ptah:

The rest of the article specifically mentions sex selective abortion, among other technical means of preferring boys over girls.

It also mentions that in the good old days, long before secularism, people just exposed girls to death.

Two birds one stone. The Arabs clearly hate their women and only want to have sex with angles in paradise. Accomadate them. Send the women to China.

Jeff points out an important fact. The hatred of girls in these cultures predates modern abortion and ultrasound technology. This is not so much an indication of the corrosive effects of Modernism as it is a sign of the moral evils embedded in traditional cultures.

OJ and Peter sing the praises of tradition, but what we in America recognize as tradition is a radical revolution from the standpoint of THE traditional cultures of the world. It points out that people are both intensely social and at the same time intensely individualistic beings.

Social conformity welds individuals and groups together and forces certain roles and restrictions on them. Individuals will always be pushing the edges of that control to realize their individual ambitions - in this case, to maximize their family income by aborting girls, at a cost to their society. Technology like ultrasound vastly empowers individuals to do so. Ultimately the traditional social controls will not work, and the old traditional societies will cave in.

Think of it as an arms race between the social side of man with it's need for connectedness and conformity, and the individualistic side of man with it's need for personal ambition. Technology feeds both sides of the conflict, like a Swiss arms dealer.

Robert:

the point of the story is the sudden imabalance, putting paid to your point.

My point is that, given the current technology, the imbalance will remain unless the traditional under-valuing of girls changes. The society will have to change its value system, or it will undergo collapse.

Yes, it will have to Christianize. Not all traditions are created equal.

Not all Christian traditions are created equal. If you are talking about our current, democratic, capitalistic, individualistic version of Christian Tradition (version 2.004) then I agree with you. Make sure that they don't load an outdated version ( pre-version 1.776) or you may end up with the same problem.

America had a superior culture in the 17th Century to the one it has today.

Robert:

Jeff refers frequently to infanticide by exposure, which I usually understand as an argument in favour of abortion. I am far from convinced that, at least in the West, it was anything like the plague he suggests, as it is very hard to believe that collective dirty little secret could have been so well kept in a Christian society. Of course, some social scientist pops up to "prove" it was and write a book, and off we go again on the bad old days.

In the East, was there ever a record of a shortage of girls? Hatred and patriarchy are not the same thing. I agree with you completely that tradition itself is not a moral justification, but the ambivalent voices of women from these cultures makes it hard to cut a swath of righteousness from the outside.

The problem I have with your analysis is that when a forseeable problem arises from social engineering( in this case population control), you point the finger, not the engineering, but at the cultural value that prevents it from turning out the way the engineers hoped and predicted. So it isn't that tradition must be defended at all costs. It is that, once again, the modernists have a self-exculpatory mechanism that keeps them from accepting any responsibility for their actions.

Peter,

I am not exculpating anyone or anything. I do not defend abortion, or the One Child rule in China which is exacerbating this problem by making Chinese parents who want a boy even more desparate to abort a girl fetus.

Does technology bear some of the blame for the problems we see in the world? It is an interesting question. Ultrasound is definitely a causal factor for the current imbalance in China and India. Without it, parents would not turn to abortion for sex selection. But, knowing this, do we ban this technology? No, I don't think so.

I think that we Modernists (if that is what I am) have a responsibility to not see the march of technology as a panacea to the world's problems. Technology has the power to disrupt the social balance, and always has unintended consequences and costs. Even where the technologies in question promise to bring great benefits to humanity, I think that it is wise to be slow and cautious in it's introduction (if possible), primarily to give time to uncover the unintended consequences and to allow social and legal traditions to adjust. So, I think I agree with you.

Peter:

My reference to infanticide had nothing to do with justifying abortion, and everything to do with refuting ahistorical claims regarding secularism and sectarianism.

Infanticide and child abandonment was as common in both pre- and post-Enlightenment Europe as abortion is today.

You should read the whole article--at one point it makes reference to rampant female infanticide during the 18th century. That had to have left a demographic mark, and far predated secularism or the one-child policy (which I am not about to defend).

Robert's points are very good.

Was America's culture in the 17th century superior to today's?

Decidely not, if you were Black, female, or Jewish.

"America had a superior culture in the 17th Century to the one it has today."

I said PRE 1776. Just hearken back to European Christendom pre-enlightenment. Not that Eurpoean patriarchy approached Asian patriarchy in it's contempt for women, but the economic value of women were probably the same for the majority of people. Imagine if they were given access to ultrasound and quick & easy abortions. Do you think that many people would be able to reconcile their Christianity with their economic interests? At least enough to cause a similar deficit in female births?

Jeff:

That's the stupidest thing you've ever said. To take one example: in Romania 70% of pregnancies are terminated. Think 7 in 10 medieval babies were murdered?

Robert:

The 17th Century is the 1600s.

OJ:

For you to contend that American culture was superior with respect to women, Jews or blacks then, as opposed to now, is, at the very least, questionable.

Perhaps you should ask a few women whether they would prefer to be chattel.

Jeff:

You can't--they're at work doing one of the two jobs they have to hold down since their husband left them with the kids.

Robert:

This whole issue of tradition/morality in the face of technological change is a mind-bender and one that often leads to despair rather than answers. Ellul, Grant and others went at it and generally concluded pessimistically. Churchill understood it very well about war. As Jeff, bless his heart, shows, if you try and argue against modernity, you will almost certainly be met with one of the following arguments:

A)It was just as bad or worse in the past. The authority for this proposition is usually some modern academic who "proves" something like the Pre-Enlightenment Western countryside was littered with the corpses of exposed babies. The fact that there is no reference to this in the histories, diaries, songs, poems, plays, fables, novels, political and religious records, etc. of the times is ignored, as is the fact that the practice, such as it did exist, was condemned morally and legally;
B)Except for a few bloodsuckers on top, everyone in the old days lived in misery and craved modern-style freedom. For some reason, when they got it, they stopped craving and wouldn't exchange modern life for anything;
C)It is illegitimate to argue than anything in the past was superior unless you are personally prepared to live exactly as they did and forego modern dentistry, cars, etc. This is kind of the intellectual equivalent to the "Go back where you came from" response to an immigrant that complains about anything.
D)Even if technology has some unfortunate consequences, the benefits always outweigh them;
E) You can't stop progress, so stop boring us by trying.

To the extent that the modern view above tends generally to be held by the same types of people who adhere to materialism and darwinism (with many honourable exceptions such as you), their insistence that history is random and non-teleological is amusing.

It is hard to reconcile the modern view that we live in a period of unparalleled freedom with the simultaneous view that technology is this inevitable force we can't or shouldn't try to slow down or halt. Commencement speakers often bore students by insisting we can choose for good and bad, but as we almost never choose not to invent or develop something because we think the bad outweighs the good make, that argument is a little too convenient. I share Orrin's view that (collective) faith is the only realistic way to preserve any true freedom of choice in this matter for society, but that is not a popular view in intellectual circles and I don't think shared by you. So my question is, how are your conservative instincts on issues of morality and tradition transmitted to the next generation? What philosphical basis is there for a conservative, atheistic discussion and debate on morality with your co-citizens?

Peter,
I don’t think that we can turn back the clock on technology – it is one of the spirits that escaped Pandora’s Box many generations ago. I am not pessimistic on technology, but cautious. The worst abuses of technology occur when traditional societies are upended by new developments. We in the West were able to adapt to the changes more successfully since we were driving the development of technology, and since our social norms had already changed in a way to enable the growth of technology, in the form of individualistic Protestant Capitalism. The societies in Asia and Africa are based on much more ancient norms, and have had the technologies of the Industrial Age and the Information Age thrust upon them. The technologies overwhelmed the old social networks and methods of control. Tyrannies filled the void. So it is not as much the fact that increased technology leads to increased evil as it is that social traditions need to be able to change in a way to preserve what is good without introducing new evils. Can this be done? I don’t know, but it is indispensable that we try.

As far as good/bad old days compared to good/bad modern days, it is debatable. Given a chance between living in 1204, 1704 and living my current live in 2004, I choose my current life. My current life has problems, but I have learned to deal with them, and I am very comfortable with all the modern conveniences. Am I happier living this life than I could be living a life in one of those other eras? I don’t know. There are happy and unhappy people in every era, in the end happiness is a personal ability to live with and accept the limitations and tribulations of your life as you live it.

As for transmitting morality through religion or philosophy, I would never argue that religion is the problem, and that we cannot make progress until we banish all religious superstition. This is a non-starter for me. I’m conservative in that I think that people are inherently prone to evil, and a change in philosophy won’t change that. Morality has to have more than a philosophical prop. Two things are required for a person to be willing to live his life according to a set of moral tenets: 1. the person must be willing to act not only for his own interest, but for the greater good of all, and 2. the person must believe that following those tenets will enhance the greater good. I know that you would say that #1 is not possible without a belief in God and judgement in the afterlife for your actions in life. For most people maybe that is the case, I don’t know. But the conversation about morality assumes #1 but centers around #2. If you are engaged in a conversation about #2 with people who demonstrate a serious commitment to getting it right, do you need to agree on #1?

Robert:

"The worst abuses of technology occur when traditional societies are upended by new developments."

No, they're not. They're when "advanced" cultures come unmoored from traditional morality. No traditional society ever did anything as horrific with tecjhnology as the Germans did with Zyklon B or as the whole West has done with abortion.

OJ:

Yeah, you are right. Pol Pot was a real charmer. And that whole Hutu/Tutsi thing was ever so modern.

Peter:

I'm only trying to point out there is little new under the sun. Have you ever heard of the surname "Esposito?"

Check out the derivation sometime.

Jeff:

Machetes aren't modern technology.

Their ideology was modern though.

OJ:

Ideology? What, are you joking? That was the kind of inter-tribal slaughter that is as old as humanity.

Pol Pot was as rationalist as Watson and Crick.

Pol Pot was sectarian possessor of absolute truth. Just like any other religion.

Besides, as should be obvious, I was referring to Rwanda.

Rwanda was just applied Darwinism as Cambodia was applied Marxism.