Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
But if God himself could have made the division or some super-man ship's
officer who could have represented God, could have made it, it is not
hard to believe that a less superficial, a more profound and human
difference between people would have been used in sorting out the people
who should live from the people who should die than a difference in
organs of reproduction.
The women were saved first because the men were men and because it was
the way the men felt. It expressed the men who were on the deck that
night that the women should be saved first; it was the last chance they
had to express themselves like men and they wanted to do it.
But if God himself could have made the division with the immediate and
conclusive knowledge of who everybody was, of what they really were in
their hearts, and of what they and their children and their children's
children would do for the world if they lived no one would have
quarrelled with God for making what would have seemed at the moment, no
doubt, very unreasonable and ungallant and impossible-looking
discriminations in sorting out the people who should live from the
people who should die.
Possibly even Man (using the word with a capital), acting from the point
of view of history and of the race and from the point of view of making
a kind of world where _Titanic_ disasters could not happen, would have
chosen on the deck of the _Titanic_ that night, very much the way God
would.
From the point of view of Man there would have been no discrimination in
favour of a woman because she was a woman.
The last cry of the last man that the still listening life-boats heard
coming up out of the sea that night might have been the cry of the man
who had invented a ship that could not sink.
There would not have been a woman in a life-boat or a woman sinking in
the sea who would not have had this man saved before a woman.
If we could absolutely know all about the people, who are the people in
this world that we should want to have saved first, that we would want
to have taken to the life-boats and saved first at sea?
The women who are with child.
And the men who are about to have ideas.
And the men who man the boats for them, who in God's name and in the
name of a world protect its women who are with child, and its men who
are about to have ideas.
The world is different from the _Titanic_. We do not need to line up our
immortal fellow human beings, sort them out in a minute on a world and
say to them, "Go here and die!" "Go there and live!" We are able to
spend on a world at least an average of thirty-five years apiece on all
these immortal human beings we are with, in seeing what they are like,
in guessing on what they are for and on their relative value, and in
deciding where they belong and what a world can do with them.
We ought to do better in saving people on a world. We have more time to
think.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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