Mathematics of Life
I’ve never understood why the heroes of sexual licence are so blind to its essential tendency to suicide. Ideas are passed on in the home. Contraception, abortion and homosexual acts drastically limit the number of children raised in homes where these things are accepted. Stable, sexually continent couples have more children every year, and then their children have more children. Arithmetic has no moral concerns, and condemns the hedonistic view without pausing to consider its truth or falsehood. Its champions should not abandon it for this reason, but they should stop writing paeans to the new world order and study the age-old art of the lament for a doomed glory. They sing like Romans marching through the gates of Carthage, the defenders either in hiding or already atop the pyre. But were they only to look up, they would recognize those walls for the cliffs of Thermopylae, and the men before them for the band of Leonidas. In a thousand years, they will be remembered not as the conquering army of Scipio, but the routed horde of Xerxes, who dared to flog the Hellespont.