Time Immortal

I’ve read some of Baden Powell’s book Rovering to Success. In one chapter, he talks about women, and about dealing with sexual temptation. And basically, his lesson is one of restraint: when tempted, have a cold shower, or at least focus one’s efforts and energies onto another activity. His view, I think, was that the human person was able and morally required to rise above his or her baser instincts, and to use the body — in every capacity, in all its functions — responsibly.

Which is why it’s positively heartbreaking, the news that Peter Hitchens brings concerning sex and the Scouting movement:

…it is only natural that our new soft totalitarians should want to get their clammy hands on what is left of the Scouts and the Guides. These organisations, with their religious and monarchist origins, have been under a quiet, sustained assault for years, as they don’t conform to multiculturalism. Now they have caved in to the sex education fanatics, simpering ingratiatingly as they mouth the standard excuses. Here is the Chief Scout, Mr Peter Duncan, : “We must be realistic and accept that around a third of young people are sexually active before 16 and many more start relationships at 16 and 17.”

I can’t see that old Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts, would have thought much of that. His cure for sexual urges was, famously, a cold shower. It is hard to imagine him handing out condoms to his young charges. I think he would have viewed this “realistic” stuff as defeatism. He would no more have agreed that it was necessary to accept this sad fact as inevitable than he would have surrendered Mafeking to the besieging Boers (look it up).

Just so. Scouting is supposed to be about standing for something, about standing up for principles, and about bettering oneself. Caving in to the whims and desires of the flesh, of the government, or of the sinful world, is not something any Scout is supposed to do; it betrays his (and now her) oath, which is first to God.

Sadly, Peter Duncan — though a likeable fellow in person — is no Baden Powell, and has not the stern quantity within him to stand up and say, to all who will listen, that Scouting opts to depart from the received wisdom of a self-dooming society, and to strike out along a more traditional path of teaching and practice where sex education and the teaching of sexual ethics and responsibility are concerned.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

A 15-year-old Boy Scout intervened to stop a man from stabbing Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom with a kitchen knife on Tuesday, a move the leader’s spokesman said saved him from assassination.

Gayoom, who was unharmed in the incident, paid tribute to teenager Mohamed Jaisham, who was wearing the characteristic green scout uniform with scarf and woggle at the time and foiled the attack by wrestling with the man and grabbing the blade.

The boy’s hand was badly wounded.

…

The attacker, an unemployed 20-year-old man, has been arrested. Shareef said residents on the island described the man as having extreme religious views. However, he said he suspected the attack was more likely the work of Gayoom’s political rivals than Islamist hardliners.

Well done, young Mohamed Jaisham, for carrying on in the finest tradition of courage and readiness that Baden Powell sought to foster in founding the Scouting movement!