Oz Conservative

Oh boy! Sydney 1966

2012-02-02T20:45:00.003+11:00

Screen Australia has released a short documentary about life in Sydney that was filmed in the mid 1960s. Australian readers in particular are likely to enjoy it.

The three prides

2012-01-30T15:30:00.001+11:00

It's clearly the case that many Westerners lack pride. But when I write that I'm referring to positive rather than negative forms of pride. So how do we distinguish between them?

I can think of three kinds of pride, two of them of the positive variety, one of them negative.

Self-full or egoistic pride

This is pride in its negative aspect - the one that many religious traditions, including Christianity, condemn.

It is not necessarily bad in its origins. To live well we do need to exercise a controlling or directing will, one that at its best is guided by reason and prudence. This controlling will then regulates our appetites, thoughts, actions and impulses for our larger well-being.

When, instead of being controlled by our appetites or impulses, we do instead control them, we can feel a sense of self-mastery, of enhanced being and of masculine strength.

And the risk is that these benefits can lead us to think that the controlling will is itself the end good in life. And that can lead to a self-worship, an egotism, a will-full pride in self which then sets the limits of what we are receptive to very narrowly at the borders of self.

Little wonder that, as a counterbalance, many religious traditions then emphasise humility as a virtue. But we should understand humility as a counterbalance and not as a quality that should lead to self-erasure or to a lack of assertion of controlling will in its positive aspect.

Loving pride

This is the inspired pride that we feel on perceiving the good in that which we are closely related to, for instance, the beauty of our spouse, the cuteness of our child, the achievements or the finer qualities of our compatriots or ancestors or race. To feel loving pride is a sign of health, of wholesomeness of spirit.

The lack of such pride in many Westerners is an aspect of an alienated existence, something we should seek to overcome.

Masculine pride

I take masculine pride to be a mostly good thing - that is, unless it spills over into egotistic pride. What, after all, does masculine pride often involve? It involves a willingness to prove ourselves in life's challenges; to pit ourselves against adversity; to be emotionally strong; to keep to standards of honour; and to be courageous and loyal. There are good reasons for this kind of masculine pride to be fostered amongst boys, not the least of which is that it cultivates those qualities which men need to effectively fulfil an adult male role in society.

A car sticker for jaded women?

2012-01-30T13:24:00.000+11:00

I was in the parking lot of my local shopping centre and I noticed the following sticker on the back window of one of the cars:

In case it's not clearly visible, the sticker reads: "I believe in unicorns, good men and other mythical creatures".

It's meant to be humorous, but even so if I were a woman I wouldn't put one on my car. People are likely to assume that you've had unhappy experiences with men and have become a bit cynical. It's not exactly good self-advertising.

And, fairly or not, it might even be thought that you're the kind of woman who is drawn to the wrong kind of men like a moth to the flame, who gets burnt each time, but who isn't self-reflective enough to figure out what's going wrong.

From the horse's mouth

2012-01-29T11:26:00.003+11:00

Anne Summers is a very influential Australian feminist. She has been editor of Ms magazine, head of the Office of the Status of Women in Australia, and chairwoman of Greenpeace International.

She recently gave her two cents' worth in the Melinda Tankard Reist controversy. Melinda Tankard Reist is an Australian feminist who is anti-abortion, anti-porn and against the sexualisation of girls.

But can a feminist be anti-abortion? Anne Summers, a grand old dame of Australian feminism, thinks not. And her reason for thinking so is revealing:

Can you be "pro-life" and a feminist. I say an emphatic, No.

Let me elaborate. Feminism might be blandly defined as the support for women's political, economic and social equality, and a feminist as someone who advocates such equality, but these general principles need practical elaboration and application. What does economic equality actually mean? How can women in practice achieve social equality? As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women's ability to be independent.

There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one's fertility. To achieve the first, women need the education and training to be able to undertake work that pays well. To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.

That confirms what I've written about feminism for many years now. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. And the key principle of liberalism is autonomy - the aim of a self-determining, independent life.

Equality is a secondary principle. If you think that you, or the group you belong to, are disadvantaged in achieving an independent, autonomous life, then you will call for equality (or for an end to discrimination, or for social justice etc). In other words, when feminists demand equality what they are really asking for is a greater degree of autonomy/independence/self-determination, which they believe has been denied them by privileged men.

So how do influential feminists like Anne Summers believe they can make women more independent? She is very clear about this. The first way is to make women independent of men by having them successfully pursue well-paying careers (and, in practice, by making women financially independent of men via transfer payments such as welfare payments, alimony and child support payments, paid maternity leave payments etc).

Second, a pregnancy is likely to impede women's independence in a number of ways. It might make it more difficult to complete her education, or to progress in her career, or to use her sexuality for purposes of power. And it might make her focus on family rather than career or to become financially or emotionally dependent on a man as a father to her child. (Anne Summers is childless herself.)

So feminists take very seriously having the choice to abort. It goes back to their first principle of achieving autonomy/independence.

What really needs to happen is for that liberal first principle - that autonomy is always the highest, overriding good - to be challenged openly. That's what would open up moral and political debate in the West.

Wild attack in Perth

2012-01-28T09:30:00.004+11:00

More Australia Day news, this time from Perth. A gang of 20 young men of African descent went on the rampage in Perth, targeting a young white man to chase down, to rob and to viciously beat:

A PERTH teenager has spoken of his terror after he was violently bashed by a gang of thugs who repeatedly kicked him and stomped on his head after being racially taunted.

Perth detectives are hunting up to 20 youths, believed to be of African descent, who were involved in the attack in the city at 11.30pm last night.

James Claxon

The police described the attack this way:

Detective Sergeant Steve Coelho said the gang appeared to have been walking from the McIver train station on a "rampage" last night.

"They have singled out white Australians and for no reason whatsoever, completely unprovoked, they've attacked one of the males. That led to a vicious assault. He's had severe facial injuries and his head literally stomped on,'" Det-Sgt Steve Coelho said.

(A brief TV report gave further details.)

The Australian media has picked up on the fact that the white teen was stomped so hard in the face that the attacker's shoe print was clearly left behind. But that's been happening in the U.S. for some time - Lawrence Auster at VFR has reported on attacks in which the victim is repeatedly stomped on the head, e.g. here, here and here - it seems to be a trademark of these kind of attacks.

I'll make just one political point about this. The liberal assumption is that whites are a false category oppressor group, who use violence against the non-whites they have "othered". That's why hate crime legislation is assumed to protect non-whites from whites. It's also why so many Daily Mail readers, when commenting on the Prime Minister fleeing from Aboriginal protesters, assumed that Aborigines in Australia are victims of mistreatment by whites.

But the reality on the ground is in most cases very different. The Perth bashing is an example of this. Here we have a relatively small non-white immigrant group who feel so bold in a new country that they form a gang and mercilessly bash the white native born inhabitants. It's difficult to imagine this the other way round. If a group of a few thousand white Australians decided to migrate to Nigeria, is it likely that their teenage sons would form gangs and stomp the faces of the local Nigerians?

Prime Minister flees Aborigines

2012-01-27T09:40:00.001+11:00

Extraordinary photos were published yesterday on Australia Day of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, fleeing Aboriginal protesters:

It's yet another example of the way that Australia Day has become dominated by race politics. Here's another example. A rising young tennis star, Bernard Tomic, has a luxury $150,000 car that, as a probationary driver, he is only permitted to drive to and from training. On Australia Day he apparently breached these conditions and was pulled over several times by police. He is now claiming that he is a victim of racism (he is of Croatian descent):

Bernard Tomic allegedly accused Gold Coast police of harassing him because "you think I'm not Australian" as he was pulled over three times yesterday for breaching driving restrictions in his high-powered BMW.

Tomic, a rising star of Australian tennis, was fined $600 and copped enough points to lose his licence.

The claims began a bizarre spinout from the teenage P-plater, who can only drive his bright orange $150,000 V8 BMW M3 to and from training.

He appeared to defy police and did laps of the trendy Broadbeach restaurant strip with a mate before locking himself in his home.

Police sources said Tomic alleged officers pulled him over because it was Australia Day, referring to his European heritage.

Again, I find that extraordinary. Tomic is one of the most privileged young people in Australia. He has money, fame and public adulation. And yet when something goes wrong he immediately claims that he is a victim of racism - for being Croatian of all things.

And to return to the Aboriginal incident again, it was disappointing to read the comments on the story from Daily Mail readers. Many of the most upvoted comments spoke about Aborigines being treated as second-class citizens in Australia. It makes me wonder what people overseas have been taught to believe about the treatment of Aborigines in this country. Are they aware of the vast tracts of land owned by Aboriginal tribes? Of the positive discrimination in education, such as free tutoring and mentoring, university admissions programmes and liaison officers? Of the encouragement to Aborigines to identify positively with their own tradition, an encouragement not offered to the mainstream?

At an official level Australia Day just isn't working as a day of national celebration. Lawrence Auster made a brief comment about my Australia Day posts that "Australia sounds far more PC than America" and if you were to jet in during the lead up to Australia Day and read the papers and watch the TV you'd most likely agree. But at an unofficial level it's not so bad; there seem to be young people, in particular, who take the chance to get together and celebrate the day more positively.

What can you do if you identify with the mainstream tradition in Australia? A right-liberal like Andrew Bolt would argue that everyone should just forget about race, ethnicity and nationality and interact on a purely individual basis. But that means giving up on our larger identities; it's a solution based on an impoverished identity.

Left-liberals believe that the mainstream is a dominant group which practises racism to uphold its privileges. So the left-wing solution is for the mainstream to give up its racism and its privileges. But as we've seen many of those who push these ideas are much more privileged than the average person in the mainstream. Tomic the tennis star is more privileged than I am; so is Professor Fozdar who complained about Australians flying flags on Australia Day - she has a plum job as an academic and has received $2 million worth of grants so far in her career; so too is leading neurosurgeon Dr Tao who complained about racism in his Australia Day speech.

In other words, it doesn't seem to matter that other groups are becoming more privileged than the average Anglo - the claims of the newly privileged classes to be racially oppressed just keep growing.

So what should we do? I don't think we should give up our identity out of frustration with the abuse of racial politics. That's too high a price to pay and won't stop the attacks anyway. Nor should we think that if only we treated other groups more nicely that the attacks would go away - that's clearly not going to happen as evidenced by the Aboriginal protest yesterday.

We just have to act in a resilient, principled way, which means continuing to identify positively with our own tradition and rebutting any unfair attacks on it. We might also have to learn to close the newspapers and turn off the TV at times, and celebrate our identity in our own way, unofficially, as many young Australians seem to do.

Criticism of White Ribbon Day in the mass media

2012-01-26T13:58:00.002+11:00

Here's some good news. A week ago I again criticised White Ribbon Day, a day when men are asked to wear ribbons to show their opposition to domestic violence. Unfortunately, the White Ribbon campaign is dominated by a feminist ideology which only recognises men as perpetrators of violence; which holds traditional social norms to be at fault for violence; and which exaggerates the extent of violence.

Bob McCoskrie, the national director of Family First NZ, wrote in to support my stance and to point out that he made similar criticisms of White Ribbon Day in a column in the New Zealand Herald last year. His column is very well written: it is clearly explained, balanced and has a lot of supporting information. It's a model of how we could get a point across in the mass media.

The comments from readers were very supportive, but as you might guess Bob McCoskrie was attacked by the political class for his stance:

Women's groups and political leaders have rounded on Family First director Bob McCoskrie for refusing to wear a white ribbon today to oppose violence against women.

I went and looked up the Family First NZ site. It's very good. Some of its policies that are worth considering include:

optional income splitting for couples for tax purposes
considering fault when allocating levels of child support to remove economic incentives to divorce
child support to take into account the income levels of both parents
presumptive shared parenting
measures to reduce divorce rates, including affordable premarital counselling

Patriotic flaggers worry academics

2012-01-25T08:51:00.002+11:00

Here's a classic example of what Australia Day has become in the hands of the liberal political class. The lead article on the Melbourne Age website last night was about residents of Perth who fly the Australian flag on their cars in the lead up to Australia Day:

They are a regular sight across Perth as January 26 approaches - drivers flying Australia Day flags from their cars.

But the popularity of the annual trend might be about to fall, after research from the University of WA found drivers with Australia Day flags are likely to be more racist than those with un-adorned cars.

As I wrote on Monday:

You would think that Australia Day would be time for a little patriotic pride. Unfortunately, that's not how it's treated in the media. The media is obsessed in the week leading up to Australia Day with endless handwringing about whether Australians are racist or not. They just can't leave the issue alone...

So what constitutes "racism" according to the academics? It seems that the flag flyers are a little less likely than others to embrace an open-bordered multiculturalist view:

Professor Fozdar said 43 per cent of those with car flags said they believed the White Australia Policy had saved Australia from many problems experienced by other countries, while only 25 per cent without flags agreed.

And 56 per cent of people with car flags feared the Australian culture and its most important values were in danger, compared with 34 per cent of those without flags.

Professor Fozdar said 35 per cent of those with flags felt people had to be born in Australia to be truly Australian, while 23 per cent believed that true Australians had to be Christian, compared with 22 per cent and 18 per cent respectively for the non-flag group.

Interestingly the flag flyers came from a wide variety of backgrounds:

Professor Fozdar said there was no clear link between education, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, voting pattern or income and flag flying, although her survey showed a slightly higher likelihood of younger rather than older people adopting the practice.

The whole thing makes me think that in five years' time if you wave a flag on Australia Day you're likely to have a team of anthropologists from the local university come knocking on your door.

Edit: Neil Mitchell has a column in today's Herald Sun making much the same point. He complains that:

Australia Day has developed into "kick an Australian Day".

And that:

the negative navel-gazing seems to have overtaken the party to the point that the event is turning sour.

Indoctrinated free thinkers

2012-01-24T08:40:00.002+11:00

Over at the reddit men's rights page, a young person left a message hostile to the idea of a men's political movement:

LOL men's rights?! Are you kidding me Reddit? White men own this entire planet, lock stock and barrel.

Come on, is this a joke? Please tell me this is a joke...

So here is someone who believes that white men own the entire planet and are therefore privileged oppressors who don't need a movement on their behalf.

I responded briefly as folllows:

white men own this entire planet

Is that meant to be a joke? First, women own more of the world's wealth than you imagine:

Women will be the richer sex by 2025, owning 60 per cent of the UK’s personal wealth compared with 48 per cent today, research has revealed. The study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research also found that UK millionaires aged under 45 and over 65 are more likely to be women than men. There are 24 per cent more female millionaires aged between 18 and 44 - 47,355 compared to 37,935 men. Female millionaires aged 65 and over also outnumber their male counterparts - 71,369 compared to 67,865. Researchers found the expected change in personal wealth was due to women performing better in education than men, having higher levels of single home ownership and a longer life expectancy.

Second, whites are being matched by Asians, particularly East Asians, when it comes to wealth and power. In the U.S., for instance, Asians have higher average levels of income than whites. China is now the world's largest export nation; Japan and South Korea also have powerful economies.

So why would anyone imagine that white males own the world? Because it fits into an ideology which tries to explain inequality in terms of one group of people (white men) socially constructing itself and othering everyone else in order to enjoy an unearned privilege. This means that the task of politics becomes to deconstruct the oppressor group.

It's an ideology which never should have been accepted, but these days it's becoming more obviously antiquated.

The reply of the young person to my comment was very interesting:

I don't know, I went to a school that prides itself on free thinking and allowing students to make up their own mind, and it's general consensus that the white male has not only dominated the world the last 3 centuries, but that it has caused by far the most suffering against other people, both for women and other cultures and races.

It shows how clever liberals have been: their indoctrination has had two parts, first, that white men are the evil agents responsible for oppression in society and, second, that the repeated, unceasing promotion of this belief in schools is not indoctrination but is part of a culture of "free thinking and allowing students to make up their own mind".

In other words, they have camouflaged the brainwashing.

In my experience, there are students who don't entirely fall for this: as they get into the senior years they are at least dimly aware that an agenda is being pushed on them that they are expected to go along with. But clearly there are at least some students who go all the way through high school and come out with the views they have been indoctrinated to believe in, including the belief that they have not been indoctrinated but have made up their own mind as a free thinker.

Positive pride

2012-01-23T15:30:00.007+11:00

One of the mistakes we can make is to reduce the good or the bad to single words which don't capture the complexity of moral worth.

An obvious example, and one which I've discussed previously, is the word pride. It's not possible to describe pride as either good or bad as it can be either depending on what exactly the word pride is being used to describe.

There are clearly positive forms of pride. For instance, pride is often associated with a warmth of love, as when we take pride in our children, our spouse or our people. Pride, in this sense, is a healthy sign of attachment - it would not be a virtue to be so cold or alienated or denatured that we were incapable of feeling it.

Pride can also be positive when it is a matter of not wanting to be bested. That's particularly true, I believe, for boys or young men - it is an aspect of a healthy competitive spirit that helps boys and young men to push forward their development. Even the dislike boys have of being bested by girls has a logical purpose: given that women tend not to have romantic feelings toward men they feel superior to, it makes sense for boys developing toward manhood not to want to be bested by their female counterparts.

Pride can be positive, or negative, in another sense: when it comes to wanting to hold to standards. For instance, if we take a pride in our appearance it can be positive (if it means not falling into slovenliness) or negative (if it becomes narcissistic or vain). If our pride in holding to standards helps us resist taking part in base actions that is positive; it can be negative, though, in other contexts, e.g. a woman who has an aristocratic standard and who therefore won't engage in ordinary work (snobbery?).

It's the same when it comes to communal pride. If we take pride in the history of our family, or in the beauty of our local surrounds, or in our national culture then we can be motivated to work to hold to the best of these things.

Miles Franklin was a well-known Australian author of the 1900s. She was on the left, but even so she was critical of some of the debasement of Western culture. Just after WWII she wrote a hostile review of a book by a much more radical woman, Christina Stead. She accused Stead of "writing a handbook on whores," one which depicted women "without shame or pride" - note how shamelessness is associated here with a lack of pride. Miles Franklin also tells the story in this book review of how two feminist men in 1920s America tried to persuade her to join their "free love" circle. They didn't get far because Miles Franklin was revolted by the idea of men describing themselves as feminists. She wrote:

[Floyd] and Charlie announced to me the glad tidings that they were feminists. I was so uninstructed that distaste awakened in me. It seemed to me that the word was related to feminine, and for a man to be feminine was to be effeminate, and utterly obnoxious to me, reared where men were men.

This is a more indirect example, but it does suggest the connection between a pride in her national culture and holding to positive standards (in this case, of masculinity).

Religious traditions have tended to emphasise the negative aspects of pride. That makes sense for two reasons. First, it is common for religious traditions to identify too strong an egoistic sense of self as a barrier to being receptive to the spiritual. Second, there is a sense in many human cultures that an overweening pride, (or hubris), when directed against the divine, leads to man's downfall.

There is a more specific understanding of this second negative aspect of pride. Let's say that man is confronted with a reality that has been determined for him, one in which important aspects of his being and his place within a larger order have already been cast without his choice. How does a man respond to this? If he is humble before God he might well accept his place in a larger order oriented toward the good. But if he, from a pride in his own capacity to make things as he will, is not humble but rebellious, then the given reality with all its predetermined distinctions will feel like a restriction, an impediment to his liberty.

This, it seems to me, is at least part of what the Christian tradition is criticising when it comes to pride; it can be seen in the story of Satan, of Adam and of Babel.

Proph at Collapse:The Blog has written a post on this theme:

reality itself is radically unfree: man's species, sex, race, nationality, time and circumstances of birth, and the authorities to which he is subject, to name just a few, are all determined for him without his consent or even his notice. In him, determinism reigns. With a strong sense of the sacred, this lack of freedom becomes understandable and rationalizable: through his participation in the sacred (for instance, by religious ritualism), man understands himself to be part of a rational order oriented toward the good. In other words, the sacred allows man to experience the authority of the order of being as legitimate. Without a sense of the sacred, reality becomes meaningless, senseless, and incomprehensible; the human condition becomes one not of citizenship and duty but of imprisonment and injustice. Rebellion against that order results, with predictable consequences.

I find this particularly interesting as it relates to trends we see in modern society. Clearly there are liberals who do fail to understand themselves as being "part of a rational order oriented toward the good" and who therefore reject predetermined aspects of being such as sex, race, nationality, forms of authority etc. At the same time, there is a risk that those who do understand themselves to be part of a rational order then become overly compliant toward all aspects of hierarchy or given conditions of life, leading to unnecessary injustices or inequalities. And the focus of the modern world (and the modern churches) often seems to be on an exaggerated attempt to demonstrate that one has not committed this error.

There is an irony, too, in that a hubristic pride before God can lead to a loss of the positive pride in belonging to a social order oriented toward the good - including the warmth of love that is associated with given forms of social distinctions, such as being a man or woman, father or son, Frenchman or Japanese etc.

However, although the churches do have reasons for criticising certain expressions of pride, it would be a gross mistake if they regarded pride as always a vice and never a virtue. That's not a reasonable position to take. It should be possible for churches to go beyond a single word and to explain in some depth how best to understand qualities like pride.

What obsesses the political class on Australia Day?

2012-01-23T12:47:00.002+11:00

You would think that Australia Day would be time for a little patriotic pride. Unfortunately, that's not how it's treated in the media. The media is obsessed in the week leading up to Australia Day with endless handwringing about whether Australians are racist or not. They just can't leave the issue alone - which reveals, I think, where their heads are at. Even in a relatively conservative paper like the Herald Sun, you just can't escape the obsession - in today's edition, for instance, there are no less than three columns all boringly saying the same thing. It's not that they are sinking the boot in, it's that their frame for discussing Australia Day is limited to the issue of whethr Australians are or aren't racist in response to diversity and multiculturalism.

An antifeminist advice columnist?

2012-01-22T22:19:00.003+11:00

In the 1980s feminist Sara Ruddick wrote in favour of abolishing a distinctly paternal role in the family. She looked forward,

to the day when men are willing and able to share equally and actively in transformed maternal practices...On that day there will be no more 'fathers,' no more people of either sex who have power over their children's lives and moral authority in their children's world ... There will [instead] be mothers of both sexes.

But are men who adopt such a role likely to keep the respect of their wives? American advice columnist Amy Alkon thinks not:

Heterosexual women might think they want the feminist ideal of a man (a sort of apron-wearing, assertiveness-free co-mommy), but here's what happened to the marriage of one man who left his testosterone at a bus stop somewhere:

Elliott Katz was stunned to find himself in the middle of a divorce after two kids and 10 years of marriage. The Torontonian, a policy analyst for the Ottawa government, blamed his wife. "She just didn't appreciate all I was doing to make her happy." He fed the babies, and he changed their diapers. He gave them their baths, he read them stories, and put them to bed. Before he left for work in the morning, he made them breakfast. He bought a bigger house and took on the financial burden, working evenings to bring in enough money so his wife could stay home full-time.

He thought the solution to the discontent was for her to change. But once on his own, missing the daily interaction with his daughters, he couldn't avoid some reflection. "I didn't want to go through this again. I asked whether there was something I could have done differently. After all, you can wait years for someone else to change."

What he decided was, indeed, there were some things he could have done differently--like not tried as hard to be so noncontrolling that his wife felt he had abandoned decision-making entirely.

Amy Alkon goes on to write in the comments that the belief that men and women are the same has led some well-meaning but confused men to be less masculine than they need to be in relationships. She also has a policy of not taking over the symbolically masculine role in a relationship:

Men feel good about getting to be the man in a relationship. Why take that away from them?

Anyway, it seems that those promoting a unisex maternal role in the family are going to meet at least some resistance from heterosexual women who need a man to show some level of self-assertion, decisiveness and leadership in a marriage.

Fathers and mothers are convenient administrators?

2012-01-20T15:23:00.001+11:00

Earlier this month I wrote a post about an academic liberal, Kok-Chor Tan. He believes that the resources of wealthier countries should be considered by right to belong to poorer countries. Why? Because in his view the overriding good in society is individual autonomy and autonomy is undermined by social and economic inequality. Therefore, liberals ought to be committed to a policy of global redistribution of wealth - not out of humanitarian concern for others, but as a matter of justice and right.

I've read a bit further along the Kok-Chor Tan book and his next step is to consider possible objections. The objection he spends most time discussing is the idea that we have special obligations to our conationals rather than only a universal obligation to humanity in general. He looks at the arguments of a British academic, David Miller, in support of the idea of special obligations.

Miller's position is that we have particular duties at the local and national levels, as well as more general ones to humanity. He puts forward two arguments against limiting duties to humans in general. The first is that we would be adopting an artificially abstracted posture as a moral actor if we ignore special duties. In support of this argument he quotes Alasdair MacIntyre, who believes that limiting duties to humans in general:

requires of me to assume an abstract and artificial - perhaps even an impossible - stance, that of a rational being as such, responding to the requirements of morality, not qua parent or farmer or quarterback, but qua rational agent who has abstracted him or herself from all social particularity, who has become not merely Adam Smith's impartial spectator, but a correspondingly impartial actor, and one who in his impartiality is doomed to rootlessness, to be a citizen of nowhere.

I don't think I would have put it exactly like that, but even so there is force to this argument. Most moral traditions have allowed for both special and general obligations. It is difficult not to, as we stand in particular relations to others, as husband and wives, parents and children, townsmen and compatriots. Each of these relationships engenders particular loves and loyalties and duties - they become aspects of the good which we have a duty to uphold. We would be discarding important aspects of our created being, abstracting ourselves down to the level of a disembodied Cartesian ego/reason, if we were to be wholly impartial toward others.

Occasionally you come across examples of Christians who have dissolved particular forms of being and particular relationships in favour of an approach to morality based on disembodied reason. One example is that of Sarah Grimke, an early American feminist of the 1830s and a Quaker. She wrote:

permit me to offer for your consideration, some views relative to the social intercourse of the sexes. Nearly the whole of this intercourse is, in my apprehension, derogatory to man and woman, as moral and intellectual beings. We approach each other, and mingle with each other, under the constant pressure of a feeling that we are of different sexes; and, instead of regarding each other only in the light of immortal creatures, the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinction between male and female. Hence our intercourse, instead of being elevated and refined, is generally calculated to excite and keep alive the lowest propensities of our nature. Nothing, I believe, has tended more to destroy the true dignity of woman, than the fact that she is approached by man in the character of a female.

... Until our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex, - until we rise above the present low and sordid views which entwine themselves around our social and domestic interchange of sentiments and feelings, we never can derive that benefit from each other's society which it is the design of our Creator that we should. Man has inflicted an unspeakable injury upon woman, by holding up to her view her animal nature, and placing in the back ground her moral and intellectual being.

And in describing her ideal woman she wrote:

She views herself, and teaches her children to regard themselves as moral beings; and in all their intercourse with their fellow men, to lose the animal nature of man and woman, in the recognition of that immortal mind wherewith Jehovah has blessed and enriched them.

According to Sarah Grimke we become "moral and intellectual beings" by abstracting ourselves from our embodied and particular natures as men and women. This is an approach to Christianity which, unfortunately, is not uncommon (e.g. the idea that the only identity a Christian has is with the church) and needs to be effectively criticised.

The second criticism made by Miller of the "general duties alone" principle is that we have a strong moral intuition that we do have particular duties. In other words, it's very difficult to live consistently by the idea that we should be impartially general in our sense of moral duty.

That's also a good argument. After all, if it's morally impermissible to have a special duty to our conationals, then you also have to accept that we have no special duty to our own children. I should be equally concerned to act for the moral welfare of a man I don't know in Zaire as to my own child in my own house is the moral principle I am being asked to follow. For instance, if I go out to work and earn money, why should I distribute it primarily to my own family? If my moral duties are only general ones, then perhaps I am obligated to distribute the money elsewhere.

How can the "general duties alone" people resolve the problem? Some might simply assert an unprincipled exception. Jeffrey Friedman, for instance, believes in the "general duties alone" mantra when it comes to nations:

A truly liberal society would encompass all human beings. It would extend any welfare benefits to all humankind, not just to those born within arbitrary borders; and far from prohibiting the importing of "foreign" workers or goods they have produced, or the exporting of jobs to them across national boundaries, it would encourage the free flow of labor, the goods, and capital ...

But he just can't stand the same principle being applied to other special duties. He therefore resorts to this plea:

We would be miserable if we could not treat our friends, spouses, and siblings with special consideration; but is this necessarily true of our conationals?

And what about Kok-Chor Tan? His response is more principled, but not more persuasive. He likes the argument of Robert Goodin that:

Special responsibilities are...assigned merely as an administrative device for discharging our general duties more efficiently.

In other words, we don't really have a special responsibility to our own children. It just happens to be more administratively efficient for me to be responsible for my own children rather than for someone else's. If it weren't for this administrative advantage, then I would have no moral responsibilities toward my own children in particular.

Not only do I think this is false, if people really thought it were true it would have negative consequences. It would demoralise the sense of moral responsibility that people felt toward those closest to them and it would mean, too, that we could be more easily displaced in our responsibilities (e.g. if the state decided it was more efficient to have an "expert" raise a one-year-old child than the child's mother, then why not take the child from the control of the mother?)

The ideological madness of White Ribbon Day

2012-01-18T18:14:00.002+11:00

Unfortunately, the white ribbon day campaign in Australia is gaining momentum. It's being presented to men as a way to signal opposition to domestic violence. But in reality it's a sneaky way to get men to accept a radical feminist ideology.

What is this radical ideology? It's the idea that men use violence against women as a means of imposing patriarchal rule. That leads feminists to emphasise:

that domestic violence is gendered: that it is to be understood as violence committed by men against women
that domestic violence is systemic: that it is part of the norms of a traditional society and is to be found amongst all groups of men and is widely prevalent in society
that a society can rid itself of violence by dismantling traditional gender roles, traditional social norms and by creating a new equal, non-hierarchical and non-patriarchal society

But such claims run up against the following realities:

a significant percentage of violence is committed by women not men (here)
violence is concentrated amongst an underclass and some ethnic groups (e.g. Aborigines) (here and here)
violence is strongly linked to alcoholism, unemployment and homelessness (here)
traditional social norms amongst men did not condone rape or violence against women
women are safer when in relationships with men than when alone (here)
violence against women is not as prevalent as claimed in the false statistics peddled by the white ribbon day campaign (e.g. see here and here)
the shift toward a matriarchal feminist culture has not, so far, led to an increasing respect for women, nor to self-respecting behaviour by women, and has, if anything, encouraged rather than discouraged the rise of a "thug" culture amongst men. (at the end here)

The white ribbon day people have explained their ideological approach in documents at their website. For instance, Stephen Fisher has authored a paper titled From violence to coercive control: renaming men's abuse of women. (It's currently the first paper listed at the site.)

It's an extraordinary document - a kind of ideological madness. Let me give you one example. According to Stephen Fisher we shouldn't understand domestic violence as being about acts of physical violence. If we do this, then we might start to think that non-violent men are innocent of patriarchal control. Fisher complains that,

the focus on physical acts allows a distinction to be made between good and bad men. For example, some people may say that most well-meaning men do not perpetrate physical or sexual violence against women. This allows men to believe that if they are not hitting women, then they are not violent and are not the target of violence prevention efforts. In fact many women victims report that they feel most trapped and fearful when the frequency of physical violence decreases.

According to the patriarchy theory of domestic violence, the violence has to be systemic. That's why Fisher isn't keen on making a distinction between good and bad men and why he favours a broader definition of domestic violence to include:

emotional, sexual, financial and spiritual violence

Yes, now there is even a category of "spiritual violence" against women (no, I don't know what this means).

Fisher also makes very clear the ideological distinctions he wants to draw. He wants us to take a "profeminist" view of domestic violence, which means a belief that,

men’s violence against women happens because individual men are supported to perpetrate this violence by the social context of gendered inequalities in a patriarchal society. Ignoring these inequalities is both a symptom and outcome of seeing men’s violence against women primarily as a medical or individual issue.

So the right approach, according to Fisher, is to see domestic violence as being a product of gender inequality in a patriarchal society. The wrong approach is to see it as a medical or individual issue which he explains as follows:

Many of the ways that men’s violence against women is commonly presented either implicitly or explicitly reinforce the idea that there is something wrong with the perpetrator (and sometimes the family or even the victim) that needs addressing. It is said that he may have a problem with anger, alcohol, communication skills, conflict resolution, childhood trauma, or even have ‘sexist attitudes’.

This way of naming the problem results in solutions that diagnose these perpetrators with some kind of ‘disorder’ or ‘problem’ and then devise a therapeutic intervention to 'fix’ them.

Fisher has other ideas. He believes the fault lies with social norms:

Firstly our dominant culture and everyday social norms support men’s superiority and women’s inferiority. Secondly it is not necessarily the case that men are merely ill-informed. There are distinct advantages for men to continue to hold and act on these beliefs, not the least of which is control over women. So while violence may be perpetrated by individuals this is done within the context of wider social norms.

He doesn't want treatments for those men with anger management issues. He wants men to identify themselves as privileged, with all the loss of moral status that entails:

So men’s violence against women is not simply the action of a bad (or mad) man losing his temper and hitting his ‘loved-one’. Nor is the issue one of men simply needing to develop more respect for women. It is true that perpetrators have little respect for women but the central issue is their desire for control over women rather than their lack of respect. The issue is one of systematic power inequalities and a society that supports men’s entitlement to a range of gender privileges.

White ribbon ideology is designed, ultimately, to get men to assent to the idea that they are privileged oppressors of women. If that is true, then men get to be at the bottom of the totem pole of identity politics. They then have to work on themselves, doing what they can to humbly listen to and learn from those they have oppressed. As Fisher advises in the conclusion to his paper:

men who are committed to supporting this important work must continuously strive to listen to and read the work of feminists who have worked tirelessly for decades for gender equality.

Civic Nationalism 1

2012-01-17T14:59:00.003+11:00

This is another instalment of my e-booklet.

It was once common for national identity to be based on ethnicity. Members of a nation were thought to share some combination of a common ancestry, culture, language, race, religion, customs and history.

John Jay, a founding father of the United States, held to this traditional understanding of national identity. He thought it providential that the US was “one connected, fertile, widespreading country.” He added:

With equal pleasure I have often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people - a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs...This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.

Over time, though, Jay’s traditional nationalism came to be thought illegitimate. Liberals began to take a negative view of ethnicity as something that ought not to matter; therefore, there had to be some other basis for national identity.

And so Western societies shifted gradually toward a policy of civic nationalism. Membership of the nation was to be defined by citizenship, and unity was to be based on a shared commitment to liberal political values and institutions.

One prominent defender of the civic nationalist ideal is Michael Ignatieff. He is a Canadian academic and a former leader of the Liberal Party in that country. He distinguishes a civic from an ethnic nationalism this way:

Ethnic nationalism claims...that an individual's deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen...

According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community.

This is the liberal logic at work. Ethnic nationalism is predetermined (“inherited, not chosen”) and is therefore rejected in favour of a civic nationalism which is thought to be self-determined (“right to shape their own lives”).

But is civic nationalism really a viable replacement for traditional nationalism? There are reasons to think not. Civic nationalism suffers from being indistinct, inconsistent, unstable and shallow.

Indistinct & unstable

People generally like to feel that there is something unique about their national identity. But if identity is based on liberal values and institutions then it won't differ much from country to country. The civic national identity will be much the same in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other Western societies.

That not only makes national identity less special, it also means that it makes less sense to keep to existing national boundaries. If two nations have the same civic national identity, then why not merge together if there are economic or political advantages in doing so? And why should citizenship stop at national boundaries? If I support liberal political values, and being, say, American is defined by such values, then why shouldn’t I consider myself American even if I live elsewhere?

There are liberals who have already drawn these conclusions. Thomas Barnett is a “distinguished scholar” at the University of Tennessee. This is what he had to say about the war on terror:

We stand for a world connected through trust, transparency and trade, while the jihadists want to hijack Islam and disconnect it from all the corruption they imagine is being foisted upon it by globalization...

In that war of ideas, I’d still like to see Lady Liberty standing outside the wire instead of hiding behind it, and here’s why: I don’t have a homeland. My people left that place a long time ago.

I don’t have a homeland because I don’t live in a place - I live an ideal. I live in the only country in the world that’s not named for a location or a tribe but a concept. Officially, we’re known as the United States.

And where are those united states? Wherever there are states united. You join and you’re in, and theoretically everyone’s got an open invitation.

This country began as a collection of 13 misfit colonies, united only by their desire not to be ruled by a distant king.

We’re now 50 members and counting, with our most recent additions (Alaska, Hawaii) not even co-located with the rest, instead constituting our most far-flung nodes in a network that‘s destined to grow dramatically again.

Impossible, you say? Try this one on for size: By 2050, one out of every three American voters is slated to be Hispanic. Trust me, with that electorate, it won’t just be Puerto Rico and post-Castro Cuba joining the club. We’ll need either a bigger flag or smaller stars.

Thomas Barnett believes that America is defined by a liberal ideal. Therefore, being American is not about living in a particular place amongst a particular people. Any other country that wants to sign on to the ideal and become a “united state” can do so, no matter where that country is located.

Barnett has parted company with the vision of America held by the founding father John Jay. Jay, if you remember, stressed how providential it was that America was one connected country:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people - a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs...

Barnett is not alone in drawing out the logic of civic nationalism. Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman, believes that America is exceptional in being universal:

America's "exceptionalism" is just this - while most nations at most times have claimed their own history or culture to be exclusive, America's foundations are not our own - they belong equally to every person everywhere.

That’s not a helpful way of defining your own nation as distinct. First, it’s not true that America is exceptional in holding to a civic nationalism – that is common amongst Western nations. Second, if the foundations of your nation aren’t your own but belong equally to every person everywhere, then why shouldn’t people choose to cross your borders to seek what belongs equally to them?

Rudolph Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, once explained his civic understanding of American identity as follows:

Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of one’s Americanism was not one’s family tree; the test of one’s Americanism was how much one believed in America. Because we’re like a religion really. A secular religion. We believe in ideas and ideals. We’re not one race, we’re many; we’re not one ethnic group, we’re everyone; we’re not one language, we’re all of these people. So what ties us together? We’re tied together by our belief in political democracy, in religious freedom, in capitalism, a free economy where people make their own choices about the spending of their money. We’re tied together because we respect human life, and because we respect the rule of law.

Those are the ideas that make us Americans.

Americans are “everyone” according to Giuliani, or at least everyone who believes in a set of secular ideals. The American political commentator Lawrence Auster wrote in reply to Giuliani:

...having told us the things that don’t make us Americans, he tells us the things that do make us Americans: belief in democracy, freedom, capitalism, and rule of law. But other countries believe in those things too. So how is America different from those other countries? If a person in, say, India believes in democracy, freedom, capitalism, and rule of law, how is he any less an American than you or I or George Washington? And how are we any more American than that Indian? Giuliani has removed everything particular and concrete about America and defined America as a universal belief system, not a country.

Giuliani did not shy away from accepting the logic of his own position. He made this declaration to the United Nations:

Each of your nations - I am certain - has contributed citizens to the United States and to New York. I believe I can take every one of you someplace in New York City, where you can find someone from your country, someone from your village or town, that speaks your language and practices your religion. In each of your lands there are many who are Americans in spirit, by virtue of their commitment to our shared principles.

So how exactly is it distinct to be American? According to Giuliani there are many who are “Americans in spirit” in every country of the world. America is no longer defined as a particular people and place, as a country, in the traditional sense. In Giuliani’s hands American identity becomes a globalist secular religion.

The logic of civic nationalism has been drawn out clearly enough by Professor Peter Spiro. He too recognises that defining American identity in terms of political ideals or values leaves few limits as to who can be considered American:

But here's something that really is new: the underinclusion of members-in-fact outside the territory of the United States.

One of the commenters on my first post pressed the proposition that America is an idea. That's completely consistent with strong civic notions of American citizenship and identity.

At one time, that idea was distinct. No longer. The American idea of constitutional democracy has gone global. That's America's triumph, but it may also be its downfall.

As I ask in the book, if that person in Bangalore wants to take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, on what grounds can we deny him membership?...And what of the child born in Juarez, whose interests and identity will be connected to El Paso, Austin and Washington...but who has the bad luck to have been born a mile on the wrong side of the line?...

So: whatever it means to be American, it's everywhere. But that makes it all the harder to draw the membership line in a meaningful way.

C.S. Lewis & the Natural Law

2012-01-14T15:08:00.001+11:00

There is an appendix to C.S. Lewis's book The Abolition of Man in which Lewis attempts to set out the natural law, in the sense of moral precepts known across different cultures and times. Lewis does a good job of this; of particular interest to traditionalists, he upholds in these laws particular ties of affection, duty and loyalty.

For example, his first natural law is the law of beneficence. But this is divided into a law of general beneficence and a law of special beneficence. Included as examples of special beneficence are these:

'Love thy wife studiously. Gladden her heart all thy life long.' (Ancient Egyptian. ERE v. 481)

'Nothing can ever change the claims of kinship for a right thinking man.' (Anglo-Saxon. Beowulf, 2600)

'I ought not to be unfeeling like a statue but should fulfil both my natural and artificial relations, as a worshipper, a son, a brother, a father, and a citizen.' (Greek. Ibid. 111. ii)

'This first I rede thee: be blameless to thy kindred. Take no vengeance even though they do thee wrong.' (Old Norse. Sigdrifumál, 22)

'The union and fellowship of men will be best preserved if each receives from us the more kindness in proportion as he is more closely connected with us.' (Roman. Cicero. De Off. i. xvi)

'Is it only the sons of Atreus who love their wives? For every good man, who is right-minded, loves and cherishes his own.' (Greek. Homer, Iliad, ix. 340)

'Part of us is claimed by our country, part by our parents, part by our friends.' (Roman. Ibid. i. vii)

'If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith.' (Christian. I Timothy 5:8)

Another natural law is the duty to parents, elders and ancestors:

'Honour thy Father and thy Mother.' (Ancient Jewish. Exodus 20:12)

'To care for parents.' (Greek. List of duties in Epictetus, in. vii)

'When proper respect towards the dead is shown at the end and continued after they are far away, the moral force (tê) of a people has reached its highest point.' (Ancient Chinese. Analects, i. 9)

Another is to children and posterity:

'Nature produces a special love of offspring' (Roman. Cicero, De Off. i. iv,)

'To marry and to beget children.' (Greek. List of duties. Epictetus, in. vii)

An interesting law of nature is what is termed "magnanimity" by Lewis, meaning greatness of mind and heart, a refusal to be petty, a willingness to face danger, and actions for noble purposes. It is the opposite of pusillanimity. It has been defined as follows:

Greatness of mind; that elevation or dignity of soul, which encounters danger and trouble with tranquility and firmness, which raises the possessor above revenge, and makes him delight in acts of benevolence, which makes him disdain injustice and meanness, and prompts him to sacrifice personal ease, interest and safety for the accomplishment of useful and noble objects.

It's interesting that this overlaps considerably with the concept of "praetes" which is often (misleadingly it seems to me) translated as "meekness" or "gentleness" in the Bible. Here are some examples as collected by Lewis:

'There are two kinds of injustice: the first is found in those who do an injury, the second in those who fail to protect another from injury when they can.' (Roman. Cicero, De Off. I. vii)

'They came to the fields of joy, the fresh turf of the Fortunate Woods and the dwellings of the Blessed . . . here was the company of those who had suffered wounds fighting for their fatherland.' (Roman. Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 638-9, 660)

'The Master said, Love learning and if attacked be ready to die for the Good Way.' (Ancient Chinese. Analects, viii. 13)

'Death is better for every man than life with shame.' (Anglo-Saxon. Beowulf, 2890)

Finally, I'd point out that you have to be careful in accepting natural law doctrine. Just because something exists in nature doesn't mean it's right or good. Natural law doctrine has to be either a partial justification ("nature intended us to do x") or else it can be argued for along the lines that an objective good can be discerned by the faculties given to men (e.g. reason, conscience). The Catholic encylopedia also points out that there are natural impulses or tendencies which are conflicting and so have to be harmoniously ordered:

Actions are wrong if, though subserving the satisfaction of some particular need or tendency, they are at the same time incompatible with that rational harmonious subordination of the lower to the higher which reason should maintain among our conflicting tendencies and desires. For example, to nourish our bodies is right; but to indulge our appetite for food to the detriment of our corporal or spiritual life is wrong. Self-preservation is right, but to refuse to expose our life when the well-being of society requires it, is wrong.

To be worthwhile an account of natural law has to be set out intelligently and comprehensively; Lewis's, I think, is likely to be one of the more productive accounts.

Is pride a virtue or a vice?

2012-01-13T13:33:00.001+11:00

Sometimes language fails us. We have a word "pride" that clearly has both positive and negative associations, so much so that it has been held to be both the crown of virtues and the queen of vices. Reduced to a word, we can then be led to either reject it or exalt it, both of which options seem inadequate. Ideally we would develop two clear terms: one to represent pride as a vice, the other pride as a virtue.

Pride as a vice

The Christian tradition tends to emphasise the idea of pride as a vice. It is listed as one of the seven deadly sins, and St Gregory considered it the queen of vices. We are told:

In almost every list, pride (Latin, superbia), or hubris, is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins, and the source of the others.

That's a serious condemnation of pride. But it needs to be remembered that something very specific is being referred to here. Pride as the original deadly sin is understood by St Gregory to be,

that frame of mind in which a man, through the love of his own worth, aims to withdraw himself from subjection to Almighty God, and sets at naught the commands of superiors. It is a species of contempt of God and of those who bear his commission. Regarded in this way, it is of course mortal sin of a most heinous sort. Indeed St. Thomas rates it in this sense as one of the blackest of sins. By it the creature refuses to stay within his essential orbit; he turns his back upon God, not through weakness or ignorance, but solely because in his self-exaltation he is minded not to submit. His attitude has something Satanic in it, and is probably not often verified in human beings.

Most religions are opposed to a state of being in which we are so full of self that nothing else penetrates. The kind of pride described by St Gregory is even worse: it is a lack of humility before God motivated not by blind egoism but by a knowing self-exaltation.

The condemnation of this kind of pride is not unique to Christianity. The ancient world recognised as fatal character flaw in otherwise great men an overreaching pride, one that offended the gods and which brought about one's downfall. Even in Old English there is a term "overmod" which seems to mean something very similar to "hubris" or "overreaching pride".

Understanding the Ancient Greek concept of "hubris" helps us to understand some of the early Christian approaches to virtue and vice:

In ancient Greek, hubris referred to actions that shamed and humiliated the victim for the pleasure or gratification of the abuser...It was most evident in the public and private actions of the powerful and rich. The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist's fall.

Hubris...was also considered the greatest crime of ancient Greek society. The category of acts constituting hubris for the ancient Greeks apparently broadened from the original specific reference to mutilation of a corpse, or a humiliation of a defeated foe, or irreverent "outrageous treatment" in general. It often resulted in fatal retribution or Nemesis. Atë, ancient Greek for "ruin, folly, delusion," is the action performed by the hero or heroine, usually because of his or her hubris, or great pride, that leads to his or her death or down-fall.

There seems to be much in the New Testament which cautions against hubris. To act from a position of power to inflict harm on others is something that the New Testament writers emphasised as a wrong, stressing instead the idea of self-controlled, merciful, benevolent action not motivated by an assertion of power.

So is the lesson then that "God hates pride as the root of all evil"? I think that's an unfortunate message to derive from this, as it strongly condemns not only the negative but also the positive connotations of the word pride. As I suggested earlier, it's a pity that we can't convey the negative associations with a particular term like hubris, or vainglory or vanity or narcissism.

Pride as a virtue

The positive side of pride has been described as follows:

With a positive connotation, pride refers to a satisfied sense of attachment toward one's own or another's choices and actions, or toward a whole group of people, and is a product of praise, independent self-reflection, or a fulfilled feeling of belonging.

Imagine a man who sets out to build a house. He shows great diligence, skill and perseverance and when the job is done, and done well, he has a momentary feeling of pride in his achievement. This is pride that is aroused by having worked hard and well to fulfil a useful task. Is that a deadly sin? I don't see why we should treat it as such - not unless it leads to a vain, closed-off egotism.

Imagine too a boy who is at an age at which he is developing his self-identity. He becomes interested in the life of his forebears and what they achieved and feels a sense of pride in family - one which helps to motivate him to develop the positive qualities that will enable him to contribute positively to the life of his family.

Perhaps too this boy starts to identify with his community, and he feels a sense of pride in the higher achievements of his community. This might help to bring him to a particular love for the great works of art and architecture that are part of his tradition; it might help to motivate him to uphold the standards achieved within the life of the community; it might also lead him to a closer sense of belonging and connectedness to a particular community. A deadly sin? Surely not.

This boy might also feel a sense of masculine pride, one which might make him feel ashamed to act weakly or contemptibly or basely.

Aristotle felt that pride was the crown of the virtues because added to other virtues it strengthened them. But Aristotle was careful to distinguish pride from hubris which he thought aimed:

to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater

Again, note the connection to certain New Testament themes, such as the distinction between justice and revenge, an opposition to achieving superiority by mistreating or disregarding others, a lack of mercy etc. Perhaps the classical and the biblical are not always as far apart as we think.

Anyway, here is the question that has to be asked. In contemporary Christian culture is it more important, to get the balance right, to emphasise the positive connotations of pride or the negative ones? I'm happy to hear the arguments of those who believe otherwise, but it seems to me that it's more important right now in our demoralised, alienated and guilt-ridden Western societies to emphasise the positive aspects of pride, the ones which belong to a healthy and fully-developed personality.

Ch.5 Nation & ethny

2012-01-08T19:44:00.008+11:00

If we are to follow liberalism consistently, then whatever is predetermined rather than self-determined will be thought to impede our autonomy and will have to be made not to matter.

Our ethnicity is formed from a number of unchosen, inherited qualities: from ancestry, kinship, race, culture, language, history, religion and customs. It is something we are born into (an “accident of birth” in liberal terminology) rather than something we self-create.

We can therefore expect that the liberal attitude to ethnicity will follow the same pattern as the liberal attitude to sex distinctions and to the traditional family. Ethnicity will be described negatively as a restriction using terms like fetter or prison or chain; it will be held to be something the individual needs to be liberated from; to make this liberation possible, ethnicity will be described as a social construct or as an imagined tie rather than a natural one; some will wish to abolish it outright, whilst others will attempt to make it open to self-determination by making it more flexible, diverse and self-selecting. Those defending ethnicity will be criticised in moral terms as being bigoted or prejudiced or xenophobic.

This issue touches also on national identity. The traditional nation was often based on a shared ethnicity. Therefore, liberals have in practice rejected traditional nationalism in favour of a civic nationalism. Civic nationalism is the idea that what binds a nation together is not ethnicity but a citizenship based largely on a shared commitment to liberal political values or institutions.

Consistency

The most consistent liberals will reject both sex distinctions and ethnic ones. An example is David Fiore who was quoted earlier as insisting that,

Any time a human being chooses to describe themselves as anything but a "human being", liberalism has been thwarted.

... The liberal subject is always merely that - he or she can have no group affiliation, no "sexual orientation", no gender in fact!

For Fiore, both gender identity and group affiliation are impermissible under the terms of liberalism.

Kang Youwei, the Chinese intellectual who tried to import Western ideas into China in the 1890s, also followed through with the liberal idea consistently. Kang held that autonomy ought to be thought of as a scientific principle of society:

he claimed, for example, that basic principles such as “human beings have the right of autonomy” and that all societies should be organized on the basis of "human equality" were all "geometric axioms".

This led him to prefer a society in which sex distinctions were abolished:

men and women will be equal and everyone will be independent and free. They will be dressed in similar attire and hold similar jobs, and there will be no difference between male and female.

Here we have the familiar liberal claim that individuals need to be liberated from a predetermined quality like their sex. Kang applied the same logic to ethnicity; in his ideal society,

there will be no individual or group differences, there will be no separate nations...all will be equal and free

...he argued for the eventual abolition of state boundaries and the unification of all nations on earth...racial differences would gradually disappear when "all races will merge into one”

Across the spectrum

It’s notable that liberal ideas on ethnicity are held by those on both the left and right of the political spectrum. The right-wing libertarian Ayn Rand believed that,

What matters is what you accept by choice, not what you are connected with through the accident of your ancestry.

Ancestry, being predetermined (an accident of birth), is held not to matter.

The left-wing English musician, Billy Bragg, agrees that ethnicity should be made not to matter:

The multicultural society would be one in which ethnicity, like class, no longer matters.

The right-wing former PM of Australia, John Howard, disliked multicultural programmes because they,

simply ensnare individuals in ethnic communities.

The assumption is that ethnicity is a negative restriction on the individual, hence the term “ensnare”.

John Howard’s one-time opponent, Mark Latham, a former leader of the Labor Party, also warned against preserving traditional ethnic identities as they might lead us to be "pigeon-holed into past habits and identities" ("pigeon-holed" being another negative, restrictive term applied to ethnicity). He advocated instead a self-selecting concept of identity, one involving individuals “picking and choosing from a range of cultural influences.”

Paul Kingsnorth is critical of his fellow leftists for taking the liberal view on ethnicity:

For longer than a century, sections of the idealistic left have dreamt of a world made up...of "global citizens" casting off the chains of geography and nationality

Kingsnorth recognises here the basic liberal attitude held by sections of the left: traditional nationality is held to be limiting, a "chain," to be thrown off in favour of globalism.

If we go back to the right, we find the views of Augusto Zimmermann. He chooses to criticise multiculturalism for seeing human beings as “organically integrated into their ethnic groups” rather than as “free individual citizens”. He is worried that an individual might be “regarded as emotionally and psychologically connected with his or her ethnic group” which could reinforce the idea that a person’s character is “predetermined”.

We are not, in Zimmermann's view, allowed to be connected to, or integrated in, our ethnic group as that might predetermine who we are thought to be.

A left-wing Australian academic, Mary Kalantzis, wants to make identity more self-determining:

Instead of a nation as it might be represented through some 'distinctively Australian' essence, the essence of a postnationalist common purpose is creative and productive life of boundary crossing, multiple identities, difficult dialogues, and the continuous hybrid reconstruction of ourselves. This is the new reality of Australian identity, multicultural and multilingual.

In case you missed it amidst the academic language, Mary Kalantzis believes that the very purpose of Australian society is to self-determine our identities. That requires fluidity (boundary crossing), multiplicity (multiple identities) and self-selection (the continuous hybrid reconstruction of ourselves).

An American academic, Stephen Kautz, is a supporter of classical liberalism. He describes the classical liberal attitude toward communal identity as follows:

We have been taught by our classical liberal ancestors to think of ourselves as free individuals above all, rather than as children or parishioners or citizens, or as members of a racial or ethnic group - or, indeed, as members of any other communities...

...the idea of community is always somewhat suspect for thoughtful liberals

... there are no natural bonds between human beings, and so there is no natural community. Indeed, the family is not simply natural, according to some of the founders of liberalism.

Here we have the denial that ties of ethnicity, or family for that matter, are natural, as well as the belief that people are liberated to become free individuals by rejecting an ethnic or national identity.

Sukrit Sabhlok is also a classical liberal. He once explained the classical liberal view on nationalism to me in these words:

Mark Richardson wonders where liberalism stands on the nation state. The short answer, I think, is that classical liberals recognise the concept of “country” as an artificial construct that is not inherently something of value to be preserved...To take the line that there is something inherently special about being Australian is to place undue emphasis on a word.

Again we have the idea that a national community is a mere construct rather than a natural entity with real meaning.

Strobe Talbott, who served in President Bill Clinton’s administration, had a similar idea:

Here is one optimist's reason for believing unity will prevail... within the next hundred years...nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single global authority... A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century - "citizen of the world" - will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st... All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances...

For Talbott, countries are just “social arrangements” (i.e. constructs) and therefore can be made obsolete in favour of a world government.

Economist and writer Philippe Legrain prefers to reimagine the idea of community:

Misplaced nostalgia for the erosion of the coerced local communities of old – the flipside of which is liberation from the tyranny of geography, social immobility and the straitjacket of imposed national uniformity – should not blind us to the richness and vibrancy of the new chosen communities, be they groups of friends from different backgrounds, multinational workplaces, environmental campaigns that span the globe, or online networks of people with a common interest. Solidarity is alive and well when British volunteer doctors treat AIDS sufferers in Africa, when friends take over many of the roles that family members once performed (or failed to perform), and when the membership of pressure groups never ceases to rise...

It is Legrain’s view that we have been liberated from traditional “coerced” communities in favour of new “chosen” communities. What can these self-selecting new communities be? Not family as that is “coerced” and not nation or ethny (which are thought of in negative, restrictive terms – note the use of the word “straitjacket”). But they can be groups of friends, activist groups and multinational workplaces. Those are permissible forms of solidarity in a liberal society, particularly if they are diverse and boundary-crossing.

There is an internet writer in Australia who goes by the name Osmond. He is a social democrat (a left-liberal) and contributes to a Fabian website. In a post titled “What defines who we are?” he tells us that he is tempted to adopt a stance,

of individual identity, that I’m just “me”, I’m not locked into the confines of my heritage or culture.

When I wrote a post about this, Osmond left this comment:

people are individuals who are not trapped within some rigid prism of culture or ethnicity. We may be influenced by it but in the end we define who we are.

I have a sense of communal identity. That is my political beliefs, a universal social democratic viewpoint...

This, clearly, is the liberal attitude to ethnicity. We have ethnic identity being described in negative, limiting terms (“locked,” “confines,” “trapped,” “rigid prism”) as well as an insistence that identity must be self-defined. For Osmond, the best form of self-defining identity is a political one: he identifies with a form of liberalism itself (social democracy).

Finally, it’s interesting to look at the lyrics of a proposed new English anthem called England Forevermore. The anthem attempts to inspire feelings of patriotic solidarity, but it doesn’t entirely escape the influence of liberal ideas:

I am England, England is inside of me.
I am England, England is what I want her to be,
I am England, I am English, I am England to my core,
And wherever you may find me, you'll find England.

The anthem does, it is true, build up the idea of a communal identity (I am England to my core). But at the same time it insists that this identity is subjective and self-defining (England is inside of me, England is what I want her to be). The anthem follows the option of reimagining ethnic or national identity to fit in better with liberal first principles.

Bolt

What I have tried to show is that the liberal view of ethnicity is to be found across the political spectrum. It is held by those on the left and right, by social democrats, libertarians and classical liberals.

To underline this point, I’d like to look at the attitudes of Andrew Bolt, a prominent Australian journalist. For many years he has been at the most right-wing end of the political mainstream in Australia. And yet he clearly shares the basic liberal view when it comes to ethnicity and national identity.

Take, for instance, the column Bolt wrote about a tribe of Australian Aborigines who wanted an important historic artefact returned to them. Bolt thought the Aborigines were guilty of forgetting,

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race. In this New Racism, we're driven back into tribes.

Similarly, Bolt doesn’t want the National Gallery to recognise ethnic distinctions by having a separate category for Aboriginal art. He believes that art is supposed to “transcend differences of race and country” and that it is therefore wrong for the National Gallery to “drive us back into our racial prisons”.

Bolt has chosen to apply a negative, limiting term to ethnicity (“prisons”). He has also followed the usual liberal pattern by insisting that our identity should be self-determined (“free to make our own identities”).

Bolt has also given this more general account of his attitude to ethnic and national identity:

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

...That's why I believe we can choose and even renounce our ethnic identity, because I have done that myself.

He considers ethnicity, nationality and race to be a mere accident of birth (predetermined); he prefers a model of society in which a communal identity is either chosen or renounced altogether in favour of identifying with ourselves alone as individuals.

He is serious about reducing identity to an atomised, personal one. He is the son of Dutch immigrants and so he once thought of himself as having a Dutch identity. But he tells us that,

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

And he has written of one mixed race Aboriginal activist that,

She could call herself English, Afghan, Aboriginal, Australian or just a take-me-as-I-am human being called Tara June Winch. Race irrelevant.

Bolt’s is a radical position rather than a conservative one. It is radically individualistic and to some degree narcissistic: we are expected to ditch the larger and meaningful traditions we belong to in order to identify with ourselves alone.

Civic nationalism

It was once common for national identity to be based on ethnicity. Members of a nation were thought to share some combination of a common ancestry, culture, language, race, religion, customs and history.

John Jay, a founding father of the United States, held to this traditional understanding of national identity. He thought it providential that the US was “one connected, fertile, widespreading country.” He added:

With equal pleasure I have often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people - a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs...This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties.

Ethnic nationalism claims...that an individual's deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen...

According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community.

We stand for a world connected through trust, transparency and trade, while the jihadists want to hijack Islam and disconnect it from all the corruption they imagine is being foisted upon it by globalization...

In that war of ideas, I’d still like to see Lady Liberty standing outside the wire instead of hiding behind it, and here’s why: I don’t have a homeland. My people left that place a long time ago.

I don’t have a homeland because I don’t live in a place - I live an ideal. I live in the only country in the world that’s not named for a location or a tribe but a concept. Officially, we’re known as the United States.

And where are those united states? Wherever there are states united. You join and you’re in, and theoretically everyone’s got an open invitation.

This country began as a collection of 13 misfit colonies, united only by their desire not to be ruled by a distant king.

We’re now 50 members and counting, with our most recent additions (Alaska, Hawaii) not even co-located with the rest, instead constituting our most far-flung nodes in a network that‘s destined to grow dramatically again.

Impossible, you say? Try this one on for size: By 2050, one out of every three American voters is slated to be Hispanic. Trust me, with that electorate, it won’t just be Puerto Rico and post-Castro Cuba joining the club. We’ll need either a bigger flag or smaller stars.

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people - a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs...

Barnett is not alone in drawing out the logic of civic nationalism. Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman, believes that America is exceptional in being universal:

America's "exceptionalism" is just this - while most nations at most times have claimed their own history or culture to be exclusive, America's foundations are not our own - they belong equally to every person everywhere.

That’s not a helpful way of defining your own nation as distinct. First, it’s not true that America is exceptional in holding to a civic nationalism – that is common amongst Western nations. Second, if the foundations of your nation aren’t your own but belong equally to every person everywhere, then why shouldn’t people choose to cross your borders to seek what belongs equally to them?

Rudolph Guiliani, a former mayor of New York City, once explained his civic understanding of American identity as follows:

Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of one’s Americanism was not one’s family tree; the test of one’s Americanism was how much one believed in America. Because we’re like a religion really. A secular religion. We believe in ideas and ideals. We’re not one race, we’re many; we’re not one ethnic group, we’re everyone; we’re not one language, we’re all of these people. So what ties us together? We’re tied together by our belief in political democracy, in religious freedom, in capitalism, a free economy where people make their own choices about the spending of their money. We’re tied together because we respect human life, and because we respect the rule of law.

Those are the ideas that make us Americans.

Americans are “everyone” according to Guiliani, or at least everyone who believes in a set of secular ideals. The American political commentator Lawrence Auster wrote in reply to Giuliani:

...having told us the things that don’t make us Americans, he tells us the things that do make us Americans: belief in democracy, freedom, capitalism, and rule of law. But other countries believe in those things too. So how is America different from those other countries? If a person in, say, India believes in democracy, freedom, capitalism, and rule of law, how is he any less an American than you or I or George Washington? And how are we any more American than that Indian? Giuliani has removed everything particular and concrete about America and defined America as a universal belief system, not a country.

Giuliani did not shy away from accepting the logic of his own position. He made this declaration to the United Nations:

Each of your nations - I am certain - has contributed citizens to the United States and to New York. I believe I can take every one of you someplace in New York City, where you can find someone from your country, someone from your village or town, that speaks your language and practices your religion. In each of your lands there are many who are Americans in spirit, by virtue of their commitment to our shared principles.

So how exactly is it distinct to be American? According to Guiliani there are many who are “Americans in spirit” in every country of the world. America is no longer defined as a particular people and place, as a country, in the traditional sense. In Guiliani’s hands American identity becomes a globalist secular religion.

The logic of civic nationalism has been drawn out clearly by Professor Peter Spiro. He too recognises that defining American identity in terms of political ideals or values leaves few limits as to who can be considered American:

But here's something that really is new: the underinclusion of members-in-fact outside the territory of the United States.

One of the commenters on my first post pressed the proposition that America is an idea. That's completely consistent with strong civic notions of American citizenship and identity.

At one time, that idea was distinct. No longer. The American idea of constitutional democracy has gone global. That's America's triumph, but it may also be its downfall.

As I ask in the book, if that person in Bangalore wants to take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, on what grounds can we deny him membership?...And what of the child born in Juarez, whose interests and identity will be connected to El Paso, Austin and Washington...but who has the bad luck to have been born a mile on the wrong side of the line?...

So: whatever it means to be American, it's everywhere. But that makes it all the harder to draw the membership line in a meaningful way.

If you define a national identity by an idea, then anyone anywhere can potentially belong to that nation. It starts to be thought arbitrary to limit membership of a nation to people who happen to live within a line drawn on a map. You get complaints, like that of Professor Spiro, about the “underinclusion of members-in-fact” living outside the territory of that country. The nexus between land and people is broken.

And that leads to an unstable form of national existence. If anyone who is willing to commit to a political idea is "in spirit" a member of my nation, then why won't it be thought right for them to migrate, in whatever numbers, to take up citizenship? How, in principle, is a transforming mass immigration to be argued against?

And if national identity is the same across nations, then why not merge nations into larger regional entities? Why not create superstates which give you more political and economic clout on the world stage?

Regional states

The creation of a regional superstate is already underway. The European Union continues to grow and to claim greater amounts of sovereignty over member states.

Are there any limits to the growth of the EU? Not if you follow through with the logic of civic nationalism. All that matters, according to that logic, is that a particular country is committed to a set of liberal political institutions and values. If they meet the test, they're in.

Stephen Kinzer is a former bureau chief of the New York Times. He believes that there are many countries which could reach a satisfactory level "of political and economic democracy" to qualify for EU membership:

Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and possibly Russia could also become candidates. In the distant future, so might Israel, a Palestinian state, or even Morocco.

Why not Morocco or a Palestinian state? They might not be part of Europe or populated by Europeans, and they might be very dissimilar to the historic European nations in their history, religion and languages. But if they meet certain political criteria then, under the rules of civic nationalism, they could potentially join. The English could find themselves subject to the same regional superstate as the Moroccans.

That outcome would sit well with David Miliband, a leading Labour politician in the UK. In 2007, as the then foreign secretary, he called for the EU to expand outside of Europe. He argued for new EU trade associations,

that could gradually bring the countries of the Mahgreb (North Africa), the Middle East and Eastern Europe in line with the single market, not as an alternative to membership, but potentially as a step towards it.

In what way, then, are national boundaries meaningful when the logic of civic nationalism is applied?

As you might expect, the European politicians are not alone in looking to create a regional superstate. In 2003 an Australian Senate committee recommended the formation of a Pacific Economic and Political Community (PEPC). The report of this committee proposed the establishment of:

a Pacific community which will eventually have one currency, one labour market, common strong budgetary and fiscal discipline, democratic and ethical governance, shared defence and security arrangements, common laws and resolve in fighting crime, and, health, welfare, education and environmental goals.

It was intended that Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and 14 smaller Pacific nations would sign up to this Pacific version of the EU.

In 2005, the Australian Labor Party put forward a policy paper which again supported the creation of a Pacific Community. This policy paper advocated the establishment of a Pacific Parliament, a Pacific Court, a Pacific Common Market, a common currency and military integration.

Hugh White, a professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, approved of the plan, writing that,

Closer Pacific regionalism - even eventual confederation - may be an idea whose time has come.

Kevin Rudd, later to be Prime Minister but then shadow minister for foreign affairs, boasted that the Labor Party was "leading the government on the creation of a Pacific Community."

So there have been significant political forces in Australia which have pushed for the integration of 14 very different countries into a single Pacific Community. And if this community were ever to get off the ground, there is no reason why its borders wouldn't shift again.

Brainwashing Norway

2012-01-07T12:59:00.003+11:00

See, documentaries can be fun. I've just watched one called Brainwashing Norway. It's brilliant. The Norwegian who made it, Harald Eia, seems to be a genial sort of guy, but alert, intellectually curious and quick-witted (caveat: all I really know about him is that he's a comedian with a sociology degree).

Unfortunately, the video takes a while to load on the internet. So I'll give a quick rundown of what happens.

It goes like this. Harald Eia has been brought up in a society which prides itself on "gender equality" which is understood to mean that sex distinctions shouldn't matter anymore. He himself has largely accepted this view; he tells us at one point that he doesn't treat his daughters as girls but as people (his daughters roll their eyes).

But he can't help but notice that sex distinctions do still matter in Norway, even though his country is ranked as the most gender equal in the world. For instance, Norwegian men and women are more likely, rather than less likely, to choose distinct occupations: 90% of nurses are female and 90% of engineers are men.

The Norwegian government has implemented programmes to make the balance more even, but they have had only a small and temporary influence on what men and women choose to do. So Eia starts to wonder if there might be innate differences between men and women.

He decides to interview some Norwegian academics to see what they think about this possibility. This is where the fun starts. These academics dress as if they are student radicals, but they are, in reality, staunch defenders of the state ideology. When he asks about the idea of innate differences, it's as if he's put a grenade into them.

This starts at 7.25 with an academic called Cathrine Egeland. She looks perplexed when asked if there might be biological differences between men and women that explain different occupational choices and she declares herself uninterested. Another academic, Joergen Lorenzten, then claims that research showing differences in the male and female brain is old-fashioned and that modern research shows that everything about men and women apart from the genitalia, hair and breasts is the same. He states that the interests, feelings, capacities and intelligence of men and women are identical.

So why then are men more interested in technical fields than women? The Norwegian academics give the stock answer that it has to do with the way that girls and boys are treated (i.e. that it is a social construct). A couple of strikingly female Norwegian women then try to persuade us that sex distinctions are produced by the different way that people address baby boys and girls.

Eia asks the academic Joergen Lorenzten if people are so "mouldable" that there are societies where men and women have the same interests (12:57). Lorenzten replies,

I feel that this is almost the basic theorem. We are, as you say, mouldable. There are no limits to what humans can do - in relation to what's important. And that is behaviour and emotionality.

To his credit, Eia decides to get some more information - this time from outside Norway. He travels to meet Professor Richard Lippa who has done a large-scale survey comparing occupational choices of men and women across 53 different countries. The Norwegian academic Lorenzten laughs when he hears of this plan to meet Lippa; he tells Eia that Americans are poor at doing academic research.

But Eia flies off to America regardless. Professor Lippa tells him that across the world there are the same differences in occupational choices. Professor Lippa does allow that culture might play a role in these choices, but believes that the differences are too consistent across all nations to be entirely a product of culture.

Next stop is Professor Trond Diseth, a child psychiatrist. Professor Diseth states that boys and girls show a preference for masculine or feminine toys from the age of 9 months. The professor believes that gender behaviour is a product of a biological disposition which is then influenced by culture. He strongly rejects the claims of Lorenzten that the research showing biological differences is old-fashioned.

Then we're off to England to meet Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. He has done research on newborn babies and found differences in what holds the gaze of boys and girls, i.e. before any cultural influence is possible. Baron-Cohen has also researched the effects of exposure to testosterone in the womb and found that this correlates to language and social development; also, that girls who are exposed to unusually high amounts of testosterone exhibit a preference for masculine toys; and that children aged 8 who were exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb have a higher level of interest in systems - in understanding how things work.

Eia returns to Norway to confront the Norwegian academics with this information (33.10). He asks Cathrine Egeland (who looks a bit like Ellen deGeneres) "What is your scientific basis to say that biology plays no part in the two genders' choice of work?" She replies,

My scientific basis? I have what you would call a theoretical basis. There's no room for biology in there for me. I feel that the social sciences should challenge thinking that is based on the differences between humans being biological. (34.50)

That's a bit like saying "I'm not interested in the truth, I'm interested in getting an outcome that I consider to be the moral one." Note too that liberals like to claim that they are the ones who are for science, but in this case it's the liberal Cathrine Egeland who is rejecting the way that science challenges her political beliefs ("there is no room for biology in there for me").

Lorenzten takes a different approach. He queries why scientists would be interested in finding biological differences:

The fascinating thing with this science is why they are so concerned with the biological origin to gender. Why this frenetic concern?

Lorenzten clearly thinks it's a bit beyond the pale to be researching biological distinctions between men and women. Eia's response is that he didn't think the overseas researchers did have a "frenetic concern" as they all recognised a mixed origin to sex distinctions: part cultural, part biological. Eia believes that it's the Norwegians who are frenetic in seeing everything as cultural.

It's interesting to see the liberal academics in Norway so discomfited when they are challenged in their views. You can tell that it doesn't happen to them often, that they inhabit an intellectual world where their own views are the orthodox ones.

Do Australian resources belong to Africans as a right?

2012-01-04T17:06:00.004+11:00

I'm still reading Kok-Chor Tan's book, Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice.

In this book Kok-Chor Tan puts the case for "comprehensive liberalism" against the "political liberalism" of John Rawls. It's a dispute between two varieties of liberalism.

Rawls's liberalism appears to be the less radical of the two options. As Kok-Chor Tan describes it, Rawls wants to establish a "law of peoples" - one which would govern the way nations act toward each other. Rawls doesn't seek to impose the full liberal programme in establishing his international protocols. He is willing to tolerate the existence of hierarchcial, non-liberal societies (on certain conditions) and he doesn't insist on the same "distributive justice" (equal distribution of resources) on a global level that he wants to establish within the Western liberal nations.

Kok-Chor Tan believes Rawls is selling out in making these concessions. His key argument is significant. He rejects the idea that liberals should tolerate non-liberal understandings of distributive justice, as toleration is only a value inasmuch as it serves the cause of autonomy. Given that autonomy is undermined by social or economic inequality, liberals should therefore opt not for tolerance but for egalitarian redistribution:

For the comprehensive liberal, on the other hand, the toleration principle is derived from the more fundamental liberal commitment to individual autonomy, and inasmuch as autonomy is a posteriori underminable by social or economic inequalities, he or she will insist on some principle of distributive justice, disagreements over the content of this notwithstanding.

That might seem drily academic, but it is significant in a number of ways. First, it helps to explain why liberals are so committed to the principle of equality. If you believe that the highest good is autonomy, then it will seem unjust if some people have more resources (money, power, status) to exercise autonomy than others. So you might well then be committed to "distributive justice" (taking resources from some people to give them to others).

But there is no stopping the logic of this principle. Consider what it leads to when it comes to foreign aid. Rawls believes that wealthier nations have a humanitarian duty to use some of their resources to assist poorer nations. Kok-Chor Tan is strongly opposed to this view. He believes that the resources of wealthier nations belong to the poorer nations as a matter of justice and therefore as a right:

it makes an immense difference whether wealth redistribution between countries is conceived as a matter of humanity or justice...treating duties between countries as a matter of justice...reminds us that the crucial issue is ultimately that of rightful ownership rather than that of humanitarian contribution.

He quotes another liberal (Barry) to underline this point:

...if some share of resources is justly owed to a country, then it is (even before it has been actually transferred) as much that country's as it is now normally thought that what a country normally produces belongs to that country.

Kok-Chor Tan is serious about this. He argues that even though this is a liberal principle, the non-liberal countries are likely to accept it, as most of them are non-Western nations who would benefit materially:

Accordingly, because non-liberal societies tend to be in reality the less well-off societies compared to liberal ones, they stand to gain from an egalitarian global theory and therefore...will readily endorse this ideal.

And the Western nations? Kok-Chor Tan believes that they will have the intellectual compensation of seeing their beloved liberal ideology put in place globally. Liberal states, he writes,

are to accept global institutional arrangements that will call on them to transfer resources, which they have taken for granted as rightfully theirs, to less endowed countries.

...liberal states sacrifice some of their GNP, but get a global system of rights consistent with their moral philosophy.

These proposals would have a particularly deep effect on Australia. One of the specific suggestions made by the comprehensive liberals is this:

Pogge, for instance, proposes a global resources tax (GRT) that will tax better endowed countries for extracting natural resources in their own countries.

Another idea is that there should be "technology transfers": that technology produced in one country belongs by right to a less well-endowed country.

All of this goes to show that there is always a more radical liberalism. There will always be those who want to implement the theory more consistently.

It's not difficult to see how Kok-Chor Tan's own version of liberalism could be trumped. If the moral course of action really is to level social and economic conditions between individuals, so that no-one is privileged in their autonomy; and if this means that the resources of one individual belong by right to someone less well-endowed; then why bother at all with property rights?

Why should the guy up the road end up with more money because his dad worked hard and left him and his family a big inheritance? Under Kok-Chor Tan's approach, part of that inheritance belongs by right to me as a matter of justice. I have a claim to it, even though neither I nor anyone in my family did anything to produce that wealth.

I would much rather live in a society with a degree of inequality, but in which people were able to set about producing wealth for themselves, their own families and their own communities, rather than one which insisted on redistribution as a right.

It's true that absolute poverty in some countries is a serious issue to be tackled, and one which unduly diminishes the quality of life for those experiencing it, but that needs to be addressed by carefully targeting aid (so as not to make things worse) rather than handing resources over as a right to be used for whatever purposes, useful or not, the rulers of that society have for it.

The utopian family

2012-01-02T20:35:00.003+11:00

The final section of the chapter on family of my e-book.

Various thinkers over the years have attempted to envisage a utopian family life. Their aim has been to imagine an ideal family system, one that recasts family relationships to best reflect the principle of individual autonomy.

Aldous Huxley was an interesting intellectual figure of the twentieth century who drew on a range of philosophies in his works. He wrote about a utopian society, that of the Palanese, in his novel Island, published in 1962. The Palanese family system is clearly based on the principle of autonomy. The Palanese do not raise their children in a nuclear family but through Mutual Adoption Clubs (MACs). These clubs were made up of twenty couples who together looked after 50 or more children. The children would not stay with any particular couple but move about.

According to the guide to the island, the new family system was superior to the traditional “bottled up” nuclear family because it produced,

An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family.

In this utopian family the ties of kinship have been broken. Children are no longer raised by their biological parents. That makes sense under the terms of autonomy theory as it means that the family unit is no longer biologically predetermined (“compulsory”), but is self-determined (“voluntary”).

This “liberation” from ties of kinship was also a feature of the utopian new family imagined by Germaine Greer in her influential work The Female Eunuch. Greer suggested that children should be raised in a "rambling" family structure on communal farms, which the parents would visit "when circumstances permitted." Some parents might "live there for quite long periods, as long as we wanted to." Greer didn't think it necessary that her child should "know that I was his womb-mother".

The relationship between parent and child was once again to be a voluntary, flexible, open, non-biological one.

In the 1890s, a Chinese intellectual by the name of Kang Youwei set out to modernise China along Western lines. He wanted to introduce not only Western science but also a philosophy of individual autonomy:

...he proclaimed the equality of humanity as well as a notion of individual autonomy.

His vision of family life has been described as follows:

He was perhaps the most influential politico-philosophical writer of the 1890s in China ... Although Kang had not yet formulated the principles of his utopian vision by the 1880s, many of his radical notions were already developed.

Marriages should be freely contracted and subject to change; children should be raised in public nurseries with no filial obligations (nor would parents have obligations toward their children)...

So family relationships were to be flexible (subject to change); children were to be raised outside of the family; and parents were to have no obligations toward their children (or vice versa).

In the 1840s, John Humphrey Noyes established his utopian Oneida Community of several hundred people in the United States.

Noyes saw himself as an enlightened, progressive thinker, committed to freedom, equality and feminism (he mixed together science and the Bible as sources of authority for his theories).

Once again, ties of kinship weren’t allowed at Oneida. Children were allowed to remain with their biological mothers for 15 months for the purposes of breastfeeding. After that they were to be raised by experts and rotated at night between different members of the community according to a principle of non-attachment.

And that is the trade-off. If you want inclusive, open, flexible and self-determined relationships – relationships that can easily be changed or substituted – then you won’t want deep attachments to form, not even the natural attachment between mother and child.

But the question has to be asked whether it is really non-attachment that we want when it comes to our closest relationships.

The Oneida experiment ended when a generation of children was born and the parents lobbied to be allowed to marry and form stable family units. The parents ultimately chose attachment over radical autonomy.

Fried art

2012-01-02T13:30:00.001+11:00

Sir Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) is a big name artist here in Australia; one of his paintings was purchased last year for $5.4 million. So it's noteworthy that a Melbourne artist, Andy Wear, has fried a sketch by Nolan and sold it on ebay. Wear claims that he was inspired to do so by a dream:

"In the dream I had an exhibition of drawings which had all been crumbed and deep-fried. I'd never seen anything like that before," Wear said.

Art has lost its way, has it not?

Fathers matter

2011-12-30T15:35:00.005+11:00

Katherine Baldwin is 41 and is unmarried and childless. She has written a piece for the Daily Mail on the difficulties of dating men when the biological clock is ticking loudly. In her piece she writes:

It seems the trend to postpone motherhood till later has produced an army of women in their late 30s and early 40s who, like me, wonder if they’ve left it too late. We had succeeded in our careers and now we were ready for a family, but no one informed our ageing ovaries of the plan. We thought we could have it all, but statistics tell us that not all of us can.

That's an important point to make, particularly when one in five British women are reaching age 45 without having had children. And I have no doubt that putting careers and independence first is part of the problem. But there are other reasons why women end up childless, reasons which Katherine Baldwin discusses at her own website (more of which later).

Katherine Baldwin

My wife has two female friends who are both beautiful and feminine women, but who have remained childless. One of these women chose obviously unsuitable men for boyfriends right through her 30s. The other didn't go out with men.

I've had a chance to get to know these women and the problem isn't really a desire to remain independent. Rather, it's that they weren't able to overcome problematic relationships with their fathers.

I've noticed too that the women at my workplace who marry well and in a timely way seem to have close and affectionate ties with their fathers.

It seems that fathers matter. The work we put into our relationships with our daughters has long-term consequences.

Katherine Baldwin explains her difficulties in partnering partly in terms of an absent father:

I seem to be one of those women who craves intimacy and affection with a man but is so scared of it that she chooses people who aren’t up for it or ready for it or she sabotages relationships with anyone who is. This pattern seems to be common with women of “absent” fathers...

She writes also that:

my tendency to choose inappropriate or unattainable partners is definitely the most concerning at this stage in my life...

The above quotations also chime with something I read a few weeks back in the Mail on Sunday’s You Magazine about daughters of absent fathers. It said that “as adults, women with absent fathers are often torn between longing for a committed, loving relationship and a fear of having one in case the man they love abandons them as their father did. It is only when they realise what they are doing that they can move on and have a healthy relationship.”

...For many years, I’ve had far too many boxes that a potential partner had to tick and I’ve found fault in many a boyfriend. I’d always concluded they weren’t right for me. I’m finally realising that maybe my tick boxes and fault-finding were my ways of avoiding commitment – the commitment I so craved but was so terrified of.

That's not to say that other factors might not be involved. When women are told that their 20s are for "freedom" rather than for family formation, they are more at liberty to choose "inappropriate or unattainable" partners - men who push "sexy" buttons rather than "potential husband/father" ones. And pickiness seems to be a part of our natures - we build up idealised, romantic images of our soul mate that are difficult for people to measure up to in real life. (That's one of the problems with leaving family formation too late - we are often so driven to relationships in our early 20s that the pickiness is overruled - but later on in life it can take control).

Katherine Baldwin's career has been a glamorous one: she has travelled extensively overseas as a correspondent. But she is honest in discussing her mixed feelings about it. There are aspects of travel and life overseas that she has enjoyed, but she has also found it exhausting and unsettling. And it is not career itself from which she derives higher meaning:

I think relationship is key to addressing that sense of emptiness some of us feel. And I’m not just talking about getting ourselves a partner...For me, it’s about my relationship with myself, my relationship with something greater than myself (or God as I like to call Him) and then, once those two things are in a good place, my relationship with others.

Have you ever noticed that when you’re in the company of someone you love or of someone you’re really comfortable with – you could be having a laugh or just sitting in silence – those existential questions rarely come up? We feel connected, content and are able to live in the moment.

The same goes when I feel connected to God. I feel grounded, I feel a sense of purpose...

This is relevant to the discussion I've tried to open up recently about problems with the current culture of Christianity. I see what Katherine Baldwin is expressing here as being both basic and authentic to the spiritual life. She is not dissolving herself or abstracting herself; she describes herself as feeling "grounded" and having a sense of "connectedness" which brings her contentment and a sense of purpose and an ability to live in the moment.

Finally, I know that some of my readers will react angrily to Katherine Baldwin, seeing her as a representative of women who have made family formation difficult. But I'd ask that she not be attacked personally in the comments. My aim isn't to antagonise her personally and I don't think it does our cause much good to do so either. There's nothing I've read at her site which is anti-male; she is someone who is trying to work things through and she is doing so with a degree of culture and intelligence.

Finding our own truth?

2011-12-29T22:22:00.001+11:00

Susan Walsh runs a site that's widely discussed in the manosphere. Recently she and Dalrock had a spat about the extent to which women divorce frivolously. It wasn't an argument I followed closely and I'm not sure where I stand on the specifics. I do, though, support Susan Walsh's general stance as she describes it here:

Any expectation on the part of men here that I use HUS [her website] as an MRA platform, discouraging marriage and vilifying American women as unsuitable partners is ludicrous. I believe that marriage is good for individuals, for society, for the economy, for civilization. It is not perfect, but it is a highly valuable institution. The divorce rate for college educated couples is only 17%.

However, Susan Walsh did make a particular comment in the debate that I thought noteworthy. She began by telling her opponents:

You do not know me at all, much less at an intimate level. You know nothing of how I live my life. I have my own truth, and you have no right to judge it as a lie, because you don’t know what it is.

And when this was criticised she wrote:

What does it say exactly? Do you not have a code of principles and beliefs that you live by? Are your ethics identical to everyone else’s? Or do they adhere to an absolute truth?

Every woman and man must find their own purpose, their own truth.

Do you believe that greyghost is qualified to opine on the essence of who I am at an intimate level? That is the truth I speak of, not the statistics of frivolous divorce, which may or may not be obtainable.

This appears to be an example of the "compromise position" in modern philosophy that I wrote about earlier this month. If you remember, I asserted that traditionalists believe in group essences (e.g. a masculine or feminine essence) whereas radical liberals deny the existence of essences altogether. But in practice there is often a compromise in which people think in terms of individual essences.

But look at the consequences of believing in individual essences. It means that there is no absolute truth existing outside ourselves and therefore no common purposes. We cannot know the "truth" that is someone else's unique essence, we can only leave them unimpeded to find their own.

It's not a good philosophical basis for establishing community norms or for holding together the shared understandings of purpose and value that bind a community together.

The traditionalist understanding is that individuality is an important and attractive feature of life, but that there do exist supra-individual essences which orient our identity, values and purposes in certain directions that can be known to us. So truth for us can be absolute and objective rather than personal and subjective.

Here's another way of looking at it. A traditionalist seeks to live through what is objectively meaningful or purposeful. A radical liberal who has rejected essences altogether might believe that meaning lies in the act of self-determining one's purposes. The person who adopts the compromise position might believe that purposes are other determined (given to us) but at a personal level, so that there is a truth to live by, but it is subjective and unknowable to others.

But if such purposes can be given to us individually, then why not accept that essences can exist supra-individually? If one is possible, then so surely is the other.

We need to reform Christian culture

2011-12-28T15:42:00.001+11:00

Why has the West fallen so far? The major culprit is the state ideology, namely secular liberalism. But I think it has to be recognised as well that the current Christian culture also feeds into this liberalism and so reinforces the problem.

In short, we are going to have to challenge the current Christian culture with a more traditionalist one.

So what is the problem with Christianity today? One problem has to do with a preeminent Christian virtue, that of caritas. In the Bible we read quotes like the following:

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

And this:

as you would that men should do to you, do you also to them in like manner

Such quotes have led to a belief amongst many Christians that the highest virtue, and the path to salvation, is a selfless love of the other that transcends any particular distinctions. This can then lead to the idea that the best Christian is the one who goes furthest in sacrificing himself for the "other".

You can see how this fits in with liberalism. The liberal script is similar: the liberal elite considers itself morally superior insofar as it practises non-discrimination toward the other, unlike the non-liberal mainstream.

The current, popular understanding of caritas within Christian culture has major problems. It dissolves the particular loves and loyalties on which communities are founded in favour of a "perfected love" which is proved by "selflessly" transcending the particular. The Christian subject effectively becomes an abstracted individual, just as the liberal subject is abstracted.

Once again, we traditionalists are up against what has become established as an orthodoxy. So how do we challenge this orthodoxy?

Not by rejecting caritas as a virtue. If we love God, and if we hold that men are made in the image of God, then our loving concern for other men does not stop at those to whom we are more particularly related.

However, that doesn't mean that our particular loves and duties are rendered null and void. The Catholic Church has recognised this by formulating an "ordo caritas":

The exercise of charity would soon become injudicious and inoperative unless there be in this, as in all the moral virtues, a well-defined order...

The precedence is plain enough...Regarding the persons alone, the order is somewhat as follows: self, wife, children, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, domestics, neighbours, fellow-countrymen, and all others.

It's important, too, that Christians don't talk themselves into an abstracted sense of self that isn't enjoined on them by the Bible. As I pointed out in a previous discussion of this issue:

If I love my neighbour as I love myself I will wish for him the objective goods in life. That will include that he enjoy membership in a traditional community of his own. I will want his life to be rightly ordered.

But remember - I am loving him as I love myself - so to the extent that I wish upon him this objective good so too would I wish it upon myself and to those closest to me.

And my first responsibility in working for the achievement of these goods is to myself and those closest to me extending out in a circle to my family and friends, my neighbours, my countrymen and then all others.

Nor is caritas to be understood as a forced emotionalism. The Catholic doctrine is that the seat of caritas is to be found in the will rather than the emotions:

Its seat, in the human will. Although charity is at times intensely emotional, and frequently reacts on our sensory faculties, still it properly resides in the rational will a fact not to be forgotten by those who would make it an impossible virtue.

Finally, it's also important to remember the context in which Jesus was teaching. Judaism at the time of Jesus was divided into a number of currents: the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Zealots. Jesus appears to criticise the leading faults of each of these currents. The Zealots, for instance, were focused on violence; the Sadducees were elitist; and the Pharisees were concerned with the letter of the law:

An important binary in the New Testament is the opposition between law and love. Accordingly, the New Testament, presents the Pharisees as obsessed with man-made rules (especially concerning purity) whereas Jesus is more concerned with God’s love; the Pharisees scorn sinners whereas Jesus seeks them out. Because of the New Testament's frequent depictions of Pharisees as self-righteous rule-followers, the word "pharisee" has come into semi-common usage in English to describe a hypocritical and arrogant person who places the letter of the law above its spirit.

The story of the Good Samaritan can be read in the light of this. An "expert in the law stood up to test Jesus" and asked Jesus who exactly was his neighbour that he should love as himself. Jesus then told the story of the man who was robbed and who wasn't helped by passers-by until a stranger, a Samaritan, came by.

A reader, Gerry T. Neal, commented on this in a previous discussion as follows:

Jesus was not interested in answering the man's question but in addressing the spirit that lay behind it. By asking "who is my neighbor", the lawyer was hoping to get a definition of "neighbor" that would enable him to say "okay, these are the people I have to love, I don't have to love these other people". This reflects the legalistic attitude of "I will do what is required of me - but only the very minimum".

The parable Jesus tells, in which a robbed person, left to die on a highway, is ignored by the people who should be most concerned with helping him, and is helped by a member of a despised rival ethnic group, speaks to that attitude. The people who walked by the man in need found reasons to justify their not stopping to help. That is the kind of justification the lawyer was looking for. Jesus was not willing to give it.

This parable then, does not mean that our specific duties to love specific people, have been abrogated by Jesus and replaced with a universal command to love everybody equally. It means that our requirement to love our family and kin, our friends and neighbors, and our countryman, does not translate into an excuse for a lack of compassion and charity towards others to whom we do not have those specific bonds of attachment.

We are not to have a "closed off" attitude of doing the minimum required by the letter of the law. That's not supposed to be the motivating spirit. Jesus emphasised this because his interrogator was a Pharisee. If we were walking along and saw someone of another ethnic group in trouble would we help out? Or would we turn our backs because we thought, in a legalistic sense, we weren't obliged to assist?

Surely it is possible to think that we would stop and help a fellow human being, as an act of loving concern (caritas), without then dissolving all particular human relationships into an abstracted "serve the other". The former is clearly enjoined on us by the Bible. The latter is not.

When kinship in the nation goes, the family follows?

2011-12-28T08:31:00.000+11:00

Cadel Evans won the Tour de France this year and has now announced that he and his wife are adopting a young child from Ethiopia. It's possible that this is because there are fertility issues and that his wife hasn't been able to fall pregnant. But that's not how they are presenting the decision. They are saying that they always wanted to adopt and that it's how they want to start their family:

"We always felt the strong wish to adopt, so we decided to start our family through adoption."

The explanation jumped out at me because I've read similar comments from Westerners recently - there are people who wish to follow the lead of Angelina Jolie and create a blended adopted/biological family.

And I suppose it's a logical progression for the liberal West. If ties of kinship are held to be meaningless in terms of our larger communal identity, then it's likely to follow that they will be held to be meaningless in our family identity as well.

Liberal supremacism

2011-12-26T09:28:00.000+11:00

Kok-Chor Tan teaches political philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has written a book titled Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice. I'm most of the way through it and will write a full review shortly. However, I can't resist giving a brief preview.

What Kok-Chor Tan wants to show in his book is that liberalism doesn't have to be set against the existence of particular human cultures. But the arguments he uses are not exactly reassuring. In the part of the book I've just read, his argument is that:

a) Most human cultures can be redefined along liberal lines. The non-liberal elements are merely extraneous, or are oppressive impositions from above.

and

b) If there really do exist genuinely non-liberal cultures, then those cultures will have to be "let go".

He is giving cultures a choice: either you redefine yourself to be the same thing as liberalism or there is no place for you in our future global order. You could call this liberal imperialism or liberal supremacism.

In the following brief quote from Kok-Chor Tan's book, take note of his presumption that liberals rule the world and get to decide which cultures get the thumbs up and which the thumbs down. Note too that he treats individual autonomy as the decisive factor in deciding the worth of a human culture:

I do not deny that there could be, in principle at the very least, genuinely nonliberal cultures. When such hard cases do arise, we may be forced to make the difficult choice of letting a culture pass on and to try to accommodate its adherents in other ways. Remember, again, that our concern for culture stems ultimately from what it means for individual autonomy; so long as restrictions against individuals are a permanent feature (if this is indeed so) of a cultural way of life, we will have to concede that this culture will be one of those unavoidable losses of our social world.

A stormy Christmas

2011-12-26T08:32:00.002+11:00

Well, that was a Christmas to remember. My family had a family lunch in the south-eastern suburbs and drove back to Eltham in the north-eastern suburbs in the early evening.

As we drove in it became clear the suburb had been hit hard by storms. In one suburban street a car had been swept into the middle of the road, sleepers holding in garden beds dislodged, a boulder had been pushed out of a garden and onto the road and fences had been pushed over. Damage caused, presumably, by a flash flood.

At home everything made of hard plastic in our back yard had been smashed through by the hail stones. Our neighbour's garage was flooded and his skylights broken. But being on high ground we escaped relatively lightly.

Hailstones from yesterday's storms

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T08:32:00.002+11:00

I'd like to wish readers a Merry Christmas.

To add to the Christmas cheer I'm posting a video of one of my favourite singers, Hayley Westenra, singing carols.

Dead stream, live stream II

2011-12-23T08:58:00.004+11:00

I wrote in an earlier post of my feeling that society was increasingly bifurcating into a nihilistic modernist stream and a still living traditionalist one.

Today The Thinking Housewife has a short post up about a pro-abortion campaign in the US. This campaign is based on the idea that abortion should be regarded as "a normal and necessary part of women's reproductive lives". The campaigners hope that by encouraging women to share their abortion stories that some of the stigma surrounding abortion will be removed.

So I went and read the stories. And some of them clearly fit into the dead stream category. There are people in our society who are now thinking along these lines:

“I got knocked up over spring break— as a 32-year old married graduate student. Having children was never something that my husband and I considered to be an option. The decision to terminate the pregnancy was easy...Every day since then, I am grateful that my birth control slip-up did not determine the path of my career or my life. No regrets.” -- Jess

She's 32 and married but is so determined to remain childless that she made the "easy" decision to have an abortion. She did not want a child to "determine the path of my career or my life" (she wanted to remain a self-determining individual).

It seems to be a common theme:

"I was married, but my husband and I were not eager to have children. At this point, we had been married for 16 years and our lives felt complete and were enjoyable just as they were. Neither of us had ever really entertained thoughts of children."

Heather is in the same boat:

"Never wanted children, but had healthy, heterosexual relationships...abortion was an easy decision for me -- I knew I didn't want children...I had been raised to believe that women are smart, moral creatures who have both the capacity and the responsibility to make such decisions...my second unplanned pregnancy at 38. Still clear that I didn't want to have a child and having made sure my (monogamous) partner understood that before we ever began sexual relations, I had my second abortion...It is unthinkable to me that millions of women are not able, or soon will be unable, to control their own lives, are not considered intelligent enough or moral enough to be entrusted with the work that is our birthright"

I'm not sure what Heather believes is the work that is her birthright (having casual unprotected sex with boyfriends?) but it doesn't appear to be motherhood.

These stories did not make me think that abortion is a normal and necessary part of women's reproductive lives. They made me think that some Western women have turned in a nihilistic or hedonistic way against the idea of having children. They are dead streamers.

Jesus as psychiatrist

2011-12-22T21:25:00.002+11:00

Dr Keith Ablow is an American psychiatrist and contributor to Fox news. A recent column of his was titled "Was Jesus the first psychiatrist?". The answer Ablow gives is yes:

Recently, many people who have e-mailed me asking whether there are parallels between God’s teachings and the field of psychiatry and psychology. In the end, I believe the two things are very nearly one

You might be preparing yourself for something terrible to follow, but it's not too bad - there's some good advice for depressed people. However, part of his message illustrates something about modern thought that's worth criticising. Ablow writes:

The key truths that people must seek out are those elements of self that define them as individuals—who they really, truly, finally and irrevocably are, deep inside...

They must, essentially, reawaken some of what they were born with—the God-given, inexplicable, ultimately undefeatable capacity to move in the direction of their own, unique interests, abilities, beliefs and dreams.

This is a compromise version of liberalism - and it's a very common strand within modern thought.

We could distinguish between three different positions. A traditionalist recognises the existence of what might be called group essences. For instance, a traditionalist is likely to recognise that the term "masculinity" represents a real, unchanging essence which provides part of a man's telos: what he is to fulfil as an aspect of his being.

A radical liberal is likely to deny the existence of essences altogether. There are no such properties, there are only social constructs. Nor is there a given telos: value comes from the act of self-creating or self-defining our own being and concept of existence.

But many moderns don't hold consistently to this full-blown anti-essentialist position. They hold to a compromise position of recognising not group essences, but individual ones. They believe that each individual has a unique essence that must be realised through an individual life path and that this requires, above all, an absence of external constraints on the individual, and equal opportunities.

In popular culture you hear this compromise position in the insistent call to "follow your dreams, never give up". Within academic liberalism it exists in the assumption that our chief end as humans is a professional career such as a violinist in an orchestra or a surgeon or a writer. In romcoms, the heroines usually have professional jobs in glamorous, creative fields such as being a magazine editor or TV producer.

It's possible that the compromise position is a secularised version of the Calvinist idea of having a calling in the world of work. The problem, though, is that in a secular society there is no longer a belief that such a calling is directed at pleasing or glorifying God - which would allow humble and everyday work to count. Instead, a professional calling has to mark you out as a special and unique individual - it has to be the fulfilment of who you are as a person.

So instead of sacralising the everyday work we do in the world as men and women, we get a belief that there is one special, creative career path that will realise our true self. This places the fulfilment of our being very narrowly and individualistically within the field of certain types of career ambition.

If we look again at what Dr Ablow recommends he states first of all that,

The key truths that people must seek out are those elements of self that define them as individuals—who they really, truly, finally and irrevocably are, deep inside...

A traditionalist could agree substantially with that, although given our different view of essences we could leave out the phrase "as individuals" - and we would not just look deep inside for our identity but also to who we are in relation to an external reality.

Dr Ablow then writes,

They must, essentially, reawaken some of what they were born with—the God-given, inexplicable, ultimately undefeatable capacity to move in the direction of their own, unique interests, abilities, beliefs and dreams.

And we would largely disagree. Why do we have to move in the direction of our unique beliefs and dreams? Why can't, for instance, a woman find a considerable aspect of her meaningful identity in motherhood? That's not going to be a unique belief or dream, but one shared by many women since the dawn of time. But it doesn't lessen its significance.

Dr Ablow is an interesting case. It's difficult to find consistency in the political and philosophical positions he defends. He definitely holds to some right-liberal/libertarian positions, but there are some conservative/traditionalist ones as well (perhaps because he accepts the idea of essences in general, he is more receptive to traditionalist positions than an anti-essentialist, social construct liberal would be).

If I get the chance I'll look at some of his other pieces in a future post.

Dead stream, live stream

2011-12-21T22:41:00.002+11:00

Sorry, but this is another "symptom of decline" post.

There's a website called "Corporette" which describes itself as "a fashion and lifestyle blog for overachieving chicks". There's a post up there about how a woman can go about freezing her eggs:

Ever considered freezing your eggs, either because you wanted to postpone kids for your career or because the right partner seems to be in hiding?

So that's what "overachieving" women do? They freeze their eggs because they want to postpone kids for their careers?

Anyway, the corporette author discovered that it's considered more viable to have embryos rather than eggs frozen. So her plan is to follow up having her eggs frozen by later on freezing some embryos fertilised with donor sperm:

I’m still considering freezing embryos in a few months, because I think that would be the right decision for me. I do want to have children (ideally, one biological and one adoptive). On the whole, I am comfortable with donating unused embryos to research.

What an attitude. She has decided already that her family will consist of one child conceived with donor sperm and another child adopted presumably from overseas. Has she wondered if her future husband will be OK with this? Or that he might prefer to have a say in whose children he ends up raising? And doesn't kinship matter at all anymore? (A point made by Laura Wood in her comments on this story.)

Why has it all come to this for Ms Corporette? Why hasn't she already found a man to marry and have a family with? That's difficult to know from a distance, but she does tell us that "I pride myself on being an Independent Woman," which is not exactly likely to attract the most traditionally oriented of men. She tells us too that she is not

going to have (yet another) years-long relationship without any concrete direction; I am 34...At this age I feel better about knowing what I want...

Which makes it sound as if she is one of those women who couldn't bring herself to admit openly and definitely to wanting marriage and children and so who drifted along in relationships with unsuitable men.

Some of the comments are also noteworthy:

Anon woman: This is something I’ve always considered. I’m only 26, but my mom struggled with fertility at 24. I’m married, but I’m just starting out (I’m a 3L) and I don’t want to have children for another 10+ years. I am considering freezing embryos as soon as I begin Biglaw next year.

So this woman is married but refuses to consider motherhood until she's about 35 (i.e. until just the time when her natural fertility begins to plummet). Her priority in life is not her children but "Biglaw".

Other commenters revealed that they took the option when reaching their early 30s of becoming single mothers by choice:

Anon: I was 33 when I decided I was not going to wait any longer. I didn’t want to be in the situation where I needed to think about fertility treatments or being pregnant at an older age or being a parent at an older age. I went to fertility doctor and chose an anonymous donor.

a: I’m seriously considering doing the single-parenting thing (it’s crazy, but is it worse than never having kids when I really want them?)

Always a NYer: My point is that not having the biological father around shouldn’t deter or make you feel less as a parent.

AFT: from the time I was teenager, my mom always said that if I wanted children I should just have them and I didn’t need to be married and I shouldn’t wait around for a husband. She thought that it was important that I could have my own choices and that I did not have to bend my life around whether a man would be around.

My point is, you are definitely not crazy for wanting a child/children and considering doing it solo if the time is right for you and no guy is around.

Someone needs to tell these women that there are easier solutions, the main one of which is to be oriented to marriage and motherhood at a younger age. The current life script for this type of woman is not viable. It goes like this:

a) Deliberately push off family formation until the magical age of 30. Focus on career, travel, partying and casual relationships instead.

b) Get to 30 and find it more difficult to find the right man than you expected.

c) Get to 32 or 33 and recognise that there is only a small window of opportunity left to have children.

d) Take desperate measures that will make it even more difficult to marry, e.g. freeze some donor fertilised embryos or have a child as a single mother.

I can't help but think that society is bifurcating. Those following along the modernist path are sinking deeper into a nihilism in which kinship no longer matters as much, in which fatherhood is optional, in which a paralysing question mark is placed next to motherhood, and in which women home in on the most demoralised of men.

But there is also an ongoing, more traditional stream in society, one that is more determined to arrive at positive family outcomes. There do exist women who are part of this stream (e.g. two beautiful, kind-hearted women in my office in their mid-20s who married good men and have just recently had their first child).

Which stream will prove to be the more powerful? Time will tell.

Rethinking education for boys

2011-12-20T23:11:00.003+11:00

The Year 12 results for Victorian high school students were released this week. 34 students received a perfect score of 99.95. But there was something significant about the schools these students came from.

15 of the 34 students came from just four schools. And these four schools are very alike: they are all traditional boys schools (Scotch College, Melbourne Grammar, Xavier College, Melbourne High School).

About 30 years ago there were more of these boys schools. But then the idea took hold that boys would do better if they were educated alongside girls and many of the boys schools went coeducational. But the coed schools just don't seem to be keeping up. The small number of surviving boys schools are beating them hands down.

So perhaps the prevailing wisdom about coeducation needs to be reconsidered. Perhaps one way of boosting boys' academic performance would be to reverse the trend by which single sex schools for girls are expanded whilst boys schools are closed down. It could be that the ideal is to have single sex schools for boys in the middle high school years and then mostly single sex schooling at senior high but with some combined classes (drama, music etc.) to develop social skills.

There's something else worth noting about the four boys schools. They are schools with a liberal philosophy but a traditional culture. The traditional culture supplies some of the depth that the liberal philosophy lacks.

That kind of "fusion" was once more widely typical of Western societies - that is, until liberalism began to go it alone from about the 1920s onwards (and more intensely since the 1960s). The liberal mainstream has suffered from a technocratic hollowness ever since.

But the schools which kept the historic architecture, the chapels, the honour boards, the anthems, the sporting traditions, the historic rivalries and the school loyalties have an advantage in drawing on the strengths of young men.

Obviously I don't like the idea of such a fusion between liberalism and traditionalism, as it leaves liberalism as the leading philosophy in society. But the boys schools which resisted the larger trends in society by keeping some of the traditional elements do seem to have benefited from doing so.

Southern Oregon goes gender neutral

2011-12-20T00:39:00.000+11:00

A little while ago I wrote a post on parents who complained that children were at risk from TV shows being "gendered". The first reader comment was:

"gendered" Do liberals hate public toilets?

And right on cue arrived the following story about the replacement of toilets for men and women at Southern Oregon University with "gender-neutral bathrooms":

Kevin Tomita says that in his four years at Southern Oregon University, he has noticed a sizeable effort by administrators to make the campus more gender-neutral.

...At least 15 gender-neutral bathrooms were created over the past few years, either by changing the signs on the doors or by gutting old bathrooms and reconstructing them...

The changes across campus — particularly the bathrooms — were a welcome addition for Amiko-Gabriel Stocking, a student who chooses not to identify with a gender of male or female...

"I certainly became less anxious about my own gender identity," said Stocking, 27. "I create my gender as I go."

Well, that makes Stocking a liberal hero, I suppose. Stocking has managed to "liberate" himself from a predetermined sex identity and to replace it with a fluidly self-defined and self-determined gender identity - right in line with liberal autonomy theory. He has done it as a homosexual activist, but the campus authorities are supporting him all the way.

Stocking has also taken aim at gendered language:

Stocking, who is finishing a major in human communication and sociology this year, is working on a senior project to create a gender-inclusive training manual for the Lotus Rising Project, a youth-led social justice organization in Southern Oregon.

The manual describes gender-inclusive language that encourages people to focus on an individual rather than gender, omitting words such as "he" or "him" whenever possible.

It is gender inclusive except that it discourages the recognition of gender and particularly the existence of men.

So students at Southern Oregon University are being offered a freedom from being men and women. If I were the conservative opposition there, I'd be countering this with a freedom to be men and women. That's the more significant freedom to hold onto.

(Hat tip: WWWW)

A female soldier's story

2011-12-18T18:22:00.000+11:00

Why do women sign up for the military? How do they experience military life? One woman's answer to these questions is given in a recent Salon article.

Bethany Saros signed up as a very young woman:

I’d joined the Army right out of high school. The life had seemed so glamorous, and my recruiter swore up and down that I would be a world traveler.

Glamorous? Part of becoming a soldier is learning to kill. And part of it is agreeing to subordinate yourself to the commands of your superiors. Unsurprisingly, Bethany Saros did not enjoy her military training:

But as an innocent, home-schooled girl from the suburbs of the Midwest, I was unprepared for military life. I sobbed my way through basic training. As a child, my tears had been a way to pacify an overly strict father, so whenever my 4-foot-11 [?] male drill sergeant got in my face, I dissolved into waterworks.

She found it difficult to compete as a soldier even against other women:

One day, we were learning to use pugil sticks (which were basically giant Q-Tips we used to beat each other to a pulp) and I was going up against a tall, frail-looking girl everybody thought I could take. But she came at me so mercilessly I never even had the chance to raise my stick before I was on the ground wondering what in the hell just happened. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” the female drill sergeant screeched at me. “YOU DIDN’T EVEN FIGHT BACK!” (Cue crying.) This scenario seemed to be a metaphor for the rest of my military career.

After five years in the army her life was a mess. But she was pleased to be posted to Iraq because she thought she might find spiritual peace in the desert (what about the mission?):

By the time my boots hit the sand in Iraq, I was tired. I had spent the last five years getting pummeled by life in the Army — an abusive marriage, a nasty divorce, an unsuccessful relationship, getting raped by a co-worker, and an alcohol problem that had only added fuel to an already roaring fire. Though I was on the road to recovery with six months of sobriety under my belt, I was mentally and spiritually exhausted. Truth be told, I was looking forward to a year in the desert. As a child in Sunday school, I’d heard stories about saints who went to the desert looking for spiritual peace — the very desert where I now found myself.

Instead of spiritual peace she found a fellow soldier to have an affair with. The likelihood is that she embarked on this affair in order to get pregnant and be shipped back home. But she doesn't present the narrative this way. Her rationalisation hamster runs very fast to present an alternative grand narrative.

a) She denies embarking on the hookup to get pregnant:

When I met J., I wasn’t looking for a relationship. But Iraq had turned out to be more alienating that I’d originally thought. I was disconnected from everything familiar, surrounded by people who did not understand my sobriety or my sudden need for spirituality, and I felt more alone than I ever had in my life. J. was fresh out of a relationship where he’d been cheated on and was feeling rejected and hurt. After a month of friendship, we sought solace in each other’s arms. We thought we were in love...

b) She denies knowing that she could get pregnant from having sex for a period of six weeks:

That couldn’t happen to me. I had been married for two years without getting pregnant. I’d been in a year-long relationship without getting pregnant. It was impossible that I’d get pregnant in a relationship that had barely been alive for six weeks.

c) She portrays herself as the victim of the male soldier who deceived her as to his real intentions, despite the likelihood that she also deceived him about her real intentions:

That night, I finally was able to get in touch with J. “Are you really pregnant?” he asked in disbelief.

“Yes. I went to the doctor this morning,” I said.

“Listen,” he said. “I cannot think of a worse time to tell you this but …”

I knew what was coming. “You’re getting back together with K., aren’t you.” It was more of a statement than a question.

The conversation that followed consisted of the usual phrases that go through breakup dialogue — you lied to me, how could you, etc. Except I couldn’t slam down the phone and write him off as a jerk for the rest of my life. We had created a child together. We had decisions to make. Decisions that I was in no condition to make but had to be made anyway, fast.

“Are you going to keep it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I can’t do an abortion. I just can’t.”

“OK,” he said. “I am going to be there for you and the baby. We will work this out. No matter what, I will be there for you.”

Strong words spoken in the heat of the moment, just like everything else about our relationship.

She continues on with the same rationalisations:

I thought of J. and how he was in Iraq, consequence-free, at least for the time being. I had no way of knowing that his promise to be there for me and the baby would be meaningless, that I would eventually have to go after him for child support...

She had no way of knowing that a tour of duty fling wasn't likely to lead to a commitment? Again, it's likely that the guy got played, but she doesn't want to present it that way.

In the end it's clear that Bethany Saros was made to be a mother not a warrior:

But I wasn’t going to let the little person snuggled up in my belly down. One day, my son would be old enough to ask me questions, and I wanted to be able to tell him that I gave him the best life I possibly could. At the end of the day, my son was the only person I would have to explain myself to.

But what a wasteful and circuitous route to motherhood. If what was really important to her was the maternal instinct to protect her future children, then what was she doing in the army in the first place? She needed training not in the military, but in selecting a suitable father for her future children.

Guardian: EU a sinking boat

2011-12-18T08:36:00.000+11:00

I really do want the European Union project to fail. It's an attempt by the elites to gradually erase the sovereignty of the traditional European nations and peoples. So I thought it interesting that the left-liberal Guardian newspaper in England is feeling glum about the current prospects of the EU. An editorial about the sniping between the French and UK governments was subtitled:

So long as we are all in the same sinking boat, we would be wise to focus on rowing in the same direction.

And in the text of the editorial there's this:

Comrades, we are in the same boat. A sinking one.

Guardian readers, it seems, feel comfortable referring to each other as "comrades" - something which conjures up images of communist commissars from the USSR.

Will the EU go the same way as the USSR and collapse? It's certainly possible, but we shouldn't be too hopeful. The European elite believe in the EU as a moral cause and won't let go of it unless they really have to.

A strange homage to policewomen

2011-12-16T22:07:00.000+11:00

A Melbourne artist has paid homage to policewomen by creating three sculptures depicting them as prostitutes.

Frank Malerba claimed he was inspired by the,

"contemporary identity of women, emanating the strong, cool, authoritarian characteristics empowering women of today"

And then, inevitably, he argued that provoking the public is what art is really for:

"I wanted something that was different and edgy, something that will make people react. That's exactly what art is supposed to do," Mr Fagan said.

That's not exactly a profound reason for the existence of art: making people react. Communicating the more difficult and higher truths of being would be a deeper and more challenging mission for the high arts.

Anyway, Frank Malerba got his wish and provoked a reaction - a strong enough reaction for his artwork to be shelved. But it's interesting how moderns choose to express their moral opposition. The culture and leisure officer of the local council said that public feedback was opposed to the sculpture for being:

demeaning to women, including policewomen and sex workers

I found that funny - we're supposed to accept that a sculpture of women dressed as prostitutes is objectionable because it is demeaning to prostitutes.

The Chief Police Commissioner also expressed disapproval:

"I believe the proposed sculptures are disrespectful to all women, not just policewomen," he said.

You do still hear liberal moderns talk about the need for respect. And I don't disagree that the statues are disrespectful. But I'd love to hear the Chief Police Commissioner explain exactly why they are disrespectful. Because that then begins to reveal more about the real moral reasoning involved.

And some did try to explain:

Cyber expert Susan McLean said the council should not have got to the stage of asking for opinions.

“As a former policewoman I am offended because it reinforces all the stereotypes of women,” Ms McLean said.

“It’s male fantasy stuff and it’s from the porn shops. It’s not empowering females.

So the dispute then hinges on whether women are empowered by the sculptures: the artist says they are, Susan Mclean says they're not. Why doesn't she see women as being empowered by the sculptures? Because she believes what is being depicted is coming not from women, but from outside forces: from men or from social stereotypes.

But what if some women are happy with more brazen expressions of female sexuality? Ruth Parkinson wrote into the paper to support the sculptures on the grounds that:

Some people will always see forms of nudity as denigrating but there are many of us who see these images as empowering.

And that's what the moral debate seems to have come to. Something is moral if it empowers women; immoral if it doesn't. And empowerment depends on it being something self-chosen or self-asserted rather than imposed from without.

It all seems to me to be a weak basis for holding to moral standards. If we really followed through it would mean that whatever women thought empowered themselves would be morally justified. If that's what women are told, and if women then really do sincerely want to act up, then good luck trying to convince them otherwise.

The problem with TV is?

2011-12-14T08:06:00.001+11:00

A Herald Sun article on parental concerns about childhood TV viewing habits had this:

Of particular concern are shows that are violent, gendered, sexualised, and have advertising aimed at children.

But parents say such content is "difficult to avoid" and only half have rules on what their kids can watch, down from 80 per cent 15 years ago.

Two things leaped out at me. First, that in 50% of households children can watch anything on TV. And second, that there are parents who are concerned that TV shows are "gendered".

The concern about "gendering" is a liberal one. Liberals want us to be self-determined; our sex though is predetermined; so liberals want our sex not to matter in life. So they hold sex distinctions to be socially constructed and believe that children should not be exposed to "gendered" patterns of life on TV.

Such liberal parents should probably not take their kids to the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill. I stopped off there the other day to get money from an ATM. I passed by four or five 20-something women who had clearly been watching the TV show Mad Men. They were wearing the most beautiful and elegant dresses and looked gorgeously feminine.

And yet given the voting patterns in the area, there's a decent chance that these young women were Greens voters.

So even in trendier lefty areas, the campaign for a genderless society is not going so well. It's going to be difficult to persuade young men that gender is a social construct when young women present themselves in such a charismatically feminine way.

Rudd off the record

2011-12-14T07:40:00.000+11:00

Former PM Kevin Rudd was out walking in Sydney the other day. A group of journalists sitting in a bar saw him and beckoned him over. They asked him what he thought of Julia Gillard's pledge in a recent speech that "Labor says yes to the future". He flipped the bird, laughed and said "F*** the future."

Interesting that that's what popped into his mind as a humorous response.

The meaning of conservatism

2011-12-12T00:44:00.000+11:00

Bonald has written a very worthwhile short essay titled The Meaning of Conservatism. It's not that long (it's divided into four short pages which you have to click through), but it still manages to be a comprehensive account of the differences between conservatism and liberalism.

In victory or defeat

2011-12-12T00:21:00.000+11:00

I like the Asics ad that is currently showing on Australian TV. Maybe it's because there are so few appeals to the stronger masculine instincts in men these days.

What happened to progress?

2011-12-10T09:31:00.001+11:00

There's a new film out in Australia called Decadence: The Decline of the Western World. It has been made by someone of Sri Lankan descent named Pria Viswalingam. He remembers a time when Asia was in awe of the West, but he now believes that Western civilisation might be on the way out:

Viswalingam is a former SBS TV presenter whose credits include Fork in the Road and Class. Having devoted a career to analysing culture and society, he says the symptoms of decay and decadence are unmistakeable.

Those symptoms include soaring suicide rates and the west's addiction to anti-depressants. They include rampant individualism, emptying churches and disintegrating families. And they include the west's obsessive devotion to money as the only true measure of worth.

The good thing about this is that Viswalingam is asking the right questions. He is concerned about what holds a society together and what allows it to continue as a tradition into the future. Liberals are relatively indifferent to this. They don't identify much with communal traditions and are more likely to worry about meeting the political aims of liberalism itself.

So a liberal might think of the West as progressing because it is becoming, say, more multicultural (i.e. more liberal), even whilst someone like Viswalingam sees signs of decadence that threaten the future of the West.

What's interesting is that we seem to have reached a point at which some intellectuals are beginning to look outside of the liberal framework and recognise that it's not just a question of progress toward liberalism. I've noticed that even in solidly liberal papers like the Melbourne Age, that the rise of China has started to focus some minds on the possibility of Western decline.

Some of the reviews of Viswalingam's film have also been surprisingly positive. The review in the Melbourne Age was even titled "Society is past its use by date" and included the following quote from Alexander McCall Smith:

"People have been talking about the 'broken society' for some time now," Smith wrote in a complementary article. "[The British] riots demonstrated just how broken. The broken society is a consequence partly of social change and cultural change.

"The social change is familiar: the destruction of the family as the fundamental social unit would be fine if we had replaced it with something. We have not. [And] it’s a culture in which we seem to have abandoned many of the values on which we based our civilisation.

"We don’t know what we believe in and are busy bringing up children who share our confusion ... We have created a strange culture perpetuated by television and other media that rejoices in and celebrates dysfunction, violence and anti-social behaviour."

It's even significant that Viswalingam pinpoints 1969 as the turning point. I think he's wrong here - the problems go back much further than 1969. But the fact that Western intellectuals are starting to talk about the 1960s as a source of decline shows how things can change. The 1960s were once held up by the left as a golden age of political radicalism.

And that's an important lesson to draw from this. There are some people who are sympathetic to traditionalism but who are too defeatist. They believe that things will just go on as before with a rock solid liberal orthodoxy. It discourages them from a more active participation in a traditionalist movement.

But politics can change. It's possible that there will be more favourable conditions for us to build a movement and to argue our politics amongst the intellectual/political class. We need to keep trying to push ourselves forward.

Finally, although many of the talking heads in the film come from the left, I was pleased to see that Professor John Carroll also has a role. He is the writer of "Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture" - one of the best of the recent books that could broadly be described as traditionalist.

So we have a major documentary film which actually has a traditionalist-leaning academic featured in it. That is not a common occurrence in the Australian film industry. It's enough to make me want to find time to go and see the film in the cinemas.

Let's drop the valium myth

2011-12-08T08:03:00.000+11:00

A standard feminist argument against the traditional family is that it left women so discontent that they were popping valium pills and self-medicating on martinis to get by.

And no doubt there were women doing just that. But the feminist argument doesn't work. If the problem was that women were at home rather than in paid work, then the increase in women going out to do paid work should be improving the situation. Fewer women should now be relying on pills and alcohol to get by.

But the opposite has happened. The reliance on pills and alcohol has increased considerably. For instance, in America the situation is as follows:

More than one in four American women took at least one drug for conditions like anxiety and depression last year, according to an analysis of prescription data.

So more than a quarter of American women are now taking anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drugs. And this is the situation in the UK when it comes to alcohol consumption in middle-class homes:

Millions of middle-class women are drinking far more alcohol than they thought, according to official figures revealed.

...up to a third of women are drinking beyond safe limits every week - much higher than previous estimates.

The shock statistics also reveal the more you earn, the more you drink - with those in higher income groups consuming 30 per cent more alcohol than the working classes.

It confirms the warning by Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo last year when she said the most serious drinking problem was from middleclass, middle-aged people.

She told MPs: "That is where the serious and dramatic harm is increasing."

The ONS found that those in managerial and professional jobs drink 15.1 units a week, against 11.6 for those in routine and manual occupations.

Those in the very highest income brackets have even more.

Sarah Jarvis, a GP in London, said: "This is not scaremongering - this is a disaster.

"Older people think that because they are not going out vomiting in the street they are not binge drinkers but it is simply not true.

"I see thirty-somethings and forty-somethings with real health problems.

"A lot of them are holding down full-time jobs and don't think they have a problem.

"These people share a bottle of wine with their partner every night as well as having gin and tonics before supper."

The proportion of women drinking too much has leapt from a fifth to a third under the new calculations...

So according to official figures one in three women in the UK exceed safe alcohol consumption, with the problem being more acute amongst high earners.

Surely the evidence here is clear enough. Women are taking more pills and drinking more booze as society changes in a feminist direction - which leaves the valium argument discredited.

Candace Bushnell & traditional marriage

2011-12-07T21:41:00.003+11:00

This won't come as a great shock, but Candace Bushnell, the writer behind the Sex & The City TV series, sees herself as a non-traditional woman.

When Bushnell was 43 she married a man 10 years younger. She has described this large age gap as a great positive:

...the reason my marriage works is that it's not traditional. When I was younger, I dated men of various ages, some a little younger, some several years older. And I saw a pattern begin to emerge: Whenever I was with an older man, all those societal dictates about male and female roles would creep into my subconscious. I'd start acting like the little woman, and then my behavior would make me sick and I'd rebel by staying out at nightclubs until four in the morning. I knew what I wanted - an equal, balanced relationship in which both members could shine, a union in which I'd have a partner as opposed to a provider ... equal partnership is something many women want...My fellow cougars and I found our footing in relationships with younger men.

And by the way, our men don't usually resemble boy toys ... More likely, he's confident, open-minded and willing to make his own rules.

And she has described the inspiration behind Sex and The City as an attempt to liberate women from the "injustice" of the rules of society:

I’m 52 years old now, and when I was a young girl growing up in the 1960s, there were a lot of dos and don'ts. We, young girls, were told what was permissible and what was not, and how we were to behave and conduct ourselves. And I object to that. And this injustice has always driven me. SATC, with all the sexual liberation and freedom expressed by the women characters, reflects a society unfairly imposing itself on women.

But Bushnell's cougar vision of liberation is floundering. Following on from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore's divorce, we now learn that Bushnell is divorcing her husband after discovering his relationship with a much younger woman. Her non-traditional approach to marriage didn't work.

And I don't think that's entirely accidental. Bushnell is mistaken when it comes to equality. A 43-year-old woman is going to struggle to give equally in a marriage with a 33-year-old man. She won't be able to give him her youthful beauty and passion. She won't be able to give him children. The sacrifices will come mostly from his side, not hers.

It's interesting, too, that Candace Bushnell felt the impulse of masculine and feminine roles only with older men, rather than with younger ones. Her rejection of men older than her suggests that she is not accepting of a man expressing a masculine role as a husband and father within a marriage. Again, I don't think that's a giving attitude from a woman. It's as if she wants a marital relationship which resembles the unstable, free-floating, sex based relationships that occur on campus before men and women become conscious of their adult roles. For a woman to insist on that kind of a relationship when married requires a husband who is, in my opinion, either immature or who is forced to suppress his adult personality.

And why? Consider again what Candace Bushnell says about being with older men:

Whenever I was with an older man, all those societal dictates about male and female roles would creep into my subconscious. I'd start acting like the little woman, and then my behavior would make me sick and I'd rebel by staying out at nightclubs until four in the morning.

What does that say about Bushnell's feminine identity? It's not something through which she can connect with a man anymore. She has defined it in a negative way as something externalised and oppressive. But this too then limits what she is able to give in a marriage. The equality of marriage being a meeting point between the masculine and the feminine is lost.

Amanda Vanstone: holding a thin line

2011-12-05T22:46:00.006+11:00

The Labor Party has changed its platform to support homosexual marriage, so that issue is in the news in Australia right now.

One public figure who has weighed into the debate is Amanda Vanstone, who was a minister in John Howard's Liberal Government.

It's another chance to look at the political beliefs of a high profile member of the right-wing party here in Australia.

Amanda Vanstone is known as a more socially liberal member of the party. So it's no surprise that she supports homosexual marriage. What is more surprising is the grounds on which she supports it. She argues:

Perhaps we need a reality check on what we think marriage really means. Opponents of gay marriage often argue that marriage is ''a union between a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, for life''.

It is not convincing. It is a triumph of hope over reality. Marriage long ago stopped being to the exclusion of all others and for life. If we don't care about those two elements being disregarded by so many, why should we care about the ''between a man and a woman'' part?

The idea that marriage has already lost its real meaning and that therefore there is nothing to lose in accepting homosexual marriage is not unusual. It was made by three columnists in the Melbourne papers today: Amanda Vanstone, Wendy Tuohy and Dennis Altman.

Tuohy's column is particularly interesting, as it basically says that there is nothing sacred left in the world-weary West and therefore marriage has become so watered down in meaning that it no longer makes sense to exclude gays.

I don't disagree that the meaning of marriage has been watered down. But there are two things to note about this argument. First, it's not a very good way to justify homosexual marriage. What is being suggested is that homosexual marriage would be incompatible in meaning with the original, intact, traditional meaning of marriage. But it is compatible, the argument goes, with the meaning that is left to a broken form of modern marriage. Isn't that really an acknowledgement that homosexual marriage does affect the meaning of marriage?

Second, it's a radical position for Amanda Vanstone to take. She doesn't find the idea that marriage is exclusive and for life to be "convincing". She has moved on to a model of marriage that is not exclusive and not for life. She describes this as a "reality check" on what marriage really means. So the meaning of marriage for her is radically open - except for one remaining, restraining principle.

She lost her father as a young child and she knows someone who has struggled with not knowing his biological father. So she seems to draw the line at creating families that do not have both a male and a female parent:

It is, in my view, in the best interest of every child that they have on a day-to-day basis both male and female parent role models and both male and female adult role models.

I agree with her and won't criticise her for holding this view. But it seems to be inconsistent with the earlier part of her argument. If we are going with a new meaning of marriage which is neither exclusive nor life-long, then families won't be as stable as previously. So more children, not less, will end up living without male and female parental role models.

How exactly does she expect children to have both male and female parental role models on a day-to-day basis in her new family order? If we have accepted, as a principle, that marriage is no longer to be faithful and no longer to be for life, then surely that will lead to more children living without one of their parents. And if the state endorses the idea of homosexual marriage, then surely that will lead to more children living with parents of just one sex.

If you want to try and hold the line somewhere in a liberal society, then it had better be a mighty strong line you are holding onto. But Vanstone's is weak. She has cut most of the way through it herself.

And I suppose this illustrates the difficulty of wanting to be socially liberal, whilst still believing in some kind of traditional standard in society. It's difficult to unleash the forces of "do whatever you will" and then add on "except for this". Standards can't be defended that way. They have to make sense within a larger framework of society. If you want children to be raised by parents of both sexes, then you ought to be defending marriage having the meaning of a faithful, lifetime commitment between a man and a woman.

But this is what Amanda Vanstone believes ought to be abandoned, or at least relegated to a few hold-out churches.

Arthur Sinodinos: star recruit?

2011-12-04T20:05:00.009+11:00

Arthur Sinodinos is being touted as a star recruit to the Australian Liberal Party - the right-wing party here in Australia. He isn't new to the party, having being influential behind the scenes as an advisor to the former PM, John Howard. But now he is a senator and is working on policy for Liberal leader Tony Abbott.

So what does Senator Sinodinos believe in? What does it mean to be a leading member of the Liberal Party these days?

He explained himself perfectly well in his maiden speech to Parliament. The first thing he wants is mass immigration to create a "Big Australia":

I support a bigger and more sustainable Australia as a framework for growth and opportunity...To meet the challenges ahead we need a bigger, more sustainable Australia that will maximise our economic prospects and living standards, enhance our national security and allow us to project more influence in the world. For me, that means ...continuing high levels of immigration to supplement a shrinking workforce in an ageing society...

Is this really a conservative policy? It means not conserving Australia as it is, but radically changing Australia demographically via mass immigration. It is a policy view shared by none other than Kevin Rudd, the former Labor PM.

Note that Senator Sinodinos combines the terms "bigger and more sustainable" Australia. He's trying to incorporate some environmentalism here too, even though it's likely that a bigger population will make it more difficult to reach environmental targets.

Senator Sinodinos goes on (and on) talking about the need to restructure Australia to maximise economic performance. It makes him sound like your typical right-liberal Economic Man.

And then he finally leaves off talking about the economy to state:

Let me turn to my personal values and outlook.

That's interesting. It means that he views the market as being a public issue, but other values as being merely private or personal. The needs of the market are allowed to have a public authority that other values aren't. So what are his personal values? He begins:

Firstly let me say I am proud of my Greek heritage, which is the basis of Western civilisation.

If I were Greek and proud of my heritage I would want to contribute to its continuation. I wouldn't make it a merely personal value that is outranked by the higher authority of the market. Anyway, as we shall soon see, Senator Sinodinos is not exactly consistent in identifying with his Greek heritage. He goes on to say:

Growing up, the local Greek Orthodox church was our religious and social centre. In my teens I became quite interested in matters of faith and religion and still am. Two aspects of Christian teaching have particular resonance for me. The first is to treat others as you would have them treat you. Related to that is the observation by St Paul in a letter to the Galatians—I do not know what seat they were in—that 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.' If we are all one, then there is no basis for discrimination on the grounds of colour, creed, gender or other human constructs.

So Liberal Party senators are now openly endorsing the idea that race and sex are merely social constructs that should be made not to matter. That again is a very radically liberal view. Note too the contradiction: Senator Sinodinos claimed that he was proud of his Greek heritage, but in the very next part of his speech he endorses the idea that "There is neither Jew nor Greek" as "we are all one" and that such distinctions are, in a negative sense, "human constructs".

I am not an authority on the Bible, but I very much doubt that St Paul meant that the races and the sexes had no real basis but were merely human constructs. It is more likely that he meant that despite such distinctions all could find salvation in Jesus Christ. After all, if St Paul really did mean that race and sex were human constructs, then the rest of the Bible would be false. Doesn't Genesis refer to God creating man and woman distinctly? Isn't it then heretical to claim that humans created man and woman?

Senator Sinodinos then defends the place of Christianity as follows:

I am proud of our nation's Judaeo-Christian heritage. Whatever the fallibilities of individuals within our churches, these institutions have made an immeasurable positive contribution to the moral climate of modern Australia as well as through the work of their great charitable bodies. Even the most ardent supporter of markets knows that no economic system exists in a vacuum; markets are shaped as much by ethical, religious and cultural values as they are by explicit rules. In other words, you are always responsible for your own behaviour, no matter what the rules are.

Again, if he is proud of the nation's Judaeo-Christian heritage, then why doesn't he seek to uphold it? If he were to go ahead with his Big Australia policy, then Australia would become less of a Christian country over time. Many parts of Australia would become primarily Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu.

And it's notable as well that he defends Christianity on the basis that it supplements market rules well. The perspective here seems to be upside down - it's as if religion and culture have to be justified in terms of the market, rather than the market in terms of religion and culture.

Senator Sinodinos goes on to speak about the usual themes of right-liberalism: a freer market, less government spending, entrepreneurship, and individual choice combined with personal responsibility. He isn't entirely consistent, though, in his "small state and free market" outlook, as he also wants the following:

...we should contemplate a new sovereign wealth fund modelled on those employed by Singapore and Korea. It could acquire stakes in individual companies to increase our exposure to the newly growing emerging markets and economies to reinforce our influence in the global economy and thereby strengthen our national security. Such a fund could also kick-start a genuine venture capital market—still stalled after all these years—so that more Australian inventions and innovations can be commercialised here rather than abroad.

Senator Sinodinos is a right-liberal. Today in Australia that means:

justifying mass immigration on economic grounds
supporting the idea of environmental sustainability
seeing the market as a legitimate public value
seeing other values as merely personal or private
rejecting the categories of race and sex as being human constructs
saying nice things about Judaeo-Christian heritage, but leaving the market as the larger public value
seeing freedom in terms of individual choice, qualified by the need for personal responsibility
holding to the idea of less government interference in the market, whilst suggesting forms of government intervention to aid competitiveness

That is where Senator Sinodinos sees Australia as being at. He is trying to draw together the current political culture in a way that is amenable to his own right-liberal viewpoint.

And he calls this viewpoint "conservative". For instance, when talking about his relationship with John Howard he says,

But I think in many ways we had a similar outlook - both relatively conservative.

And there's this interesting exchange with an ABC interviewer:

JULIA BAIRD: Just finally, you said the Howard government succeeded because he expressed the innate conservatism of the Australian people. Do you think this is the key to political success - understanding that Australians don't like change much?

ARTHUR SINODINOS: I wasn't saying Australians don't like change much.

JULIA BAIRD: So what do you mean by conservatism in this regard?

ARTHUR SINODINOS: I think what I mean by it is that Australians like that their society evolves rather than tries to jump forward in big steps. We're not ones for cultural revolution - certainly not in the Chinese sense.

But they are comfortable with what we are today because it happens over time. Australians are very much, I think, relaxed with who they are in terms of their identity, achievements as a country.

And that's, you know, we all recognise our blemishes and all the rest of it. But the point is, they are comfortable with the idea that we evolve rather than try and do things in revolutionary strides.

JULIA BAIRD: Bit by bit.

ARTHUR SINODINOS: Yeah. And that's what makes it stick, Julia.

So to someone in the Liberal Party conservatism means:

a) Not taking a negative stance toward your own country or religion (even as you dissolve them), in contrast to those leftists who see their country or religion in more hostile terms as immoral

and

b) Making liberalism "stick" by not changing things all at once, in a revolutionary way, but bit by bit over time.

So Liberal Party conservatism doesn't have a sense of conserving things, but rather it means something like "gradualist liberalism".

The lesson? The mainstream political culture in Australia, as elsewhere in the West, is not to be relied upon. We are not going to get much joy from the likes of Senator Sinodinos, not because he is corrupt or self-serving, but because he is a man whose mindset has been formed by the existing political culture.

It is pointless to wait for men like him to put things right. We can no longer afford an attitude of passive dependence.

We need to encourage an ideal of masculinity which involves not only service to one's family (which most men do well) but also service to one's own community or tradition (which was once a core masculine concern but has fallen away).

Gaita & the ground of philosophy

2011-12-03T08:54:00.001+11:00

Raimond Gaita has written a column for The Age in favour of homosexual marriage. It's a more thoughtful argument than is usual for this debate.

Gaita believes that there are people who oppose homosexual marriage because they find gay sex disgusting or immoral or because they believe it will have damaging social consequences. But he sees these objections as being relatively superficial.

The most radical source of opposition to homosexual marriage, he argues, is that many people don't believe that there is depth in homosexuality: that it is not deep enough to be integrated into the meaning of marriage. That leaves the term "homosexual marriage" as an oxymoron and, if true, it would mean that if homosexual marriage were legalised the concept of marriage would be degraded:

From this perspective, even if the law were to permit gay marriages, these would be marriages in inverted commas only. The state cannot do what is, so to speak, conceptually impossible. If it were to try, this thought continues, it would degrade the concept of marriage. After a time, even heterosexual married couples would no longer understand what it means to be married.

But Gaita is strongly opposed to this view of homosexuality; he believes that society should recognise the "depth and dignity" of the "sexual being" of homosexuals as,

Our sense of a common humanity is premised on seeing in all human beings their capacity to make meaning that we respect of the big facts that define the human condition - our mortality, our vulnerability to misfortune and, of course, our sexuality. To be blind to that in others is to be partially blind to their humanity.

That's a significant quote. He is arguing that our common humanity rests on our capacity to make our own meaning of who we are. Therefore, runs the argument, if we don't respect how others make meaning we are denying them human status. Homosexuals are just doing the human thing, claims Gaita, of defining their own being in ways that are meaningful to them, so not to recognise what they decide to be would be a denial of their full humanity:

Laws premised on blindness to the full humanity of our fellow citizens wrong them more profoundly than can be conveyed by the complaint that they deny them access to goods and opportunities.

Gaita's position is not original. It's another way of putting the orthodox liberal view. And it is not obviously true. Why should we accept that it is our capacity to self-define our place in the world and our being which is the measure of our humanity?

There was an older view in Western philosophy that our being flowed from our essence, which in turn then provided our "telos" (the end toward which we are rightly oriented).

I'm not sure the ancients adequately defined this essence, but even so it strikes me as a more promising philosophical framework than the modernist liberal one.

A core problem with the modern view is that we are supposed to accept that meaning is something we make for ourselves - which leaves meaning as something subjective and therefore not very meaningful. It doesn't really seem to matter in the liberal view what specifically men choose to do or be, as there is not thought to be a masculine essence which helps to define our ideal being and the fulfilment of who we are.

And so liberal moderns have no basis for preferring one concept of being and self to another, as their concept of being doesn't connect to anything beyond the individual self. It doesn't matter, in this view, whether I choose to be a self-sacrificing father, a juggalo or a brony. These are all the same, and must be treated the same, as they are all instances of individuals defining their own being in ways that are meaningful to them. If anything, it is the fatherhood option which might be ranked lower by liberal moderns, as it might be thought to have been accepted for reasons of tradition rather than as something individually self-defined.

If it's true, as liberal moderns claim, that what matters (what makes us fully human) is our capacity to make meaning for ourselves of our own being, then value will shift away from what we specifically choose to do or be, and flow instead to the idea that we must accept as equal each individual's self-made being - as to judge differently would mean denying to some individuals what makes them human.

And so value for liberal moderns resides in "equality", "tolerance", "respect", "non-judgementalism", "diversity" "non-discrimination" and so on. But these values circle round an emptiness - they exist to uphold the idea that there is no being except the one we make for ourselves, that there are no real standards of what we choose to do to be, that there are no given qualities to who we are which place us naturally within families or communities or larger human traditions, and that meaning is ultimately subjective and, therefore, not very meaningful.

The unhappiest award goes to...

2011-11-30T20:22:00.001+11:00

Who is unhappiest at work? According to one survey, the unhappiest workers are female, unmarried, age 42 and a doctor or lawyer.

That's an interesting result. According to liberal theory, such women should be the happiest. Such women are "unimpeded" in their autonomy by any commitment to family and they have successfully pursued a glamorous, high status career outcome.

But they are unhappier than anyone else.

Mightn't this suggest that an unimpeded, maximised autonomy is not the sole, overriding good in life? And that marriage is more significant to women than the liberal theory allows for?

And who are the happiest workers? They are married men with children, a good income and a managerial position.

That fits perfectly with what traditionalists would expect. Such men are fulfilling their masculine natures to be fathers and husbands and good providers. They are the happiest despite the fact that they have sacrificed a considerable measure of their autonomy to make a strong commitment to family and career.

Some more interesting data comes from a recent Herald Sun article about longer working hours. Which sex starts paid work earlier and finishes later? Not difficult to guess:

The report quoted Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing about 30 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women are at work at 7am, and one in six men and one in seven women at 7pm.

Maybe that should be considered when feminists complain about the pay gap. The working day is longer for men which must account for some of the gap.

Survey: male provider role unchanged in 35 years

2011-11-27T17:41:00.001+11:00

The male provider role is still going strong in Australia. Bettina Arndt has discussed some research data which shows that the amount of paid work undertaken by women has barely changed since the mid-1970s.

It's true that female workforce participation rates have risen since the 1960s from 33% to 58%. But that includes women working only a few hours a week and those unemployed but looking for work. But when it comes to full-time work there has been no significant change:

One of the most stubborn characteristics of the Australian workforce is women's rejection of full-time work. The Australian National University economist Bob Gregory sums up the data: ''Despite the rapid increase in education levels, despite large changes in social attitudes towards married women working in the labour market, despite large increases in labour market rewards and despite increased labour market involvement, the proportion of women 15 to 59 employed full time is much the same as it was 35 years ago.''

Nor have women's part-time work hours increased much:

women's weekly part-time working hours show very little overall rise - barely an hour over 30 years.

The conclusion drawn by Arndt is that husbands are being unfairly castigated for not doing a larger proportion of unpaid work when women have not increased their proportion of paid work.

The response from the female readers is interesting. Some agree that the paid and unpaid work balances out:

In my own household my husband earns 95% of the income (working very long hours) and does 5% of the unpaid housework/child care. I earn 5% of the income and happily do 95% of the unpaid housework/child care.

But then one woman had this ungrateful thought toward her own husband:

Yes Bettina, my husband plays on his iPad on the long commute. Likewise his long lunch is a "work-related activity". Do you really think this tripe helps men? You may like to consider that reading your articles makes many women feel very stabby towards them.

Another took the PC line that there are no natural preferences at work but that it's all due to socialisation:

you do not discuss why women are 'rejecting' full-time work. (No, it's not because as a female I am 'biologically hardwired' to be a snuggly nurturer all my life.) You do not go into any of the cultural or social background which could lead to such a rejection.

But most of the comments, from men and women, agree with Arndt - and that's in a newspaper with a largely lefty readership:

Reader 1: At last, someone tells the truth of what I see around me and what my own experience is. Why would I have kids and spend all week working and commuting?

Reader 2: Arndt's comments are absolutely true. Many academics and journalists are determined to trot out the party line on women and work, ignoring the clear evidence to the contrary. For example, did the media ever pick up on the obvious fact that ABC childcare went broke because contrary to the rhetoric, there is not an enormous unmet need for childcare in Australia, other than in affluent inner urban areas? Childcare centres in the suburbs and the urban fringe, where the majority of kids live, have plenty of spaces, because most of the children's mothers are not working or working in ways that still allow them to care for their children. You never hear this story because it doesn't match the approved story we are meant to be telling.

Reader 3: I generally agree with your article. Put simply, any women I know of about my age (mid 30's) in a relationship with children either do not work, or at least do not work full time. Nor do they seem to be ever intending to work full time again.

My conclusion? Women can be hypercareerist in their 20s and that can be demoralising to their male peers. The men ask themselves why they should bother trying to keep up when society doesn't want them as providers anyway. But the female hypercareerism doesn't last in the large majority of cases.

I've seen that happen many times. I've seen strongly feminist women who have sworn over and over that they weren't maternal types suddenly get jack of it all, pressure their boyfriends into marriage, have a child and quit their jobs.

So one conclusion is that men shouldn't accept that the male provider role is redundant. It's not by a long way.

But there's one more conclusion to draw. Even on the right there is often an assumption that women's greatest aim in life is to be a full-time careerist. Therefore, if you support the traditional family you might be criticised for trying to impose a masculine bias on women or trying to support a policy that women will rise up against collectively.

But the reality seems to be that even after decades of the state and the political class trying to impress a careerist world view on women, that most women aren't buying into it - that they really do want to focus on their families and that they don't see full-time careerism as the path to self-actualisation.

So I don't think traditionalists have much to lose in supporting the traditional family. We can afford to be a bit flexible when it comes to female workforce participation; all that we really need to do as a minimum is to continue to uphold the male provider role in society.

Boys need their dads

2011-11-27T13:34:00.002+11:00

From the Melbourne Herald Sun:

Teenage boys without a father figure are more likely to go off the rails and turn to crime.

Interestingly, it isn't even the quality of interaction between father and son which cuts crime and delinquency rates - it is sufficient that the father be present:

While the father's involvement in a son's life was beneficial, it was the mere presence of a dad that affected delinquency rates.

"The sense of security generated by the presence of a male role model has protective effects for a child, regardless of the degree of interaction between the child and father," said Melbourne Institute director Deborah Cobb-Clark...

"Fathers provide children with male role models and can influence children's preferences, values and attitudes, while giving them a sense of security and boosting their self-esteem.

"They also increase the degree of adult supervision at home, which may lead to a direct reduction of delinquent behaviour."

Wealth does not necessarily offset the absence of a father:

Wealthy families were no better placed to solve the problems associated with youth delinquency, it said.

There's another Snow White

2011-11-24T19:52:00.006+11:00

In my last post I reported that a "warrior princess" Snow White film was being made. I suggested that modern culture had trouble accepting women as feminine creatures. As if to prove my point, I discovered that there's another film version of Snow White being produced called Mirror Mirror. This one stars the daughter of musician Phil Collins, Lily Collins:

Lily Collins as Snow White

Obviously I can't complain about the promotional picture shown above. That's certainly a feminine representation of Snow White.

But she doesn't stay that way. She ends up as a swashbuckling leader of a group of bandits in the forest. Lily Collins says that:

Our Snow White starts off as the fairytale princess we all know and love and then she progresses into a young woman and much of a fighter.

Just as Kristen Stewart was left with bloodied knuckles after her fight scenes, so too has Lily Collins found the fight scenes difficult:

While “Snow White & The Huntsman” has offered images of a warrior Snow White, Lily too, in “Mirror Mirror,” has some fight scenes.

“This was insane training,” she said of preparing for the role. “I’ve been fight training and fencing for about three months now… I was kickboxing, doing some stuff on wires. It’s been really intense.”

And all that training has left Lily a little worse for wear.

“I’ve gotten a lot of bumps and bruises, but so far no bad injuries,” she said.

So to prepare for the role of Snow White an actress now has to spend three months kickboxing.

Which raises a serious issue. If a girl wants to develop her feminine essence - so that she brings it out to its fullest and most admirable extent - then how does she go about cultivating it?

Modern society does not care much for this task. A girl will get no positive guidance from the mainstream culture. Watching actresses kickbox their way across the silver screen or the TV set isn't likely to help.

But if girls don't cultivate what is most admirable in their femininity, then won't they feel disconnected in their self-identity? And won't it be more difficult for men to feel instinctively connected to them?

Here's one small piece of advice I can offer. A young woman should look at herself in the mirror and observe her body: the elegance of her hands, the slenderness of her arms, the softness of her breasts, the warmth of her eyes and her smile. And she should try to match this truth about her body with her inner presence. Does her inner sense of self match what her own body has developed toward?

A bloody Snow White

2011-11-23T22:51:00.000+11:00

A new Snow White is being filmed. True to the modern age, Snow White has been transformed from "the loveliest of them all" into a warrior princess.

Snow White as a warrior princess

The actress playing Snow White, Kristen Stewart, has been doing so many intense fight scenes that she was photographed with bloodied knuckles:

Is this something to worry about? In the sense that it's another example of a trend in modern society, I think that it is. Things go wrong when people don't identify wholly with their own sex. If you are in any way set against yourself as a man or a woman, then it becomes difficult to express yourself adequately in relationships with the opposite sex.

What does the recasting of Snow White suggest to girls? It suggests that to be the heroine you now have to mix a considerable amount of the masculine in with the feminine. It suggests that the feminine by itself is inadequate or inferior.

It's a pity the film makers went this way, as the preview suggests that the film is well made and likely to do well at the box office.

A new fatherhood survey

2011-11-22T20:24:00.001+11:00

A new US survey on fatherhood arrived at a couple of interesting conclusions. First, men do still want to father children:

Most of the men agreed or strongly agreed with statements such as "Having children is important to my feeling complete as a man"; "I always thought I would be a parent"; "I think my life will be or is more fulfilling with children"; and "It is important for me to have children," she said.

Second, men holding "non-egalitarian gender views" are more likely to commit to fatherhood and to value fatherhood. The term "non-egalitarian" is academic-speak for holding the view that there are distinctions in the roles of fathers and mothers within the family. In other words, men who believe that the paternal role is distinct from the maternal one are more committed to fatherhood:

Men who valued leisure and career, who espoused greater religiosity, who embraced non-egalitarian gender values, and who were already fathers tended to value fatherhood most.

These findings are similar to those arrived at in earlier research. For instance, back in 2007 I reported on a study undertaken by researchers from the University of Virginia which found that:

it would appear that women who are in marriages that are characterized by more traditional gender beliefs and practices are happier with the emotion work they receive and do receive more such emotion work from their husbands.

In 2006 another research project revealed that:

only 53% of "gender egalitarian" men work full-time compared to 95.7% of the traditional type
there was a higher fertility rate in traditional type families (1.7) compared to gender equality types (1.05)
men in traditional type families spent both more time at work and more time with their children (45.8 hours at work and 9.2 hours with children compared to 36 hours at work and 8.7 hours with children)

This stands to reason. If you believe that you have a distinct and necessary role in the family which expresses and fulfils your masculine self-identity then you are more likely to commit to that role than if you see it in more neutral terms.

The start of something bad?

2011-11-19T14:15:00.006+11:00

On page four of the Herald Sun recently was a news item that might one day have very serious consequences for Australia:

Australian farmers and manufacturers will benefit from a nine-nation free trade deal that leaders hope to have in place within a year.

US President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the heads of seven other Asia-Pacific nations have agreed on the broad outline of a Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Mr Obama hailed it as a "milestone" that could dwarf the euro-zone.

It commits Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam to drop all trade barriers.

There's a good side and a bad side to this. Australian politicians have been looking for some time now to create an Asian Pacific bloc similar to the EU. In 2003, for instance, a senate committee issued a report which:

proposes a Pacific community which will eventually have one currency, one labour market, common strong budgetary and fiscal discipline, democratic and ethical governance, shared defence and security arrangements, common laws and resolve in fighting crime, and, health, welfare, education and environmental goals.

In other words, the Australian senate agreed to shift sovereignty toward a regional federation. There was to be "one labour market" in this new federal entity, meaning no borders between Australia, PNG and other pacific nations.

Fortunately the Pacific Community never took off, but Kevin Rudd did bring in a Pacific Islander guest worker scheme in 2008. This scheme was opposed by Brendan Nelson which brought him the following rebuke from the national political correspondent for the Herald Sun:

A guest worker scheme makes sense ... it should also pave the way for a pan-Pacific economic and trade pact ... Rudd's employment scheme, which will initially allow 2500 "guest workers" into Australia, is the first tranche of an eventual Pacific "common market".

And so he we are a few years later, a step closer to a Pacific common market. The good news is that the nations involved in this Pacific free trade pact are so geographically diverse that it will be harder to argue for an EU style federation. The bad news is that these free trade pacts can easily lead on to a "free movement of labour" - which would mean a further loss of border controls for Australia.

Finally, it's worth noting that the Australian Department of Immigration has been proved correct in its warnings about a guest worker scheme back in 2008. It noted the negative impact of the mass recruitment of overseas labor in countries such as the USA and the UK. One problem noted by the departmental researchers was that:

... As immigration has increased, native-born low-skilled workers (those most directly affected by foreign-labor programs) are increasingly dropping out of the labor force, and the tendency seems most pronounced among teenagers.

If you've been reading the Daily Mail recently you'll know what a problem that has become in the UK. Jobs there are increasingly going to overseas applicants, leaving a large pool of native born young people unemployed. The problem has been recognised by the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron who has warned that:

...around two-thirds of the increase in employment since 1997, was accounted for by foreign-born workers. Even now people are managing to come to the UK and find a job. Yet throughout all of those years we consistently had between 4 and 5 million people on out of work benefits. You can understand it from the employer's point of view. Confronted by a failing welfare system, shortcomings in our education system and an open door immigration system they can choose between a disillusioned and demotivated person on benefits here in the UK or an Eastern European with the get up and go to come across a continent to find work. Or they can choose between an inexperienced school leaver here or someone five years older coming to Britain with the experience they need. But that situation is simply not good enough. We have to change things.

Open borders means that a nation doesn't have to confront failings in its education and welfare systems, as workers can be taken from overseas. But keeping 5 million locals on welfare is a costly business and the recent riots in the UK also show the dangers of a large class of unemployed young people.

The question, then, is whether this new nine nation agreement can be kept to a free trade pact (which is how it's now being presented to the public) or whether it will lead on to a free movement in labour or, worse, an attempt to create an EU style regional federation.

Roebuck disliked his own

2011-11-14T20:08:00.000+11:00

Peter Roebuck has died after jumping from his hotel room in South Africa. He had earlier been visited by police after claims of sexual misconduct against boys.

Roebuck was the captain of an English country cricket team, who then moved to Australia to become a cricket commentator. But he did not like Australians. Some of his newspaper columns read very oddly, as they combine the usual kind of sporting analysis with hate filled commentary against native born white Australians.

Here is one example (in which native born Australians are termed "lamingtons" which are a kind of cake popular in Australia):

AUSTRALIA must not be waylaid by nauseating nationalists convinced that the defeat in Perth was caused not by a combination of absent friends and wayward bowling but by a sudden bout of politeness. Nor must it take heed of backslappers arguing that India's celebrations and appealing at the WACA Ground matched Australia's excesses in Sydney.

That is to confuse joy with rage. Likewise, the umpiring was acceptable and even-handed. Only lamingtons imagine otherwise. The game is up for that lot. It is time to move on. It is debatable whether people born in this country should be allowed to vote. It is no achievement to emerge from a womb. They could just as well be in Winnipeg. Australia is best loved by its settlers.

Similarly in an column titled "Lily-livered lilywhites have held cricket back" Roebuck complained that,

Over the years, Australian cricket has been dominated by players of Anglo-Saxon extraction.

But Roebuck thought that there was a progress toward enlightenment in Australia, in which Anglo-Saxons were on the way out:

Australia is advancing. A bright-eyed 17-year-old girl is making her Test debut in Bowral. Aboriginal sides from every corner of the country are taking part in the Imparja Cup in Alice Springs. And a government led by a Mandarin speaker has just issued a formal apology to the first tenants of this vast, hostile continent. It is all part of the same process, a long-awaited and stiffly resisted move towards enlightenment.

Roebuck seemed to get some of his identity from turning against his own tradition. It did not make him a happy man. Those writing his obituaries have struggled to portray him as a man with an anchored sense of self. In one column, he is described in these terms:

Peter Roebuck has jumped to his death in Cape Town, leaving behind the last great mystery of a complex and often tortured life that was full of questions and very few answers...

His life often appeared a long, lonely and ultimately futile attempt to find fulfilment, with plenty of controversy along the way, notably his suspended jail sentence 10 years ago after he admitted caning three young cricketers he had offered to coach.

It was that unedifying court case in Taunton that led many to question Roebuck’s motives when he helped fund the education of promising young cricketers, often providing accommodation for them at his homes in Sydney and Pietermaritzburg...

I worked briefly with Roebuck 12 years ago at the Sunday Telegraph and I have to say I found him the rudest, most prickly and unhelpful colleague I have ever experienced.

Facts rarely featured in his work. But I never got to know him properly and those who did spoke very differently on Sunday.

‘Scatty and focused, brilliant and fallible, muscular yet incredibly fragile, Peter Roebuck was too many men rolled into an irreplaceable one,’ wrote his friend Peter English in a brilliant tribute on the website Cricinfo, to which Roebuck contributed.

‘Individuals like him often sit on the outside, making choices and then fretting over the consequences.

‘In the end it was a wonder he lasted so long, dealing with demons and demonising which shadowed him during his playing days and forever after. Deep down, I think, he knew he would determine his end.’

I can't think of Roebuck as an admirable man. He cut himself off from some of the healthier and sustaining attachments in life with his disloyalty to his own kind.

[Readers: I'd ask that comments be restrained in nature in the light of Roebuck's recent death]

Bill Bennett: one rule for women another for men?

2011-11-13T16:29:00.002+11:00

Bill Bennett provoked a storm of criticism from the men's movement with two recent columns.

In these columns he noted the decline of men in education, employment and the family. He believes this is due to a lack of good masculine role models for men.

Now, I'm a supporter of traditional masculinity, so I'm not opposed to this aspect of Bennett's argument. But his analysis is both inadequate and confused. He doesn't see anything wrong at all with the changes to society over the past 50 years - in fact he strongly supports them. Nor does he see anything wrong with the behaviour of women in society - in fact he thinks women have gone from strength to strength.

So in his mind there is nothing that might be discouraging men from committing to work and family life. He believes the larger trends of society are fine - it's just that men haven't been socialised properly into their roles. So he hasn't thought very deeply about what once connected men to work and family and what might be disconnecting them today.

Here is Bennett praising the "ascension" of women in society:

For the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious and arguably more successful than men.

Now, society has rightly celebrated the ascension of one sex. We said, "You go girl," and they went. We celebrate the ascension of women but what will we do about what appears to be the very real decline of the other sex?

Bennett assumes that female "ascension" is to be measured in terms of career ambition; nor does he consider how a supercharged careerism in 20-something women might affect relationships. Are women who are focused on independent careers going to commit to family formation at a young age? If not, how does that affect the type of men they select for? Might some of these career ambitious women appear less feminine in their personality to at least some men? And if these women rise quickly in their careers, won't there be fewer men in their peer group for them to hypergamously look up to as potential mates?

Bennett goes even further with his "she done no wrong" argument:

Many women told me the problems are much worse than I described. They explained to me how they have to lower their standards to find a man. Young women, in particular, complained that men are dragging them down and holding them back. As one woman told me, if 60 is the new 40 for men, then 25 is the new 13.

Most feminists are not celebrating the decline of men and shouting it from the rooftops. Certainly, the far-left feminist movement has sought to diminish the role of men, but a majority of women want able, competent men of their equal. Strong men make stronger women (and vice versa) and stronger families, and women want that. Many men today aren't sure what they want.

Bennett is 68-years-old and clearly never had to go through the modern relationships scene. If he had, he wouldn't accept with such naivety the claim that the average 25-year-old woman is a perfected creature waiting patiently to select wisely a traditional man to marry. In particular I would recommend to Bill Bennett that he google the term "ladette".

And what of his claim that "strong men make stronger women (and vice versa) and stronger families"? I'm not sure exactly what he means by this, but presumably he means that a self-sufficient, independent career woman will bring out the qualities of resilience, self-sufficiency and career ambition in men and vice versa and that this will create a strong family culture. I just don't think this is right - and the evidence would seem to be on my side. It's not that men want women to be entirely helpless or dependent, but the male protector instinct will only be triggered if there is something to protect. If a woman is entirely independent and self-sufficient - and if women allow their personality to become too aggressively harsh - then women are likely to leave many men feeling cold.

Which brings me to my last but most important point. Bill Bennett can't seem to decide between liberal and conservative values. In the end, he seems to want men to be traditional and conservative but women to be liberal - and this is not something that's going to work out in the long run. If men think they are being held to traditional responsibilities whilst women to get to choose any option they like, then increasing numbers of men will want what women are having - and will look for ways to get such options for themselves.

Bennett claims that liberal societies have delivered autonomy to men but that men haven't made good use of it:

In developed Western countries, man has unprecedented freedom to choose, to a degree heretofore unknown, a life of his own wanting and design. A mere hundred years ago, man couldn't afford to dawdle in limbo between adolescence and manhood; manhood was thrust upon him for survival. Today, more opportunity lies at his feet than ever. Yet with this increased opportunity comes increased confusion, and the response on the part of some men has not been encouraging.

That's good evidence that Bennett, in his underlying philosophy, is a liberal: he thinks of freedom in liberal terms as being a freedom to choose a life of one's own design, i.e. a freedom to self-determine or self-create.

There are two problems with this claim. First, it's not clear how a man today really has such a freedom compared to a man of 100 years ago. Like most men I want to have a respected place as a husband and father in a family; I want to take pride in and contribute to my larger ethno-national tradition; I want to live in a society in which personal morality is taken seriously and in which art and culture reflect higher spiritual values; and I want to have a sense of my tradition building on the past and growing into the future rather than disintegrating. Isn't it true that I would have had more chance of of living such a life 100 years ago than today? So how am I more "free" today in choosing a life of my own design?

The second problem is that Bennett contradicts himself in his advice to men. If progress means a freedom to choose a life of one's own design, then why does Bennett so much want men to choose the predetermined values of traditional masculinity? For instance, Bennett criticises the Occupy Wall Street movement in this way:

Take the Occupy Wall Street movement, for instance. While diverse and scattered, some of the mottos and slogans on display are in stark contrast to the traditional and time-tested ideas of manliness.

So he believes that men should select "traditional and time-tested ideas of manliness". I agree that they should, but the problem for Bennett is that this contradicts his liberal belief that society is rightly based on choosing a life of one's own design. If I'm a young man, and I've been brought up with the idea of choosing a life of my own design, then why shouldn't I choose to spend my 20s playing computer games? Or being a player? Or being effeminate? Surely, if the aim is to self-design, you wouldn't go for something because it is traditional.

The only way you can suggest that men should go for "traditional and time-tested ideas of manliness" is to assert that there are values that are more important than "self-design". But if you do this, you have to be consistent and admit that there are going to be similar values for women too. But I don't hear Bill Bennett talking of "traditional and time-tested ideas of womanliness". In fact, Bennett seems to believe that women have "ascended" by becoming non-traditional.

Bennett complains that modern society has given men confusing messages about what it means to be a man, but Bennett's own messages are also confusing: he gives extreme praise to women for being non-traditional self-designers, whereas men are to follow a traditional and time-tested masculinity.

Bennett makes a bald assertion that these different pathways don't conflict, but it's likely that they do and that men will pick up on the double standard anyway.

So is Bennett a conservative or a liberal? I think he's a right liberal who continues to hold in a confused way to some more traditional values. As such I don't think he's the ideal person to put the case for traditional masculinity to young men.

When real communities aren't allowed

2011-11-12T14:54:00.003+11:00

What happens when people are no longer anchored in a tradition of their own? The answer, it seems, is that you get odd subcultures emerging which fill the need for identity and community.

There are young white men in America who are becoming juggalos and bronies. Juggalos are fans of a band called Insane Clown Posse (or other bands from the Psychopathic Records label). The following video gives you an idea of what juggalos are like (language warning):

And what are bronies? They are adult male fans of the TV show My Little Pony, which is aimed at 3 to 6-year-old girls. Bronies go into toy stores to collect figurines of the ponies; they post pictures of the ponies on facebook fan sites; and they have brony get-togethers. This is how a 32-year-old male speaks of the show:

First we can’t believe this show is so good, then we can’t believe we’ve become fans for life, then we can’t believe we’re walking down the pink aisle at Toys R Us or asking for the girl’s toy in our Happy Meal. Then we can’t believe our friends haven’t seen it yet, then we can’t believe they’re becoming bronies too."

He is raving about this:

Brony men haven't quite grown up to an adult masculinity. They are forming communities based on something childish and girly. Pity they aren't responsible members of a real community that would draw out higher aspects of their masculine nature.

George Frederic Watts

2011-11-08T23:00:00.000+11:00

George Frederic Watts was an English painter of the Victorian era. He attempted to create paintings that "speak to the imagination and to the heart and arouse all that is best and noblest in humanity" - a very different credo to the modernist idea that the purpose of art is to shock the public.

One of his most popular paintings was Sir Galahad (1862):

This one is titled Choosing:

This one Prayer:

This is a portrait of Jane Senior:

Rossiter's liberal mind

2011-11-07T21:59:00.006+11:00

At the Town Hall site there's an article titled "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." In the US, the term "liberal" is usually used to refer to what we would call left-liberals, so I assumed before reading it that it would be an attack on left-liberalism.

And it's a good attack. But the problem is that the author, Lyle H. Rossiter, hasn't broken cleanly with liberalism himself. He stands by principles that are clearly classically liberal (right-liberal), even if he stretches them a little in a conservative direction. So we are left stuck with the choice between a right and a left liberalism.

This is how Rossiter outlines his right-liberal political convictions:

Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.

There's a good side to this. Rossiter's right liberalism aims at a rugged individualism which encourages personal responsibility.

But it is inadequate to hold a society together and it's closer to left-liberalism than Rossiter realises. It's also a difficult combination of propositions to hold together. After all, if the stress is on the idea of the sovereign, self-determining individual, then what binds that individual to an external standard of morality? Why wouldn't a sovereign, autonomous individual say to himself "I'll choose to do what I want to do or what I think is right for me as an individual"? And what would bind that individual to tradition, which in its very nature is the creation of a collective that predates the individual? And if there is only the individual, bound to law and to contract and to voluntary cooperation, but not to collective forms of identity such as ethnies or nations, then on what principled basis can the influx of individuals from diverse sources be opposed? And if that is not opposed, then what is to prevent the eventual domination of politics by those arriving to take advantage of Rossiter's ordered liberty and who are willing to act as a collective to achieve their aims?

As you would expect from a right-liberal, Rossiter criticises the left-liberal preference of relying on the state to regulate society and to redistribute resources in the name of equality. He does score quite a few hits in his criticism of the left-liberal mentality:

What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.

That's some slapdown. But Rossiter leaves out the intellectual underpinnings of all this. Left-liberalism begins with the same kind of assumptions that Rossiter's right liberalism does: that individual autonomy is what matters. The left-liberal assumption is that it is the capacity for an autonomously self-created life that makes us distinctly human. Therefore, if some people are born with an advantage in pursuit of such a life, then we have a literal case of human inequality: some are being treated as more human than others due to an unearned privilege.

That seems unjust to left-liberals and so they look to the state to create conditions of equality, in particular by attacking whatever "ism" is held to be sustaining the privilege of some over the disadvantage of others. Left-liberals become committed to the view that equality is the natural condition of humanity and that inequality has been socially constructed. Inequality is not the result of different capabilities or interests or natures but of a system, i.e. of systemic discrimination or prejudice or exploitation. And so the left-liberal state does embark on a radically intrusive programme of remaking society.

There are considerable differences between right and left liberalism, but they share a great deal when it comes to first principles and both are suicidal to the societies which adopt them. So the aim should be a clean break from both and the opening up of politics to other approaches - and for this reason I can't feel enthusiastic about Lyle H. Rossiter's attacks on the liberal mind.

The family - motherhood

2011-11-06T16:55:00.009+11:00

(Another instalment of my booklet, hence the length)

What liberalism asks men to accept is that they are to be liberated from being fathers – at least fathers with a distinctly paternal role.

This explains the attitude of Sara Maitland who associates fatherhood negatively with authority. She has confessed her desire to,

...cast out the Father in my head who rules and controls me ...This frightens me; I want to protect my father and my love for him. I do not want to kill him, to see him dead. I want to set the man free from having to be a father.

That is an anti-paternal understanding of what freedom means. It is freedom from fatherhood, rather than freedom to be fathers.

You might think that motherhood would fare better. After all, the new unisex parental role is drawn from the traditional motherhood role.

But unfortunately there is a logic to liberalism by which motherhood is also reduced in status.

In part this is simply because the maternal role, just like the paternal one, is based on something predetermined rather than self-determined, namely our sex. Therefore, there are liberals like Alison Croggon who view the maternal role negatively as a restriction on the individual:

the role - rather than the task - of motherhood is an iron cage

There are liberals too who dislike the connection between motherhood and a woman’s biology.

After all, the liberal theory is that we become human through self-defining or self-determining acts.

But motherhood is something common to all females, human and non-human, as a matter of inherited biology. So it is dismissed harshly by many liberals as a mere “biological destiny”.

Motherhood also offends some liberals because it leaves women relatively dependent on others for support; rather than enhancing a woman’s autonomy it tends to reduce it.

Here is Kate Millett putting the full-blown liberal view:

In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male.

If you really believed the theory, you would not want as a woman to prioritise motherhood. It loses its place at the centre of life and becomes instead a limiting and non-human activity.

What are women expected to prioritise instead? There is a simple answer: careers. Careers fit in better with autonomy theory because they can be individually chosen (i.e. they can be thought of as a uniquely chosen life path in contrast to the predetermined role of motherhood) and because they are thought to leave women less financially dependent on men.

Fiona Stewart gave voice to such liberal attitudes in 2004 when a baby bonus was introduced in Australia. She was concerned that some young women might not prioritise education and careers over motherhood:

Everyone in the youth sector was - and still is - committed to encouraging girls to see motherhood as one of many choices. To move away from the historical model of "the baby maketh the woman"...This strategy of encouraging choice over biological destiny was aimed particularly at girls from non-English-speaking backgrounds... If we have to pay women to have children...it should be done in a way that ensures that education and career still come first.

And there’s this from American professor Laura Kipnis:

For the first time in history, women are relatively free from traditional fetters. No longer is womanhood synonymous with motherhood...

...with more control over maternity, record numbers of women are now participating in the workforce, meaning that womanhood is no longer synonymous with dependency. In fact, women can now be entirely free from men should they so choose.

The language used here is typical of liberalism: motherhood is thought of as closing off choice and therefore as being a “fetter.” And it is associated negatively with dependency. What is thought to matter to women is not the freedom to marry well and have children but the freedom to live apart from men.

Australian newspaper columnist Alan Howe is another liberal who belittles motherhood as being a preordained role:

It used to be that your early 20s were an ideal time to have children. Newly married and generally expected to do little more than care for little nappy-clad economic stimulation packages, women's lives were often predetermined events.

But as educated, ambitious waves of women entered the workforce...things changed

Mothers “do little more” than care for babies complains Alan Howe. He does not, as a liberal, accord motherhood a high status.

Kasey Edwards is a Melbourne woman who was brought up to be career ambitious. She rose high in the corporate world but at age 30 ditched her career because she felt the corporate drudgery to be unfulfilling. What was she to do instead? She felt the urge to have children but resisted it on these grounds:

I'm prepared to accept that having kids could be one answer to being thirty-something and over it, but I don't want to accept that it is the answer. It seems so stiflingly predetermined to think that it doesn't matter who we are or what we have done with our lives up until now, we all have to breed in the end.

Motherhood has lost prestige in her eyes because it is not a uniquely self-created life path.

Here is a more radical interpretation of autonomy theory by an American feminist blogger:

Women, however, particularly women with children, don’t have access to the full menu of choices. In our culture “motherhood” is a kind of prison...

As for freedom from biology... there can be little argument against the notion that females bear a disproportionate burden, biology-wise...That women have to do the pregnancy is not a “cultural construct.” What Firestone and others have postulated is that until women are liberated from this burden, their personal autonomy will always be compromised...by the actual physiological process of hosting a parasite for nine months.

If the point of life really is to maximise autonomy then it makes sense to treat motherhood negatively as a limitation (a “prison” is the term used above) and pregnancy as a biological burden from which women are to be liberated.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clarke, took this negative view of motherhood. She once justified her childlessness on the grounds that,

You’ve got better things to do with your time, unimpeded.

The seeds of this anti-maternal attitude were sown early. In 1892 Elizabeth Cady Stanton made a speech to a U.S. senate committee. She told the committee that the aim of life was the “self-dependence of every soul” and that women had a “birthright to self-sovereignty.” Woman, she declared, “as an individual...must rely on herself.”

This female autonomy was to be achieved through education and careers. And, predictably, family relationships were radically reduced in status. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described them as “incidental” to life:

...it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties...

In the introduction to a book Elizabeth Cady Stanton edited in 1881 there is a longer treatment of the same theme. She wrote of her own sex that:

Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations...Custom and philosophy, in regard to woman's happiness, are alike based on the idea that her strongest social sentiment is love of children...But the love of offspring, common to all orders of women and all forms of animal life...calls out only the negative virtues that belong to apathetic classes, such as patience, endurance, self-sacrifice...

Maternal love isn’t seen as being as meaningful when you believe that independence and self-assertion are what really matter in life.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was very radically individualistic. She thought that society should be structured around “the isolation of every human soul”.

But most of us don’t share that view. Most of us do want a degree of independence, but we also want to be fulfilled in our relationships with others and we don’t care if those relationships are preordained – they still matter.

Take Lori Gottlieb. She and a friend decided “in a fit of self-empowerment” to have their children as single mothers. In doing so she went further than most women in the pursuit of a life independent of men.

But even in her case “self-empowerment” was not what she most valued. She has described a moment when she and her friend were having a picnic in a park and watching their children play:

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist — vehemently, even — that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.

For Lori Gottlieb, being a wife and mother are not “incidental” relationships. They were once part of her dreams and longings. And yet they don’t fit in well with the ruling ideology of our society. It’s not easy for liberal intellectuals to view motherhood as promoting female autonomy and so the maternal role, just like the paternal one, has lost status in the modern West.

Stealing motherhood

2011-11-05T14:52:00.004+11:00

Sorry, I couldn't resist a post on this.

Liz Jones has written another of her confessional columns for the Daily Mail. This time it's about her attempts to become a mother by stealing the sperm of her partners. She begins by reminding us of the ridiculous modern girl life script that she and too many other Western women have bought into:

...for most of my adult life, having a child was the furthest thing from my mind.

I wanted a career, freedom, a nice house and to keep my figure. As a feminist, I looked down on mumsy types.

But when I was in my late 30s, I decided that if I didn’t get pregnant soon then it might never happen. I had also reached a point in my life where I wanted to settle down with a man, and though my boyfriend at that time was wildly unsuitable, I thought that I could change him.

Yes, it's the modern girl jackpot. She wanted to be the autonomous career girl type and she spent her fertile years looking down on motherhood and dating unsuitable men. But in her late 30s, at the very, very last moment she suddenly decided it was time to settle down.

She's not exactly alone in having pursued this life course. It's part of the cultural message being promoted to Western women. For instance, there's a hit romantic comedy film out called Bridesmaids. The "heroine" of this film is part of a player guy harem; she sticks with him because she thinks he's hot. But in her late 30s she finally sees through him and starts to consider an average joe type. That's modern "romance" for you - the heroines are ageing women who get rescued at the very last moment by a decent guy.

But there was to be no such romcom ending for Liz Jones. Her "wildly unsuitable" boyfriend didn't want children. So Liz Jones took matters into her own hands:

He refused to believe I was on the Pill, and insisted we use a condom for every moment of our intimate contact.

‘I don’t trust you,’ he said, muttering something about women claiming to want a career, but underneath wanting to start a family.

I called his bluff and told him there was no way I would want a baby with him, given he didn’t earn any money. Yet the truth was, I had hatched a plan that many will doubtless find shocking.

Because he wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I decided to steal it from him. I resolved to steal his sperm from him in the middle of the night. I thought it was my right, given that he was living with me and I had bought him many, many M&S ready meals.

The ‘theft’ itself was alarmingly easy to carry out. One night, after sex, I took the used condom and, in the privacy of the bathroom, I did what I had to do. Bingo.

I don’t understand why more men aren’t wise to this risk — maybe sex addles their brain. So let me offer a warning to men wishing to avoid any chance of unwanted fatherhood: if a woman disappears to the loo immediately after sex, I suggest you find out exactly what she is up to.

As it turned out, my attempts to get pregnant by Trevor failed, and shortly afterwards he and I split up.

It would be a lot nicer, you would think, for Liz Jones to have gone about things the traditional way, i.e. learn to be attractively feminine in her early 20s, reward a family oriented man with her affections, get married and have a committed and enthusiastic husband to raise a family with together. Surely that's a better outcome than having to scheme to steal the sperm from an unwilling boyfriend.

Liz Jones did marry her next boyfriend, but again he was wildly unsuitable. He was 14 years younger and unwilling to commit to children. So she stole his sperm too but again without successfully becoming pregnant. She's now in her 50s, divorced and childless.

The moral of the story is that women should ignore the cultural messages encouraging them to endlessly delay family formation. Would you really want to end up in Liz Jones's situation? Wouldn't that be crushingly humiliating?

Men, too, need to consider the timing of family formation. Liz Jones relates in her column that,

I spoke to several men before writing this article. One, in his mid-30s, has just got engaged to a woman who is 39. He told me he is not yet thinking about starting a family, as he is self-employed and worried about the recession. They also live 45 miles apart, each in their own flat.

He told me he wants to wait until they have a house together, and for his business to become established.

I bet his fiancée will be pregnant within the year.

That man hasn't thought things through. If he really does want a family it would have been prudent to marry a younger woman. But if he is committed to marrying a 39-year-old then the time to try for a family is straight away. It's not sensible for him to say he "is not yet thinking" about family.

The family - fatherhood

2011-11-03T22:09:00.002+11:00

This is another section of the booklet I am writing , which is why it begins abruptly.

Fatherhood

In the traditional family our sex does matter: there are distinct and complementary roles for men and women as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers.

It is a form of family life that liberals cannot easily tolerate. Liberals think of individual self-determination as the highest good, but our sex is not something we can choose for ourselves. This leads to the idea that our sex should be made not to matter in family life.

Liberal societies therefore have shifted toward an ideal of a single, unisex parental role, based on the traditional motherhood role.

This is one of the ways that liberalism is anti-paternal. The convergence into a single, unisex role is done at the expense of fatherhood.

Sara Ruddick expressed this idea clearly in her book Rethinking the family. She declared that she looked forward,

to the day when men are willing and able to share equally and actively in transformed maternal practices ... On that day there will be no more 'fathers,' no more people of either sex who have power over their children's lives and moral authority in their children's world ... There will [instead] be mothers of both sexes.

Note that Sara Ruddick not only wants there to be “mothers of both sexes” rather than fathers and mothers, but that she associates fatherhood negatively with “moral authority”. That is because paternal authority is unchosen and therefore violates the liberal ideal of autonomy - a second way in which liberalism is anti-paternal.

She’s not alone in pushing men to adopt a more maternal parenting style. James Garbarino, the president of an institute for the study of child development, has expressed the view that,

To develop a new kind of father, we must encourage a new kind of man...we need to ask, "Why can't a man be more like a woman?"

Similarly, Diane Ehrensaft in Parenting Together has endorsed the idea of men and women "mothering" their children together and Andrew M. Greeley would like society to administer a "dose of androgyny" to men and "insist that men become more like women".

I’m reminded too of the Nescafe advert which ran on Australian TV and which included in its jingle the lyrics:

You can be mother when you are a man ...
Open your mind you know that you can.

What is the logical consequence of believing that there is only one unisex parental role based on motherhood tasks?

It means that the male role within a family becomes less necessary. If men have a distinct role as fathers, i.e. if they contribute something different to their wives, then they aren’t easily displaced.

But if the male role is no different to the female one, then their role might be helpful but it isn’t necessary. This is a third way in which liberalism is anti-paternal.

Englishwoman Laurie Penny has seized upon the decline of a distinct male provider role to inform men of exactly this point:

...since feminist liberation, we have been enabled to provide for ourselves and our children on a more basic level. If that alienates men from their traditional roles of breadwinner and head of the table then too bad...

So, precisely in what way do children ‘need’ fathers?...The plain fact is that now that women are allowed to financially provide for themselves, we no longer need husbands to raise children...

What women could do with, fundamentally, are wives – other people, male or female, to share the load of domestic work and money-earning in a spirit of genuine support and partnership. When more men can stomach seeing themselves in the role of 'wife and father', then we’ll have a basis for negotiation...If you’re truly man enough to be a wife and father, bring that to the table and we'll talk.

She is saying that children no longer need fathers – and if liberalism is correct about a unisex role then she is right. If men and women are no different, and have no different role to play, then why logically would children need a father in the house?

Penny Laurie is telling men that as their role as a father is no longer necessary they should aim to be one of the wives of either sex in the home. In doing so she is being consistent in applying liberal ideas about unisex parenting.

Another liberal who is radically consistent in applying the theory is Professor P.Z. Myers. He very much supports the idea that the male and female role within the family should be a unisex, interchangeable one.

He was therefore critical of Archbishop Nienstedt who asked,

What will happen to children growing up in a world where the law teaches them that moms and dads are interchangeable and therefore unnecessary?

The archbishop is making the same point that I made previously, that if the role of fathers is interchangeable with that of mothers then it becomes unnecessary and so the presence of fathers is thought to matter less in the family.

Professor Myers’ ominous reply was this:

I think a world where moms and dads are interchangeable in their roles and responsibilities in child-raising would be a fine place to live. Aside from nursing (and again, biologists will fix that someday, too)...

He so much wants parenting roles to be interchangeable that he hopes that men can be genetically re-engineered to be able to breastfeed children.

That is the logical extreme to which a visionary scientist like Professor Myers is willing to take the idea of a unisex parental role.

Blankenhorn

One critic of the liberal view of the family is the American writer David Blankenhorn. In his book Fatherless America he argues that men should not abandon a distinctly paternal role.

How does Blankenhorn explain the push toward a new fatherless family?

He explains it, as I do, in terms of autonomy. He believes that there are people who see socially defined roles, such as those of father and mother, as restrictive. These people believe that they are freeing individuals by replacing such socially defined roles with self-determined ones.

Blankenhorn quotes as an example of this the views of the very liberal Mark Gerzon. Gerzon celebrates the new family on the grounds that:

Couples may write their own scripts, construct their own plots, with unprecedented freedom...a man and a woman are free to find the fullest range of possibilities. Neither needs to act in certain ways because of preordained cross-sexual codes of conduct.

“Writing your own script” is liberal-speak for rejecting what is predetermined (or, as Gerzon puts it, “preordained”) in favour of what can be self-determined. Gerzon considers this to be an “unprecedented freedom”.

Blankenhorn recognises that this vision of freedom is part of a reigning orthodoxy:

In many ways, it is a bracing, exhilarating vision, bravely contemptuous of boundaries and inherited limitations, distinctly American in its radical insistence on self-created identity...It is the reigning ethos of much of contemporary American culture.

But it is not a vision that Blankenhorn can accept:

I dispute it because it denies the necessity, and even repudiates the existence, of fathers' work: irreplaceable work in behalf of family that is essentially and primarily the work of fathers.

I dispute it because it tells an untrue story of what a good marriage is. In addition, I dispute it because it rests upon a narcissistic and ultimately self-defeating conception of male happiness and human completion.

...androgyny and gender role convergence reflect the ultimate triumph of radical individualism...it is the belief, quite simply, that human completion is a solo act. It is the insistence that the pathway to human happiness lies in transcending the old polarities of sexual embodiment in order for each individual man and woman to embrace and express all of human potentiality within his or her self...Now each man, within the cell of himself, can be complete...

This idea, so deeply a part of our culture, is fool's gold. It is a denial of sexual complementarity and ultimately a denial of generativity...Especially for men, this particular promise of happiness is a cruel hoax. Like all forms of narcissism, its final product is not fulfilment but emptiness.

Feminists for polygamy

2011-10-31T21:43:00.005+11:00

OK, so Kate Bolick writes a lengthy article confessing that she cannot make up her mind between autonomy and intimacy - leaving her single in her late 30s.

I've posted a couple of traditionalist replies to this, but how would a feminist respond to Kate Bolick?

Jessica Mack is a feminist who is critical of Kate Bolick for suggesting that women can't have it all: Mack insists that you can have intimacy without compromising autonomy. But what exactly does this mean? How can you retain a freedom to choose however you like whilst still committing yourself to a relationship?

Mack offers several suggestions. First, she thinks one option is to have open relationships:

Sex columnist Dan Savage has written for decades about the pragmatism of non-monogamy in making marriages work. Feminists often, and rightly, decry the double standard that men can sleep around, while women cannot. Savage suggests that rectifying this is not about confining men to fidelity, but rather encouraging women to break out and explore. I may be out on a licentious limb here, but I would argue that the concept of non-monogamy will be the biggest relationship issue we will grapple with in our time.

I wonder if Jessica Mack would suggest this if she weren't 28 and childless. If she were 38 with a few children in tow she might not think giving her husband/partner free rein to roam such a good idea. Anyway, open relationships might well preserve a measure of choice, but most likely at the expense of intimacy.

Jessica Mack's second suggestion is even more noteworthy. She thinks that polygamy might extend autonomous choice, presumably by not limiting us to just one spouse:

Disruption is also afoot in the west of the US where Kody Brown, a friendly polygamist, is filming a reality show about his life with four wives and 16 children. Brown recently launched an historic lawsuit to challenge Utah's bigamy laws. Earlier this summer the Browns' lawyer penned a stellar op-ed laying out a logical and nearly irresistible argument for polygamy as a viable relationship model.

So Jessica Mack the feminist believes that the argument for polygamy as a viable relationship model is "nearly irresistible". I wonder what the average married woman thinks of this and whether feminists like Mack really represent their interests.

You can see why polygamy is connected to autonomy - it means that we aren't limited to marrying one person. But from reading feminist commentary elsewhere, there's possibly another reason why polygamy appeals to some feminists. If you aren't committed to being a wife and mother, then those roles might seem too demanding. You might think that having more than one woman in the house to share the role would lessen the burden and allow you to do other things. But here too greater autonomy is still at the expense of intimacy - it is motivated by a lesser commitment to the relationship.

Her third suggestion is the usual liberal one of replacing a single form of marriage with a plurality or diversity of forms, so that you get to autonomously choose which one to participate in. Each form is thought to be equally valid:

Young women need to know that intimacy doesn't have to be a casualty of autonomy, and that sometimes it actually develops as a result...In order to move forward constructively, we need a multiplicity of relationship models to inspire and reassure us. We need trans couples on TV, we need non-monogamy champions, we need people married 40-plus years like my parents, and we need Stevie Nicks who, at 62, is purposefully single so that she can "always be free".

Note though that it's the purposefully single Stevie Nicks who gets to claim the mantle of freedom fighter. I wonder too if Jessica Mack really understands the commitment it takes from a husband to remain monogamous. A traditional marriage like her parents isn't a likely outcome in a society which champions non-monogamy. Chances are that Jessica Mack is helping to take away the one choice that most women really want to have.

Remoralising men

2011-10-29T15:38:00.001+11:00

Grerp at The Lost Art of Self-Preservation has written an excellent post on Kate Bolick.

Kate Bolick is the American woman who admitted that she had been brought up by her feminist mother to pursue autonomy above all else and so rejected offers of marriage from suitable men when in her late 20s. Now, in her late 30s, she finds that there are no more suitable men and so she has begun to talk up the idea of remaining a single lady.

Grerp doesn't think this is much of an option for most women. She points out that not all women are suited to a life of rugged independence:

The fact is, most women aren't very much like Bolick at all - which is why most women want to get married, because subconsciously they know, despite all the feminist propaganda that portrays marriage as a one-way trap to stifling, abused servitude, that marriage is a good deal for women. Women are smaller, weaker, more risk averse, more comfort seeking, and are rarely the kind of trail-blazing, money-making geniuses who can sit alone atop a heap of money and adulation. Almost all of them will eventually want babies too which will make them physically, emotionally, and financially more vulnerable than women like Bolick.

She could be describing my wife. My wife likes the comforts of home and of domestic routine, she is oriented to being a mother and caring for her children and, although she did support herself for many years, she doesn't handle the stress of work burdens well. Our marriage works well because my own instinct is to create a protected space for her to create a home in - but more on that later.

Grerp then goes on to look at the "We are the 99%" protesters. She finds, as I did, that many are women who feel anxious and insecure about their lives:

One of the themes that emerges from the We Are the 99 Percent posts is fear/anxiety. Over and over the posters, the majority of which are women, say they are scared. They don't know what is going to happen. They fear for the future if the government doesn't swoop in with the jobs, the debt forgiveness, and the free healthcare. The fact is that women are already the biggest users of the social safety net in terms of welfare, food stamps, WIC, subsidized housing, childcare vouchers, etc. Since they are largely covered for at least the basics of food and housing, what they are essentially demanding, then, is the eradication of risk. All risk.

While the economic situation is very complex, the timing of this tremendous outpouring of fear and despair is not coincidental. We are now at least three generations deep into the destruction of the traditional family. Boomer women came from intact families many of which would provide backup if and when they crashed and burned in their youth. Gen X women had a more fractured family landscape, but previous recessions were not as dire and grandparents often pitched in. Millenials, on the other hand, may come from a family tree with hardly an intact branch. Their Boomer parents can't afford to aid them because they need their own help. Forty percent of Boomer women are single and hardly any of them are adequately prepared for retirement.

That's well observed. I know that in my life I haven't had to feel a high level of insecurity because I grew up in a culture in which every family had a hard working father who built up economic resources. My father and uncles all did this, as did my father-in-law. So there is always family support to fall back on in a crisis. But if you were a single woman without the prospect of such family support you would no doubt feel more vulnerable.

But rather than looking to men to provide security, these women seem to think it can be provided either by the state or else by taking money from the well-off. They're not focused on how wealth in a society is generated to begin with.

Grerp next quotes the Facebook page of a 40-year-old woman who is upset that the men she knows aren't good at providing security:

Boys play house...Men build homes!!! Boys shack up...Men get married!!! Boys make babies...Men raise children!!! A boy won't raise his own children, a man will raise his and someone else's!!! Boys invent excuses for failure...Men produce strategies for success!!! Boys look for somebody to take care of them...Men look for someone to take care of!!! Boys seek popularity...Men demand respect and know how to give it..BOYS DO WHAT THEY WANT, MEN DO WHAT THEY CAN & MORE!

But as Grerp points out, it's no use a 40-year-old woman with three children from two different men suddenly demanding that a traditional man step in to look after her:

The woman who posted it has three children from two different men. She is stuck in a mediocre paying, dead-end job. She divorced her first husband because marriage wasn't fun, then shacked up with a series of less and less stable men until she threw the last mooching bum out a year or so ago. She is 40. Now she is seriously looking for Mr. Right and says she won't settle for anything less because she's worth it. The handwriting on her wall was written nearly a decade ago when she had her second and then third illegitimate child: life-long poverty.

A few weeks ago I went for a walk along Mary Street, Hawthorn. It's a particularly well-preserved part of that heritage suburb of Melbourne and I am always struck by its particular spirit of place. You get the sense of it having grown as a protected community: a place full of beautiful family homes, an attractive high street, and fine churches, schools, public buildings and parks. The men who built Hawthorn in its heyday succeeded in creating a protected space within which a community with its own local flavour and life could flourish.

That is the higher male calling, but one from which modern men are largely alienated. There are certainly still many men who work hard to keep their families afloat financially, but not so many who would identify as men with the task of shielding a real, historic community to allow the communal life within it to live on.

What went wrong? There are no doubt many reasons, but a critical one relates to the first wave of feminism in the mid to late 1800s. Until that time, men were responsible for the protective role I have been trying to describe. But the demands of first wave feminism implied, logically, that there was no such distinctively male role - and so over time the male commitment to such a role withered.

And something similar might be said of the second and third waves of feminism - that the demands of these movements undercut the idea of a distinctively masculine role within the family - with the likelihood that the male commitment to a husband and father role will also decline over time.

If a society is going to prosper it has to draw on the higher masculine instincts to create the protected conditions in which families and communities can flourish. The men of that society have to know, unmistakeably, that that is the higher task they are called upon to achieve. Female talents can be drawn on in all sorts of ways, but never to the point that men lose the sense of what they are charged with accomplishing.

That is a great mistake the West has made, and continues to make - it has demoralised and alienated its own men. If we are to be an effective counterculture we have to include, as part of our conversation, the remoralising of Western men.

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke

2011-10-27T07:56:00.001+11:00

C.J. Dennis

During World War I the Australian poet C.J. Dennis published a book of verse titled The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. It's about a Melbourne "larrikin" named Bill who meets a girl, Doreen, and who gives up his wayward life to become a husband and father.

It was a popular book of verse in its time. In the following stanzas, Bill reflects on what is worthwhile in life:

This ev'nin' I was sittin' wiv Doreen,
Peaceful an' 'appy wiv the day's work done,
Watchin', be'ind the orchard's bonzer green,
The flamin' wonder of the settin' sun.

Another day gone by; another night
Creepin' along to douse Day's golden light;
Another dawning when the night is gone,
To live an' love -- an' so life mooches on.

Times I 'ave thought, when things was goin' crook,
When 'Ope turned nark an' Love forgot to smile,
Of somethin' I once seen in some old book
Where an ole sorehead arsts, "Is life worf w'ile?"

But in that stillness, as the day grows dim,
An' I am sittin' there wiv 'er an' 'im--
My wife, my son! an' strength in me to strive,
I only know -- it's good to be alive!

It seems that back in 1916 it was still the case that a poet would express a spiritual response to nature and a sense of fulfilment in family. These themes are repeated in these lines of the poem:

But when the moon comes creepin' o'er the hill,
An' when the mopoke calls along the creek,
I takes me cup o' joy an' drinks me fill,
An' arsts meself wot better could I seek.

An' ev'ry song I 'ear the thrushes sing
That everlastin' message seems to bring;
An' ev'ry wind that whispers in the trees
Gives me the tip there ain't no joys like these:

Livin' an' loving wand'rin' on yeh way;
Reapin' the 'arvest of a kind deed done;
An' watching in the sundown of yer day,
Yerself again, grown nobler in yer son.

Bill's love of his wife features too in this stanza:

An' I am rich, becos me eyes 'ave seen
The lovelight in the eyes of my Doreen;
An' I am blest, becos me feet 'ave trod
A land 'oo's fields reflect the smile o' God.

Truro Cathedral

2011-10-24T21:53:00.002+11:00

Here is an achievement worth noting. Truro is a town in Cornwall, England, with a population of only 21,000. But it boasts a magnificent cathedral.

So is this something created in the distant past? In fact, the cathedral was begun in 1880 and completed in 1910. So only about a century ago the English were still adding such magnificent buildings to their nation's heritage.

The architect responsible was John Loughborough Pearson.

Pearson designed many churches including St Augustine's in London, the interior of which is shown below:

I wasn't able to find a good photo of the interior of Truro Cathedral, but you get an idea of how fine it is from the following YouTube clip:

Kate Bolick tells us why

2011-10-22T14:28:00.005+11:00

Kate Bolick

Kate Bolick is the latest in a spate of women to regret leaving marriage to so late in life. Her explanation of what went wrong is well worth reading.

She begins by noting that she had a terrific chance to marry in her late 20s, which she turned down:

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered.

Why would she do that? Her answer is twofold: the autonomy theory she was brought up on led her to prioritise independence over relationships, and she assumed that there would always be men for her to partner with.

Let's begin with the assumption that there would always be eligible men seeking her out. Kate Bolick is a very physically attractive woman. She describes how in her 20s she managed easily to pursue serial long-term relationships with men:

Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

...That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith.

Despite the advantage of her good looks, she now doesn't have the pick of men but feels she must settle. Where have all the "good men" gone? She observes:

...as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

Most of the men have already married, others have dropped out. And fewer suitable man are available anyway as women have pushed up the career ladder, with many of their male peers losing the motivation to do likewise. (Note the language Kate Bolick uses: "finally ready to start our lives". In her mind her 20s were just a kind of play life - a wait until her real life could finally begin in her 30s. But why delay your real life for so long?)

Bolick does recognise here the major issue that as women do increasingly better in education and careers than men that it becomes more difficult for women to marry up:

the decline of males has obviously been ... bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity ... the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller. What does this portend for the future of the American family?

Bolick is aware, too, that as her youth and fertility decline that she is losing ground in the dating market to younger women:

I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from.

All of these are important and meaty issues which are covered very well at various sites on the net. But the other part of Kate Bolick's explanation is rarely dealt with, perhaps because it requires a more fundamental rethink of modern values.

Kate Bolick tells us very clearly that she was raised to prioritise individual autonomy. And the logic of autonomy was that she should remain independent for as long as possible.

...the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother...

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle, or: A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be...You and Me...

...my future was to be one of limitless possibilities...This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place...We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

Limitless possibilities. An unfettered future. No restrictions on what can be autonomously chosen. Someone brought up to believe in this isn't going to think seriously about how our choices need to be ordered and about how a workable framework to society needs to be organised and maintained.

Here again Kate Bolick writes about her prioritising of independence over love:

When I embarked on my own sojourn as a single woman in New York City...it wasn’t dating I was after. I was seeking something more vague and, in my mind, more noble, having to do with finding my own way, and independence.

She continues later by praising the Mosuo in China for their matrilineal culture in which there is no stable marriage commitment:

The matrilineal Mosuo are worth pausing on, as a reminder of how complex family systems can be, and how rigid ours are...For centuries, the Mosuo have lived in households that revolve around the women...

Sexual relations are kept separate from family. At night, a Mosuo woman invites her lover to visit her babahuago (flower room)...there are no expectations or rules. As Cai Hua, a Chinese anthropologist, explains, these relationships, which are known as açia, are founded on each individual’s autonomy, and last only as long as each person is in the other’s company. Every goodbye is taken to be the end of the açia relationship, even if it resumes the following night. “There is no concept of açia that applies to the future,” Hua says.

But the really important quote is this one:

In the months leading to my breakup with Allan, my problem, as I saw it, lay in wanting two incompatible states of being—autonomy and intimacy...

This is what she sees as her problem. This is why she dropped the man she might have married and had children with. And she is right - autonomy and intimacy (i.e. autonomy and committed love) are incompatible. You have to decide on how to order them: do you sacrifice a measure of your autonomy to enjoy the good of marital love? Or do you reject a stable relationship to maintain autonomy?

Most of us decide that the fulfilment of a good marriage and having children is the higher good. But Kate Bolick, having been raised from girlhood to value autonomy above all else, has never been able to come to this decision decisively.

She is still caught in a kind of limbo in wanting both things. This is clear in her writing in which she jumps from regrets about not having married and her missed opportunities to ideas about marriage being a false historical construct to be replaced by more flexible living arrangements.

Her current compromise appears to be a desire to find a community of women to find companionship with. That is probably one of the worst options she could take.

Anyway, the larger lesson is that there are losses in making autonomy the overriding good in society. We can certainly value autonomy, but it's wrong to think of it as the highest, ordering principle of society.

I meet a serious left-liberal

2011-10-20T21:02:00.001+11:00

I've had the chance lately to get to know a seriously political young left-liberal. What have I learnt from the experience? Mostly that it's not easy holding together a left-liberal politics.

One of the cornerstones of his thinking is that there are no true group differences, not between nations or races or sexes. We are all of us interchangeable, whether we are men or women, or Swedes or Kenyans.

But to keep this line of thought going requires a whole series of other explanatory beliefs, most of which strain the limits of credibility. And this must be a crushing weight to have to carry around mentally.

In part, my left-liberal acquaintance argues that claims about group differences are merely stereotypes. He often argues too that they are the result of white racism. But he reaches further than this. He is so focused on the idea that group differences are false, that he lurches into all kinds of historical revisionism, e.g. the idea that whites stole technology from the Asians who in turn stole it from the Africans.

There's this whole edifice of claims (e.g. that race does not exist, that women are as physically strong as men etc) propping up the denial of difference. And sometimes he seems to tire of running with these arguments, and he will then relax into some more bluntly realistic assessment of things - he doesn't find it easy to maintain the pose.

It's a vulnerability of left-liberalism. The principle of group equality is so absolute, that it seems to be difficult for left-liberals to admit, for instance, that whites or Asians created a more developed level of civilisation. So there's a furious intellectual pedalling to explain away the "false appearance" of difference, which involves a whole series of claims about social constructs, racism, and history.

The end result is a theory that has to be over-developed and that must consume a fair bit of energy to hold together. It's not difficult to see the potential for it to come crashing down.

Cameron against open borders?

2011-10-19T22:34:00.002+11:00

British PM David Cameron has given a major speech on immigration. The gist of it is that he wants to bring immigration levels back under control and to focus on those who are likely to contribute to the British economy.

The speech is worth reading, if only because Cameron details some of the rorts in the system. Parts of the speech I found most interesting include these excerpts:

...there's no doubt that badly controlled immigration has compounded the failure of our welfare system and allowed governments and employers to carry on with the waste of people stuck on welfare when they should be working.

...the very term "Points Based System" has proved to be misleading. The rhetoric implies that each and every potential migrant is carefully and individually assessed with only those scoring the most points able to enter the country. But the reality was very different. Instead of a system of points for individuals there were a range of low minimum thresholds where anyone who met them was automatically entitled to come, almost on a self-selection basis, to work and study and in many cases bring dependants.

...The reality was that someone with a modest salary and a Bachelor's degree in any subject from any college in the world could come over here and do any job they liked. And of course the system was a magnet for fraudsters. Plenty never found work at all. One study showed that about a third of those sampled only found low skilled roles working as shop assistants, in takeaways and as security guards.

...Take the next tier - Tier 2, for migrants coming here who actually did have job offers. Large numbers of this group were actually coming to do low-level work which many people have rightly felt those on welfare should be trained for but which instead went to migrants.

...It's a system where migrants got the choice to come, rather than us having the choice of migrants. And it's a system which was totally unfair which people rightly feel added to the sense that "something for nothing" was the order of the day.

...In April we introduced a limit on the number of economic migrants able to come to the UK from outside the European Economic Area. Many predicted that this wouldn't work and that it would stop British businesses getting the workers they need. But the evidence shows this just hasn't been the case. That limit of 20,700 for the year - has been undersubscribed each and every month since it was introduced with businesses currently using less than half of their monthly quotas.

...around two-thirds of the increase in employment since 1997, was accounted for by foreign-born workers. Even now people are managing to come to the UK and find a job. Yet throughout all of those years we consistently had between 4 and 5 million people on out of work benefits. You can understand it from the employer's point of view. Confronted by a failing welfare system, shortcomings in our education system and an open door immigration system they can choose between a disillusioned and demotivated person on benefits here in the UK or an Eastern European with the get up and go to come across a continent to find work. Or they can choose between an inexperienced school leaver here or someone five years older coming to Britain with the experience they need. But that situation is simply not good enough. We have to change things.

...when it comes to bogus colleges and bogus students we have to be equally clear: they have no place in our country. In June last year in New Delhi, for example, more than a third of student applications verified by the visa section were found to contain forged documents. Private colleges now have to face far more rigorous checks on the quality of their education provision before they can sponsor international students. Since May 2010 the UK Border Agency has revoked the licences of 97 education providers. A further 36 currently have their licences suspended.

...A sample of more than 500 family migration cases found that over 70 per cent of UK-based sponsors had post-tax earnings of less than £20,000 a year. When the income level of the sponsor is this low, there is an obvious risk that the migrants and their family will become a significant burden on the welfare system and the taxpayer. So we have asked the Migration Advisory Committee to look at the case for increasing the minimum level for appropriate maintenance.

...We're also consulting on how to tackle abuse of the system, to make sure that family migrants who come here are in a genuine relationship with their partner. Time and again, visa officers receive applications from spouses or partners sponsoring another spouse or partner soon after being granted settlement in the UK suggesting that the original marriage or partnership was a sham simply designed to get them permanent residence here.

...If we take the steps set out today and deal with the all the different avenues of migration, legal and illegal then levels of immigration can return to where they were in the 1980s and 90s - a time when immigration was not a front rank political issue. And I believe that will mean net migration to this country will be in the order of tens of thousands each year, not the hundreds of thousands every year that we have seen over the last decade.

Cameron seems to be genuinely set against open borders. Why the break with open borders orthodoxy?

There are several possibilities. He might, for instance, be trying to win back ground from the BNP. It could be, too, that this is part of his concern about "Broken Britain" - that he doesn't want the further growth of an unemployed underclass.

Right-liberals are often focused on economic criteria, and it might be that Cameron believes it is more economically rational to orient immigration to those who are going to contribute most economically; he does in his speech talk about "getting the right people we need for our economy".

So arguments about the economy and social cohesion seem to have led him to reject an uncontrolled, open borders approach to immigration.

Most of Cameron's policies so far have been disappointingly liberal, but it could be that he does present a genuine alternative to the Labour Party on this important issue. The real test will be whether he really can bring immigration numbers down to the levels of the 1980s.

Eram recasts the family

2011-10-16T13:40:00.005+11:00

An advertising campaign by a major shoe retailer in France has sparked controversy in that country. Tiberge at Gallia Watch (and Lawrence Auster at VFR) have covered the story.

In short, the shoe retailer, Eram, has attempted to push the liberal line on family in their ads. I've pointed out many times that there is a clash between liberal orthodoxy and the traditional family. Liberal autonomy theory claims that we are human to the extent that we self-determine our lives. Therefore, the aim must be to self-create our own unique living arrangements. But the traditional family doesn't allow for this: first, because it is traditional rather than self-chosen; second, because it is singular rather than diverse; third, because it has a clear and fixed definition.

Radical liberals respond to this problem by wanting to abolish the family altogether. But more moderate liberals want to "reform" the family, by making the definition of the family vaguer ("family...whatever that may be"), by making it more diverse, by making it less stable and by making its boundaries more "fluid" and "shifting". This makes it seem as if family can be whatever you yourself make it to be, i.e. your family becomes an act of autonomous will or choice.

Eram, the French shoe company, wants to have things both ways. It wants to be seen as both pro-family, but also as being trendily liberal. So they've come up with an advertising slogan "The family is sacred" and illustrated it with the following ads:

In the ad above, we have two heterosexual looking women pretending to be lesbians whilst raising an adopted African boy. The ad reads "As my two mummies say, the family is sacred".

The ad on the left reads "As my dad, my mum and my dad's third wife say, the family is sacred". On the right we have "As my mum and her boyfriend who could be my older brother say, the family is sacred".

So the family can be anything and yet it is also sacred.

What we're seeing here is the playing out of an ideology. It's an ideology that is deliberately set against the stability of family life and yet still wants to claim the positive mantle of "family" to garner emotional support. And all the while the most radical and consistent followers of the ideology, those who take the idea of autonomy and independence most seriously, won't want to be "restricted" by family at all.

Update: Laura Wood's take is that the ads are ambiguous and that the last two ads in particular could be seen as sending up the deconstructed family. That's possible. There might well be some tongue-in-cheek humour intended in a child saying that his dad's third wife believes that family is sacred. But on its Facebook page the company defends the ads by stating:

Each family is unique, that is why it is sacred! Unusual, creative, sporting or glamorous, it is part of your personality and your life.

And this:

At a time when there are more and more divorces in France, when homosexual marriage has just been legalized in New York, Eram is getting into the act and showing, both in billboards and in magazines, family portraits of a type never shown in the advertising world: unstructured, recomposed, shattered, deconstructed. Children who have two moms, others with one father, one mother, and three step mothers, still others where the step father has the same age as the older brother. Hey, this is "real" life. But if families explode, the spirit of the family remains. For, no matter what, the family is sacred."

Whatever its motives, the company is running with the idea of the "new" family in its advertising campaign. I think we'll see more of this kind of thing in the future.

What would it take to rebuild fatherhood?

2011-10-13T22:53:00.004+11:00

I don't mean to focus on the delayed family issue so much, but it's in the newspapers here in Melbourne. The latest contribution is from a feminist woman, Alison Cassar (who is a sub-editor of The Age).

Cassar has been trying unsuccessfully for a year to get pregnant at the age of 41. She isn't happy with the prospect of being childless and yet thinks she has made the right decisions in life:

[being childless] is one of the most difficult and deeply saddening issues I have had to face so far in my life. But I stand by the decisions I made that have led me here because they were the right ones for me.

So what led her to delay motherhood until such a late age? For some reason she decided not to have children until she was 33. And then when she did get to 33 she lost confidence in her marriage. She was divorced by age 36, met a new partner at age 37, married again at 38 - but by then it was too late.

To me, this is more evidence against deliberately delaying motherhood until your 30s. If things go wrong, you have so little time to recover. But Alison Cassar won't draw this conclusion, despite the sadness it has brought her.

But the passage from her column that I thought most curious was this:

And where do men figure in this debate? While I know that the physical reality is not as acute for men, I have lost count of how many women have said to me that they cannot meet a man who wants to commit to children. Where are the people telling men that fatherhood is a great thing and they should do it early, rather than put the burden on women?

Where are the people telling men that fatherhood is a great thing? Alison, the feminists you so admire spent much of the past 30 years portraying husbands and fathers as wife beaters, rapists and oppressors of women. The feminist message was that it was not violent strangers that women ought to fear but their own husbands. And it was the more traditional, family oriented men who were held to be the worst culprits.

The same feminists encouraged a sexual revolution in which women were supposed to be "liberated" to pursue relationships with men for sex alone, rather than orienting themselves to love or marriage. That then helped to create a player culture amongst men.

Alison, your beloved feminist movement also encouraged the idea of a sex war between men and women, in which men were the eternal oppressors and women the eternal victims. The idea of completion through a relationship with the opposite sex and of complementarity and cooperation between men and women was broken.

And what of the feminist campaigns for official and unofficial affirmative action programmes for women in education and the workplace - campaigns which have succeeded so well that women now earn 50% more degrees than men and 20-something women now outearn men? Are the men left behind really as likely to commit to fatherhood?

Alison, in 1994 the Australian Prime Minister of the time, Paul Keating, appointed a feminist, Kate Gilmore, to run a national campaign against domestic violence. The Australian government officially endorsed her strategy, which was to portray family men as follows:

You can see the tyrants, the invaders, the imperialists, in the fathers, the husbands, the stepfathers, the boyfriends, the grandfathers, and it’s that study of tyranny in the home ... that will take us to the point where we can secure change.

Do you think that kind of feminist politics is going to encourage men to commit to fatherhood?

Finally, Alison, if you want men to commit to fatherhood in larger numbers you might like to use your influence to change the politics of the newspaper you work for. What liberalism tells people is that independence and autonomy are what matters. That's why feminists have pushed for all sorts of policies to make women independent of men.

But what do independence and autonomy mean for men? They mean a bachelor lifestyle with few stable commitments. If a man wants independence and autonomy, then he certainly won't marry.

Marriage and fatherhood do bring great rewards for men, but also great sacrifices. The sacrifices aren't easily justified in liberal terms. We need to get beyond what liberalism holds to be of value and we need to restore some of the traditional dignity associated with the role of fatherhood in society.

Researchers claim women want children, can't find husbands

2011-10-12T22:04:00.001+11:00

The debate about deferred motherhood has hit the mainstream press in Melbourne. Yesterday in The Age a fertility specialist warned of the risks of pregnancy in older mothers. That led to another column today from a group of female public health specialists.

These specialists denied that women were deferring motherhood in order to pursue other ambitions. Their evidence was not very strong, but it was interesting. They drew on some research into attitudes toward motherhood amongst women aged 30 to 34.

The research showed that nearly all women want to have children:

We found that almost all the women we interviewed wanted to have children. Only 20 (less than 4 per cent) had decided they definitely did not want to have children.

However, a very large percentage of women aged 30 to 34 did not have the number of children they wanted:

However, many of the women (80 per cent) had fewer children than they desired. The women were still of reproductive age but when asked if they were likely to have children in the future, more than half (54 per cent) said this was unlikely because of circumstances often beyond their control.

What was stopping them? Mostly the lack of a husband:

Those who did not have a child said the main reason was not having a partner, or being unable to find a partner willing to commit to fatherhood. Very few women wanted to have a child while single.

The conclusion of the researchers is that:

Our research suggests that the selfish, career-focused woman who chooses not to have children or delays childbearing is a myth.

But that's not a logical conclusion to draw. No-one doubts that once women get into their 30s that they want to get married and have children. The issue is what women are choosing to do in their prime childbearing years in their 20s. Are women in their 20s taking motherhood and family formation seriously? Are they selecting men for being good husband material?

What do the female specialists recommend to fix the situation? They want men to be educated about the dangers to female fertility of delayed motherhood:

education for men about female fertility and the risks to their partner's health of postponing childbearing.

But that leaves out the first part of the problem, namely women finding a willing husband. So the question is what can be done to help these women find a family oriented man to marry. And that requires women to think through the reasons why there might be a shortage of such men, including the following:

Do women in their 20s respect the more family oriented men? Do they pay attention to these men?
Do women defer a serious consideration of marriage and children until the age of 30? If so, aren't they habituating men to a bachelor lifestyle?
Is there a distinctive and respected role for men in the family as husbands and fathers?
Are divorce rates too high? Are young men likely to fear the ease with which a woman might use divorce laws to remove them from the family whilst keeping them to their financial obligations?

We can't live forever on the social capital of the past. When men were raised to have some pride in masculinity; when they were given an honoured and responsible place as husbands and fathers within a family; when they had a tradition of their own to perpetuate; and when they were rewarded emotionally and physically within marriage - that's when a culture of marriage was likely to flourish amongst men.

The current culture is too emasculating and rewards men for being players rather than fathers. It's inevitable that some men will become demoralised and fall into a more self-oriented lifestyle, leaving women more vulnerable to remaining single in their 30s.

This issue isn't going to go away. Nor will it be fixed by a simple educational message. A more promising option is for groups of people to start self-consciously modeling a different set of values, in which the conditions for a healthy family life are better understood and respected.

Who would you choose to guard violent prisoners?

2011-10-09T21:00:00.000+11:00

This is one of those stories you have to shake your head at. As we know, the Swedish state takes its liberalism very seriously. One aspect of liberalism is the belief that individuals should be self-determining. Since our sex is something that we don't self-determine, liberals often conclude that it should be made not to matter in an individual's life choices.

Therefore, a woman should be able to become a prison guard just as a man can, even if she is small and slightly built and in charge of large, violent, murderous men. In fact, according to Daniel Hammarland, at some Swedish prisons the majority of staff are now female.

Can you predict the result of this particular application of liberalism? The result is that there will be small, slightly built women bashed brutally to death by much larger, stronger, more violent men. This is what happened to 25-year-old Karen Gebreab in a Stockholm prison earlier this month. The details of her death are truly shocking.

The 5'2 (159cm), slenderly built guard was sent to accompany a 28-year-old prisoner, Erik Ljungström, who wanted to smoke a cigarette. Ljungström's crimes include attempted murder for stabbing a man three times with a knife, followed by his arrest after his release for attacking a childhood friend with a knife.

The only other guard in the vicinity was also female. Ljungström began his assault on Karen Gebreab by attacking her with his fists. She fell to the ground. The second female guard rushed in with a baton, but as guards aren't allowed to hit prisoners on the head, she hit him on the arm instead. He simply grabbed the baton and used it to bash Karen Gebreab. She was hit with at least 40 blows. When a couple of mintues later some male officers arrived, Ljungström stopped and surrendered. But Karen Gebreab died shortly after.

Here are the photos, first of the prisoner:

And the victim (she is in the yellow shirt in the left-hand bottom corner):

As you can see she is petite, even by female standards. She would have had little chance against a male inmate.

The problem with trying to make our sex not matter is that oftentimes it does matter. So you either have to admit that the principle is flawed or else detach yourself from reality. The Swedish state, it seems, prefers to be detached, despite the harmful consequences of being so.

Developing identity

2011-10-09T13:59:00.003+11:00

This is a post on a sensitive topic. It's not my intention to insult anyone, but it's an important issue that deserves to be aired.

It goes like this. As a boy I went through a phase in which a developing self-identity was important to me, and I was very fortunate to be able to identify with a long line of family going back to the early days of settlement in Australia. My identity was therefore positive and in no way confused.

I've therefore wondered at times about boys who can't so easily identify with a particular tradition. Does this affect their developing sense of self?

A short time ago I wrote a post on Andrew Bolt, a prominent journalist here in Australia. Bolt has described his own difficulties with identity this way:

I am the son of Dutch parents who came to Australia the year before I was born.

For a long time, I have felt like an outsider here, not least because my family moved around so very often.

Bolt tried at first to identify with his Dutch ancestry but then gave it all up in favour of a radical renunciation of any kind of ancestral tradition.

Note that Bolt had difficulties even though it is relatively easy for Dutch people to assimilate into the mainstream Australian tradition, given that the ethnicity is so closely related. So how much difficulty would a boy have who, say, had a white father and an Asian mother?

I'm sure that there are differences in how such boys respond to their situation. But some don't respond well. Here is one negative reaction:

Whats it like being Half-White and Half-Asian? Thats an important question for a changing America. With the flood of interracial relationships, and with mixed-race being the fastest growing race in America, there are going to be quite a few Hapa males around...

So what is it like? Humiliation, degradation, terror, fear, embarrassment, shame, self-hated, angst, debasement, sadness, hopelessness, pain, anger, rage, etc etc need I go on? You can’t imagine the internal conflict. The brutal civil war inside all Hapa males. The Hapa Paradox. We exist because Asian men are humiliated and emasculated, and yet we are Asian males. We are at war with ourselves from birth. The idea that an Asian man like me, is genetically 50% white, and carries ONLY the white-male Y chromosome. The Asian Y-chromosome is dead in me. Asian maleness is dead in me. I’m a Eunuch. I’m an Asian male inside a dead Asian male. That is what it means to be half-white, half-asian.

He has a belief that Asian women go for white men because they prefer white looks/genes to Asian ones and yet he himself, as an Asian looking man, is the very thing his mother rejected. That seems to be one source of his angst.

He goes on to complain about a lack of a clear identity, that young men like himself feel:

Homeless. Raceless. Strangers to strangers.

I don't know how representative he is of those in his position. But it does at least raise the issue that there are going to be a lot more young men who won't be able to form a positive sense of identity as easily as in a more traditional society.

As for my own son, I've already started to go through the family history with him. He's very interested, particularly in those relatives who served overseas in the army. I do believe that one role of fathers is to bring their sons into the larger tradition to which they belong. That not only means being the kind of father that sons would want to emulate, but also making sure that they have a positive sense of their family history, their national history and the larger Western cultural tradition.

Wife shopping

2011-10-08T21:23:00.001+11:00

Juliet Jeske has written another interesting column on the difficulties of dating in New York as a woman over the age of 35.

It's a cautionary tale for those women deliberately leaving family formation until their 30s. Jeske herself married in her 20s, but left childbearing quite late and then found out her husband was homosexual.

So she found herself having to start over. What problems has that involved? Well, she definitely wants kids:

I always thought I would have kids. My husband and I planned to eventually start a family, but at the age of 36 I discovered my husband was a closeted homosexual. My marriage immediately ended and I entered the dating pool past my prime reproductive years. I knew it would eventually take time to have a healthy relationship again, and I definitely felt like my biological clock wasn't just ticking but banging loudly like Quasimodo's bells throughout my entire body.

The men she has met whilst dating fall into four categories:

in my age range I tend to find hook-up artists who never want to settle down, men messed up from a break-up or divorce, extremely socially awkward men with no dating experience and the men I refer to as wife shoppers.

The "wife shoppers" are men who want to start a family:

A wife shopper is usually the following:

•Over 40
•Never Married - No children
•At the peak of their professional career
•About to buy property or has just bought property

Wife shoppers are men searching for the future mother of their children.

So why can't she get together with a "wife shopper"? First, these men understandably are looking for a woman who is likely to be fertile:

They make no bones about wanting to start a family, and many won't consider women over the age of 35. Women do lose reproductive capacity after 35, and in health terms pregnancies in older mothers are deemed higher risk.

...One of the habits I have noticed is something I call baby momma math. My date will look at me, ask me my age again, and then I watch them adding up how long we would have to date before trying to start a family, and they aren't exactly subtle about it.

Second, she finds the "wife shopper" men bluntly methodical:

Maybe it's something about the personality traits of any man who waits until they are at the peak of their career before getting married and having kids. In their mind they have a checklist and once they have done everything else they want to accomplish in life they move on to starting a family.

Third, she is worried (and understandably so) about rushing into a relationship in order to have children, without having time to make sure of a firm connection with the man:

Having my marriage end the way it did has given me major trust issues to begin with, so the idea of running down the aisle with a man hell-bent on becoming a father is terrifying. Divorce is hell on earth and the thought of having another divorce -- only the second time with children -- is especially nightmarish. Rushing into a situation in order to have children with a partner I barely know seems like a recipe for another divorce.

Keeping a healthy marriage together, especially one with children, is extremely difficult. The union between the two adult partners should be the most important thing -- communication, lifestyles, goals, and temperaments must work in harmony before the added stress and pressures of children are added to the mix.

Juliet Jeske complained about the last column I wrote on her (she identifies strongly as a liberal), seeing it as a personal attack. It wasn't meant as such and nor is this one. I think she has clearly and intelligently identified some of the difficulties of family formation for a woman of her age. It helps to confirm for me the wisdom of bringing back marriage and motherhood where it belongs - in a woman's 20s.

EU proposal could see women being paid double for the same work

2011-10-08T13:00:00.001+11:00

Feminists have often raised the slogan of "equal pay for equal work". That is not a principle they truly believe in. What they want is equal or more pay for women regardless of the hours of work put in.

The latest evidence comes from the European Union. The EU is proposing not only that new mothers get 20 weeks leave on full pay after the birth of a baby but that they also get 2 hours a day to breastfeed the child when they return to work.

So let's say that there are two workers in a firm. Tony is a hardworking dad supporting a family. He gets paid $70,000 for putting in 8 hours a day for 48 weeks in the year. So he is working 1920 hours to get his $70,000. His female counterpart Julia had a baby at the start of the year. So she ends up only working for 30 weeks. Then she breastfeeds for at least one hour a day on her return. So she earns $70,000 for working 1050 hours. She gets the same wage for working 55% as much as Tony. If she takes the full 2 hours breastfeeding time then she will end up being paid the same as Tony for less than half the hours.

Is that equal pay for equal work? Surely not.

Now it might be argued that there are reasons for paying the woman so much more than the man - that it has to do with her family responsibilities. But the same could also have been said for the older system that the feminists complained about so much. Men used to be paid more because it was assumed that men had to support not only themselves but also a wife and children.

So if the older principle was so terribly unjust in feminist eyes, then how can they justify the new system?

Doesn't whiteness studies contravene Section 18C?

2011-10-07T13:58:00.007+11:00

So an Australian judge has found that:

People should be free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying.

Andrew Bolt was found guilty of contravening the Racial Discrimination Act on this basis, since he questioned why light-skinned Aboriginal activists would identify with the minor part of their ancestry.

But who else would also have to be found guilty? The thought crossed my mind that all those academics involved in "whiteness studies" courses contravene the law, given that the whole point of these courses is to associate whiteness negatively with oppression and to deny that a white racial identity is legitimate.

So I did a quick google search and within a minute had come up with sufficient evidence to run a case. In the very first section of the first document I looked at I found this:

“[t]he critique of whiteness…attempts to displace the normativity of the white position by seeing it as a strategy of authority rather than an authentic or essential ‘identity’”

Here we have a clear denial that a white person might have an authentic race identity.

In the same document we find the following:

the central overarching theme in scholarship on whiteness is the argument that white identity is decisively shaped by the exercise of power and the expectation of advantages in acquiring property

Isn't that an insulting claim? The allegation is that whites only identify as whites in order to get power and money.

Then there's this admission about whiteness studies:

This literature sits within a long history of observations of whiteness as a problem

So whiteness is looked on in the literature as a "problem". Not a tad offensive to white people?

There's also this:

Allen, as is central to the critical study of whiteness ... [describes] the invention of the white race as political rather than biological or evolutionary.

Umm, how can I be free to fully identify with my race, if the very existence of my race is denied?

It gets worse:

Again, Roediger was also responsible for editing a collection of essays concerned with whiteness. Entitled Towards the abolition of whiteness, this text contributes to the movement, above attributed to Ignatiev, of those seeking to combat white race privilege by abolishing the white race.

Now, surely anyone selling this book in Australia is contravening section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Then there's the following less than charming passage:

‘New Abolitionism’ “refers to the abolishment of the white race so that whites may gain their freedom from the enslavement of their cooperation in racism” ... It requires challenging all of the institutions that reproduce race and whiteness, and the supporters of ‘new abolitionism’ call on all ‘so-called whites’ (to borrow the language of Race Traitor) to become race traitors, telling us that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”

I'm not feeling fully free to identify with my own race after reading that particular rant. I'm feeling offended. Definitely a case for Section 18C.

And there's this this from Olivia Khoo:

In the Australian context Olivia Khoo uses Asian-Australian and indigenous literature to discuss the possibilities for destabilising whiteness in Australia. She suggests a strategy of ‘visibilising’ whiteness as an ‘ornamental detail’, arguing that “[s]howing up the ornamentation of whiteness enables it to be dislodged from its position of power and associated privileges”

Oddly, Olivia Khoo's own suffering at the hands of white privilege was to be catapulted into a job as an English lecturer at Monash University. Must have been a hard path to tread.

All of the above quotes are from just one paper written by a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland - the first paper I happened to look at. Just imagine, then, if Section 18C were to be applied consistently throughout academia. You would probably have to close down the English departments at most universities and at many high schools - and some of the history and politics departments as well.

Joys of fatherhood

2011-10-05T20:10:00.000+11:00

My little toddler daughter is very affectionate but hasn't said much yet. So I thought it very cute when I came home today and said hello to her and she replied "Hello Daddy" - not quite her first words (she can say something that sounds like "yes") but still a wonderful moment for me.