A little bit will become a lot

Paul Martin was the Liberal Party Prime Minister of Canada from 2003 to 2006. There is a clip of a speech he made that was uploaded to YouTube in 2009 (I don't know when the speech itself was given). In the speech he talks about the necessity of nations giving up "a little bit of our sovereignty" so that the financial affairs of nations can be regulated at a global level. He believes that this will create "a very different world" and a "new era".

I've written often about how unstable a civic nationalism is. If you claim that your national identity is defined not by a shared ethnicity but by a shared commitment to liberal political institutions, then why shouldn't those institutions go global if you think there is a managerial advantage in them doing so?

As it happens, you have to doubt the claims about global regulation made by Paul Martin in his speech. He assumes that the Western nations are well regulated and that the threat to the international economies comes from the newer players such as China and India. But not only are these countries unlikely to accept Western regulation of their economies, the most recent failures have come from Western countries anyway.

Here is a transcript of Paul Martin's speech:

One more thing on this question of sovereignty. Very difficult for a large country to accept that someone is going to come in, like the United States or the Europeans, and is going to say “You’re not doing your regulation in a proper way”.

But what’s going to happen when China and India are economies as powerful as the United States or Europe? And what’s going to happen when there’s a mortgage meltdown in India? What’s going to happen when a Chinese hedge fund goes under? And the results of that tsunami don’t stop at the Chinese or Indian border? But that you find them at Idaho and Iowa and California? Who’s going to deal with that?

Unless we’re prepared to understand that in fact we’re all going to have to give up a little bit of our sovereignty in order to make the world work.

I think that we are really at the beginning of a very different era. 1944 the great minds of the world Dexter White, John Maynard Keynes and a bunch essentially laid the foundations for the Bretton Woods institution and the United Nations. And they built a system which functioned for over 50 to 60 years.

I think that it’s time to renew that vision. A very different world than one that (?) and independent nation states simply came together but could ignore what was essentially going on inside those countries. That day is over thanks to (?) I think we’ve got to take it one step further and we’ve got to say that in fact countries have responsibilities to their neighbours. And their neighbours are in every nook and cranny of the world. And I believe that that is going to become the debate of our generation.

Paul Martin was replaced as Canadian PM by the Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper. He made similar comments in a speech of his own ("there is going to have to be global governance"). So the policy seems to be one that Canadian political leaders are determined to pursue.

A tax on men

There is a university town in the north of Sweden called Umeå. The town council of Umeå has an equality committee and this committee has raised for debate the idea of introducting gender taxes, specifically a tax on men. What's interesting is the justification given for placing special taxes on men:

Umeå will be the municipality in Sweden working most to be equal. A municipality in which women and men have the power to shape their own lives and society on equal terms, with as much influence, with an equal opportunity to live a financially independent life.

If you're wondering why I write so often on Sweden, it's because they express liberal principles so clearly and openly.

A general aim of liberalism is individual autonomy. By autonomy is meant being able to self-determine one's own life and being independent. Equality means that individuals have the same level of autonomy: the same "power to shape their own lives" and "an equal opportunity to live a financially independent life".

The Swedes are convinced that you get autonomy and independence via careers and money. Therefore, equality for women means that women should be equally committed to careers as men and should receive at least as much money as men do.

And so the Umeå equality committee is absolutely convinced that it is a gross injustice if women spend any more time with their babies than men do. Men must take an equal share of parental leave if equality is to exist.

Similarly the Umeå equality committee believes that justice requires that women be made perfectly financially independent of men through a guarantee of equal earnings, even if this means taxing men extra to reduce male take home pay.

And so you get ideas like this:

Umeå municipality's overall gender equality objectives are: To create opportunities for women and men have the power to shape society and their own lives.

An important factor is economic equality and economic independence. Therefore, we might begin to investigate the introduction of a gender tax?

Would a gender tax designed so it would be about men paying higher taxes because there is still an unexplained pay gap of around seven per cent in favor of men.

But there are more reasons that makes an average of 4,500 kronor per month, the difference in income between men and women. It's about the choices we have to do and how these choices are valued. Women still take the majority of parental leave and work part-time to a greater extent and more unpaid work at home. Women lost in their wallets for life.

The injustice of it is necessary to talk about and take responsibility for.

Should we be economically equal and financially independent? How will we get there? Is an equality tax the only option? Or are there other ways?

Closing the pay gap, to challenge the structures and actively work for an equal distribution of unpaid housework, breaking the gender segregated labor market, to ensure that fathers are taking a larger share of parental leave, to challenge our own beliefs and dare to see things for how they actually looks and not how we think it looks.

...A municipality in which all women and men have the power to shape their own lives and society on equal terms, with as much power and with equally loud voice so that both women and men are able to live a financially independent life, whole life.

Most Western countries are following the same ideas, even if they are less upfront in spelling them out.

I find it a particularly sterile vision of society, one in which it is assumed that women lose out when men commit themselves to a provider role and in which the aim is not a closer, complementary union between men and women but maximum independence.

It is a vision, too, which assumes that motherhood is a negative factor in a woman's life, a potential impediment to acquiring money and independence, that must therefore be delegated equally to men.

This kind of liberalism, when boiled down to its essential aims, is really about career and money. It doesn't rise to anything more than this. It is a low and dispirited expression of Western culture.

Minister wants to lecture Europe

A senior state government minister from here in Victoria wants to go to Europe to lecture governments there on multiculturalism. Nick Kotsiras believes that we have done it right with a policy of actively wanting people to retain their separate identities that stand apart from the others because this is a strength. This welcoming of standing apart is held to be the most effective way of integrating people by making them feel like they are not outsiders.

I think what they should do is perhaps follow Victoria's example and put in policies that we have to overcome the problems they're facing in the Netherlands. You can't force people to, you can't restrict people, you can't take away a person's identity without consequences.

After visiting Austria and Denmark he wrote:

A large number of people who I spoke to on the street felt that they were not wanted, that they did not belong to the country and they were seen as outsiders. There are no government programs like in Australia where we say we want your specific skills, cultures and religions that stand apart from others - because that is our strength

.
That's an interesting insight into how a senior minister looks at what is happening in Australia. What interests me is that he recognises the importance of communal identity to immigrants. The question is: if communal identity is important to an immigrant, won't it also be important to someone who belongs to the existing mainstream culture of a society?

In other words, if it is wrong to take away an immigrant's identity, isn't it also wrong to take away the identity of those who belong to the founding culture of a nation?

Nick Kotsiras's policy rests on an arbitrary distinction: identity matters for migrants, not for those who belong to the founding culture.

And there is a second problem with the Nick Kotsiras policy. As I wrote in a previous thread:

For a culture to reproduce itself it needs to have the "space together" to do so - something that multiculturalism doesn't allow for. In this sense it is an "anti-cultural" policy.
 

If you have a street in a Melbourne suburb where an Egyptian Muslim lives next to a Macedonian Orthodox who lives next to a Mexican Catholic who lives next to a Indian Hindu - and all of these people inhabit a society that is oriented to career and consumerism - then what kind of culture is going to reproduce itself? How are these cultures going to be able to "stand apart from others" even in the medium term?

If you are someone who believes that identity matters then mass immigration combined with mixing people randomly into big cities isn't the way to go - which is why Nick Kotsiras shouldn't be lecturing the Europeans about the wonders of the Victorian policy.

The alternative policy you sometimes hear in Victoria, the traditional right-liberal one, isn't any better. This policy prefers mass immigration combined with the idea that identity doesn't matter for anyone, not for Aborigines, founders or recent migrants. That's a radically individualistic view which tells individuals that they can just identify with themselves alone.

Where does that leave us? First, it's useful for a senior government minister to have admitted that identity does matter. We should file away the quote. Second, we can't rely on governments right now to do the right thing by us. If your identity and heritage is important to you, you have to organise independently of the government. No more "passive citizen who votes every few years". Instead, we need men who see themselves more actively as protectors and builders of the particular tradition they belong to.

Once that change of attitude takes place, those identities which want to continue on will have to concentrate forces somewhere (it could be in more than one location), and to build up the kinds of institutions through which cultures reproduce themselves (media, schools, arts, churches and so on).

If, like me, you belong to the founding culture, you're going to have to accept that much ground will be lost. It's no use being too paralysed by this fact, as the task is to dig in somewhere and to build. The further along we get, the more likely it is we will appeal to those who don't just want to witness decline but who want to contribute more positively to something that is growing into the future.

We grew again!

I've been meaning to report on the last meeting of the Eltham Traditionalists group. The good news is that we once again grew in numbers (for the third meeting in a row). We are hitting growth targets at the moment.

The idea is that once Eltham Traditionalists is securely in place (hopefully by the end of the year if the momentum continues) I will invite those living elsewhere in Melbourne to add their names to a register. Once several people in a particular area of Melbourne (e.g. the southern suburbs) have registered, I'll put them in touch with each other and support them to build up an association of their own.

Roebuck on women and marriage

Alan Roebuck has written a post at The Orthosphere on what the attitude of men toward women and marriage in a liberal culture ought to be. I think it's very good, particularly in outlining why marriage continues to be of importance. It's not just that the arguments are compelling, but that he models a spirited response to the difficulties of the age.

There was some debate in the comments about advice that Alan Roebuck gives to men facing divorce; that perhaps is inevitable given the difficulty of men in that situation (i.e. no easy solutions).

If you haven't already read it, I encourage you to do so:

Can Man Live Traditionally?

A classical find

Western high culture reached a peak of nihilism in the mid-twentieth century and it was at about this time that the tradition of classical music was ruptured. The decades following 1950 were barren ones; if you loved classical music you had to go back to music that was composed earlier.

But there are signs of a revival. One of the most curious examples is that of the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. He spent his early career as a jazz musician; according to his wikipedia entry his breakthrough into classical music happened in 1995 when he was already in his fifties.

If you listen to his music it's as if the great rupture never happened. He has picked up the tradition and carried on with it.

That's not to say that there aren't issues. He has written much sacred music but from within the "interfaith dialogue" perspective. So, for instance, in his work Stabat Mater there is a section involving an Islamic call to prayer. To my ears it just doesn't gel with the rest of the work.

Here is an abridged version of the Stabat Mater; in my opinion parts of it are very good:



Another work he is well-known for is the Benedictus from The Armed Man:

Who does Tony Abbott call the most worthy Australians?

If you want to retain any hope that Tony Abbott will represent a conservative view as a future PM you had better stop reading now.

In the paper today there is a story titled "Liberal Party swats the WASP type with a more inclusive approach".

The story reports on a multicultural meeting organised by the Liberal Party in Melbourne last month:

TONY Abbott has declared the rebirth of a "more inclusive" Liberal Party which has ditched its WASP traditions as the Coalition fields a record number of ethnic candidates.

With the opposition heavily favoured to win September's election, the next federal parliament is shaping as the most multicultural ever, with the Liberal Party fielding at least 21 candidates from diverse ethnic backgrounds...

Mr Abbott said such an event would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

"The Liberal Party would have been reluctant to have explicitly reached out to recently arrived immigrants," Mr Abbott said.

"Because of our reputation for being a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) party, a lot of newly arrived migrants would probably think the Liberal Party was not for them."
 

I was curious to find out what Abbott said at the meeting and so looked up his speech. It's a shocker. I'll quote it later, but he is at pains to emphasise that migrants are better than natives.

Why would he think this?  The late cricket commentator Peter Roebuck explained why he believed immigrants were better than native born Australians this way:

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.

That view hasn't just been plucked from a hat. If you are a liberal who believes in the self-making, self-defining individual then it probably is true that immigrants are superior to natives. It is immigrants who have made a self-conscious choice to move to a particular country - it is an act of "self-making". The native born aren't such good liberal individualists - their identity is an inherited one.

And this view is even more pronounced amongst right-liberals. What matters to right-liberals is having the freedom and the opportunity to be self-made within the market. Therefore, having a positive view of your country means seeing it as a land of opportunity for all those wishing to "make themselves" within a free economy.

Therefore, those individuals who cross borders from countries with less opportunity to be self-made into a more advanced one will seem particularly virtuous - like an ideal type of right-liberal citizen. And the greater the leap the higher the virtue: to take a hazardous journey from poverty in a closed economy to opportunity in a more open one will seem like the ultimate, heart-warming act of self-making to a right-liberal.

You get a sense of such an outlook in some of the speeches of Ronald Reagan. He said once in support of high immigration:

...I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still...
 

With all that in mind, consider what Abbott said in his Melbourne speech (abridged):

For a long time, I regret to say, our Liberal Party did not fully reflect the diversity of modern Australia...we were too slow to change and to accommodate the diversity, the richness, the multiculturalism of modern Australia. But we have well and truly changed and we have well and truly learnt a necessary lesson and I want to tell you that if all of our candidates are successful, by far the most common surname in the Liberal Party Room will be Nguyen.

People who have come to this country from many parts of Asia; who have come, worked hard, prospered, succeeded and become first class Australians – that is the face and the name of modern Australia. 

...I want to say how brave every single migrant to this country is, because every single one of you has done something that those who are native born have never done. You have been gutsy enough to take your future in your hands and to go to a country which is not yours and make it your own. Modern Australia is absolutely unimaginable without migration and migration ... has added a heroic dimension to our national life, because so many of the people who have come to this country have been fleeing persecution, have been leaving countries where the freedom, the justice, the prosperity and the solidarity that we take for granted are absent. So, you have added a heroic dimension to our national life.

...You have brought to this country a sense of family, a sense of enterprise and a sense of community. Almost every one of you have come to this country and you have worked hard, often in small business. You’ve built community amongst people from your own background and amongst the wider Australian community and you have cherished family. As a result of your hard work, our country has security, prosperity and liberty.

...I particularly respect and value the hard work and the skills that everyone brings to this country when they come to do a job from day one - in particular, those who come to this country as skilled migrants...they might come as temporary migrants originally, but they make the very best Australian citizens eventually. They are the most worthy, the most welcome parts of the Australian family...
 

One thing I find particularly interesting is that Abbott is happy to give all the credit for Australia's security and prosperity to recent immigrants. In doing so he is throwing over his own pioneering ancestors. Why does he feel comfortable doing this? It's because in his mind the whole issue of ancestry and ethnic loyalty doesn't matter.

What matters to him is the act of being self-made in the market. So it wouldn't register to him that he is losing anything in throwing over his own forebears.

In other words, it's not that he is hostile to those who do have such loyalties, and he even goes so far as to praise recent immigrants for having "built community amongst people from your own background". But for himself it doesn't matter.

That attitude is perhaps a little better for us than the current left-liberal one. It is likely to be a little more tolerant of our efforts to hold onto our own traditions.

The Anglo left-liberal attitude goes further than not registering or caring about an ethnic identity of their own. Instead it makes a white identity exceptional, by claiming that whiteness is at the source of human inequality (because it is held that whiteness was invented to justify unearned privilege and a racist oppression of others). In the left-liberal view an expression of European identity is treated not as a normal expression of identity but as an immoral assertion of supremacy.

But even if the right-liberal attitude is less hostile than the current left-liberal one, it is still blind - still oblivious - to the mainstream tradition. It is a mistake to think that someone like Abbott can represent us. If you think he is better than Gillard and therefore worth making the effort to vote for, then fine. But don't have illusions that it's possible to vote him in and then sit back while he puts things right. That just won't happen. If things are to improve it will because we ourselves work steadily toward goals of our own. It won't simply be gifted to us from above: we have to take it for ourselves.

Losing the waiting game

There are a lot of good-looking, well-educated Western women who are missing out on marriage and/or motherhood. The Daily Mail has yet another article on this today, featuring women who couldn't find Mr Right and so chose to become solo mothers in their late 30s or early 40s by using anonymous sperm donors (and sometimes overseas egg donors).

One of the women profiled was Jessica McCallin. Perhaps you can't tell everything from a photo, but she seems like an attractive woman, i.e. someone who ought to have been able to find a father for her children relatively easily. So what went wrong?



She doesn't attempt an explanation, but one of the other women profiled, Caroline Saddington, offered this:

‘In your teens you envisage marriage and two children,’ she says. ‘Then my 20s were career-focused and I got to my 30s and hadn’t met a man good enough to be a father. They fell far short of my expectations.

That's a losing combination of attitudes. She wants to not only defer family formation until very late in the piece but retain high expectations of men as fathers as well. The women who do manage to get out of the "defer family option" reasonably unscathed are the ones who aren't too fussy and who are willing to compromise in their very early 30s. But more on this later.

Dennis Prager has written a column which touches on the problem of deferral:

I was in college and graduate school during the heyday of modern feminism. And the central message to women was clear as daylight: You are no different from men. Therefore, among other things, you can enjoy sex just like they do -- just for the fun of it and with many partners. The notion that nearly every woman yearns for something deeper when she has sexual intercourse with a man was dismissed as patriarchal propaganda. The culture might tell her to restrict sex to a man who loves her and might even marry her, but the liberated woman knows better: Sex without any emotional ties or possibility of future commitment can be "empowering."

Feminism taught -- and professors on the New York Times op-ed page continue to write -- that there are no significant natural differences between men and women. Therefore, it is not unique to male nature to want to have sex with many partners. Rather, a "Playboy culture" "pressures" men into having frequent, uncommitted sex. And, to the extent this is a part of male nature, it is equally true of women's natures.

Another feminist message to women was that just as a woman can have sex like a man, she can also find career as fulfilling as men do. Therefore, pursuing an "M-R-S" at college is just another residue of patriarchy. Women should be as interested in a career as men are. Any hint of the notion that women want, more than anything else, to marry and make a family is sexist, demeaning, and untrue.
 

I don't entirely agree with the wording of this. But I think he is right that women have come under pressure to reject looking for love and marriage in their early 20s in favour of careers and hook-ups. And the problem is not just that this is a denial of better aspects of a woman's nature, but that it is a losing strategy for these women in the longer term.

In some ways, the very worst enemy of middle-class Anglo women right now are feminists. Why? An open-bordered country like Australia now has a lot of different ethnic groups. Amongst the women of these groups, upper middle-class Anglo men are strongly favoured and competed for.

I have met some of the women from overseas backgrounds who are successfully competing for the upper middle-class Anglo men. They are often very classily feminine (rarely brash), they dress very stylishly (think Parisienne), they are friendly, happy and non-aggressive. They are ready to meet a future husband when they are at university.

And what is being drummed into the upper middle-class Anglo women? They are raised with feminist ideas, such as that you prove yourself in career competition with men; that to be feminine is weak; that family formation is something you leave until your 30s; that it is empowering to emulate a male player lifestyle in your 20s; and that all that is owed men is a sexual relationship and even that is to be on your own terms.

It makes it very difficult for Anglo women to compete. An upper middle-class Anglo woman to have any chance with the men of her own age and peer group has to jettison the feminism that is drummed into her at school (and, even worse, sometimes reinforced by her own father). Some, I think, are beginning to attempt this and are trying to compete in dress and manners, but it may not be enough.

Finally, some women might read this and think "Well, why should we be competing for the men, they should be competing for us." And for men who aren't in as strong a position that no doubt remains true. But the most favoured men are in a position to choose and they won't choose women who don't turn up on time and who prefer to spend their 20s gloomily devoting themselves to career and counting down the years until it becomes respectable for them to try to make a go of a relationship.

Remember too that the role of a husband has been so whittled down within modern culture that it can no longer be assumed that men will be drawn to the "office" of being a husband - it has lost greatly in status and prestige. A lot of men will therefore wonder about such commitments and winning them over means making the personal side of marriage a very strongly attractive proposition. That can happen if a woman is able to live up to a romantic ideal, but to appear in such a way to a middle-class man means being classy, feminine and genuinely warmly natured.

I guess I would like Anglo women to unleash their feminine souls and to give themselves a fair chance with the men of their own peer group. That is a better option than reaching 35, finally admitting that family matters, but having no husband to be a father for a child.

Abbott's scheme

I've written in recent posts about the trend in modern societies to dissolve the social functions held by individual men and women and to have these functions carried out instead by a class of state administrators.

There's an excellent example of this in the Australian papers today. The leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, has a  paid maternity scheme which would pay women their full wage for six months. A woman earning $150,000 a year would therefore receive $75,000 for each child she had.

The scheme has met resistance from within the Liberal Party for being too expensive, but Abbott is sticking with it:

This is a question of wage justice. When a woman takes leave because she's having a baby she should be paid at her wage just as if a bloke takes leave to go on holidays should be paid at his wage.
 

Feminist Eva Cox thinks this finally marks the arrival of a radical feminist policy on paid maternity leave, as it justifies paid maternity not as a health or welfare issue but as a workplace entitlement.

The more radical basis for arguing for parental leave is to set up it up as an ongoing workplace entitlement. Feminists have long argued for parenting time to be recognised as a legitimate employee entitlement, like holiday pay, sick pay and long service leave.
 

There will be readers of this blog who will benefit financially from Abbott's scheme and no doubt the money will be welcome. However, in spite of this I think we should be opposed to it.

What the scheme does is to reduce further the role of being a husband. It was once the case that a woman relied on her husband's efforts to earn a living in order to be supported whilst having her children. Under Abbott's scheme a woman will be supported by a combination of her own career position and a government mandated leave scheme.

So the first problem with the scheme is that it contributes to the narrowing role of the individual in society to that of worker and consumer.

Second, it means that the question of how long a woman might be able to spend at home with her child will no longer be decided at the family level but at the bureaucratic one. Abbott thinks six months at home is the right length, but down the track government officials might opt for either a shorter or longer period of time. Isn't that a blow to the status and function of the family as an institution?

Third, the longer term effect of the scheme will be to give governments power to enforce a sex neutral version of the family. The reason for this is that if you believe that individuals are made through their career, then it will seem unjust for women to spend more time at home with a child than men do. That's why in Europe there has been a push to make it compulsory for men to take a portion of the leave. In other words, if you want the money you'll have to accept a sex neutral concept of parenting in which the traditional motherhood role is shared equally between men and women.

The argument for men taking up the scheme is already being made in Australia, for instance, by Jessica Irvine:

Reforms such as Labor's paid parental leave scheme, paid at the minimum wage, and Abbott's more generous scheme to pay mothers their own salary for six months offer vital support for women in a stressful phase in their life. It is social recompense for the private investments women make to give life to the future workforce.

But Abbott should join Warren Buffett in encouraging fathers to take up his parental scheme too. Because if women are to truly "lean in" in the workforce, men must learn to "lean in" at home too.
 

The scheme pushes further toward the idea of individuals being interchangeable units in society. The connection between a female nature and motherhood, and a male nature and fatherhood is diminished.

Fourth, the place of stable marriage as a foundation of parenthood is further reduced. It no longer matters as much whether a woman is married, or even in a relationship, as her ability to mother a child is now connected to her position at work rather than to her place within a family.

It is true that a personal relationship between a man and a woman is still left in existence and feminists of the past once argued that this would be a more pure foundation for relationships between the sexes. The problem is, though, that getting rid of the "social office" aspect of being a husband and wife also decreases the level of stable commitment to such relationships. It becomes harder for individuals to justify the formalising of relationships and to find meaning and satisfaction in fulfilling a marital role even at times when the personal relationship itself is under strain.

It should be noted that Tony Abbott is at the more right-wing end of the mainstream political spectrum. The fact that even he simply assumes that part of the traditional male role should be taken over by the administrative state demonstrates just how strong such attitudes are within the political class. It does not even register with him that something might be lost in the process. The influence of economism within right-liberalism probably doesn't help, as it encourages the idea that activity in the market via a career is the measure of success and self-realisation.

How does the liberal concept of freedom lead to statism?

A commenter in a recent post made this argument:

I don't agree with your long-running contention that modern liberals actually want maximum individual liberty and "autonomy" in the sense that classical liberals meant it (classical liberals being more akin to modern libertarians on that score). Modern liberals favor massive state intervention into every aspect of social, economic, and political life, which far from removing impediments to autonomy and self-determination, is necessarily the very death of autonomy and self-determination. Modern liberals want to crush the individual, and they are knowingly the enemies of liberty in the sense that classical liberals meant it.
 

In other words, the commenter is asking how modern liberals can combine the idea of maximising individual liberty (understood to mean autonomy) with a more intrusive state.

Let's look at an example, namly that of Nick Clegg, the Deputy PM in the UK and a leader of the Liberal Democrats in that country. In a speech entitled "Why I am a liberal" he argues that liberals don't like concentrations of power as that limits autonomy:

A liberal abhors excessive concentrations of power in politics and economics alike. I believe monopoly in the market place is as destructive of creativity and autonomy as is monopoly in politics.
 

He contrasts this liberal view with that of socialists, who he believes are more statist:

Socialism believes that society can only be improved through relentless state activism, a belief driven by far greater pessimism about the ability of people to improve their own lives.
 

So you might think that this is a case of a belief in individual autonomy pushing someone to be anti-statist.

But as soon as Clegg begins to discuss policy, out comes the state. Here is a classic example:

My party has new plans to provide free childcare for all toddlers from the age of eighteen months. Childcare costs are a punitive burden for so many parents today, inhibiting the freedoms and choices which parents in other countries take for granted.

And currently there is no help with childcare costs at all until a child is three years old. If people want to work, let them. We would offer 19 months of parental leave… shared between mothers and fathers… So that - if they want to - men can stay at home with their children.

And - if they want to - women have more opportunities to get back into work.
 

The problem is that the logic of individual autonomy pushes toward these sorts of policies. If you really believe that there should be no impediments to choice, then why should a woman's sex stop her from choosing to self-create through a career? But how can you give her this "freedom" (from motherhood) unless it is heavily subsidised by the state (via childcare) and unless the state acts to overthrow the connection between motherhood and womanhood (by promoting unisex parenting).

And here's another example. Liberals don't like the idea that the things we don't choose might have an effect on the life path we determine for ourselves:

And I believe a liberal society is impossible if children are condemned for life – their education, their health, their economic well being – by the circumstances in which they were born.
 

But that implies that children have to have the same start regardless of what their parents do to support them. And if parents can't be relied upon to give all children the same start, then what force in society is going to? The answer is the state:

We are also developing new policies which would target extra resources at the most deprived children, especially in those crucial early years of education, and introduce significantly lower infant class sizes.

...Our plans would revolutionise the care and schooling provided to young children, so giving both parents and children peace of mind and opportunities that have been denied them.
 

Finally, Clegg is someone who dislikes the idea of a national state. And why wouldn't you if you follow a universalist philosophy? If you're a universalist, then there is no basis for discriminating in favour of the people of your own nation. You'll want to apply liberal principles globally instead. And so Clegg, despite all his talk of dispersing power, happily discusses the need for international government:

In exactly the same way we need international regulation to mitigate the worst excesses of our financial institutions, we need international regulation to protect our environment from selfinterested elites.

Global problems require global solutions. But only liberals truly believe in international governance. In pooling sovereignty at supranational level.
 

Finally, consider Clegg's pitiful account of solidarity:

The only way we will make it through the hard times ahead, the only way we’ll build a fairer, more cohesive society, is if we come together.

Not if we drive people apart.

Liberalism seeks to bring people together by recognising our own freedoms are dependent on the freedom of others.

I uphold your freedoms because you uphold mine.
 

That's the kind of thing a classical liberal like J.S. Mill was at pains to emphasise. It's the idea people will not intrude on the freedom of others because that then undermines the guarantee to their own freedom.

But it's a paper thin version of social solidarity. In effect, Clegg envisions a society made up of interchangeable autonomous individuals who express solidarity by being willing to recognise each other's freedoms.

But there is no recognition of the fellow feeling or loyalty that comes about through a shared history, culture, religion, language or kinship - no sense that people might form an ethny or a people.

But to summarise: Clegg does take "freedom as autonomy" seriously. It leads him on the one hand to wish to disperse power to individuals rather than to rely on a paternalistic state. But, at the same time, there is a logic by which the state is relied on to remove impediments to choice and to equalise conditions of life so that the things that aren't chosen don't determine life outcomes.

I understand that libertarians would disagree with the way that Clegg has developed a liberal politics, but what they need to understand is that there is a logic by which Clegg (and so many others) have taken liberalism in that direction.

An example of misunderstanding traditionalism

People are used to politics being dominated by a right and a left liberalism. That can make it difficult to envisage an alternative to these options.

I was reminded of this in the discussion to my post "Hostility in the manosphere". One commenter, calling himself "Nah," claimed that hostility to traditionalists is justified by the fact that traditionalists have already been around a long time but had lost:

In one form or another, "traditionalism" has been around for over 60 years, and has an unbroken record of total and unmitigated defeat.
 

To me, that's a puzzling claim. I wrote a comment in response pointing out that by the 1970s society was dominated not just by liberalism but more specifically by a left-liberalism, which dominated the schools, the universities, the mainstream churches and the media. There were no institutions (in Australia, anyway) which you could call traditionalist.

Nah accepted that society after the 1970s was dominated by liberalism. But he didn't accept my claim that there were no significant non-liberal institutions earlier in the 1900s (with the partial exception of the Catholic Church) to oppose the advance of liberalism. He wrote:

Are you kidding? ALL the institutions were non-liberal at the beginning of the 20th century. Over time the liberals infiltrated them, hollowed them out, and generally turned them into a mockery of their former selves. Conservatism (like the British Empire) went from penthouse to outhouse over the course of the century. You are deluded if you think you can get back into the penthouse when you couldn't even defend it back in the day you actually owned it.
 

It's true that liberalism did move to rule more exclusively on liberal principles alone during the course of the 1900s. But that doesn't mean that in the year 1900 you had a situation in which a traditionalist ruling class governed society via traditionalist dominated institutions. That very much misunderstands what was happening at that time.

In Australia, for instance, politics was dominated by a contest between a group of Deakinite liberals who favoured protection and another group of free trade liberals. The Labor Party had just become a significant third force in politics. Was there an organised traditionalist party in Australia in 1900, representing a powerful section of the ruling elite? The answer is no.

Remember too that the 1800s were the heyday of classical liberalism and that the first wave of feminism began from the mid-1800s and reached a peak of radicalism in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Artistic and political modernism had already developed a long way by the year 1900. For instance, Nietzsche had declared the death of God in the 1880s; Freud effectively did likewise in his very influential works which he began publishing in the 1890s; a movement of nihilists and anarchists assassinated various heads of state from the 1880s; and Munch painted "The Scream" in the 1890s.

The full force of modernism in the arts was therefore ready to hit very soon after the year 1900. Picasso's "The women of Avignon" was painted in 1907; Duchamp's "Fountain" (a urinal) dates from 1917; Schoenberg's influential atonal work Pierrot Lunaire was composed in 1912; and James Joyce began work on Ulysses in 1914.

So it was modernism, and not traditionalism, that was in full flight in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In his final response Nah accepts that classical liberalism was strong in the 1800s, but he goes on to make this objection:

As for the "classical liberalism" of the 1800s... that is exactly what is known today as conservatism or traditionalism. Is this really what you oppose? If you are against "1800s liberalism", exactly what are you in favor of? What kind of "traditionalism" are you talking about if you exclude everything that happened in the English-speaking world in the 1800s?
 

So we finally get to the real basis of the misunderstanding. Nah believes that traditionalism is just another name for classical liberalism. He wonders if we don't believe in contemporary liberalism, nor in classical liberalism, exactly what is left for us to believe in. He finds it difficult to see the alternative.

This post would become horrendously long if I tried to make a detailed reply right now. But the basic point I will make is that in rejecting both forms of liberalism we are not "excluding everything that happened in the English-speaking world in the 1800s". Until recent decades liberalism did not seek to rule exclusively by its own principles. The family, for instance, was nearly entirely untouched by liberalism until about the 1850s. Christianity remained strong within the Anglo elite up to about the 1880s and the aristocratic values are evident within Anglo culture right up to the 1920s. Traditional forms of nationalism, whilst somewhat undermined by liberalism, held on until the 1930s in most Anglo countries.

So there was still an ongoing tradition, with many things to admire within it, in the 1800s and later, despite the fact that liberals were strong within the political class and pushed society over time in the direction they favoured.

"We’ve assumed we can put it off indefinitely"

The Daily Mail has a story up about university educated women delaying motherhood for too long. One of the women they profiled explained her situation this way:

Helen is typical of the new breed of would-be mums who prioritised their careers over family. She left Bristol University and was head-hunted by Goldman Sachs where, as a woman trader in the early Nineties, she was a rarity. Twelve-hour days were standard; routinely she began work at 6am.

She married her husband Duncan, a freelance cameraman, when she was 30, and continued to work. "I did want a baby. But I was on this merry-go-round and I couldn’t get off," she recalls. I visualised a future with children but you bury your head in the sand and hope these things will sort themselves out. But they rarely do."

For Helen, the consequences of delaying motherhood were catastrophic. When she began a new job with a £200,000-a-year salary in the London office of a German bank, she worked even harder to warrant her huge earnings. But her stress levels soared commensurately. Finally, in 2001, aged 33, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with depression.

She then wanted to try for a baby, but her medication would have been harmful to an unborn child. Meanwhile, her marriage, stretched to breaking point by her illness, collapsed. It took six years before Helen stopped taking medication for depression and by then she was almost 40 and single.
 

Kristina was also interviewed:

For Kristina Howells, 40, studying became a substitute for the child she didn’t have. In her 20s, she was head of music at a school in Kent.

‘It was the prime age for having babies, but work consumed me,’ she says. ‘When I wasn’t teaching, I was planning lessons, taking after-school activities; organising festivals and concerts. It was rewarding but stressful. I remember thinking, “I’m still very young. I can find the right man in my 30s.”

‘You think you’re invincible. Then I reached 30 and was almost panic-stricken. I had a career but no man to have children with, and I didn’t want to be a single mum.’
 

Solutions? It seems that liberal culture has reached a point at which the message transmitted to women is that what ultimately matters is career: that this is the means to self-realisation.

It makes sense that this message would be taken up more fervently by upper middle-class women, as these women have access to the higher status and higher earning professions.

It's not that these women have entirely rejected the idea of motherhood, but it is not actively pursued - it is something that is assumed will just happen of itself at some indefinite point of time in the future.

So the solution is, in part, for a more realistic view to be promoted within society: a view which recognises that women need to more actively pursue marriageable men in a timely way and to plan for family life whilst still in their 20s.

But even more than this, we need to tweak the culture, so that self-realisation is connected, at least in part, to marriage and motherhood, rather than exclusively to careers. And this is surely possible. We do fulfil ourselves in part in committed relationships with the opposite sex. And we do fulfil important aspects of our being as parents to children.

We have to resist, too, the idea that delaying motherhood until very late is a positive sign of a middle-class identity. The Daily Mail story is good in this regard: it points to the regret and loss and to the negative social consequences of middle-class women "forgetting" to have children.

On a more positive note, I do think there are signs that a younger generation of women are more determined to begin their families by about the age of 27. Hopefully that will start to show up in some of these social surveys.

Some good reads

I don't have time to put together a post myself, but I've been collecting a few good reads from around the "tradosphere".

So here goes:

Luke Torrisi has a post up on the value of tradition at Sydney Trads. It focuses on what can be done at home to encourage a sense of belonging to a tradition. I share Luke Torrisi's interest in some of the older literature for children - it is definitely an achievable aim of even a moderately sized movement to republish some of this literature. (The post comes up better on Google Chrome for me than my version of Internet Explorer).

Mark Moncrieff has been writing up a storm at his new blog Upon Hope. It's great to have a second traditionalist site in Melbourne, so I'd encourage readers to keep visiting. Have a browse through, but the style of Mark's writing is evident in posts like this (the stages of liberal reform) and this (what is really meant when liberals use terms like sexist).

Vanessa from Traditional Christianity ponders the issue of what a Christian women aims for in her appearance and dress in this post. Part of her answer is that "feminine beauty is a gift we bestow upon others. It puts a smile on the face of the people around us and it reminds them of the good things in the world."

Hostility in the manosphere

In some parts of the manosphere being a traditionalist is considered a bad thing. Why the hostility?

It can be confusing at first glance, as the reasons aren't always stated openly. For instance, a recent post at a site called Pro-Male Anti-Feminist Technology (which I'll call PMAFT) claimed that "Trad-cons let feminists define their reality". But what is meant by this?

A lot of the comments at the site don't help - they are just wayward insults (trad-cons "submit to the feminine collective" or "They don’t seem to have any other values than misandry just like the feminists.")

I made some comments at the site in an attempt to tease out what was really going on and I finally had some success. The site owner stated his opposition to me as follows:

Your arguments against “autonomy” assume that feminists are living autonomously (or honestly trying to). You have let them define your reality as well. To those of us speaking in standard English, it sounds like you have a problem with “autonomy” as it is in actual reality. This doesn’t surprise me since traditionalism is a collectivist ideology.
 

That I get. He is someone who wants to stick with the liberal emphasis on autonomy. So when feminists use arguments based around female autonomy he has a problem. His way out is to claim that feminists are lying when they claim to be promoting autonomy for women.

But he has observed me doing things differently. My response to feminism is to criticise the overriding emphasis on autonomy, and to the PMAFTers that means that I am allowing feminists to define my reality.

Is the PMAFT approach the way to go? I don't think so. Let me point out just two immediate problems with retaining a modernist emphasis on autonomy. First, note the criticism made of traditionalism, that it is a philosophy that is "collectivist". Well, in an important sense that's correct. After all, the family is a collective. So is an ethny. And a nation. A church too is a collective institution.

If you think the individual is important you have to support the collectives which give the individual his significant social roles; which provide the stable social relationships that individuals are created for; which deepen the identity of individuals; which anchor individuals by providing a sense of belonging, attachment and connectedness; and which link an individual's nature (his essence) to a social function and to a set of higher values.

The PMAFTers apparently believe that you can think in terms of the individual alone, having abolished collective forms of existence. But that diminishes the individual rather than liberating him, and it allows social function to shift away from ordinary men and women and toward an elite class of administrators (i.e. the individual doesn't play such a role in society anymore).

Second, what does autonomy mean when it comes to relationships? The PMAFT site owner takes this approach:

It’s after Valentine’s Day so I have been on the lookout for a new woman. (I dumped my previous girlfriends before Christmas to avoid the Christmas, New Years, and Valentine’s Day holidays.)
 

It's similar to what college women are "supposed" to do in relationships with men: they are supposed to avoid entanglements by making sure relationships don't get too serious (by limiting themselves to occasional hook-ups, or by dating the wrong sort of men and so on).

That way you do get to preserve your independence, but you do so by degrading a culture of relationships. But if you think what matters most is preserving your own autonomy, that may not be such a concern.

I know some of my readers will react by dismissing the manosphere altogether. I don't think that's the way to go: it's a politically diverse movement and there are aspects of it we can support. Even amongst those who criticise trad-cons there are important distinctions (see here for an interesting comment on this by David Flory).

A moment of time, 1920

It was Anzac Day yesterday, a public holiday in Australia which began as a commemoration of the Australian and New Zealand troops who fought in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.

The above photo shows an Australian soldier laying a wreath at the Cenotaph in London on Anzac Day in 1920.

I like the photo, perhaps because it offers such a contrast with the image of men in the media today. Perhaps the most common portrayal of men is that of the loveable but harmless doofus - a character that is given to most TV dads.

The men in the photo, in contrast, have a dignity and seriousness of purpose and a masculine bearing.

I don't think you can just blame Hollywood executives for the transformation. I think it has to do, in part, with the larger trends in society.

The larger trend is to reject unchosen qualities like our sex as authoritative when it comes to social roles and organisation. Instead, authority is shifted away from the ordinary person to a class of people who rule along the lines of more formal principles  (you can tell here I have been reading Jim Kalb) .

What that means is that the ordinary man no longer holds what you might call "social offices" (I'll expand on this in a moment). What is left to the ordinary man are personal relationships alone and this fits in well with dad as a loveable doofus.

What do I mean by social offices? Being a man once meant something in terms of the roles that were held in society. For instance, being a husband was not just about a personal relationship with a wife, but was an "office" with particular duties, responsibilities, status and authority. The same was true of being a father, which again came with responsibilities to provide for, to protect and to mentor, alongside the authority and the status to carry through with these tasks.

Increasingly these roles/offices are being socialised (shifted from individual men to the state) and androgynised (no longer connected specifically to men).

But there has been an even more significant change since that photo was taken in 1920. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s, there was still a sense of Australian men having a group ethos and existence. There was a positive pride in achievement, particularly as pioneers, soldiers and sportsmen.

When you have this kind of culture, then men also have a role as defenders of the tradition they belong to. Their role is to keep going the particular tradition they belong to, to be the sentinel on the wall allowing the tradition to be renewed within this protected sphere. It's a responsibility that brings men together in the public sphere and which requires a larger engagement with society. It again represents a kind of social office, which brings a particular purpose to the work that men do in society.

But this kind of role has been radically undermined in the larger society. First, by the constant attacks on men as oppressors rather than as defenders and then, second, by the shift toward open-bordered, internationalism in the West.

As things stand, therefore, it would be difficult for Western men to have the same seriousness of purpose as the men depicted in the photo in 1920.

It seems to me that the choice is either to accept the loss of social offices, and to make do with a lifestyle based on personal relationships alone combined with career and consumption (with authority and responsibility in society being shifted away from individuals and toward an administrative class) or else to seek to recreate more traditional communities, though most likely on a smaller scale than they once existed.

I don't think we experience what we are meant to experience as men if we accept the modern conditions of life. What is more, it is likely that men will continue to experience confusion and uncertainty about being a husband or a father or even a worker, when a large part of the meaning of such roles has been lost.

The more we can either hold onto, or recreate, the social offices I have tried to describe, the stronger we become.