Liberalism, honour, witchcraft and the no harm principle

American singer Lana del Rey has joined a movement of witches who are placing spells on Donald Trump. On reading this story I discovered that the key moral principle of witches is the Wiccan Rede, this being "An it harm none, do what ye will" - or in modern English, "Do what you want, as long it doesn't harm anyone".

This is striking, as it is also a key moral principle of liberal modernity. The idea itself goes back a long way. Rabelais, a French writer of the Renaissance, wrote (in the 1500s) of an ideal community based on the principle:

Do What Thou Wilt, because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour.

The idea here is that gentlemen, at least, can be free to choose in any direction because they will by nature choose what is honourable.

John Stuart Mill, the English liberal, had much the same idea in the mid-1800s, although he added to it by suggesting that all social classes could be educated to the level of being gentlemen. He also emphasised the "no harm" principle that had been clearly stated by the French revolutionaries in their Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789:

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.

History has made clear that John Stuart Mill was wrong. We have had high levels of education in the West for many decades, but the level of gentlemanly honour has dramatically fallen rather than risen. One of the reasons for this is that people are generally much more attentive to the idea of "do what you want" rather than the condition "as long as it doesn't harm anyone".

Why doesn't the "no harm" clause work in practice? One problem is that people are able to rationalise away the harm that their decisions create. A woman might choose, for instance, to divorce her husband, thereby dissolving her family. Clearly it has a considerable effect on those around her. But she might say to herself "the children will be better off if I'm happy". Or "we will still be a family, all of us, I'll just be living with another man." Angelina Jolie took this line recently about her decision to divorce Brad Pitt:

'I don’t want to say very much about that, except to say it was a very difficult time and we are a family, and we will always be a family,' she said, visibly emotional.

'My focus is my children, our children,' she explained to the BBC.

'We are and forever will be a family and so that is how I am coping. I am coping with finding a way through to make sure that this somehow makes us stronger and closer,' she said.

In her mind, she can choose to divorce but not dissolve her family, in fact the divorce will make her family stronger and closer.

But even when there is no rationalisation, even when the harm is admitted, the no harm principle is pushed aside. Dalrock recently had a post about an American woman who decided to divorce her husband and who justified her decision using the following lines from her favourite author, Cheryl Strayed:

Go, even though you love him.

Go, even though he is kind and faithful and dear to you.

Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his.

Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him.

Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him.

Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three.

Go, even though you once said you would stay.

Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.

Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.

Go, even though there is nowhere to go.

Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.

Go, because you want to.

Because wanting to leave is enough.

This is so interesting, because the last line clearly states that "do what thou wilt" is enough of a justification, that you don't need to meet the moral condition of "do no harm."

Obviously, the instinct to honour is not strong enough in many people to hold them to virtue or to moral duty. They follow instead an individualistic impulse to follow "their own good" even if this harms others.

And here's the thing. Rabelais defined honour quite well: "an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice." But why not then encourage people to act virtuously? If you tell people that the moral thing is "to do whatever you want" it suggests that standards of virtue don't exist and that one act or choice is as good as another.

In other words, the "do what thou wilt" slogan is "de-moralising" - it places people in a moral vacuum, an empty moral landscape. Little wonder then that people lose some of the moral strength to do the right thing by others.

Do liberal states in the US really have lower divorce rates?

Moral of this story: distrust the reporting of statistics in the mainstream media.

In August of this year, the US Census Bureau released a report on divorce rates in the different states of America. It was widely reported in the media that people were more likely to divorce in the Bible Belt states than in the liberal northeast.

At the time I accepted the statistics. I believed that people in the northeast were less likely to marry as teenagers and more likely to have higher incomes and higher education and that this explained the difference.

Anyway, some on the left had a field day using statistics about higher divorce rates in the Bible Belt. Here's an example:

...perhaps conservative Christianity and conservative religion in general are unable to provide a sound basis for marriage — that perhaps there are other, more secular foundations for marriage that conservative Christians are missing. What might they be? Well, an obvious possibility is treating women like fully autonomous equals in the relationship, something which conservative Christianity frequently denies.

But then I came across another statistic, namely that 28% of those divorced identified as conservative, 33% as moderate and 37% as liberal. It didn't make sense. If those in the liberal states have the lowest rate of divorce, then why do those who identify as liberal have a much higher rate of divorce?

So I went back to the original source. And to my surprise I found that the divorce statistics had been misrepresented in most of the mainstream media. It turns out that what was being compared was the number of divorces per 1000 people in each state rather than the number of divorces per 1000 married couples:

Rates throughout this report count the marital events reported in the past 12 months per 1,000 men or women in the population 15 and older. (p.2)

That wouldn't be significant if roughly the same number of people got married in each US state. But that's not the case. There is a much lower rate of marriage in the liberal north-east of the US:

...the states with the lowest marriage rates for men in 2009 tended to be in the Northeast. Maine and New Jersey were among the states with low marriage rates with 13.5 and 14.8 marriages per 1,000 men. Maine and New Jersey also had low marriage rates per 1,000 women, with 12.2 and 13.3 marriages, respectively. (p.4)

...Twelve of the thirteen states where men had marriage rates below the U.S. average were located east of the Mississippi River. (p.5)

In comparison, a state like Wyoming had a marriage rate of 28.7 - that's more than double the rate in Maine.

So you might expect states with a higher rate of marriage to also have a higher rate of divorce. And that's how a representative of the Census Bureau explained the statistics:

Divorce rates tend to be higher in the South because marriage rates are also higher in the South," said Diana Elliott, a family demographer at the Census Bureau. "In contrast, in the Northeast, first marriages tend to be delayed and the marriage rates are lower, meaning there are also fewer divorces."

That is the key quote. The demographer responsible for the statistics is explaining in the plainest of English why the divorce rate is lower in the north-east. It is because in the liberal north-east people are less likely to be married in the first place.

How does Professor Lewin think women step up to personhood? A clue: not through heterosexual marriage

Professor Ellen Lewin

Laura Wood at The Thinking Housewife has posted an item about an American academic, Dr Ellen Lewin. Dr Lewin, a professor of women's studies, was so outraged at receiving a batch email from a Republican students group that she fired off a reply telling them to "f-off".

Anyway, I did a little search on Dr Lewin. It turns out that she is a very orthodox liberal. She has written a book titled Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture. The basic argument she runs in the book is that divorced single mothers and lesbian mothers have something significant in common: by raising children without husbands they both have achieved the good of motherhood without a loss of autonomy through dependency on men.

The message is that divorce can be good for heterosexual women because it liberates women to be autonomous.

I have to say that there's a contradiction in Professor Lewin's argument, but I'll get to that a little later.

It's interesting to see how liberal autonomy theory plays out in Professor Lewin's book. For instance, she argues that there is a difference between being a good mother in a marriage and in a divorce. Being a good mother in a marriage is not so good because it is merely a "natural attribute" (not something self-determined). But if a mother gets custody in the courts, that is a "self-conscious achievement" and "evidence of skill" in "protecting the integrity" of her family:

Mothers who face actual or potential custody challenges use strategies of appeasement, support, and autonomy in the course of protecting the integrity of their families. The claim to being a "good mother," a key element of feminine gender identity in American culture, is transformed from a natural attribute into the product of self-conscious achievement...

In this situation a competent mother is one who accedes to enough of her husband's demands to discourage a custody challenge but not so much that her concessions can be turned against her. Being a "good mother" is thus transformed from a state of being, a natural attribute, into evidence of skill, rewarded by the father's failure to gain custody or, better yet, by his failure to pursue it at all. [pp.177-178]

As for divorce being a step up for women, this is how Professor Lewin puts it:

These convergences between lesbian mothers' coming-out stories and the divorce stories of both lesbians and heterosexual mothers point to a telling contradiction in American culture. Marriage is seen as a special kind of success for women, but it also imposes a loss of autonomy and personhood that threatens to compromise the individual's quest for accomplishment and individuality. As observers of American culture have noted since Alexis de Tocqueville described his impressions in the mid-nineteenth century, individuality and the related concept of privacy are such core dimensions of American culture that conditions or behavior that might be interpreted as dependency seem questionable if not shameful...

... Both coming out and divorce shift women's status downward in the eyes of the society as a whole, yet the women who experience them view them in many respects as steps up. At the core of both coming-out and divorce stories is the theme of increasing autonomy and competence, and both kinds of accounts tend to focus on discovery of one's "true" self. In these respects, as Kath Weston has observed, they constitute odysseys of self-discovery; at the same time, they demonstrate a concern with achieving adulthood and autonomy which is a particular consequence of the infantilization that both marriage and heterosexuality can impose on women. [pp.43, 45]

The logic of the argument is that in a marriage women are dependent on a man, that this makes married heterosexual women infantile, so that divorce and/or lesbianism represent a step forward toward an adult, autonomous life.

The fact that the conclusion is so odd, that it suggests that being a lesbian or a divorced woman is more adult than being a married mother, should suggest to us that there is something wrong with the premises of the argument.

My own view is that the mistake is to think of autonomy as a single, overriding good. In practice, we don't do this. We marry despite the fact that we thereby limit our autonomy, because there are other important goods associated with marriage, including those of marital love and parenthood.

As it happens, Professor Lewin finds it difficult to maintain the consistency of her argument. She argues for divorce and lesbianism in terms of autonomy, but when it comes to justifying motherhood she is at a loss – becoming a mother does not increase a woman's autonomy, so it has to be justified on other grounds, but these same grounds could then just as easily justify a commitment to heterosexual marriage:

Lesbians who are not mothers share with other childless women a feeling of distance not only from the kinds of things "ordinary" women do but from the special relationship to the spiritual world women can derive from their connection to children. By becoming a mother, a woman can experience a moment of transcendent unity with mystical forces; by being a mother, she makes continuing contact with her inner goodness, a goodness that is activated by altruism and nurtured by participation in a child's growth and development.

By becoming a mother, a lesbian can negotiate the formation of herself: she can bring something good into her life without having to sacrifice autonomy or control. Thus the intentional single mother (whether she is lesbian or heterosexual) can achieve a central personal goal – the goodness that comes from putting the needs of a dependent being first. By becoming a mother through her own agency, she avoids the central paradox that motherhood represents to married women – a loss of autonomy and therefore of basic personhood in a culture that valorizes individualism and autonomy. Like ending a marriage, having a baby on her own allows a woman to meet her basic personal goals, and she may see it as a critical part of establishing a satisfying identity in a culture that often blocks women's efforts to be separate individuals. [p.73]

She is running with two very different sets of principles here. When it comes to motherhood, what matters to her is not autonomy but feeling connected and the good of altruistic care for another. The very close, dependent relationship of mother and child is seen as a good. But when it comes to heterosexual marriage, personhood is defined solely in terms of being a separate, autonomous individual.

She could just as easily have defined the good of marriage in the way she defined the good of motherhood: in terms of the closeness of the relationship, of finding inner goodness in the giving of oneself altruistically to one's spouse, of the spiritual fulfilment of marital love, and of the completion of a feminine identity in being a wife.

I'll finish with one more inconsistency in Professor Lewin's position. She justifies motherhood in terms of participating in a child's growth and development. But what if that child is a boy? What is that boy growing and developing toward?

If Professor Lewin had her way, that boy would not have much of a future role in society. He would grow up in a society in which women aimed either at intentional single motherhood or else at divorce as a pathway to autonomy, adulthood and self-discovery.

It's not much for a boy to grow and develop toward. So what would be the point of a woman committing herself to participating in his development? What mothers need to justify their role are young women in society who are willing to make a life together with their sons. Professor Lewin doesn't like the idea of this life together and so is no true friend of motherhood.

The delayed marriage debate

One of the looming battles in the culture war is the issue of when to marry and have children. Feminists have urged women to stay independent of men; this hasn't, in general, led women to reject the idea of marriage and motherhood outright. It has, though, encouraged the trend for women to defer family formation until some time in their 30s.

But this creates a number of problems including the following:

• women lose reproductive choice. If women only attempt to marry and have children in the final, declining years of their fertility, they may well miss out on having the children they want
• if women aren't serious about marriage or children in their 20s, then they are more likely to select the "wrong" sort of men - the bad boys, the narcissists, the thugs etc. This then discourages the family man ethos amongst men and encourages a player culture. Numbers of men who might have made good husbands will drop out altogether.
• when women do start taking family formation seriously in their 30s, they are more likely to find it difficult to meet suitable men. Some men will already have married, others will have dropped out and some will be players. The women themselves will no longer be at the peak of their youthful fertility and attractiveness to men and they might well be less able to pair bond due to the number of casual relationships already entered into.
• all of this combined is likely to encourage a more cynical and adversarial culture of relationships between men and women
• men and women will not be able to gift each other their youthful passions and they will be considerably older and more infirm as grandparents

Feminists are mostly winning this battle in the culture war. However, there do exist opposing voices, warning of the problems created by leaving things so late, such as the BBC Radio DJ, Lauren Laverne:

BBC radio presenter Lauren Laverne has criticised the growing culture of ‘freemales’ who choose an independent life over having a husband and family.

Lauren Laverne



The 32-year-old BBC 6 Music host says women who delay having a family in their twenties risk never finding ‘a sense of completion’.

Despite initially being seen as a ‘ladette’, the ex-pop singer married when she was 27 and had her first child, Fergus, two years later. She gave birth to her second son, Mack, in September last year. Her husband is DJ Graeme Fisher.

But she admits her decision to start a family is in stark contrast to her friends who are not interested in settling down until they are 35.



‘I was getting married when none of my friends even lived with their boyfriends, and then I had Fergus,’ she told Red Magazine.

‘It’s great that you get to be young for longer, but the downside is people worry too much. If you’re with the right person, do it, get married, have the baby, take a leap of faith. You can’t plan everything, you can’t wait and wait and wait.



‘The nice thing now is that I have a sense of completion about my family and the future. You can only really get that when you crack on when you’re young.’

Her friends are being foolish. They are not willing to settle down until they are 35 - exactly the age at which a woman's fertility starts to peter out. They are not even making relationship commitments in their late 20s.

Lauren Laverne is not alone in speaking out against trends toward delayed marriage. Two American researchers, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker of the University of Texas, have recently published their findings on the state of play in relationships between young Americans. One of their conclusions is that women, by delaying a serious commitment to relationships, are creating a player culture amongst men, which then undermines women's desires later on to find a committed relationship:

Researchers found that since women in the 18- to 23-year-old group feel they don't need men for financial dependence, many of them feel they can play around with multiple partners without consequence, and that the early 20s isn't the time to have a serious relationship. But eventually, they do come to want a real, lasting relationship. The problem is that there will still be women who will have sex readily without commitment, and since men know this, fewer of them are willing to go steady.

"Women have plenty of freedom, but freedom does not translate easily into getting what you want," Regnerus said.

This issue was even openly discussed in the usually liberal Salon magazine. There was a very respectful interview with the two researchers about the issue of women having "lost control" of relationships, with increasing numbers of women reporting about modern relationships that "I don't like this script, it sucks." One of the researchers gave this advice:

I don't think it's in women's interest to play the field for a long period of time. It can get depressing, not only about their relationships but to see the pool of men in their 30s who are available. My advice is if you find somebody who you love and who loves you, make it work...

...Women need to somehow reacquire control over the direction of relationships. They feel like they don't have control.

Women who have been brought up to believe that independence is what matters most won't easily warm to the idea of marrying earlier. One woman's comment in reply to the two American researchers was that,

It strikes me as the typical fear tactics used to keep women's ambitions and autonomy in check because many men don't have the personal skills to succeed in equal partnership.

She ain't budging.

Some of the late marriage camp are also picking up on a statistic which claims that women with college education, their own income and who marry later are less likely to divorce. So you get comments like this one:

A woman is in the best position to avoid divorce if she is college-educated (the more the better), has her own income, and she marries no sooner than age 25. Women who fit this description have a very, very small likelihood of finding themselves in divorce court - WELL under national averages.

So this begs the question... is the goal for women to GET married, or to STAY married? Personally, I'm voting for the latter.

It's not that waiting until your mid-20s to marry is necessarily wrong. Some people don't mature into their adult personalities until this age. But the argument is sometimes used to justify a "wait until you're in your 30s and have done the whole education/career thing" position. So I do want to point out that the divorce rate difference between those who marry in their early 20s and those who marry in their late 20s doesn't seem to be that great. It's those who marry as teenagers who clearly have a higher divorce rate.

If you look at the following chart it shows that those women who married at less than 18 years of age had the highest rate of divorce; those who married at 18 and 19 had the next highest; those who married at 21 to 25 initially had the next highest but in the long run did the best; whilst those who married from 25 to 29 did the best in the early years of marriage but over time ended up with a higher divorce rate than those who married in their early 20s.

The lesson from this data set is that marrying below the age of 20 does significantly increase the risk of divorce for a woman, but marrying at 23 involves no greater risk than marrying at 29.