On reason

There was a longstanding idea in Western thought that tyranny existed when a man was no longer governed by reason but by his baser animal appetites/passions or by his vices. The solution was to cultivate habits of virtue.

Understood the right way, this idea is likely to have positive effects. But I wonder if, understood the wrong way, it might have contributed to the constellation of ideas that led to modern day liberalism.

Here's how it could go wrong. Let's say I believe that the important thing is that it is my individual reason that holds sway and that this defines my personal liberty. You might then come to believe the following:

1. If I am to be free, then I must be governed by my reason.

2. If I am to be governed by my individual reason then my reason has ultimate authority.

3. Therefore I should resist the external authority of a power hierarchy (bishops, kings etc). To obey or to serve is suspect, perhaps servile. It should be possible to have a society without a power hierarchy or, at least, to "level" a society.

4. If individual reason has authority, then I should not be swayed by custom, feeling, affection, loyalty or mere "prejudice".

5. Tradition is especially bad as it might be merely "imitation" which would mean being governed by "other mind" rather than by my own reason.

6. Nor should I be governed or defined by "non-mind" aspects of self, such as sex or race, which I will come to think of as mere "accidental" attributes of self.

Remember that by the time of the French Revolution there was a deification of reason. This is why a critic of the revolution like Edmund Burke attacked the kind of logic I set out above. Burke argued that the stock of reason in each individual man was too small to be a reliable or practical guide to everyday behaviour and that there was often a collective wisdom to be found in inherited tradition or in "prejudice" (i.e. received social norms or standards).

It's not surprising that the "I am free when governed by individual reason" principle would appeal to secular intellectuals. These intellectuals were no longer employed in the service of an established theological tradition; they were not disciplined to a larger, accumulated body of thought. Nor is it surprising that a bureaucratic class, raised within the new scientific approach, would be supportive of such a principle, as it freely allows society to be governed along technocratic lines.

There's a second problem as well with the idea that we secure our own liberty, and that of our society, when we cultivate the virtues, so that we are governed by reason rather than gratifying impulsively our animal passions or our vices.

The problem is that it suggests that passion, feeling, instinct, emotion and the physical aspects of life are in a lower category than the mental or intellectual aspects. If understood this way, it can fail to integrate the human person and lead to a backlash in which the more primal, directly felt and forceful aspects of life are reasserted (e.g. aspects of the Romantic movement, or more recently writers like D. H. Lawrence). It might even lead to the original idea being turned upside down, with the claim that we are liberated when we throw off the "repression" placed on our sexual or animal natures.

In short, it's important that the original principle is understood clearly, in a way that doesn't drift toward a proto-liberal mindset based on individualism, rationalism or levelling.

To achieve clarity the following might help:

1. The guiding or directing or ordering faculty, commonly called "reason", is not just a logical, intellectual, analytical feature of the mind. Rather, it is the discerning faculty, able to experience, evaluate, order and rank the variety of human experiences and to judge prudentially.

2. Whilst it is true that the animal or biological impulses and appetites will often need to be overruled by higher order moral or spiritual factors, it is also the case that they (the animal/physical/biological impulses) can be the foundations of, or inspire, much that reason will find worthy and sustaining. Sometimes, therefore, it is more the case of guiding or channeling our animal/biological natures to their proper ends rather than suppressing them.

3. Our individual reason is not sufficient an authority for either our own behaviour or for the governance of society. Our prudential reason itself should know this. It is proper for there to be leadership structures in society. In normal circumstances, it is a virtue to be loyal to the natural, organic communities we belong to and to serve them, whether they be our family, our community, our ethny or our nation.

4. Given that our individual reason will be insufficient, it is important that a society establishes a healthy cultural framework for individual behaviour, one that will include social norms and standards. These will not be permanently fixed or unable to be challenged, but ideally will reflect an accumulated understanding of how a society is able to order itself successfully and orient itself toward a common good.

5. It will be helpful also for a society to establish a framework of education in which young people are exposed to the best minds from previous generations, to help them in the process of acquiring wisdom and insight and to benefit from the life experience of those who have gone before them.

One final thought. Liberal rationalism and individualism often go together with a commitment to an abstract, universal love or to a progress toward "higher unities". This makes sense once reason begins to be deified along proto-liberal lines. If I am not a man, but a reasoning mind, then the particular attributes belonging to me become less important in defining my self, my attachments, my loves and my duties. Nor am I placed in time, or connected in lineage in as significant a way. My attachments are more likely to be understood to be universal ones that a reasoning mind might abstractly think its way toward; nor are any distinctions between reasoning minds likely to be thought to hold, and so there will only be the individual mind existing alone and as part of a universal entity, either of humanity or of all things.

This, at least, is one possible path of thought that might be travelled by those who take the reasoning mind itself to be the human person.

Rethinking education for boys

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.

No evidence of campus bias?

In my last post I made the claim that the left dominates on campus. This seems obvious and uncontroversial to me, but my occasional Marxist reader THR strongly protested. He doesn't see things this way at all. He thinks there is no evidence that the left dominates on campus. He believes the idea that the left dominates is "risible" and a "furphy".

So maybe it's worthwhile going through some evidence.

Voting patterns

There is ample evidence that a large majority of academics in the US are Democrat voters rather than Republicans. So not only are most academics "liberal" in the broader sense of the word, they are more specifically left-liberal. This will be especially true in the arts/humanities faculties.

From 2002:

The Luntz Research Companies, a respected polling company, conducted a survey this spring of the opinions of the liberal arts and social science faculty at Ivy League colleges and universities. The results explain the ideological indoctrination rampant on campuses today ...

* Only 3% identified themselves as Republican, while 57% admitted they are Democrats.

* 64% identified themselves as liberal, 23% as moderate, and only 6% as conservative.

* Here is how they voted in the 2000 election: 61% for Al Gore, 5% for Ralph Nader, 6% for George W. Bush, and 28% either did not vote or refused to answer.

More statistics here:

A new study of the party affiliations of college professors proves a massive gulf between Right and Left. Liberal professors often outnumber conservatives by ten to one and sometimes by more than twenty to one on campus ...

Eli Lehrer, who conducted the study, told Campus Report, "We sent students in each of the colleges to their local Boards of Elections and had them get lists of the faculty members and look up registration cards. Now, this only works in the states where you register by party and where voter records are public.... We tried to get a good sample of colleges."

The study concluded, "Colleges like to characterize themselves as wide-open places where every thought can be thought, where any opinion can be held, where all ideals and principles may be pursued freely. The demonstrable reality, however, is that you will find a much wider-and freer-cross-section of human reasoning and conviction in the aisles of a grocery store or city bus."

Liberals outnumber conservatives 18 to one at Brown University. At Cornell University, the number is even higher, with liberals outnumbering conservatives more than 26 times. Penn State displayed a bit more balance, with the ratio of liberals to conservatives being six to one. Even the smallest disparity, at the University of Houston, had a ratio of three liberals to one conservative.

Of the 166 professors examined at Cornell University, only six were conservatives, with no conservatives at all in the fields of history and sociology. There were likewise no conservatives in these fields at Brown University.

Some of the largest disparities were found in the University of California system. UCLA, for instance, has only nine conservatives for 141 liberals. UC-Santa Barbara had only one conservative professor in the 73 examined. At the four UC schools surveyed, there were only five conservative political science professors compared to 90 liberals.

At UC-Berkeley, only seven of the 66 professors noted were conservatives, with none in the department of sociology.

... the University of Colorado was one of the most liberal schools of those surveyed, with liberal professors outnumbering conservative professors by more than 23 to one. An earlier, more comprehensive study conducted by the Rocky Mountain News found a 31 to one Democrat to Republican imbalance among faculty at the school.

Let me repeat: there is a dominance not just of liberal professors on American campuses but more specifically of left-liberal professors.

Curriculum

Why does it matter that a large majority of university professors are left-liberals?

It matters when a large number of subjects on offer exclude more conservative students, e.g. "Discourses on heteronormativity in colonial racist narratives". It matters when students choose more traditional subjects, e.g. "Renaissance Italy", but are supposed to discuss the subject matter in tutorials in terms of left-wing academic theories (deconstructionism, standpoint theory etc.). It matters when the curriculum itself is radically reorganised to serve the technocratic goals of modern liberalism.

I reported recently that Australia's new national curriculum for high schools was to be organised around three key considerations:

i) indigenous perspectives
ii) a commitment to sustainable patterns of living
iii) the skills, knowledge and understandings related to Asia and Australia's engagement.

The universities aren't far behind. The University of Melbourne has declared that it is no longer an "exclusive knowledge habitat", but an "access point" to serve "society's changing needs". As such, arts students are now required in their first year to choose two of the following "foundation subjects":

Understanding Asia; Globalisation; Australian Indigenous studies; Knowing Nature; From Homer to Hollywood (communication studies); Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

They must also select from these "breadth studies":

100-181 Australian Indigenous Studies
800-175 An Ecological History of Humanity
800-122 Catastrophes, Cultures & the Angry Earth
800-201 Climate Change ll
800-101 Critical Thinking With Data
800-267 Drugs That Shape Society
800-121 Food for a Healthy Planet
800-116 Generating the Wealth of Nations
800-205 Genetics, Health, and Society
800-206 Human Rights and Global Justice
800-150 Internet Meets Society
800-191 Introduction to Climate Change
800-204 Language and Computation
800-203 Learning Cultures: Minds, Ideas, Objects
800-123 Logic: Language and Information
800-166 Poetics of the Body 1
800-266 Poetics of the Body 2
800-366 Poetics of the Body 3
800-100 Seeing: The Whole Picture
200-268 Water for Sustainable Futures

It's not that much different to the high school plan. It's organised around indigenous studies, Asian engagement, the environment plus a number of other subjects that might appeal to the future technocrats of the world.

So the issue is not just the personal political preferences of academics as expressed on voting day. The curriculum and the course structure offered by universities are being increasingly reshaped along liberal modernist lines.

Camille Paglia on the American left

Lawrence Auster has already highlighted the recent Salon article by Camille Paglia, but it's interesting enough to have a second go at here.

Camille Paglia is a left-wing feminist intellectual. She is not, though, an orthodox member of the left - she does sometimes set herself outside of the intellectual mainstream.

In her Salon article, Camille Paglia is critical of the American Democrats for being out of touch with grassroots feeling on the healthcare issue. She asks tellingly:

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers ...

This is a significant point. Left-liberals like to imagine themselves as being dissenting outsiders battling a privileged establishment. The reality is that left-liberals themselves form an entrenched wing of the political establishment. The self-image is bogus.

That the left forms a political establishment on campus is illustrated by the experiences of Dan Lawton. He is an American university student who thought it a bit one-sided that only 2 out of 111 academics at the University of Oregon were Republican voters. He wrote a column for the student paper suggesting that the university attempt to attract a few right-wing professors:

What I didn't realize is that journalism that examined the dominance of liberal ideas on campus would be addressed with hostility.

A professor who confronted me declared that he was "personally offended" by my column ... I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.

He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.

"You think you're so [expletive] cute with your little column," she told me. "I read your piece and all you want is attention. You're just like Bill O'Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you."

... She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed ...

Students should never come under personal attack from faculty members for straying from the party line. The fact that they do shows how easily political partisanship can corrupt the elements of higher education that should be valued the most.

Camille Paglia also points out that left-liberals typically value individual autonomy as the highest good whilst supporting the growth of an intrusive, coercive state authority:

Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy.

And what about the liberal idea that we should be radically self-determining, writing our own script, following our own life path etc. Camille Paglia doesn't see it happening in practice:

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

Camille Paglia has also noticed the left-liberal failure to think deeply about the real world consequences of social policy:

By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

Finally, I thought there was something to this observation by Camille Paglia:

If the left is an incoherent shambles in the U.S., it's partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois liberals are left.

What are we being delivered to?

Liberalism is advancing at breakneck speed toward the greatest emptiness ever known to mankind. Consider the following two news items. It has been announced that there is to be a national curriculum for Australian schools. On what principles is this curriculum to be based?

According to a report in the Herald Sun there are to be three "key considerations" underpinning the entire development process. They are:

i) indigenous perspectives
ii) a commitment to sustainable patterns of living
iii) the skills, knowledge and understandings related to Asia and Australia's engagement.

So the education of Australian children is being planned by people who seemingly lack a love of learning or a passion for culture or science. What a view of Australia these "key considerations" reveal. The Australian mainstream culture is overlooked in favour of "indigenous perspectives". Flogging stuff to Asia matters. And there's a nod to environmental sustainability.

And that's it. What does this say to the average Australian child? That they don't embody a culture and tradition of their own but are to develop instead as Economic Man - albeit one who remembers to recycle stuff.

The second news item is far worse. It turns out that immigration has been running at an astonishingly high level. And the officials in charge justify this on the grounds that the economy is king. Australia is one big labour market.

Last year there were 171,318 permanent arrivals in Australia. There were also 47,780 New Zealanders who settled permanently and 657,124 migrants with the right to work. This adds up to 876,222 arrivals in a country with a population of about 22,000,000.

What is the purpose of this immigration? The Immigration Minister gave this explanation:

Senator Evans said immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants ... Decisions about who came to Australia would increasingly be left to employers.

Are we a nation or an economy? Do we want to develop economically and industrially or just grow by selling passports and having more people? Do we really want to sacrifice individual standards of living just to have a higher overall level of GDP?

My apologies to Australian readers who find all this demoralising. I expect that at first it is unavoidably demoralising. But I hope that there will be at least one positive effect, which is to show just how bankrupt Australian liberalism has become. There is nothing worthwhile animating it. The focus of government policy is not even on real economic development anymore; it's just about crude technocratic management of the economy to maintain overall growth of GDP.

Anyway, in response to the educrats and their "key considerations" and to Senator Evans and his view of Australia as an employer run labour agency, I penned the following protest ditty:

Our liberal elite is cold and grey
No culture at all, the economy holds sway
Over pallid minds and hollow souls
Dedicated to technocratic goals.

Lord deliver us from these bloodless ghosts
Shut up in bureaucratic posts
Let men with hearts less feeble, values less base
Favour us all and take their place.

Strange university creatures

There's been a ruckus at Washington University in the American state of Missouri.

One of the graduates of the university is the conservative journalist, lawyer, author and activist, Phyllis Schlafly. She has been a prominent opponent of radical feminism since the early 1970s.

She received an honorary degree from the university at this year's commencement ceremony in front of 14,000 people. Some of the staff and students were displeased at a conservative being honoured this way and stood up and turned their backs when she received the award.

The 83-year-old Mrs Schlafly was unfazed by the protest and clearly enjoyed the moment. She later described the protest as "tacky".

And this is where it gets particularly interesting. Some of the staff and students are running a campaign to have the university take back the honorary degree.

Fourteen Washington University law professors have written a letter to the Chancellor, Mark Wrighton, in which they explain that,

Our objection to honoring Ms. Schlafly ... stems from the fact that she has devoted her career to demagoguery and anti-intellectualism in the pursuit of her political agenda.

Demagoguery? Anti-intellectualism? Compared to most political websites, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum is genteel in style - about as far away from demagoguery as you can imagine.

The claim has more to do with the inner workings of the professors' political mindset, which, in the closed environment of a university, has probably rarely been challenged.

One retired law professor did step in with an alternative view:

Jules Gerard, a retired Washington U. law professor who worked with Schlafly to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, said that if the university were to rescind the degree, then it would have to change its policy statements — to say that the school tolerates all views except conservative ones.

And what about the Chancellor, Mark Wrighton? He is acting more strangely than anyone:

Wrighton said the university will review the process for awarding honorary degres and will propose appropriate changes.

"Personally, I do not endorse her views or opinions, and in many instances, I strongly disagree with them," Wrighton said.

... Wrighton affirmed his personal commitment to strengthening diversity and inclusiveness and to improving gender balance at the university.

"Washington University -- or any other university -- is neither perfect nor are all its processes for making decisions. We can always do better. In the aftermath of Commencement, I am deeply committed to whatever work needs to be done to rebuild damaged relationships with members of our community -- faculty, students, alumni, parents, trustees and staff. I thank you for all that you do to make this a community so open, tolerant and inclusive ..."

He affirmed his commitment to strengthening diversity and inclusiveness and to improving gender balance? Perhaps you're thinking right now that Washington University is an unusual campus at which men vastly outnumber women and at which ethnic minorities are unfairly underrepresented.

But that's not the case at all. There are slighly more female than male undergraduate students at the university (52% to 48%). Exactly half of graduate students are female.

58% of the students are white. This is higher than the percentage of whites who live in the city precinct of St Louis (44%). However, it's much lower than the percentage of whites in the population of the state of Missouri (87%). So there is a strong case that it is whites who are underrepresented at Washington University.

Therefore, the chancellor is beating himself around the head for crimes against liberal diversity that don't even exist. It reminds me of the situation of apparatchiks under communist rule who also had to prove their loyalty to the system by readily confessing to phantom offences against Marxist-Leninism (although of course the stakes were higher in the USSR - Wrighton doesn't face a knock on the door at night).

And all this because of a single award to an 83-year-old conservative. What this demonstrates is that liberals, despite their mantra of tolerance, are radically intolerant.

A single, small manifestation of something non-liberal, something outside the system, being publicly acknowledged, and they immediately feel the need to confess their sins, to promise never to repeat the offense, to redouble their efforts to purge themselves of the intrusion and to take diversity and inclusion to ever more radical lengths - even to the point at which it becomes a kind of exclusion.

A traditionalist teacher

I've long held the view that Western societies won't escape their current trajectory until a section of the political class abandons liberalism in favour of a principled traditionalism.

Enter Glynne Sutcliffe. She grew up in Melbourne, obtained an honours degree in history and and a masters in South Asian languages and civilisation, taught at both secondary and tertiary level and now runs an early learning centre in Adelaide.

She has written an article proposing an education revolution. Her proposals are, in fact, revolutionary as they contradict basic tenets of the modern education system.

She writes, for instance, that "teachers who care most about content mastery are likely to be considerably better than teachers who have been required to prioritise generalist classroom management skills".

She criticises, too, the "child-centred" approach to education, as ultimately alienating and confusing for most students. She writes of this approach:

But under progressivist pedagogies teachers aren’t supposed to teach - they are specifically told that they should abandon completely the role of “sage on a stage”, and instead be a “guide on the side” - the much over-hyped “facilitator”.

She also stands firm against the whole technocratic approach to such issues by highlighting the importance of teacher personality (she uses the term "flamboyance") in motivating and capturing the interest of students.

But most impressive, in my view, is her explanation of what has gone wrong. She believes that teachers need to assert a positive authority in the classroom:

it raises the whole issue of authority, a much vexed question in modern western society. Let me say clearly, it is my view that any teacher must have authority to be in any way capable of teaching anybody anything. Students rarely develop an enthusiasm for independent study (the sine qua non of the portfolio/project/assignment system) unless an obviously well-informed teacher has a cultivated mind that both provokes emulation and generates teasing questions that get under a student’s intellectual skin.

... authority is best sourced in respected knowledge and experience, as well as the power to achieve identified and substantive goals ...

What is the stumbling block to accepting such positive authority wielded by teachers?

Here we have to go back for another look at the assumptions of progressivism, and the post-Enlightenment certainties that human beings reach their fullest potential as self-actualised “independent individuals” living out their days in an egalitarian universe of similar others.

The last quote really gets to the heart of the modernist project. I find it encouraging that Glynne Sutcliffe has identified the underlying problem of liberal modernism so clearly.

Who civilises men?

The modern university is now largely justified in economic terms, either as a recruiter of fee paying overseas students, or as a means to develop labour productivity.

Both sides of politics seem to agree on this. In a recent ABC debate, the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, said that:

Well, education at the tertiary level is an international enterprise. We're in a global marketplace for students, for academics.

Her counterpart, Labor's Stephen Smith, thought this attitude not economic enough:

This Government is living in the past. We've got to strike out for the future. We've got to strike out for the future with a fundamental change of attitude. Education at every level is fundamentally important to our productivity, to our capacity to compete.

It was something of a relief, then, to read an account by Anthony Esolen of his visit to Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia (via Turnabout). Esolen isn't just concerned about the economic aspect of education, but about culture and character.

Hampden-Sydney College is a rare thing, an all-male campus. Esolen was pleased to find that the young men he met at Hampden-Sydney had a well developed sense of honour and brotherhood. He found that the young men, in their masculine environment, developed "timocracies" - by which he means organisations based on a love of honour.

Esolen believes that Sydney-Hampden has preserved a more traditional understanding of the university as compared to the modern economic view:

At Sydney, though, something remains of the old meaning of the word "college" -- a group of people, in this case all of them men, who may have come together in the first place for all kinds of reasons, but who are made one, made brothers, by the common course of study, the venerable traditions of the school, and the polities of honor into which they are brought and in which they thrive, personally and intellectually.

It's a far cry from "college" as commodity.

Esolen goes on to make another significant point. It's his experience that boys educated in institutions like Hampden-Sydney are more likely to develop polities based on timocracy, and to be influenced positively in their character by this, than those in mixed-sex environments. This leads him to challenge the idea that it is women who civilize men. He writes:

Women do not in fact civilize men; they domesticate men, as I've said before. Men civilize men. There's a difference.

What is that difference? A soldier in a cavalry unit who spends most of his time in barracks or under the skies, may well be more civilized, more trained to think of and to act for the common good, to command other men or to obey, than many a high-priced lawyer or even college professor. He's not domesticated, though, and his new bride at first might find him pretty hard to live with.

On the other hand, men who live comfortable lives apart from other men, taking no initiative for the common good, considering only their wives and children and not the welfare of anybody else's children, never to be relied upon in time of public need, may be domesticated but not civilized. You might find plenty of men of the former sort at the inception of a great nation. You will find plenty of men of the latter sort at its decline.

It's an argument worth considering. I think perhaps my father's generation might fall into the domesticated but not civilised category. They were generally good family men, but they didn't seem to take a wider responsibility in the defence of their own tradition.

I wonder, though, if men will continue to be even domesticated, let alone civilised. There are larger numbers of men now, it appears, who have made the decision not to devote themselves to the welfare of a wife and child.

So perhaps the plea to men will have to be, not only to become more civilised in their commitments, but more domesticated too.

Not so independent schools

In today's Herald Sun the following news:

Private and public schools would be forced to take students who cannot afford to pay fees under radical changes being floated by the State Government.

If such a policy goes ahead it will violate the independence of private schools. Such schools should be able to select students according to their own standards and values.

As it is, most private schools do offer scholarships to academically gifted students who can't afford to pay full fees. They do this, though, on selection criteria they think best, and not under government directions.