Lopsided liberation

I want to draw out a point I raised in my post on Cardi B. If you remember, Cardi B released a "twerking" music video and justified it on the grounds of female empowerment. She and many others defined female empowerment as women doing whatever they want or feel like doing, without judgement from others and without negative consequences.

It is an extraordinary social experiment to "liberate" female sexuality in this way. It used to be thought that a person was most at liberty when they were not under the control of their animal passions or appetites, but had instead, through their higher reason/moral sense, cultivated habits of virtue, through which the animal passions/appetites could be directed to their proper ends.

And here we are with this older principle turned on its head. It is now thought that women are liberated and empowered when they are driven instead by unrestrained sexual impulse, by what they feel in the moment in terms of sexual passion.

And what of men? Has society taken a similar gamble and encouraged men to follow their animal impulses when it comes to sex? The answer, of course, is a resounding no. Our society, if anything, is petrified of the idea. There is a suspicion applied in our society to male sexuality, a suspicion that men are potential rapists or harassers of women. Men are forever put on the defensive, feeling pressured to apologise to women for the sexual sins, real or potential, of their sex.

So what we have is a lopsided account of sexual liberation. What is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

The remedy is not to encourage men to act on whatever sexual impulses they happen to have in order to even the score. It's unlikely that any society would really ever encourage this given the strength of male libido combined with the physical strength of young men.

Our society has been foolish, though, to imagine that "liberating" the female sexual impulse would have happy results. Earlier cultures were very much aware of the negative potential within female sexuality.

In 1613, for instance, Sir Thomas Overbury wrote a poem titled "The Wife". Overbury gives much thought in this poem as to how a woman might make a good wife. He does not deny the significance of beauty or passion, but he is clearly aware that for a wife to be loyal her love will have to derive not just from the animal passions (lust) but from her reason and her religious commitments.

In the following lines, Overbury observes that having a wife who is beautiful is not enough; unless she loves her husband, then her beauty is of little reward to him:

Without her love, her beauty should I take,
As that of pictures; dead; that gives it life:
Till then her beauty like the sun doth shine
Alike to all; that makes it, only mine.

And of that love, let reason father be,
And passion mother...

Overbury does not want his wife's love to be based on feelings alone. He wants the "father" (the governing/directing aspect) to be reason and passion the "mother".

He also makes the point that what matters most is not the birth, beauty or wealth of a wife but that she be "good":

Rather then these the object of my love,
Let it be good; when these with vertue go,
They (in themselves indifferent) vertues prove,
For good (like fire) turnes all things to be so.
Gods image in her soule, O let me place
My love upon! not Adams in her face.

Good, is a fairer attribute then white,
’Tis the minds beauty keeps the other sweete;

And what does he mean by the word "good"? He wants her to be "holy", i.e. to have a love of God that then commits her to a love of her husband:

By good I would have holy understood,
So God she cannot love, but also me,
The law requires our words and deeds be good,
Religion even the thoughts doth sanctifie:
As she is more a maid that ravisht is,
Then she which only doth but wish amisse.

Lust onely by religion is withstood,
Lusts object is alive, his strength within;
Morality resists but in cold blood;
Respect of credit feareth shame, not sin.
But no place darke enough for such offence
She findes, that’s watch’t, by her own conscience.

Then may I trust her body with her mind,
And, thereupon secure, need never know
The pangs of jealousie

If it's not clear, he is arguing that she won't be inwardly faithful if it is only a fear of being shamed for breaking a moral convention that stops her from cheating. But if her mind is turned toward the love of God, and through this a love of her husband, then it becomes a matter of deep conscience that she remains faithful and then he can "trust her body with her mind".

What this illustrates is that earlier generations were concerned to answer the question of how female sexuality, as an animal passion or appetite, might be directed, guided or restrained, to make possible a culture of marriage and family. The idea that you would deliberately aim to unleash female sexuality, and call it "liberation" or "empowerment", would have dumbfounded our ancestors. And the sexual chaos of our own times has proven our forebears to have had greater wisdom.

Just how free is Cardi B?

Cardi B is a popular Caribbean-American singer. A recent song, "City Girls", currently has 32 million views on YouTube. The song not only has coarsely sexual lyrics, the video clip features more than a dozen women dressed in G-strings twerking, i.e. shaking their backsides suggestively.

It's supposed to be sexy, but I couldn't help but find it culturally alien. It just seems so odd - there are women standing on their heads twerking, others on their back, some of them squatting. It looks atavistic - a reversion to a primitive mating ritual.

I think there's a reason for my response to the video, which I'll explain later. But I'd like to begin with this:

Stephanie Hamill's complaint is that Cardi B's video does not empower women. That's a poor way of criticising what's on display. After all, in a liberal society "female empowerment" means women rejecting customary restraints on their behaviour in order to do whatever they feel like doing.

Cardi B is dutifully following the logic of female empowerment. She is expressing her sexuality as she wants to, without regard for any traditional standards or norms. She is taking empowerment to the next level.

And that's exactly what many of those commenting on Stephanie Hamill's tweet pointed out. A selection:

Cardi B herself replied to Stephanie Hamill along similar lines:

So saying the video is not "empowering" is ineffective. People will just respond by arguing that the video shows women asserting their power to act however they want, without judgement, and that there should be no negative consequences in doing so. This is precisely in line with what female empowerment is understood to mean.

So what is a better way of criticising the video? Liberals would have us believe that they are creating a society based on freedom and equality, by which they mean a society of equally autonomous individuals. However, the issue of female empowerment highlights that you cannot have an equality of autonomy - that this cannot, in practice, be realised, and therefore the attempt to achieve it is misconceived. Second, the issue of female empowerment demonstrates the falsity of the liberal understanding of freedom.

In other words, the liberal approach does not deliver in practice either true freedom or equality - and these are the very things that liberalism attempts to base itself on.

Let's start with equality. Some of the comments to Stephanie Hamill's tweet pointed out that there is a double standard when it comes to sexual expression. Women are "empowered" by twerking their naked backsides, but if men were to expose themselves in public in a similar way they would be condemned.

What this points to is that it is difficult to apply the principle of acting however you feel to both sexes. In general, if you want women to be able to choose whatever they feel like, without judgement or consequences, then men have to be the ones to enable these choices, to bear the brunt of the fallout of these choices, and to act responsibly to hold society together.

It's not surprising, then, that at a time when women are encouraged to be "empowered", men's behaviour is increasingly scrutinised, monitored and policed and that men are often held to traditional standards in a way that women no longer are.

Which brings me to the most important point to be made in all this. It was once thought that man was a "rational animal", meaning that man had both an animal nature but also a rational nature that could discern the good and that could direct the animal passions to their proper ends. Freedom was understood to mean the achievement, through disciplined habits of virtue, of a rational self-control over our own person.

It's not that the animal passions are necessarily bad or to be suppressed; the insight is that we are only free to act as we know we should when we are in our right mind, rather than under the control of our animal passions.

And that was embedded within Western culture for millennia. That's why there are so many derogatory terms in our language for a loss of rational self-control over our animal impulses: dissolute, dissipated, wanton, licentious, promiscuous, libertine, loose, profligate - even the term "liberal" was once sometimes used in a pejorative way in this sense.

And I think that's why Cardi B's video seems so culturally alien to me. There is no restraint on the animal passion side of human nature in it. It depicts humans as rutting animals; there is no influence of the rational nature that was once considered pivotal to human freedom.

Would someone under the direction of their rational nature favour sexual immodesty? I don't think so. The higher good is for men and women to achieve a deep and stable emotional and physical intimacy with a person of the opposite sex, one that will provide enduring support even into old age.

Someone who is oriented to this goal will act modestly when it comes to their sexuality. They will be oriented to spousal love, and will want to give of themselves to that end, not promiscuously.

The aim for women, just as for men, is not to be "empowered" in the liberal sense, but to order themselves to the good, including the common good of the communities they belong to.

Shelley the Utopian

In my series of posts on the English poet Shelley (here, here and here), I've looked at his very liberal attitude to freedom, and how this made him want to abolish marriage, sex distinctions and nationality.

I'd like to end the series by considering why this liberal concept of freedom also committed Shelley to such an emphasis on equality.

I think the answer goes something like this:

1. Shelley rejected the idea that human nature was tainted, i.e. that man was a fallen creature.
2. He believed instead that man had power over his own nature. It was human institutions that had corrupted this nature, and these could be reformed.
3. Once man was perfected he would return to his intended, natural condition of being good, free and equal.
4. In this condition, a utopia would emerge, a heaven on earth, in which human existence would be regenerated, with everything being made beautiful, in body and mind, and subject only to a pure universal love, unmotivated by any base concerns.

Man was corrupted, in Shelley's view, and denied this wonderful utopian existence, by acts of tyranny - the exercise of power over others. It was this that threw a "mask" over the world, hiding man's true nature from himself. In Shelley's own words:

The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches

And this is where freedom and equality become such great and noble (and inseparable) objectives for Shelley. The aim was to reach a condition in which there was no exercise of power over others. Shelley was so serious about this that he even portrayed God as a tyrant and a modified version of Satan as the hero who rebelled against the authority of God.

So try then to imagine how Shelley saw things. For him, what mattered was a fight for liberty against "tyranny" (defined as any exercise of power of one person over another) which therefore was also a fight for equality (for abolishing "distinctions" that gave one person some sort of standing vis-a-vis another person). Hence the twinning of freedom and equality.

Freedom and equality were the keys to establishing humanity's true condition of heaven on earth and so were supercharged in their significance.

It would be easy to criticise Shelley's world view as being unworkable or impractical. But more than this it deserves to be condemned for being, mostly, undesirable - a dystopia rather than a utopia.

If we return once more to Shelley's vision of what man would be like once the "mask" had been removed, and true freedom and equality revealed, we see the problem:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains/ Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,/ Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king/ Over himself

What does it mean to be free in a Shelleyan sense? It means that nobody has power over me and that I am king over myself - an autonomous individual. My will is uncircumscribed. But to be free and equal in this sense also means that I am tribeless, nationless, Godless and churchless. Also abolished, as Shelley explains elsewhere, are biological sex and marriage.

Do I really want Shelleyan freedom? What about the meaning, identity and belonging that I derive from manhood, from membership of a communal tradition, and from stable family commitments?

Shelley wants us to move away from particular loves and loyalties, and the obligations and commitments that go with this, toward disinterested universal ones, which do not "encumber" us, but which also abstract, atomise and deracinate our own personhood, and which make human relationships shifting, uncertain and volatile.

The last point is evidenced in Shelley's own life. He wanted "pure" relationships, based not on exclusivity or jealousy, but this ended in the suicides of two women, including his first wife. Throughout his life, he "abandoned" quickly and frequently.

It is not that Shelley was wrong in just one respect, or that his system could be tweaked a little to make it viable and desirable. It is the larger approach that fails, the overall framework.

A photo for James Kalb

I saw the photo below and immediately thought of the American traditionalist James Kalb:

James Kalb could put this photo on the cover of his next book. It illustrates so well something that he often discusses, namely that liberalism reduces the good to desires or preferences but since "all desires are equally desires" they become equally valid. Hence this young woman not caring if her daughter is a princess, a doctor, a teacher or a slut - something that is absurd and yet to the liberal mind represents a moral position.

If you are interested in the ideas of James Kalb it is worth reading his essay "Out of the Antiworld" (see here). A relevant excerpt is his discussion of what follows from the rejection of an objective moral order:

The result is that nothing can be held to have a natural goal or reason for being, and the only meaning something can have for us is the meaning we give it. In such a setting, wanting to do something is what makes it worth doing, and the good can only be the satisfaction of preferences simply as such. Morality becomes an abstract system that has nothing substantive to say about how to live but only tells us to cooperate so we can all attain whatever our goals happen to be.

Given such a view, the uniquely rational approach to social order is to treat it as a soulless, technically rational arrangement for maximizing equal satisfaction of equally valid preferences. That principle claims to maximize effective freedom, but it narrowly limits what is permissible lest we interfere with the equal freedom of others or the efficient operation of the system. Private hobbies and indulgences are acceptable, since they leave other people alone. So are career, consumption, and expressions of support for the liberal order. What is not acceptable is any ideal of how people should understand their lives together that is at odds with the liberal one. Such ideals affect other people, if only by affecting the environment in which they live, and that makes them oppressive. If you praise the traditional family, you are creating an environment that disfavors some people and their goals, so you are acting as an oppressor.

The result is that the contemporary liberal state cannot allow people to take seriously the things they have always taken most seriously.

It is worth noting that the things this mother allows her daughter to be fit well into the limited framework suggested by James Kalb, namely career and private indulgences. The daughter is not really being liberated to all that our identity, our moral nature and our spiritual life have to offer. And even the relatively worthy aims of being a doctor or a teacher are sullied by being put on the same level as that of being a slut - one is thought to be as good as another.

Lena's equality

I posted recently about Lena Dunham after she made a video with her father celebrating the impending extinction of white men.

Lena had promised to move to Canada if Donald Trump won the election but, unsurprisingly, has announced that she will not be fulfilling her vow. In her explanation of why she is going to stay in America she wrote:

I've realized I can survive, as a Jewish pro-choice sexual assault survivor with a queer family member and a belief that we are all exactly and beautifully equal.

On reading this, I thought that maybe she doesn't think white men are "exactly and beautifully equal" as she has extinction in mind for us. But leaving this aside the formulation that "we are all exactly and beautifully equal" struck me as odd.

It doesn't seem to be true. Some people are more low-minded, more criminally-minded and more selfish than others. Some people have evil in their hearts and minds. Some people dwell in what is squalid in life and never rise above it. I do not see how such people are "exactly and beautifully equal" to others.

We can be aware, even in our own lives, of the rise and fall in the quality of our thoughts, actions and feelings. One manifestation of who we are is not equal to another.

So why would Lena Dunham claim that people are exactly equal? You might think she means this in the sense that we are all equal in the sight of God (so that even those most alienated from the good, nonetheless retain an imprint of what is perfect and divine in their nature - even if this is difficult to discern on the surface).

But I doubt that this is it. I suspect the context for her is the liberal belief that there is nothing objectively right or wrong and therefore no way of measuring what is higher or lower in what people aspire to be or do. What liberals do instead is to assert that there is an equal dignity in people defining their own good, their own identity, their own lifestyle and so on. It makes sense, in this liberal context, to assert that people are "exactly equal," just as it is senseless to do so from a more traditional perspective.

The liberal approach to equality comes with problems. It doesn't change the fact that people seek distinction in life. But instead of seeking distinction by disciplining themselves to objective standards of character, they are left to do so in other ways. For instance, if there is no distinction to be had in the traditional moral realm, then material status takes on an even greater importance (educational and career status for the upper classes; phones, designer shoes etc. for those lower down the ranks).

In the moral sphere liberals seek distinction through virtue signalling, i.e. by knowing what political position to take to best represent the latest trends in liberal thought. This alone gives some people a sense of superiority over others.

There's another way for liberals to signal moral distinction/superiority. Liberals don't believe in an objective right or wrong. However, they do believe in a system in which we each define our own good, whilst respecting others' freedom to do the same. This means that it is virtuous in a liberal system to not interfere with how others define their own good. So it is considered especially moral to be non-discriminatory, inclusive, open and tolerant. Therefore, the most virtuous/superior liberal will be the one who is most inclusive to whoever is deemed to be the most "other".

In practice Muslims are usually tagged as the most "other" and so there are many liberals who believe that they are demonstrating moral distinction by being open to the Islamising of the West (the liberal churches seem to be especially prone to this - to promoting Muslim immigration as a great moral cause, even though this will eventually undermine the place of Christianity in the West).

Finally, liberals have brought in inequality via "intersectionality," in which membership of a group thought to be oppressed gives a person greater moral authority and status than those thought to be more privileged. This moral pecking order is taken very seriously by some liberal activists; in an odd way, group victimhood gives people a special place vis-à-vis others, to the point that it is thought that the others ought not to speak but to listen, or to take up less space, or to move aside.

So that is Lena Dunham's "beautiful equality." It is an equality in which people seek to be recognised as superior via such things as career status; politically correct beliefs; upholding the "other" regardless of the practical consequences of doing so; and claiming membership of oppressed groups.

It's a mess. It does not create equality and the drive toward distinction is mostly frittered away on things that do not really confer distinction. And, as for white men, we apparently do not even qualify to be part of Lena's system.

Trump, the blank slate, tattoos and more

Donald Trump was asked by a reporter to define conservatism. The most he could offer was "I think it’s a person that doesn’t want to take risks..a person that wants to conserve."

But nor could the readers at Breitbart do much better. Most commonly they defined conservatism by offering up some version of classical liberalism: individual liberty, constrained federal government, free enterprise.

I left a comment of my own:

Conservatism is not really about not wanting to take risks. It is wanting to conserve the things that are undermined by a liberal ideology. Liberalism begins with the idea that there is nothing of meaning or value existing as part of reality outside the individual. Therefore, what matters is the individual self-defining or self-determining his own meaning and value (the meaning is in the act of choosing, the "agency", rather than in what is actually chosen). Morality in this view is accepting the right of others to do the same thing (hence the moral focus on tolerance, non-discrimination, etc.) For liberals, things that are predetermined, and can't be self-determined, limit human freedom and should be made not to matter. This includes what liberals call "gender" (the social expression of our biological sex) and race/ethny.

Conservatives seek to connect man to the things of meaning and value that transcend him (the goodness of which exist objectively independent of his will). These include aspects of character and virtue; manhood and womanhood; family (including the fulfilment of offices such as fatherhood/motherhood/husband/wife); nature (man's connection to); nation (love of and loyalty toward); a moral code; a church tradition; art and culture that inspires men toward the higher things; and a continuity between generations past, present and future.

I thought afterwards that there was another angle to all this. If you don't believe that there is anything there, only what you put there, then this explains the longstanding liberal tendency to begin with the blank slate individual.

In other words, liberals like to assume as a model that we begin with nothing and then we make of ourselves something according to our own free will and choices. It is a model which works at two levels. At the individual level it is the model of the self-made man. It is assumed that we make something of ourselves at a public level through our careers, or perhaps through sporting or artistic achievements.

This helps to explain why liberals are so morally focused on the idea of equal opportunity in terms of careers, sports and the arts, even at the extreme level of wanting women to be able to advance in the career of a combat soldier. A conservative would be more focused on the transgressive nature of such a step, of its disruption to a healthy relationship between the masculine and feminine, of it not being a fulfilment of womanhood. But these things are simply not "there" for a liberal mind, they are false social constructs without value; what the liberal mind perceives is the chance for a woman to make herself according to her choices, it is this freedom that brings meaning.

(Remember, too, that if you think of people as essentially "choice makers" then the fact of being a woman is hardly relevant - the category itself won't seem that significant in human life, except as a potential factor in having an unequal chance to be self-made. A liberal won't think in terms of "man" and "woman" the way that conservatives do.)

It should be said that this focus on being self-made does potentially give a kind of dynamism to liberal individuals. They won't be content until they have made it professionally in some respect. Conservatives get a sense of meaning from other things, and this can potentially make us less socially ambitious and therefore leave us in a weaker position to influence society. It's something within the conservative mind we might have to acknowledge and overcome.

Even certain aspects of popular culture, such as tattoos, might be linked to liberal assumptions about the human person. If there is nothing meaningful given to us, but only what we ourselves make of ourselves, then perhaps the human body in its natural state isn't meaningful, but is merely a blank canvas, upon which we then make meaning, perhaps by drawing or writing things that express something about our lives or aspirations or personalities. Hence tattoos. It's different, though, if you think that our bodies already, in their given state, have a depth of meaning and express something deeply significant about who we are - if this is your starting point then tattoos can potentially be visually distracting - the surface meaning of the tattoo can distract from the more profound meaning of the body in its natural state.

The idea of things being a blank slate and being given meaning when the human will acts upon them also works at the level of society and the environment. It's noticeable, for instance, that political leaders are judged in a liberal society not for being good stewards or custodians of a certain valued tradition, but for having made changes - preferably changes along liberal lines ("reforms") but if not that, then any kind of changes. Perhaps part of the explanation for this is that liberals see the idea of people acting upon society and the environment as a good in itself - as being a meaning-making virtue.

Again, this does give liberal societies a certain kind of dynamism, even if it sometimes produces ugliness and excess. It makes for motion. The overall logic of liberal societies is ultimately a self-destructive one, but we should acknowledge and seek to match in our own way the dynamic aspect.

Why then do liberals disallow some choices?

What do liberals believe about morality? I recently quoted Dr Leslie Cannold, an Australian ethicist, as follows:

Defining our own good, and living our lives in pursuit of it, is at the heart of a moral life.

So what matters to Dr Cannold is not what we happen to choose but that we get to define our own good.

There were readers of this site who doubted Dr Cannold's sincerity. They pointed out that traditionalists aren't allowed to define the good as we would like to and that certain choices that traditionalists would make are disallowed. Dr Cannold and other liberals, these readers claimed, are therefore not following a logical philosophy and are asserting their power in society in an arbitrary way.

But I don't think that's right. The liberal system logically forbids traditionalists to choose the kind of society we would like to have (by "logically" I don't mean that it's right that liberalism does this, but that the outcome follows from first principles).

It goes like this. Liberals believe in a freedom to self-determine. Therefore liberals don't want things that are predetermined to influence what we can or cannot choose to do.

But qualities like our sex and our race are predetermined. Therefore, a common liberal position is that:

i) it is permissible to freely identify with these qualities privately, i.e. as a matter of your own personal life

ii) it is wrong to assert these qualities in ways that might limit the choices that other people make.

You can, therefore, identify at a personal level with your own particular ancestry, but it would be considered wrong to deny someone entry as a migrant to your country on the basis of race. Similarly, you can choose to identify as a man or a woman, but you cannot select for employment on the basis of sex. If you deny someone an ability to choose on the basis of an unchosen, predetermined quality like their race or sex it is treated as discrimination based on these qualities, i.e. as "sexism" or "racism," and as a denial of equal opportunity.

So it is no use for a traditionalist to argue that his good is to have an immigration policy that leaves him with an ethnic homeland of his own or that his preference is for an army that does not employ women as combat troops, as both of these options discriminate on grounds that are unacceptable within the liberal system.

That's why traditionalists have to dig deeper and challenge liberalism on the basis of first principles. The issue to be fought is whether a freedom to self-determine is really an adequate basis on which to found a society. Traditionalists would argue that individual autonomy is not always and everywhere the overriding good to be pursued. To make it so is ultimately dissolving of the particular society you belong to. A wiser policy would be to accept a range of goods and to order them so that the social framework fits together (works together) to the greatest extent possible.

A couple of other observations. This aspect of liberalism, that you can hold to something as a private feeling but that you cannot assert it in a way that might limit what someone else can choose, explains those liberal politicians who talk positively about their own ancestry whilst enacting "non-discriminatory" migration policies which spell the end of particular ancestral identities.

The former Australian PM, Malcolm Fraser, was reportedly proud of his Scottish heritage, but was also an open borders man. An earlier PM, Sir Robert Menzies, was famous for his regard for his British heritage but oversaw the transformation of Australia into a mixed European nation. Menzies described his affection for his British heritage as being "sentimental" (a private sentiment rather than an identity to publicly uphold). A more recent PM, Paul Keating, identified not only with his Irish ancestry but with a strain of Australian larrikin culture - but, again, was fervently open-bordered. I have even heard some serving Labor MPs speak positively of their UK connections, but it would never cross their minds that such identities should be upheld through migration policy.

Finally, the argument has been raised that liberals aren't sincere in wanting people to self-define their own good and make their own autonomous choices, because the liberal state is happy to intrude paternalistically in discouraging smoking or in making people wear seat belts and so on.

But the seat belt or smoking issues don't really contravene liberal principles as these do not deny equal opportunity in the manner I described above but are rather "neutral" health measures that apply to everyone equally.

Australia to have the most onerous discrimination law?

The Federal Labor Government is proposing a new Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination law which redefines discrimination as "conduct that offends or insults".

You just have to shake your head at that definition. It doesn't take much to offend some people, so the limits this law would put on free speech are potentially very onerous. The Victorian Attorney-General got it right when he observed that:

Many people may be subjectively offended or insulted by the simple expression or manifestation of views different to their own.

To make such expressions of views in workplaces, schools, clubs and sports prima facie unfavourable treatment and hence discrimination ... appears to substantially erode freedom of expression.

Even the Human Rights Commission is critical of the proposed law:

Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs thinks the broad definition will spark too many lawsuits.

She said the words offend and insult "have to go".

"There is no need to set the threshold so low," she said. "I would suggest the government consider taking the words 'offensive' and 'insulting' out (of the legislation).

"It does raise a risk of increased litigation".
 

And what does this say about liberal society? Liberals go on and on about individual freedom, and yet here we are facing a law which makes it an offence to say something that someone else, subjectively, thinks is offensive.

How do we explain this? I think part of the explanation is this: liberals pursue a freedom which is understood to mean an absence of impediments to self-determined choice. Because this is the liberal "good" it means that liberals focus on a "negative" morality, i.e. a morality of non-interference. The idea is that we all get to pursue our self-determined goals, only if we agree to leave each other to pursue these goals: therefore the good person is the one who shows respect for others and their choices, who is non-discriminatory, who believes in equality, who is tolerant, who is non-judgemental, who isn't prejudiced and so on.

The problem is that there is nothing to stop a negative morality of non-interference being pursued to the point that it itself becomes coercive or even tyrannical. And that is what we are seeing in the proposed Australian anti-discrimination laws.

I'll finish by congratulating the Law Society of South Australia for its submission to the inquiry on the proposed law:

The Law Society of South Australia told the Senate inquiry it "condemned" the new definition.

"The robust expression of opinions, short of incitement to hatred, is a strength of our social and legal system," its submission states.

"It should not be curtailed to protect subjective offence that individuals may feel when their beliefs or attitudes are criticised."

From the horse's mouth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Australian resources belong to Africans as a right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Wise: the sound of your demise is beautiful

Tim Wise is the ugly face of the left. He's a self-styled "anti-racist" activist, with a brimming hatred of whites.

Wise was clearly upset by Republican gains in the mid-term elections. So he wrote an open letter to American whites, in which he takes comfort in the impending demise of white people:

You need to drink up.

And quickly.

And heavily.

Because your time is limited.

Real damned limited.

So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.

The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.

Already there are two big questions to be asked here. One is why Tim Wise hates whites so much. The second is why he thinks that the Republican Party is devoted to the defence of whites.

But, first, here are some more of the charmless thoughts of Tim Wise:

you will lose...

It is coming, and soon.

This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.

It is math...

The kind of math that proves how your kind -- mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like -- are dying.

You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.

Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.

Our ankles survive.

You do not.

So on to the first question. Why does Tim Wise hate whites?

I think the answer has to do with how left-liberals explain the existence of inequality. Liberals believe that inherited group characteristics, such as our sex, our race or our sexuality, should not matter when it comes to our life outcomes.

That means that liberals take it very seriously if one group appears to be advantaged in any way (in liberal-speak "privileged").

Inevitably, such advantage does exist. So liberals have to explain why advantage exists and how it can be overcome.

To answer that it exists because of differences between groups in talents or interests is not accepted by liberals. Liberals generally assume that talents and interests are spread evenly amongst different groups. To answer that advantage exists because one group forms an historic majority is also considered illegitimate.

The answer generally given by liberals is that group advantage exists because of discrimination by one group against another, motivated perhaps by prejudice or bigotry. Right liberals tend to believe that all groups are capable of such bigotry but that progress and enlightenment will overcome historic injustice.

But there are left liberals who spin the theory a bit further. They hold that one dominant group (men, whites) deliberately created a system of discrimination to uphold an unearned privilege at the expense of the excluded "other".

So the dominant group becomes the barrier to the historic achievement of justice and equality. It becomes the "cosmic enemy" of humanity. So to overcome oppression and inequality you have to set about undermining the dominant group, deconstructing it, bringing it down.

Don't believe me? Listen, then, as Tim Wise continues his rant:

in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, keep it up. It doesn't matter.

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

Most leftists don't express the "cosmic enemy" idea as strongly as Tim Wise does. Some do not express it at all (e.g. some of the left-liberals in the men's rights movement). But the beliefs I described above are not that uncommon on the left. They are to be found, for instance, in the whiteness studies courses to be found in dozens of universities. And they explain, too, the more general feeling to be found in modern Western politics that it is somehow progressive for established white communities to be broken up (I've had two principals apologise to me in job interviews for the number of white students at their schools).

As a typical example of the "whites as cosmic enemy" theme, there is the article "Privileged whites" penned by Jennifer Clarke, a teacher at the Australian National University. In this article, Clarke describes Australia as a "regionally anomalous white enclave run largely by white people to our own advantage", in which anti-discrimination laws should be applied more effectively so that "a majority of Australians would no longer be of northern European ethnic heritage".

Tim Wise wants the same sort of solution for the US. He doesn't want an armed pogrom against whites. He just wants them to die out and be replaced by other races:

It's OK. Because in about forty years, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it...

Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.

They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion...

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims...

And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now -- we are -- your destruction.

And I do not mean by that your physical destruction...

We just have to be patient.

And wait for you to pass into that good night, first politically, and then, well...

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

Which brings me to the second question. Wise assumes that the Republicans are a pro-white group.  But this isn't obviously true. The Republican leadership has been keen to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and the party has done little to stem the demographic transformation of the US.

But the left-liberal theory assumes that the system is run in the interests of the dominant group. The theory works better if the Republicans are assumed to be acting in the interests of the white majority (even if there is little evidence that this is so). Therefore Wise portrays a Republican victory as a victory for those who want to keep America as a majority white country.

And what about our response to Tim Wise? First, we have to recognise that Wise is correct about the demographic transformation of the US and its long-term consequences. So we need to continue to build up opposition to open borders in the US and elsewhere.

Second, we need to criticise the liberal assumptions about equality that lead on to hostility against whites. It's utterly wrong for liberals to try to make race and sex not matter in a society. They do matter and should matter.

If, for instance, the Danes are the historic majority in Denmark then of course they will be the "dominant" group. Yes, they will have the "advantage" when it comes to representing the cultural norms of that society or filling most of the positions of power and influence in that society.  But that doesn't represent an illegitimate, immoral privilege. It's a normal aspect of a nation of people maintaining its own existence.

Yes, whites in America have been the "dominant" group in the above sense. Perhaps that does confer an advantage on whites in America in the sense of representing cultural norms or occupying a large number of public offices. But that is a perfectly normal and proper kind of advantage, one that occurs in every living nation, including those in Asia and Africa. What is improper is for liberals, with their abstract, ideological approach to equality, to seek to undermine this kind of "advantage".

Are white Americans privileged in other ways? Yes and no. In terms of income, education and family outcomes, Asian Americans do better than white Americans. It's true that white Americans tend to do better than hispanics and blacks. Liberals assume that talent and interests are spread evenly across groups and that such unequal outcomes must therefore be due to discrimination. But if the problem is discrimination by white Americans toward the excluded other, why then do Asians do so well? Why do they do even better than whites?

We need a better, non-liberal approach to equality. The current one delivers us the absurdity of Tim Wise, an "anti-racist" who treats one particular race as a cosmic enemy and who will not rest until the historic majority is no more.

Art critic violates the code

What are you not supposed to say in an arts review? Philip Hensher visited a display of Aztec art at the British Museum. In his review for the Daily Mail he made it clear that he thought Aztec art to be of little value. Not only did it express the cruelty and evil of Aztec culture, it wasn't beautifully made but was heavy and vulgar:

If there is a more revoltingly inhumane and despicable society known to history than the Aztecs, I really don't care to know about it. But, on top of the moral ugliness of the Aztecs, there is the undeniable fact that almost everything they made was aesthetically hideous, too.

The sculpture is brutal, square and blocky. The decorative styles are coarse, without any obvious expressive power.

The jewellery and mosaic styles are vulgar and showy ...

As I was reading Hensher's review, I thought to myself that he was going to provoke a reaction. He was violating two principles of modern liberalism. First, he was declaring a non-Western culture and civilisation to be inferior. Second, he was asserting an objective standard of good and of beauty.

There are certain reactions you could predict to Hensher's two violations of the "code". The first is the claim that the West is equally guilty of whatever the non-Western culture is alleged to have done. The second is the claim that standards of beauty and goodness are merely relative: that we cannot judge another culture by our own standards, which are only true for us.

Sure enough even the Daily Mail readership has internalised these predictable responses. Here's a little selection of hostile comments directed at Philip Hensher:

Sarah, USA: It doesn't matter if it's gruesome, our civilization is even more disgusting. At least they did those sacrifices with a greater outcome in mind. What do you leave for us? Let's kill whales to the extreme to feed sushi lovers? Let's kill seals just because they're paying me to do it? ... Please, for the sake of knowledge, don't let this person write anything else, ever.

AnnMae, USA: Frankly, I find it difficult to judge other civilizations from our moral judgment today. Today we live far differently than they did, and by this token we really cannot judge why they did what they did, or the morality of it ...
Now, how 'bout looking at the artefacts with an unbiased eye? Despite their uses, they are still SACRED objects, just as crosses, prayer mats, and certain head coverings are today. I don't see our author condemning every Christian or Muslim because some shed blood in a holy name . . . this no different.

David, North West: the greek and roman civilisations, upon which the enlightenment ideals were built in the 18th century and which have had an enormous impact on modern society, on democracy and also on art, were both pretty gruesome as well.

you cannot judge past societies on today's standards

using this man's 'logic' we'd have to condemn all modern art as having been produced by a society that could permit 30,000 children to die of preventable illnesses and starvation every day, while the affluent grow ever more obese

Dave, Torquay: How many artifacts [sic], artwork and buildings in Britain are the result of bloodshed. Mr Hencher [sic] comes across as bigotted [sic] and ignorant.

Miss Ann, Fife: What an amazingly ignorant article. It is exactly this kind of disrespect and fear of other cultures and civilisations, both past and present, which has got Britain into the kind of mess it is in today. This isn't journalism, it's propaganda and ignorance.

Sean, USA: Our contemporary North Atlantic culture has far more sanguinary cruelties rationalized, symbolized, idolized and accepted: wars, economics and social policies.

James, NY: What I'm waiting for is for the author to condemn and call for the demolition of the Tower of London and all its heinous artefacts... I'm sure that his righteous fury towards the savage race that built that den of torture is equal to his fervor over the ancient Aztecs.

Claire, London: What we find evil, repulsive and distasteful now, was perfectly normal and legal for the Aztecs at that time

David, London: your ignorance is unsurprising, secondly, i would imagine you have no problem with christian iconography which often depicts torture and murder ...

Basically, its all about context, and a basic tenent [sic] of intelligence is the ability to remove yourself from your own narrow minded worldview...

Nearly all of the 80 comments carry on along these lines. Think of what this means. It means that even the cruellest of ancient societies has to be defended furiously by modern Westerners - as being right for its time and no worse than the modern West.

Or think of it this way. An art critic states that he finds the cruel, brutal sacrificial art of the Aztecs unappealing. This is enough to unleash a barrage of criticism that he is ignorant, biased and unintelligent and shouldn't be allowed to write for a newspaper.

This is a losing mindset. The conditioned response that we are always worse in what we do or have done, even when compared to the cruel and bloody culture of the ancient Aztecs, is much too negative a view to take our own tradition forward.

(Lawrence Auster has discussed the issue of Aztecs in a post at VFR here.)

An ABBA star, a child called Pop and bathing Swedish style

Björn, the ABBA pop star, wants to ban independent religious schools in Sweden. Why? He gives this explanation:

Above all, children should be kept away from anything that bears even the slightest whiff of indoctrination. In fact, freedom from indoctrination ought to be a basic human right for all children.

I burst out laughing when I read this. There is no place in the world where people are more indoctrinated than in Sweden. And they are not indoctrinated by churches but by the secular state.

Consider two other news stories from Sweden. We learn in one story that the parents of a 2-year-old have refused to reveal the child's gender:

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

Where would the parents have gotten this idea from? It's state policy in Sweden. A Swedish minister, Jens Orback, announced some years ago that:

The government considers female and male as social constructions, that means gender patterns are created by upbringing, culture, economic conditions, power structures and political ideology.

So there is a state doctrine that gender is an artificial social construct which should be made not to matter. The parents, as indoctrinated as they come, want to raise their child in line with this state policy:

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

The child's parents said so long as they keep Pop’s gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.

Pop's wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop's hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop's parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child – they just say Pop.

So we are not supposed to discriminate between boys and girls, not even by dressing them differently or applying different pronouns to them. Gender must be made not to matter.

The second story has a similar theme. Authorities in the city of Malmö in Sweden have decided to let women swim topless at public swimming pools. It was thought discriminatory that men should be allowed to swim bare breasted and not women. Also, thinking about women's breasts as sexually attractive was thought wrong as this made a woman's gender matter - and gender is not supposed to matter:

Speaking to The Local, Ragnhild Karlsson , 22, explained the womens' motives for swimming without bikini tops.

"It's a question of equality. I think it's a problem that women are sexualized in this way. If women are forced to wear a top, shouldn't men also have to?"

Outraged by what they regarded as discrimination, a group of women in southern Sweden made a show of solidarity by establishing the Bara Bröst network. (The name translates both as 'Bare Breasts' and 'Just Breasts'.)

"We want our breasts to be as 'normal' and desexualized as men's, so that we too can pull off our shirts at football matches," spokeswomen Astrid Hellroth and Liv Ambjörnsson told Ottar, a magazine published by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education ...

"Our aim is to start a debate about the unwritten social and cultural rules that sexualize and discriminate against the female body," said Astrid Hellroth and Liv Ambjörnsson.

So to be equal, Swedish style, we must not discriminate between men and women - we must treat them exactly the same. This means not recognising that the adult female body has a sexual significance different to that of men. It means, in other words, pretending that the female body has no natural sex appeal to men.

The non-discrimination principle leads on to a denial of any form of social differentiation. And so you get the following "resolution" of the bare breasted swimming controversy:

“I’m satisfied with the decision,” Bengt Forsberg, chair of the sports and recreation committee on recreation, told The Local.

“Everyone is required to have a swimsuit when visiting the city’s indoor pools and if it doesn’t cover the upper body, that’s OK too.”

... "We don't define what bathing suits men should wear so it doesn't make much sense to do it for women. And besides, it's not unusual for men to have large breasts that resemble women's breasts," he said.

According to Bengt, everyone is being treated the same by the same rule so everything is OK. Nor, in Bengt's world, are male breasts any different to female breasts. Gender doesn't matter.

In 2007, a young woman named Cordelia wrote about her unisex childhood in Sweden. She noted that at adolescence it was no longer possible to pretend that the sexes were the same, as the behaviour of the boys and girls started to vary dramatically. Then, as a young woman, she rejected the whole unisex indoctrination that had been pushed on her at school and within her family:

It started becoming increasingly clear to me as if man and woman are two pieces of a puzzle that fit together because they are essentially differently shaped ... That their physique and psyche complemented rather than duplicated each other. The idea that they are identical pieces seemed to me as a tremendous misconception and I was terribly irritated at having been fed an incorrect version of things all through my childhood. What I had been told simply wasn’t true. All my recent experiences showed that men and women were different and that men could no less be like women than women could be like men.

Since I wouldn’t want a man who behaves and looks like a woman, it makes sense that a man wouldn’t want a woman who behaves and looks like a man! True?

Why this ridiculous pretense that we are the same, when we very obviously are not? If I had been brought up more as a girl/woman instead of a gender-neutral being, I would have been stronger and more confident as a woman today! As it is, I had to discover the hard way that I was not the same as a man in a multitude of ways ...

I have no idea how the unisex ideal affected the boys around me. They too were brought up in a ‘unisex’ way.

I can tell you this though: In Sweden it is not common for men to help women with bags on public transport. Also, men expect women to regard sex in the same way as they do (i.e. casual unless expicitly stated otherwise ...)

Until quite recently, every time I noticed a difference between me and men I kept thinking; this is wrong ... I ought to be like the men ... I felt like I was letting other women down unless I constantly strived towards the male ‘ideal’ that was set for Swedish women ... But let me tell you, it’s hard work hiding your true nature and pretending to be something you are not!

Discovering that being feminine is not a ‘crime’ (in fact, it can be a positive thing) was a big revelation for me. I don’t actually want to be like a man!

I wish Northern European society would stop denying women the opportunity to be female! What good does it really bring? Who benefits?

So, Björn, here you have one Swedish child who was indoctrinated in ways she came to think false and harmful. But it wasn't by a church school. It was not a religious indoctrination but a political one, carried out by the Swedish state and within a secular culture.

Perhaps we have to accept that parents will always seek to indoctrinate their children and governments will always seek to indoctrinate the citizens. What matters is the quality of the indoctrination. The Swedish product seems to be of a particularly poor quality.

The principles of equality and non-discrimination are not sufficient by themselves. Taken literally and absolutely, they ignore or destroy all forms of social differentiation. They lead ultimately to a bland denial of reality in which, for instance, we are supposed to believe that there is no natural sex appeal invested in women's bodies. Instead of a celebration of gender difference, they lead to an unhappy repression of it.

So this is our choice?

What is the way forward for the left? That's the theme of an article by Jonathan Derbyshire in the New Statesman.

According to Derbyshire the mainstream left in Britain is "intellectually hollowed out". He thinks it timely that a new pamphlet has been released titled What Next for Labour? Ideas for the Progressive Left.

One of the contributors to the pamphlet, Sunder Katwala, argues that the technocratic management of the market isn't enough. Instead, the left must focus on elaborating,

an autonomous moral conception, independent of, and ultimately sovereign over, the mere notions of efficiency and rational 'tidying up' of capitalist society into which socialism is in danger of degenerating.

Katwala is a Fabian socialist who wants to go back to basics. He wants more emphasis on the autonomous individual rather than on technocratic efficiency.

Then there is the suggestion made by Jon Cruddas, a Labour Party MP, and Jonathan Rutherfod, an academic:

New Labour, Cruddas and Rutherford imply, has worried too much about individual liberty and not enough about equality. The key 'fault line' in the coming debates on the left, they argue, will be between those who see the market as the best mechanism for delivering the autonomy so prized in modern societies, and those who think that genuine freedom is a collective achievement. Or, as Katwala puts it, between those for whom autonomy is the ultimate end (call them "liberals") and those whose principal concern is with how autonomy is distributed (call them "social democrats").

Read this carefully and you'll see just how limited a choice we're being offered here.

Katwala's "liberals" think that individual autonomy is the ultimate end. So do his "social democrats". The only difference between them is that the "liberals" (in the European not American sense) believe that autonomy is maximised by individuals pursuing their self-interest in a market; the "social democrats" are more focused on the equal distribution of autonomy through "collective" (by which they mean state) action.

This debate is generations old. It is politics with a walking stick. And it is radically reductive: we are supposed to assume that the ultimate end is one single good, namely individual autonomy - with politics divided between those who favour equality (in the distribution of autonomy) and those who favour liberty (fewer impediments to the practice of autonomy).

The task for traditionalists isn't to take sides in this debate. It's to move beyond its limitations.

What we should be discussing is whether autonomy (or any other single good) can be taken as the sole organising principle of society; what we are logically committing ourselves to when autonomy becomes the highest end; what other goods must be sacrificed in the attempt to maximise autonomy; and whether the pursuit of autonomy has internal coherence.

Glossing over a possible loss

John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for president, has a 25-year-old daughter, Meghan McCain. She identifies as a Republican and is actively involved in politics.

Meghan McCain recently wrote an opinion column for the New York Daily News on the subject of homosexual marriage. I found it interesting because it set out so clearly the liberal way of treating these issues. According to Meghan, the ruling principle of society is equal freedom; therefore we must be equally free to choose to marry; therefore we must not discriminate against homosexuals when it comes to marriage.

This is what she has to say:

As I read the news about the recent advances of marriage equality across our country, I think it is easy for many to get distracted by the politics and rhetoric on this issue and lose sight of what is really at its heart: the equality of freedom.

No matter how politically charged the discussions about marriage equality may get, the question is really a simple one: Do the rights and privileges we offer citizens include everyone in our country, or only some of us?

I believe that allowing gays and lesbians the freedom to marry is an idea whose time has come ... For me, this is about treating all of my friends, and all of our brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren the same as I want to be treated. Equality under the law and personal freedoms are what make America the greatest country in the world, and they are core values that I hold as a Republican.

As I recently wrote after speaking at the Log Cabin Republican convention: "People may always have a difference of opinion . . . but championing a position that wants to treat people unequally isn't just un-Republican. At its fundamental core, it's un-American." I believe most Americans want our nation to succeed. Marriage equality moves us to a place where more of us can do a better job of taking care of our families.

Gays and lesbians are a vital part of our communities. They are doctors, teachers, firefighters, emergency personnel and neighbors. In this way, marriage equality is also about supporting good citizens and strengthening our communities. When a committed gay couple seeks to declare their love for one another and get married, the whole community benefits from the added stability and strength of that family. On top of that, we don't give up anything by sharing responsibilities and protections with those whom we love.

I don't intend to discuss the issue of homosexual marriage here. What I want to look at is the inadequacy of equal freedom as an organising principle of society. The argument I'll make is that equal freedom commits liberals to an overly limited and reductive view of politics.

The first question to ask is this: what do liberals mean by freedom? The answer is that they mean the freedom of an abstract individual to choose without impediment in any direction (as long as we don't directly harm the life or liberty of others). This, though, is not a true freedom. The reality is that we don't exist as abstract individuals. We exist as individuals who are invested with a concrete identity as men and women and as members of particular communities and traditions. We exist too as moral beings, concerned with issues of right and wrong.

Therefore, if we are to be free, it must be as men and women, as Americans, Australians or Japanese, and as moral beings. It is our freedom to live as our invested (or "encumbered") selves which is meaningful and signficant.

Why don't liberals recognise this? Whey don't they even register this as an issue? Well, if they did then they would have to abandon equal freedom as a single, reductive organising principle of society. They would have to recognise that there are other goods which exist prior to equal freedom, such as those relating to manhood and womanhood, to communal traditions, and to the pursuit of common, objective moral goods.

They don't want to go there.

And what about equality? What is the problem with this being an organising principle?

If freedom must be equal, then there must be no discrimination in how a society operates. The principle of non-discrimination becomes paramount, as it has in the West.

Well-intentioned liberals like Meghan McCain routinely assume that implementing this principle of non-discrimination will not have any negative consequences, that it will only strengthen society.

This is an assumption that she has to make. Once she has committed herself to a principle of equal freedom, she must then hopefully and willfully presume that there will be a positive outcome for society as a result.

If this weren't the case, if liberals like Meghan McCain really thought carefully about the likely effects of a non-discrimination principle, then they would have to think more concretely about the inner dynamics of social institutions, what is required to uphold them, the particular goods they embody, and how they fit within a larger framework.

Once you begin to examine things at this level, then you have to admit the possibility that some forms of discrimination (or differentiation) serve a reasonable purpose specific to a particular institution. The discrimination doesn't exist arbitrarily or as a consequence of ignorance, backwardness, prejudice or bigotry - the level of explanation generally preferred by liberals, who really don't want to delve into a deeper analysis, as they do not wish to think in ways that might undermine equal freedom as a simple and straightforward, albeit highly reductive, organising principle of society.

So how then should conservatives reply to the principle set out by Meghan McCain?

First, we should insist that freedom is not the only significant good. Western man traditionally took not only freedom as a good, but also virtue, love, courage, loyalty, piety and wisdom. There is no reason to reduce all goods to one single good.

Second, we should insist that freedom cannot be understood as abstracted individuals choosing in any direction without impediment (i.e. as radical personal autonomy). Freedom is only meaningful if it allows us to live our lives well as we really are, i.e. as our invested selves.

Third, equality must take into account the purpose and nature of social institutions, how they are constituted, what is necessary for their function, and the goods they embody. This will mean accepting, as necessary and legitimate, forms of social differentiation in which rates of participation in social institutions might vary, as might social roles and responsibilities.

Hitchens & conservative rights

What makes us free? Peter Hitchens believes that the left has it wrong. The left has put its faith in abstract declarations of human rights. These declarations give judges the power to interpret what is right or wrong. Rather than everyone, including those holding state power, being held to a divinely sanctioned morality, it is now the officials of the state who wield this power. Hence a vast increase in state authority and a loss of liberty.

Hitchens prefers what he calls conservative rights. These are clearly defined legal rights which limit the power of what the state can do, as opposed to the "grandiose blether about rights" coming from the left, which leads the state to interfere in people's lives:

That is why left-wing rights increase the power of the state. Conservative rights, as expressed in the hard, cool, terse, language of the 1689 Bill of Rights ... concentrate on saying quite clearly what government cannot do. And in the space that is left, when the ruler is restrained by such things, free men can live, write, speak and think.

I don't think this goes far enough. If you really want to defend freedom, you have to take the contest to a deeper level.

What really counts are not the legal forms but the understanding of who man is and what his freedom is for.

For instance, the Lockean liberals, who Peter Hitchens seems to endorse, did not have a neutral view of the nature of man and what men might legitimately do in society. They had an excessively pessimistic view of men as being asocial, self-interested creatures who only pretended to act socially in order to impose their own partisan interests on others. Therefore, men were to be restricted to private pursuits, with the ideal activity being participation in the market.

The Lockeans left a lot out of man. They wanted us to be free as atomised, abstracted individuals, lacking natural ties to our community and oriented instead to a pursuit of private self-interest.

Think too of the modern liberals. They define man in terms of autonomy: we are human to the extent that we can self-determine our own lives and being.

This view of what man is has inevitable consequences. It is an autonomous self that is to be made free - one "liberated" from unchosen, inherited aspects of life such as manhood and womanhood, traditional forms of the family, ethnicity and objective forms of morality.

The realm of freedom then becomes those aspects of life that can be chosen at an individual level: career, entertainment, travel, shopping and so on. Society becomes good at developing these aspects of life; others are neglected or deemed illegitimate and repressed.

The rule is this: the concept of what man is will lead on to a view of what freedom is for. This is the deeper, driving force behind whether we have a true conservative liberty or not.

The conservative position should be this: we cannot be free as radically autonomous, self-created individuals. If we are to be free, it will be as men and women, as husbands and wives, as fathers and mothers and as members of distinct human communities and traditions.

One final, important point. If we do not do battle on these grounds, then it is likely that an older concept of rights, one focused on limiting state power, will give way to state interference and coercion.

Why? If it is accepted as true that we become human through the power to self-create our own autonomous lives, then it will be thought terribly unjust for there to be any inequalities in this power of autonomy. It would mean accepting that some people were more human than others - a serious breach in human equality.

For instance, if careers help our autonomy by making us financially independent, then how can we justify men spending more time in careers than women. If the liberal view of personhood is true, then this would mean that women were being relegated to a less human status than men.

This will seem so immoral and so unjust to liberals, that it's unlikely that the state would not interfere coercively to achieve "gender equity".

At the very least, we have to make sure that a new generation of conservatives is brought up to reject not only the particular forms of coercion enacted by the liberal state, but also the underlying principles justifying them.

A liberal elitist cuts loose

Many readers will know the TV show Wife Swap. Two mothers from different backgrounds switch families for a period of time.

A recent episode of the American programme features a San Francisco liberal couple. The woman introduces herself as a certified hypnotherapist, life coach and destination coach. She is not a patriot. When asked why she is not a proud American she explains,

Because of the chance that I was born on American soil. I mean that's just the way it was. I had nothing to do with it personally.

I've heard this kind of line before. It relates to the idea that what counts is that we self-determine who we are and what we do. Therefore whatever aspect of our lives is an "accident of birth" is thought not to matter.

It's a position that's difficult to hold to consistently. After all, our IQ and many of our personality traits are influenced by heredity and are therefore an accident of birth, as also is the family upbringing we experience.

So our San Fransico couple should also reject a sense of pride in their own intelligence, education and work ethic as these are a product, to a significant degree, of conditions we are born into. But they don't - they are proud of these qualities to the point of arrogance.

It's actually more logical to recognise the debt we owe to generations past for the positive qualities that we do inherit. Past generations have battled through to recognise and perpetuate ideals in culture and personality. We do rest on these achievements, even if we inherit them rather than creating them for ourselves. So pride in a larger entity does make sense - more so than the belief that we are self-created as individuals.

But I digress. The San Francisco woman might be a bit flaky, and she appears to spend little time with her own children ("If I'm too much with the kids, it doesn't suit my personality"), but she comes across in the clips as a basically nice person.

It is the San Francisco man, Stephen Fowler, who really takes the cake. He is paired with an unsophisticated but decent and well-meaning Midwestern woman. He treats her with absolute contempt and disdain. He calls her a dumb redneck and congratulates her for using big words. He laughs when he tells her she is overweight and undereducated. And he disparages her simply for living in the Midwest.

This arrogant elitism might appear to be a strange double-standard. After all, Stephen Fowler as a liberal is supposed to be strongly into equality. How can you have an egalitarian elitism?

Perhaps the answer lies in what liberals understand by equality. Usually it is thought to mean an equal freedom to follow our own unhindered will. Of course, this doesn't work too well when you're a parent. Stephen Fowler, when watching his young son practise fencing, says proudly to the camera "I'm not going to force him to do it". But it's merely pretence. The son instantly objects "I don't want to do it and you say I have to do it."

Stephen Fowler is a more coercive father than most. He wakes his son up at night because the son forgot to complete some maths sums. The children don't have friends over and live a regimented life.

But it's difficult for a liberal to admit that they are being coercive. After all, liberals hold that we become fully human when we are free to follow our own will unhindered. To coerce others means denying their humanity: their equal human rights.

So it's not surprising that an aggressive liberal like Stephen Fowler should pretend that he is not coercing his son, when that is exactly what he is doing (for better or worse).

Nor is it surprising that, as an aggressive liberal, he should follow through with the logic of his position and disrespect as people those whose lives he believes are unacceptable and worthy of coercion.

(There's a terrific post on this aspect of liberalism, very much worth reading, here.)

Finally, it strikes me watching the YouTube clips that Stephen Fowler believes himself to be highly cultivated and therefore superior. I think it a greater blessing, though, to be fully natured. I would be more impressed by Stephen Fowler feeling a connection and a loyalty to his own tradition, rather than by his university qualifications and his good vocabulary.

The first, and most eye opening, of the YouTube clips is below:



The follow-up is here: