A racist hymn?

A Church of England bishop has called for the banning of a popular hymn, I Vow to Thee, My Country, because it is too nationalistic.

I looked at the words of the hymn, but couldn't find much that might be considered objectionable. It's true that part of a line does mention vowing to your country a "love that asks no question". If the line simply means "My loyalty is so deep that it is never brought into question" then there's no problem. It's only if the line is read as meaning "My love for my country means I never question what it does" that it becomes an expression of a false, mindless loyalty.

The nationalism of the poem is also a little overwrought, but this is understandable given it was written at the end of World War One, when a generation of British men had indeed made tremendous sacrifices for their country.

Which brings us back to the Bishop of Hulme. He says that "it is dangerous for a nation to suggest that our culture is somehow superior to others." This comment reveals the influence over the bishop of a secular liberal philosophy.

For liberals, society is a collection of competing wills. Social dynamics are therefore understood in terms of a "will to power" of some groups over others. So, for the bishop, an expression of nationalism can only be understood as one group, the English, asserting a right to dominance, a right to superiority, over another group, the non-English.

But this liberal understanding entirely misses the point of the hymn. The hymn stresses very clearly that national feeling is not based on a will to power but on a love of country. In fact, the hymn makes no mention at all of English superiority, and could easily be adopted by any other national group. And far from urging national dominance, the hymn actually calls for gentleness and peace.

The problem is therefore not the nationalism of the hymn but the liberalism of the bishop. The bishop is conceiving things too much in bad faith; he needs to trust better the nationalism that is based on a genuine love of one's own country and people.

Make that ten

Professor Robert Ehrlich has recently written a book titled "Nine Crazy Ideas in Science." Unfortunately, I think he left one out: the idea that there is no such thing as race.

Last month an American scientist, Alan Templeton, toured Australia. He claimed in public lectures that his studies of human genes proved that race did not exist.

Now, I've heard this claim before. It's never seemed credible to me. There must exist genetic differences between the races, because how else can you explain the very obvious physical differences between, say, Swedes, Kenyans and Chinese?

Fortunately, Alan Templeton was asked to respond to exactly this objection. His reply is noteworthy. He claims that physical characteristics, like dark skin, can appear in two populations where races are supposed to be different. He also challenges his students to distinguish between Fijians and Africans, two races which are supposed to be different.

These are such weak answers that Alan Templeton's credibility is entirely lost. First, it's not even true that you can always find similar physical characteristics across different human populations. I very much doubt, for instance, if any Scandinavians were ever as dark-skinned as the average Masai tribesman of Kenya.

But even if you could find such a Scandinavian, it still wouldn't disprove the fact that some human populations share certain physcial characteristics much more commonly than other human populations.

For instance, Europeans are generally more round-eyed than East Asian populations. Fijians have frizzier hair than either East Asians or Europeans. North Europeans are more likely to have blue eyes than Africans etc.

That's exactly why it actually is possible to tell which region of the world people originate from. Alan Templeton's challenge to his students, to distinguish a Fijian from an African, could easily be met if the students were presented with a photo of ten ethnic Fijians picked at random from the streets of Suva, and ten ethnic Masai tribesmen from Kenya.

Obviously, there do exist genetic differences between different races of humans. That is the only reasonable explanation for why there are readily identifiable physcial differences between different human populations.

So why would a scientist like Alan Templeton be so irrational in his views? It's because the existence of race undermines the liberal political philosophy which so many intellectuals live by.

According to liberalism, we are supposed to be self-created by our own will and reason. Our race, though, is not something we create out of our own will and reason; it's something that we simply inherit. Therefore, for liberals it is illegitimate and must be excluded as something with influence in our lives. What better way for a scientific liberal to "deal with" race, than to declare it does not even exist. That way it is intellectually abolished.

I don't believe that this approach will succeed, though, even in the medium term. If race does exist, then science will eventually reach a degree of development where it will have to be recognised.

To some degree this is already happening. For instance, scientists have recently discovered an effective heart drug which is "on course to become the first medicine approved for use in a specific ethnic group". (It works effectively for Africans, who have lower levels of nitric oxide than other ethnic groups.)

By the way, liberals wanting to abolish the category of race will be in for a little surprise if they ever visit a Japanese supermarket. I remember when I lived in Japan wanting to buy a carton of milk from my local supermarket. There were three different kinds of milk, each marked prominently with a different number.

I remember puzzling over which one I should buy. As I recall, one was marked with something like a 4.5, another with 2.1 and the other with 1.2. I guessed that these were different levels of fat in the milk, and wondered why the Japanese would be so fussy about the fat levels, as they were nearly all thin anyway.

Later on a Japanese friend revealed to me what the numbers really meant. The milk was modified according to its lactose content, not its fat content. This is because 90% of Asians are lactose intolerant and therefore find it hard to digest milk. Europeans, it seems, somewhere in our history, developed a genetic distinction of being readily able to digest milk as adults.

What women want

Selling like hotcakes in Britain is the ...... Boyfriend Arm Pillow. It's supposed to comfort lonely women who want to be hugged to sleep by a man.

Just one more little indication that men and women haven't outgrown each other yet. We do still need each other. Men have an instinct to want to put their arms around a woman at night, and women have the complementary instinct to want to be hugged.

By the way, the newest star of Australian reality TV is a beautiful young woman by the name of Rebecca Olds. She has this to say about her love life:

I can't find a man. They are either already taken, or they are gay. I don't know what the problem is. I don't think I have ever been really romanced before. I don't think I have ever been asked out on a proper date. I just want a man's man. Someone who likes doing stuff, like going fishing ... (Herald Sun 8/8/04)

Note that Miss Olds doesn't want a SNAG or a metrosexual. She wants someone who is overtly masculine, and who might pay her some old-fashioned romantic attention.

The gender-bending kind of feminists might not like to hear such sentiments, but it should be reassuring to traditionalist young men.

Why do men earn more?

Janet Albrechtsen wrote a fine column for The Australian a couple of weeks ago. It explains that the reason why men's wages eventually outstrip those of women is that many women choose to work part-time so that they have a better opportunity to look after their families.

She gives the actual figures. In May 2004 there were 1,026,000 women in the Australian workforce who were partnered and had children. Of these a large majority worked part-time: there were 622,000 part-timers compared to 404,000 full-time workers. In stark contrast the overwhelming majority of men who were partnered and had children worked full time: almost 1,500,000 million full-timers compared to just 93,000 part-time workers.

The women were not forced to work part-time rather than full-time, they wanted to. The same survey which collected the May 2004 statistics asked women if they wanted to work more hours and 80% replied no.

Janet Albrechtsen concludes that "women's preferences for part-time work or just less work or different work than men, with its inevitable consequences for promotion and pay, is a choice, not the result of partriarchal oppression."

Nor, of course, should the average non-feminist woman be so worried about the higher male rate of earnings anyway. Those 1,500,000 million men working full-time are not sending their money off to a private Swiss bank account to be used for their own luxury spending. They are earning money to support their families. In other words, the money goes back to their wives anyway.

Setting the target

Think of a political trend which conservatives dislike, such as feminism. The typical approach of conservatives is to attack the outward manifestations of this trend, which in the case of feminism might include the masculinisation of women or the effeminacy of men.

These conservative attacks never seem to be really effective. Feminism marches on oblivious as do all the other political trends opposed by conservatives.

This isn't surprising. If you look at the origins of a political trend like feminism it goes like this.

Item 1: The fundamental liberal principle that individuals should be self-created by their own reason and will.

Item 2: Our sex is not created by our own reason and will. Therefore, society may not be organised around the fact of sex.

Item 3: Women are encouraged to adopt traditionally masculine social roles and vice versa.

As stated above, conservatives typically attack item 3, the end product of the liberal process. However, because liberals accept item 1 they will continue to believe that item 3 is the right thing to do, no matter how much conservatives ridicule it, and no matter how much it goes against the personal instincts and preferences of liberals themselves.

An important part of what conservatives need to do is to target item 1. Perhaps conservatives could stress in opposition to the liberal principle something like the following:

Reason and will are gifts which are not ends in themselves but are a means by which individuals can elevate themselves to the higher part of their given nature.

This principle is not sufficient in itself as it doesn't fully delineate the limitations of individual will and reason. However, it does suggest that the task of individuals is not to remove all impediments to individual will and reason, but to learn how best to use reason and will within a given set of conditions.

(First published at Conservative Central 05/07/03)

Liberalism as a secular religion

This issue might well appear to some to be a case of social engineering gone crazily immoral...

Liberals sometimes act as if they are following a kind of secular religion, rather than a political ideology.

I was reminded of this when reading an editorial from the Brisbane Courier Mail (15/5/2001). The topic was whether women should be accepted into the frontline as combat troops.

The editor did a reasonable job in listing the possible objections to such a move. He asked,

Are women indeed physically up to the task of lugging around a 30kg pack for weeks on end? Will their presence in the frontline ranks prove a distraction to the male soldiers whose protective instincts towards them might undermine unit efficiency? Or, conversely, might they be exposed to widespread sexual harassment?

Might women, too, undermine that fierce, tightly knit loyalty and interdependence on which military morale is built? Might they even, perversely, be responsible for higher casualty rates in battle...

And so on.

However, having taken the trouble to raise these objections, he then dismisses them out of hand by writing,

Yet all of these objections, however practical and well-meaning, represent a denial of the right of women to choose for themselves what roles they will fill in time of war.

Think about this. The editor will not consider objections "however practical and well-meaning" if this conflicts with the liberal principle of individualism: the idea of individuals being free to create themselves in any direction.

The principle of individualism is to be preferred, even if it potentially weakens the armed forces, and therefore the continued existence of the liberal society itself.

This is not a very pragmatic approach to politics. The editor seems to be aware of this as he goes on to admit that,

Yes, this issue might well appear to some to be a case of social engineering gone crazily immoral, but the irrefutable fact is that society has changed since the dark days of WWII.

Women have chosen to throw off the limitations imposed on them, even those limitations intended for their own protection.

The editor recognises that his beliefs may be considered immoral, and that they might leave women unprotected. His response?

He invokes something he considers to be of greater importance: the progress of society toward an individualism in which we "throw off the limitations imposed" on us (ie we deconstruct those aspects of society that we did not choose for ourselves).

It's important that we try to understand the liberal mind so that we know what we're up against. The views presented by the Courier Mail editor make it clear that liberals don't always follow a pragmatic self-interest.

They do have first principles which they treat almost as "articles of faith" and are willing to follow through to the end. This is the sense in which liberalism can be seen as a kind of secular religion.

(First published at Conservative Central, 27/05/2002)

Is tradition an evolutionary advantage?

There's a very interesting article on global birth rates in the current edition of the left-liberal magazine New Statesman (31/5/04 - not yet online).

The author, Phillip Longman, begins by pointing out that birth rates are falling even faster in the developing world than in Western countries. Since the start of the 1970s, fertility rates have fallen by 27% in the industrialised countries and 46% in less developed nations.

Brazil is one country which has experienced this fertility decline. Since 1975 its birth rate has dropped by nearly half to just 2.27 children per woman. Similar declines have been recorded in countries like China, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Mexico.

What this means is that within 30 years or so, the population pressures in developing countries will probably ease. Hopefully, this will mean less pressure from third world "refugees" flowing into Western countries. So Western conservatives shouldn't give up trying to retain immigration controls: we should do our best over the next 30 years to preserve what we can, before the pressures of third world population flows begin to ease.

Why is fertility declining globally? Phillip Longman gives what is a very significant answer for a left liberal. He believes that children are no longer seen as an advantage in modern, secular countries for several reasons. First, when people move from small farms into large cities, children become more of an economic liability than a resource.

He also believes that the message conveyed by television in third world countries is that "people with wealth and sophistication are people who have at most one or two chilren."

Phillip Longman also quotes the views of biologists who,

speculate that modern human beings have created an environment in which the "fittest", or most successful individuals are precisely those who have few, if any, offspring. As more and more humans find themselves living under conditions in which children, far from providing economic benefit, have become costly impediments to success, those who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves.

This scenario disturbs the left-liberal Phillip Longman. It means that those who adapt best to modern liberal societies won't be the ones reproducing. The ones who will reproduce will be those who "out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game [of secular, liberal societies] altogether."

Longman believes that this is already happening. He quotes birth statistics from the United States where the highest fertility rates (90 children per 1000 women) are in conservative Utah, compared to only 49 children per 1000 women in liberal Vermont, the only state to send a socialist to Congress and the first to enact gay marriage.

I believe that Longman is at least partly correct in all this. A man who is stubbornly conservative and wants to continue his own line (whether of his family or nation) is likely to choose to have children regardless of the economic cost, or loss of cultural status. Someone who has accepted modern liberalism is less likely to have this motivation.

For Phillip Longman the result is that,

Those who reject modernity would thus seem to have an evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons, or Muslims who remain committed to comparatively large families, or members of emerging sects and national movements that combine pro-natalism with anti-materialism".

So there you have it. An intelligent left-liberal concludes from the data that traditionalists have an evolutionary advantage!

Biology rules?

Yvonne Roberts, in a recent defence of feminism, tells us that,

In a society truly moving towards the demolition of stereotypes ... fathers would be just as likely as mothers to spend a baby's first year at home ... As it is, today's dominant narrative is ... that women ... allegedly much prefer home and hearth and hubby at work. Biology rules, OK - a view that is daft not least because it excludes men from engaged fatherhood.

There's an important question to ask here. Why would Yvonne Roberts so object to the idea that women are more biologically predisposed to look after babies? What is it in her belief system which makes such an idea objectionable?

The answer, I believe, has to do with the basic principles of liberalism. Liberals believe that to be fully human we have to be self-created by our own reason and will. This means, though, that we are not supposed to be influenced in an important way by the fact of being born male or female, as this would make biology rule, rather than will and reason.

Therefore, Yvonne Roberts doesn't want to believe that women are more naturally inclined than men to look after babies. She won't accept this, because to someone who thinks within a liberal framework, it seems too much like a biological destiny.

What happens though if we don't start out from liberal first principles? Then we are free to accept that there are in fact natural differences between men and women (something which science has proven beyond a doubt anyway). There would no longer be an ideological obstacle to women acting to fulfil their feminine nature, nor men their masculine nature.

One last point. Note how Yvonne Roberts so entirely rejects the traditional male role in the family, that she entirely excludes it from "engaged fatherhood". According to her, men can either remain unengaged within the family, or else take over the motherhood role from their wives.

This grossly underestimates what men have traditionally contributed to their families, whether by working to provide for their families, or by providing emotional and physical security, or by socialising their children.

It also makes men dispensable within the family. If men are only useful if they agree to take over the female role, then why couldn't you just have families with female adults?

It's important to contest this trend which says that men are only engaged as fathers when they stay at home to look after babies. It's a view which is ideologically inspired and which undermines any necessary role for men within the family.

Man and woman for eternity

The Pope has released a letter to Catholic bishops on the issue of feminism. One of the more conservative aspects of the letter is its reaffirmation of gender difference. According to the document feminism has erred in its "obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes" and that,

From the first moment of their creation, man and woman are different, and will remain so for eternity.

According to one newspaper report Catholic feminists responded to this criticism by claiming that "the letter presented a caricature of feminism as trying to deny any difference between the sexes".

But then up popped the feminist author Natasha Walter, who immediately confirmed the "caricature" by questioning "whether there were essential differences between men and women at all." Ms Walter then cast doubt on the existence of any special maternal instinct in women by arguing that,

We have centuries and centuries of acculturation towards a 'vocation' of maternity, and men have only had a couple of generations of acculturation towards active paternity. Until we encourage men [to do more] it's too early to call on whether there are innate differences. The weight of tradition is so strong that it precludes the freedom to choose.

This is an interesting quote for two reasons. First, it's one of those statements you sometimes come across nowadays which overlook the commitments that men have traditionally made to their families.

When Ms Walter talks about the recent advent of "active paternity" she means the sharing by men of traditionally motherly tasks, like the feeding, washing or changing of children. But this use of language excludes from "active paternity" the efforts that men make to provide for and protect their families, to socialise their children, and to maintain the formal, public structures of community life.

These traditional commitments of men can't just be taken for granted. They need to be recognised and encouraged within a society, particularly by women who are the chief beneficiaries.

The quote is also interesting as it brings out the conflict between liberal individualism and tradition. Liberals believe that we should be self-created by our individual reason and will. Tradition necessarily falls foul of this dictum because it pre-exists our own reason and will. In other words, tradition will often seem to liberals to be a hostile force as it is something that influences who we are and what we do but which we don't choose by our own will or reason.

Hence, all the talk by liberals about tradition "weighing" upon the present generation, rather than guiding it or inspiring it or adding identity and meaning to it. Ms Walter is therefore showing a typically liberal concern when she fears that a "weight of tradition" might interfere with an individual "freedom to choose".

Forced to evolve?

I still haven't seen the film Stepford Wives. My expectation is that it will make traditionally feminine woman seem like zombies under the control of their husbands. It is likely to be, in other words, a liberal attack on the traditional family.

My suspicions were strengthened when I read an interview with the screewriter of the film, Paul Rudnick. According to the interview (with Maureen Dowd) Rudnick claimed that the plot of the film had only increased in resonance since the original was made in 1975 because,

men have grown even more anxious about gender issues and begrudge having their hegemony shattered by women, gays and minorities. "Straight white males act like the angry new endangered minority," he said. "Men only evolve with a gun at their head."'

A charming view of things, isn't it? Unfortunately for us, left liberals like Paul Rudnick view society as a collection of competing wills, each seeking to enact its own desires. If some social groupings have more power, it is, in the left liberal view, because they are acting as a social class to dominate other groups as part of a will to power. Hence, the task of politics for an egalitarian left liberal is to bring down such "privileged" groups in order to once again achieve equality of will between different people.

That's why left liberals "translate" what they see in such negative terms. Left liberals don't see the existence of a white majority as a positive thing, in terms of a continuing tradition within a country. They see it only in terms of an imbalance of wills in relation to minorities. Nor can they see the political leadership of men within a community in terms of men discharging a sense of duty or responsibility toward their own societies. For left liberals it is viewed negatively as a will to power at the expense of some other "oppressed" social class, such as women or homosexuals.

It's the same when it comes to family life. Take, for instance, the fact that men end up earning more than women. For conservatives, this is at least partly due to something good: the fact that married men want to provide for their families and therefore put in a big effort at work. For liberals, though, it isn't seen as something that men do for women, but as part of a will to power by a dominant, privileged group over an oppressed group.

The fact that men still stubbornly work hard to support their families, and that many women still choose to put much of their effort into caring for their family is something which clearly rankles both Paul Rudnick and Maureen Dowd.

Rudnick complains that men still "want a babe and don't care about her earning power. Women want a rugged poet or musician with a private jet."

Dowd for her part complains about the popularity in modern culture of the "wifely arts of cooking, gardening, decorating and flower arranging" and that instead of the "squat and blunt Betty Friedan" of the 1970s, we now have the "sensual Nigella Lawson".

Given these cultural trends, it's perhaps little wonder that Paul Rudnick believes that men will have to be forced to "evolve with a gun at their head". It would be better, of course, if liberals themselves evolved away from a philosophy which makes the existence of majorities illegitimate and which views natural and healthy forms of social life in terms of an oppressive will to power.

Chinese puzzle

I'm still a bit puzzled by this, but I came across an article defending religion and tradition against the secular state at an officially sanctioned Chinese website.

What is happening in China? I knew that China was moving away from a state controlled economy, but is there now also a shift away from radical liberal ideology and statist politics?

Admittedly, the article is written by an American, but it still seems significant to me that it should be featured at a Chinese website.

The article itself is something of a mixture of liberalism and conservatism. One of its conservative assertions is that there does exist a human nature, which ultimately places a limit on what can work in politics, and which therefore needs to be respected. As the author himself writes,

Human beings are free to adopt self-destructive ideas, but we are not free to make them work. Ideas based on a faulty view of human nature can grip the imagination of the powerful for decades, wreak havoc and suffering on untold millions, but they cannot triumph in the end. What is contrary to nature, including human nature, cannot ultimately survive.

The author then lists some aspects of this nature which human societies need to recognise in order to flourish. He asserts that,

the future belongs to those people and cultures that deeply commit to ideas grounded in human nature: Men and women are not interchangeable units, sex has a meaning beyond immediate pleasure, society needs babies, children need fathers and mothers, marriage is a word for the way we join men and women to make the future happen.

It would be difficult for most liberals to accept such a statement. For liberals, we are made human by our capacity to create who we are and what we do from our own will and reason. It's therefore difficult for liberals to accept that a pre-existing nature deeply influences the direction of our lives.

That's why liberals believe it is a positive liberation to act contrary to our inherited manhood and womanhood, or why so many liberals believe that there is no single way to define what a family is. For liberals, such things as an inherited manhood and womanhood are not valued parts of our inborn nature, but are impediments to our individual will and reason to be overthrown.

But as the author of the article points out, cultures which adopt the liberal view cannot sustain themselves in the longer term because acting against nature will inevitably have destructive effects.

Shattering stereotypes

A year ago my wife and I took a road trip along the Murray. We were impressed by most of the country towns along the way, such as Echuca, Swan Hill and Mildura.

There was one town, though, which we chose to hurry through: Robinvale. We stopped there for lunch and immediately sensed the tension in the town. It didn't have that relaxed, laid back feeling that most Australian country towns have. The atmosphere wasn't helped by the groups of young men, of both Aboriginal and Tongan descent, milling about on the street corners.

So I wasn't surprised to read that the tensions in the town have spilled over into violent brawls between Aborigines and Tongans. Five Aborigines have been bashed in three separate attacks, shots have been fired and bomb threats made. The local Aborigines are worried that the (white) police in the town aren't able to protect them from groups of Tongans.

This is not just an example of multiculturalism gone wrong. It confounds our normal expectation of things, because we are used to the left liberal idea that society is a collection of competing wills, and that inequalities occur when one group asserts its will and becomes dominant and privileged over another group.

According to this left-liberal world view, it must be Anglo-Australians who have gained privilege and dominance by oppressing Aborigines, and the aim of politics must be to redress this "structural" inequality (of will).

What then happens is that left liberals operate with a very crude stereotype in which whites are presented only as oppressors and Aborigines only as victims. Furthermore, there is a very stong moral component to this kind of politics, because there is a clear sense of a deliberate and self-serving imposition of injustice, which requires guilt and atonement as morally correct responses.

All of these assumptions have been orthodox on the liberal left in Australia. But reality quickly dissolves the whole ideological apparatus. In Robinvale whites are clearly not the oppressors, but are, if anything, failed protectors of Aborigines. The stereotype which left liberals cling to so stubbornly, of the oppressor Anglo-Australian, simply can't be applied.

Who is a good father?

It's often assumed these days that the good father is the man who takes on part of the motherly role within a family, by changing nappies or feeding the baby or cooking meals.

There is little awareness of the important and distinctive role a man has as a father, separate from such tasks. Which is why I was struck by the following comment of Professor Richard Warshak, a child psychologist. Professor Warshak defends the role of men within the family by asking the following questions:

Is the primary caretaker the parent who does the most to foster a child's sense of security, the person to whom the child turns in time of stress - the role most often associated with mothers?

Or is it the parent who does the most to promote the child's ability to meet the demands of the world outside the family and to make independent judgments - the role most often associated with fathers? We really have no basis for preferring one contribution over the other. Both are necessary for healthy pyschological functioning

Well put! Mothers usually do more of the hands-on care of young children, and mother-love is vital to a child's self-esteem. But fathers do have an important role to play in successfully socialising children.

Most societies have recognised and encouraged this aspect of fatherhood. For instance, in a play of the early 1500s (Mandragola, 1518) part of the daily routine of the good father was that,

after dinner (he) talked to his son, gave him advice, helped him understand human nature, taught him how to live, in fact, with examples from past and present.

But our "gender neutral" society is oblivious to the responsibility of fathers to successfully socialise their children, despite the fact that it's a challenging task requiring an element of paternal wisdom.

Turning left

Here's a comment by the former leader of the right-liberal Liberal Party, John Hewson, in the Financial Review (23/7/04):

I believe that politics is about redistribution and certainly should be focused on helping the 'have nots'.

It's significant for John Hewson to say this, and not only because it shows yet another prominent right-liberal turning to the left.

It's not an accident, or some personal whim, which would lead John Hewson to claim that politics is about redistribution. It's the end product of a liberal thought process which goes something like this:

1) To be fully human we must be self-created by our individual will and reason.
2) Society is a collection of individual wills competing to enact their desires.
3) It is wrong for some wills to dominate others as this denies some people their full humanity.
4) The main aim of politics is therefore to ensure that all wills are equal.

Although conservatives might support a particular redistribution policy, we would never claim that redistribution was the main aim of politics. This is because we don't start out with the idea that society is a collection of competing wills.

Conservatives are still loyal to traditions and identities which lie outside the framework of liberal thought. For conservatives, a major aim of politics is to defend and protect such traditions and identities. For a conservative, it therefore makes no sense to conceive of redistribution as the central task of politics.

A victory for the family?

The Howard Government here in Australia is taking a bold step in investigating joint custody of children following divorce.

As Mr Howard put it "The situation at the moment is that the presumption is that custody will be given to one (parent) or the other. What we're looking at is to alter that so the presumption is that it will be a shared arrangement unless circumstances suggest otherwise. That is turning the existing arrangement ... on its head."

Mr Howard gave as his reason for the joint custody proposal the need to get men back into boys' lives. He announced to Parliament,

Far too many young boys are growing up without proper male role models. They are not infrequently in the overwhelming care and custody of their mothers ...

If they do not have older brothers or uncles they closely relate to - and with an overwhelming number of teachers being female, in primary schools in particular - many young Australian boys are at the age of 15 or 16 before they have a male role model with whom they can identify.

Mr Howard is to be congratulated for upholding the importance of fathers in family life. This pits him against the likes of Christopher McLean who complains that,

It seems to be a taken-for-granted truth that boys can only learn to be men from other men, and that school programs for boys need to include a major emphasis on male role-models and mentors.

I think this is a highly dubious and quite dangerous proposition ... I believe that boys need to learn to be ethical human beings, not "men", and women are perfectly capable of teaching this.

Don't dismiss Christopher McLean as some irrelevant left-wing crackpot. The above quote is taken from the Tasmanian Department of Education website as part of its "gender equity" policy.

Christopher McLean's view is, in fact, quite a logically consistent one for liberals to take. If you are a liberal male, and you believe that you should be self-created by your own reason and will, then you have to reject the idea that you are a product of something you are born into, like your gender. Therefore, Christopher McLean is, from the liberal perspective, showing how "liberated" he is from his own gender, by replacing the whole category of being "male" with being "human" and by displaying clearly his rejection of masculine loyalties in giving to women the authority and responsibility to teach boys.

It's not hard for conservatives to rebut this liberal attitude. The reality is, of course, that we are not just products of our own individual reason and will, but that unchosen factors such as gender play a significant role in shaping who we are. In terms of boys and masculinity, for instance, the researcher Steve Biddulph has described how nature normally takes its course so that,

At around six years of age, a big change takes place in boys. There seems to be a sudden 'switching on' of boys' masculinity and little boys seem to 'lock on' to their dad ... and want to be with him, learn from him and copy him. They want to 'study how to be male'.

A more difficult objection to the Howard position has been put forward by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward. She points out that if men want to have joint custody they will have to prove willing to undertake half of the mothering tasks of young children. In her own words,

I think this is a great opportunity to start talking about the role of men in families and their rights and responsibilities. It's about changing nappies, wiping up after a sick child, dreary hours spent on the floor playing blocks. Equal parenting is not the 16 minutes of child play a day that is the average amount of time that men spend with their children.

Leaving aside some of the anti-male and even anti-motherhood undertones of this comment, Pru Goward is making a significant point. If the solution to the divorce problem is joint custody, then men will have to undertake motherhood tasks while they have custody of the child.

Some "masculinists" would be more than happy to take up Pru Goward's challenge. These men basically support the liberal view that men and women are interchangeable, and that individuals are oppressed by being "forced" into traditional sex roles.

For example, a group called the Australian Men's Party has as part of its charter that,

Both men and women have been denighed [sic] rights and given unequal responsibilities because of their traditional gender roles. We should give equal concern to the lack of rights and unfair burdens that both sexes have suffered because of their gender roles.

Or again that,

Masculism believes that both men and women have been victims of their assigned traditional gender roles. Masculism does not blame one sex for the predicament we find ourselves in - as both sexes have contributed to the definition of traditional gender roles.

But are traditional gender roles artificial and oppressive? Or do they relate to the real instincts, drives and talents of men and women?

Quite often, men who attempt to switch gender roles find that natural drives and instincts are hard to conquer. Take the case of Jonathan Myerson who describes his experiences as a Mr Mom as follows:

I'm bent over the three-year-old who's bent over the toilet seat. I'm struggling to win the right to wipe his bottom. He's fighting back and yelling 'I want Mummy to wipe me ... Go away.' Eventually might triumphs and the bottom is wiped. I survey the screaming, tearful child and wonder 'Has it all been worth it?' Is new manhood all it's cracked up to be?

He complains, having looked after three children, that:

after all this bonding and their experience of Daddy as Active Parent, when Firstborn falls over, he calls for Mummy; when Secondborn crawls into the early morning bed, it is Mummy she wants to cuddle; and when Thirdborn wants anything, he wants it from Mummy.

He concludes in frustration that,

All I know is that the bond between mother and child seems dominant, necessary, effectively unbreakable ... the father is in these early years an adjunct, a satellite. (The Age 24/8/97)

Nor is it just from the child's side that the relationship with a mother is "dominant, necessary, effectively unbreakable." Mothers, too, frequently feel a bond to their babies, and to baby care, which is different to the male experience.

Columnist Sally Morrell, for example, felt alright on her first day back at work, having left her baby at home with her husband Andrew. However, on the tram ride home she began to feel a sense of loss:

By the time I jumped off the tram I was in a state of near panic. I ran home, scrambled to get the key in the door and hurried to James' cot.

He was asleep, his chubby fists were closed and puffs of breath came out from between softly parted lips. I was crying by the time Andrew found me there.

I felt a bit of a goose at first for reacting so strongly. Then again, I think many mothers go through the same sort of turmoil and not just when they first leave baby behind.

I guess you are never so close to your child as during those first few months when baby needs not just your love but your most intimate care - the dressing, the feeding, the bathing, the nursing, the carrying, the putting to bed." (Herald Sun 8/9/94)

For women, baby care can be more that just an awkward chore, as it is for a lot of men. Women can find it an emotionally rewarding experience, which bonds them closely to their baby.

Joint custody, therefore, is not a solution to the problem of divorce, as it removes young children from the important relationship with the mother, a relationship which most men will be neither willing nor able to adequately replace.

Of course the current "solution" to divorce, in which fathers are supposed to work to support their families, whilst being banished from the family home, is also unacceptable, as it is not only callous to men, but deprives children of the important influence of their fathers.

The real solution is to radically reduce the incidence of divorce. This, however, would require a challenge to the liberal belief that the highest good is the freedom to do as we will.

(First published at Conservative Central 30/06/2003)