Do we need a moral code?

In the late 1960s a young Jane Fonda married the film director Roger Vadim. It was not a traditional marriage. Vadim asked his wife to share the marital bed not only with himself, but with a variety of call girls.

Understandably, Fonda regrets the arrangement. She does, however, admit that she wasn’t forced to do anything against her will. She writes,

But do you know what’s so interesting? I never felt coerced into it. I was never asked to do half the things that I found I didn’t want to do. I just thought that if I refused I’d be left, because I wasn’t enough. Isn’t that sad? And if that’s true of me, who seems so in charge and strong, imagine how it can be for other women.

She has a point. We are often told that as long as we consent to an action, and nobody else is harmed, that there can be no moral objections. But reality is more complex than this. There are many reasons why people might consent to an action against their better judgement.

When we are young, for instance, and don’t have a lot of life experience, we don’t always assert control over what happens to us. Nor do we, at this time of life, always have first-hand experience of the consequences of what we are choosing, in order to bolster our innate moral sense.

The Melbourne Age ran a story recently illustrating the limitations of an “ethics of consent”. It was about a young university student, Anna Neylan, who falls pregnant and who after “peeping through the keyhole of motherhood” knows that her preference is to have the baby.

Her boyfriend, though, wants her to have an abortion. She wrestles “with the burden of choice” and speaks to social workers and counsellors. She writes that,

Each time, I leave feeling strong and certain. In my heart I know that I want to have the child. I know that I’m not too young. I know I’d make a wonderful mother.

But the opposition of her boyfriend leaves her in doubt. She confesses,

I’m a mess; I trust him more than I trust myself. He comforts me with the promise that I’ll eventually be the mother of his children.

So she has the abortion and awakes in a “room full of blanketed grief.” Nor does she recover well in the coming weeks. As she describes it,

Waves of guilt lull me into troubled sleep at night ... I feel numb when I have sex. My partner doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to talk. When I try to talk or when I just want to cry, he tells me that he can’t help me.

A month later the boyfriend leaves her and she sinks “to dangerous black depths.”

So an ethics of consent did not serve Anna Neylan well. It left her open to a kind of exploitation at a time of vulnerability in her life.

For conservatives, it is not the case that by our giving of consent, and an absence of direct harm to others, that an act is made moral or even acceptable. For us, there is an inherent right or wrong in different behaviours, and a moral code, reflecting the wisdom, the moral strength and the moral ideals of generations, should exist to guide individuals toward right forms of behaviour.

A liberal may well label such a moral code as oppressive, as the first principle of liberalism is that we should be unimpeded in following our own will (and not constrained by something external to our will, such as a moral code).

But is a moral code really oppressive when it helps to protect the most vulnerable from exploitation and harm? Or when it helps us to overcome our own weaknesses of will by buttressing our better moral natures?

There is a supportive function of moral codes, an assistance to individuals in living a life of moral integrity, which needs to be defended against the largely unsympathetic outlook of liberalism.

Are majorities legitimate?

The French take their secularism seriously. They are currently debating a proposed law which would ban the wearing of religious symbols in schools. This would forbid the wearing by students of the Muslim hijab, the Jewish jarmulke and large Christian crosses.

I was interested to read the reaction of a British liberal, Gary Younge, to the proposed French law. (The Guardian 26/1/04) He made it clear that he himself is a secularist. This is not because he is convinced of the truth of atheism. In fact, he declares himself to be a lapsed agnostic, who is largely unconcerned with religious issues.

Instead, he is a secularist because he feels that it fits better with his liberalism. Liberals want people to be self-created by their individual will and reason. Younge, therefore, doesn't want his own fate to be influenced by a God external to his own will ─ he has, in his own words, "a philosophical problem with submitting my destiny to a higher being."

Similarly, Younge can only accept a personal morality that he decides and which applies to himself alone. He doesn't like the idea that a morality might be formalised, even to the extent of being given a name. As he himself puts it, he has a "problem with giving a name to my sense of what is morally right and wrong."

Younge's account of his secularism is a warning to churches which try to base themselves on a liberal philosophy. The logic of liberal individualism is to lead people to reject the authority over them not only of a church as an institution, but also of its moral code, and even of the idea of God existing externally to our own will.

Double standard

As a staunch secularist you might expect Younge to agree with the banning of religious symbols in French schools. In fact he does not.

Younge distinguishes between a ruling, oppressor group in society and marginalised oppressed groups. According to him, the Catholic Church was part of the privileged oppressor class and it was therefore proper that it was "sidelined" by secularism following the French Revolution of 1789.

Younge identifies Muslims in France, though, as being "ethnically and racially marginalised" by the racist French majority. Therefore it is legitimate that they seek to preserve their "racial and ethnic identity" of which Islam is a "crucial part".

Younge does not want Islam, being so crucial to the identity of a marginalised ethnic group, to be sidelined by secularism. In fact, he sees the attempt to do so as being just one more proof of the racism of the European French majority.

Of course, what you have here is the great left-liberal double standard which so perplexes conservatives. Younge not only allows, but encourages, ethnic minorities to keep their "racial and ethnic identity". Any attempt to defend such an identity by the majority, though, is condemned in the harshest terms as "racist".

Such an approach has the absurd consequence that it doesn't allow a mainstream culture to exist. Once you become the majority you become illegitimate.

Why would Younge hold such a view? Younge's arguments do make some sense within the confines of a liberal philosophy. After all, liberals want to be self-created by their own reason and will, and not by the national or ethnic tradition they are born into.

So what they are really looking to deconstruct is the mainstream culture that has some claim over them. It's not so important that they undermine the ethnic traditions of minority groups. In fact, it may even be an advantage to encourage such groups to hold to their traditional identities. It is presumably helpful for liberals if there continues to exist a visible minority toward whom the majority can actively practise "non-discrimination."

Reactions

There are several possible reactions to the left-liberal view of things. Some people react sensitively to the accusation that they are part of a racist majority. They try to re-legitimise themselves by going to increasingly greater lengths to prove that they are not racist.

This is futile. The French have already gone so far to accommodate immigrants that they have undermined their own future existence as a distinct people and culture. And still they are branded a racist majority.

French Muslims, meanwhile, have spearheaded attacks on French Jews, and yet are still accorded the status of victims of racism. They are protected from accusations of racism by their minority status.

In other words, it's not possible in the eyes of left-liberals for the majority to be exonerated of the accusation of racism. Trying to win legitimacy by taking increasingly desperate measures to prove how "anti-racist" you are is a losing game to play.

Another reaction to views like Gary Younge's is to reject the whole left-liberal approach in favour of a right liberal one. Right liberals are no more likely than left liberals to uphold a national or ethnic tradition. However, their approach is not to entirely condemn the existing majority of a society. Instead, they want everyone to assimilate into a liberal culture, defined in terms of democracy, tolerance, free enterprise, individual freedom, a fair go and so on.

This has a superficial appeal to many people, because it avoids the sense of a self-hating double standard which is a part of the usual left-liberal approach. But the ultimate outcome is the same: it is still considered illegitimate for the majority to defend their own particular tradition as a part of public policy.

Impasse

Centuries ago, our ancestors adopted liberal individualism as a political principle. They did so without thinking through carefully enough what the logical outcome of this principle would be.

Liberal individualism makes it impossible to defend the existence of your own national or ethnic tradition. This is because we are born into such a
tradition ─ we don't choose it through our own will or reason as liberal individualism insists we do.

The logical thing to do, to break the impasse that we are currently in, is to break free from the philosophy of liberal individualism: to finally recognise that it is a faulty part of our political tradition.

All this really means is a willingness to accept that we are created not just through our individual will and reason, and that this doesn't diminish our status as humans.

As part of this rejection of liberal individualism, we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be free, one which includes the freedom of all people, majorities included, to live within their inherited and continuing ethnocultural tradition.

Things will start to change for Europeans when we begin to challenge liberal individualism as the underlying, and sometimes unexamined, "first principle" of our intellectual and political classes.

(First published at Conservative Central 07/02/2004)

The state of play

Science is increasingly vindicating conservative politics.

For decades, liberals have asserted that there are no significant differences between men and women and that the dominance of men in certain professions can only be a result of prejudice or bigotry.

Conservatives, in contrast, have held that men and women are different in their natures and that this explains the dominance of men in certain fields (and the preponderance of women in others).

Science has finally swung the debate in favour of the conservative view. It's difficult now to suggest that there are no significant biological differences affecting the dispositions of men and women.

There is an article in today's Herald Sun (not online) which shows how liberals are reacting to the scientific reality. It's by an Australian mathematician, Dr Clio Cresswell. Her liberalism is clear from her confession that "I've always had a lot of trouble with the idea of male and female differences" and that "When people tell me I can't do something because of its male flavour, it becomes a challenge to me to become the best."

So her starting point, just like any liberal, is to want to overcome gender differences as representing a kind of restriction on the self.

However, she's too much of a scientific realist to overlook the evidence that natural differences do exist. For instance, she notes that,

A 1999 study conducted at Virginia Tech in the US found that the areas in boys' brains involved in mechanical and spatial reasoning mature four to eight years earlier. Could that be why I only hooked into mathematics at 18?

So how does she reconcile her liberal dislike for gender difference with her knowledge that men and women are different in their intellectual natures?

She takes a kind of mid-way position. She still wants more women in the sciences, but she admits that women will have a different "take" on their scientific work. She notes that the Australian Mathematics Sciences Institute is trying to attract girls into maths by emphasising "biology, psychology and the environmental sciences" as career paths rather than physics, finance and engineering.

In terms of the medical sciences she relates the views of Dr Fiona Stanley, Australia's only female plastic surgeon, who says that what she loves most about her work is not the "purely technical exercise" of surgery, but "pain management, healing, psychology ...".

She herself admits that "For me, the true beauty of maths lies in its encapsulation of complex inter-relationships, not in its ability to solve problems."

So is this a possible solution for liberals? Can they admit male/female differences but still even up the science professions by making science less technical and problem solving, and more oriented to human relationships?

I doubt it. I still remember at university meeting quite a number of women who had gone into scientific fields, found them unsatisfying and were returning to study for careers like teaching.

Even Dr Clio Cresswell is an illustration of this tendency. She began her career as an actuary, a very dry career choice for a woman. Sure enough, she quit her job to return to uni to do a PhD (more predicatable) and became a Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW.

But she then veered off further into more traditionally feminine employments. She has subsequently written relationships advice for a women's magazine (more on this later) and has dispensed relationships advice on the TV show Beauty and the Beast. She has hosted a breakfast radio show and appeared on the panel of the TV comedy show The Glasshouse. She's done book reviews on radio and become an Australia Day Ambassador.

In other words, she has not found maths by itself a sufficiently fulfilling career choice. Does she really expert large cohorts of women in the future to do so?

Finally, on a different note, it's curious that Dr Cresswell should have ended up in the business of relationships advice. She is now past 30 and has not had success in this field. Nor would you expect her to, given the strategy she set herself to win a man.

She writes that at age 18 she came up with a plan to win over "a man's heart":

My plan was ingenious: I'd become a fully developed package, in both mind and body. Mathematics for the mind, along with other things like reading and travelling and then running, weight training and sweating for the body. Great conversation and a great set of shoulders - I'd be irresistible. Yep, I'd easily compete with the women who'd intimidated me in my early years.

I expect that a lot of the men of my generation will roll their eyes at this kind of strategy. Did she really believe that broad shoulders were the way to attract men? Did her instincts fail so much that she thought men wanted intellectual conversation and muscularity in a woman?

It seems she's partly learned her lesson. She goes on to write,

I'm not much beyond 30 now. And how's the plan going you ask? Not that well, I'm afraid. The trouble seems to pop up early on. Like when I meet a gorgeous man and he'll ask the question: "What do you do?" I reply, "Mathematician" and he'll come back with: "You must have a lot of testosterone" or "What's the square root of 532?" Not exactly the sexy conversation I had in mind ...

"Meanwhile, Melroy [a female astronaut] assures me that it's not at 30 but at 40 that men become increasingly interested in the full package. So my original plan still has hope. But with all those comments about too much testosterone still ringing in my ears, I've eased off on the shoulder exercises as backup.

Intriguing. I know this is written in a semi-serious vein, but the way she's presenting it is that she still hopes her body building and intellect combination, the "full package", will eventually prove attractive, though she's easing off on some of the more mannish self-presentation just in case men might actually prefer ... a more feminine woman.

Conclusion? Dr Cresswell, by the weight of scientific evidence, may be starting to accept natural differences between the sexes, which is something of a breakthrough for a liberal woman, but it'll be more impressive when such women manage to arrive at a heterosexual celebration of gender difference.

Catching up to Sweden?

Left-liberals often look to Sweden as their ideal. They like the Swedish model of a high-taxing welfare state. We are often told by leftists that Sweden is the kind of society, in which the individual is provided for by state welfare, that we need to catch up to.

But what is there in the Swedish model to prevent the abuse of welfare? This is one of the problems which is now catching up with the Swedes.

For instance, in Sweden workers who take sick leave get paid at least 80% of their wage, with the first two weeks paid for by their employer and the government paying for the rest indefinitely. Generous? Yes - to a crazy degree.

The result of such an ill-considered welfare scheme is that whereas US workers take an average of 6 days sick leave per year, Swedish workers take 32 (2002). At any one time the government is paying sickness benefits to 10% of the work force.

Now the Swedes are having to take remedial measures. If workers on long-term sick leave don't return to work, they will be required to resign and seek alternative positions. The Swedish Government is even willing to create an alternative labour market to get those taking long-term sick leave back into active work. Workers who refuse to join in this special "transitional" labour market will have their sickness benefit terminated.

Reality wins out in the end. A welfare system has to be designed intelligently so that it doesn't undermine natural forms of society such as the family and so that it doesn't remove normal work incentives.

Sweden is only just now learning its lession - namely, that you can't offer people an ongoing wage without the requirement to actually turn up to work. This was a policy destined to fail.

A feminist setback?

A Current Affair ran as a feature story tonight another one of those surveys on "What women want".

I found the results heartening. In first place, women wanted love. Second most important thing for women was motherhood. Only 13% of women nominated career and at the very bottom of the list was power.

Decades of feminist propaganda seem to have failed. Most women don't see a careerist competition with men for "power" as the most important thing in their lives.

Predictably the feminist interviewed for her reaction to the survey, Eva Cox, was not happy. She repeatedly denied that the survey could be valid.

(Ms Cox herself looked very mannish, even for a radical feminist. I looked up her biography and it turns out that she is yet another feminist who was abandoned by her father as a child. I have attempted to explain the political origins of feminism here but I have to admit that there is also a strong psychological element - an issue of paternal abandonment - in giving rise to feminism.)

Taking the other side

In the news lately has been the story of Douglas Wood, the Australian kidnapped in Iraq and then rescued by US soldiers.

Today Douglas Wood told of the ruthlessness of his captors who executed two Iraqi hostages next to him and who beat him up for understating the amount of money he kept in his office safe.

At a press conference, Mr Wood called his kidnappers “a---holes”. Most of us would understand his use of such an uncomplimentary term. But Andrew Jaspan, the editor of The Age, Melbourne’s second newspaper, did not.

Andrew Jaspan called Douglas Wood “boorish” for using the term. As Jaspan himself explains it,

I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood’s use of the a---hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through ... The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive.

Labor Party speech writer Bob Ellis went even further in expressing his respect for the kidnappers by praising them as “honourable men (with) a well-treated captive.”

My point here is not to make a judgement about the morality of the war in Iraq. It’s to point out the capacity of some members of our cultural elite to identify with “the other," even to the point of defending cut-throat terrorists.

This is not a new phenomenon. More than a century ago an English poet, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, chose to defend the Mahdi uprising in the Sudan. When Sir Herbert Stewart defeated the Mahdi’s forces at Abu Klea, Blunt was moved to condemn the victorious British forces as “A mongrel scum of thieves ... without beliefs, without traditions” whereas “on the other side” were,

men with the memory of a thousand years of freedom, with chivalry inherited from the Saracens, the noblest of ancestors, with a creed the purest the world ever knew, worshipping God and serving him with arms like the heroes of the ancient world they are ...

Blunt’s admiration for the Mahdi’s forces was misplaced. The Mahdi revolt was partly a response to General Gordon’s efforts to outlaw the slave trade. Nor was the Mahdi’s programme the kind of idealised defence of an ancient tradition suggested by Blunt. Instead,

The Mahdi maintained that his movement was not a religious order that could be accepted or rejected at will, but that it was a universal regime, which challenged man to join or to be destroyed. The Mahdi modified Islam’s five pillars to support the dogma that loyalty to him was essential to true belief.

Personally, I am not sympathetic to any kind of imperialism. But Blunt was not just a critic of British imperialism. He was fundamentally disloyal to his own people. His mindset was to identify with “the other” almost to the point of reverence.

And these men we have with us still.

Bad timing for thought police

This week in Melbourne two pentecostal pastors were punished for defaming Islam. It's a bit confusing as to what they actually said which contravened the law; they mostly based their criticisms of Islam on passages from the Koran, but the judge found that they did not make clear that their reading of the Koran was "literalist" and the judge also complained that some of their comments had drawn laughter from the 250 strong audience.

Their punishment for such "hate" speech? They have to spend $70,000 on large apologies in both of Melbourne's daily papers, and put an apology on their website for a year. They have also been ordered by the judge to never even imply what they'd said about the Koran.

The Islamic Council of Victoria claimed that this was a "light remedy" and "appropriate", but the pastors have appealed and say they would rather go to jail than apologise for "for standing for the truth". (As columnist Andrew Bolt has pointed out it seems very strange that the pastors should have to apologise to 2.5 million people, when their original comments were made to 250 people. It's like a kind of ritual public humiliation for a political thought crime - it has the flavour of Soviet Russia during the show trials even if the outcomes aren't as severe.)

Unhappily for the thought police other events in Melbourne this week make the judgement seem very ill-advised. On Thursday came the news that ASIO had raided the homes of several Melbourne Muslims in order to break up a terror cell which had conducted training camps in the countryside and which had cased the Melbourne stock exchange and Flinders Street railway station.

Then yesterday came the Herald Sun report "Muslim books of hate sold". It seems that a bookshop attached to a Melbourne mosque has been selling literature which tells Muslims that they should "hate and take as enemies" non-Muslims, that they should learn to hate in order to properly love Allah, that they should learn military tactics and that if a person speaks ill of Islam it's acceptable to kill them.

(Note also that on Thursday came the news that Islamic terror suspects had been arrested in Amsterdam and Paris.)

So this is the odd situation. Two pastors criticise the Koran, in part because of passages condoning deception and violence against non-Muslims. For warning against the possibility of "hate" inspired by the Koran they themselves are found guilty of a hate crime - for supposedly taking the Koran too literally.

But reality proves almost immediately that their warnings are not out of order and that a suburban mosque is selling literature encouraging violence against non-believers and that some of the mosque's worshippers have taken up the call to jihad by preparing for acts of terrorist violence against the peaceful residents of Melbourne.

Has it not been shown that there are indeed Muslims, even in Melbourne, who take the Koran literally? Is it not the case the the judge has been proved wrong in his decision and that it is the court which now owes the two pastors an apology?

A Swedish pay gap?

Feminists often complain that women are paid less than men. Their complaint, however, is usually exaggerated. As this new Swedish research shows the pay gap is much less than feminists claim (only 5% in Sweden) and the reason it exists has more to do with the jobs women choose than with any patriarchal bias.

Nor is it such a bad thing if men end up earning more than women. All this means is that men are working hard to support their families materially and that women are dedicating at least part of their time to caring for their children. The extra money that men earn, in other words, is not used to somehow oppress women, but rather to allow women to mother their children.

Follow the Aka men?

The Melbourne Herald Sun this morning carried a large article headed “Dads urged to get maternal”.

They weren’t kidding when they wrote the heading. The article begins by urging men to suckle their babies (for soothing rather than feeding purposes). Why? Because an anthropologist has found a small tribe of African pygmies in which this male suckling happens.

These pygmy men have been declared “World’s Best Dads” by FatherWorld magazine because they’re near their children 47% of the time.

Now, before men rush out to buy their maternity bras a few words of warning. First of all, liberals routinely misuse these kinds of anthropological findings.

Let’s remember that these Aka pygmies number roughly 30,000 out of a male population of over 3 billion. It’s not reasonable to suggest on the basis of this tiny population that male suckling of children is normal.

Remember, too, that when the Aka visit villages the mothers hold onto their babies for 90% of the time. It’s only when the tribe is moving around the forest foraging for food that mothers reduce their baby time to 40% by handing the baby around (7.3 times per hour).

I wonder too if Western women would want to follow a model of society in which 17% of men have more than one wife and child mortality runs at 20%. Note also that the anthropologist who has studied the Aka, Barry Hewlett, reports that “Aka society is very adult-centered in that parents seldom stop their activities to pay undivided attention to their children.” How can you be a world’s best dad if you seldom stop your activities to pay undivided attention to your children?

Nor do Aka fathers seek to discipline or role model their children. Instead, the children are left to be autonomous and therefore often act in disrespectful ways to their elders: an example given is a group of boys throwing sticks at an elderly man, who protested but was forced to retreat into the forest.

However, it’s not only a flawed use of the anthropology which undermines what is claimed in the Herald Sun article. There is also the assumption that a man makes himself a good father by holding onto a baby and doing maternal things. In other words, a very limited criteria for judging fatherhood has been employed.

Why shouldn’t a man’s efforts to provide material comfort for his family be counted as good fatherhood? Or his ability to successfully guide, educate and socialise his children? Or his ability to provide physical and emotional security for his wife and children? Why is it always just nappies, or even worse, “suckling”?

Which brings us to a final flaw. It is no accident that men are being judged in terms of their maternal rather than their paternal skills. Our political class is liberal and liberals believe that traditional sex roles are oppressive because they are “imposed” by biology rather than being individually chosen. Therefore, liberals assume that it’s a good thing to “throw off” traditional sex roles – for them it means that we are less limited in what we can choose to become.

But this is an ideological rather than a realistic view of things. The reality is that the natures of men and women are different and that most men will not be able to reproduce the kind of mother-love which women bestow upon their children.

The world’s best dads will be those who provide the most protected conditions for this mother-love to develop and flourish. This is one of the important gifts of a father to his children – a distinctive act of paternal care, rather than an ideological attempt to follow a unisex maternalism all the way to the nipple.

The two McConvills

James McConvill must be pleased with himself tonight. He had an opinion article today in both Melbourne newspapers.

What’s even more unusual is that the two articles are set against each other: one is conservative in its outlook and the other is liberal.

The conservative article is in the Herald Sun (not online). In this article McConvill argues that the attempt by women to choose everything by “having it all” hasn’t worked. He writes that,

Being a high-flying executive, the devoted parent, the loving partner, the loyal friend and the overall all-rounder is just not possible for any mere mortal.

Now, many writers have made similar observations. McConvill, though, goes further than most by drawing out questions of principle.

First, he writes that “With the potential dangers that too much choice can expose, the challenge for the feminist movement today is to appreciate that not only are there limits on what women can do, but that there should be self-imposed limitations on what women can choose.”

This is a direct challenge to the liberal first principle on which feminism is based. Liberals believe that to be fully human we must be self-created from our own individual will and reason. In order to be self-created, there must be no restrictions or limitations on our freedom to choose what we do and who we are. Our actions and identity, in other words, must be self-determined.

McConvill, in arguing that there are in fact limitations, is setting himself against this liberal principle. He also sets himself against the principle elsewhere in the article when he argues that “unfettered choice” can be oppressive, and that “propping up freedom of choice as the panacea for today’s woman” is misguided, and when he denies the feminist claim that “the key to women’s real liberation is self-determination – the freedom to structure one’s own path to success”.

The second way that McConvill breaches the liberal first principle is when he ponders the following question: if it’s not possible for women to choose everything, then what should they choose?

For feminists, the answer is that women should choose to focus on their careers rather than motherhood. The problem with motherhood for feminists is that it’s a traditional gender role. It’s thought of as a merely “biological destiny” – an identity which the individual inherits due to the accident of being born a woman, rather than something fashioned by individual reason.

McConvill, though, suggests that for many women motherhood would be the better choice. He cites “happiness studies” which show that family relationships are more important to individual well-being than “the great job, respect on a professional level, money and a glitzy lifestyle”.

McConvill goes so far as to suggest that rather than seeking to “dismantle the traditional stereotype” of women as mothers that “we should embrace it” for the majority of women.

So, in the Herald Sun article McConvill rather bravely challenges the very foundation principle of liberalism. In his article in The Age, though, he reverses his position.

The Age article is a tribute to former prime minister Paul Keating. Why does McConvill admire Keating so much? Because “He made me believe I could do anything and be anybody” – which made McConvill believe that “one day I too might become prime minister” and which inspired him to pursue his career success in the law.

There is a kind of selective conservatism happening here. McConvill is telling women that it’s important to accept that there are limits on what we can choose to do and be. But he applies to himself the liberal principle that he can do anything and be anybody – and that politicians should be judged by how well they promote this belief.

Such a selective conservatism obviously won’t work. Once you set up the liberal principle as the foundation stone of politics, as McConvill does in his tribute to Keating, it will eventually be applied across the board, including in the lives of women.

Prostitution update

Just a brief follow up to the post below. I decided to politely query Andrew Norton's claim that prostitution is a legitimate way for female uni students to finance themselves. I made the following comment at the Catallaxy site:

I have to say I'm surprised that no-one, even at a liberal site, has raised an eyebrow at Andrew's suggestion that prostitution is a legitimate way to finance your life.

Isn't this even the least bit controversial? Aren't there at the very least some doubts about the effects of prostitution on the psychological and emotional well-being of women?

Now, to the credit of the guys at Catallaxy I got some reasoned replies. However, these replies are only further confirmation that liberalism, even of the classic variety, cannot comprehend the full nature of man.

For instance, Jason Soon's reply was that:

1) women who engage in prostitution have few other prospects [but why then are female uni students taking up the "profession"? If a woman is smart enough to be at uni, capable enough to complete academic work, and physically attractive enough to earn money as a prostitute why doesn't she have other prospects?]

2) it is not that prostitution damages women's emotions but that women with damaged emotions go into prostitution [probably true, but choosing prostitution is hardly the best way to recovery]

3) stigmatising prostitution makes things harder for the prostitutes [perhaps, but the nature of what prostitutes do is what really harms them, rather than societal disapproval. The stigma might at least discourage some women from getting involved in the first place.]

However, what really struck me about Jason's reply was his following comment:

I'd argue that students who choose to engage in prostitution to supplement their discretionary income do so at their ... discretion and see no reason to stigmatise it as such ... They offer a service as do the rest of us which has a demand and willing customers.

Jason is establishing two criteria here for what makes something morally acceptable. First, is it something which is self-chosen (something done at our own discretion) and second is it something which acts within the terms of the free market.

The problem is that this approach is ideological. It derives from the right-liberal beliefs that we are made human by being self-created through our own reason and will (and that the "good" is therefore being unimpeded in our individual choices) and that the free market is the providential means of harmonising competing wills.

It's not an approach which connects well to the true "inner life" of man - to our "moral nature" if you like - nor does it really connect to the "real world effects" of moral choices - in this case, the real effects of prostitution on women.

Finally, Andrew Norton himself replied to my comment with an "I agree with Jason". Andrew believes that student prostitution is OK because the girls involved are "matter-of-fact" about it and enjoy "massive income advantages over job alternatives".

Andrew is operating with the idea that individuals will rationally choose to pursue their economic advantage within the free market. Aside from this "rational" choice, he has no other criteria with which to judge the morality of a particular choice or action. We are left with a vision of "Economic Man" and little more.

As I've noted before, I find this a curiously limited and diminished view of man. It's an irony that a humanistic philosophy like liberalism should end up making man seem so small.

Prostitutes as responsible citizens?

Don't expect too much from right-liberals in the moral sphere.

A left-wing researcher at Melbourne Uni has claimed that many female students are turning to prostitution because of Liberal Party welfare reforms.

Andrew Norton, the most mainstream right-liberal at the Catallaxy website, has chosen to defend the Liberal Party reforms as follows.

He claims that uni students have higher lifestyle expectations than in the past and that,

I can't see any reason for government to pay for all this, so students should work for it.

The interviews ... show that the sex worker students accept this. They are quite pragmatic about what they do, adopting the language of choice and individual responsibility ... We should not see student prostitution as a policy failure, but as a legitimate way a small minority of people choose to finance their lives.

Prostitutes, it seems, meet all the requirements of good right-liberal citizens. They don't make government bigger by depending on welfare but "responsibly" earn their own money. And they exercise a "pragmatic" individual choice in entering their field of work.

And this is all an intelligent right-liberal has to say on the issue. He is indifferent even to "pragmatic" questions of the real-world effects of prostitution on women, let alone the issue of moral integrity in the realm of sex and love.

This is an example, I think, of how liberalism, even in its right-wing forms, cannot adequately comprehend the nature of man. To someone not sharing this ideology the liberal approach to moral issues seems curiously artificial and stunted.

Something does not become moral because it is individually chosen or because it frees the market from government intervention.

The feminism which ends in tears

Virginia Haussegger is becoming well-known in Australia as a feminist critic of feminism.

She already had a public profile as a TV journalist when she wrote an explosive newspaper article in 2002, The sins of our feminist mothers.

In this article she describes how her generation of women was brought up to believe “We could be and do whatever we pleased”. This is the basic principle of liberalism: that we should be “free” to create who we are and what we do through our own individual choices.

At first things seemed to go well. She writes of a generation of women who “crashed through barriers and carved out good, successful and even some brilliant careers.”

But the story ends unhappily. The feminist mothers forgot “to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships.”

Virginia Haussegger describes very well the incompetent attitude to relationships of women brought up in a culture of liberal individualism:

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

Nor did the feminist mothers warn their daughters of the biological clock, so that:

We are the ones, now in our late 30s and early 40s, who are suddenly sitting before a sheepish doctor listening to the words:

“Well, I’m sorry, but you may have left your run too late. Women at your age find it very difficult to get pregnant naturally ...”

For Virginia Haussegger the end result is that,

here we are, supposedly “having it all” as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes ... It’s a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.

But the truth is – for me at least – the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless ... and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

It was wrong. It was crap.

Of course, Virginia Haussegger received a bucketing from the sisterhood for her bold complaints. She has, though, held firm in making criticisms of feminism, even publishing a book this month, Wonder Woman, in which she declares feminism to be “an inadequate structure from which to build a life.”

I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how far she goes in really challenging feminism. Not too far, I expect, as this would require a radical rethinking of the way things are valued in a liberal society.

Is the important thing in life, as liberals claim, establishing an unimpeded individual choice? If yes, then women who break down traditional restrictions on their choices, for instance by “breaking through” career barriers, really are the feminist heroines they are made out to be.

But what if this assumption is wrong? What if the important thing is to fulfil the better and deeper parts of our own inborn natures? Then the task would not be to break through traditional stereotypes but to create the best conditions in which we could fulfil our masculine or feminine natures – for instance, by protecting the conditions in which women could express and experience marital and maternal love.

Virginia Haussegger is trying to warn us that even when the liberal option is undertaken most successfully, even when we create the greatest level of individual autonomy, in which our individual choices are least impeded, all we get is a pleasant and comfortable, but barren and pointless existence.

When surrender isn't enough

From Paul Cella the following story of rights gone wrong.

In America a school wrestling league allows competition between high school boys and girls. Two Christian schools, which don't "want to put our young men in a situation where they would be inappropriately touching a young lady" have responded by allowing their male students to forfeit their matches against female competitors.

This, you might think, is a kind of principled surrender on the issue. The girls win the matches, but the boys don't have to act inappropriately. But for some liberal parents even this passive evasion is an infringement of the girls' "rights" and they plan to take the Christian schools to court.

Again, this case highlights the radically different attitudes to gender held by liberals and conservatives. For liberals, our sex is something we don't get to choose and is therefore an impediment to our freedom to decide individually who we are and what we do. Gender therefore has to be abolished as a "limiting" factor to individual choice and hence the insistence that there should not be discrimination on the basis of gender.

For conservatives the point of life is not an unlimited freedom to create ourselves in any direction. Instead, it's an effort to draw out the better, higher qualities of our given nature, including our nature as men and women. One part of the higher nature of men is to be physically protective toward women. Therefore a "gentleman" would not agree to engage in physically rough contact sports with women.

Of course, it's the liberal view of things which currently holds sway, which is why even a passive resistance on the issue by the two Christian schools has come under attack.

Radically inconsistent

I'd like to hear a liberal explain this one.

In 2003 a pregnant woman was violently attacked in NSW and tragically lost her baby. The attacker couldn't be prosecuted for murder or manslaughter as the unborn child was not considered a "separate entity" from the mother.

In response, as Marcel White reports, the NSW Parliament has recently passed a new law which would make it an offense punishable by up to 25 years jail to kill an unborn child in an attack on a mother.

But where is the consistency in this? When a mother doesn't want to complete a pregnancy, the state will actually pay for an abortion. The state does so many thousands of times a year. Therefore, you would think, the state has determined that there is no moral problem in deliberately killing the unborn.

But when a mother does want to complete a pregnancy, the killing of the unborn child suddenly attracts a penalty usually applied to manslaughter or murder. The unborn child in this case attracts the stern protection of the law.

As Marcel White observes,

In the legal world, it seems like in some situations it's a baby, and in other situations it's a loose conglomeration of cells. All is contingent on whether the mother wishes to have a child.

So what matters, in a liberal society, is what a woman wills. What is "moral" is that which gives her the freedom of individual choice. If this requires the state to fund abortions on the one hand but to prosecute severely those who kill unborn children on the other, then this is what will happen, in spite of the radical inconsistency of the two measures.

Liberals are willing to accept the inconsistency because they don't want to break with their own way of describing the nature and purpose of human existence, namely that we are made fully human, and partake in our humanity, when we create ourselves through our own will and reason.

Placing limits on our will, for a liberal, means denying a part of our humanity. Hence, the idea that the most moral thing must be to allow a woman to choose "in any direction".

The liberal world view, though, is arbitrary. There is no compelling reason why it should be accepted. It makes a lot more sense to define our humanity not in terms of a self-creating will, but in terms of a complex inborn nature acting within a given universe.

Liberals have succeeded in imposing their understanding of things on society in general, and without a challenge to this ideological orthodoxy, it's unlikely that there will be a change of heart, or even a search for consistency, on this issue.