Morality & human dignity

At a recent news conference the Australian Prime Minister said, “We don’t like the number of abortions. We think it’s too high.” As a measure to tackle the problem, funding was announced for counselling services for pregnant women.

Feminist Leslie Cannold doesn’t like this policy. In an Age article, she argued that counselling should not be aimed at supporting women to continue their pregnancies, but should simply foster the goal of female autonomy. She wrote:

There is one key feature that attaches to all legitimate counselling: the commitment to fostering a woman's autonomy. At the heart of all ethical medical practice, you will find the key value of autonomy, the Greek root of which means "self-rule". Why? Because only people free to direct and govern their lives according to their own values are recognised by others as having what Australian philosopher Robert Young describes as "the dignity that moral agency bestows".

This view is, of course, the standard liberal one. It is the idea that we have dignity as humans because of a freedom to choose our actions according to our own individual will and reason. In other words, what really matters in terms of moral choices is self-rule or autonomy.

Note that all that liberals care about is that we are self-directed according to our own values. This, in their opinion, is sufficient to create a human dignity. My values could be anything at all, but as long as they are mine and I am free to enact them, I am fulfilling my moral status as a human.

This is not the traditional view. Traditionally, it was thought that humans had been granted a free will. This free will was an aspect of human distinctiveness, and even of human dignity. It was not, though, something which needed to be asserted as a moral aim in itself, as it was a fixed possession – something given to us which could not be rescinded.

The fulfilment of our moral nature as humans was not, therefore, simply the existence of free will. It was the use of this will to choose what was morally right and to do so even when our own worldly interests suffered as a consequence.

There is an interesting article in City Journal by Theordore Dalrymple on this very theme. The article is about the novel A Clockwork Orange, written by Anthony Burgess.

Burgess imagines in this novel a scenario in which humans actually lost free will – in which they could be conditioned by the state to act as the state desired. For Burgess, such a scenario would undermine the possibility of genuine virtue because,

A good man, in Burgess’s view, had to have the ability to do evil as well as good, an ability that he would voluntarily restrain, at whatever disadvantage to himself.

This view of morality is much closer to the traditional one than to the modern liberal version outlined by Leslie Cannold. It does not make self-rule the object of morality, but instead understands morality in terms of a capacity to choose rightly or wrongly (free will) but in which the moral aim is to discipline the self to act according to an objective good.

Tyrants, invaders, imperialists?

There is a feminist argument which goes something like this. What matters is that I am able to follow my will. I can follow my will when I have money and power. Men have more money and power than women. Therefore men have organised a system, patriarchy, to give them a privilege of will at the expense of oppressed women.

Some feminists have added to this: men use violence against women to maintain the system of patriarchy. Therefore, ending violence against women means not so much punishing or treating individual male offenders, but attacking the whole social system of patriarchy.

It’s a neat little argument, but not one which catches the real motivations of men and women very well. For instance, it turns the hard-working husband who sacrifices a great deal to earn money for his family into an evil patriarch, intent on dominating his wife. Similarly, it undercuts the position of the woman who takes time off to raise her own children, as she is not successfully competing for money and power in doing so.

Still, the argument has been very influential. For instance, in 1994 the Keating Labor government released a “National Strategy on Violence against Women”. This strategy argued, in line with patriarchy theory, that all men were responsible for domestic violence.

The spokeswoman for the strategy, Kate Gilmore, denied that “men that are violent are different from every other man in the country”. Instead, all men in the family represented an aggressive, violent force against women. She wrote:

You can see the tyrants, the invaders, the imperialists, in the fathers, the husbands, the stepfathers, the boyfriends, the grandfathers, and it’s that study of tyranny in the home ... that will take us to the point where we can secure change.

Keating was unwise to endorse a strategy which understood the role of men so negatively and pessimistically. The blue collar male voter, in particular, was unimpressed by this and other hostile policies and turned against Keating at the next election. The Labor Party has to this date been unable to win them back.

Kate Gilmore seemed to have an inkling of how unpopular her strategy might prove, as she said at the time that,

there are a lot of men who feel very resentful of this message, there are a lot of women who out of loyalty to the men in their lives also find this a very difficult message.

Patriarchy theory was too insulting to men to succeed electorally. It will also in the future face other hurdles, including recent research into the causes of male violence.

For example, in Saturday’s Age there was an article on the topic of women who sexually abuse adolescent boys. The article contained this surprising information:

there is growing evidence that not only are young male victims of female sexual abuse severely affected, but that they are also at higher risk of going on to become abusers themselves.

"When you look at these men who have been abused by females, and compare them to the men abused by males, in terms of psychological function, they were doing as badly as the men abused by males," says Dr Patrick O'Leary, a senior lecturer in social work at the University of South Australia.

O'Leary, who conducted Australia's biggest study of male victims of sex abuse, says that having been sexually abused by a woman was for men a higher risk factor towards becoming a sexual offender than being abused by another male.

A study sponsored by the Public Health Agency of Canada, titled The Invisible Boy, made similar findings. Citing four research papers, the report said, "there is an alarmingly high rate of sexual abuse by females in the backgrounds of rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men (and) male adolescent sex offenders abused by 'females only' chose female victims almost exclusively".

What will patriarchy theorists make of this? There is growing evidence that sexually abusive men were themselves abused by women as adolescents. This suggests that the problem has more to do with a cycle of abuse than with a patriarchy in which all men fulfil a role of tyrants, invaders and imperialists.

No homeland for liberals?

As I have often admitted, liberalism does sound enticing on the surface. The idea that individuals should be free to create who they are according to their own will and reason has an appealing ring to it, and this doubtless explains some of liberalism’s success in the West.

It’s when you read the fine print that alarm bells start ringing. For instance, the logic of the liberal principle I set out above is to undermine traditional nationalism.

The reason is simple. A traditional national identity was important in defining the individual. However, as it was based on ethnicity (a shared ancestry, language, culture, religion and so on) it was something the individual inherited, rather than something he chose for himself.

Liberalism doesn’t want us to be “other” defined in any important way; it insists that we be self-defined. So traditional nationalism eventually came to be thought of as illegitimate within the terms of liberalism.

So what could a principled liberal do? From the start, some liberals replaced a traditional ethnic nationalism with a belief in internationalism. Most, though, have kept to some modified, liberal form of nationalism.

The problem is that such modern forms of nationalism are shallow, shifting and unstable. Usually they are based on the holding of common “values” (invariably liberal ones) to which any person can give their individual consent.

But this means two things. First, anyone can become a member of the nation, which makes membership of a nation less meaningful. Second, the geography of the “nation” you belong to can change radically. There are no limits to potential federations of nations, if all that is required is a shared commitment to liberal values or policy aims.

This is the political background to understanding the “nationalism” of Thomas Barnett, described as “a distinguished scholar” at a policy centre at the University of Tennessee. In a recent article, Mr Barnett had this to say about the war on terror:

We stand for a world connected through trust, transparency and trade, while the jihadists want to hijack Islam and disconnect it from all the corruption they imagine is being foisted upon it by globalization (aka, America’s “plot to rule the world”).

In that war of ideas, I’d still like to see Lady Liberty standing outside the wire instead of hiding behind it, and here’s why: I don’t have a homeland. My people left that place a long time ago.

I don’t have a homeland because I don’t live in a place - I live an ideal. I live in the only country in the world that’s not named for a location or a tribe but a concept. Officially, we’re known as the United States.

And where are those united states? Wherever there are states united. You join and you’re in, and theoretically everyone’s got an open invitation.

This country began as a collection of 13 misfit colonies, united only by their desire not to be ruled by a distant king.

We’re now 50 members and counting, with our most recent additions (Alaska, Hawaii) not even co-located with the rest, instead constituting our most far-flung nodes in a network that‘s destined to grow dramatically again.

Impossible, you say? Try this one on for size: By 2050, one out of every three American voters is slated to be Hispanic. Trust me, with that electorate, it won’t just be Puerto Rico and post-Castro Cuba joining the club. We’ll need either a bigger flag or smaller stars.

Note what Thomas Barnett is saying. He has reconciled himself to the fact that he has no homeland. The fact of homelands is something that, for him, belongs to the past. His modern “nation” is not even a place, but a concept.

As such, membership is open. Barnett expects, and looks forward to, a rapid growth in membership of the United States, with its borders to extend through Latin America.

Barnett has put his understanding of the “nation” more plainly and starkly than most other liberals, but even so it is perfectly in line with accepted policies in Western countries.

Those European leaders who are willing to cede the sovereignty of their own nation to a European Union, and to consider the admission of a non-European country, Turkey, are acting from a similar mindset to Barnett.

So too are the Australian politicians, from all political parties, who recommended the formation of a Pacific Union. These politicians no doubt consider themselves “nationalists” – in the Barnett sense, that is – but are happy to transfer their allegiance to an entirely new, sovereign Pacific state.

The fault lies ultimately in that seductive idea that we should be free to choose who we are according to our own individual will. This has delivered to us a nationalism in which there are no stable ethnic homelands – in which our loyalty is not even to a particular people or place, but to “concepts” which are all too easily transferable, so that nations become peculiarly vulnerable to dissolution within larger federations.

(Hat tip: Steve Edwards for the Barnett quote)

Gillard vs Gillard

Less than a year ago, Julia Gillard was interviewed by The Sunday Age on the issue of feminism. What Julia has to say on the issue is important, as she is a leading member of the Labor Party and considered to be prime ministerial material.

Her views were clear and very much in line with feminist orthodoxy. Girls, she opined, should have choices, except that the choice to be a traditional stay-at-home mum was no longer an option. In her own words:

If one suggested to a girl in school today that her future life would consist of marriage, raising children and tending the family home, she would no doubt look at you as if you had just arrived from Mars ...

... while she may not know what course she wants to chart out in her life yet, she knows work will play a role in it – and an important one. Whether for the thrill of career, the social integration of work, the pay packet or for a mix of all of them, she’ll work. (The Sunday Age 8th May 2005)

So in May 2004 Gillard’s attitude was that women who wanted to be mothers would do so by mixing their careers with motherhood. To suggest anything else was out of this world.

This is not what traditionalists like myself want to hear. We believe that the motherhood role is an important one, and that it’s a positive thing for women to be able to stay at home to raise their children.

So should we be worried? Was Julia Gillard right to declare traditional motherhood to be unrewarding and effectively defunct?

There are several reasons why we should not be too worried about Julia’s comments. First, she contradicts herself in the very same interview. Having declared that being a stay-at-home mum is too unrewarding to contemplate, she then declares of the modern woman that,

She should be surrounded by boys who grow up to be men who feel free to make the choice to be the carer, the at-home dad, the part-time working dad, to have more options than being the breadwinner.

So it turns out that being an at-home carer is not so bad after all – Julia Gillard even recommends it as a liberating option for men. It seems that what Julia Gillard really objects to about women staying at home is not that it’s unrewarding, but that it’s a traditional gender role.

This raises a further question. Is it really true that young women have rejected traditional gender roles? There are reasons to think not. For instance, a recent survey of 5,000 teenage girls in Britain found that an overwhelming 97% wanted their future partner to be the main earner in the relationship. They utterly rejected the idea of a gender role swap.

Which brings us to the most surprising evidence against the Gillard view: Julia Gillard herself. She has now revealed that she might have happily ditched her career, despite having a most glamorous job, if she had met the right man:

If I’d met a man that, you know, I was tremendously in love with and the one thing he wanted was to have kids, then obviously I might have made a different set of decisions.

Furthermore, she doesn’t think she herself could have mixed motherhood and career, despite recommending it as the only option for today’s women:

I’m full of admiration for women who can mix it together, working and having kids, but I don’t think I could have.(Herald Sun 5th March 2006)

According to Sally Morrell, in today’s Herald Sun, Gillard continues by saying,

I can understand it all at an intellectual level and I do admire it, but I think I just emotionally would have found that all very tough.

Sally comments,

That may be because of the loving way she was brought up – hands-on, no child care.

Which is the same way her sister, Alison, brought up her own two children.

Gillard can’t remember ever having a babysitter as a child and says her niece and nephew could count on one hand the number of times they’ve been babysat.

To Gillard it was always going to be an either-or decision. “You’re working at this intense, high level or you’re having kids,” she said.

Makes sense to me.

So there is a divide here between what Julia Gillard thinks intellectually ought to happen (breaking down traditional gender roles) and what she values in her own personal experience (being brought up in the care of her own mother).

The problem is that in these situations the intellectual understanding always wins out. It is thought to be more principled to follow the intellectual understanding, and to try to get young women to reject at-home motherhood, despite what we value in our own lives.

Which is why we need to tackle the intellectual assumptions of liberalism, in which traditional arrangements are considered illegitimate precisely because they are so important within our own nature that they are seen to be an unchosen destiny, rather than a product of our own reasoned choices.

If we continue to accept this liberal intellectual framework, then we won’t be able to reconcile what we understand intellectually and what is truly important in our own lives.

Choice for men?

The logic of making "choice" central to morality is unravelling further.

For years we have been told that a woman has a right to choose whether or not to become a mother, and that for this reason abortion must be allowed.

Now in America a man is arguing in court that he should have a similar right to "choose" whether or not to become a father.

It seems that the man was misled by a sexual partner who told him that she was infertile. The man is claiming he should have no liability for the child which resulted from the relationship as he never chose to have it.

The court case has put pro-abortion women in a difficult position. One liberal, pro-abortion woman, Lindsay Beyerstein, has argued that men should continue to pay for unwanted offspring on the following grounds:

If you know that you might become a dad whether you like it or not and you have sex anyway, the consequences are your problem.

Anna Winter, an Australian left-liberal, read this argument and blanched. For obvious reasons. After all, if applied consistently, doesn't it also suggest that women who have sex knowing that pregnancy might result should also live with the consequences?

So Anna has taken a different approach, and argued that both men and women ought to be able to opt out: women through abortion and men by having a right to disown a child (in certain circumstances). She writes:

I do have sympathy for the idea that men should be able to choose parenthood, and that "if you don't want to get a woman pregnant then don't have sex" is not an acceptable response ...

... should there be room for an opt-out for men who find themselves potential fathers after one-night stands or in situations where they have already made their wishes clear? Yes, it would be an enormous, morally difficult choice. But if we are to argue that women are capable of considering such huge, life-altering issues, then is it hypocritical to deny men the same level of respect?

So Anna is willing to let the state, rather than the father, pay for a child's upkeep, to keep consistently to the principle of "choice" in morality.

The question then becomes: will the state be willing to pay?

I doubt it, and therefore the Beyerstein double standard is likely to continue, in which men are told that it is morally wrong not to accept the consequences arising from sexaul relationships, whilst women are told they have a right to choose whether to live with such consequences or not.

From the conservative point of view, it is the whole approach of trying to decide moral issues on the basis of "choice" which is wrong and which leads to such outcomes, in which one woman argues for a blatant double standard, and another, in order to be consistent, accepts the idea of men disowning their own children.

Does ethnicity matter?

Does ethnicity matter? Is it important?

Right-wing (classical) liberals generally answer with a consistent “no”. Even if they feel some sense of ethnic identity themselves, they believe that a modern, autonomous individual should be shaped by his own reasoned choices. We don’t get to choose our ethnicity, so it is assumed (at best) that ethnicity is something of secondary rank within human nature, something of a sentimental nature, but not relevant to how we choose to organise our lives or our society.

Left-wing liberals are less consistent. Like all liberals, they believe that we are human because of a freedom to exercise our individual will. Therefore, they tend to read issues in terms of power relations: who is dominant in their will over others. Those tagged as dominant tend to lose moral legitimacy, as they are thought to have organised a privilege at the expense of the oppressed “other”.

What this means is that left-wing liberals will generally be harsher on ethnic groups tagged as “dominant” than on those they consider oppressed – especially if the “oppressed” group is thought to be rallying around ethnic discrimination to improve their status.

For a traditionalist conservative like myself, neither of these liberal views is adequate. A traditionalist would argue that ethnicity is important in creating a social context for individual life and in providing a core source of identity for individuals.

This is true whether we belong to a large, successful, “dominant” ethnic group (e.g. the Japanese), or a small, beleaguered one (e.g. an Amazonian rainforest tribe).

The importance of ethnicity is evident even amongst Western populations who are supposed to have transcended it some generations ago.

In my recent reading I have happened across the following three stories, each highlighting the continuing relevance of ethnicity in the West.

The first deals with an unhappy topic: the suicide rate amongst adoptees in Sweden. A large scale research project has found that children adopted from overseas are several times more likely to suicide than ethnic Swedes.

Why? One plausible explanation offered by the research is that it’s “not unusual for foreign adoptees to have greater problems in finding their identity in relation to their parents and society as a whole.” In other words, they suffer because they are less sure of who they are both in terms of their family and their ethnicity.

(After the Asian tsunami the UN discouraged adoption offers from Australia for precisely this reason.)

Then there is the following snippet of information from a science website:

If your spouse is genetically similar, you’re more likely to have a happy marriage ... Child abuse rates are lower when similarity is high, and you’ll also be more altruistic and willing to sacrifice more for someone who is more genetically like you, research shows.

This supports data produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing that divorce is twice as likely when spouses are born in different countries.

Finally, there was the newspaper report on housing trends in Melbourne. The featured family, the Gannons, were moving from West Brunswick to McKinnon for several reasons:

I saw it as a very good area to bring up a family, probably as opposed to where we live at the moment. Nothing against it, but you’ve got schools that aren’t that great, a big influx of migrants, we’re not that far away from Housing Commission, which affects the schooling, so that was a consideration.

All these cases involve serious issues: where to raise your family, marriage outcomes, mental health. In each case, ethnicity remains an important factor and can’t simply be relegated to a sentimental B-League, as some liberals might expect us to do.

Are men the cosmic enemy?

There are enemies, and then there are cosmic enemies. What is the difference?

Let me explain it this way. There are liberals who believe that humanity can be decisively liberated, so that the "new man" who is free and equal can triumph and thereby achieve the proper end of history (i.e. of human progress).

But what is stopping this decisive victory of the new man? Why can't we move forward and be liberated?

Some political moderns (usually radicals of various kinds) answer: there is an enemy group, an oppressor group, which is frustrating the arrival of the new free and equal man.

This oppressor group comes to be seen not just as a normal political rival or opponent, but as a powerful "cosmic enemy" whose existence prevents the realisation of our true humanity.

The hand of the cosmic enemy is detected in all the problems we suffer, to the point that the normal rules of morality are put aside and it is thought desirable to abolish the very existence of this enemy.

But who exactly has filled the role of this cosmic enemy? If we go back to the time of the French Revolution, the aristocracy were seen to be the enemies of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and a considerable violence was meted out to them in order to abolish the ancien regime.

So this represents, perhaps, the first development of the idea of a "cosmic enemy".

At the time of the Russian Revolution, it was the bourgeoisie who were thought to be the natural enemies of a workers' state, again with violent measures attached.

However, the fullest development of the idea came with Hitler, who identified the Jews as the cosmic enemy, and who violently sought their annihilation.

And since then? There still exist whites who see the Jews as a cosmic enemy. But it is more mainstream now for gentile whites themselves to be seen this way.

The most obvious example is the politics of Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard professor, who publishes a journal with the motto "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity". Ignatiev has written that "The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any oppostion".

Finally, there is also a current within feminism which views men as a cosmic enemy. Consider the following quote from Higginbottom and Roy in Feminist Action 1 (1984):

Men's minds are not true ... We must learn about men and their archetypes in order to put them back in their place - they are an aberration and out of control ... Men won't exist for much longer.

Here we have feminists yearning for the very abolition of men. The Sydney Morning Herald published another feminist piece earlier this year, by American columnist Maureen Dowd, which also breezily contemplated the extinction of men.

Dowd quotes a male researcher, Dr Bryan Sykes, who has perfected the "men as cosmic enemy" line. According to Dowd,

He fantasises about "a world without men", a version of the mythological "cult of Diana" hunter-gatherer societies where women were in charge and men were just there for entertainment, where there would be "no Y chromosomes to enslave the feminine, the destructive spiral of greed and ambition diminishes and, as a direct result, the sickness of our planet eases. The world no longer reverberates to the sound of men's clashing antlers and the grim repercussions of private and public warfare."

It is this kind of thinking which is the most dangerous kind of "hate speech", because it is not merely a criticism of an opposing group, but a totalising world view in which the enemy is responsible for a failure to achieve the promised land, so that the abolition of the enemy, even by violent means, is eagerly anticipated.

But note that this notion of a cosmic enemy stems from a "progressive" politics. It rests on the idea that the arrival of a "new man" is imminent, but is frustrated by the cosmic enemy.

It is difficult for conservatives to understand this mentality. For us, the human condition does not allow an "end point" to history. There will always be a struggle to achieve what we think is ideal in society, not just because of the challenge of outsiders ("enemies"), but even more so because of the inevitable frailties existing within our own natures.

(Hat tip: this post, including the term "cosmic enemy", was suggested by comments made by the American traditionalist, Lawrence Auster, at his website View from the Right, as well as ideas expressed at the same site by the commentator Matt.)

Isn't this domestic violence?

The domestic violence campaigns assume that men are always the perpetrators. But in real life things are more complicated.

Pell & his critics

Last week liberal Catholics revealed that they had reported Cardinal Pell of Sydney to the Vatican for preaching “outside of mainstream doctrine” (which, we are told, is not quite the same thing as heresy).

Why? The liberals in the Church don’t like what Cardinal Pell has to say on the issue of individual conscience.

I’m not surprised the liberals are upset. Cardinal Pell has done what the liberals would not have wanted him to do: he has identified the difference between a view of morality inspired by secular liberalism, and a Catholic view.

What is the secular liberal idea of morality? Liberals believe that we become human when we choose for ourselves who we are and what we do. Therefore, liberals generally make the assumption that there is nothing in our nature, or in the way the world is constituted, which might limit the choices open to us. We can inscribe on ourselves whatever seems best. As long as what we choose does not restrict the similar freedom of others it is permissible.

What matters to a liberal is more the fact that a choice is “self-authored”, rather than what is actually chosen.

This is a view which runs counter to the authority of traditional moral codes and that of church hierarchies, as these will both appear to a liberal to be external impediments to the self-authoring individual.

What does Cardinal Pell have to say about such ideas? A good place to find the answer is a lecture given by Cardinal Pell two years ago at the University of Cambridge.

In this lecture, Cardinal Pell argues against the idea that there is a primacy of individual conscience. Pell begins his argument by quoting and commenting on the following from John Paul II:

For man has in his heart a law written by God. To obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged (cf. Romans 2:-14-16). Naturally, though this law is written in our hearts, it is not our hearts’ law: it is God’s law.

This is not what a liberal would want to hear. This is not a view of man as being unbounded in his choices, but one which asserts the existence of a moral law (and therefore the possibility of right choices) and also the existence of a given moral nature in man (and therefore the possibility of a “right will”).

Our dignity as humans, in this view, depends on whether our will is aligned with our given moral nature. It is a perfection of will, rather than a “liberation” of will, which is important.

Later in the lecture Cardinal Pell observes that,

Unless all kinds of implicit Christian assumptions are made explicit, the claim to the primacy of individual conscience easily becomes in our cultural context the same as a claim to personal moral autonomy. Fine though autonomy is, in Christian hands this has tended to become code for “rationalisation of personal wishes” and there is no dignity in that, unless our wishes are for the genuine good. A wish isn’t dignifying just because it’s mine.

Again, this won’t go down well in the liberal heartlands. Cardinal Pell is explaining that in a liberal society, arguing for the primacy of individual conscience easily slips into the idea that there is no higher moral authority than ourselves as individuals, so that we can falsely dignify as “moral” whatever it is that we desire for ourselves.

Cardinal Pell develops this theme further when he notes that,

Most Western moral philosophers since the eighteenth century ... have followed Kant in advocating some form of moral self-legislation and government (autonomy) ... Kant would be appalled by contemporary autonomy liberalism. He believed in objective morality ... which autonomy gives us the means and opportunity to follow, never a self-made morality of private preference.

Finally, Pell discusses the views on conscience of Cardinal Newman. It seems that even in the 1800s, Cardinal Newman thought it important to distinguish a Catholic view of conscience from the secular liberal view.

First, Cardinal Newman emphasised that conscience was external to our own will: he termed it a “messenger from Him” or “the aboriginal Vicar of Christ”. That this placed Newman outside of liberal orthodoxy he well knew:

Newman carefully distinguishes this proper understanding of Christian conscience from its secular alternative, which is “in one way or another a creation of man”. “Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been superseded by a counterfeit, which the 18 centuries prior to it never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it, if they had. It is the right of self-will ... It is the very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience.”

I won’t attempt a more detailed summary of Cardinal Pell’s arguments. All that I’ve tried to show here is the effort made by Cardinal Pell to separate the secular liberal view of morality from the Catholic one. Cardinal Pell is correct, I believe, in thinking it important to make this distinction at a time when the Church is suffering the effects of “the acid rain of modernity on our Catholic communities.”

Young, crazy, out of control

There are a lot of young Australian expats - about 10% of Australians aged 18 to 35 live overseas. Why? The reasons are looked at in a new book by 25-year-old Ryan Heath, an extract of which was printed in The Age this morning.

Some of the expats he interviews come across as profoundly narcissistic. For instance, Holly Lyons, now living in London complains that,

In Australia the television industry is ageist. As a 22-year-old woman, it was impossible to get work heading a script department.

Yes, Holly, it's tough not being able to start out at the top.

A lot of the expats, though, complain about a lack of job opportunities in Australia. This is interesting, as our Government justifies its immigration programme on the basis that Australia has too few skilled workers; the expats are providing evidence that the opposite is true and that there is an oversupply.

How do you fix this situation? Ryan Heath's solution is not to give preference to Australian youngsters seeking professional work, ahead of overseas applicants. Instead, it's actually to increase overseas migration and to create vacancies by kicking the older generation of Australians out of work (The charming title of his book, addressed to baby boomers, is Please Just F*** Off, It's Our Turn Now).

Heath is serious when he calls for more immigration. He wants Australia to be more globalised in its demographics and writes,

The truth is that Australia doesn't really have a world city - and it's too deluded to realise what it needs to do to create one.

Reading the morning papers in the aftermath of th 2005 London bombings, I was struck by the faces of London. Thirty-two of the 39 photos of victims that stared at us that next morning were under 35 and looked like the United Nations.

That's when I realised what a real "world city" is. It's not easy; it's not white; it's not old. It's crazy and colourful and out of control in a way I don't recognise in Australia.

This is not the most obvious conclusion to draw from the London bombings. But equally odd is Heath's next argument. He claims that Sydney is only a middle-ranking city and that,

it takes no great leap of the imagination to put Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg on the same footing as Sydney. But it's a real challenge for white chauvinists to think that a Portuguese-speaking city might be more interesting.

The funny thing about this quote is that I have often wondered whether liberals really want Australia to end up like Brazil. And it seems that for Ryan Heath the answer is actually yes. He thinks it could only be chauvinism which might make an Australian prefer Sydney to Rio.

Ryan Heath, as you may have guessed, is not a politically neutral commentator. His leftist credentials include being a National Union of Students representative, and working as an Australian Labor Party adviser and refugee advocate.

He is not, though, considered to be radically leftist; some have actually critised his book for selling out the cause, and Heath himself wrote in reply to one correspondent that,

I am more glad that you still called me 'left'. I think quite a few people worry I have abandoned that perspective.

So he is not even on the far left. The gap between liberals, even of the mainstream variety, and the rest of us seems to be growing ever larger.

The no future clause

There are people who like the idea of liberalism. They are attracted by the thought that we might define who we are by our own individual choices. Last year, authoress Lionel Shriver wrote an article for The Guardian in which she paid tribute to the liberal idea. But her article had an unexpected twist: she recognised in the very philosophy she was praising the seeds of Western decline. So she wavers in her article between an appreciation of liberalism and an awareness that it has a no future clause for any society which adopts it. Why no future? Because if we are concerned only to be autonomous in our choices, then we will shift our emphasis,

from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction

and this makes it less likely that we will commit ourselves to family life and children and the creation of new generations. Lionel Shriver believes that this underlies the falling birthrate in Western countries. She describes what has happened to the culture of the West as follows:

Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lower-case gods of our private devising. We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life ... We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty ... We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead ... we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not ‘Did I serve family, God and country?’ but ‘Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon?

As I have mentioned, Lionel Shriver is not entirely unsympathetic to such a culture. She thinks it has an “upside” in people trying to live for the moment and pack as much as they can into their lives. Her liberalism, in fact, is utterly orthodox when she suggests that material progress may lead inevitably to a modern Western style culture:

Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them.

This is a pure and intense liberalism. The claim is that we ourselves can decide the limits of what we might become, which means that there are no limits. The self, in this view, is borderless and open. (In contrast, conservatives would claim that we do have an inborn nature which gives a natural direction to our lives. An example would be our nature as men and women, which does influence our behaviour, our identity, our social roles and our ideals.) Wavering women Lionel Shriver, therefore, is a woman who believes in the liberal idea, but who regrets its major consequence: that the West won’t reproduce itself. She develops this view further by interviewing some of her female friends, who similarly waver between their support for a liberal culture and their regret about a failure to reproduce. First, there is 44-year-old Gabriella, who thought having children would compromise her autonomy – her freedom to choose – and only changed her mind when it was too late. She tells us that,

Having children in my 20s would have spelled the end of everything I had spent my life working towards and was about to really enjoy: the ability to spend my money the way I wanted, travel where I wanted, choose my partners, live as I wished.

Gabriella has accepted the fact of being childless, but she does feel some sense of loss that she has not passed on her genes to future generations. She states that,

If people like me don’t reproduce, civilisation may be the worse for it ... I am a typical product of my family; I can see the thread stretching back through the generations. Do I think it’s a shame that this genetic inheritance won’t continue? Yes I do ...

Then there is Nora. She is a childless woman who aims to continue “to have fun, to enjoy my job, to meet interesting people, to go on great holidays, to read interesting books” and so on. But she too has regrets. “I think my parents came from an excellent gene pool," she says, "and it’s a shame that, to date, that hasn’t been passed on.” Then there’s this:

at the end of our exchange Nora declares fervently, “You and I should have had children!” – hastily appending that she meant not for our own sakes, but in social terms. “We’re blessed with brains, education and good health.” She admits that the longer our discourse has continued, “the more I think I am a squanderer of my gifts and my heritage. But I live in a decadent age where that doesn’t seem such a problem. Anyway, devoting my whole life to promulgating my ethnicity is a big ask.

And from here the balance in the article swings decisively to a disappointment with liberalism as a dead end. Lionel Shriver is moved to write:

Contentment. Happiness. Satisfaction. Fun. There’s nothing, strictly speaking, wrong with these concerns, but they are all of a piece. They fail to take into account that our individual lives are tiny beads in a string. Our beloved present is merely the precarious link between the past and the future – of family, ethnicity, nation and species. We owe our very contentment ... to the ingenuity of our ancestors, yet it rarely seems to enter the modern childfree head that proper payback of that debt might entail handing the baton of our happy-happy heritage on to someone else.

Even more trenchantly she adds,

My friends and I are decent people – or at least we treat each other well. We’re interesting. We’re fun. But writ large, we’re an economic, cultural and moral disaster. There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn’t make Gabriella and me the “mavericks” that we’d both have fancied ourselves in our younger days, but standard issue for our age. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy – a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise ... Large sectors of western population have broken faith with the future.

In Lionel Shriver we have a liberalism grown wistful and self-critical, but too deeply ingrained to be jettisoned. Let’s hope that others will take the further, necessary step of repudiating liberalism more decisively, as a mark of faith in our own future.

The exquisite morality of a ratfink

What does cartoonist Michael Leunig think about the Danish cartoons affair? His answer, as set out in The Age today, appears to be this: treating people with respect is more important than freedom of speech, unless the people are Westerners, in which case they should rightly have ridicule dumped on them.

Think I'm being unfair? Well it's true that Leunig dresses up his argument in much moral finery of expression. Even so, it's not hard to recognise the primal emotions bubbling away underneath: an uncritical adulation of the outsider and a vilification of his own society.

But here is Leunig in his own words:

Some very vile and vicious things are done in the name of freedom. Mischief and bad motivation attach themselves, surreptitiously and parasitically to noble ideas. We've seen a lot of that lately ...

I am also suspicious of the motivation behind the commissioning of the famous Danish cartoons. I suspect that hatred may lie at the heart of the matter, even though hatred is a condition the West increasingly disowns.

The anti-cartoon riot story, as ugly as it is, must surely be the consequence not only of a handful of dull cartoon cliches, but of the accumulated anger resulting from the humiliation, persecution and suffering inflicted on Islam by the West. [See it's all our fault.] The cartoons are taunts, probably deliberate, to an aggrieved and traumatised spiritual community who feel at the mercy of the West's contempt, ignorance and ruthless military might. [It's all our fault, just in case we didn't get the message the first time.]

Any cartoonist with a heart or conscience (from whence good cartoons come) would not mock or taunt such a group in this formally transgressive way. [I almost fell of my seat laughing at this point: a liberal complaining about transgression? Liberals transgress as readily as they breathe. The cultural history of the West during my own lifetime has been one of transgression.] I like Manning Clarke's advice here: look with the eye of pity, which implies mercy and respect, the qualities which redeem a society more than the quality of raw freedom. [Manning Clarke was a fellow traveller who couldn't quite make his mind up about communist Russia.]

Any Australian who has lingered in an indigenous community learns of the traditional sacred protocols and chooses to respect them or not. To publish a photograph of a recently deceased Aborigine is something a white photographer might be asked to avoid. It is a matter of respect and character whether a photographer complies. [Note: Aborigines get respect.]

Public cartoon ridicule is properly dumped on the slick and the mighty, the officially powerful, on our own smug mob, on the triumphant ones protected by helicopter gunships and offices of state. [Note: Aborigines are not "smug", Muslims are not "smug", but we are, so we don't get respect.]

Cartooning is psychoanalytic and it is best when it discomforts us, not them ...

And on it goes. The underlying assumption is that morality works as follows: if you are strong you are morally bad, if you are weak you are morally good.

As a consequence it pays in a Leunigian world to be weak. You get to be morally justified. The strong, in comparison, get a guilt which no amount of mea culpas is going to wash away.

It is all very unhealthy. It requires the adoption of moral double standards. It justifies a most basic disloyalty to your own community. And it irrationally makes strength a vice and weakness a virtue.

Leunig makes considerable use of the phraseology of traditional morality to make it all sound more palatable, but no amount of rhetorical gloss will ever make his arguments sound.

What is the C for?

There was an odd twist today to the campaign in Australia to legalise the abortion drug RU486. A letter appeared in The Age supporting the campaign and praising parliamentarian Lyn Allison for telling the world about her own abortion. The letter runs:

Thanks to the courage of four female senators who put forward a private bill, the question of whether women will have access to RU486 is one step closer ... Particular acknowledgement must go to Lyn Allison, whose bravery in telling her personal story will come as a great comfort to the many women who have also made the difficult decision to have an abortion. I hope that members of the House of Representatives will follow in the footsteps of their Senate colleagues and vote in support of this important bill ...

Why is this so remarkable? It was penned by the Shannon Rees, the President of the YWCA!

I'd known that the YWCA was left-leaning but this open and extravagant support for abortion by a supposedly Christian women's organisation surprised me.

So I went to the YWCA website and discovered the following:

YWCA used to stand for Young Women's Christian Association. Our name was officially changed to YWCA in 2002. Although we respect and honour our Christian history, we are a modern progressive secular organisation ... YWCA women are united by one belief: a commitment to equality and opportunity for all women, and peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all people.

So they no longer pretend to be Christian. In some ways I admire them for their honesty. It's clear that many "Christian" organisations are so in name only and are really motivated by secular "progresssive" ideals. Perhaps in coming years we'll see more of these nominally Christian organisations follow the lead of the YWCA and formally renounce their religious affiliation.

Are we entering a feminist down phase?

Some years ago I was browsing through a pile of American magazines from the late 1940s in a second hand bookshop. The most interesting article I found was written by a female columnist (the magazine was from around 1946 or 1947). She argued that women had had enough of the hardships brought about by feminism (loneliness, childlessness etc) and that it would be a relief to return to more traditional values.

Which is what women did in the 1950s, thereby ending the first great wave of feminism which had begun (roughly speaking) in the 1860s (there had been individual feminists before then, but it seems to have been in the 1860s that feminism was first taken up as government policy in Great Britain).

I wonder if we are now poised on the brink of another feminist down phase. There seems to be a similar weariness amongst women - an unwillingness to continue shouldering the burden of overwork and poor family outcomes which are associated with modern feminism.

This wearing down of feminism from within is especially marked in a recent article in the Daily Mail by Amanda Platell (The Silent Conspiracy, 28th January 2006). The entire article is worth reading as evidence of a change in attitude, but let me cite some of the most revealing passages.

Here is Amanda Platell explaining that despite her glamorous career and lifestyle she wishes to question the feminist legacy:

Fortunate as I am to have lived the life I have done, my marriage ended in failure and I was never able to have the children I longed for (though in my case that owed more to biology than circumstance). Look around you and there are plenty of others like me; the women who inherited a new world order - and who now bear the emotional scars to prove it.

It's only now, as we start to look back, that we can see just how much we've scorched the social landscape around us. In our rush to embrace the new, we have systematically rejected much that, for centuries past, had brought women stability and happiness. Is it any wonder that the younger generation aren't sure what to think, and instead allow the thrill of youthful hedonism to drown out the conflicting signals around them.

On the one hand they are told they must strive to have it all; and on the other, they can see around them the evidence that this will never truly be possible. Or at least not without great cost to their physical and emotional well-being.

Far too often, it seems to me, the unwitting price of female emancipation has been heartache, stress and a life spent chasing false promises. But if we women are ever to feel truly happy with our lot, I believe we have to stop whingeing, stop blaming men and society, stop playing the victim and stand up and ask the unthinkable; are we ruining for ourselves? Could it be that the freedom we now enjoy is part of the problem?

Another revealing part of the article begins when Amanda Platell seeks a comment from author Fay Weldon, once a feminist icon:

"Women like you should be cursing women of my generation", she told me. "All we did was make you go out to work and earn money and have children and completely exhaust yourselves. I'm sorry". She called women like me 'the lost generation' - the ones who had inherited a barren landscape after the revolution had marched through.

"If you want to be like a man, then feminism hasn't gone far enough", she said, "if you want to be like a woman, it has gone too far.

And there, straight away, was the kernel of the matter: feminism was supposed to about equality, not sameness. We wanted to better our sex, not obliterate it. But that is what has happened. In striving to be the same as men, the only things we were guaranteed were the exhaustion and stress and guilt that came with the effort of labouring to become something we never were and never could be.

And striving to be like a man had other consequences. For a start, men don't like it - at least, not the kind of men you'd want to spend your life with. This has led to another unsayable truth. Women today take their 20's out for themselves, to pursue career and relationships - but not permanent ones - to experiment, to have fun. It's the 'me' decade of their life. I have no problem with that, but it does lead to a kind of independence that can make it hard for women to ever settle down with another person and willingly accept all the emotional and financial compromises that entails.

This, in turn, has led to another unintended consequence - this time biological. The principled and often pathological belief that men and women have to be treated the same has led women to believe they can have kids whenever they want and with whomever they want - or even by themselves if they choose. The principle legacy of that belief is not more contented mothers, but more women putting money in the pockets of a booming fertility industry as they discover the hard way that nature doesn't perform to order and pays no regard to social idealism.

Then there is the following extraordinary admission which Amanda Platell obtains from Tessa Jowell, the Minister for Women:

I felt sure the Minister for Women, Tessa Jowell, would have some right-on feminist response, so I tracked her down at the start of a countrywide tour where she was listening to women's concerns. I expected a sop: what I got was a shock.

Tessa said straight out that her daughter would not tolerate the stress of the impossible juggling act that women of her generation performed. Moreover, she admitted no amount of government policy would ever bring about the perfect work/life balance that might help make women happier. Part of the problem, she admitted, was that the anticipated participation of men in the home and parenting stakes has simply not materialised, and certainly not to the degree expected.

Women, even when they work full-time, are still the primary carers of children and elderly relatives, still do most of the housework, cooking and shopping. Only a fraction of men have taken up paternity leave.

Perhaps, as Tessa suggested to me, such characteristics are part of women's DNA - and no amount of legislation can change this fundamental difference between the sexes.

(This last statement of Tessa Jowell is the most significant. It represents a truly heretical thought within the church of liberalism: that perhaps we can't choose to be anything we will ourselves to be, because science has proven the reality of gender difference. Gender, in other words, can't be made not to matter, because our distinctive masculinity and femininity is hardwired into us.)

Time will tell whether Amanda Platell is representative of the spirit of the age, and that we really are to get some relief from feminism.

I'm not suggesting that institutional feminism will go away. Even in the 1950s there were UN women's officers jetting around the globe to various conferences and no doubt this will continue.

But perhaps at ground level some more space will open up for romance, marriage and motherhood.

The unturned mind

In the year 1587 (or thereabouts) Sir Walter Raleigh wrote the following lines for Queen Elizabeth,

But true love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning;
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.

The last line is the most striking. It suggests something important: that a mind which loves does not turn against itself.

The conservative mind, I believe, does not readily turn against itself. It does not seek to step outside a faithfulness to natural forms of love, attachment and identity.

This helps to explain the reluctance of conservatives, throughout the centuries, to grapple with the liberal mindset. There would be some discomfort and confusion for a conservative to turn his mind the way a liberal does.

There is a lesson here too for the modern Christian churches. At times the churches seem to suggest that Western man should practise a kind of self-abnegation as an act of love for "the Other".

But in reality this suggestion is incoherent. If the Christian churches want love, they should preach the opposite of self-annihilation for the Other, and instead encourage the Western mind to stay true to itself, its loyalties and attachments.