Can Latham rescue fatherhood?

Mark Latham is the new leader of the Labor Party opposition in Australia.

He has recently turned his attention to what he calls a crisis in masculinity. According to Latham the identity of men has become "blurred and confused" leading to loneliness and depression.

The solution suggested by Mr Latham is that "We should foster fatherhood at every opportunity" so that men have "a real sense of belonging to society".

So far, so good. But then Mr Latham spoils it all by outlining his model of fatherhood. As one paper reported it,

Mr Latham ... said men needed to do more to recognise the significance of fatherhood.

He said he expected more men to give up work to stay home to care for children.

"Women have traditionally taken this role, but I expect in future we will have many more stay-at-home dads in Australia," he said.

"This is an important part of rebuilding male identity - recognising the significance of fatherhood."

So there you have it. Mr Latham's wants to rebuild male identity by having men take over the traditional female role of mothering children. And this is supposed to make men less confused!

Individualism

Left liberals like Mr Latham often seem willing to talk about concepts like identity and connectedness, concepts which are also important to conservatives.

The problem is that the left liberal attempt to deal with such things inevitably becomes twisted by their commitment to liberal individualism as a first principle.

Liberals want individuals to be created by their own reason and will. Our sex is not created by our own reason and will - it's something we are simply born into. Therefore, liberals quite logically try to downgrade the influence of our sex in our lives. They prefer to see gender as a mere social construct from which the individual can be liberated.

That's why liberals take such a positive view of sex role reversal. It's a kind of proof that the influence of gender is being overthrown. It is a statement that our own will and reason is unlimited by the fact of gender.

The fact that liberals are led, by their philosophy, to reject the influence over us of our sex, explains the many hostile comments by liberals to the mere existence of gender distinctions.

Gloria Steinem, for instance, has complained bitterly about "the false division of human nature into the "feminine" and "masculine"; and Jessica Bernard has campaigned against traditional masculine fatherhood in favour of "paternity without gender, fatherhood without manhood."

The Australian social commentator Hugh Mackay has even called for those who have fought against gender distinctions to have their sacrifices recognised on ANZAC Day, alongside the sacrifices of soldiers who gave their lives for their country.

For Mackay, the achievements of those who "were prepared to fight a culture war that has radically refocused our understanding of the supremacy of personhood over gender", are equal to the efforts of Australian soldiers who fought in the World Wars. (The Age, 22/3/2000)

Fatherhood

So you can see the problem for Mark Latham. His politics allows him to recognise the social dysfunction brought about by a confused male identity. However, he is committed to the idea that masculinity itself is a mere social construct and that sex role reversal is liberating and progressive.

It is therefore quite logical for Mr Latham to tie the two things together by suggesting that a crisis in masculine identity should be solved by a sex role reversal in which men increasingly become "mothers" to their children.

Most men, though, will not see it this way. They won't take the view that men and women are so interchangeable that men can simply take over a feminine role within the family.

As it happens, even after a decade or more of encouragement, men have become the primary caregiver in only 1% of Australian families.

Mr Latham has correctly identified the importance to men of a male identity, and he has correctly identified fatherhood as being crucial to this identity. But this is as far as he can go. His liberalism won't allow him to accept the idea of a distinctly masculine fatherhood, which is different to the role played in families by women.

What does such a masculine fatherhood look like? I won't attempt to give a complete answer in a short article. But there are several obvious features that can be quickly mentioned.

Firstly, fathers are ultimately the ones responsible for providing for their families. This provider role is not always well appreciated, but it is still important for families.

It has a positive benefit of allowing mothers to care for their families without the pressure of full-time work outside the home. Take the case of "Jane" as recorded by Bettina Arndt in an article on modern marriage (State of the union, The Age 15/4/2000). Jane spent 12 years looking after her two children, whilst her husband Peter worked to support the family financially. When her children were aged 12 and 10, she returned part-time to paid work, but as the article points out,

She finds she can't cope if she works more than 20 hours a week. "When I'm flat-chat and Peter is flat-chat, it's hideous. I become a shrew. It's not worth it. I didn't have children to shriek at them and blame them."

Peter is effectively helping his family as a father by protecting his wife from the pressures of full-time work. His efforts to be a provider mean that his children have a less stressed, and more gently feminine mother to care for them.

According to "Australia's foremost fatherhood researcher", Macquarie University psychologist Professor Graeme Russell, many men are aware of the importance of their efforts to be providers, despite the denigration of the role in the media. Professor Russell states that,

They [men] know the role of provider is being devalued, yet when you talk to men about this, they'll tell you they still see their work as family nurturing.

Being a provider is not the only role that fathers perform. It's also important that men support their wives emotionally. The Herald Sun relationships columnist, Toby Green, puts it well when she describes men as fulfilling "the role of nurturer to the nurturer". Toby Green says of new mothers that,

It is important, since she feels she is the lifeline to the child, that he [the father] be the chief emotional support to her. Someone needs to fill her emotional cup so she is topped up to fill that of someone else. (Herald Sun, 1/7/99)

Finally, fathers also have an important role to play in socialising their children, especially their sons. This was recognised as long ago as 1506, in an Italian play called Clizia. The daily life of a "good father" was described in this play as follows,

He [Nicomaco] passed his time worthily; got up early in the morning, heard Mass, ordered the day's food, and then saw to whatever business he had in town, at the market, or at the magistrate's office. If not, he either discussed some serious topic or other with a few friends or shut himself in his study at home to balance and tidy up his accounts. Then he dined happily with his family and after dinner talked to his son, gave him advice, helped him understand human nature, taught him how to live, in fact, with examples from the past and present.

It would be possible, of course, to add a great deal more about the masculine contribution men make to their families as fathers. Suffice it to say that Mark Latham misrepresents things if he believes that men can only contribute to families, and achieve a sense of identity and belonging, by filling the caregiving role that women now play in family life.

We still need men to successfully carry out the traditional fatherhood role that is most suited to their masculine nature and which best complements the role played by women within the family.

(First published at Conservative Central, 13/03/2004)

Garrett now singing a different song?

Labor MP and former Midnight Oil singer Peter Garrett has criticised Howard Government MPs for being indifferent to Australian art and culture:

Can you remember the last time a senior member of the Federal Government ... stood up, hand on heart, and declared their strong support and unbridled enthusiasm for Australian art and culture?

Well no, Peter. But I do still remember how you declared your feelings for Australian culture on Australia Day 1998. You spoke of Australians remaining,

what we have always been: a people without a soul, not a nation but a community of thieves.

No-one could accuse Peter of being indifferent. Just plain hostile, like too many of our artists.

It amazes me that so many artists believe that their role is to shock and insult the public, and that they then complain when the public shows little enthusiasm for the arts.

High art ought really to communicate the more difficult, elevated and profound of human experiences. It probably for this reason will never have the same mass appeal as sport. If Australian art were to follow this path it might, however, win the respect of a section of the public.

But too often today the arts are simply an uninspiring mixture of rancour and therapy, which is better left ignored.

Riots in Brussels

The mainstream media doesn't seem to want to report this; there was nothing about it in the Melbourne papers this morning.

So let me fill the gap: there have been three nights of rioting in the Belgian city of Brussels. 53 Muslim youths were arrested last night, following the arrest of 45 the previous night. Stones have been thrown at cars and pedestrians, windows of cars have been smashed, cars have been set on fire, a youth club has been set ablaze and two molotov cocktails were thrown into one of the city's major hospitals.

The riots have taken place soon after two police officers were ambushed by about 20 immigrant youths in Paris and brutally beaten. The French police union has complained that "these explosions of violence against the police are a kind of guerrilla warfare aimed at getting the forces of law and order to leave certain areas in order to immerse them in a logic of sedition and terror."

Does the mind have a sex?

In 1673 a Frenchman, Francois Poullain de la Barre, declared that "the mind has no sex".

He wrote on this theme that,

It is easy to realise that the difference between the sexes concerns only the body - being, correctly, only this part that serves for the production of men. Since the mind participates only by giving its assent (and giving it in all people in the same manner), we can conclude that it is sexless.

In simple terms, de la Barre believed that men and women differed only in their reproductive organs. He thought that men and women were, by nature, the same in all other respects, including everything to do with the mind.

De la Barre drew some very modern, feminist conclusions from this idea. He asserted that traditional gender roles had no basis in "natural law" but were maintained by prejudice and custom alone.

(For instance, he complained that "legal scholars, who also have their prejudices, have attributed to nature a distinction that derives from custom alone.")

De la Barre claimed that,

the mind, not functioning differently in one sex than in the other, is equally capable of the same things

and therefore concluded that women were as equally suited as men (or more so) to be priests, generals and monarchs.

The argument framed by de la Barre eventually came to have much influence. But it can now be seen to be mistaken in its first assumption. Science is now demonstrating that the mind does have a sex. After a period of more than 300 years we can now conclusively reject the theory pioneered by de la Barre.

It has now finally become accepted in the scientific mainstream that there are significant differences between the male and female brain. A new book, The Female Brain, written by an American neuro-psychiatrist Louann Brizendine is the latest, and undoubtedly not the last, work to be published in this area (see the review by Janet Albrechtsen aptly titled "Feminism begs to differ, but unisex brain is a fantasy").

The scientific research should give heart to conservatives who have long held that there are naturally occurring differences between men and women which are hardwired into human biology.

(In fact, I think many conservatives would tend to the view that there is an essential masculinity to men and femininity to women, which forms a core part of our identity and which is reflected in traditional gender roles within the family and society.)

What does diversity research tell us?

I returned to my childhood suburb of Melbourne during the week to visit my parents. Twenty years ago it was an ageing, but still largely monocultural middle-class area of Melbourne. Today it is multicultural.

It is genuinely multicultural in the sense that there are not just two or three ethnic groups living in the same area, but such a diverse mix of people that no ethnic groups stand out at all.

I find the experience of such diversity to be profoundly alienating. It gives me a sense of atomised individualism, in which I exist only as an individual for the pettier purposes of shopping or entertainment. I no longer have the sense of being part of a larger tradition, with a deeper place and more serious responsibilities to my own culture.

It is, I have to admit, always a relief when I head back to my own suburb, which is not exclusively Anglo, but predominantly so. I don't feel the same sense of alienation in such conditions.

I know it's not politically correct for me to write such things. However, I don't think I'm alone in experiencing things this way.

Earlier this year, the BBC ran an article titled "Does diversity make us unhappy?". The straightforward answer given in the article was yes.

Both the Home Office and the Commission for Racial Equality had commissioned research which found that diversity was associated with certain negative outcomes:

It is an uncomfortable conclusion from happiness research data perhaps - but multicultural communities tend to be less trusting and less happy.

Research by the Home Office suggests that the more ethnically diverse an area is, the less people are likely to trust each other.

The Commission for Racial Equality has also done work looking at the effect of diversity on well-being.

Interviewed on The Happiness Formula, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips accepts that people are happier if they are with people like themselves.

"We've done the work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren't other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness.

"People feel happier if they're with people like themselves ..."

To give some credit to Trevor Phillips he does draw as a conclusion from the research that "We need to respect people's ethnicity". This raises the question of how Western governments can respect the ethnicity of their mainstream populations, an important issue that has not been considered as part of public debate.

Feminist: it's wrong to stay home

Gretchen Ritter, a feminist academic, doesn't like the idea of women staying at home to look after their children. She tells us that it's actually wrong for women to do so, for the following reasons.

It denies men the chance to be involved fathers ... What does it mean when fathers are denied the opportunity to nurture their kids in ways that are as important as their work? What do the children miss when they don't have fathers changing their diapers, picking them up from school ... On both sides, the answer is too much.

There are three flaws in this opening argument. First, men in traditional families don't miss out on the chance to be involved fathers. A recent major survey found that in more traditional households where men are the main breadwinners, fathers spend an average of 9.7 hours a week with their children. In contrast, in feminist type arrangements where women earn a larger percentage of the income, men spent fewer hours (8.7) with their children.

Second, Gretchen Ritter falls into the usual trap of trying to persuade men that child-care is an important and rewarding task to commit to, whilst arguing that women should be doing something else. There's an inconsistency in her message about the value of nurturing children.

Third, children are most sensitive to the absence of their mothers. There are many young women rejecting feminism because they grew up missing their mums.

Women who stay at home also lose out - they lose a chance to contribute as professionals and community activists ... we need women in medicine, law, education, politics and the arts.

Gretchen Ritter ignores the vast majority of women who are not going to be lawyers, doctors, teachers, politicians, artists and community activists. Ritter assumes that the word "women" refers to upper middle-class feminist women.

Obviously, a large number of women work in jobs they don't find rewarding (according to the survey linked to above, only 31% of young British women find their job fulfilling). Why should such women give up on stay-at-home motherhood to continue in relatively mundane and menial paid work?

Nor is it impossible for women to value stay-at-home motherhood, whilst later contributing to society as teachers or lawyers. This is, in fact, what a considerable number of professional women choose to do.

There's one other thing to mention here. Motherhood is at the centre of life in a way that careers can never be. It is a more intensely personal role, more embedded in women instinctively, and more a part of the inner world of emotions and spirit.

In the book The Bitch in the House there is a letter from a 1950s mum to her feminist daughter, explaining why she did not feel oppressed to be a housewife. The mother writes:

When you and your sister were growing up, I was what your generation calls a "stay-at-home mom" ... I can say now that those were some of the happiest years of my life. I was enchanted by my daughters, and watching them grow up from little helpless blobs into wonderful people was the most rewarding experience I ever had. I didn't then and still didn't consider it a job. It was joy.

This woman had worked prior to having children, and she became a teacher when her children were older. Yet, she doesn't sacrifice the idea of motherhood to her professional work, and, better yet, she doesn't even regard the two in the same way. There is a significance to the motherhood role that can't be reproduced in mundane work, not even in a professional career.

Full-time mothering is also bad for children. It teaches them that the world is divided by gender.

I had to laugh at this one. This is a case of a liberal panicking at the idea that gender differences might be thought to matter.

This movement also privileges certain kinds of families, making it harder for others. The more stay-at-home mothers there are, the more schools and libraries will neglect the needs of working parents, and the more professional mothers, single mothers, working-class mothers and lesbian mothers will feel judged for their failure to be in a traditional family and stay home with their children.

Interesting. Gretchen Ritter wants to "privilege" her own preferred family model by making the traditional family seem illegitimate. And yet her closing argument is that she doesn't like the privileging of certain kinds of families!

She makes her case by arguing that traditional women create inequity by setting a motherhood standard which makes other women feel bad. The problem with this argument, though, is that it undermines Ritter's previous claims of how inferior the traditional family is. If the previous claims were right, then you would think that traditional women would be glumly contemplating their more fortunate not-at-home sisters.

Instead, we are told that it is the non-traditional women who are feeling insecure about what they are doing, so much so that only by abolishing the traditional family will they recover their self-confidence.

(Gretchen Ritter's article "The messages we send when moms stay home" was first published in July 2004 in the Austin-American Statesman. The only link to the original article I could find is here.)

The conservative by-products of science

It has been fashionable in recent times for people to engage in race denial (meaning that they claim that race does not exist as a biological reality, but is instead a social construct).

Why deny the existence of race? For the same reason that differences between men and women are claimed to exist only as social constructs.

If you're a liberal, and you believe that we are only human when we are self-determined, you won't like anything that seems to be a biological destiny. You won't want to recognise anything which seems important to us, but which is based on unchosen biology.

Hence the convenient idea that gender and race are social constructs, and can therefore be changed as we ourselves see fit.

Common sense ought to tell us that the liberal theory is wrong. It's not difficult to observe significant differences between men and women across all cultures; nor is it difficult to identify accurately the ancestry of most people based on their physical characteristics.

However, it hasn't really been common sense which has fatally undermined the liberal view. It has been science.

Science has vindicated the conservative view that gender differences are hardwired into us as part of our human nature, rather than being solely a product of culture. We now know too much about sex hormones and the structure of the brain for this to be denied.

Increasingly, too, science is undermining the race deniers. The latest evidence involves genetic research into SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms).

Scientists are now looking for genes which are associated with illnesses like arthritis. They have discovered, though, that genes differ according to our broad ancestry. If they control for a person's race (whether someone is of African or European ancestry, for instance) they reduce the amount of "false associations" in their research.

Already, scientists have found SNPs correlating to our continental ancestry (African, European, Asian etc). Now, SNPs have been identified which show not only European ancestry, but which distinguish between those of Northern and Southern European descent.

So as a by-product of medical research we have it confirmed that there is a biological basis not only for broad continental differences in race, but even for intra-continental ones such as those between Northern and Southern Europeans.

And scientists are now starting to investigate distinctions within the other continental groupings (which they will surely find).

I wonder how long it will take for such research to become commonly known and to complicate the established liberal views on race?

The silent apartment

Liberalism tells us that the highest aim in life, the very thing which makes us human, is our freedom to be self-determined. This means that liberals use words like autonomy and independence to describe the key goals in life. The problem is that it’s not so simple to make people absolutely autonomous. It means denying that we have any inborn qualities, or any unchosen, inherited forms of identity, which might help define who we are. It even means, as a matter of logic, downgrading the status of love in human life. After all, our highest ideal of love is a joining together of a man and woman in a kind of permanent union or bond. It’s not easy to reconcile this ideal with the liberal one of achieving an autonomous, unimpeded individual will. This problem becomes especially acute for feminists, since feminism takes the basic principles of liberalism and applies them to questions of male and female relationships. As evidence for this, take the case of feminist writer Vivian Gornick. She has written an honest account of her own love life in an article titled “What independence has come to mean to me” (published in the book The Bitch in the House). She begins the article by declaring that her sixty-fifth year is a year of reckoning and that she is brooding now on her “lifelong struggle to become a human being: an independent human being”. (Note how liberalism makes the status of being human contingent: it’s something you only attain through reaching a certain condition of autonomy or independence.) She then quotes an article she wrote nine years ago, in which she looks at people walking along a New York street and is struck by the lack of firm relationships:

This is a population in a permanent state of intermittent attachment. Inevitably the silent apartment lies in wait. Who could ever have dreamed there would be so many of us floating around, those of us between thirty-five and fifty-five who live alone. Thirty years of politics in the street opened a door that became a floodgate, and we have poured through in our monumental numbers, in possession of the most educated discontent in history. Yet, we seem puzzled, most of us, about how we got here, confused and wanting relief from the condition. We roam the crowded streets, in naked expectation of a last-minute reprieve.

And how did Vivian Gornick come to be part of this mass of confused single people? She recalls that as a young woman she,

discovered the promise of revolutionary feminism; and then the loneliness that came with what I took to be independence – turning it quickly into a political position (“this is what we must endure to become ourselves”)

Much later she recognised that it was not so much “sexism” which kept her single but her politically inspired treatment of men:

In the name of equality I tormented every man who’d ever loved me until he left me: I called them on everything, never let anything go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both.

She then decided that work, with its promise of independence, could replace love.

Work … had come to seem everything. Loving a man, I had decided, would never again be uppermost in my concerns.

But this turned out to be more difficult than she imagined: the instinct toward love was difficult to suppress. She wrote an article in which she “examined the matter once more, and this time looked more clearly at the consequence of what I so easily claimed could be dispensed with – love, that is”:

Perhaps, in fact, the two (work and love) were incompatible. Love-as-I-had-always-known-it was something I might now have to do without. I approached the thought blithely, as though it would be the easiest thing in the world to accommodate … The only important thing, I told myself (again), was work … If I worked, I’d have what I needed. I’d be a person in the world. What would it matter then that I was giving up on “love”? As it turned out, it mattered … the idea of love, if not the reality, was impossible to give up. As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy and sentiment. It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones: so deeply embedded into the make-up of the spirit it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence.

Having admitted that her need for love couldn’t be denied, Vivian Gornick then recognized that her “autonomy” was not really what she had held it up to be, and that:

what I was calling my “choices” weren’t really choices at all, they were simply the impulses of a conflicted being: one of them had to be acted upon. And thus, more often than not, after I had “chosen” I’d end up feeling stranded, confused and disappointed; surprised it was turning out this way; and as shut up inside myself as before – neither free nor independent. Ah, there was the rub. Not independent. Consciously I was undivided in my desire for autonomy. Independence, I thought, was what I valued above all else. But it was turning out that I had not understood the word at all. For years I had mistaken rebelliousness for independence. I thought that every time I treated the men in my life badly because “work comes first” I was asserting my independence. I thought dressing like a slob meant defying the social code. I thought reciting the history of women’s oppression ad nauseam explained all the writing I wasn’t doing.

What is there to say about all of this? Conservatives are by no means opposed to ideals of autonomy or independence. But these are part of a mix of goods which we might seek in life. They are not the be-all defining our humanity. To choose to sacrifice a degree of autonomy in order to enjoy another good, namely romantic or marital love, doesn’t threaten the conservative world view in the same way it does for liberals. It doesn’t undermine a conservative definition of “personhood”. It’s important that we build up our own conservative influence, so that there’s a more effective opposition to liberal orthodoxy. If we don’t, then we will periodically have feminist upswings, in which large numbers of middle-class, intellectual women will suppress the instinct toward love for the ideologically superior claims of autonomy.

Three surrender monkeys

Not everyone has the spirit of survival in them. Just in the past week I've happened to read no less than three declarations of civilisational surrender. Readers can decide for themselves which is the most appalling.

First up is Christabelle Dinks, a script editor for a forthcoming BBC programme Rise and Fall of Rome. She sees Britain today as being in a,

period of transformation ... other civilisations are taking over ... and what's to mourn really.

What’s to mourn really? Can you get a more denatured, whimpering remark than this?

Next we have an Australian writer, Stephanie Dowrick. After pondering the violent situation in the world today she finally comes up with the following solution:

The crucial issue may, instead, be one of surrender. (The Age 16/09/06)

Stephanie Dowrick is so defeatist she wants us to wave the white flag.

Which brings us to Piet Hein Donner, the Dutch Justice Minister who said in a recent interview:

For me it is clear: If two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce Sharia tomorrow the possibility should exist. It would be a disgrace to say: “That is not allowed.”

Donner has accepted on principle the idea that Holland could come under Sharia law. No-one with a normal loyalty to his own tradition would so readily accept such a possibility.

Three people, each capitulating feebly in contemplating the end of their own civilisation.

Pell's straight talk on Islam

Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, has backed the comments made recently by Pope Benedict linking Islam with violence.

In a statement Cardinal Pell noted that,

The violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict's main fears. They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence.

Dr Pell also described the response of Australia's mufti, Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali as "unfortunately typical and unhelpful":

It is always someone else's fault and issues touching on the nature of Islam are ignored. Sheik Alhilali often responds to criticism by questioning the intelligence and competence of the questioner or critic.

He added later in a radio interview this observation about Sheik Alhilali:

I'm tempted to say almost never does he address the criticism of Islam but diverts the question away from it and I think resorts to evasions.

In other news on this issue, there was a demonstration by Muslims outside London's Westminster Cathedral. The placards held by the demonstrators make for interesting reading: "May Allah curse the Pope," "Pope go to Hell", "Jesus is the slave of Allah" and most bluntly revealing of all, "Islam will conquer Rome".

Is a woman's word enough?

Should a woman's testimony alone be sufficient to convict a man she accuses of rape or domestic violence?

Most of us would answer no, as there is a possibility that the woman might be making a false accusation.

Back in 1994, though, when third wave feminism was at a peak, it wasn't so easy to raise this objection. There was an idea around that women never lied about such attacks and that it was sexist to assert that they might do so.

It was in this climate that California began to require jurors to be instructed that a rape conviction could be based on the accuser's testimony alone, without corroboration. Similarly, in some cities in the US "excited utterances" by a woman alleging an assault were considered proof of the attack: for example, in 1994 Jennifer Mantz, head of the Seattle domestic violence unit, told reporters:

If the officer describes the victim as so agitated she can hardly speak, then she's considered too upset to have made up a story.

As it turns out, a surprisingly high percentage of allegations of assault are unfounded. In 1984, a research team studied 556 rape allegations. When using the most strict criteria to judge allegations as false (an admission by the accuser and polygraph testing) 27% of the allegations were found to be false. When, in follow-up research, three reviewers were asked to judge according to a set of criteria whether the allegations were false, in 60% of cases all three found the allegation to be false.

Similarly, a survey in Washington D.C. revealed that 24% of rape charges were unfounded; a 1994 study by a researcher at Purdue University concluded that "false rape allegations constitute 41% of the total forcible rape cases reported during this period"; and studies at two large Midwestern state universities covering the period 1985 to 1988 found that 50% of the 64 reported rapes were false.

Which brings us to some recently reported news items. A Melbourne court has been told that a woman who claimed to have been kidnapped and threated with rape was attempting to extort money from her parents to pay off a drug debt ("Kidnap was a con" Herald Sun 14/09/2006 - note, though, that this is an allegation by the defence.)

In English news, a woman has admitted making up a horrific story about how she was brutally raped on an Oxfordshire road. This follows the jailing of two Bicester 16-year-olds in November for falsely claiming they were abducted and raped.

Last week also saw the acquital of an English man, Warren Blackwell, of a conviction for rape (after he had already served his prison sentence). The police appear to have brought the rape case against Mr Blackwell, despite being aware that the woman accusing him had a history of psychiatric problems, had convictions for dishonesty and had made similar allegations against a series of men.

Mr Blackwell's accuser made her first allegation of rape when she was only 14. The 16-year-old boy she had accused was exonerated when a police investigation found she was still a virgin.

So false allegations against men remain a real problem. Some thought will need to go into measures to better protect men within the legal system from being falsely accused.

A counterblast from Father Schall

In my last two posts I sketched out the philosophy of Don Cupitt.

Cupitt's claim is that human life is "outsideless": that there is no truth deriving from an external reality, but rather "truths" which humans create for themselves.

This, in Cupitt's view, has the great benefit of leaving humans wholly autonomous rather than heteronomous (governed by external laws). Individuals don't need to measure themselves according to an external standard, but are free to choose without impediment who they are to be.

Bear in mind Cupitt's idea that we are "outsideless", self-creating beings as you read the following from Father James Schall:

The initial choice that each of us has to make in life is whether we think the world and ourselves already exist with some intelligible content to define what we are or whether there is nothing there but what we put there.

Conservatives will largely accept the first option, liberals like Cupitt are more likely to hold the second view.

Father Schall then suggests why the conservative option might seem less appealing than the liberal one:

The former position, it would seem, is rather demanding on us. It suggests that we are not our own self-creators, that what we are is something for us to discover, not make out of our own imaginary resources. But we are seemingly freer if there is nothing there in the first place, if we are solely responsible for our world and our own being.

So, if the liberal option appears to make us freer to be self-created, why not choose to adopt it? Father Schall makes an important observation:

The trouble with being so absolutely free that nothing is presupposed, however, is that what is finally put there is also only ourselves.

Father Schall goes on to develop this important observation as follows:

In such a view, everyone's world is identical, full of only themselves, with their own laws enforced by no one but themselves. On this premise, no reason can be found not to be something else tomorrow. A world full of nothing but Schall, it strikes me, as utterly boring. A world in which Schall is never the same is even worse.

Is there really nothing more to us that what our own subjective self puts there? What measure of substance does a "self" retain if it can change to any degree, in any direction, at any time?

Liberals think that by asserting a radically autonomous, fluid, multiple self that they are freeing the individual to be limitless. To the conservative mind, though, they are achieving the opposite: they are defining the individual in a way which contains the individual to a small and superficial existence.

Cupitt II

How do you manage to become an atheist Buddhist Anglican priest? In Don Cupitt’s case, you first adopt a non-realist philosophy.

Cupitt believes that our ideas are products of language systems. The very categories of our thought, therefore, do not correspond to an objective truth or reality (hence the anti-realist tag).

This effectively places Cupitt’s philosophy within the broad category of nominalism: it means that he doesn’t recognise the real existence of universals. It means too that Cupitt won’t see words as pointing to some really existing entity that we might value for itself; there is nothing behind a word, except the meaning we, for the time being, have given to it.

It’s important to try to grasp all this, as there are important consequences to such anti-realism which you can’t help but recognise within liberal modernism.

For example, anyone holding to a Cupitt type nominalism is likely to favour a social constructionist view over an essentialist one. In other words, they are likely to believe that things which appear to be a natural part of reality are, in fact, mere inventions or constructs of a particular society at a particular time.

An example of this is the modernist attitude to gender difference. Liberal moderns often dismiss the idea that there are important natural differences between men and women as being essentialist. They prefer the idea that gender difference is an (oppressive) social construct.

Here is another example to consider. A writer criticising my views on nationalism recently wrote:

Mark Richardson wonders where liberalism stands on the nation state. The short answer, I think, is that classical liberals recognise the concept of “country” as an artificial construct that is not inherently something of value to be preserved ... To take the line that there is something inherently special about being Australian is to place undue emphasis on a word.

In this quote you get the idea of nominalism at work in the denial that the terms “country” and “Australian” point to any really existing entity. Instead, we are told that “country” is an artificial construct and that “Australian” is merely a word.

Conservatives need to know what we are up against. Some of our adversaries don’t even acknowledge, for philosophical reasons, the real existence of the entities we wish to conserve.

Is there really no outside?

After I finished writing my last post about the Anglican/Hindu priest, the thought occurred to me that there might be more such multi-faithists. A google search came up with the unfamiliar name of Don Cupitt, a Buddhist/Atheist/Anglican priest.

Cupitt is an interesting thinker: he takes some of the trends existing within liberal modernism to their logical conclusion. For instance, he is a non-realist: he believes that ideas are created by language systems rather than representing anything really existing.

Therefore, for Cupitt, there is no really existing truth but only socially constructed "truths".

On the website of Sea of Faith, an organisation based on Cupitt's philosophy, we find some of the implications of this non-realism clearly laid out:

Truths are made within human culture and language. Ideas, beliefs, faiths: we made them up ... So SoF proclaims its mission: "To explore and promote religious faith as a human creation." In this sense, Sea of Faith is humanist."

Its members ... know their religious practices and "truths," like everyone else's, are socially constructed, made by human communities ... So, since faith systems were man-made ... we know we can remake them for our needs, our times, our place. We can ordain gays, or abolish the priesthood ... make God female - or re-fashion him/her as the symbol or imagined incarnation of wholly human values ...

One sympathiser distills the Cupitt lesson this way:

Religion ... becomes like art. Christians are artists, creators of truths. We give up the notion of a divinely ordained hierarchical universe that we just slot into. We have always created ethics.

So there is nothing out there, no "outside" (Cupitt actually uses the term "outsideless" to describe the human condition). This, for Cupitt, is nothing to regret, as it fits in well with another trend within liberal modernism: the belief in autonomy as the highest of human values.

Cupitt values the idea of autonomy, and the freedom he associates it with, so highly, that he thinks that it, rather than the real existence of God, is the true basis of religion.

And since the real existence of God would impede such autonomy, he thinks it anti-religious to suppose the real existence of God. This at least is how the following reviewer summarises his views:

He believes that for genuine moral choices to be made by humans God cannot be understood as one who 'stands over' humanity imposing moral choices onto us..

How can such a hetronomous faith ever be the means whereby I become autonomous and fully-liberated spirit? It is impossible. This appears to be a conclusive religious argument against the objective existence of God. An objective God cannot save ... The more God is absolutised, the more we are presented with the possibility of living under the dominion of a cosmic tyrant....

The absence of objective truth, or even access to an objective reality, is taken to be the ultimate in a liberation from any constraints. We can do and be anything according to our own will because there is no truth for us to live by. As it's explained in one article on Cupitt:

as our language is not a corrupted version of a 'pure' form residing beyond language, we cannot say that words have any meaning beyond their cultural and social 'norms'. The meaning of word is only agreed by the human community and does not reside 'outside' a text. Because of this, 'nothing is entrenched or necessarily absolute' ...

Realism is now understood by Cupitt as, 'spiritual slavery', nothing more than an imposition and restriction onto the world of free-choice and free-values. Morality is synonymous with freedom; the freedom to grow into an autonomous person. There is no longer any fixed truth by which one must align and judge oneself. We are free (and must be freed) to be who we want to be.

I won't attempt a rebuttal of the non-realist view right now, but in my next post I'll quote some interesting views of James Schall on the issue.

Anglicans rebuke Howard, praise elephant gods

John Howard "doesn't understand multi-faith" complains Anglican priest and Monash Uni "sociology of religion" professor Gary Bouma.

Professor/Rev. Bouma, speaking in a Melbourne mosque, was upset that Mr Howard had urged Australian Muslims to learn English and adopt Australian values.

Meanwhile the Anglican understanding of "multi-faith" is developing momentum. One Anglican multi-faith expert, the Rev. David Hart, has put his principles into practice and has converted to Hinduism. He has changed his name to Ananda and now spends his time offering up prayers to Hindu snake and elephant gods - whilst still retaining his licence to officiate as an Anglican minister.

"I have neither explicitly nor implicitly renounced my Christian faith or priesthood," he told an interviewer. The Rev. Hart/Ananda also expected his conversion would be treated without suspicion by the Anglican hierarchy and would be "read in the spirit of open exploration and dialogue, which is an essential feature of our shared modern spirituality."

In terms which might interest the "sociology of religion" Anglican priest, Professor Bouma, the Rev. Hart/Ananda also declared that "My philosophical position is that all religions are cultural constructs."

"The Anglican Church firmly believes in engaging itself fully in inter-faith dialogues" added the Rev. Hart, who now, it seems, will be able to enter into such a dialogue with himself.