Incredible denial of gender reality

This one really takes the cake. Lawrence Auster has reported extensively on the following story (see here and here).

A dangerous 6'1'' rapist was brought into an Atlanta courthouse and was found to have homemade knives in his shoes. The judge requested extra protection. Despite this a 5'0'' female deputy sheriff was assigned to guard the rapist while he changed clothes. The rapist overpowered the 52 year old woman, took her gun, returned to the courtroom and shot dead the judge and two others. He is still on the run.

When the District Attorney was asked whether a female deputy sheriff should have been chosen to escort the powerful young criminal, he answered:

Yes. Women are capable of doing anything men are capable of doing.

This is yet another example of how seriously liberals take their first principles. Even after three people have been gunned down, a District Attorney (i.e. a reputable authority) still insists that it's OK for a woman to guard a violent male offender. He still insists on the principle that our sex does not set any limits, or suggest any direction, to what we can do or become.

Liberals have made a gross error in defining freedom the way they do. They think that freedom is a liberty of will in which there are no impediments to individual choice. Liberty is therefore set at odds with our given (our unchosen) nature as men and women.

The upshot is that liberals have to deny basic realities in the name of a false freedom. A District Attorney can no longer recognise how absurd it is to expect a petite middle-aged female to guard a powerful, violent male criminal.

A flood of reputable nonsense

Liberals don't like traditional gender roles. This is an ideological thing: liberals believe we have to decide for ourselves who and what we are, rather than accept the influence of inherited things like gender.

And so we get the following flood of nonsense, all from reputable authorities, seeking to overthrow traditional forms of gender.

First there was a declaration from Jens Orback, a Swedish minister, that "The government considers female and male as social constructions." Not an opinion which would seem sensible to anyone who has ever been in a serious relationship, but nonetheless the stated policy of the Swedish government.

Not to be outdone, the Norwegians have gone one step further, by bringing their Prime Minister into the issue. Kjell Magne Bondevik is upset that the little figures in IKEA furniture assembly instructions aren't depicted as female. He has called this situation "untenable" and secured the support of the opposition parties.

It seems that to the Norwegian political class, any potential remnant of a traditional gender role (men doing carpentry), is considered an issue of national importance, to be handled directly by the PM.

The Norwegian unions, as you might expect, are no more sensible than the government. They want maternity leave time to be taken away from women and given instead to men. This is part of a drive toward a unisex style of parenting.

The plan, though, brought criticism from breastfeeding activists, who rightly perceived that dad might not be as successful at breastfeeding little Lars or Inge as mum.

So, the breastfeeding activists have been won over with a second idea, which is to give all Norwegian working women the right to take two hours off every day, at any time, to breastfeed, and to be paid for it.

Of course, the trade off is incoherent. If dad is home on leave with the baby, mum is not going to be able to use her two hours breastfeeding time anyway. It also contravenes in a spectacular way the idea of "equal pay", since it means a woman would be paid the same amount for 6 hours of work as a man would for 8 hours work.

The move to abolish gender is not restricted to Scandinavia. At New College in California restrooms for men and women have been replaced with "de-gendered" ones. Signs on the doors of the unisex toilets proclaim "Lots of people don't fit neatly into our culture's rigid two-gender system".

The writer of this sign might like to journey outside of California. He/She/It would find that it is not just American culture which has a two gender system. He/She/It would be astonished to find that all cultures do.

I know that a lot of people will dismiss the above as "political correctness gone too far", but remember that it is all being advanced by higher level authorities in society: a government minister, a Prime Minister, a council of trade unions and an academic college.

An official liberalism has reached a radical phase in which a basic fact of life, the distinction between male and female, is being denied and acted against.

Radio theology

I was listening to Derryn Hinch's radio talk show the other day when the topic moved on to religion. Hinch is every inch a secular liberal, yet he listened politely while a Christian lady explained to him her beliefs. All went well till she mentioned her conviction that the faithful would go to heaven and the rest to hell.

"What!" spluttered Hinch. "That's discrimination!"

Hinch then repeated his often expressed view that "we are just ants". Which is an interesting position for a modern liberal to take. Liberalism evolved out of a humanism which wanted to make man the centre of things. Man was to take on god-like qualities of creating his own being. Yet to do so man and the universe he inhabited had to be made empty so that there were no limits to what men could will for themselves. But by making man and his reality empty, man was in the long run made to seem small - ant-like in Hinch's view.

Liberalism reached too far and achieved the opposite of what was intended. We need now to recognise that a god-like self-authorship is not the way to make man into something fine and admirable. It's better to accept that we have a given nature and that we live within a given reality, but that within this existing situation there is a possibility to find and to manifest what is inherently good and meaningful.

Which is simply to say that we have to stop the deliberate, ideological process of making ourselves and our reality empty, and recognise the finer things that are part of our human experience.

School of rock

I never thought I'd quote Who magazine twice in a week. But I can't resist putting in the following little item.

Scott Weiland is a rock musician, and formerly a junkie. However, following a drugs programme he's tried to get himself together. He now says of his experiences:

I didn't know who I was. I wasn't a man, that's for sure, but I wanted to become a man ...

Now, for the first time ever, I'm a man and I can look at myself in the mirror and say, "Know what? I like who I am."

I'm not satisfied completely, like "Yep, I've arrived," although I am a man and I can man-up and be accountable. I'm accountable for my wife and my kids and that's financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually - in every way.

I find this interesting. Liberals want us to act against our inherited sex and to become less masculine in order to be free of our biological destiny.

But in doing this we're likely to end up like Scott Weiland once was, and to feel inadequte in our own self-identity. What we need to do, and what society ought to encourage men to do, is to deepen our own sense of masculinity, until we reach the point where we really can say that "I like who I am".

Liberalism only delays and confuses this process, by encouraging the exact opposite.

Developing right-liberalism

Lawrence Auster has written a fascinating article on recent events in Lebanon.

I have a special interest in the piece, as it further develops the concept of "right-liberalism", a term I coined in the late 1990s. Lawrence Auster has found his own very productive and persuasive way to make use of the concept.

It's gratifying, of course, to see the term used at View from the Right, which is one of the most successful of traditionalist ventures, with up to 3000 visitors a day.

Nerds' revenge?

Steve Sailer is one of the most interesting of modern thinkers.

In his latest VDARE article, he asks why so many male scientists and engineers have turned on Larry Summers, the President of Harvard.

Summers suggested that the reason why men dominate the higher echelons of science and engineering is, in part, because of a male genetic advantage in these fields. This means that affirmative action programmes for women in science and maths are misguided, as it's not discrimination which is preventing female "progress", but a natural disadvantage.

You would think that male scientists and engineers would react positively to Summers' views. But they haven't, and Sailer has an intriguing explanation for this. Sailer acknowledges that the influence of politically correct liberalism is one reason for male scientists and engineers to oppose Summers. But he argues also as follows:

But a more interesting subset, however, are the male science and engineering types who support gender quotas for women out of self-interest. My theory: they see the feminists' vendetta against Summers as their chance to get revenge on the female sex for its annoying femaleness.

Why do these men insist that sexist discrimination and socialization are the only possible reasons there are fewer women than men in their own fields?

Why do they demand massive social engineering to get more women to become as obsessive about the pocket-protector professions as they are?

Paradoxically, this is typically because of how little these nerds appreciate women. They don't like females the way they are. They want a vast societal effort to remold women into liking the same nerdy things they like.

That way, maybe, nerds can finally get dates.

It's roughly the same reason you see so many butt-kicking babes in movies aimed at male teenage comic book geeks ... It's always hyped in the press as female empowerment. But it's driven far more by the adolescent male's wish that sexy girls would stop being interested in all that boring girl stuff like relationships and start being interested in cool guy stuff, like kung-fu fighting and really big guns.

I find this theory persuasive, though I don't know where it leaves the majority of men who prefer their women feminine. Is it possible for us to get the "nerdier" men onside in some way?

By the way, whilst we're on this subject, I was interested to read the views of Fabio, the cover-guy for female romance novels, in this week's Who magazine.

Fabio is definitely on the side of traditionalists when it comes to female attractiveness. He says,

Something that really attracts me is a very feminine woman. When I see a really feminine woman with class, I melt.

As do most of us.

There's always a more radical liberalism

Another item brought to my attention by Jim Kalb's terrific website Turnabout is the following.

Harvard puts on a "diversity" show each year called Cultural Rhythms. On February 28th the Harvard newspaper published a celebratory account of this year's show, the highlight of which was a speech by actress Jada Pinkett Smith.

Upon receiving an award from Harvard, Pinkett Smith tearily gave thanks and then shared the following "life lesson" with the audience:

Don't let anybody define who you are. Don't let them put you in a box. Don't be afraid to break whatever ceiling anybody has put on you.

Women, you can have it all - a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career. They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want.

Not surprinsingly, the Harvard representative at the show, Dr. S. Allen Counter, the director of the Harvard Foundation, was delighted by Pinkett Smith's comments. He said that Pinkett Smith was "the best we've had thus far".

And why wouldn't he. After all, Pinkett Smith's speech was a popular expression of the liberal philosophy which universities like Harvard live by.

The basic liberal idea is that we are made human by the fact that we can create ourselves through our own will and reason. This requires, exactly as Pinkett Smith claims, that we should define our own identity and that we should do whatever we have a will to do.

For a liberal, this is what our humanity rests on, it is how human freedom is understood, and it is the starting point for how equality and justice are understood.

But it's wrong. We don't get to entirely define for ourselves who we are. Much of our self-identity is inherited rather than freely chosen. For instance, our masculine identity as men is something we are born with. So too is our cultural identity something that is not pulled out of thin air, but is a product of the time and place and tradition we are born into.

The problem with asserting the liberal view is that it gives inherited forms of self-identity a negative connotation, as being impediments to individual will. In a liberal society, there will almost inevitably be an attempt to deny or overthrow unchosen forms of human identity.

This process occurs gradually, with each generation asserting a more radical position. And this is what has put Jada Pinkett Smith and Harvard in such a difficult situation.

In the following week's issue of the Harvard newspaper, the celebratory tone of reporting about Jada Pinkett Smith's comments gave way to an apologetic one. It seems that some homosexual students objected to Pinkett Smith's assumption that women wanted a career plus a man and husband rather than another woman.

This, asserted the offended students, was "extremely heteronormative". And they have a point. If the highest aim of life is to be self-defined in whatever way we choose, then it is a kind of faux pas to assume people to be heterosexual. This is society imposing an inherited expectation, rather than establishing an entirely blank canvas for people to choose for themselves.

Hence, the Harvard authorities have already stepped into action to rectify things. The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations has begun to work together with homosexual groups to "increase sensitivity toward issues of sexuality at Harvard" and the Foundation has also pledged to inform future speakers of the sexual diversity of their audience.

Jada Pinkett Smith was undoubtedly liberal in her views, but she didn't see the next, more radical version of liberalism lying in wait, the version of liberalism which won't even allow an assumption of heterosexuality to restrict the freely self-authoring liberal individual.

Sweden vs Science

A minister in the Swedish government has made the following extraordinary claim about men and women. Jens Orback announced that,

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

Don't let the meaning of this pass you by. The Swedish government has made it official policy that what is "male" and "female" is invented and has no real existence. Gender difference, it is being claimed, does not really exist.

In Sweden, this view is taken seriously. So much so that funding for a book was denied by a county government because it contained an interview with a leading neurobiologist, Professor Annica Dahlstrom. Professor Dahlstrom referred in the interview to scientific research showing that there are differences in the brains of men and women.

So, Swedish liberals have a problem. They want to believe that there are no differences between men and women. But then a leading neurobiologist lets it be known that science has revealed the most significant of differences between men and women.

What do the Swedish liberals do? They try to suppress the scientific evidence.

Of course, when the Vatican objects to such dubious practices as the use of the unborn for medical research or spare parts, liberals attack the Catholic Church for its "dark age" attitude of hindering scientific progress. But, as we now clearly see, liberals themselves don't support science in an open-ended way. They are willing to try to suppress a scientific truth which is inconvenient to their political beliefs.

And why do they do it? Why do they so stubbornly cling to the unlikely idea that men and women are the same?

The reason, as I have outlined many times before, is as follows. Liberals believe that we are human because we can create who we are by our own will and reason. Our gender, though, is not something that we can choose for ourselves - it's something we're simply born into. Therefore, it becomes a limitation or constraint on our freedom to choose who we are.

Liberals want to remove this constraint. A favourite option for doing so is to claim that gender is merely a social construct. Our masculinity or femininity is merely a creation of society, so the argument goes, designed to uphold a power structure which privileges male will at the expense of female will.

If true, two things follow. First, gender itself can be deconstructed, removing the constraint on the "freedom" of the self-creating individual. And second, by doing so the patriarchal power structure is undermined, paving the way for "equality" (equal will) between men and women.

No wonder that Swedish liberals cling so stubbornly to this idea, even if it makes them look like flat-earthers. It fits in with their ideology beautifully. It makes possible the kind of freedom and equality which liberals so eagerly seek.

Sadly for liberals, science is now fatally undermining the "gender is a social construct" idea. It is now beyond dispute that our masculinity or femininity is created, to a considerable extent, by biological factors. Science has proved decisively the very thing that conservatives have always claimed: that we are not just "blank slates" but that our distinctive natures as men and women are hardwired into us.

And finally, what of those liberals who don't want to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence? Most, no doubt, will retreat to option two. They will recognise that gender difference is real, but insist that it be made not to count.

They will therefore continue to support the attempt to overcome the influence of gender through social engineering.

For instance, they will no doubt approve of the "equality bonus" recently proposed in Sweden. The Swedish government is upset that most parental leave is still taken by women, even after such leave was made available to men. Swedish men, if fact, only used up 18% of their leave entitlement last year.

For a conservative, this is not so surprising. Women will by nature have a stronger maternal instinct than men, and men will have a stronger provider instinct than women. So you would expect most parental leave to be taken by women.

But the Swedish government is willing to spend a lot of money offering financial incentives to men not only to stop working and take parental leave, but to do so alone, when the mother isn't home.

For the liberal Swedish government it's important that gender not count in how we arrange work and family life. And if the financial incentive doesn't work? Get ready for more heavy-handed measures to combat any traces of traditional gender roles in liberal Sweden.

Too many to overlook

There's been a lot of talk in the Australian media lately about a looming labour shortage. After years of economic growth, immigration rates will need to rise, it is confidently asserted, to meet a potential shortage of workers.

This argument was neatly punctured by an article in today's Age. Leading Australian economist Bob Gregory has revealed that the number of working age men living on welfare in Australia has doubled in the last 22 years, from 500,000 to an incredible 1,000,000.

For a nation whose entire population totals only 20 million, this is a massive pool from which to draw additional labor requirements. You would think that the first priority of any government would be to retrain some of these men to fill any looming gaps in the labor market.

Why should we leapfrog 1,000,000 working age men on welfare to look overseas for our labour? It's hard to believe that this is even economically rational, let alone morally justifiable.

Sending cheerleaders to war

There's a country town in Illinois called Paris which has suffered the highest American casualty rates in the Iraq war.

Five residents of Paris have died in the war. What's especially striking, though, is that two of the dead were young women. It seems that not only did many members of the local football team sign up for duty - so too did the cheerleaders.

A local reporter comments that most of the unit from the town signed up after 9/11 and that,

They joined in that kind of environment, but the town did not expect those 19-year-old footballers and 20-year-old cheerleaders to be putting on fatigues and going to war.

There's pictures in the newspaper report of the two dead women. They were both strikingly beautiful and feminine looking. Exactly the kind of women you would think men would instinctively want to protect from violent harm.

Yet we are now supposed to accept the idea of women signing up for and being killed in wars. This is an idea we should stubbornly resist. It might be a cliche, but it's nonetheless true, that men are made to be protectors and providers. We give up this basic truth about ourselves if we send women into the battle zone.

Our problem is that our liberal political leaders believe in the idea that we should be self-created by our own individual will and reason. Our gender is not something that we choose for ourselves. So, as a matter of principle for a liberal, it must be made not to count.

Therefore, liberals won't be swayed by arguments about the nature of men and women, as they want to overturn any such inherited nature. What we have to do instead is to attack the most basic idea of liberalism, that we have to be self-authored in order to be fully human.

We have to try to liberate the Western mind from this misguided, arbitrary and ultimately destructive principle. Only then will our political class think it legitimate to consider the distinctive natures of men and women when formulating public policy.

Making mothers of both sexes

The Melbourne Age newspaper is on the warpath. It is a war against traditional, masculine fatherhood.

In the past four days The Age has run three major articles calling for men to lay down their briefcases so that they might change more nappies.

Why this special plea to men to do less paid work? As I outlined in some detail in my article on The Old Father, liberals don't like the idea of traditional gender roles. Such roles are inherited, rather than being chosen by our own will and reason, and are therefore thought of by liberals as being an impediment to individual freedom.

So liberals think it's important that we throw off traditional fatherhood and motherhood roles. Instead there is to be one gender-neutral "parent" role, based on hands-on motherhood tasks.

That's why Sushi Das, in her Age article, asserts that,

In time, employers and governments will have to stop basing their decisions on the backward-looking model of man-as-breadwinner and woman-as-child-rearer, and move towards a new model where men and women are seen as workers and parents.

See - we are no longer to be fathers and mothers, but simply "parents" and "workers". Our sex has been cut out of the picture. It is no longer meant to matter. Which is why it's ironic that Sushi Das, in an attempt at emotional persuasion, appeals to Australian men's sense of manhood to make the change. She ends with a special plea to men: "Now is the time for courage ... It's time to be a man."

This is a fantastically ludicrous argument. We are being told that we can show our manhood by abolishing a most important facet of it, namely a distinctively masculine fatherhood.

In the second Age article, Natasha Campo argues, in orthodox liberal fashion, that we will be liberated by the abolition of traditional sex roles. She defends the feminists of the 1970s as follows,

Women's liberationists such as Anne Curthoys argued that women's liberation had to be synonymous with the liberation of mankind generally because role division according to sex harmed both sexes by locking men into the workplace and women into the home.

The third article describes the views of Australia's Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward. She so much wants to achieve an androgynous model of parenting that she thinks the Government should consider running special "relationship programs" to achieve it.

Like Sushi Das, she also pulls out some emotional "persuaders" to bolster her case, including the claim that women work in total two hours a day longer than men, and that this is causing high divorce rates and low fertility rates.

Her claim about longer female working hours should be received with some scepticism. I've seen quite a few survey results on this issue and they all showed that men and women worked very similar hours when paid and unpaid work was combined.

Quite a few surveys actually show men working slightly longer hours than women. For instance, in 1993 an Australian Bureau of Statistics study found that among employed people with children women spent on average 40% of the day on paid and unpaid work compared to 42% for men.

Perhaps this explains why most women are reasonably content with the division of household labour. For instance, in 1996 a researcher from the Australian National University, Dr Janeen Baxter, found that only 3.8% of women who did more housework than their husbands considered themselves "not at all satisfied" with the situation.

Pru Goward seems to recognise this resistance of women to the idea of unisex roles within the home. She insists in her Age article that "Women also needed to change their belief that they were better at housework and childrearing than their partners".

Yet if women are stubbornly traditional, just like men, it seems unlikely that the male commitment to breadwinning is a major factor behind divorce and fertility problems.

Ultimately, the call from the political class for motherhood and fatherhood to be abolished is an ideological one. It is an attempt to radically remake us so that we fit in better with an abstract concept of individual freedom.

Norwegian arrested for smacking

Here's a case from Norway of a stepfather who tried to do the right thing and ended up in court - and nearly convicted of a crime.

His two stepsons had been unruly for some time and had hit classmates. After giving them warnings, he finally put them over his knee and smacked their backsides three times with his bare hand. For this he was arrested!

One judge wanted to convict him, but was overruled by the other two judges.

I'm not someone who believes in the "spare the rod, spoil the child" motto, but I do think it's up to parents to decide when "smacking" (a slap on the bum or back of the legs) is an appropriate punishment.

Something's wrong when the police can arrest a father for responsibly punishing his own sons.

Liberals & the nation: Who will be left?

Pamela Bone is a left-liberal columnist for The Age newspaper.

Usually, you expect left-liberal Australian journalists to support easier entry for illegal immigrants into Australia. It's something of a cause for the left here in Australia.

Recently, though, Pamela Bone wrote an article for the Age in which she made several arguments against an open borders policy for asylum seekers (The Age 22/11/03).

One of her arguments is that the immigration policies of Western nations are creating a brain drain in poorer countries. She quotes an aid worker in Malawi who told her bitterly that "There are more Malawi doctors working in Manchester than there are in Malawi."

She notes also that at a graduation ceremony for migrant women here in Victoria,

One young woman told me she came here as a refugee from Sudan four years ago. She'd worked in a hotel and sent money back to support her mother and brother and sisters, who had escaped Sudan and gone to Egypt. She's since managed to sponsor all of them to come to Australia─all except their father, who had stayed in Sudan to help "get the peace".

'He says if everyone leaves, who will get the peace?' the young woman said. Who indeed?

The father, in asking who will be left to reform his own country, is giving voice to a sentiment which I expect has crossed the minds of many Western conservatives: that the problems in many third world countries need to be tackled over the longer term by their inhabitants, rather than by shifting large populations to the West.

The question still remains, though, of why a left-liberal like Pamela Bone would be making such arguments against mass immigration. Is she going against her liberal principles?

The answer is no. The basic liberal principle is that we should be radically autonomous, in the sense of having no impediments to our individual reason and will.

Liberals apply this principle to different spheres of life and sometimes there are conflicting results. For instance, because liberals want to be self-created by their individual will and reason, they are usually unsympathetic to a traditional national identity, which is something we are born into rather than choosing for ourselves.

That's why so many liberals are comfortable with a policy of mass immigration which effectively breaks down the traditional national identity.

However, one effect of such mass immigration is to bring large Muslim populations into Western countries. This potentially threatens liberalism as it is applied to gender and the family.

Liberals, wanting individuals to be self-created by individual will and reason, stress the feminist ideals of female independence and autonomy and of a gender blind society. Such feminist views are not strongly supported within fundamentalist Islamic cultures.

Pamela Bone is willing to recognise that an open borders immigration policy, by creating a large Muslim population in the West, potentially threatens the feminist aims of liberals like herself. She chooses to keep the feminism, rather than the open borders policy, even though both are products of liberal first principles.

That's why she can write:

The second argument [against mass immigration] is about whether Western countries are entitled to preserve their own cultures. Three quarters of those seeking asylum in Europe are from Islamic countries. There are now Muslim majorities in parts of England, and in France there are more Muslims than practising Catholics.

... the threat of fundamentalism can't be ignored ... Women, in particular, had better hope the peculiar attitudes held by some Muslims towards women can be changed before those holding them become a majority.

The point to be drawn is that it's not necessarily illogical for a liberal like Pamela Bone to make arguments against mass immigration. She does so not out of a conservative defence of traditional nationalism, but because of the possible harm to other liberal projects, such as feminism.

The pity is that the opposition to mass immigration has to come from within liberalism itself. Pamela Bone is most likely to remain an isolated voice within her own camp. A conservative opposition would at least be in a position to take a more unified stand against current immigration policies.

(First published at Conservative Central 01/01/2004)

Missing fathers

Are fathers necessary to a family, or are they merely optional? Gradually we are sliding toward the latter view. When governments choose to allow single women and lesbians access to IVF they are effectively accepting the deliberate creation of fatherless families.

In other words, we no longer show sympathy to childless single women by urging them to find a husband. Instead, we are increasingly accepting the idea that they should deliberately bring a child into the world without a father.

Yet it's not hard to find evidence that children need fathers. In recent months, several Australian celebrities have spoken out about the deep importance to them of having a father.

For instance, in yesterday's Age newspaper, there was an interview with leading Australian fashion designer Alannah Hill. I've always had some admiration for Alannah Hill as she has completely rejected the androgynous, grungy trends in fashion, preferring instead to design almost ultra-feminine clothes for women, replete with flowers and frills. Her fashion ethos is unashamedly heterosexual. She says,

I spend most days designing the most romantic clothes so that girls when they wear them will evoke some gush of love from the opposite sex.

Alannah Hill's greatest sadness is a feeling of neglect by her father. She says of this that,

I would have loved a strong family upbringing but it wasn't to be. It's something I have worked out somewhere inside of me, but the emptiness and wanting will never leave. I did feel very abandoned by my dad. I was the fourth of five children and he ignored me. I will always have a sadness inside me. I struggle with it a lot ...

Then there is the case of Virginia Trioli, who is a well-known journalist and broadcaster here in Melbourne. She has written of the loss four years ago of her father that,

I find his death more difficult to deal with as the years go on, not less so, which is bewildering - and I find talking about him even harder. It reduces me to a hollow shell ... He loved to dance - we used to dance together in the lounge room to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, music I love to this day. I gave a reading at his funeral and did a terrible job - I was a complete mess.

Finally there is the case of Marcus Graham, a popular Australian actor. Interviewed late last year in the Herald Sun, he described how,

Dad left when I was about two ... My mum sent me to a psychologist when I was five. I spent about a month every Saturday putting blocks into holes. I remember being miserable and heavily shut down. At the end of this psychological reading, they said, "He needs to see his dad." I thought that was obvious.

So here are three prominent Australians describing for us the depth of loss they have experienced through the absence of a father. This ought to be a reminder to us that humans are made, emotionally and psychologically, for a well-functioning heterosexual family life, in which children have a close relationship with both a mother and a father.

Fathers are much more than a useful, but optional, addition to family life.

A workable spectrum

Is there a way to make sense of the political spectrum? I think there is. The terms “left” and “right” do make sense as distinctions within mainstream liberalism.

It works this way. All liberals start off with a belief that the individual should be self-created by their own will and reason. This means that liberals have to clear away unchosen impediments to individual will, such as race, gender and class.

But this leaves a fundamental problem. How can you possibly regulate a society made up of millions of individual wills, each pursuing their own selfish desires? This is the question asked by Australian liberal Clive Hamilton, in his essay The Disappointment of Liberalism. He writes that,

this essay is a prelude to answering the question of how we can reconstruct the social in an individualized world. In a world where we are no longer bound together by our class, gender or race, why should we live cooperatively?

Mainstream liberals have given two basic answers to this question. Right-liberals (classical liberals) believe that society can be regulated by the “hidden hand” of the free market. In this theory, people can pursue their economic interests selfishly, and yet still generate positive outcomes for society as a whole. Right-liberals therefore have a focus on Economic Man and would prefer that the state didn’t interfere with and distort the operations of the market.

Left-liberals reject the idea of the market as a means of regulating society. They see the market as generating unequal outcomes, and they want a more deliberately rational regulation of society. They therefore prefer society to be regulated either by the state or by local communities.

So, the most basic left/right distinction is between those on the right who prefer market regulation and those on the left who prefer state/community regulation.

There is, however, another important distinction to be made. If you were to imagine a pure liberalism, in which individuals were entirely autonomous and unimpeded, a centralised state would have little role. Therefore, the more radical liberals, of both right and left, who want to achieve a pure liberalism straight away, will be “small state” or “no state” liberals.

So the political spectrum goes like this. On the right you have those wanting regulation by the market and on the left those wanting more deliberate regulation by the state or local community. In the middle you have those accepting a larger role for the state and on either radical end you have those opposing a large role for the state.

So, on the far left you have anarchists (left-libertarians), then on the centre-left you have social democrats (left-liberals), then on the centre-right you have mainstream right-liberals like the American Republicans or Australian Liberals and on the far-right you have Ayn Rand type right-libertarians.

Notice that the opposite ends of the spectrum have something in common in virtue of their radicalism, namely a libertarian opposition to a central state.

All that remains to be explained is where conservatives, communists and fascists fit in to the spectrum. As noted, the terms “left” and “right” refer to a distinction within liberalism. Therefore, conservatism doesn’t fit within this spectrum at all. That’s why conservatives will sometimes find themselves agreeing with left-wing criticisms of an unregulated market, but at other times with right-wing criticisms of an interventionist state.

Marxist communism is an interesting case. I reserve judgement, but I expect it fits on the spectrum as a form of radical leftism. It’s true that Marxists want to establish an authoritarian state (the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) to achieve their aims, so this might seem to go against the idea that the more radical liberals want a small state. However, Marxists believe that the dictatorship of the proletariat will only last for a limited time and will then give way to the end of history in which there will be no state. So ultimately Marxism does seem to fit in well as a form of radical leftism.

I reserve judgement too on the exact place of fascism within the polical spectrum. However, I expect that it doesn’t fit on the spectrum at all, as it’s not a part of the liberal mainstream. Fascists don’t follow the mainstream liberal belief in a society made up of millions of atomised wills, each following its own desires. The triumph of human will, its highest realization, for fascists, seems instead to be the practical assertion of a collective will, itself embodied in the will of the leader.

Perhaps the notion that fascism is “off the spectrum” explains why it seems to incorporate aspects of both left and right wing politics.