Why does the Swedish boy wear pink sandals?

One of the clearest differences between liberals and traditionalists concerns sex distinctions.

Liberals want to be autonomous - they wish to be "self-determined" in the sense of choosing for themselves who they are and what they do. We don't get to choose our sex for ourselves and therefore masculinity and femininity will often be treated by liberals as a limitation or restriction to be overcome.

Just recently I've read a number of articles in the media, each of which expresses this underlying negative attitude to sex differences.

At one extreme, there was a report of a speech given by a Melbourne bio-ethicist, Dr Robert Sparrow, to the Australian Medical Students Association. According to Dr Sparrow, medical technology should be used to "remove limitations on the opportunities available" to individuals.

What is one major limitation on individuals according to Dr Sparrow? Quite logically for a liberal, he believes that manhood and womanhood are limitations. Therefore, he suggested in his speech that one day medical technology might be used to create a "post sex" world in which there were no males or females but only hermaphrodites. If this proves impossible, he suggests that all people be born female, as females have a more "open" future than males, being able to do things (such as experience pregnancy) that are unavailable to men:

To reach this post-sex world, Dr Sparrow said parents wanting the best for their children should start choosing baby girls through IVF because they live longer and have more opportunities in life.

"There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men around gestation, childbirth, and breastfeeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms in the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men," he said.

Dr Sparrow said his somewhat "tongue-in-cheek" argument was based on a line of thought about medical ethics that suggests medical technology should be used to serve the welfare of individuals and remove limitations on the opportunities available to them.

"I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a 'post-sex' humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more 'open' future than boy babies," he said.

... When asked if people should act on his suggestion, Dr Sparrow said he didn't expect many people would take up the challenge just yet.

"I don't think we're seriously looking at a world of only girl children just yet, but I do think that when philosophers start talking about using medical technology to achieve things that aren't about health, so increasing people's IQ or life expectancy for example, you have to ask why we shouldn't all be girls," he said.

Then there is the war on the colour pink. I wrote an item some time back about the uproar created in Sweden by a pink ice-cream marketed to girls:

The Swedish Consumers Association however uses an entirely different word: "gender-profiling".

"Girlie, GB's new ice pop, is pink and has make-up inside the stick. It says a lot about what GB thinks about girls and how they should be," said the association in a statement.

Well, the war on pink continues. Lauredhel, an Australian feminist, recently opened up a Target catalogue and was horrified to discover the marketing of pink toys to girls. She complained that it was "pinkly sickening". She went in search of toys for girls in the catalogue that weren't "pinkified" and was glad to discover a castle, but alas inside the castle there were no "siege engines and dragons and such" but instead a "sleeping pink baby".

Meanwhile, The Age saw fit to run a column titled "Girls can't thrive in a puff of pink". The writer, Monica Dux, is alarmed by the sight of young girls dressed as fairies, princesses and ballerinas. She suggests, oddly enough, that mothers who dress girls this way have created a raunch culture among older girls. She writes that those people who are anxious about raunch culture,

seem to be overlooking the pink elephant in the nursery, the one in fairy wings and a tiara.

She believes that there is,

a whiff of hypocrisy surrounding those parents who so readily lament the rise of raunch, while at the same time dressing their daughters in ways that entrench objectifying feminine stereotypes ...

Her solution runs as follows:

So, here's an idea: no matter how keen your daughter may be on her pretty princess outfit, pack it away and bring it out only for occasional play.

There might be a few tears, but you might also short-circuit a development path that leads to a grown woman who, deep down, still sees herself as all sugar and spice.

Then there was the report about two new publishing houses in Sweden (yes, Sweden again) which are operating explicitly on a liberal philosophy in which "individual freedom" is set against "traditional gender roles":

Two new publishing houses for children's books have sparked debate in gender-equal Sweden ...

"Our goal is for all people, regardless of gender, sexuality, ethnicity or other such things, to have the freedom to create their own identity and be respected for their personal qualities," said Karin Salmson, the co-founder of the new Vilda publishing house.

Vilda and another small publisher, Olika, both opened their doors last year with the express aim of making children's books that promote liberal values and challenge traditional views on gender, race and sexual orientation.

"Many parents feel forced to change he to she or she to he and other details as they read stories for their children, because so many details in children's books are so very traditional," Salmson said.

Vilda has therefore introduced a so-called "hug label", guaranteeing that its books have been "scrutinized from a democracy, equality and diversity perspective" and contain no details "based on prejudice or traditional gender roles that rein in individual freedom".

The publisher for instance makes sure girls are not always dressed in pink and boys in blue, that dad is not necessarily the one rushing off to work while mom stays home whipping up dinner and that same-sex parents are portrayed as a natural part of life.

Olika's co-founder Marie Tomicic also says her publishing house aims to "break down traditional gender roles and offer children broader role models, allowing them to be all they can be."

Together the two small publishers have so far only released about a dozen titles, including a book about a boy who wears pink sandals, and a story about a girl who likes to make farting sounds using her armpits, who just happens to have two dads.

The publishers' philosophies are largely in line with ruling attitudes in the country, which is widely considered a world leader in gender equality and minority rights.

What all of this suggests is that liberal autonomy theory doesn't work on its own terms. It is based on the idea that we should aim to be free to choose for ourselves in any direction. But when liberal thinkers try to apply this idea, it generates its own major limitations.

And so you get a bioethicist who looks forward to a time when the option of being male and female no longer exists; you get others who find it difficult to accept little girls acting like little girls by associating with the colour pink or wearing fairy princess costumes or playing with dolls.

What's worse is that the kind of choices liberalism sets itself against are often the ones most important to individuals. We don't seek our freedom as abstract entities; most men want the freedom to live as men, most women the freedom to live as women.

If a liberal tells me that I embody nothing, it is no use him then proclaiming that he has made me free "to be all that I can be". I was free to be more back when I embodied, as a man, a significant life principle - even if this meant that my identity wasn't entirely open-ended.

One final point. The traditional view of gender contains a principle of self-development. We are asked to find what is most admirable in our masculine or feminine selves and apply it successfully in the world. The liberal view of gender makes an easier, but less productive, demand on us; we are exhorted as men to not act so much like men and as women to act less like women.

Isn't there a reason, therefore, why the traditional view is more likely to develop individual character?

So we are friendless by nature?

I've now read the second chapter of Professor Steven Kautz's Liberalism & Community. If you remember, the book is intended to be a defence of classical liberalism.

Once again, I found it an extraordinary read. Kautz sets out the foundations of classical liberalism so openly that the flaws in the theory are strikingly clear.

Kautz begins the chapter by reminding the reader that liberalism has become an orthodoxy:

Classical and contemporary liberal teachings ... dominate our political discourse. America is still now, or perhaps now more than ever, somehow a liberal regime ... (p.23)

Why is "community" such a problem for us, here and now? The short answer is liberalism. The political philosophy of liberalism, its critics and friends agree, is in some sense our political philosophy: we are somehow all liberals. (p.28)

Why has a liberal orthodoxy brought about a lost sense of community? Kautz argues first that liberalism overwhelmed other traditions which once upheld a positive sense of virtue:

Liberalism ... has prevailed in this century in America, overwhelming those elements of the American political tradition that once tamed our individualism and materialism. If liberal America once found needed moral sustenance in various religious and republican traditions of virtue that have long since been abandoned, as many argue, then it must now find a way to reconstitute those indispensable moral supplements to the material comforts that liberal politics provides. (p.28)

It's Kautz's second argument which is really striking. Kautz explains that the "moral pyschology" on which liberalism is based is inevitably hostile to community:

It should not be surprising, even to partisans of liberalism, that a world dominated by liberal individualism has given rise to longings for lost community. Classical liberalism is a doctrine of acquisitive individualism, and teaches that man is by nature solitary and selfish, not political or even social: the most powerful natural passions and needs of human beings are private. Human beings are not friends by nature.

This harsh moral psychology is, at any rate, the fundamental teaching of classical liberalism. As a result, the idea of community is always somewhat suspect for thoughtful liberals. Liberals are inclined to view partisans of community as either romantic utopians or dangerous authoritarians.

If there is no natural common good, beyond peace and security, then invocations of the spirit of community are either foolish or fraudulent, impossible dreams or wicked ideologies. (p.28)

Kautz goes on to write in a similar vein:

Classical liberals ... seem to believe that we could be content to live alone, because there are no natural bonds between human beings, and so there is no natural community. Indeed, the family is not simply natural, according to some of the founders of liberalism. And even if there were certain natural passions or sentiments that might, in favourable circumstances, bring human beings together in a natural community, these passions are overwhelmed, in most circumstances, by the strongest human passion, the desire to preserve oneself and to live in tolerable comfort in a world of human enemies ...

In short, the most urgent human good ... is the security of our bodies ... I repeat: our classical liberal teachers have taught us that human beings are in the decisive respect friendless by nature, and we have constructed a world on the basis of this understanding. It is not surprising that we feel lonely, now and then. (p.29)

Liberal politics is, as a result, a politics of fearful accommodation among natural foes who somehow reconstitute themselves as civil friends ... (p.29)

This "moral psychology" ought to have been challenged, and marginalised, long ago. It is way too pessimistic an account of human nature. We are asked to believe the following:

i) humans are by nature solitary and selfish
ii) other humans are to be regarded primarily as a threat to my life
iii) the primary good is to be left alone, in physical security, to pursue acquisitive wants, in other words, to accumulate material goods
iv) any invocation of community is either utopian or authoritarian

I think back to my childhood and early adulthood in Melbourne, a city of several million souls. I remember a whole set of naturally occurring communities: those of family, suburb, parish, city, state and nation. I remember people acting supportively toward each other, on the basis that you should "help your mates", or that men should act courteously toward women, or that you should help out a fellow Australian, or that you should help the less fortuntate and so on. I remember too a range of goods that were held to be more important than acquisitive wants: loyalty to friends, love for women, a culture of family life, masculine character and achievement, an appreciation of the arts, and a love of nature to name a few.

Melbourne was, at that time, a settled community and the primary experience of life was not fear of those you lived amongst. If anything, the opposite was true: people were generally honest and helpful in their dealings with each other.

So there is no compelling reason, in my own life experience, to retreat into a private world of acquisitive individualism - a world in which community is feared as a danger to my liberty of person or property.

We lose too much in this retreat, including a freedom to participate in the more significant aspects of life.

Feminism ... just ... got ... worse ...

Penny Red is angry:

You bloody traitor, Kathleen Parker. You weak-willed, belly-showing traitor.

What would make a young socialist feminist so mad? How could Kathleen Parker so enrage her?

Penny Red is upset that Kathleen Parker wrote a column in defence of men and fatherhood. Parker's column is worth reading in its entirety, but it ends on this note:

As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.

In the coming years we will need men who are not confused about their responsibilities. We need boys who have acquired the virtues of honour, courage, valour and loyalty. We need women willing to let men be men – and boys be boys. And we need young men and women who will commit and marry and raise children in stable homes.

I think this is exceptionally well put. Penny Red, though, intensely dislikes the quote because she thinks it is right that men are marginalised, that culture disrespects and dishonours masculinity, and that men and women engage in a sex war.

Here is how Penny Red responds to Kathleen Parker:

Women have been raising children alone for centuries untold, and, since feminist liberation, we have been enabled to provide for ourselves and our children on a more basic level. If that alienates men from their traditional roles of breadwinner and head of the table then too bad. I was raised by a single mother who was also a part-time lawyer; it did me no harm whatsoever, and I fully intend to be one myself one day.

... So, precisely in what way do children ‘need’ fathers - or is it, in fact, fathers who need children? ... The plain fact is that now that women are allowed to financially provide for themselves, we no longer need husbands to raise children effectively, if, indeed, we ever did. What women could do with, fundamentally, are wives –other people, male or female, to share the load of domestic work and money-earning in a spirit of genuine support and partnership. When more men can stomach seeing themselves in the role of 'wife and father', then we’ll have a basis for negotiation.

This is bad enough, but it gets worse. Penny Red goes on to state that a child is only the mother's - that the father has no rights at all when it comes to a child. She is willing to balance this view by stating that the father is therefore under no obligations, financial or otherwise, to the child:

Why is it unarguable that a man should support his offspring? With state help, most women are perfectly capable of doing so on their own ...

... Before they are their own, my kids will be just that - mine - and my money will pay for the nappies and school shoes.

So sorry about your balls, guys, but before they are their own these babies are ours, and they will remain ours whilst they are born from our bodies. We would be only too delighted for you to help us – genuinely help us – with the work of raising the next generation, but fatherhood is a privilege, not a right. If you’re truly man enough to be a wife and father, bring that to the table and we'll talk.

How should men respond to this? There are a couple of ways I think are unhelpful. The first is to get angry and resentful toward women in general. Not all women are Penny Reds. In my own neighbourhood of Melbourne there are many genuinely lovely young women who still represent a more traditional womanhood. The best comeback to the Penny Reds is to find such a woman and live happily with her.

However, it's not helpful either to entirely ignore women like Penny Red. She represents a trend within modernism which has real influence within our culture. If we take the attitude that it's most masculine just to shrug off women like Penny Red, we allow the situation to get worse. A real advantage we have as men is the ability to apply ourselves in a concentrated way to a problem in order to solve it. We shouldn't leave it to sympathetic women like Kathleen Parker to take on the problem of feminism. It should be our aim to work patiently and perseveringly to entirely rid our culture of the negative influence of feminism.

How do we do this? There are at least four ways to argue persuasively against Penny Red's politics.

The first is simply to point out the factual errors. On average, children raised by single women don't do as well as those raised in more traditional families. Nor do most single mothers manage to do well financially on their own. The provider and protector roles of men are not yet redundant, in spite of the role of the state in supporting single motherhood.

The second approach is to point out just how unliveable Penny Red's politics are. Feminism has reached the point at which feminists themselves are rarely able to follow their own principles in practice. For instance, Penny Red declared early in her post that she intended to become a single mother. However, later we learn that she has left herself considerable wriggle room:

I love my partner deeply and would be thrilled to bear a child who carried half of his genetic material. If we are still together at the time my child is born I will be only too happy for him to help me raise it, for him to share legal guardianship and for my child to call him ‘dad’. And this is not because it’s his moral or genetic right, but because I’m lucky enough to have met an emotionally and domestically literate man who I think would make a wonderful parent. But I want him around because he's a fantastic person, not because my kids need a male parent. And if he doesn't want to be involved, I'll manage.

So she does have a male partner and she would be "thrilled" to bear his child and she thinks he would make a "wonderful" parent and she would like her child to call him "dad". But the fact of his being male is just ... well, fortuitous. What seems clear is that Penny Red does want to live with the father of her child, in spite of all her arguments that men are superfluous.

Which leads on to the third problem with her politics. Penny Red, despite wanting to live with the father of her child, has undercut her own position in such a relationship. If men and women were really to believe the arguments that she makes, then how could a woman keep a man in a long-term relationship? If a man no longer believes his role as a father is a necessary one, and if he believes that he has no obligations to a child which, after all, is his wife's and not really his, then a woman is going to have to work overtime to keep him around. She is going to have to really exert herself to keep him happy.

To put it another way, when a man believes that his children are his own in a significant way, and that their welfare depends on his masculine role within the family, then he is much less likely to leave in a crisis. A woman in such a relationship can relax a bit, knowing that her husband has reasons to stay.

The final approach is the most important. What Penny Red has done is to apply, in a radical way, liberal autonomy theory to the lives of women. If the key aim in life is to be autonomous, then why wouldn't a woman assert that her child is her own and not someone else's? Why wouldn't she want to negotiate a role for the father on her own terms? Why wouldn't she claim that fathers are unnecessary and that she as a woman can manage on her own?

So if we really want to undermine feminism in Western culture we have to attack at the root of the problem - by decisively rejecting liberal autonomy theory. This means rejecting the idea that individual autonomy is the overriding, organising principle in society. We need to confidently assert other goods as well, including (as Kathleen Parker does) what is good for the survival of our own tradition.

Cut adrift in Harlem

You might have heard the saying that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. Well, here's a story to illustrate the quote.

Susan Crain Bakos is an older, white, female liberal. A few years ago, she wrote a column announcing that she'd given up on white men and now preferred the company of black men. She wrote that she deliberately chose black men because of the racial difference and because black men not only had "more energy, style and edge" but were also "gentlemen, something which white men no longer are".

Well, she's now written another column. It turns out that she acted on her decision to only date black men by moving to Harlem and socialising in a Harlem bar. At first, things went well. The bar, St.Nicks Pub, was a bubbling hub of diversity:

On that Saturday night when I first went with friends to hear the Africa Band, I thought the pub — Harlem! — welcomed me. And I rhapsodized about the experience to friends. Striding into St. Nicks on a balmy August night, working my embroidered denim Halle Bob skirt with the deep front slit, I felt Harlem gently kissing my thighs. Nelson, the bar manager, smiled at me and brought folding chairs up from the basement to arrange seating for us because, he said, “I want you sitting here where I can keep an eye on those pretty white legs.”

I was surrounded by the kind of crowd that I imagined assembled in small Harlem jazz bars during the Renaissance and again in the 1940s and the 1960s, time periods when the excitement in the air was inextricably linked to a sound appreciated by sophisticated people who sought out diversity. Africans and African Americans, whites, Latinos, European and Japanese tourists — a mélange of ages, races, sexual orientations and interracial couples — they were jostling against each other in this tiny crowded space without animosity ...

But as time passed problems emerged. There was crime:

It was always a place where cash disappears from unwatched handbags, a jacket or cashmere shawl tossed casually on the back of a bar stool may be sold to another patron and “salesmen” come through hawking everything from tube socks to portraits of the Virgin Mary. Between the casual theft and the men who asked, “Will you buy me a drink? Lend me some money? Help me buy a new car?” — Yes, a car! — I had stopped carrying more cash than I would spend on two drinks and a cab home. Drugs, of course, were available for purchase in the backyard, which usually smelled of pot smoke.

There was jealous hostility from black women:

... the undercurrent of anger that I’d seen as an occasional flash in a black woman’s eye turned into more open hostility. The African-American girl bartenders, especially on Sunday nights, brazenly overcharged white customers and told them to leave for “being disrespectful” if they complained. Black women “regulars” made loud negative comments about white women ...

There were political resentments:

One of the regulars, an educated, successful black man, lectured me repeatedly: “America must apologize for the original sin of slavery and offer reparations.” “The prisons are full of young black men caught with nickel and dime bags,” he declared, “Incarcerated on the three-strikes-you’re-out rule.” “Reverend Jeremiah Wright! Why is he being pilloried for saying what black ministers say every Sunday in Harlem!”

There was violence:

...the violence was escalating, too ... There were stories of one musician slashing another in the backyard, of fist fights among drug buyers and sellers, of guns waved but not shot. One Friday night, I was in the pub when some thugs came in and roughed up some other thugs. Most of the African-American regulars bolted for the door; the white people stayed.

Then there was Mykul, a thug who knocked her to the ground to steal her handbag:

Mykul, my assailant, is a thug; and I was naive to have ignored that.

I discovered during chatty conversation at the pub that Mykul—pronounced Michael—was a hairdresser who initially learned his craft while in prison. Liberal white woman that I am — was? — I believed in rehabilitation, so I made an appointment with him at Big Russ’ Barber Shop on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. And I even returned a second time.

I’m sure he stole my wallet on that second hair appointment, though he blamed a gypsy cab driver for its loss. I wasn’t going to make a third appointment. Then the shakedowns for more money began. He called asking me to pay more “because you would pay it downtown.” Apparently desperate to cover the debt with his drug dealer, he’d told me he had — or maybe just to buy more drugs — he stepped up his game.

When I hit the concrete with the back of my head and the small of my back, I knew that I was forever changed. I was mugged once before, but it wasn’t personal. No one I actually knew by name had ever raised a hand to me. Born and raised in East St. Louis, Ill., I had nevertheless lived my life — until that night — in a world where men do not hit or shove women.

She found herself friendless:

No one outside the pub that night would loan me a cell phone to dial 911. Crying, I went inside and borrowed a phone from Melvin. Two uniformed cops responded to the call, a man and a woman, young and as unsympathetic as the patrons at the bar — who hugged me in greeting most nights — and now wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Nobody knows you,” the cops said. “Nobody saw anything,” they said.

“It’s always like that in there. Someone gets stabbed in the backyard and nobody saw nothing, nobody knows nothing."

... The next day, a friend who has written about Harlem said: “I am sorry you lost your idealism and innocence; you held on to it far longer than most people do ..."

She concludes:

Often I think that African Americans give us too much power. White people aren’t the primary force keeping them down. Thug Life is. I haven’t seen Mykul since that night in May. If I did, I’d probably find a safe building and hide. The physical sense of violation I felt when Mykul attacked me was so profound that I could not understand how my neighbors could stand by and offer no help, no sympathy.

She began by glamourising the diversity of Harlem, but her own experiences there led her to observe that:

Harlem is no place for a woman without male protection.

Having cut herself adrift from her own community, she found herself in a place where she no longer felt, in her own words, "emotionally safe".

Hat tip: Pilgrimage to Montsalvat

Liberalism vs community?

I've just begun reading Liberalism & Community by Steven Kautz. He is an Associate Professor of Politics at Michigan State University.

The book is a reply to those who have criticised liberalism for undermining community. Admittedly, I've only read the first chapter, but so far I've been more disconcerted than persuaded by the way Kautz puts his argument.

I'm going to quote some sections of the text and then briefly comment underneath, beginning with this admission by Kautz:

We have been taught by our classical liberal ancestors to think of ourselves as free individuals above all, rather than as children or parishioners or citizens, or as members of a racial or ethnic group - or, indeed, as members of any other communities. (p.19)

I'm still astonished that people can think this way and build a politics on such an understanding of life. Kautz is happy to support a liberalism in which we become "free" to the extent that we diminish the role in our lives of communities. Kautz thinks of "freedom" as the highest good, and he identifies communities as a threat or hazard to this freedom.

Such a perspective makes no sense if you think of people as social creatures, whose lives are naturally embedded in distinct communities. In this view, freedom is something that is achieved within a society and not against it.

Kautz is aware of such objections. He goes on to quote some communitarian critics of the liberal outlook:

But this idea of the free individual is based on a confusion, say its critics: one's deepest attachments to other human beings are not freely chosen, adopted, and then discarded like articles of clothing, but are given prior to such choices and "partly define the person I am" ...

Indeed, the human being who overcomes such "constitutive" attachments is not liberated, but is rather, says Sandel, "wholly without character, without moral depth"; an honorable human being must surely "feel the moral weight" of these primary loyalties.

The criticisms here are quite good. Liberalism holds that to be free we must be self-defining, self-determining individuals. But much of what is most significant in our lives is unchosen, including our communal identity and a great part of our family commitments. If we lose this unchosen aspect of life, then we will be poorer in our sense of ourselves and our place within a community.

Kautz seems to take this criticism seriously. He therefore sets out to prove that the asocial, "free" liberal individual can also stake a claim to "moral depth":

All of this is undoubtedly partly true: the liberal idea of the free individual too often, in liberal practice, produces eccentric, passive, lonely individuals. But it is perhaps not exhaustive.

Even for contemporary admirers of community, praise of the loyal and devoted citizen is commonly tempered by an awareness of the moral gravity of those who contributed to liberalism's past and present victories over intolerant and oppressive communities: moral freedom may require rebellion against moral community.

Those free individuals who secured for themselves, and for us, the blessings of liberty, even at the price of rebellion against a father or a priest or a prince, are perhaps not wholly "without moral depth," but deserve both our admiration and our gratitude: the truly free human being possesses a moral dignity that at least rivals the dignity of a human life that is animated by love or piety or patriotism.

Once again, Kautz, the defender of classical liberalism, writes of community as a kind of natural competitor against, or even enemy of, freedom. He even contrasts the "truly free human being" with the human being animated "by love or piety or patriotism".

I don't like Kautz's radically individualistic "truly free human being". I don't even think he is all that free - what, after all, is his freedom for, once he becomes asocial and discards membership of a distinct community and tradition, and once he steps aside from a life animated "by love or piety or patriotism"? Isn't it better to be free to participate in the greater aspects of life, rather than to discard them in order to be an autonomous loner?

Falling down in Koreatown

Back in 1996, at the age of 43, Heather King found herself married but childless, and living in Koreatown, a suburb of Los Angeles crowded with large immigrant families.

The experience led her to break with the liberal culture she had grown up with. As a young woman, Heather King believed "passionately" in the freedom to have casual sex and to take drugs. She fell pregnant a number of times and ended up having three abortions; she refused to consider motherhood out of fear that it might limit or restrict her lifestyle:

Coming of age in the '60s, I believed passionately in sexual freedom and the concomitant right to choose abortion. Also a staunch supporter of drinking and drugs, I became deeply alcoholic and sobered up in my mid-thirties to discover that I had somehow graduated from law school. I have now been married for six years, and, at forty-three, am childless.

It is difficult to admit that two of the babies I aborted were conceived with married men, one of whom was a one-night stand, and that the third abortion was performed during the course of a long-term relationship. I would like to be able to say that I agonized over the decisions, but the fact is that they were based on expedience and fear.

Motherhood would have disrupted my life in every conceivable way. It would call upon resources I was not at all certain I possessed--patience, selflessness, the ability to go without sleep--and I viewed it, frankly, as a kind of prison sentence. It seemed inconceivable that a woman would actually invite the upheaval that a baby entails. I don't care how much joy they say it brings, I said to myself, no way am I getting sucked into that trap.

She then devoted herself to a career as a lawyer:

When we arrived in Koreatown, I was working as a litigation attorney in a Beverly Hills office. I could scarcely have been more temperamentally ill-suited for the job, but it was the first time in my life I had made decent money and I was desperately afraid to give it up. My eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue, fell upon the bimonthly paycheck with the same grim relish a buzzard displays for carrion; I dragged through each day consumed by anxiety and the hideous fear that I would contract some stress-based disease and keel over dead at my desk.

Finally she began to reconsider the values on which her life had been founded:

During those four years my life felt, oddly enough, like a prison sentence--the sentence I had hoped to avoid by exercising intelligence backed by the unfettered exercise of free will. As a matter of fact, although I had enjoyed virtually every purported freedom that modern life has to offer, I realized that in one way, my life had always felt like a sentence. I had drunk and smoked and slept around to my heart's content, yet the apotheosis of my personal freedom had consisted of servitude to a bottle of booze and getting pregnant by someone whose name I barely knew ...

I had followed my own unguided will, and it had led me straight to hell on earth: an existence characterized by guilt, shame, doubt, insecurity, and the inability to love or be loved.

So the freedom to act in any direction guided by nothing more than individual reason was not liberating for Heather King. She had been misled, first by the belief that it is the absence of limit or restraint which represents human freedom, and second by the idea that individual reason alone is sufficient to guide us successfully through life.

Individual reason is important but it's not enough: not only does it vary in quality from individual to individual, even when it's strong it will still often take too long for individuals to learn important life lessons from scratch. As Burke famously wrote:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

Which brings us back to Koreatown, Los Angeles. Heather King moved there for the cheap rent, but felt alienated rather than enriched living in the midst of diversity:

It is a neighborhood under physical, mental, and spiritual siege. Here, encircled and infiltrated, we live in the agora. As I write, a man ten feet from my desk puffs a cigarette on his porch; I can see the whites of his eyes ...

Here it is not an exaggeration to say that somebody will steal it if it's not nailed down. Somebody, for instance, stole my brand-new bicycle, then somebody stole my car ...

The majority of our neighbors are Latino and Korean and the place is lousy with children. Mothers and fathers - mostly mothers - throng the sidewalk with their litters of offspring. I used to wonder with irritation why these people give birth so relentlessly ...

Three times a day the produce truck parks out front, blaring "Turkey in the Straw" or "O'er the Bounding Main" for twenty minutes at a stretch. At 8 P.M., a man who sells bread out of the back of his car pulls up and emits a haunting wail, like a mullah calling the devout to prayer ...

We fall asleep to the whirr of circling helicopters and the staccato lullaby of gunfire. Crack addicts propel their shopping carts through the alley; car alarms shriek like wounded animals; the spray cans of the graffiti "taggers" hiss audibly. Girlish screams follow the thud of fist against flesh.

The litter is ferocious. A set of unspoken rules prevails: when holding something you no longer have any use for--a newspaper, a napkin, a styrofoam cup--open your hand and let the thing drop to the ground where you stand. When finished eating, throw what's left - a chicken bone, a corn cob, a banana peel - in the street ...

When I do the dishes, I can see the Korean mother across the way stirring a pot and wiping her table. A kind of blue-net birdcage, housing what appear to be dead sardines, dangles from an eave; kimchee ferments below in an earthenware crock ...

There seem to be two things going on here. First, an understandable reaction to crime, overcrowding, and unfamiliar sights, sounds and social mores. How could Heather King relax and feel a sense of home in these conditions of diversity?

But it seems too that Koreatown challenged her liberal-left hostility to motherhood and family. She was confronted daily with the sight of large families and women surrounded by their children. This too was alien to her own social class and she records her negative response: "lousy with children", "litters of offspring".

But in re-examining her underlying values, she also came to question her negative attitude to motherhood. She has come to believe that the reasons she gave herself for her abortions were false:

The vague notion underlying my abortions, and I suspect of the vast majority of other women's as well, is the idea that there wouldn't be enough to go round--not enough time, not enough energy, not enough space, not enough people to help. But when I examined my motives honestly, I realized that though I said not enough for the kid, I meant not enough for me.

I mouthed platitudes about the global population boom; in fact, I was most worried about overcrowding in my own bedroom. I chafed against the "enforced labor" of motherhood while accepting without question the prevailing consumer ethic that sentences the vast majority of us to a lifetime of economic servitude.

The truth in my case is that there was not only enough to go round, there would probably have been more than most of the rest of the world will ever enjoy: maybe not an expensive home or fancy cars--I don't have those things now--but nourishing food and a roof over our heads and comfortable clothes. There would have been books and music and museums. It would have meant sacrifice, deferred plans, missed vacations, no slipcovered down sofa, no hundred-dollar shoes, but there would have been enough. The truth was that I simply did not want to share.

She now believes that motherhood might have changed her for the better:

If I discovered today I was pregnant, I hope my convictions would be steadfast and unwavering. I hope I would know enough to weigh my fear--of birth defects, of making do with less, of not being a good parent, of noise and anxiety and lack of sleep--against the possibility that a child would change me in ways I cannot imagine, in aspects of my life that probably desperately need changing.

What a pity, though, that this change of heart came so late in life, when the time for motherhood had probably passed by.

What makes heterosexuality legitimate?

Feministe is one of the larger feminist websites. There was a post recently at the site titled "What Does a Feminist Relationship Look Like?". Readers were asked to respond to the following question:

How do you work feminism into your relationships? Do you think it’s even possible to have a fully feminist, egalitarian heterosexual relationship?

There was a range of answers, but I couldn't help but notice response no.54 from Allyson:

I would like to suggest that women (and men) struggling with what an egalitarian heterosexual relationship looks like refer to Christine Overall’s Heterosexuality and Feminist Theory. The feminist philosopher argues that it is possible to have a feminist heterosexuality, if it is separated from institutionalized heterosexuality. She suggests that this is accomplished by each partner taking a critical perspective, becoming aware of the privileges attached to their relationship and then rejecting that privilege and striving against heterosexist oppression.

In addition, she argues that a feminist heterosexuality can only be present when it is a conscious choice; in other words, she argues that a woman must engage in critical reflection, identify that she is attracted to men and act accordingly. A feminist heterosexuality cannot be one that is automatically assumed because self-determination is not present there.

Dr Overall is apparently a big thing in Canadian academia: the Queen's University website declares,

Dr. Christine Overall is one of the world’s foremost feminist scholars, particularly in the field of reproductive ethics, and is regarded as a pioneer in the field of feminist philosophy.

(By the way, what are the chances of a pioneer in feminist philosophy being called Dr Overall - conjuring up images of the appearance of 1970s style feminists.)

So, on Allyson's reading at least, Professor Overall believes that women can be legitimately heterosexual, but only if they choose this heterosexuality self-consciously after a period of "critical reflection". If they fail to do this they haven't self-determined their sexuality and it becomes illegitimate.

This is a logical, if unusual, application of liberal autonomy theory. Liberalism sets autonomy as a primary life aim and therefore seeks to remove impediments to individual self-determination. But there are a lot of significant things we don't self-determine, our sexuality being one of them (along with our ethnicity and our gender). Some liberals therefore claim that heterosexuality is not fixed and naturally predominant, but that sexuality exists fluidly in multiple forms along a continuum.

Dr Overall's solution seems to be a bit different: she wants people to go through a conscious process of choice to make it seem as if their heterosexuality is voluntary and self-determined. (Note how closely connected feminist philosophy is here with the basic concerns of liberalism.)

Living the modern dream?

Tracey Emin would seem to be living the dream life, at least as it's defined in modern society. She is a British modernist artist (of part Turkish Cypriot descent) who has money, fame, a successful career and independence.

But she's been "depressed for months pondering her life". She is finding it difficult to come to terms with her childlessness:

The future is freaking her out and even the present she's finding hard to cope with. She always thought the brilliant thing about not having kids “is that you can do what the f*** you like, but I don't want to do what the f*** I like. I can do anything. I can travel around the world, I can stay up all night drinking, I don't have to answer to anyone. But I don't want to be like that anyway.” ... sometimes I question the whole big scheme of things. How does it all work? What's it all for? If I was a grandmother I'd have this other kind of arc where things go but I don't have an arc. The only thing I have is me.”

Emin's disenchantment is expressed in some of her artworks:

This is what she meant in her photographic self-portrait, I've Got it All, which shows Emin giving birth to a pile of banknotes: “I was saying I haven't actually got anything, that's it. There's no other level of fecundity that's coming out of me except this material one. The raw stuff, the thing that propels people through life, that's not happening to me.”

So maximising individual autonomy through money, career status, independence and casual relationships hasn't brought Emin to a condition of liberty or emancipation. She feels instead cut off from significant, fulfilling aspects of life.

Nor has the pursuit of autonomy created a "self-determining" character type. Instead, Emin tends to be passive and naive when pondering her fate - as if her situation is something that has simply happened to her and over which she had no control. For instance, we read:

She's been ... pondering her life, the "children thing", she tells me again and again. It's getting to her. Where are they? Why doesn't she have any? Will she ever?

It doesn't seem to be all that difficult to explain why she has no children: abortions in her twenties, shacking up with unsuitable men, and deliberately leaving motherhood to an advanced age.

I don't think Emin is alone in refusing to consider the reasons for things. It seems to be a characteristic of Western modernity. Perhaps it's because the Western orthodoxy doesn't like to recognise a given human nature, believing the existence of such a nature to be an impediment to autonomy. This, though, means that it's difficult to consider, and to grow knowledgeable about, the role of this nature in human affairs.

Similarly, if your focus is on autonomy - on the idea that we should be unimpeded in choosing according to our own will - then it becomes difficult to ask things of other people. On what basis can we expect others to act for our own benefit? So we can only hope or assume that they will. There is no principled basis for expecting that someone will act in a certain way toward us.

Consider too that autonomy is maximised by making everything as "open" as possible, so that our options are made to seem unlimited. To suggest that some things might not work out as well as others is therefore, in modernist terms, to set limits and to be judgemental. The scope for judgement becomes more limited.

Perhaps there are other factors in play as well. Regardless, it does seem to be true that modernity has not fostered a confidently "self-determining" character type.

Renan & the nation

What is a nation? John Laughland asked this question recently at Brussels Journal, and gave an impressive answer; he did exactly what needs to be done, which is to intelligently examine the liberal principles on which the modern order is based:

“What is a nation?” Ernest Renan famously asked in 1882 and concluded that it was a group of people who had decided to live together. The definition has stuck because it encapsulates the most cherished belief of all liberals, which is that human life is essentially about individual choice ...

Even Renan’s definition, however, contained a fudge – a fudge which was essential to prevent his idea from descending into obvious absurdity. He said that a nation was a group of people which had done great things in the past and which wanted to do more in the future. The use of “wanted” was essential to preserve his key notion of choice, but his reference to the past made a nonsense of it.

The people who have done great things in the history of the nation are not the same people (not the same individuals) who are alive now. It is therefore wrong to elide the two uses of the word “people” into one. A people cannot be defined by choice: if members of a nation find or believe that their country has a glorious past, then that past is precisely something inherited and not chosen, like one’s parents. One’s parents determine an individual in a way the individual has not chosen and cannot control.

Laughland has put this well. Liberal autonomy theory is based on the idea that to be fully human we must be self-creating, self-determining individuals. This means that we must be "liberated" from whatever impedes individual choice. This sounds nice, but has drastic consequences. As Laughland points out, it undermines a traditional national identity, as this is "something inherited, not chosen".

But does liberal autonomy theory describe reality? Are we really uninfluenced by inherited forms of identity? Do we really make choices as autonomously as the liberal theory hopes and claims we do?

Laughland observes the situation in England today and concludes not. He writes of the young white people who marched against the violence currently sweeping England that:

their unspoken choice – their instinct – to rally together reveals a good deal about the nature of human action. It reveals, in particular, that choice and forms of behaviour are, in fact, partly determined by ethnicity – very often without people being aware of it.

The Renanian attempt to carve out a sphere for the liberal ideal of free individual choice is therefore doomed to failure. Just as Joseph de Maistre said that he had never met “a man” but only Frenchmen, Englishmen and so on, so our free individual choices are in fact influenced by factors we have not chosen. These include our parents, our nationhood and our ethnic background. They form part of what we are as individuals – we are all members of various human groups – and the human condition is unthinkable without them.

A nation, in other words, is not a “community of values” or an impersonal social construct governed by certain laws. A nation – as the word suggests, derived as it is from the verb ‘to be born’ – is a family.

But what of the opposition? What about those who strongly support the liberal view? There's a forum called Debate and relate which recently debated a statement by the former Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, namely that:

An Australian is someone who chooses to live here, obey the law and pays taxes.

Hawke is following autonomy theory logically by stating that to be an Australian all you have to do is choose to live in Australia. It seems, though, to empty the concept of an Australian identity of meaning. A commenter at the forum made the obvious objection that:

According to Hawke, Australians have no distinct ethnic or cultural identity. In fact, they have absolutely nothing to define them as a people - no history, traditions, ancestors, customs or heroes. To be an 'Australian' is not to belong to a distinct national community; it simply means you live here and pay tax.

In short, it seems that Hawke is saying that 'Australians' don't really exist in any meaningful sense.

Hawke, though, found a defender. One commenter thought that Hawke's position on a national identity was the morally right one:

To say it is just 'to live here, obey the law and pay taxes' is opening up the door for the individual to create his own identity. To say we have 'distinct identity' is to indoctrinate people into a 'social/cultural straightjacket'. But because you're a right-wing redneck retard, you'll maintain that everyone ought to act just as you say; because you have psychological fascist tendencies. Who knows, maybe one day you'll grow up and respect other's decisions to live a life they choose.

Autonomy theory has led this person to see any kind of meaningful communal identity in negative terms as a restriction on individual choice (a "straitjacket"). He takes a defence of a distinct identity to be an act of disrespect toward others; he explains it as an assertion of power over others by those who are psychologically authoritarian.

There are a few things to say in response to this. First, it's obviously hopeless to try to uphold an existing national tradition when people follow autonomy theory in this way. That's why John Laughland is right to take the argument back to first principles and to explain why autonomy theory is misconceived.

Second, the above quote is a good example of how liberalism in practice is anything but neutral on important issues. To even assert the existence of a distinct identity is damned as illegitimate in the quote. So even though we are supposed to be granted free choice by liberal autonomy theory, in practice much is put entirely out of bounds (including much that is most significant in our lives).

Third, the quote suggests the insincerity of the ideal of multiculturalism. The liberal commenter hates the very thought of identity; don't tell me then that he is motivated by an appreciation of ethnic culture. Presumably, if he does support diversity it's because he doesn't want any particular culture to predominate and to form an obvious source of identity for individuals.

A feminist comment to show young women

In a recent post I complained about a feminist double standard. Some feminists at the Hoyden about Town site had endorsed lesbian separatism as a strategy for women whilst later admitting that they themselves lived happily with the fathers of their children.

My post generated a lengthy debate. One of the participants, deus ex macintosh, is a feminist commenter at Hoyden. She argued with a refreshing lack of rancour and a willingness to reply directly to comments. I'm grateful to her for engaging in a reasonable discussion of the issues. Nonetheless, I was struck by her concluding remarks - and I only wish that I could make young women aware of them.

She was asked the following question:

... if the wife and mother deal is so bad, why do women keep signing up for it?

She answered:

For the same reason that theory conflicts with evidence as Mark has pointed out. We are talking in generalisations. Patriarchy or any other type of social theory works at a macro-level to describe general social trends and attempts to explain them. Marriage or any other type of personal relationship works at a micro-level and is a result of individual negotiation. Feminist or not I would no more live my life based solely on a social theory than I would invest my money based on an economic one. At the micro-level they're inherently unreliable which is why we're constantly examining where our personal experience supports the theory and where it differs, hence the switch in voices.

"Feminist or not I would no more live my life based solely on a social theory..." So here the personal is being insulated from the political. Unfortunately, not all young women are going to be so pragmatic. Some will be too earnest or too conscientious or even too unsophisticated in picking up cues as to how far the theory is meant to be taken in one's personal life.

So you arrive at a situation in which some active feminists will escape the negative consequences of their own theory more successfully than other young women who are less politically savvy and who follow the theory at face value.

The message to young women therefore is this: feminists might sound very confident in condemning what is traditional in relationships and family life, but this masks a pragmatism and a scepticism about the real world applicability of the theory.

Chances are that feminists will later wash their hands of you if you take what they say too literally.

Is the "freemale" a fiction?

What is it that liberalism asks of women? The aim of life in a liberal society is autonomy. Women maximise their autonomy by pursuing a single girl lifestyle of career, travel, shopping, casual relationships, partying and so on. With this lifestyle women have financial independence and no binding family commitments to impede their autonomy. They become, in the liberal sense of the word, free.

The Daily Mail ran an article recently titled "Rise of the Freemale". It heralded the increase in the number of single women in the UK as evidence of female liberation:

The number of single women has hit an all-time high, a study has shown - and most of them aren't looking for love.

They apparently choose to be alone, and rejoice in a life where they can spend their time and money as they wish.

This new breed of singleton has been dubbed a "freemale", because she chooses freedom over family ...

Paula Hall, a relationship psychotherapist with Relate, said many women had been put off relying on relationships for their happiness ...

"If you're busy and fulfilled with lots of close friends, then relationships may seem a bit irrelevant ...

"Basically, women feel comfortable doing whatever they want to do with their lives."

The article makes it sound as if the liberal theory is working out well in practice, and that there are growing numbers of single women happily liberated from serious relationships or motherhood.

But then the Daily Mail ran a follow-up article by Dr Pam Spurr, a relationships counsellor. She believes that many single women in their 30s are putting on a public act of being contented with their situation:

What's really going on behind the confident demeanour and fulfilled exterior is crushing loneliness and desperation.

Single women become adept at playing the isn't-life-grand game.

They have to do it around men so they don't appear desperate.

And they come to do it around other women, too, as I've discovered in the course of counselling hundreds of single women ...

She gives the example of Susie:

Susie, 38, a music industry lawyer, is a classic case of portraying the sunny single when inside she's utterly miserable ... Susie felt ashamed of living a lie - and finally confessed she always pretends to be cheerful about her single status.

"How would other people feel coming back to an empty flat after a long, hard day with no one to talk to or cuddle?

"They have no idea how good they've got it. Yet I've got too much pride to say: 'I desperately want to meet someone'".

Then there is the case of Jenny:

Take Jenny, 35, who e-mailed me about her profound regret over dumping a man she had dated at 29.

She said he had been a good and kind partner, but she'd felt there was something "more" to be had in a relationship, and also had wanted to focus on her TV production career while it was hurtling skywards.

Jenny's e-mail made pitiful reading. She blamed herself for her predicament: her damaging attitude towards her former boyfriend, her immaturity in wanting every aspect of her "needs" met and being blinkered about putting her career first.

She suffered insomnia as she fretted nights away about her choices.

So what went wrong? Dr Pam Spurr puts things this way:

Yes, outwardly women in 2008 are supposed to aspire to careers and self-fulfilment, but inwardly they also long to satisfy an urge that's been around as long as humankind: to connect with a partner - and if their biological clock is ticking - to fulfil it and produce children together.

It's absolute tosh to think it's any other way. The human species would die out if this weren't the case.

So autonomy can't always be the overriding aim. There are other important goods to consider as well if we wish to be fulfilled in life. If we always make autonomy the primary aim, we are likely to end up feeling alienated and disconnected rather than liberated and free.

Dr Pam Spurr tells us that the women she counsels:

come home to a sleek apartment, decorated to their taste, and surrounded by lots of lovely things - and they feel as empty as the rooms they paid so much for.

It's normal to want a period of independence from family commitments in our early adulthood. But to take autonomy as the main principle on which to build a life isn't likely to work in the longer run.

Work or anti-work?

Can a consistent politics be derived from liberalism? Here's yet another reason to think that the answer is no.

Liberalism begins with a view of society as being made up of millions of individual wills, each competing to enact their own desires. Therefore, a key question for liberals is how you best regulate society so that these competing wills can be harmonised.

The answer given by right liberals is that the market can do the job. The idea is that individuals can act selfishly for their own profit and the market will ensure a beneficial result overall, one which creates freedom, progress and prosperity. It's no surprise, then, that right liberals focus on a certain vision of Economic Man - of man viewed in terms of his economic role within a market.

Left liberalism emerged in protest at this market-oriented politics. Left liberals decried the unequal outcomes created by the market, and they criticised the irrational, inefficient outcomes created by the free market. They preferred society to be regulated by a benevolent, neutral, reforming class of government bureaucrats. They asserted a vision of Social Man against the right liberal view of Economic Man.

But there is a contradiction in the left liberal position, one which tends to split left liberals into different camps today. If, as liberals believe, the good in life is to be autonomous, so that we are free to enact our own individual wants, then we will naturally seek the power, status and money required to achieve this.

How do we get power, status and financial independence? Through careers. In fact, it is a common feminist complaint that women have been oppressed because they have not had access to power, status and independence through careers to the same extent as men.

So you might think, then, that left liberals would strongly promote access to careers as a path to liberation - and many do. In the Scandinavian countries, for instance, left liberals have succeeded in making this an explicit government policy.

But there's a catch. Left liberals define themselves against a vision of Economic Man; how then can they promote participation in the market as the path to individual liberation and human equality?

So left-liberals are caught between a work and an anti-work position. If they take the "work" position, they are giving credit to the market, which runs against their leftism. If they take an "anti-work" position, they have to accept inequalities in what they see as the key public good, namely individual autonomy - in particular, they have to leave intact the "power structures" by which they believe some groups in society oppress others.

It's not easy for left liberals to bridge the two positions. I've recently read Catherine Deveny try to do this. Here she is putting the "anti-work" view:

I watch office workers, jolted out of their slumber by the alarm clock, who have shovelled in their breakfast, thrown on their clothes and rush to catch the train to a job they hate.

This is not a view of careers as liberation. But she still keeps to the idea that women are oppressed by a lack of autonomy provided by careers. So her solution is to suggest that women who don't choose careers should nonetheless be paid and given career titles to increase their status:

Considering there is no status in being a parent or carer, let's at least give these skilled and dedicated individuals wads of cash and a fancy name, such as 'domestic engineer' or 'early childhood development specialist'. Seriously. And let's stop discussing maternity leave and go in swinging for paid parenting, paid grandparenting and paid caring.

There is still a logical inconsistency here. She wants women to have career status and financial independence without having to participate in the market. Her solution, though, involves "commodifying" motherhood - redefining motherhood as a market type activity, rather than valuing it in non-market terms. So she is advancing a view of "Economic Woman" - of women valued in terms of market activity - which contradicts her left liberalism.

I expect that left liberalism will continue to generate two different positions. There will be the downshifting, anti-materialist, hippy type rejection of careerism and market values. Alongside this will be a more dominant and public view of careers as integral to personal liberation, social success and human equality. There won't be a stable view bridging the two positions.

Immigration forcing down standards?

What are some of the consequences of Prime Minister Rudd pushing immigration to record levels?

Well, pity the first home buyer. According to the ANZ bank, housing prices are set to soar again due to pent up demand:

The ANZ's senior economist, Paul Braddick, said yesterday that Australia faced a critical and potentially chronic shortage of housing.

"A growing housing shortage is setting the scene for the mother of all housing booms," Mr Braddick said.

"Demand has accelerated and rising immigration, both permanent and temporary, shows no sign of abating".

There will be cultural changes as a result of this. Parents and grandparents will have to play more of a role in purchasing housing for younger people, as happens in some Asian countries with high property prices. It will be more difficult for young people to establish financial independence early in life; it will also be more difficult for women to choose to devote a part of their life to raising young children at home.

We're also more likely to get low quality housing options:

A radical plan to solve Victoria's affordability crisis by putting shipping containers in caravan parks has infuriated social welfare groups.

Macroplan Australia managing director and prominent urban planner Brian Haratsis said shipping containers could be located on public land or in caravan parks ...

"There will be a lot of talk about trailer trash, but people don't seem to understand there are others who simply can't afford accommodation ..."

This follows on from earlier news about overseas students being crammed into Melbourne share houses. In one case a Nepalese landlord stacked 48 overseas students into a single Melbourne home:

A millionaire landlord has been stacking up to 48 Nepalese students in a single house in northern Melbourne and dozens in two other rundown properties, say council investigators.

In today's Age, writer Lea McInerney describes the difficulty of finding a flat to rent:

Constant, fruitless searching in this high-pressure rental market is crazing me ... I behave obsequiously toward agents ... They get to decide how long my life stays on hold. One day I'm sitting in a park, feeling glum ... A friend rings and I burst into tears, not sure I can go on ... The lowest number of people I count inspecting a flat was 11; at the busiest one, a quirky two-storey place, I stopped counting at 60 ... One agent I came across, from the kindly camp, said: "Don't take it personally; it's a nightmare for everyone."

The family is not a technology, part 2

If, as Jim Kalb writes, modernism is based on a scientistic view of reason, what are the consequences for the family?

Not so good. Scientism, the attempt to apply the kind of reasoning at work in the natural sciences to the whole of life, has encouraged a technological view of society. There are to be universal systems based on clear and efficient principles which can be applied and managed by experts.

The traditional family fails as a technology. Jim Kalb has explained some of the reasons why:

(a) For a rational technological system to exist, everything has to be transparent and manageable from the point of view of those on top.

(b) Traditional and local institutions - family, religion, nationality, and non-liberal conceptions of personal integrity and dignity

i) Are generally opaque and resistant to outside control. They're recalcitrant.

ii) Aren't oriented toward maximum equal satisfaction of individual preference ...

iii) Aren't based on expert knowledge ...

iv) Recognise distinctions and authorities that aren't required by liberal market and bureaucratic institutions. It follows that they're based on hate and oppression. The family, for instance, is based on distinctions of sex, age and blood ... (see p.8)

Is it possible to find examples of moderns rejecting the family on the grounds outlined above by Jim Kalb? Absolutely.

Leon Trotsky wrote the following in 1932 in defence of the attempts to reform the family in communist Russia:

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” - that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution ... The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.

Note the terminology at work: "archaic, stuffy and stagnant", a "shut-in petty enterprise". The term "shut-in" corresponds to Kalb's second point, namely that the traditional family is too opaque and resistant to outside control to function well as a technology. The complaint that the family is a "petty enterprise" makes sense if you expect the institutions of society to exist as part of a universal, centralised system managed from the top.

And then there is Tom Flynn. A few years ago he was co-editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin. In an article titled "Replacing our Last Cottage Industry" he exhorted secular humanists to continue their attack on the family:

Pat Robertson is right - as secular humanists, we are heir to a tradition that is in many ways profoundly anti-family. For more than a hundred years humanists and freethinkers have been either center stage, or cheering from the front row, each time reform blunted the family's ubiquity and power ... humanists and other reformers have dealt the family countless body blows. Some say the family is becoming more inclusive. I say we are subduing the family, not extending it - perhaps setting the stage for its replacement.

Secular humanists should celebrate this achievement, not minimize it, and renew their assaults upon the family. This obsolete and exploitative institution must go.

What does Tom Flynn have against the family? He explains:

... At humanism's core lies enmity toward all things medieval, authoritarian, and obscurantist. As medieval holdovers go, the family is short on obscurantism, but drenched in authoritarianism. It's second only to matrimony in transmitting the idea of women as brood animals. In perpetuating the idea of children as property it has no peer. The family must go.

So secular humanists object to that which is "obscurantist". This seems to relate to Kalb's observation that institutions which are "opaque" aren't well suited for technological systems.

Flynn also objects to the authoritarianism of the family. This was predicted in Kalb's fourth point: the family fails in a technological society because it recognises authorities not required by liberal market and bureaucratic institutions.

Similary, there is Flynn's objection to the place of women and children in the family. Again this is predicted in Kalb's fourth point: the family fails in a technological society because it recognises distinctions of age and sex not required by liberal market and bureaucratic institutions. These distinctions will therefore be understood and explained in a negative sense, as aspects of oppression.

What's most intersting, though, is another of Flynn's objections to the family, the one fitting Kalb's third point: that it isn't administered by a class of experts:

... the family stands in the way of another implicit humanist goal: decoupling ... reproduction from parenting. The birth control explosion of the 60s emancipated much sex from reproduction. Yet even today, few can imagine anyone but themselves raising their kids, as though conception and childbirth imply anything about one's capacity to prepare a child for today's complex world.

The costs of cottage industry

We expect specialists to build our cars, raise our buildings, make our clothing, write our software - the list is endless. Perversely, only society's most precious products - us - are still entrusted to cottage industry. If society is falling apart as conservatives charge, perhaps the blame lies not with "alternative family structures" (more accurately, non-familial households) but simply with parents, single or married, rich or poor, for whom parenting could never be more than a hobby - pursued in naive isolation, abandoned just when one threatens to get good at it. While procreation and parenting remain yoked, most children are doomed to be raised by amateurs ...

The family, our last cottage industry, must go!

Looking Backwards - Issuing A Challenge

In 1888 Edward Bellamy published the utopian novel Looking Backwards, 2000-1887. Bellamy predicted that by the 21st Century capitalism, home, and family would be forgotten. Generations of reformers imbibed Bellamy's vivid images of happy workers who lived in dorms and ate in refectories, of children raised in large cohorts by gifted mentors, and dreamt that this was the shape of things to come. Science-fiction masters like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and others portrayed futures in which the family had been eclipsed by licensed, professionalized alternatives. Many progressives simply assumed that one day, if not too soon, parenting would be a career like any other. Those most capable of it would be trained to mentor armies of children not their own.

Too many secular humanists no longer find such visions compelling.

It's interesting how similar Trotsky's turn of phrase is to Flynn's. Trotsky condemned the family as an archaic petty enterprise; Flynn condemns it as a cottage industry.

There is the same technological impulse at work; instead of a family run as a "hobby" by "amateurs" (i.e. by parents), children would instead by raised by "specialists", by "licensed, professionals" who would transform parenting into a "career".

Note that Flynn isn't satisfied with the degree to which children are already raised by "specialists" (i.e. via schools and pre-school centres). He wants to take the principle further, so that bearing a child would no longer be connected to parenting that child. He wants there to be fewer children and for these children to be raised by "gifted mentors" rather than by their biological parents. He asks:

Can we construct a vision of an individualist future where most sex never leads to conception; where only a fraction of the population reproduces; and where only gifted mentors parent, without regard for whose offspring the children may be?

The most direct response to Flynn's challenge is to state clearly that the family is not a technology and cannot be ordered on the basis of neutral expertise, or centralised management, or bureaucratic or market authority. It is too much an intimate, private institution based on instinct, affection, and natural forms of loyalty and distinction.

Hat tip: for the Flynn article, Pilgrimage to Montsalvat.

See also: The family is not a technology & The revolutionary family heads west

We can be better than neutral

Here's a more upbeat story to report on. Over at Abandon Skip, there's a post on the popularity of the song De La Rey amongst Afrikaners in South Africa. The song has become something of an anthem for Afrikaners, expressing a pride in their own identity.

There are a couple of things about the situation which impress me. First, it seems to be predominantly young Afrikaners, both male and female, who are generating enthusiasm for the song. Second, some of the Arikaners have clearly rejected the idea that it is a mark of distinction to be neutral about ethnicity.

For instance, Bok van Blerk asks the audience before singing the song, "I'm proud of my language and culture. Are you?". He has also made the comment that, "Tswana, Zulu, Sotho, English or Afrikaner, take pride in who you are, it gives you backbone and direction in life."

This is exactly the shift Westerners need to make. For a long time, the neutrality strand of liberalism has set a different tone. The gist of this strand of liberalism is that it's best to be neutral about important public goods, and to orient ourselves instead to the pursuit of our private, individual interests. At best, ethnicity is then recognised as a purely personal sentiment, not to be defended as a good in a formal, public setting.

We are therefore supposed to win admiration by proving how neutral we are about our own ethnicity. The most advanced practitioners of this art achieve status by identifying the most "othered" ethnic group and displaying sympathy toward them. In general, though, the effect is to produce a Westerner who has little sense of his own culture and who thinks of culture instead as something he consumes according to taste from a range of other ethnicities.

It's not a sustainable way of ordering things. If everyone were to do it, and we were all neutralists, then there would be no range of "other" ethnicities to consume. In other words, even to maintain things as they are now, there have to be groups of people who reject the ideal of neutrality and who continue to produce distinctive cultures.

There is another problem with the neutrality strand: it trivialises our life aims. Much of what is significant in life requires a communal setting. If we limit ourselves to the pursuit of private interests, we undermine the opportunity to fulfil important aspects of life.

We can be better than neutral. We can identify positively with our own culture; we can defend its value as a real entity and not just as a personal sentiment; and we can admire those who show themselves to be most connected to their own ethnic culture and who represent it at its best.

(If you follow the link to Abandon Skip's post there are several short You Tube videos showing the response of young Afrikaners to the De La Rey song.)