Even as victims we're oppressors

In 2008 an Indian national living in Melbourne, Puneet Puneet, got drunk and drove at double the speed limit. He hit two white Australian men, killing one and seriously injuring another. He was arrested and bailed but he borrowed the passport of a conational and fled Australia.

He has now been arrested in India and is facing a deportation hearing. But here's the thing. His family is portraying Puneet Puneet as a victim of white racism, even though in this case he is clearly the perpetrator of a crime and the victim is a white Australian:

His father told Fairfax Puneet was a victim in the case. "There is differential treatment for Indians in Australia. I do not think he will be safe there. He is not an accused, he is a victim," he said.

His mother said outside the court that "accidents happen all the time".

"So many Indians were killed in Australia probably in cold-blooded ways. What about those?" she added.

The narrative of whites as oppressors and non-whites as victims is so strong that it is invoked even when, as in this case, an Indian has killed a white Australian.

Another case of Indians playing the race card occurred recently in America. A female Indian diplomat, Devyani Khobragade, has been arrested for falsifying a visa application. She wanted to bring out a young Indian woman to be her nanny and housekeeper and claimed on the visa application that she would be paid award rates. It is alleged that the nanny/servant was in reality only paid $3.00 an hour.

That's interesting for a couple of reasons. First, Devyani Khobragade claims to be an advocate for women. She does not seem to practise what she preaches and was willing to exploit female labour for her own advantage. Second, it's another example of how difficult it can be for locals to compete with overseas labour. Presumably, the Indian woman was willing to travel to America and work for an absurdly low wage as a servant in the hope of getting residency. Why would a local accept the same conditions?

Anyway, once again, the father is claiming that his child is a victim of racism:

"It is nothing but a racial bias. It is simple and clear racial bias to harass the Indians," he said.

Feminist snow removal threatens Stockholm?

Is there not going to be an almighty backlash against feminism in Sweden?

Things have reached a point that the ploughing of snow is being subjected to feminist analysis. Apparently the older policy, of ploughing major roads first, has been deemed sexist because more men than women drive cars. The recommended new policy is to plough areas near bus stops and kindergartens first as this is more "gender equal" (women use these areas more than men do).

But that then leaves the arterial roads covered with snow. See more here.

What colour ribbon do you wear for this?

I browsed the news this morning and found two news items relating to domestic violence.

In the first incident, an American woman pushed her husband off a cliff eight days after their wedding because she was having second thoughts. In the second, an Englishwoman tried to hire someone to kill her husband after he found out about her various affairs.

This kind of domestic violence happens and is reported in the newspapers but it simply doesn't exist when it comes to campaigns against family violence. In these campaigns, such as the White Ribbon campaign, it is always assumed that men are the perpetrators and women the victims.

Such is the strength of the "male oppressor/female victim" narrative in our times.

French socialists plan a "silent revolution"

I always feel a bit on the back foot when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. A lot of Australians have been persuaded already that gay marriage is a matter of conferring a right on a group of people and that there will be no negative consequences.

If you're one of those Australians I would ask you to read on with an open mind. Tiberge at Gallia Watch has translated part of a debate in the French senate on the family. France recently legalised same sex marriage, despite very considerable public opposition. Now a further new law is being considered, one that will promote a "diversity" of family types.

The debate begins with a comment from the ruling Socialist Party Minister for the Family, Dominique Bertinotti:

I am convinced that the Senate's efforts will be towards the consolidation of this advancement for equality. This law is part of a silent revolution.

She states openly in the French senate that what is happening in France is a "silent revolution." She is not arguing that nothing significant will change; rather it is a revolution from above - from socialists like herself.

Alain Gournac, from the more conservative UMP, then reminds her of the mass, popular demonstrations in defence of the traditional family that have taken place in France:

The silence of a million people in the street!

But the socialist lawmaker is undeterred:

Sexuality is henceforth disassociated from conjugal life and from procreation.

She is saying that marriage and having children is no longer based on the heterosexual couple of husband and wife.

Another female Socialist Party senator, Michelle Meunier, then chimes in:

This bill is part of the slogan of our Republic. It allows homosexuals to have a family. Let's admit it. It leads the family out of the fantasy of "one mother, one father and one child"...

She labels the traditional family a "fantasy." The debate has reached a point at which the traditional family is denigrated in the French senate.

Charles Revet, again from the UMP, then calls out to object:

It's not a fantasy! What are you saying!

But the Socialist Party senator continues:

...because that family has never been universal. In all periods, parents have brought into the world children that they couldn't or wouldn't accept responsibility for. In all periods, children have been raised by persons other than the father and mother. What causes the problem is this idealized "hetero-patriarchal-white" family, that is further and further removed from reality. The law must adapt. (...)

Again, she reveals her hostility to the traditional family: she labels it the "hetero-patriarchal-white" family and states that it is increasingly removed from reality.

The more right-wing senators reacted with indignation to her comments, but yet another left-wing female senator, Esther Benbassa, a Green, continued along the same theme:

Protect the child? Everybody is for it! The child needs a father and a mother? Pure ideology, just like the concept of a traditional family, the pattern of "daddy-mommy-child" is a broken model which recomposed and single-parent families long ago abandoned.

She states that it is "pure ideology" that a child needs a father and a mother. This is, in effect, dissolving of family relationships. If a man, for instance, believes that his presence within a family is a necessary one, and that by abandoning his wife and children he will do harm, then he is much more likely to stay and to invest a lot of himself in his roles of husband and father. At the same time, if his wife believes his role to be a necessary one, both for her sake and that of the children, she is likely to act to keep him involved within the family.

But let's say a man really believed what Esther Benbassa claimed in the French senate, that a child doesn't need a father. If that is true, then why would a man put much effort into fatherhood? His children don't need him to do this, at least according to the women socialists. So why, then, make such sacrifices for the sake of the family?

The logic of the new family is male disinvestment in family life. It's possible that the female socialists do intuitively grasp this and welcome it as part of their attempts to dissolve the "hetero-patriarchal-white" family. It's possible that there are ordinary French people who grasp the same thing, hence the mass demonstrations against the socialist laws and the abysmal approval ratings for the French President, Francois Hollande.

It seems to me that the only way things might work out in France is if there is a disconnect between what is officially approved and what ordinary men really think and believe. If the state takes as a principle the idea that families don't need a father, but ordinary men hold to the opposite view that their role is a significant and necessary one, then society might be able to hold together.

But isn't there a risk that men will be influenced over time by what is held at an official level to be true? Isn't there a risk that men will be drawn into a state sponsored culture in which the presence of a father within a family is thought to be unnecessary?

UK immigration minister criticises pizza boss

Regular readers will know that I'm not a great admirer of the UK Conservative Party. Nonetheless, today I have something positive to say about one leading member of that party, the Immigration Minister Mark Harper.

It was reported yesterday that the boss of the Domino's pizza chain in the UK, Lance Batchelor, wants another mass influx of overseas workers into the UK. He claimed that he couldn't find enough staff for his pizza shops from within the UK (and the EU).

He was supported by Sir Stuart Rose, the former boss of a supermarket chain. According to him, it is right that companies offer low pay as long as there is someone round the world willing to accept the work:

the former boss of Marks & Spencer, Sir Stuart Rose, also attacked the work ethic of many Britons and said it was wrong to criticise immigrants prepared to work for lower salaries.

Sir Stuart added: "It is up to people to decide whether they want to do the work for the pay that is being offered. If they don’t, somebody else is there to do it. What’s wrong with that?...I’m a free market economist – we operate in a free market. If these people want to come here, and work the hours they are prepared to work for the wages they are prepared to work for, then so be it."

I'm afraid that Sir Stuart Rose's comments are a good example of why I am not an absolute supporter of free market economics (though I am generally sympathetic to a market economy). If Sir Stuart had his way, the wages of British workers would fall to the lowest level that any migrant from around the world would be willing to work at.

It shows a gross lack of the virtue of fidelity: he is not standing in a faithful relationship with his own countrymen and willing what is good for them.

The good news is that Mark Harper, the Immigration Minister, was having none of it and rebuked the two men:

Businesses complaining about a lack of British applicants to fill job vacancies should pay higher wages, the immigration minister declared last night.

Mark Harper said that, if firms were unable to find willing workers, they were not paying the market rate and should ‘reflect’ on the salary package they are offering.

Mr Harper said there was no question of the government relaxing immigration rules so Domino’s could ‘keep wages low’.

He pointed out that Domino’s can recruit staff from within the entire EU without restrictions – an area that covers 500million people.

Mr Harper told a committee of MPs: ‘If out of a market of hundreds of millions of people you cannot find enough people to work in your restaurant, you should look at how much you are paying.

‘Dominos should pay what the market demands to fill their roles’

There is something else that Sir Stuart Rose and Lance Batchelor should consider. It is not always laziness that leads a local worker to reject a job that an immigrant worker is willing to take. It is often the case that local workers can't afford to do so.

For instance, if you're a male British worker and are offered a job on minimal pay you are likely to harm your position when it comes to attracting a possible future wife. But for a male immigrant that wage might look good to a woman from his home country.

Similarly, a male British worker has to look for accommodation standards that the women of his own community would accept, something that transient migrant workers might not have to worry about.

It's the case too in the US that undocumented migrant workers don't have to pay tax on their earnings and can therefore live on a lower wage than a local.

I can understand a local worker looking at a substandard pay offer and wondering why it would be worth accepting if it didn't provide him with an opportunity to establish a family of his own.

Fidelity & community

Via Laura Wood, here is an interesting reflection by Chad Bird:

What makes community life viable, in groups as small as a family or large as a country, is the will of individuals to makes sacrifices for others, to consider more than their own needs and wants, and to act accordingly.

The more robust this other-focused approach to life is, the healthier the community will be. For that reason, there is no greater threat to the cohesion and perpetuation of a society than narcissism.

The narcissist operates not according to an objective set of values or beliefs, nor are the needs of others an impetus for his actions, but his whole world is centered in the navel at which he gazes. The be-all and end-all reason for his existence is the man in the mirror. Therefore, the question he poses, whenever any decision must be made, is quite simply this: “What’s in it for me?”

I find this interesting because it ties in with my recent exploration of the theme of fidelity.

There was once in Western culture an emphasis on fidelity. Fidelity means that you are turned towards particular relationships. These relationships call us to particular forms of service that are selfless in one sense (i.e. the aim is not to get something from the other person) but that nonetheless fulfil important aspects of self and express aspects of our identity.

We can have such relationships with our spouse, our parents, our children, our ancestors, our church, our God, our country, our ethny and so on.

Fidelity is not the only proper focus in life. It doesn't encompass everything to do with virtue or character or spirituality or the good life.

However it is something significant in the life of the individual and was once an important part of the understanding of the good within Western culture - it was part of the mix right up to the early 1900s.

A drift in modern culture

An American woman makes this interesting observation:

Whether intentionally or not, modern culture has become such that men are held to a certain standard of conduct and women largely are not. Any few standards to which women are or used to be held, e.g. chastity, kindness, beauty and/or childrearing prowess, are contested and ultimately abandoned, because oppression. In today's culture, a man's chief duty is to everyone else, while a woman's foremost duty is to herself. A woman is entitled to a good man, while a man must fight, jump through hoops, beg for and otherwise "earn" a good woman.

The degree to which this is true of individual women varies, but I do think it's true of our culture in general.

I think what happened is this. Liberalism preached the idea that the aim in life is to maximise our individual autonomy, i.e. to have as few restrictions on our self-determining choices as possible.

But (particularly on the left) the idea took hold that men were privileged when it came to autonomy in comparison to women. For instance, the wife of the deputy PM in Britain claimed earlier this year that men are "able to toy with unlimited options" in life whereas women "face a series of stark choices".

Such an idea might be fraudulent, but nonetheless it was believed. It could then be used to justify the idea that the aim of politics was to push to maximise autonomous choice specifically for women. What mattered was whatever women wanted and men were expected to go along with the programme as a matter of social justice.

And over time the general attitude seeped into the culture. It became expected that men would do the right thing, women their own thing.

It's not a viable way of organising society in the long term. There are liberal MRAs (men's rights activists) who believe that the way to change the situation is to challenge the idea that men are privileged in comparison to women and then to push towards an "equal autonomy" in which men and women have the same roles and responsibilities in life.

Traditionalists like myself agree with the liberal MRAs when it comes to challenging the idea of men as privileged oppressors. We have that much in common. But what we would like to see is a return to complementary relationships between men and women: the roles and responsibilities would be allowed to differ according to masculine and feminine inclinations and traits, but both men and women would be held to a standard.

Not a thought revolution

Clive Palmer is an Australian mining magnate who threw a lot of money into the last election and won a seat.

In his maiden speech to parliament Palmer called for a "thought revolution." Unfortunately, rather than proposing anything new, he presented yet again the ideal of an "economic man" whose first commitment is to economic matters. He said,

Australia needs a revolution in the way we think, in the way we boost our wealth and economy for all our citizens...Our main concern needs to rest with how we can grow and expand our economy and create more wealth.

This is just more of the same from right-liberals. Left-liberals too, when you get to the crux of what they believe, think that a professional career is the main prize in life.

However, in another speech Palmer did reference the concept of fidelity. He got it disastrously wrong, but it's interesting that it still has significance for him.

Fidelity, as I understand the concept, is a turning toward the relationships we are made for, and which call us to service as an expression of who we are. There are many such relationships, but one of them is to our ancestors.

Palmer had this to say:

We need to make sure we can generate more prosperity and growth for Australians so that families have a better standard of living.

We have a very lucky country and we're standing on the shoulders of our ancestors to carry our tradition forward to the next century.

Again, there's that ideal of the "economic man" - that what matters is success in the market. But nonetheless Palmer, for rhetorical effect at least, still invokes the idea of having a debt to previous generations and a responsibility to carry forward a tradition. There is still some semblance of an idea of fidelity toward one's ancestors.

But he has misunderstood the tradition he is to carry forward. Federation of the Australian states was argued for on the basis that economic considerations shouldn't outweigh ties of ancestral kinship. For instance, the following poem was recited at federation meetings by a future PM, Alfred Deakin:

From all division let our land be free,
For God has made her one: complete she lies
Within the unbroken circle of the skies,
And round her indivisible the sea
Breaks on her single shore; while only we,
Her foster children, bound with sacred ties
Of one dear blood, one storied enterprise,
Are negligent of her integrity.—
Her seamless garment, at great Mammon's nod,
With hands unfilial we have basely rent,
With petty variance our souls are spent,
And ancient kinship under foot is trod

Palmer is reversing the message of the generation that federated Australia: he wants to steer course according to "great Mammon's nod" even if this harms the ties held sacred by the federation poet.

Feminists gone wild

An extraordinary demonstration has taken place in San Juan, a provincial city in Argentina.

In brief, a gathering of 7000 feminists attempted to attack a cathedral, which was defended by 1500 men. The men did not attempt to physically attack the women, but linked arms and formed a barrier.

And the feminist women? They spat on the men, sprayed them with aerosol spray paint, performed lewd acts in front of them, draped their underwear over them and generally behaved as if they had been seized by some primitive or savage spirit. I'm not going to directly paste the YouTube video (it is not suitable for work) but you can watch it here.

If you do choose to watch the video, note the contrast between the bearing of the men and the cruelly mocking and destructive behaviour of the feminist women.

Now moustaches are labelled discriminatory

I'm proud to say that Movember began here in Melbourne in 2004. If you're not already familiar with it, Movember is a charity movement in which men grow a moustache in November in order to raise money for men's illnesses, such as prostate cancer.

Movember has now spread internationally, but has found a critic in left-wing academic, Arianne Shahvisi. She complains about men growing moustaches for Movember because of the,

pernicious gendered and racial connotations carried by the practice

What are these pernicious practices? Well, you have to follow some convoluted logic here. According to Arianne Shahvisi if a white man grows a moustache for charitable purposes it thereby "others" men from other ethnicities who have a permanent moustache:

With large numbers of minority-ethnic men—for instance Kurds, Indians, Mexicans—sporting moustaches as a cultural or religious signifier, Movember reinforces the “othering” of “foreigners” by the generally clean-shaven, white majority.

It's a bit unusual to think that beards and moustaches are not Western. I sported a beard and moustache for a time in my 20s and if you go back to the 1800s, it was common for Western men to have facial hair. But that too is read as "racist" by Arianne Shahvisi. She thinks Western moustaches are a reminder of the Western colonialism of that century:

We are not simply considering an arbitrary configuration of facial hair, but one that had particular, imperial connotation to British men of our grandfathers' generation and currently has a separate cultural valence for men from certain ethnic groups. Moustaches, whether or not “mo-bros” mean theirs to be, are loaded with symbolism.

Arianne Shahvisi's complaints don't stop there. She believes that moustaches are not inclusive enough. After all, not every man can grow a moustache and nor can every woman:

Further, the inclusivity of Movember deserves examination. For one, only men (and even then, only some men) can grow a moustache. The decision to focus on the moustache to raise awareness of men's health issues might seem like an apposite one ... but it reinforces the regressive idea that masculinity is about body chemistry rather than gender identity, and marginalises groups of men who may struggle to grow facial hair, such as trans-men.

In solidarity with Movember, some women have also relaxed normative shaving-etiquette during “No Shave November.” Instead of being met with the same teasing words of encouragement, many have been subject to ferocious abuse across social media, reflective of the intolerability of women's body hair...

Nor does she like the Movember parties. According to her they are about,

white young men ridiculing minorities...Across nine cities in the UK, participants dress up in costumes that mock and trivialise racial minorities ... and the LGBT community ... celebrate war and imperialism (gun-toting cowboys, colonial generals in pith helmets, and cavalrymen in slouch hats), and emulate racist fictional characters and sexist stereotypes (such as 'Dictator' Aladeen with a harem of female bodyguards, Hulk Hogan lookalikes, hard-hatted builders).

Meanwhile, female attendees take on the uniforms that now seem fit for any occasion, yet really for none at all: Playboy bunnies, air-hostesses, nurses, cheerleaders. Unsurprisingly again, the woman deemed best-looking or best-dressed picks up the title of “Miss Movember”. Set against this damaging carnival of normativity, an official Movember t-shirt slogan "Moustaches against Establishment" seems particularly empty and hypocritical. This culture is summarised in the language of the website, which is itself a lesson in how to reinforce traditional conceptions of masculinity (witness: 'fighting the good fight', 'moustache army', 'flying the flag'), once again precluding the ostensible aim of breaking down the norms that force men to adopt pre-packaged roles...

Movember parties - carnivals of normativity?

 Those two paragraphs are densely packed. To summarise:

• she has an image of white men as being subhuman oppressors of everyone else. You have to wonder just what goes through her mind when she sees a white man walking down the street.
• she worries that Movember parties are "carnivals of normativity"
• she doesn't like normal masculinity, not even when it is expressed in uplifting phrases like "fighting the good fight." She seems to believe that the proper aim of society is to break down masculine norms

Conclusions? The really obvious thing about Arianne Shahvisi's column is that although it is supposed to be against racism and sexism it is, in fact, an unpleasant diatribe against white men and, as such, is itself racist and sexist. It could hardly be clearer that Arianne Shahvisi looks on white men as being exceptional - in a negative sense.

We're likely to get more of this kind of thing. The academic left seems to want to pursue the idea of "microaggressions" - in which small, seemingly harmless things are revealed to be acts of aggression against minorities.  I don't think this will play out well for the academic left - it comes across badly, like an act of bad faith, as in Arianne Shahvisi criticising Movember.

Missing privilege

Which race in America suffers the most from stress? A group of researchers expected to find something that fitted the "white privilege" narrative. But the answer was more complex:

Dunkel Schetter said the study did not support a few of the researchers' original assumptions, including their hypotheses that African-American and Hispanic parents would have higher levels of most kinds of stress, and that stress would be a major reason for the racial and ethnic disparities in health.

"It wasn't that clear cut," she said. "There were forms of stress that were higher in whites than in African-Americans and Hispanics, there were forms of stress that were quite low in the African-Americans even when they were poor, and there were forms of stress that varied in Latinos, depending on whether they were U.S.- or foreign-born."

The study did find that:

A mother who wasn't living with the father of her baby was likely to have higher stress levels than one who lived with the baby's father.

Final Eltham Traditionalists dinner 2013

For Melbourne readers:

The final Eltham Traditionalists dinner for 2013 is coming up soon. The dinners have been very successful: they've been enjoyable events that have linked up an increasing number of people during the course of the year.

If you'd like to be involved please get in touch with me (you don't need to live in Eltham itself - just be within driving distance). Contact details are at the Eltham Traditionalists website.

Can Lily Allen criticise Robin Thicke?

One of the most popular songs this year was "Blurred lines" by Robin Thicke. It has a video featuring topless dancers, whilst the lyrics are about men trying to seduce good girls.

The song annoyed English singer Lily Allen who penned an angry feminist response called "Hard out here". But Allen's song is exceptionally coarse. And Lily Allen herself is a staunch feminist defender of the right of women to be unrestrained in their sexuality and not to be called sluts for being so.

Which means it's difficult to take her criticism of Robin Thicke seriously. She's not interested in upholding reasonable standards. Instead, she wants women to have an absolute right to do whatever they want sexually, whilst at the same time expecting men to restrain their sexuality according to feminist demands.


Lily Allen: not the best choice to criticise Robin Thicke

I don't see how this can work. How can women behave coarsely and without limits, without that then affecting the behaviour of the men around them? If Lily Allen chooses to trash the standards of society, so that there is no sense of modesty when it comes to sexuality, then how can she expect men to act as if such standards existed?

There is a larger lesson here, which is that the effort of liberal society to understand freedom as autonomy doesn't work well when it comes to relationships. If the idea is to maximise our autonomous choice, then it's true that a woman can act however she likes sexually, but what she then loses is any right to ask that men don't do the same.

Lily Allen is Robin Thicke. She is his female counterpart, his twin. She is acting according to the same principles as he is. They are part of a bundle.

If he is wrong, then so is she.

In Sweden boys play with fluffy go walkies

Sweden has bought into autonomy theory in a big way. According to this theory, the aim of life is to maximise individual autonomy, i.e. the ability to self-determine who we are. Therefore whatever is predetermined rather than self-determined is a prison or straitjacket that impedes our freedom to be whoever we want to be. Our sex is something that is predetermined. Therefore, think the liberal autonomists, it must be made not to matter.

And so in Sweden it is now thought wrong to show boys playing with traditionally boy toys and girls with girl toys. Which means you get advertising catalogues like the one below, showing a boy playing with a toy called "Fluffy go walkies".

A Swedish toy catalogue

Does it matter if Sweden tries to abolish sex distinctions? Yes and no. Sex distinctions are so deeply embedded into us, that they will continue in some form regardless of the policy of the Swedish authorities. They can never be made not to matter.

It is odd, though, for Sweden to journey down this road. In a heterosexual culture, there ought to be a celebration of sex distinctions rather than a statist effort to suppress these differences. It can also be disappointing (and disorienting) to young men and women in their late teens and twenties to find the opposite sex not fully embracing their masculinity or femininity. It takes away some of the context in which young people orient themselves to committed relationships. And, finally, we tend to be most settled in ourselves when we have a deeper sense of our own masculinity and femininity. So it makes little sense to blur gender lines when we consider what is important to individual identity.

The Pope on fidelity

In a recent post I took aim at Giles Fraser, an Anglican minister, who claimed that we are always morally responsible to those most other to us. Giles Fraser wrote:

...you know, constantly in Jesus' teaching there's stuff about the stranger, there's stuff about the other, there's stuff about the Good Samaritan, and our moral responsibility is always to this person who is more other than us, rather than same as us.

My response was that this can't be true as Christian morality recognises the importance of fidelity in relationships. In marriage, fidelity means that we remain turned toward our spouse, seeking to deepen a union with them, and that we accept the service we are called to in this relationship, a service that fulfils a significant aspect of who we are.

Much of our daily moral responsibility is oriented to our spouse and to our family, i.e. to those we are most close to and familiar with, rather than to persons who are most other to us.

This model of fidelity is to be found, in particular ways, in a series of relationships, e.g. between ourselves as individuals and God; between ourselves and our wider family or community (clan, tribe, ethny, nation); between God and church and so on.

Now, by one of those coincidences I published this argument on November 17th and the very next day Pope Francis was reported to have given a homily touching on the theme of fidelity. Unfortunately the Vatican hasn't published the full text of the homily, but various excerpts have been given in the press.

The theme of the homily was that we do not negotiate everything in a spirit of adolescent progressivism, in particular we do not negotiate fidelity. Pope Francis began with a reading from the Book of Maccabees in which many Jews agreed to abandon their traditions in order to curry favour with King Antiochus:

L’Osservatore Romano reported that the Pope preached:

“Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles round about us; we cannot become isolated” or remain stuck in our old traditions. “Let us go and make a covenant with them, for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us.” The proposal so pleased them that some of the people eagerly went to see the king, to bargain with the king, to negotiate.

L’Osservatore Romano continued:

The Bishop of Rome likened their attitude to what he called the modern-day “spirit of adolescent progressivism” which seductively suggests that it is always right, when faced with any decision, to move on rather than remaining faithful to one's own traditions. “The people,” he said, “bargained with the king, they negotiated with the king. But they didn't negotiate habits … they negotiated fidelity to God, who is always faithful. And this is what we call apostasy; the prophets called it adultery. They were an adulterous people” who “negotiated something essential to their very being, i.e., their faithfulness to the Lord.”

Many people, he said, accepted the king's orders “which prescribed that all the people in his kingdom should be one: and every one should leave his own law.” However, he observed, it was not the “beautiful globalization” which is expressed in “the unity of all nations” who each preserve their own identity and traditions. No, he said, the passage describes the “globalization of hegemonic uniformity,” a uniformity of thought born of worldliness.

“Still today, the spirit of worldliness leads us to progressivism, to this uniformity of thought” … Negotiating one's fidelity to God is like negotiating one's identity, Pope Francis said.

In what ways does this support the argument I made against Giles Fraser?

The Pope's homily suggests the importance of fidelity as a moral concept within Christianity. For Pope Francis fidelity is important in upholding what is essential to our being and identity.

Fidelity has to do with our relationship to God, but it applies as well to our relationship with our larger ethnic or national communities. It is not always right, says Pope Francis, in a "spirit of adolescent progressivism" to "move on rather than remaining faithful to one's own traditions". It is important, in the Pope's view, that there be a "beautiful globalisation" in which there is a unity between nations who "each preserve their own identity and traditions" rather than a "globalization of hegemonic uniformity" in which we merge into sameness.

So is our moral responsibility always to the person more other to us, as Giles Fraser claims? Not according to this homily by Pope Francis, in which our moral responsibility is to practise fidelity - a faithfulness to God and to our own traditions and traditional communities, through which we uphold our identity and essential aspects of our being.