The feminist Leslie Cannold has an article in today's Age supporting a ban on Muslim girls wearing the hijab in Australian state schools.
What interested me about the article was not so much the conclusion, but its liberal framework. In particular her idea that we should aim to "autonomously direct one's own destiny."
It's a nice sounding ambition but with perilous ramifications. Immediately it constricts the way we talk about human life. Once you accept this aim you have already left behind much that has traditionally been considered important in life.
Why? First, because it means that the focus of justice and the good will be on whatever enhances personal autonomy. So our mental focus will narrow to the idea of the "liberation" versus the "constraint" of personal autonomy (which is apparent in Leslie Cannold's article).
What is lost is the idea that some actions and experiences are inherently good and are to be valued regardless of their effect on autonomy. For instance, we might recognise fidelity in marriage to be inherently good, even though it effectively commits us to one particular behaviour and thereby limits our capacity to autonomously "direct our own destiny".
The second reason that Leslie Cannold's aim limits our mental horizons, is that there are many significant things we can't direct autonomously, so for the principle to work, all this has to disappear from view as important life aims.
For example, in traditional societies there were distinctive ideals of manhood and womanhood. It was a case of men and women living up to these established standards to which they were born by virtue of their sex.
If, though, the ruling idea is that we are to autonomously direct our own destiny, then such traditional ideals either fade in significance as being qualities lying outside of our control, or they are more actively subverted.
So an aspect of life so important to our identity, and to our sexuality, and to our family life is never adequately recognised.
There is yet a third reason why Cannold's principle is so radically limiting. It assumes that our "destiny" can be pursued and won at an individual level.
If a woman believes her destiny is to become a journalist, this can be attempted at an individual level. But what if she wants to experience romantic love, and then marriage and motherhood? This then requires not only the cooperation of a man, but the preservation of a culture in which romantic love can flourish and in which men will commit to marriage early enough for a woman to successfully conceive and so on.
If we assume a purely individualistic destiny, then the life aims most commonly presented to us will involve careers, casual sex and consumerism. It is difficult to aim for anything more significant than this, as more significant aims require a larger common purpose to create a particular kind of society or to preserve a particular form of culture.
In other words if we have a larger destiny it is something we share with others.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Swedish odd spot
I thought I'd share this one with you since it gave me a good laugh.
In left-liberal Sweden they actually have an "Equality Minister". He has come under fire, though, because the unit he set up to implement gender equality in employment has only three men in a staff of 28.
Not unreasonably he was asked by journalists "how he expected to bring equality to society if he couldn't even bring it to his own equality unit."
His excuse was that not enough competent men were coming forward to fill the positions.
Which ought to have led him to consider the fact that men and women differ in their natures and will not be interested in doing exactly the same things. Which is why understanding "equality" to mean an equal number of men and women in all fields is such a grossly ill-conceived piece of social engineering.
Frankly, I'm relieved that few Swedish men want to work as state bureaucrats enforcing gender sameness on society.
In left-liberal Sweden they actually have an "Equality Minister". He has come under fire, though, because the unit he set up to implement gender equality in employment has only three men in a staff of 28.
Not unreasonably he was asked by journalists "how he expected to bring equality to society if he couldn't even bring it to his own equality unit."
His excuse was that not enough competent men were coming forward to fill the positions.
Which ought to have led him to consider the fact that men and women differ in their natures and will not be interested in doing exactly the same things. Which is why understanding "equality" to mean an equal number of men and women in all fields is such a grossly ill-conceived piece of social engineering.
Frankly, I'm relieved that few Swedish men want to work as state bureaucrats enforcing gender sameness on society.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Liberating women for war?
Derryn Hinch is a right-wing talkback radio host here in Melbourne – but he is no conservative.
I was listening to his programme a week or so ago and he introduced the topic of women in combat. First Hinch told us of a female friend who had argued against placing women in the firing line:
This is roughly the conservative position: that men and women are different in their natures and are not interchangeable in all things.
How did Hinch respond to his female friend’s observations about the nature of women? He ignored them. He simply announced his support for placing women in combat on the following basis:
So all that matters for Hinch is that we are not impeded in our individual will. This principle is so paramount for Hinch that he doesn’t even bother to deal with other considerations, such as how men and women in their real natures are likely to act in combat situations, or the real instincts and expectations men and women have toward the opposite sex. Hinch does not even bother to realistically consider the physical capabilities of women compared to men.
This is not surprising for a liberal. After all, liberals believe that we are made human because we can create who we are and what we do through our own individual will and reason. So for liberals like Hinch, it’s a threat to someone’s humanity to deny them their will. Unrestricted individual choice becomes everything, even when this is destructive of the framework of a society or of an institution.
Yesterday, there was an interesting sequel to this story. The Herald Sun carried an article in which the first woman to pass an Australian SAS training course spoke out against placing women in combat roles. Jane Cunningham, reputedly one of the physically toughest women in the Australian Defence Force, said of such roles,
I was listening to his programme a week or so ago and he introduced the topic of women in combat. First Hinch told us of a female friend who had argued against placing women in the firing line:
My friend said that women were inherently different to men ... That men can kill more easily than women. That women are protective. And if you have a female soldier alongside you then you are at risk because she said a woman is less likely to shoot. It’s in her nature.
This is roughly the conservative position: that men and women are different in their natures and are not interchangeable in all things.
How did Hinch respond to his female friend’s observations about the nature of women? He ignored them. He simply announced his support for placing women in combat on the following basis:
If women want to be soldiers then there should be no restrictions on what they can or can’t do.
So all that matters for Hinch is that we are not impeded in our individual will. This principle is so paramount for Hinch that he doesn’t even bother to deal with other considerations, such as how men and women in their real natures are likely to act in combat situations, or the real instincts and expectations men and women have toward the opposite sex. Hinch does not even bother to realistically consider the physical capabilities of women compared to men.
This is not surprising for a liberal. After all, liberals believe that we are made human because we can create who we are and what we do through our own individual will and reason. So for liberals like Hinch, it’s a threat to someone’s humanity to deny them their will. Unrestricted individual choice becomes everything, even when this is destructive of the framework of a society or of an institution.
Yesterday, there was an interesting sequel to this story. The Herald Sun carried an article in which the first woman to pass an Australian SAS training course spoke out against placing women in combat roles. Jane Cunningham, reputedly one of the physically toughest women in the Australian Defence Force, said of such roles,
Women will never have the personal strength and are not designed to carry the loads required ... in my view women just shouldn’t be out there.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
The ethics of identity
I’ve started reading a newly published book called The Ethics of Identity. It’s of particular interest as it discusses in a very open way the liberal attitude to gender and ethnic identity.
The author is a Princeton professor, Kwame Anthony Appiah (who is of mixed ancestry, with a father from Ghana and an English mother).
For today, here is a brief review of the preface to the book.
Professor Appiah begins with the observation that liberalism “is not so much a body of doctrine as a set of debates”. When I read this I was reminded of the way that liberalism has managed to “frame” the way that politics is discussed and debated in the West.
If a set of liberal debates is typical of Western politics, then it’s little wonder that conservatives often find it difficult to intervene and express their own point of view. The conservative viewpoint lies outside of the framework of debate.
Therefore, when conservatives look at politics we have to be willing, at times, to reject both points of view. To be true to what we really believe, we have to try to collapse the existing framework of debate. In effect, we need to establish different polarities – different points of contest.
A second useful observation made by Professor Appiah is that liberalism has captured mainstream politics in the West. He writes that liberalism encompasses “nearly all members of nearly all of the mainstream political parties in Europe and North America” and he even adds that liberal issues should concern us “even if, mirabile dictu, you do not find yourself disposed to think of yourself as a liberal at all” (mirabile dictu means wonderful to relate).
Professor Appiah, then, freely admits that liberalism has achieved near monopoly status amongst the political class. Yes, we do get to choose between different parties at election time – but the mainstream parties are all fundamentally liberal in their political outlook.
So we shouldn’t place too much faith in the mainstream “right-wing” parties, as these parties have accepted an essentially liberal world view.
Which brings us to the final and most important part of the preface. When Professor Appiah sets out his basic argument he writes that, “First, the measure of my life, the standard by which it is to be assessed as more or less successful, depends, if only in part, on my life’s aims as specified by me. Second, my life’s shape is up to me.”
He later adds “I start always from the perspective of the individual engaged in making his or her life, recognizing that others are engaged in the same project”.
Now this is very familiar. It is the basic liberal principle that what matters is that we are left unimpeded to create ourselves - to author our own lives - according to our own individual will.
Professor Appiah is following this principle when he claims that the measure of a life is the ability of an individual to determine the shape of his own life and his own life’s aims.
The professor considers this view to be “unexceptional”. But conservatives ought to jump in here and object. As a liberal, Professor Appiah is concerned above all to uphold conditions of autonomy. But this leads to a distorted focus.
Traditional societies did not focus on issues of autonomy in measuring the success of a life. What was important was the fact that a man was a good father, or a good churchman, or a good Englishman, or a virtuous man.
These roles or aims may not have been “self-selected” as part of a project of self-authorship. They may simply have been considered a natural inheritance or a customary understanding of “goodness” in life.
Yet they represent more significant aspects of life than those things we can determine individually, such as our career, our place of residence or our lifestyle.
And there is a further problem with Professor Appiah’s focus on self-authorship as the measure of a life. There are important parts of our self-identity which we don’t get to choose. We don’t get to choose, for instance, our race, our ethnicity or our sex.
Which is why liberals often view such forms of identity negatively as being restrictions on individual autonomy. This is exactly the issue Professor Appiah wishes to explore.
He does not simply assume that individuals are blank slates, as some liberals do. He recognises that “we make our lives as men and as women, as gay and as straight people, as Ghanians and as Americans, as blacks and as whites.”
For Professor Appiah, this raises the “conundrum” of whether such “identities represent a curb on autonomy”.
He declares in the preface that he writes “neither as identity’s friend nor as its foe”. He is certainly not its friend by conservative standards. He asserts, for instance, that identity is socially constructed rather than being hardwired into us.
He also uses typically negative liberal language at times to describe identity. He writes of “the encumbered self, laden with all the specificity of its manifold allegiances” and he worries that ethnic identity might “harden into something fixed and determinate” (putting it outside the realm of individual choice).
Still, there are signs in the preface that he is willing to take the claims of identity more seriously than most liberal philosophers.
The author is a Princeton professor, Kwame Anthony Appiah (who is of mixed ancestry, with a father from Ghana and an English mother).
For today, here is a brief review of the preface to the book.
Professor Appiah begins with the observation that liberalism “is not so much a body of doctrine as a set of debates”. When I read this I was reminded of the way that liberalism has managed to “frame” the way that politics is discussed and debated in the West.
If a set of liberal debates is typical of Western politics, then it’s little wonder that conservatives often find it difficult to intervene and express their own point of view. The conservative viewpoint lies outside of the framework of debate.
Therefore, when conservatives look at politics we have to be willing, at times, to reject both points of view. To be true to what we really believe, we have to try to collapse the existing framework of debate. In effect, we need to establish different polarities – different points of contest.
A second useful observation made by Professor Appiah is that liberalism has captured mainstream politics in the West. He writes that liberalism encompasses “nearly all members of nearly all of the mainstream political parties in Europe and North America” and he even adds that liberal issues should concern us “even if, mirabile dictu, you do not find yourself disposed to think of yourself as a liberal at all” (mirabile dictu means wonderful to relate).
Professor Appiah, then, freely admits that liberalism has achieved near monopoly status amongst the political class. Yes, we do get to choose between different parties at election time – but the mainstream parties are all fundamentally liberal in their political outlook.
So we shouldn’t place too much faith in the mainstream “right-wing” parties, as these parties have accepted an essentially liberal world view.
Which brings us to the final and most important part of the preface. When Professor Appiah sets out his basic argument he writes that, “First, the measure of my life, the standard by which it is to be assessed as more or less successful, depends, if only in part, on my life’s aims as specified by me. Second, my life’s shape is up to me.”
He later adds “I start always from the perspective of the individual engaged in making his or her life, recognizing that others are engaged in the same project”.
Now this is very familiar. It is the basic liberal principle that what matters is that we are left unimpeded to create ourselves - to author our own lives - according to our own individual will.
Professor Appiah is following this principle when he claims that the measure of a life is the ability of an individual to determine the shape of his own life and his own life’s aims.
The professor considers this view to be “unexceptional”. But conservatives ought to jump in here and object. As a liberal, Professor Appiah is concerned above all to uphold conditions of autonomy. But this leads to a distorted focus.
Traditional societies did not focus on issues of autonomy in measuring the success of a life. What was important was the fact that a man was a good father, or a good churchman, or a good Englishman, or a virtuous man.
These roles or aims may not have been “self-selected” as part of a project of self-authorship. They may simply have been considered a natural inheritance or a customary understanding of “goodness” in life.
Yet they represent more significant aspects of life than those things we can determine individually, such as our career, our place of residence or our lifestyle.
And there is a further problem with Professor Appiah’s focus on self-authorship as the measure of a life. There are important parts of our self-identity which we don’t get to choose. We don’t get to choose, for instance, our race, our ethnicity or our sex.
Which is why liberals often view such forms of identity negatively as being restrictions on individual autonomy. This is exactly the issue Professor Appiah wishes to explore.
He does not simply assume that individuals are blank slates, as some liberals do. He recognises that “we make our lives as men and as women, as gay and as straight people, as Ghanians and as Americans, as blacks and as whites.”
For Professor Appiah, this raises the “conundrum” of whether such “identities represent a curb on autonomy”.
He declares in the preface that he writes “neither as identity’s friend nor as its foe”. He is certainly not its friend by conservative standards. He asserts, for instance, that identity is socially constructed rather than being hardwired into us.
He also uses typically negative liberal language at times to describe identity. He writes of “the encumbered self, laden with all the specificity of its manifold allegiances” and he worries that ethnic identity might “harden into something fixed and determinate” (putting it outside the realm of individual choice).
Still, there are signs in the preface that he is willing to take the claims of identity more seriously than most liberal philosophers.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Feminism and the pinup girl
The language of liberalism is everywhere. Just consider this article from yesterday’s Age newspaper. It’s about the results of a British survey which showed that most young women want to be celebrity strippers or lap dancers rather than doctors, teachers or nurses.
How did the feminist writer of the article respond to this disconcerting news? She justified it in terms of liberal theory.
The liberal theory goes as follows. We are made human by the fact that, unlike animals, we can choose to be who we are and what we do, according to our own individual will and reason.
This means that liberals want us to preserve our ability to choose for ourselves without restrictions. Therefore liberals want individuals to remain “autonomous”, “independent” and “self-determining”.
Furthermore, it’s important for liberals that a social “equality of will” is maintained. Otherwise some people gain in their essential humanity at the expense of others. Men have had more economic and political power than women, which (according to liberals) is not a reflection of men following their masculine nature in the interests of their community, but is an illegitimate grab for power at the expense of an oppressed womanhood.
So, for liberals, female “empowerment” is also a buzzword.
Back to the article. How does a feminist writer accept the fact that young women want more than anything else to be celebrity pinup girls? She writes,
A modern feminist looks at Abi Titmuss and Jordan and approves. These women are making their own choices, gaining economic and cultural power, determining their own lives .... and this is what matters for a liberal. These are the terms of a liberal morality.
Yet, the consequences of accepting this approach to morality are grotesque. It means approving of Paris Hilton or Jordan as the modern feminine ideal.
We can do better than this, but first we have to jettison the hold over us of the liberal orthodoxy, so that we can once again concern ourselves with what is objectively good rather than limiting our field of view to what is self-determined.
How did the feminist writer of the article respond to this disconcerting news? She justified it in terms of liberal theory.
The liberal theory goes as follows. We are made human by the fact that, unlike animals, we can choose to be who we are and what we do, according to our own individual will and reason.
This means that liberals want us to preserve our ability to choose for ourselves without restrictions. Therefore liberals want individuals to remain “autonomous”, “independent” and “self-determining”.
Furthermore, it’s important for liberals that a social “equality of will” is maintained. Otherwise some people gain in their essential humanity at the expense of others. Men have had more economic and political power than women, which (according to liberals) is not a reflection of men following their masculine nature in the interests of their community, but is an illegitimate grab for power at the expense of an oppressed womanhood.
So, for liberals, female “empowerment” is also a buzzword.
Back to the article. How does a feminist writer accept the fact that young women want more than anything else to be celebrity pinup girls? She writes,
For most women who model or want to model for men’s magazines ... there is little contradiction between being an empowered, “independent woman” and posing in one’s underwear ...."
[celebrity females] are known and admired for their smarts and self-determination ... [pinup girls] aren’t clueless women with no other option than to pose in their knickers; they’re women who experience genuine power and accomplishment in their daily lives ...
the language they use to justify their decision to pose is a language of empowerment ... If feminism is about choice, they say, is it not their prerogative to choose to make some relatively easy money from looking pretty and adopting a sexy pose ... Then there’s the picture spread as sexual liberation...
A modern feminist looks at Abi Titmuss and Jordan and approves. These women are making their own choices, gaining economic and cultural power, determining their own lives .... and this is what matters for a liberal. These are the terms of a liberal morality.
Yet, the consequences of accepting this approach to morality are grotesque. It means approving of Paris Hilton or Jordan as the modern feminine ideal.
We can do better than this, but first we have to jettison the hold over us of the liberal orthodoxy, so that we can once again concern ourselves with what is objectively good rather than limiting our field of view to what is self-determined.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Celebrating Partner B Day
A couple of interesting items on the issue of homosexuality.
The first is a story on David Akinsaya. He is a BBC journalist who has lived as a gay man for many years, but no longer wishes to do so.
Why? Because he doesn’t like the lack of fulfilment of not being able to have a wife and children in the normal way. He says,
Here we have a recognition of two things. The first is that the liberal ideal of individual autonomy is not all it’s made out to be. David Akinsaya has the opportunity to live an independent lifestyle, but finds it unsatisfying. He wants to make the deeper commitments, and to take his place within an interdependent family.
The second is that homosexuality, by its very nature, is not equal to heterosexuality. Homosexual men have limited options in forming families. As David Akinsaya acknowledges, a child needs a mother, as well as a father who loves the mother. A homosexual man cannot meet such requirements. Homosexuality therefore imposes a radical restraint on human potential which heterosexuality does not.
The other interesting item on homosexuality has a very different theme. Here in Melbourne a booklet has been produced to challenge the “homophobia” of ..... kindergarten children!
The taxpayer funded booklet has been sent to over 2000 children’s centres. It encourages staff to use books, posters, games, dolls and role plays to “promote awareness of homosexual issues” amongst pre-school children.
The booklet even suggests that Father’s Day should be changed to “A Day for Someone Special” and that the terms Partner A and Partner B should be used on forms instead of Mum and Dad.
These last two facts are a reminder that there are points of conflict between heterosexual and homosexual culture. In other words, if homosexuality is to be treated as equal to heterosexuality, then important aspects of a heterosexual culture will have to give way.
I recently wrote about a Melbourne University queer officer who wanted to abolish the very categories of man and woman.
Whilst less extreme, the homosexual activists in this case want to abolish Father’s Day as well as references to mothers and fathers. So again, in order to be “inclusive” of homosexual parents, the normal expression of a heterosexual family culture has to be repressed.
The heterosexual majority should not stand for this. We need to assert the primacy of heterosexuality and the culture deriving from and supporting a heterosexual family life.
The first is a story on David Akinsaya. He is a BBC journalist who has lived as a gay man for many years, but no longer wishes to do so.
Why? Because he doesn’t like the lack of fulfilment of not being able to have a wife and children in the normal way. He says,
what I long for is a nuclear family – wife, kids, the lot. I just want to be normal ... In my present way of being, no one depends on me and I, myself, have no one to rely on. When you have a wife and child, they’re yours and you are theirs.
There are gay couples who have children, but I don’t want to be one of them, as I don’t think it’s fair on the child ... The only way it would feel right for me to have a child is if I’m in love with their mother.
Here we have a recognition of two things. The first is that the liberal ideal of individual autonomy is not all it’s made out to be. David Akinsaya has the opportunity to live an independent lifestyle, but finds it unsatisfying. He wants to make the deeper commitments, and to take his place within an interdependent family.
The second is that homosexuality, by its very nature, is not equal to heterosexuality. Homosexual men have limited options in forming families. As David Akinsaya acknowledges, a child needs a mother, as well as a father who loves the mother. A homosexual man cannot meet such requirements. Homosexuality therefore imposes a radical restraint on human potential which heterosexuality does not.
The other interesting item on homosexuality has a very different theme. Here in Melbourne a booklet has been produced to challenge the “homophobia” of ..... kindergarten children!
The taxpayer funded booklet has been sent to over 2000 children’s centres. It encourages staff to use books, posters, games, dolls and role plays to “promote awareness of homosexual issues” amongst pre-school children.
The booklet even suggests that Father’s Day should be changed to “A Day for Someone Special” and that the terms Partner A and Partner B should be used on forms instead of Mum and Dad.
These last two facts are a reminder that there are points of conflict between heterosexual and homosexual culture. In other words, if homosexuality is to be treated as equal to heterosexuality, then important aspects of a heterosexual culture will have to give way.
I recently wrote about a Melbourne University queer officer who wanted to abolish the very categories of man and woman.
Whilst less extreme, the homosexual activists in this case want to abolish Father’s Day as well as references to mothers and fathers. So again, in order to be “inclusive” of homosexual parents, the normal expression of a heterosexual family culture has to be repressed.
The heterosexual majority should not stand for this. We need to assert the primacy of heterosexuality and the culture deriving from and supporting a heterosexual family life.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
The conservative opposition?
In Australia the Liberal Party is supposed to be the conservative party. For quite some time now, I've argued that it's mostly a right-liberal party rather than a genuinely conservative one.
For proof positive, consider the following. Last week, the Young Liberals in my state of Victoria passed a resolution calling for an end to "mandatory gender equality" in the state Liberal Party.
It seems that for 60 years now, it's been compulsory in the Liberal Party that state branches, electorate councils and state councils have an equal number of male and female delegates.
The Young Liberals called instead for appointments to be based on merit rather than on affirmative action.
Senior Liberals were outraged by the motion. One senior frontbencher told The Age that "Party members are angry that the leadership of the Young Liberal Movement, and the party, have not been able to rein in the zealots" and the leader of the party, Robert Doyle, observed that "There is always a group within the young Liberals who are too radical for the party's own good."
Amazing. In the Liberal Party if you oppose advanced feminism you are called a radical and a zealot. And this is supposed to be our "conservative" party.
A genuinely conservative party would not try to enforce equal numbers of men and women in politics. Conservatives are relaxed about the idea that men and women have different natures and will therefore tend to differ in their social roles.
It's only liberals who believe that gender should not be allowed to affect who we are or what we do, and who therefore get upset when there are differences in the numbers of men and women in some sphere of life.
Why do liberals get upset in this way? Because in the liberal philosophy there is an assumption that we should be able to choose, according to our own individual will and reason, what we do and who we are. We don't get to choose whether we are male or female, so for liberals our sex isn't supposed to affect our life choices.
That's why liberals think that "something is wrong" if there are uneven numbers of men and women in politics. Usually, right-liberals want to increase the numbers of women in politics by talking about equal opportunity and by using non-coercive measures to encourage women to participate. Left-liberals are more likely to coercively use quotas.
So the situtation in the state Liberal Party is that the youngsters are advocating a more typically right-liberal approach (equal opportunity), whereas the old guard are defending a more typically left-liberal policy (quotas).
What we need, though, is a party which doesn't make the liberal assumption in the first place. A party which accepts that individuals are "gendered" in their natures and that this will naturally be expressed in the differing social roles adopted by men and women.
For proof positive, consider the following. Last week, the Young Liberals in my state of Victoria passed a resolution calling for an end to "mandatory gender equality" in the state Liberal Party.
It seems that for 60 years now, it's been compulsory in the Liberal Party that state branches, electorate councils and state councils have an equal number of male and female delegates.
The Young Liberals called instead for appointments to be based on merit rather than on affirmative action.
Senior Liberals were outraged by the motion. One senior frontbencher told The Age that "Party members are angry that the leadership of the Young Liberal Movement, and the party, have not been able to rein in the zealots" and the leader of the party, Robert Doyle, observed that "There is always a group within the young Liberals who are too radical for the party's own good."
Amazing. In the Liberal Party if you oppose advanced feminism you are called a radical and a zealot. And this is supposed to be our "conservative" party.
A genuinely conservative party would not try to enforce equal numbers of men and women in politics. Conservatives are relaxed about the idea that men and women have different natures and will therefore tend to differ in their social roles.
It's only liberals who believe that gender should not be allowed to affect who we are or what we do, and who therefore get upset when there are differences in the numbers of men and women in some sphere of life.
Why do liberals get upset in this way? Because in the liberal philosophy there is an assumption that we should be able to choose, according to our own individual will and reason, what we do and who we are. We don't get to choose whether we are male or female, so for liberals our sex isn't supposed to affect our life choices.
That's why liberals think that "something is wrong" if there are uneven numbers of men and women in politics. Usually, right-liberals want to increase the numbers of women in politics by talking about equal opportunity and by using non-coercive measures to encourage women to participate. Left-liberals are more likely to coercively use quotas.
So the situtation in the state Liberal Party is that the youngsters are advocating a more typically right-liberal approach (equal opportunity), whereas the old guard are defending a more typically left-liberal policy (quotas).
What we need, though, is a party which doesn't make the liberal assumption in the first place. A party which accepts that individuals are "gendered" in their natures and that this will naturally be expressed in the differing social roles adopted by men and women.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
More double standards
There ought to be a competition for liberal double standards.
Consider this. Flic Everett is a British mum who is worried about the tide of porn her 12-year-old son is subjected too. So she wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper complaining about the sexualisation of popular culture and noting that "The old argument that no-one's being exploited - we're all adults - no longer works, chiefly because we're not all adults."
Now, as a teacher of 12-year-olds I can only sympathise with her concerns. These children often know way too much and are too precocious in their attitudes to sex.
So what's the problem with Flic's article? A google search quickly reveals a Flic Everett to be the author of books such as "Sex Tips for Girls, How to be a Sex Goddess, Fantasy Sex, and The Sexy Bitch's Book of Doing it, Getting it and Giving it."
I doubt there are two British Flic Everetts in the writing trade. More likely that we have a heavy-duty double standard happening.
It's not uncommon for liberals to accept such double standards. If the liberal idea is that we should be "liberated" from any constraints on our individual choices and behaviour, then it's easier to apply this principle to ourselves rather than to those we rely on.
In other words, Flic may well think that breaking down restraints on the sexual behaviour of women is an acceptable part of liberalism and "empowering" for females. But it's not so easy for a woman to accept the same breakdown of sexual constraints on men. It threatens the chances of women finding love and fidelity in a man.
The problem is, of course, that it's hard to operate double standards. If you preach sexual liberation to women you can't expect too much success preaching sexual restraint to men.
So if Flic Everett doesn't like the consequences of applying liberalism consistently, it won't work well to try to apply it inconsistently. Better not to apply it at all.
Consider this. Flic Everett is a British mum who is worried about the tide of porn her 12-year-old son is subjected too. So she wrote an article for the Guardian newspaper complaining about the sexualisation of popular culture and noting that "The old argument that no-one's being exploited - we're all adults - no longer works, chiefly because we're not all adults."
Now, as a teacher of 12-year-olds I can only sympathise with her concerns. These children often know way too much and are too precocious in their attitudes to sex.
So what's the problem with Flic's article? A google search quickly reveals a Flic Everett to be the author of books such as "Sex Tips for Girls, How to be a Sex Goddess, Fantasy Sex, and The Sexy Bitch's Book of Doing it, Getting it and Giving it."
I doubt there are two British Flic Everetts in the writing trade. More likely that we have a heavy-duty double standard happening.
It's not uncommon for liberals to accept such double standards. If the liberal idea is that we should be "liberated" from any constraints on our individual choices and behaviour, then it's easier to apply this principle to ourselves rather than to those we rely on.
In other words, Flic may well think that breaking down restraints on the sexual behaviour of women is an acceptable part of liberalism and "empowering" for females. But it's not so easy for a woman to accept the same breakdown of sexual constraints on men. It threatens the chances of women finding love and fidelity in a man.
The problem is, of course, that it's hard to operate double standards. If you preach sexual liberation to women you can't expect too much success preaching sexual restraint to men.
So if Flic Everett doesn't like the consequences of applying liberalism consistently, it won't work well to try to apply it inconsistently. Better not to apply it at all.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Identity
Politics often comes down to an understanding of what it is to be human.
Liberals, for instance, believe that at the core of our nature is a freedom to choose who we are according to our own reasoning and our own will.
This ultimately explains why liberals want to overturn fixed identities based on gender or ethnicity. For liberals, such qualities are an unchosen imposition on our "real" nature as self-creating individuals.
The liberal view of human nature was expressed recently in an Age newspaper article written by Moira Rayner, a Labor Party feminist. The article was penned in response to the mistake made by British police in shooting a suspected terrorist on a London train.
The article is supposed to deal with the issue of identity. There are two quotes which stand out in particular in revealing the liberal mindset. The first is Moira Rayner's claim that, "Identities are like water; they flow".
In the liberal view, because identities are things that we ourselves create, they can't ever be fixed. If they were fixed, then there would be nothing for our essential human nature to do anymore - we would lose our humanity.
The second quote is her idea that "Our true identities are the selves that direct and control each of our functions, motives and desires; the watchers who reflect on events in the outer and inner worlds - on the totality of our personal experiences and values and how we achieve our goals."
Notice how "identity" here is reduced to the bare facts of a self-consciousness which reasons and wills. It is the reasoning "selves" which observe, control and direct our desires which form our identity.
To conservatives, this is a false reading of human nature. It's not that we don't have such a reasoning self. It's that our identity can't be reduced to this.
What does the liberal view leave out? There is one obvious omission. For most people a sense of being a man or a woman is central to self-identity. We don't think of ourselves as being an "it", but are instead "gendered" in our identity.
Similarly, for most people identity is bound up with ethnicity. Ask a Japanese who they are and you are likely very early on to get the reply "Japanese".
Liberals are prevented by their philosophical starting point from accepting gender and ethnicity as core aspects of human identity. At best these qualities are thought of as external to the true inner self, like an outer suit. At worst, liberals see them as an oppressive restriction on the freedom of the self-creating individual.
And so, because liberalism is currently dominant, we get all these efforts to overturn the normal expression of gender and ethnic identity.
Liberals, for instance, believe that at the core of our nature is a freedom to choose who we are according to our own reasoning and our own will.
This ultimately explains why liberals want to overturn fixed identities based on gender or ethnicity. For liberals, such qualities are an unchosen imposition on our "real" nature as self-creating individuals.
The liberal view of human nature was expressed recently in an Age newspaper article written by Moira Rayner, a Labor Party feminist. The article was penned in response to the mistake made by British police in shooting a suspected terrorist on a London train.
The article is supposed to deal with the issue of identity. There are two quotes which stand out in particular in revealing the liberal mindset. The first is Moira Rayner's claim that, "Identities are like water; they flow".
In the liberal view, because identities are things that we ourselves create, they can't ever be fixed. If they were fixed, then there would be nothing for our essential human nature to do anymore - we would lose our humanity.
The second quote is her idea that "Our true identities are the selves that direct and control each of our functions, motives and desires; the watchers who reflect on events in the outer and inner worlds - on the totality of our personal experiences and values and how we achieve our goals."
Notice how "identity" here is reduced to the bare facts of a self-consciousness which reasons and wills. It is the reasoning "selves" which observe, control and direct our desires which form our identity.
To conservatives, this is a false reading of human nature. It's not that we don't have such a reasoning self. It's that our identity can't be reduced to this.
What does the liberal view leave out? There is one obvious omission. For most people a sense of being a man or a woman is central to self-identity. We don't think of ourselves as being an "it", but are instead "gendered" in our identity.
Similarly, for most people identity is bound up with ethnicity. Ask a Japanese who they are and you are likely very early on to get the reply "Japanese".
Liberals are prevented by their philosophical starting point from accepting gender and ethnicity as core aspects of human identity. At best these qualities are thought of as external to the true inner self, like an outer suit. At worst, liberals see them as an oppressive restriction on the freedom of the self-creating individual.
And so, because liberalism is currently dominant, we get all these efforts to overturn the normal expression of gender and ethnic identity.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
No man or woman?
The Melbourne University Student Union has a queer officer by the name of Alex Ettling. Ettling has joined the ranks of those who are pushing to abolish separate toilets for men and women and instead create "pan-toilets" to cater for "all gender possibilities". Why? Ettling told The Age newspaper today that,
Now, you can understand why a gay man would dislike the existence of just two genders, male and female. Being gay doesn't only mean having a sexual orientation toward other men, it also often involves a confusion of gender identity. A gay man might not adopt a fully masculine gender identity, nor a fully feminine one. So he may feel alienated by the idea that there are just two sexes.
But, of course, there are two sexes and it is at the heart of heterosexuality to appreciate this fact. Most men not only want women to exist, they want very obviously feminine women to exist. And women for their part are attracted to the masculine qualities of men.
So we have a clash between what some gays would want as part of their ideal society and culture (the breaking down of the categories of man and woman) and what the heterosexual majority would assert as their ideal (the upholding of a distinctly masculine manhood and feminine womanhood).
It is therefore naive for people to believe that homosexuality will be seamlessly integrated into a heterosexual culture. There are areas in which the two are incompatible, so that the claims of only one can win out. And the heterosexual majority needs to proceed with the confidence that its own claims should be the ones to dominate society.
Some people might object at this point that the homosexual objectives are so unrealistic that there is no chance that they will ever be of influence. But there is a problem with this argument. The gay men who want to abolish the categories of man and woman have a powerful ally. Their goal fits in all too well with the reigning philosophy of liberalism.
Remember, liberals start out with the idea that we are human because we have the freedom to choose for ourselves who we are and what we will do. This makes liberals hostile to those parts of our identity which we don't have the power to choose for ourselves. And this includes our sex: the fact of being man or woman. We don't get to choose this for ourselves, but are born either man or woman as part of our "biological destiny".
So liberals have already tried to make gender "not matter" by attempting to reverse traditional gender roles. For a liberal it is a positive thing for a woman to break gender "stereotypes" by playing football or working as a bricklayer and for men to do the same thing by staying home to look after babies.
So what gays are advocating is simply a more radical application of an existing principle. Instead of denying the legitimacy of traditional gender roles, they are denying the legitimacy of traditional gender itself.
The claim that you can abolish the categories of man and woman seems ridiculous. But people take seriously a similarly unlikely claim: that masculinity and femininity are merely socially constructed and an impediment to human freedom. For many years liberals have asserted that "the mind has no sex" when it is a biological fact that it does.
So obvious biologicial facts can't be relied on to win political arguments. Mr Ettling may still get to see his wish fulfilled and to have politicians repeat the mantra that there is no man or woman.
Part of our intention is to break down the belief that there is just man and woman. Ideally we'd like to see a world where there are so many gender expressions that you just don't see there being man and woman any more.
Now, you can understand why a gay man would dislike the existence of just two genders, male and female. Being gay doesn't only mean having a sexual orientation toward other men, it also often involves a confusion of gender identity. A gay man might not adopt a fully masculine gender identity, nor a fully feminine one. So he may feel alienated by the idea that there are just two sexes.
But, of course, there are two sexes and it is at the heart of heterosexuality to appreciate this fact. Most men not only want women to exist, they want very obviously feminine women to exist. And women for their part are attracted to the masculine qualities of men.
So we have a clash between what some gays would want as part of their ideal society and culture (the breaking down of the categories of man and woman) and what the heterosexual majority would assert as their ideal (the upholding of a distinctly masculine manhood and feminine womanhood).
It is therefore naive for people to believe that homosexuality will be seamlessly integrated into a heterosexual culture. There are areas in which the two are incompatible, so that the claims of only one can win out. And the heterosexual majority needs to proceed with the confidence that its own claims should be the ones to dominate society.
Some people might object at this point that the homosexual objectives are so unrealistic that there is no chance that they will ever be of influence. But there is a problem with this argument. The gay men who want to abolish the categories of man and woman have a powerful ally. Their goal fits in all too well with the reigning philosophy of liberalism.
Remember, liberals start out with the idea that we are human because we have the freedom to choose for ourselves who we are and what we will do. This makes liberals hostile to those parts of our identity which we don't have the power to choose for ourselves. And this includes our sex: the fact of being man or woman. We don't get to choose this for ourselves, but are born either man or woman as part of our "biological destiny".
So liberals have already tried to make gender "not matter" by attempting to reverse traditional gender roles. For a liberal it is a positive thing for a woman to break gender "stereotypes" by playing football or working as a bricklayer and for men to do the same thing by staying home to look after babies.
So what gays are advocating is simply a more radical application of an existing principle. Instead of denying the legitimacy of traditional gender roles, they are denying the legitimacy of traditional gender itself.
The claim that you can abolish the categories of man and woman seems ridiculous. But people take seriously a similarly unlikely claim: that masculinity and femininity are merely socially constructed and an impediment to human freedom. For many years liberals have asserted that "the mind has no sex" when it is a biological fact that it does.
So obvious biologicial facts can't be relied on to win political arguments. Mr Ettling may still get to see his wish fulfilled and to have politicians repeat the mantra that there is no man or woman.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Conservative workers
It used to be common to think of conservatives as being establishment types, whilst the working class were more radical and left-wing.
This stereotype has been wrong for a very long time. Further evidence for this comes from a report into the electoral defeat of the Australian Labor Party commissioned by a leading trade union, the CFMEU.
In a foreword to the Brompton report, a national secretary of the union, Trevor Smith, complains that the Labor Party leaders,
The report itself concludes that,
The Labor Party, it recommends, shouldn't allow itself "to be dominated by an inner-metropolitan, latte-sipping minority".
This stereotype has been wrong for a very long time. Further evidence for this comes from a report into the electoral defeat of the Australian Labor Party commissioned by a leading trade union, the CFMEU.
In a foreword to the Brompton report, a national secretary of the union, Trevor Smith, complains that the Labor Party leaders,
place their faith ... in the shallow and cheap propaganda of a wealthy, inner-city elite, which has a barely disguised contempt for a bunch of workers from the bush or outer suburbs.
The report itself concludes that,
What is required is for Labor to admit that its historical supporter base and its potential supporter base are culturally conservative.
The Labor Party, it recommends, shouldn't allow itself "to be dominated by an inner-metropolitan, latte-sipping minority".
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Axing detention?
First, a brief account of the Cornelia Rau saga for overseas readers.
Cornelia Rau grew up in Germany before her family moved to Australia and gained citizenship here. She developed psychiatric problems which led her to wander into a remote Australian town without any means of support. When questioned by local police she adopted a different name and persona, claiming to be a German national.
The Australian authorities attempted to repatriate her to Germany, but the Germans of course had no record of her and refused to accept her. So she ended up in a detention centre for illegal arrivals.
This was obviously a stuff up by the authorities, which is now being used by the left to attack the legitimacy of the whole policy of placing illegal arrivals in detention centres.
As it happens, Cornelia’s sister is a left-wing journalist, and she has led the charge in attacking the policy of mandatory detention. In an article in The Age, Christine Rau queries whether putting illegal arrivals in detention actually works as a deterrent and that we “have to take a long, hard look at our immigration detention policies and explore humane alternatives.”
Now, it’s easy to respond to a left-wing critic of mandatory detention like Christine Rau on matters of fact. It’s very clear that if you want to secure your borders you need a system of detention for illegal arrivals. As it happens, there have been reports recently from both Norway and Sweden which clearly indicate the problems you have without a system of detention.
In the case of Sweden, the Board of Migration has released data showing that 50% of those refused asylum simply go underground. In Norway, detention centres do exist, but they aren’t run as locked institutions – detainees are able to leave. What has been the result? Over 19,000 asylum seekers have disappeared over the past six years, including 7,000 in the year 2003 alone.
Do we really want such a situation in Australia, particularly after the London bombings? Do we really want a situation in which those people refused residency can simply disappear into the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney? That is what will happen without a system of mandatory detention.
The problem is that people like Christine Rau will never be convinced by facts alone. For them, mandatory detention is wrong as a matter of morality, so they will oppose it no matter what the facts suggest. So we need to understand where their particular moral view comes from.
There is a hint to the answer in Christine Rau’s article. At one point in the article Christine Rau writes,
And she adds later, in terms of exploring alternatives to detention, “Surely this can be done without exploiting people’s fears of being overrun by hordes of ‘others’”.
This is typical liberal speak. For liberals it is the sense of an ethnic “us” which is morally suspect, so that we must prove ourselves to be entirely open to the “other”. A system of carefully controlling immigration represents a closure to the “other” for the liberal mind of Christine Rau.
Why would a liberal be so opposed to the thought of an ethnic “us”? Ultimately, the answer is that liberals believe we are human because we can use our individual will and reason to shape our own lives. So the liberal project is to make sure that individual wills remain both “free” and “equal”.
We can’t be “free” in the liberal sense if important aspects of our identity aren’t chosen by our own will. An ethnic identity is not chosen by individual will, but is something we’re simply born into, so it’s seen negatively by liberals as a limitation or restriction on the individual.
Nor can we have “equality of will” if there is “discrimination” on the grounds of race or ethnicity. Such discrimination would mean advantaging one will over another on the grounds of a quality which the individual himself cannot alter – a deep offense given the liberal starting point.
So we reach the extraordinary point at which liberals cannot accept something as natural as a feeling of ethnic kinship or ethnic loyalty.
Where do liberals go wrong? They are put off course right at the start: in the idea that our humanity depends on our being self-defined by individual reason.
There is no compelling reason to accept this assertion. If we really need to state what defines our humanity it would be better to either accept the traditional religious view, that we are invested with a human soul, or else look at the totality of human nature to discover the qualities which go to make up the human person.
Cornelia Rau grew up in Germany before her family moved to Australia and gained citizenship here. She developed psychiatric problems which led her to wander into a remote Australian town without any means of support. When questioned by local police she adopted a different name and persona, claiming to be a German national.
The Australian authorities attempted to repatriate her to Germany, but the Germans of course had no record of her and refused to accept her. So she ended up in a detention centre for illegal arrivals.
This was obviously a stuff up by the authorities, which is now being used by the left to attack the legitimacy of the whole policy of placing illegal arrivals in detention centres.
As it happens, Cornelia’s sister is a left-wing journalist, and she has led the charge in attacking the policy of mandatory detention. In an article in The Age, Christine Rau queries whether putting illegal arrivals in detention actually works as a deterrent and that we “have to take a long, hard look at our immigration detention policies and explore humane alternatives.”
Now, it’s easy to respond to a left-wing critic of mandatory detention like Christine Rau on matters of fact. It’s very clear that if you want to secure your borders you need a system of detention for illegal arrivals. As it happens, there have been reports recently from both Norway and Sweden which clearly indicate the problems you have without a system of detention.
In the case of Sweden, the Board of Migration has released data showing that 50% of those refused asylum simply go underground. In Norway, detention centres do exist, but they aren’t run as locked institutions – detainees are able to leave. What has been the result? Over 19,000 asylum seekers have disappeared over the past six years, including 7,000 in the year 2003 alone.
Do we really want such a situation in Australia, particularly after the London bombings? Do we really want a situation in which those people refused residency can simply disappear into the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney? That is what will happen without a system of mandatory detention.
The problem is that people like Christine Rau will never be convinced by facts alone. For them, mandatory detention is wrong as a matter of morality, so they will oppose it no matter what the facts suggest. So we need to understand where their particular moral view comes from.
There is a hint to the answer in Christine Rau’s article. At one point in the article Christine Rau writes,
If we’re honest, her case resonated because she was white, blonde, attractive .... one of “us”. If she had been a swarthy man of Afghan descent ... would the case have so horrified us?
And she adds later, in terms of exploring alternatives to detention, “Surely this can be done without exploiting people’s fears of being overrun by hordes of ‘others’”.
This is typical liberal speak. For liberals it is the sense of an ethnic “us” which is morally suspect, so that we must prove ourselves to be entirely open to the “other”. A system of carefully controlling immigration represents a closure to the “other” for the liberal mind of Christine Rau.
Why would a liberal be so opposed to the thought of an ethnic “us”? Ultimately, the answer is that liberals believe we are human because we can use our individual will and reason to shape our own lives. So the liberal project is to make sure that individual wills remain both “free” and “equal”.
We can’t be “free” in the liberal sense if important aspects of our identity aren’t chosen by our own will. An ethnic identity is not chosen by individual will, but is something we’re simply born into, so it’s seen negatively by liberals as a limitation or restriction on the individual.
Nor can we have “equality of will” if there is “discrimination” on the grounds of race or ethnicity. Such discrimination would mean advantaging one will over another on the grounds of a quality which the individual himself cannot alter – a deep offense given the liberal starting point.
So we reach the extraordinary point at which liberals cannot accept something as natural as a feeling of ethnic kinship or ethnic loyalty.
Where do liberals go wrong? They are put off course right at the start: in the idea that our humanity depends on our being self-defined by individual reason.
There is no compelling reason to accept this assertion. If we really need to state what defines our humanity it would be better to either accept the traditional religious view, that we are invested with a human soul, or else look at the totality of human nature to discover the qualities which go to make up the human person.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Do we need a moral code?
In the late 1960s a young Jane Fonda married the film director Roger Vadim. It was not a traditional marriage. Vadim asked his wife to share the marital bed not only with himself, but with a variety of call girls.
Understandably, Fonda regrets the arrangement. She does, however, admit that she wasn’t forced to do anything against her will. She writes,
She has a point. We are often told that as long as we consent to an action, and nobody else is harmed, that there can be no moral objections. But reality is more complex than this. There are many reasons why people might consent to an action against their better judgement.
When we are young, for instance, and don’t have a lot of life experience, we don’t always assert control over what happens to us. Nor do we, at this time of life, always have first-hand experience of the consequences of what we are choosing, in order to bolster our innate moral sense.
The Melbourne Age ran a story recently illustrating the limitations of an “ethics of consent”. It was about a young university student, Anna Neylan, who falls pregnant and who after “peeping through the keyhole of motherhood” knows that her preference is to have the baby.
Her boyfriend, though, wants her to have an abortion. She wrestles “with the burden of choice” and speaks to social workers and counsellors. She writes that,
But the opposition of her boyfriend leaves her in doubt. She confesses,
So she has the abortion and awakes in a “room full of blanketed grief.” Nor does she recover well in the coming weeks. As she describes it,
A month later the boyfriend leaves her and she sinks “to dangerous black depths.”
So an ethics of consent did not serve Anna Neylan well. It left her open to a kind of exploitation at a time of vulnerability in her life.
For conservatives, it is not the case that by our giving of consent, and an absence of direct harm to others, that an act is made moral or even acceptable. For us, there is an inherent right or wrong in different behaviours, and a moral code, reflecting the wisdom, the moral strength and the moral ideals of generations, should exist to guide individuals toward right forms of behaviour.
A liberal may well label such a moral code as oppressive, as the first principle of liberalism is that we should be unimpeded in following our own will (and not constrained by something external to our will, such as a moral code).
But is a moral code really oppressive when it helps to protect the most vulnerable from exploitation and harm? Or when it helps us to overcome our own weaknesses of will by buttressing our better moral natures?
There is a supportive function of moral codes, an assistance to individuals in living a life of moral integrity, which needs to be defended against the largely unsympathetic outlook of liberalism.
Understandably, Fonda regrets the arrangement. She does, however, admit that she wasn’t forced to do anything against her will. She writes,
But do you know what’s so interesting? I never felt coerced into it. I was never asked to do half the things that I found I didn’t want to do. I just thought that if I refused I’d be left, because I wasn’t enough. Isn’t that sad? And if that’s true of me, who seems so in charge and strong, imagine how it can be for other women.
She has a point. We are often told that as long as we consent to an action, and nobody else is harmed, that there can be no moral objections. But reality is more complex than this. There are many reasons why people might consent to an action against their better judgement.
When we are young, for instance, and don’t have a lot of life experience, we don’t always assert control over what happens to us. Nor do we, at this time of life, always have first-hand experience of the consequences of what we are choosing, in order to bolster our innate moral sense.
The Melbourne Age ran a story recently illustrating the limitations of an “ethics of consent”. It was about a young university student, Anna Neylan, who falls pregnant and who after “peeping through the keyhole of motherhood” knows that her preference is to have the baby.
Her boyfriend, though, wants her to have an abortion. She wrestles “with the burden of choice” and speaks to social workers and counsellors. She writes that,
Each time, I leave feeling strong and certain. In my heart I know that I want to have the child. I know that I’m not too young. I know I’d make a wonderful mother.
But the opposition of her boyfriend leaves her in doubt. She confesses,
I’m a mess; I trust him more than I trust myself. He comforts me with the promise that I’ll eventually be the mother of his children.
So she has the abortion and awakes in a “room full of blanketed grief.” Nor does she recover well in the coming weeks. As she describes it,
Waves of guilt lull me into troubled sleep at night ... I feel numb when I have sex. My partner doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to talk. When I try to talk or when I just want to cry, he tells me that he can’t help me.
A month later the boyfriend leaves her and she sinks “to dangerous black depths.”
So an ethics of consent did not serve Anna Neylan well. It left her open to a kind of exploitation at a time of vulnerability in her life.
For conservatives, it is not the case that by our giving of consent, and an absence of direct harm to others, that an act is made moral or even acceptable. For us, there is an inherent right or wrong in different behaviours, and a moral code, reflecting the wisdom, the moral strength and the moral ideals of generations, should exist to guide individuals toward right forms of behaviour.
A liberal may well label such a moral code as oppressive, as the first principle of liberalism is that we should be unimpeded in following our own will (and not constrained by something external to our will, such as a moral code).
But is a moral code really oppressive when it helps to protect the most vulnerable from exploitation and harm? Or when it helps us to overcome our own weaknesses of will by buttressing our better moral natures?
There is a supportive function of moral codes, an assistance to individuals in living a life of moral integrity, which needs to be defended against the largely unsympathetic outlook of liberalism.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Are majorities legitimate?
The French take their secularism seriously. They are currently debating a proposed law which would ban the wearing of religious symbols in schools. This would forbid the wearing by students of the Muslim hijab, the Jewish jarmulke and large Christian crosses.
I was interested to read the reaction of a British liberal, Gary Younge, to the proposed French law. (The Guardian 26/1/04) He made it clear that he himself is a secularist. This is not because he is convinced of the truth of atheism. In fact, he declares himself to be a lapsed agnostic, who is largely unconcerned with religious issues.
Instead, he is a secularist because he feels that it fits better with his liberalism. Liberals want people to be self-created by their individual will and reason. Younge, therefore, doesn't want his own fate to be influenced by a God external to his own will ─ he has, in his own words, "a philosophical problem with submitting my destiny to a higher being."
Similarly, Younge can only accept a personal morality that he decides and which applies to himself alone. He doesn't like the idea that a morality might be formalised, even to the extent of being given a name. As he himself puts it, he has a "problem with giving a name to my sense of what is morally right and wrong."
Younge's account of his secularism is a warning to churches which try to base themselves on a liberal philosophy. The logic of liberal individualism is to lead people to reject the authority over them not only of a church as an institution, but also of its moral code, and even of the idea of God existing externally to our own will.
Double standard
As a staunch secularist you might expect Younge to agree with the banning of religious symbols in French schools. In fact he does not.
Younge distinguishes between a ruling, oppressor group in society and marginalised oppressed groups. According to him, the Catholic Church was part of the privileged oppressor class and it was therefore proper that it was "sidelined" by secularism following the French Revolution of 1789.
Younge identifies Muslims in France, though, as being "ethnically and racially marginalised" by the racist French majority. Therefore it is legitimate that they seek to preserve their "racial and ethnic identity" of which Islam is a "crucial part".
Younge does not want Islam, being so crucial to the identity of a marginalised ethnic group, to be sidelined by secularism. In fact, he sees the attempt to do so as being just one more proof of the racism of the European French majority.
Of course, what you have here is the great left-liberal double standard which so perplexes conservatives. Younge not only allows, but encourages, ethnic minorities to keep their "racial and ethnic identity". Any attempt to defend such an identity by the majority, though, is condemned in the harshest terms as "racist".
Such an approach has the absurd consequence that it doesn't allow a mainstream culture to exist. Once you become the majority you become illegitimate.
Why would Younge hold such a view? Younge's arguments do make some sense within the confines of a liberal philosophy. After all, liberals want to be self-created by their own reason and will, and not by the national or ethnic tradition they are born into.
So what they are really looking to deconstruct is the mainstream culture that has some claim over them. It's not so important that they undermine the ethnic traditions of minority groups. In fact, it may even be an advantage to encourage such groups to hold to their traditional identities. It is presumably helpful for liberals if there continues to exist a visible minority toward whom the majority can actively practise "non-discrimination."
Reactions
There are several possible reactions to the left-liberal view of things. Some people react sensitively to the accusation that they are part of a racist majority. They try to re-legitimise themselves by going to increasingly greater lengths to prove that they are not racist.
This is futile. The French have already gone so far to accommodate immigrants that they have undermined their own future existence as a distinct people and culture. And still they are branded a racist majority.
French Muslims, meanwhile, have spearheaded attacks on French Jews, and yet are still accorded the status of victims of racism. They are protected from accusations of racism by their minority status.
In other words, it's not possible in the eyes of left-liberals for the majority to be exonerated of the accusation of racism. Trying to win legitimacy by taking increasingly desperate measures to prove how "anti-racist" you are is a losing game to play.
Another reaction to views like Gary Younge's is to reject the whole left-liberal approach in favour of a right liberal one. Right liberals are no more likely than left liberals to uphold a national or ethnic tradition. However, their approach is not to entirely condemn the existing majority of a society. Instead, they want everyone to assimilate into a liberal culture, defined in terms of democracy, tolerance, free enterprise, individual freedom, a fair go and so on.
This has a superficial appeal to many people, because it avoids the sense of a self-hating double standard which is a part of the usual left-liberal approach. But the ultimate outcome is the same: it is still considered illegitimate for the majority to defend their own particular tradition as a part of public policy.
Impasse
Centuries ago, our ancestors adopted liberal individualism as a political principle. They did so without thinking through carefully enough what the logical outcome of this principle would be.
Liberal individualism makes it impossible to defend the existence of your own national or ethnic tradition. This is because we are born into such a
tradition ─ we don't choose it through our own will or reason as liberal individualism insists we do.
The logical thing to do, to break the impasse that we are currently in, is to break free from the philosophy of liberal individualism: to finally recognise that it is a faulty part of our political tradition.
All this really means is a willingness to accept that we are created not just through our individual will and reason, and that this doesn't diminish our status as humans.
As part of this rejection of liberal individualism, we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be free, one which includes the freedom of all people, majorities included, to live within their inherited and continuing ethnocultural tradition.
Things will start to change for Europeans when we begin to challenge liberal individualism as the underlying, and sometimes unexamined, "first principle" of our intellectual and political classes.
(First published at Conservative Central 07/02/2004)
I was interested to read the reaction of a British liberal, Gary Younge, to the proposed French law. (The Guardian 26/1/04) He made it clear that he himself is a secularist. This is not because he is convinced of the truth of atheism. In fact, he declares himself to be a lapsed agnostic, who is largely unconcerned with religious issues.
Instead, he is a secularist because he feels that it fits better with his liberalism. Liberals want people to be self-created by their individual will and reason. Younge, therefore, doesn't want his own fate to be influenced by a God external to his own will ─ he has, in his own words, "a philosophical problem with submitting my destiny to a higher being."
Similarly, Younge can only accept a personal morality that he decides and which applies to himself alone. He doesn't like the idea that a morality might be formalised, even to the extent of being given a name. As he himself puts it, he has a "problem with giving a name to my sense of what is morally right and wrong."
Younge's account of his secularism is a warning to churches which try to base themselves on a liberal philosophy. The logic of liberal individualism is to lead people to reject the authority over them not only of a church as an institution, but also of its moral code, and even of the idea of God existing externally to our own will.
Double standard
As a staunch secularist you might expect Younge to agree with the banning of religious symbols in French schools. In fact he does not.
Younge distinguishes between a ruling, oppressor group in society and marginalised oppressed groups. According to him, the Catholic Church was part of the privileged oppressor class and it was therefore proper that it was "sidelined" by secularism following the French Revolution of 1789.
Younge identifies Muslims in France, though, as being "ethnically and racially marginalised" by the racist French majority. Therefore it is legitimate that they seek to preserve their "racial and ethnic identity" of which Islam is a "crucial part".
Younge does not want Islam, being so crucial to the identity of a marginalised ethnic group, to be sidelined by secularism. In fact, he sees the attempt to do so as being just one more proof of the racism of the European French majority.
Of course, what you have here is the great left-liberal double standard which so perplexes conservatives. Younge not only allows, but encourages, ethnic minorities to keep their "racial and ethnic identity". Any attempt to defend such an identity by the majority, though, is condemned in the harshest terms as "racist".
Such an approach has the absurd consequence that it doesn't allow a mainstream culture to exist. Once you become the majority you become illegitimate.
Why would Younge hold such a view? Younge's arguments do make some sense within the confines of a liberal philosophy. After all, liberals want to be self-created by their own reason and will, and not by the national or ethnic tradition they are born into.
So what they are really looking to deconstruct is the mainstream culture that has some claim over them. It's not so important that they undermine the ethnic traditions of minority groups. In fact, it may even be an advantage to encourage such groups to hold to their traditional identities. It is presumably helpful for liberals if there continues to exist a visible minority toward whom the majority can actively practise "non-discrimination."
Reactions
There are several possible reactions to the left-liberal view of things. Some people react sensitively to the accusation that they are part of a racist majority. They try to re-legitimise themselves by going to increasingly greater lengths to prove that they are not racist.
This is futile. The French have already gone so far to accommodate immigrants that they have undermined their own future existence as a distinct people and culture. And still they are branded a racist majority.
French Muslims, meanwhile, have spearheaded attacks on French Jews, and yet are still accorded the status of victims of racism. They are protected from accusations of racism by their minority status.
In other words, it's not possible in the eyes of left-liberals for the majority to be exonerated of the accusation of racism. Trying to win legitimacy by taking increasingly desperate measures to prove how "anti-racist" you are is a losing game to play.
Another reaction to views like Gary Younge's is to reject the whole left-liberal approach in favour of a right liberal one. Right liberals are no more likely than left liberals to uphold a national or ethnic tradition. However, their approach is not to entirely condemn the existing majority of a society. Instead, they want everyone to assimilate into a liberal culture, defined in terms of democracy, tolerance, free enterprise, individual freedom, a fair go and so on.
This has a superficial appeal to many people, because it avoids the sense of a self-hating double standard which is a part of the usual left-liberal approach. But the ultimate outcome is the same: it is still considered illegitimate for the majority to defend their own particular tradition as a part of public policy.
Impasse
Centuries ago, our ancestors adopted liberal individualism as a political principle. They did so without thinking through carefully enough what the logical outcome of this principle would be.
Liberal individualism makes it impossible to defend the existence of your own national or ethnic tradition. This is because we are born into such a
tradition ─ we don't choose it through our own will or reason as liberal individualism insists we do.
The logical thing to do, to break the impasse that we are currently in, is to break free from the philosophy of liberal individualism: to finally recognise that it is a faulty part of our political tradition.
All this really means is a willingness to accept that we are created not just through our individual will and reason, and that this doesn't diminish our status as humans.
As part of this rejection of liberal individualism, we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to be free, one which includes the freedom of all people, majorities included, to live within their inherited and continuing ethnocultural tradition.
Things will start to change for Europeans when we begin to challenge liberal individualism as the underlying, and sometimes unexamined, "first principle" of our intellectual and political classes.
(First published at Conservative Central 07/02/2004)
The state of play
Science is increasingly vindicating conservative politics.
For decades, liberals have asserted that there are no significant differences between men and women and that the dominance of men in certain professions can only be a result of prejudice or bigotry.
Conservatives, in contrast, have held that men and women are different in their natures and that this explains the dominance of men in certain fields (and the preponderance of women in others).
Science has finally swung the debate in favour of the conservative view. It's difficult now to suggest that there are no significant biological differences affecting the dispositions of men and women.
There is an article in today's Herald Sun (not online) which shows how liberals are reacting to the scientific reality. It's by an Australian mathematician, Dr Clio Cresswell. Her liberalism is clear from her confession that "I've always had a lot of trouble with the idea of male and female differences" and that "When people tell me I can't do something because of its male flavour, it becomes a challenge to me to become the best."
So her starting point, just like any liberal, is to want to overcome gender differences as representing a kind of restriction on the self.
However, she's too much of a scientific realist to overlook the evidence that natural differences do exist. For instance, she notes that,
So how does she reconcile her liberal dislike for gender difference with her knowledge that men and women are different in their intellectual natures?
She takes a kind of mid-way position. She still wants more women in the sciences, but she admits that women will have a different "take" on their scientific work. She notes that the Australian Mathematics Sciences Institute is trying to attract girls into maths by emphasising "biology, psychology and the environmental sciences" as career paths rather than physics, finance and engineering.
In terms of the medical sciences she relates the views of Dr Fiona Stanley, Australia's only female plastic surgeon, who says that what she loves most about her work is not the "purely technical exercise" of surgery, but "pain management, healing, psychology ...".
She herself admits that "For me, the true beauty of maths lies in its encapsulation of complex inter-relationships, not in its ability to solve problems."
So is this a possible solution for liberals? Can they admit male/female differences but still even up the science professions by making science less technical and problem solving, and more oriented to human relationships?
I doubt it. I still remember at university meeting quite a number of women who had gone into scientific fields, found them unsatisfying and were returning to study for careers like teaching.
Even Dr Clio Cresswell is an illustration of this tendency. She began her career as an actuary, a very dry career choice for a woman. Sure enough, she quit her job to return to uni to do a PhD (more predicatable) and became a Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW.
But she then veered off further into more traditionally feminine employments. She has subsequently written relationships advice for a women's magazine (more on this later) and has dispensed relationships advice on the TV show Beauty and the Beast. She has hosted a breakfast radio show and appeared on the panel of the TV comedy show The Glasshouse. She's done book reviews on radio and become an Australia Day Ambassador.
In other words, she has not found maths by itself a sufficiently fulfilling career choice. Does she really expert large cohorts of women in the future to do so?
Finally, on a different note, it's curious that Dr Cresswell should have ended up in the business of relationships advice. She is now past 30 and has not had success in this field. Nor would you expect her to, given the strategy she set herself to win a man.
She writes that at age 18 she came up with a plan to win over "a man's heart":
I expect that a lot of the men of my generation will roll their eyes at this kind of strategy. Did she really believe that broad shoulders were the way to attract men? Did her instincts fail so much that she thought men wanted intellectual conversation and muscularity in a woman?
It seems she's partly learned her lesson. She goes on to write,
Intriguing. I know this is written in a semi-serious vein, but the way she's presenting it is that she still hopes her body building and intellect combination, the "full package", will eventually prove attractive, though she's easing off on some of the more mannish self-presentation just in case men might actually prefer ... a more feminine woman.
Conclusion? Dr Cresswell, by the weight of scientific evidence, may be starting to accept natural differences between the sexes, which is something of a breakthrough for a liberal woman, but it'll be more impressive when such women manage to arrive at a heterosexual celebration of gender difference.
For decades, liberals have asserted that there are no significant differences between men and women and that the dominance of men in certain professions can only be a result of prejudice or bigotry.
Conservatives, in contrast, have held that men and women are different in their natures and that this explains the dominance of men in certain fields (and the preponderance of women in others).
Science has finally swung the debate in favour of the conservative view. It's difficult now to suggest that there are no significant biological differences affecting the dispositions of men and women.
There is an article in today's Herald Sun (not online) which shows how liberals are reacting to the scientific reality. It's by an Australian mathematician, Dr Clio Cresswell. Her liberalism is clear from her confession that "I've always had a lot of trouble with the idea of male and female differences" and that "When people tell me I can't do something because of its male flavour, it becomes a challenge to me to become the best."
So her starting point, just like any liberal, is to want to overcome gender differences as representing a kind of restriction on the self.
However, she's too much of a scientific realist to overlook the evidence that natural differences do exist. For instance, she notes that,
A 1999 study conducted at Virginia Tech in the US found that the areas in boys' brains involved in mechanical and spatial reasoning mature four to eight years earlier. Could that be why I only hooked into mathematics at 18?
So how does she reconcile her liberal dislike for gender difference with her knowledge that men and women are different in their intellectual natures?
She takes a kind of mid-way position. She still wants more women in the sciences, but she admits that women will have a different "take" on their scientific work. She notes that the Australian Mathematics Sciences Institute is trying to attract girls into maths by emphasising "biology, psychology and the environmental sciences" as career paths rather than physics, finance and engineering.
In terms of the medical sciences she relates the views of Dr Fiona Stanley, Australia's only female plastic surgeon, who says that what she loves most about her work is not the "purely technical exercise" of surgery, but "pain management, healing, psychology ...".
She herself admits that "For me, the true beauty of maths lies in its encapsulation of complex inter-relationships, not in its ability to solve problems."
So is this a possible solution for liberals? Can they admit male/female differences but still even up the science professions by making science less technical and problem solving, and more oriented to human relationships?
I doubt it. I still remember at university meeting quite a number of women who had gone into scientific fields, found them unsatisfying and were returning to study for careers like teaching.
Even Dr Clio Cresswell is an illustration of this tendency. She began her career as an actuary, a very dry career choice for a woman. Sure enough, she quit her job to return to uni to do a PhD (more predicatable) and became a Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW.
But she then veered off further into more traditionally feminine employments. She has subsequently written relationships advice for a women's magazine (more on this later) and has dispensed relationships advice on the TV show Beauty and the Beast. She has hosted a breakfast radio show and appeared on the panel of the TV comedy show The Glasshouse. She's done book reviews on radio and become an Australia Day Ambassador.
In other words, she has not found maths by itself a sufficiently fulfilling career choice. Does she really expert large cohorts of women in the future to do so?
Finally, on a different note, it's curious that Dr Cresswell should have ended up in the business of relationships advice. She is now past 30 and has not had success in this field. Nor would you expect her to, given the strategy she set herself to win a man.
She writes that at age 18 she came up with a plan to win over "a man's heart":
My plan was ingenious: I'd become a fully developed package, in both mind and body. Mathematics for the mind, along with other things like reading and travelling and then running, weight training and sweating for the body. Great conversation and a great set of shoulders - I'd be irresistible. Yep, I'd easily compete with the women who'd intimidated me in my early years.
I expect that a lot of the men of my generation will roll their eyes at this kind of strategy. Did she really believe that broad shoulders were the way to attract men? Did her instincts fail so much that she thought men wanted intellectual conversation and muscularity in a woman?
It seems she's partly learned her lesson. She goes on to write,
I'm not much beyond 30 now. And how's the plan going you ask? Not that well, I'm afraid. The trouble seems to pop up early on. Like when I meet a gorgeous man and he'll ask the question: "What do you do?" I reply, "Mathematician" and he'll come back with: "You must have a lot of testosterone" or "What's the square root of 532?" Not exactly the sexy conversation I had in mind ...
"Meanwhile, Melroy [a female astronaut] assures me that it's not at 30 but at 40 that men become increasingly interested in the full package. So my original plan still has hope. But with all those comments about too much testosterone still ringing in my ears, I've eased off on the shoulder exercises as backup.
Intriguing. I know this is written in a semi-serious vein, but the way she's presenting it is that she still hopes her body building and intellect combination, the "full package", will eventually prove attractive, though she's easing off on some of the more mannish self-presentation just in case men might actually prefer ... a more feminine woman.
Conclusion? Dr Cresswell, by the weight of scientific evidence, may be starting to accept natural differences between the sexes, which is something of a breakthrough for a liberal woman, but it'll be more impressive when such women manage to arrive at a heterosexual celebration of gender difference.
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