Arguing against reality

What makes feminists think the way they do?

Here’s one useful case study. The most recent appointment to Australia’s High Court is a woman, Susan Crennan. When she was appointed the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, made clear that she was selected not because of her sex, but on merit alone.

You would think that this would make feminists happy. Not so Leslie Cannold. In an article for The Age she notes that if appointments are made on merit, and if there are fewer female High Court justices, then it is being suggested that women are less meritorious than men. This she takes as an insult to women.

But what if there are simply fewer female candidates for such positions because many women choose to devote themselves to motherhood? What if, as Susan Crennan herself has suggested, it is a “biological imperative” which leads to there being more qualified men than women for High Court positions?

Predictably, this response draws out a basic statement of liberalism from Leslie Cannold. She writes,

... such a rebuttal seems to me to constitute further evidence of the discriminatory nature of the system and those who run it.

To suggest that female biology is destiny is to depict women as slaves to their hormones rather than rational beings capable of choosing if and when they’ll reproduce.

For liberals, our very humanity is defined by our ability to choose for ourselves who we are and what we do. We are meant to create ourselves through our own individual reason and will. In this view, accepting an inherited tradition or an unchosen “biological destiny” is considered to be an oppressive impediment to the self-creating individual.

That’s why liberals hate the idea of an inherited ethnic identity. It’s also why they consider a conventional sexual morality to be oppressive and why they want many alternative kinds of family life rather than just the traditional one.

And it explains why Leslie Cannold vehemently rejects the idea that “female biology is destiny” and considers such an idea “discriminatory”.

Where does this ideological view of things lead? Think of it this way. For conservatives, the fact that women are more likely than men to take time off work to mother their children is both a natural and desirable state of affairs.

But a liberal like Leslie Cannold can’t see it this way. For her, biology isn’t allowed to count – it isn’t allowed to predispose women to motherhood.

So when Leslie Cannold sees reality – sees that women are still more committed to motherhood than men – she assumes that this must be because girls aren’t being taught to think logically or that men are somehow being obstreperous in not taking over the motherhood role.

Her efforts to eradicate the influence of biology also means that she must even reject the “compromise” position of many young women, namely, to pursue a career but to take some years off to raise their young children.

For Leslie Cannold, it is a kind of defeat, rather than a reasonable compromise, for young women to have “future plans to stay home when their kids are young” in order to live “less exhausting lives than their mums”.

So the end point of Cannold’s feminism is an oppressive one for young women. They are to sacrifice themselves to prove that their lives are disconnected from any natural impulse toward active motherhood. They must either accept the harried lives of their feminist mothers or else wait for men to be equally committed to motherhood as themselves.

Fortunately, young women seem less inclined these days to accept a view which is so at odds with reality.

Selfish, conservative & inward looking?

One good thing that's happened in Melbourne in recent years is a move away from modernist styles of housing. There's been a revival in heritage styles in architecture, and the quality of these homes is sometimes very high.

Charm has made a comeback!

But the revival of heritage styles doesn't have everyone's approval. As an article in today's Age puts it,

Architects loathe these developments, just about as much as people like them.

Patrick Kennedy is one such architect who is not amused by the fashion for heritage style homes. He complains that,

These houses now reflect the same view as our political climate -
selfish, conservative and inward looking.

Nor is fellow architect Norman Day impressed by the popularity of heritage styles. He believes that such houses are in fashion because,

people are scared. They no longer see houses as places to live - they are investments, they are commodities.

Unfortunately, it seems as if some architects are so committed to modernism that they fail to understand how most people see things.

A lot of us have a greater emotional response to heritage style homes because they connect us to our history and cultural identity and because such styles are generally less severe than the stripped down geometric styles typical of modernist architecture.

Modernist homes often look like offices. Sometimes they are stylish but cold. At other times they are just plain brutally ugly.

Norman Day is wrong. People do see houses as places to live, which is exactly why they have been choosing houses with some traditional homely charm, rather than the more severe modern styles. This may be, as Patrick Kennedy claims, a symptom of conservatism, but it is not selfish and nor is it inward looking.

It has helped to make the newer outer suburban estates more attractive places to live.

(Here's one example of the newer style of housing. I don't like the protruding garage, but the rest of the house is a nice example of a Melbourne heritage style.)

Transcendence

Lawrence Auster has written several posts lately on the theme of transcendence. Although this is not the easiest subject matter, it's an important argument and well worth the effort to read.

What is transcendence and why does it matter?

Loud and clear and wrong

Earlier this month some legal changes were brought about here in Victoria. One of them is that you can no longer plead provocation as a defence for murder.

Here is how The Age reported the impending legal reforms:

Men who kill their partners in a jealous rage will no longer be able to use the partial defence of provocation ... Attorney-General Rob Hulls said yesterday the proposed reforms to go before Parliament today tackled entrenched bias against women ... "This Government will not support a mechanism ... that has been relied upon by men who kill partners or ex-partners out of jealousy or anger".

Football and political identity Phil Cleary ... said the provocation defence was "a barbaric, misogynist law that had to go ... The real challenge now is to ensure that those old-style judges who have been complicit in the law of provocation are not able to stay complicit behind the closed doors of chamber".

Australian Democrats senator Natasha Stott Despoja also welcomed the proposed scrapping of the provocation defence. "The defence of provocation enshrines an anachronistic and old-fashioned world view of male violence towards women as understandable and justifiable ... If we are to abolish domestic violence in this country, we must abolish the protection of its perpetrators in our legal system".

The message here is loud and clear, is it not? It is men who murder women and then use a provocation defence to get off. It is old-fashioned male judges who accept murderous violence against women and conspire to defend the male perpetrators.

Now, I'm glad that the defence of provocation has been abolished. But I have to protest about the way the legal reforms have been reported. Reports like those quoted above perpetuate a stereotype about male oppressors and female victims which is based on an abstract theory, namely patriarchy theory. The stereotype is easily shown to be false.

As it happens, I've already published an article on this very issue, which provides the kind of information which ought to embarrass Rob Hulls, Phil Cleary and Natasha Stott Despoja.

What is this information? A Victorian Law Reform Commission has previously examined the issue of the provocation defence. It found that female defendants were more successful in using the provocation defence than were men. In fact, during the period examined by the commission 8 out of 26 female defendants used the provocation defence and not one was convicted of murder.

The commission also found that men were more successful using the provocation defence when their victim was male rather than female.

Furthermore, even when men were successful in using the provocation defence their average sentence was double that of women who used the same defence.

Not surprisingly, the Victorian Law Reform Commission reported that its data, "does not support the conclusion that the provocation defence generally operates in a gender biased way." In fact, as you can see from the data, if there is any gender bias it is in favour of women rather than men.

The Age report is therefore wrong on two counts. First, the provocation defence was not employed solely by men who had murdered women; rather, it was women who were more successful in using the provocation defence to escape murder convictions.

Second, far from being an instrument of patriarchal control, the legal system is much more lenient toward women than men. If there is any "rooting out" of old-fashioned judges to be done, it will be to identify those judges who are protectively lenient to female murderers, rather than male ones.

Why is it important to correct these media falsehoods? Becuase the assumption that men conspire to oppress women is a destructive one. If offends and ultimately demoralises those men whose natural instinct is to work hard to protect women, and, on the female side, it undermines the trust in men necessary to commit to relationships.

For this reason, we ought to object when the issue of domestic violence is discussed only in terms of male perpetrators and female victims. As anyone who reads a newspaper regularly would know, there are also cases of domestic violence in which it is women who inflict injuries on children, other women or even on their male partners.

The domestic violence issue needs to be addressed without the distortion imposed by patriarchy theory.

Masculinity bad for you?

Every few years we get someone arguing that "masculinity is bad for you". This time it's the turn of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward.

She has told a men's health conference that the reason why men's health is worse than women's is because a traditional masculine identity makes men work too hard to support their families. Ms Goward is reported as claiming that,

if men spent more time with their children and did more housework, it would improve their physical and mental health, make them less likely to engage in risk-taking behaviour, and give them skills traditionally allocated to women.

Now, the first thing to realise here is that Ms Goward has a political agenda in making these claims. Feminists would dearly love men to lower their work commitments and to take over the traditional motherhood role of women.

Why? Two reasons, I think. First, feminists often believe that the reason men have more political and economic power is that men have organised improperly as a group to gain power and privilege at the expense of women, who are therefore oppressed as a group (patriarchy theory). Therefore, for feminists it is seen as a great triumph for women to increase their earnings relative to men. It's easier for women to do this if their husbands are at home with the kids rather than in paid work.

Second, feminists generally follow the liberal view that we shouldn't be limited in our individual will. This means that they like the idea of a fluid gender identity in which role reversal is possible, rather than individuals following traditional gender roles as a "biological destiny".

Anyway, here is one the major problems facing Ms Goward. Women do still want their husbands to work full-time. Women themselves prefer to work part-time or not at all. And men are happiest working full-time.

These are the findings of a major research project, managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research.

So it seems that men are not "oppressing" women by working hard, nor is it likely, given the preferences of both men and women, that we'll see a widespread role reversal any time soon.

A couple of additional points. It probably is unhealthy if men really do push themselves excessively at work. This is more likely to destroy masculinity in the long run. Interestingly, the research project mentioned earlier found that men's happiness started to decrease when working over 50 hours a week. The optimum was a 35 to 40 hour working week.

Second, it's an impoverishment of masculine identity if men see work and being a provider as the only expression of being a man. Traditional forms of masculinity incorporated other roles as well, including men helping to educate and socialise their own children (especially their sons).

Something else already?

There are signs that our political class is already considering abandoning the idea of an Australian nation in favour of a larger Pacific confederation.

The ALP has actually reached the point of putting forward a policy paper which advocates establishing a Pacific Community (Australia, NZ, PNG and the smaller Pacific nations like Fiji). There would be a Pacific Parliament, a Pacific Court, a Pacific Common Market, a common currency and military integration.

Hugh White, a professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, approves of the plan and notes that "Closer Pacific regionalism - even eventual confederation - may be an idea whose time has come".

Note that the ALP policy even includes bringing Islander labour to Australia, as part of a free movement of labour.

What this shows, above all else, is how superficial the idea of "civic nationalism" is. Traditionalist conservatives support an ethnic nationalism, in which a nation is founded on a common kinship, history, language, culture, religion - on a tradition which clearly distinguishes one nation from another.

Liberals have abandoned such ethnic nationalism because it's not something that is determined by individual choice, but rather is something inherited. Instead, they have adopted the idea of a civic nationalism in which anyone could choose to become a citizen of any country.

But once national identity is so easily transferable, there is no longer a reason to maintain existing nation states. Hence the fact that our politicians can imagine making us all citizens of some other entity, alongside different peoples to whom we are not closely related and whose traditions we do not share.

Problem solved?

Australia has a system of mandatory detention for illegal arrivals. Anyone found to be here illegally is put into a detention centre until their application for residency is finalised.

It's a policy which comes under constant criticism from the left. Because of endless appeals some people end up staying in detention for long periods.

At least, though, mandatory detention solves the kind of situation Sweden finds itself in. In Sweden asylum seekers who have their applications rejected can simply disappear into the community.

What solution is Sweden having to resort to? The Swedish government is planning to offer an amnesty to allow such people to stay.

So the whole system breaks down. You can arrive in Sweden illegally, claim to be a refugee, have your application rejected, disappear into the community and still be rewarded with an "amnesty" and be allowed to stay.

It is effectively a situation which the government no longer controls: the illegal arrivals do.

It's a warning that Australia should not follow such a model by releasing everyone who arrives here illegally into the general community.

Already?

This is where liberalism gets you. Last Friday, the first ever civil union between a threesome took place in the Netherlands.

Viktor de Bruijn "married" two women in a ceremony before a notary who officially registered their civil union. At the moment, only a civil union rather than a marriage is recognised, but who knows when this will change.

Viktor described the events thus: "A marriage between three persons is not possible in the Netherlands, but a civil union is. We went to the notary in our marriage costume and exchanged rings. We consider this to be just an ordinary marriage."

It was only a year ago that I wrote an item on Alastair Nicholson, the very respectably liberal former chief justice of the Family Court of Australia. In arguing for homosexual marriage, Nicholson claimed that the traditional understanding of marriage had been superseded, to the point that "it is difficult to argue that a modern marriage necessarily excludes all others."

Once you begin to see marriage as any kind of arrangement which individuals contract to, there is no logical reason to limit it to two people - so it seems inevitable that liberal societies will move toward a recognition of polygamy. I just didn't think it would happen so quickly.

The lesson? We should think very carefully before moving from a traditional view of marriage as an exclusive union between a man and woman. Once marriage becomes liberalised into nothing more than a state sanctioned contract between individuals it loses its particular character and begins to take any form - including a polygamous one.

When the wheel turns

I left school in the mid-80s expecting to spend a few years of single independence at uni before embarking on a career and marrying.

Was I in for a shock. By the time I was ready to settle down (at about the age of 23) relationships between men and women had changed so radically that marriage seemed an unlikely prospect.

Young middle class women had been brought up to value independence above all else. I was aware of this and thought that I would have to make some compromises to accommodate this within a marriage.

What stunned me was how quickly any notion of compromise was lost. Many of the most attractive girls went "all the way" with their commitment to independence by simply deferring the very idea of marriage and children until some unspecified point in their mid to late 30s.

What is more, there was a kind of feminist triumphalism in the media. It was common to be told that women were now happily independent and self-sufficient and that traditional men were obsolete.

The situation was made more difficult by the personal behaviour of many young women. A lot of young women acted in a coarse, mannish way and chose to date "the wrong sort of guy".

Added to all this, the divorce rate was rising and divorce laws seemed to leave men with little legal protection in a marriage.

The question to be asked is how do men react when put in such a situation? When the normal process of settling down is made so difficult, how do men adapt psychologically?

I believe that many of the men caught in this situation did make a kind of psychological transformation. They found a balance in their relationships with individualistic women, by becoming more individualistic in their own outlook.

They found that now that they weren't expected to take care of women, that their lives were lighter and more "free-floating". They tried to live by the benefits of this, as this was what was now available to them.

They had been forced to become more self-sufficient, and to set their own personal goals, rather than to fulfil goals related to romantic love or family life.

For some men, this meant deferring their own commitment to family and career, for others it meant chasing their own materialistic, lifestyle goals to which their partners were expected to contribute, without making burdensome demands.

Lone women

How have things worked out for my generation now that we've reached our mid-thirties? Not so well, I think.

The first problem is that many women reached their thirties and found that they no longer wanted to do the careerist, single girl lifestyle anymore. They now wanted to marry and have a family.

Unfortunately, they were all too successful in attacking the traditional "family man" ethos when they were in their 20s. Men have gone through a major psychological adaptation away from their protector, provider instincts: it's not easy for men to change back.

And so you get the kind of lament made by Martha Kirkland, in an email to Henry Makow. Martha is a 30-something woman living in New York, who, despite being bright, thin, attractive and funny, finds herself without a partner.

Martha is understandably unimpressed by the fact that many men ask her on the first date how much she earns or whether she has a trust fund. She can't understand "how grace, charm and feminine essences no longer seemingly have a value".

She has observed that "The last thing my men friends want is any woman to be dependent upon them, especially emotionally and secondarily financially."

The conclusion Martha has drawn from this is that it is she and many of her women friends who are "at a relatively young age dinosaurs".

It's interesting for Martha Kirkland to put things this way because it mirrors what traditionally minded men felt in our twenties, rather than our thirties. That back then it was women who did not sufficiently value their "grace, charm and feminine essences"; that it was women who did not want to depend emotionally or financially on a man; and that it was traditional men who found themselves at a young age declared obsolete.

Meaning & identity

So the wheel has turned. It is now women, rather than men, who want to follow their instincts to marry, and who are disoriented by the individualistic values of the opposite sex.

Should men take comfort from this? I don't think so, because as Henry Makow rightly points out in response to Martha Kirkland's email, the situation is hardly ideal for men either.

He writes that:

Feminism lets men "off the hook". We no longer have to take responsibility for families. Instead, we can do as we please. In my case, that meant a search for meaning and identity.

Ironically, I learned that these are rooted in the masculine role feminism allowed me to forego.

In other words, a large part of meaning and identity for men is derived from our masculine role within a family, whether as husbands or fathers. So, even though a genderless, individualistic role might feel lighter and less burdensome, it is less likely to leave a man feeling fulfilled.

Martha Kirkland herself makes another good criticism of the newer, individualistic role for men. She explains that,

I attempt to persuade [these men] that the wildly successful feminist does not become the Dove Girl at home. That they are asking the impossible, a totally womanly creature that is utterly self-sustaining, emotionally, spiritually and financially. I attempt to illustrate how this creature in fact cannot co-exist. Or rather co-exist, in the same female body, mind, spirit.

What Martha is saying here is that a woman who is forced to become emotionally and financially independent is less likely to be attractively feminine at home.

I think this is generally true. A woman with a husband who intelligently protects her from some of the harshness of life, is much more likely to reveal her softer, more vulnerable feminine qualities.

It's not realistic to expect that most women will be ruggedly self-sufficient and softly feminine at the same time: this would be to expect a woman to be contradictory things.

So men ultimately have to choose one thing or the other; fully-natured, heterosexual men are more likely to want feminine women, even if this means taking on the "burden" of a protective role within the family.

Responses

I have seen a number of different responses to the situation women now find themselves in.

The relationships columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun, Toby Green, has for some years now urged men to ignore the feminism of the 80s and 90s and to return to an authentic masculinity.

She has spoken of the treatment of men by feminist women that:

We huffed and puffed and blew your masculinity down. Maybe it was the headiness of the battle, but we got carried away. At some point, we needed to be saved from ourselves ...

Has it not occurred to you that you could not really be as terrible as we keep telling you you are ...

As a mate, I will tell some in-house secrets. Some of us know we are out on a limb and do not know how to tell you without losing face that, although we may not need to be protected (I did not say dominated) and taken care of, we like it. It feels good.

Robyn Riley, another Herald Sun columnist, has taken a different approach to the situation of contemporary women. In a recent column she angrily attacked those men who, in their late 30s, still "don't want to deal with the responsibility of family, housework and career".

She doesn't want to admit that the male attitude is a predictable reaction to an earlier feminist individualism. To the suggestion that the lack of commitment is because "in the 90s, men felt they were repressed" she responds that "If they were, it was only for a decade, for goodness sake."

And she then admits that "What bugs me is that the minute women look like winning some equality, these delinquents start stamping their feet and having tips in their hair and riding around on scooters." (Herald Sun 12/2/04)

And here we have the problem. For an orthodox liberal feminist like Robyn Riley "equality" means female independence. This is because liberals believe that we should be autonomous, in the sense of being created by our own individual reason or will.

It would be very hard for an orthodox liberal to admit that we need someone else to help us to fulfil our lives. And so Robyn Riley is committed to the idea that women should be independent, and that men should do whatever is required to uphold this kind of female individualism.

There's little room here for understanding real world psychology, including how men are likely to psychologically adapt to the presence of feminist women. It is just the imposition of ideology onto one area of life which is intensely personal and instinctive.

The angry, feminist, anti-male approach of Robyn Riley is unlikely to convince a new generation of men to recommit to family life. The more sophisticated approach of Toby Green, which is able to recognise gender difference, and which allows a natural interdependence of men and women, is much more likely to allow men and women to reestablish healthy relationships.

(First published at Conservative Central 14/02/2004)

Double discrimination

We are letting down our boys.

Just take the issue of sports. Last year a Victorian tribunal ruled that a 14-year-old girl could not be excluded from playing in a boys' football competition. This was done in accordance with anti-discrimination laws.

The very same tribunal has now decided that it's fine to exclude 12-year-old and 13-year-old boys from a girls' netball league. Netball Victoria welcomed the decision, with the comment that "Girls don't play the same way as boys and don't always wish to play against boys. We believe they should have that choice."

Well, yes. They should have that choice. But so too should boys.

And to compound the double standard, there is now a Victorian football league from which boys are excluded. A newspaper article quoted one of the girl players saying "When you play with boys, you don't feel very comfortable tackling." Which I can well understand; but I also understand that many boys would (rightly) not feel comfortable tackling girls either.

So the situation is this: we have anti-discrimination laws which prevent boys from having their own football competition, but which allow girls to have their own football and netball competitions.

In other words, the anti-discrimination laws blatantly and unjustifiably discriminate. They should be scrapped: something is wrong when we can't even allow boys to do something as normal and healthy as play football together.

(I've discussed this issue previously in an article "Free to Choose??")

Gender traitors?

There have been more developments in the Swedish feminist party, Feminist Initiative.

First, Susanne Linde, a leading figure in the party, has resigned after being bullied by another leading member, Tiina Rosenberg. Rosenberg, a professor of gender studies, taunted the more politically moderate Linde, by saying that "a good moderate is a dead moderate". When Linde spoke of resigning Rosenberg said "I'm glad that our intelligence reserve won't fall with you." Linde said of this "I felt so violated I started to cry."

Now, this kind of bickering is not unheard of in political parties. But remember, feminists keep telling us how much nicer and more peaceful the world would be if only they could run things, instead of nasty men. But it seems that feminists can't even keep the peace in their own little party, let alone on the world stage.

The second development also concerns Tiina Rosenberg. She is reported to have said that, "women who sleep with men are traitors to their gender."

This statement is a real blast from the past. It harks back to the feminism of the 1970s and early 1980s. I caught the tail-end of it when I was an undergraduate uni student in the mid-80s. On the housing advertisement board, there used to be ads for women only communes. Within a few years, though, feminist separatism had run out of steam.

And now it reappears in Sweden. It is a wildly perverse attitude, which runs directly counter to healthy human instinct and social solidarity. I can only presume it has its origins either in lesbianism, or else the left-liberal idea that there are oppressor groups (men) who have set up artificial categories (male and female) in order to achieve a will to power of their own group over a deprived and oppressed victim group (women).

If you were to take such an ideology seriously, then perhaps you might see men and women as enemies locked in combat, so that a heterosexual woman could be castigated for "sleeping with the enemy."

But what a dreary, life-wasting philosophy! Imagine relegating the differences between men and women to the realm of "oppressive, artificial, social construct". This does not fit well with heterosexuality, in which it is precisely the masculinity or the femininity of the opposite sex which we love. Nor does it judge fairly the real motivations of men in working hard to establish and provide well for their families.

In a way, Rosenberg is right: if you follow the logic of the leftist view, a woman would be led into the hopeless situation of rejecting heterosexual love and the traditional family.

You would think that someone led to such a position would reconsider the ideology being pursued. But perhaps Rosenberg is a lesbian and so has little to lose from rejecting heterosexual love and family life.

Marriage not for couples?

There's always a more radical liberalism. It doesn't matter how much society gives in to radical liberal demands, the left will never be satisfied but will want to take things further.

Take the issue of marriage. Some American states are now changing the traditional heterosexual form of marriage in order to include homosexual relationships. But for some radicals, having gay couples marrying is still applying a "heterosexual norm". They want marriage laws which incorporate any number of adults living together.

The Swedish group, Feminist Initiative, recently held a conference at which they decided on their policy toward marriage. The group voted for the introduction of a "cohabitation law" which would not only ignore the gender of those marrying, but would also allow for more than two people to be included.

FI founder, Tina Rosenberg, explained that the group wants to create "a modern concept which does not favour and promote couples and heterosexual norms."

She hastened to add, "A man who lives with eight women in a patriarchal structure, where the man decides and the women obey - that's not what we're aiming for," - it's not clear, though, how she intends to prevent a pattern emerging in which men marry as many women as they want or are able.

Reality vs Orthodoxy

Minette Marrin has written a very interesting column on the issue of human rights.

She begins by suggesting that "the great post-war left-liberal ascendancy may be beginning to question its own certainties".

Her chief exhibit is David Goodhardt, a self-confessed "sensitive member of the liberal elite." Goodhardt recently abandoned left-wing orthodoxy by writing about human rights that:

People are not born with rights ... Rights are a social construct, a product of history, ideas and of institutions. You and I have rights not as human beings, but mainly because we belong to the political and national community called the United Kingdom, with its infrastructure of laws and institutions.

It's remarkable for someone from the left to declare such a thing. Usually the left trumpets the idea of abstract, universal rights. Minette Marin herself offers a good criticism of this left-wing tendency to base politics on claims of abstract rights when she writes,

This approach is incoherent ... it offers no explanation of what mysterious entity has conferred such rights or how they are to be enforced or who is to decide between conflicting rights.

There's one more worthwhile part of Minette Marin's column. She criticises the proposal that immigrants to EU countries should swear an oath of allegiance to EU laws, rather than to their nation of residence. She complains,

You almost have to pinch yourself at the folly of it. All across Europe, governments and bureaucrats and so-called community leaders have been forced, most painfully, to try to think more deeply and more critically about identity and the fragility of the ties that bind us in a shared sense of belonging and how best to strengthen them; their lazy, unexamined platitudes about immigration and celebrating diversity have been blasted, quite literally, away.

And what does Brussels come up with? A proposal that is quite astounding in its lack of the slightest understanding of feeling, sentiment, social solidarity, place, custom, ritual, symbolism or national tradition ...

This is not quite traditionalist conservatism, as it doesn't recognise ties of kinship as being one important aspect of national identity. It does, though, realistically accept the fact that questions of identity and belonging are important to individuals, can't be taken for granted and require a respect for the traditional life of a community.

Death of a school

Ten years ago Moreland City College in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg had an enrolment of over 1000 students. Last year numbers had fallen to 270 and the school was closed.

Why? It seems that multiculturalism didn't work in this Coburg school. A group of highly disruptive students gave the school a bad reputation from which it never recovered. And there is now evidence that these disruptive students were Lebanese Muslims who hated Australia and wanted to replace it with an Islamic state.

A former teacher, Chris Doig, tried to raise the alarm when some of his students danced with joy after the September 11 attacks. His concerns were ignored by authorities. Mr Doig said of these Lebanese students that "Some of the disruptive ones would say that Australia was degenerate and our legal system would be replaced by Shariah law in the not too distant future."

He also said of the disgruntled students that "Some of these were so disruptive and even violent that staff and other students abandoned the school when they could."

Nor is Mr Doig a lone voice. Two other teachers have supported his claims. One of these says that the disruptive students used to boast that Australia would become a majority Islamic country in 50 years. "They would do this by converting the infidel and by out-breeding the rest of the community."

Thoughts on destiny

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.