Gittins: angel or ideologue?

Ross Gittins is one of the true believers - those Anglo-Australian intellectuals who came of age in the late 1960s and early 70s and who have an unwavering faith in left-liberal politics.

Thankfully, they're on the verge of retirement now. But Gittins is still serving up his true believer ideology in the pages of The Age newspaper. Gittins is a supporter of open borders, and as such has to explain the opposition that exists to the policy of mass immigration. He puts it down not to people wanting to preserve the particular national tradition or culture they love and identify with but to fear and resentment of outsiders.

He therefore frames opposition to open borders in the most negative of terms:

Our evolutionary history has left us with an instinctive fear of outsiders - people who are different, people who invade our territory to steal our food and our women or, in the contemporary context, to jump the queue and steal our jobs, overcrowd our schools (and win most of the prizes), overwhelm our culture, push up house prices and add to congestion on the roads.

You can call it racism or religious intolerance - the nation that invented the White Australia policy can hardly object to that charge, except to say we're no worse than most nationalities and better than some. But I think it's best thought of as xenophobia - a fear of foreigners, people who are different, who aren't one of us.

And it's so deeply ingrained, so visceral, that it's not susceptible to rational argument. It would be nice if a greater effort by the media to expose the many myths surrounding attitudes towards asylum seekers could dispel the fear and resentment, but it would make little difference.

To acknowledge we have an evolutionary predisposition to fear and resent outsiders is not to condone such attitudes. The process of civilisation involves gaining mastery over our base emotions.

But if such attitudes are instinctive and impervious to rational argument, what's to be done now the pollies have let their standards fall?

Our attitudes towards asylum seekers may be impervious to rational argument, but they're not to rival emotions - particularly the positive emotion of empathy.

Like all nationalities, Australians are neither good nor bad, they're both. Our leaders can play to our darker side, or appeal to the better angels of our nature.

Go back just 50 years or so and Gittins' argument would have gone down like a lead balloon. It seemed natural to people back then that it was a virtue to feel love and loyalty toward your own people and tradition. It was people who didn't feel loyalty who were considered to be somehow lacking in normal human feeling.

Consider the case of Elizabeth Fenton. Back in the 1820s she went on a journey on a ship crewed mostly by Muslim sailors, amongst whom were two European converts. She wrote of one of them:

He makes me quite melancholy. He is English by name and complexion, but his tastes, manners, and his scruples, not to say his religion, are Arab. He is the son of a Scotch clergyman, but for many years has been leading his present life, trading between Muscat and Mozambique ... Poor fellow!

Of the other she wrote:

Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it, - a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice. Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

But fast forward to 2011 and we have Ross Gittins, the true believer, trying to tell us that it's all the other way around and that there is something wrong with those like Elizabeth Fenton who identified positively with their own tradition. He believes that people like her are motivated by "base emotions," by "xenophobia," by "fear and resentment of outsiders" and so on.

How off base is his position? Well, let's do a little experiment. Let's try to make Gittins' argument consistent. A traditional national community was based, in part, on a shared ancestry. It was like a vast, extended family in which people were (compared to other societies) closely related to each other. Gittins is now telling us that it is wrong, it is a "base emotion," to want to maintain this particular kind of loyalty and identity.

But why should Gittins' argument not apply equally to the family itself? Why should I discriminate in my love and loyalty between those who are a part of my family and those who are not? Is the fact that I do discriminate a sign that I fear or resent those who aren't part of my family? If Ross Gittins prefers to share his house and his resources with members of his own family, then is he suffering from an irrational, base emotion?

If his answer is that the comparison is wrong because it's natural for people to prefer their own families, then he should understand that historically people thought the same thing about national communities - that it was natural for people to have a particular loyalty and allegiance toward these too.

Gittins has applied the same logic to the national family that the radical Bolsheviks applied to the individual family. Back in 1918, following the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik spokeswoman Alexandra Kollontai put forward a Gittins-like argument in favour of open borders for families:

a woman should know that in the new state there will be no more room for such petty divisions as were formerly understood: "These are my own children, to them I owe all my maternal solicitude, all my affection; those are your children ... Henceforth the worker-mother ... will rise to a point where she no longer differentiates between yours and mine ... The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it embraces all the children of the great proletarian family.

So, Mr Gittins, was the Bolshevik Kollontai a great humanitarian for suggesting that there be no particular family loyalties? Was she motivated by the "better angels" of our nature as you believe the open borders crowd to be?

Or was she a modernist ideologue, who was willing to override healthy forms of human love and allegiance, in the name of a discredited and unsustainable ideology?

In terms of principle, Mr Gittins, just what separates you from the likes of Kollontai?

So what did Georgiou the compassionate moderate think about Anglos?

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about the so-called "moderates" within the Liberal Party (in Australia, the Liberal Party is the major right-wing party).

My argument was that the moderates should really be termed the "radicals" or the "purists" because they want a pure form of liberalism rather than one fused with anything conservative.

They reject pluralism. They do not want to balance a range of goods together within a coherent framework. Instead, they insist that there is one overriding good, that of individual autonomy.

This makes them the more ideological wing of the Liberal Party and it means that their social policy will have more radical effects on society, as it means that society has to be reshaped to fit just one primary good.

I quoted one of the leading "moderates" (i.e. purists) Senator George Brandis, in support of my argument. Brandis identifies the one goal as "individual freedom" but he makes it clear that he means "freedom as individual autonomy":

the sovereign idea which inspires our side of politics has always been the same: our belief that the paramount public value is the freedom of the individual ...

the most important single thing we must do is renew our commitment to the freedom of the individual, and restore that commitment to the very centre of our political value system: not one among several competing values, but the core value, from which our world view ultimately derives.

in qualifying the Liberal Party's commitment to the freedom of the individual as its core value, and weighing it against what he often called social cohesion, Howard made a profound departure from the tradition of Deakin and Menzies.

Liberalism ... has such a central guiding principle - respect for the freedom of the individual, his dignity and his autonomy; his right ... to be the architect of his own life [i.e. to be a self-determining, self-creating autonomous individual]

Every one of those reforms extended the bounds of human freedom, gave individual men and women greater autonomy ...

Brandis does not allow for competing values. He is not a fusionist but a liberal purist. As such he is not a moderate liberal but a radical one.

But they like to think of themselves as moderates, and as the "compassionate" liberals, and are treated as such in the media. For instance, when one of the leading "moderates" in the Liberal Party, Petro Georgiou, retired last year, we had letters of praise in the papers such as this:

Farewell Petro, your honesty and compassion to all humans will surely be missed. Here passes the last great 'liberal' leaving the party...

Compassion to all humans? Well, he didn't extend much compassion to the majority of the population when he wrote back in the 1970s:

We as Liberals are committed to encouraging and supporting diversity in our multicultural society. We reject the sterile Anglo-conformity of past days.

Sterile Anglo-conformity of past days? So we are to treat the culture that came before 1970s style multiculturalism as sterile?

That is not a moderate or a compassionate view. It is a radical recasting of society and one which is cold to the consequences for those belonging to the Anglo tradition.

The quote comes from an Andrew Bolt column in today's Herald Sun. Bolt does a good job attacking the claims that Australia was always multicultural, but he himself only puts forward assimilation as an alternative.

Neither option is appealing or coherent. The multiculturalists believe you can have open borders and that the immigrants can all live harmoniously in their own cultural groups. It doesn't work out well. If you put 140 ethnic groups into Melbourne and Sydney, it becomes difficult for a traditional culture to maintain itself. People tend to become deracinated and end up adopting a pop culture lifestyle based on entertainment and consumerism. 140 cultures stuck together effectively means no culture, just shopping malls. You need a bit of distance and continuity to maintain a real cultural tradition.

In Europe the outcome has been even more problematic. There you have Muslim immigrants in large numbers, some of whom express non-liberal values. So the liberals in power decide the solution is to pull the plug on multiculturalism in favour of assimilation.

But can assimilation work? Maybe if numbers were small. But the liberal commitment to open borders means that numbers are constantly growing. So how then is it assumed that there will always be a confident Anglo majority culture for the immigrants to assimilate into? The Anglo population will necessarily lose its confidence as its numbers and its sense of place recedes. As it declines, the newer immigrant groups will lose their desire to assimilate into a culture which is in retreat.

It hasn't been thought through. It's not enough for Bolt to call for assimilation. He needs to rethink the whole liberal framework which has brought about such unworkable options. In particular, he needs to consider why liberals are so ideologically committed to open borders.

Hymowitz II: Why are men so angry?

Kay Hymowitz has now written a follow up to her article "Where have the good men gone?"

She has noticed that young men are angry:

Anyone glancing at the responses to my article “Where Have the Good Men Gone?” can easily understand one of the reasons I wanted to write “Manning Up,” the book from which the piece was excerpted: There are lots of very angry young men out there. No, they’re not just angry at me. They’re angry at the whole sex.

It seems that the liberal order hasn't created purer relationships between men and women but more hostile and confused ones.

Kay Hymowitz then addresses one of the issues I criticised her for:

My book grew out of my observation that relations between the sexes during this protracted period I call pre-adulthood are, at best, very confused. I have tried to figure out why so many young women today complain about men being thoughtless, immature and boorish. I also wanted to know why large numbers of men have become so profoundly hostile to women.

Many readers have objected that my answer to these questions is to “blame men”...

In fact, to me the whole question of blame makes no more sense than asking whether the Chileans were at fault for last year’s earthquake. My book describes sociological and economic tectonic shifts – primarily the shift to a knowledge economy and the rise of women – that are so huge and so impersonal as to render the question of blame meaningless.

The favoured "impersonal economic forces did it" line. I still hold that to be a dodge. Feminists aimed for a particular result, they used the power of the state over a period of decades to achieve it, until they got what they wanted. And then we're told that no-one was to blame, it was all a result of impersonal, economic shifts in society.

Nor does Kay Hymowitz hold to this line consistently:

As a number of commenters have correctly noted, feminism celebrated women’s independence sometimes to the point of making men seem an expendable part of family life. Throughout the 1990’s when many of today’s pre-adult men were growing up, the entire culture turned into a you-go-girl cheering section. Girls ruled, while boys drooled, or so the t-shirts and book bags said. Boys might have also observed their uncles or fathers, perhaps good men, being taken to the cleaners by wives who kept the family house and children.

That's well put. It was not merely a matter of blind, impersonal forces. There was an ideology at work, seeking to transform society. The followers of this ideology assumed that men would simply go along with their assigned role of propping up female individualism. How much effort was put into understanding the male psyche by the social transformers? None at all.

Kay Hymowitz has also been criticised in an interesting but not quite coherent way by Helen Smith. She asks Kay Hymowitz:

What do you have to offer these men you call child-men if they do man up? Are you going to ensure that they have fair access to their children should they divorce? Will you make sure that they aren’t hauled off to jail if the wife makes false accusations of domestic violence? Will you let them keep the earnings and property that they worked for over years rather than have them turned over to their wife, even if she cheated and was abusive? Will you shield the millions of men who live in fear of their significant other but have nowhere to turn for help? Will you make marriage, in other words, as valuable to men as you think it is for women?

I doubt it. What Hymowitz and other authors in this area ... seem to want is for these men to marry women and make them happy. Rather than recognize that they are autonomous beings who are living for themselves and fulfilling their own needs and not a woman’s obligations, these analyses of the “man problem” seem to be all about what women want.

Well, such are the fruits of half a century of organizing gender relations along the lines of women’s immediate desires. Long term, it has resulted in men bailing out, going “John Galt” in the gender economy. And I can understand the disappointment. But I don’t share it. As you sow, so shall you reap.

You are frustrated that some men have turned their backs on women and have decided to live for themselves and not for you. Perhaps you should have thought of that possibility earlier. And as for that American individualism that you seem to hold in disregard?

May it live long and prosper.

The argument is very good in parts, but isn't consistent. What comes through well is that women have to consider things from the male point of view. Men are less likely to commit to marriage if marriage laws are biased in favour in women. Nor do men exist merely for the purpose of sacrificing themselves for women's "immediate desires" - men have a character and an existence of their own which needs to be recognised within a culture of family life.

That's a tremendous advance over the kinds of assumptions that were made back in the 1990s.

The inconsistency is this. Helen Smith seems to recognise the damage done by female individualism: by the idea that you could organise "gender relations along the lines of women’s immediate desires". But she then seems to uncritically accept both a male individualism ("they are autonomous beings who are living for themselves and fulfilling their own needs," "[they] have decided to live for themselves") as well as a larger culture of American individualism.

I don't think that's going to work. Can you really get women to think in terms other than their own autonomy (their own immediate desires), if you are praising the same qualities in men and in American life in general?

And if a radical individualism for women has harmed relations between the sexes, then why wouldn't such an individualism for men do the same?

Somewhere along the line, the limits of such a radical individualism have to be asserted - for both men and women.

A marriage works well when the husband acts to make his wife's life easier and the wife acts to make the husband's life easier. That's very different to living for yourself. If you really intend to live for yourself, you aren't likely to make good husband/wife material.

Finding equivalence at all costs

A democracy movement has been unleashed in the Middle East with the blessing of Western liberals. These liberals are taking one hell of a punt. They are obviously hoping that Middle Easterners deep down are just like themselves and will accept the primacy of liberal values. But it could just as easily turn out that the masses in the Middle East will use their vote to establish hardline Islamic governments.

Lawrence Auster has already reported on the takeover of the town of Derna in Libya by a group linked to Al Qaeda. This group has declared the establishment of an Islamic Emirate of Barqa. It may not last long, but the armed takeover of the town does reinforce the differences between Western and Middle Eastern politics.

Included in Auster's post was an interesting Wall Street Journal editorial on the issue. The editorial does recognise that there are significant differences between Western and Middle Eastern civilisations. But it still pushes for America to intervene to bring Western style government and secular liberal values to the region.

However, the WSJ position is a lot better than that coming from some on the American left. We learn from the editorial that:

Others question whether a fully Islamist Middle East is even a bad thing. PBS host Tavis Smiley argued Friday on "Real Time with Bill Maher" that Americans have no basis for criticizing the culture of the Middle East because "when we have these conversations about how they treat women, as if somehow we treat women better in this country, it demonizes Muslims."

So according to the left-liberal Tavis Smiley, we have to consider the treatment of women in the Middle East and the West equivalent, otherwise we are guilty of demonising Muslims. Nor is he alone in this view. Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor at USC and the Poet Laureate of California. She has first hand experience of how women can be treated in Middle Eastern countries:

Years ago, because of a flight delay, I spent a long and terrifying night alone in a hotel in Morocco -- male (Muslim) hotel employees repeatedly tried to break into my room.

But she still wrote a column in support of Tavis Smiley. Her argument was that although there are differences in degree, the misogyny of the Middle East is also the misogyny of the US:

It's the misogyny, stupid. And it cuts across all cultures: far worse in some, somewhat tolerable in others. And the "F" word is fundamentalism -- whether it is Islamic or Christian -- the symbol of battle for control becomes the female body.

I do not want to live in a country that forces me to smother myself in veils, a country that threatens me with violence for an inch of visible wrist, a country that does not allow me to vote or drive.

For the record, I also do not feel safe in a country with a House of Representatives that is capable of canceling all funding for Planned Parenthood...

The state legislature of Georgia would like to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking and domestic violence to "accuser" -- in effect, denying victims their right to accurate representation by description...

Programs for low-income women and children are being slashed left and right and MoveOn reports that there is a move to eliminate all funding for the only extant federal family planning program...

Misogyny keeps this country's brutality to women -- rape, murder and domestic violence -- at staggering levels, along with the pitched battle against a woman's right to control her own body, her right to choose.

I was terrified when I was nearly assaulted in that hotel room in North Africa long ago, but I have also been attacked by "Right to Life" crowds when entering an abortion clinic in my own country.

I know which country most women would feel safer in. Ms Poet Laureate is kidding herself. She thinks that there is no difference in kind between a lack of public funding for abortion and the sexual molestation of unaccompanied women - because both are violations of absolute female bodily autonomy.

Her desire to find an equivalence is so strong that she doesn't react to her terrifying experience in Morocco as a less ideologically driven woman might - by appreciating the relative security created for women within Western countries.

Kay: what happened to the good men?

Kay Hymowitz has written a column for the Wall Street Journal titled "Where have the good men gone?"

It's a dressed up version of an old argument: that young men are not what their fathers were; that they aren't accepting adult responsibilities; and that they are forcing young women to give up in disgust on the idea of marriage and to turn to sperm banks.

What has brought this about? Part of her argument is that the modern knowledge economy forces young people to extend their educations and to travel around the country, thereby delaying the opportunity to settle down.

But she hints too that the modern ideal of self-defining autonomy leads people to favour solo career pursuits rather than family commitments:

They write their own biographies, and they do it from scratch. Sociologists use the term "life script" to describe a particular society's ordering of life's large events and stages. Though such scripts vary across cultures, the archetypal plot is deeply rooted in our biological nature ... For women, the central task usually involved the day-to-day rearing of the next generation; for men, it involved protecting and providing for their wives and children. If you followed the script, you became an adult, a temporary custodian of the social order until your own old age and demise.

Unlike adolescents, however, pre-adults don't know what is supposed to come next. For them, marriage and parenthood come in many forms, or can be skipped altogether...

Given the rigors of contemporary career-building, pre-adults who do marry and start families do so later than ever before in human history. Husbands, wives and children are a drag on the footloose life required for the early career track and identity search.

That's liberal culture for you: family roles are downgraded and delayed as being a "biological destiny" whilst priority is given to a self-authored identity connected to careers.

Hymowitz then argues that without a commitment to family, young men lack depth:

What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.

She finishes on this note:

Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.

They might as well just have another beer.

Some of this she gets right. She's right that 20-something women are increasingly doing better than men in jobs and education. She's right that the focus on self-defining autonomy leads to a delay in family formation. She's right that modern society has left men without the family responsibilities that might encourage a commitment to more adult concerns in life.

But she still gets it mostly wrong. I was there when the changes started to kick in. My generation of men still expected to go to uni and then soon after get a job and marry. That was still the "life script". So why did it change?

It wasn't significantly because the economy required us to spend extra time at university or to travel around. That wasn't the issue we faced. The problem was that women had changed. They had been raised to put careers and independence first. Marriage and children were a long way down the female checklist - there was a time when many university women might have answered that such matters were to be left to their late 30s.

So men weren't required as husbands and fathers until some impossibly late stage in life. Furthermore, if marriage were to be deferred that long, then women didn't have to select for family men. They could let rip a preference for bad boys or have flings with unsuitable men or reject decent men because they weren't ready for stable commitments yet.

The truth is that if women in the 1980s and 1990s had selected for traditionally masculine qualities, then that's what would have remained dominant within male culture.

It's probably the case, even today, that if the majority of women selected for depth of character in men then that's what men would be encouraged to adapt to.

My criticism of Kay Hymowitz, therefore, is that she prefers to explain the changes she discusses as being the result of impersonal economic forces rather than the deliberate efforts of feminists and liberals and that she overlooks the role of women, particularly in what women select for in men, in changing the male culture.

I'd also take exception to her claim that:

husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete

If husbands and fathers are optional to any degree at all it's because the state has stepped in to artificially create this situation. And, anyway, few middle-class women want to raise children alone through a sperm donation.

Nor are the masculine virtues obsolete. If a man wants to succeed in his career and in his family life, he will still need fortitude, stoicism, courage and fidelity.

These virtues are obsolete only in the sense that they aren't being selected for by young women. So a man shouldn't expect that by cultivating these qualities he's going to gain an advantage in the dating stakes. He should cultivate these qualities instead because he recognises them as virtues in their own right and because they are important qualities to draw on in other aspects of his life.

Joel Northrup takes a stand

Cassy Herkelman awarded victory by default

Joel Northrup is a talented young wrestler in the US state of Iowa. He chose, however, to default at the state tournament. Why? He had been scheduled to compete against a girl, Cassy Herkelman.

He gave the following reason for giving up the chance to win the state tournament:

"I have a tremendous amount of respect for Cassy. However, wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times," said Northrup.

"As a matter of conscience and my faith I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa."

In modern liberal societies our sex is not supposed to matter. It is a predetermined quality that is thought to violate the principle of autonomy.

But our sex does matter. Joel Northrup clearly felt that he stood in a different relationship to Cassy Herkelman than he would to a male. He did not want to have to go against his better instinct to be physically protective towards females rather than violent. Nor, perhaps, did he want to pretend that laying hands on the body of a young woman was as meaningless as doing so to a male in a contact sport.

I don't think he should have been placed in the position he was put in. If there are girls who really do want to wrestle, they should do so in a league of their own. Nor is wrestling a sport that it makes much sense to encourage girls to participate in. How does such a sport help to develop the feminine body or soul?

A step forward? Moving politics beyond Cameron

It's worthwhile, when we make small gains, to recognise the step forward.

Take British PM David Cameron's recent Munich speech. In this speech Cameron rejected a policy of multiculturalism in favour of a "muscular liberalism." According to Cameron, liberalism needs to be more strongly asserted as the basis of national identity and belonging. This, he claimed, would prevent alienated Muslim youth from turning to Islamic terror groups.

If you were to go back 25 years or so, there would have been little dissent on the right to Cameron's speech. The criticism of multiculturalism would have been thought sufficiently right-wing by the average conservative. Politics would not have moved beyond the limits of Cameron's speech.

And that's still largely the case. However, there are at least some voices on the right not falling into line but thinking through the repercussions of Cameron's position - and making principled criticisms of it.

Some examples? Well, there was my own effort. I pointed out that Cameron is advocating a civic nationalism in which a community is bound together by a common commitment to liberal political values. But civic nationalism has its problems:

• It requires political conformity. If you don't accept a liberal political philosophy, then you're not part of the nation.
• It is an indistinct form of identity. There are many Western nations claiming to be defined by the same liberal values. So why shouldn't they then merge together?
• It is not a deep form of identity. A civic identity isn't likely to inspire a deep commitment to the nation or a willingness to make sacrifices on its behalf.

Elusive Wapiti also made some criticisms of Cameron's speech. According to Cameron, people in the UK will proudly declare themselves to be Muslim or Christian or Hindu whilst at the same time being bound together by liberal political values. Elusive Wapiti responded as follows:

Presumably said civic religion will permit these other competing faith systems so long as the citizens pay sufficient homage and don't oppose the state religion, viz his "freedom of worship" quote above.

But, as men cannot serve two masters, the tolerance of heterogenous faiths will ensure the cultural Balkanization he criticizes will remain firmly in place...for I am convinced that the thin Enlightenment 1.0 gruel proffered by the secularists cannot compete with the more robust value systems that compete for the hearts and minds of the citizenry. Moreover, because the secular humanist liberal faith does not provide much for the citizenry to internalize as a guide for behavior, except for the pursuit of individual autonomy, the State will inevitably have to resort to iron-fist-velvet-glove governance to keep all those individual wills-to-power and competing theories of governance in check if it wishes to remain in power.

Elusive Wapiti is sceptical that the civic creed will manage to hold things together so easily. First, because it doesn't offer the same depth of meaning as the other faiths and so won't be recognised as primary and, second, because it fails to provide a basis for the self-regulation of civil society.

Then there is the bracing challenge to Cameron made by Frank Ellis. Dr Ellis has written an open letter to David Cameron which is well worth reading. One of the arguments he makes is that there is a fundamental contradiction in wanting a national identity that is "open to everyone":

You have been reported as saying that multiculturalism has failed. I see no clear statement of that in your speech at all. In fact, you claim that it is the indigenous population that has driven Muslims into their parallel societies.

That you are still advocating some form of the cult is clear when you argue that ‘instead of encouraging people to live apart, we need a clear sense of shared national identity that is open to everyone’.

National identity by its very nature is exclusive, partial and narrow. A national identity that is ‘open to everyone’ is not a national identity. National identity is determined by a combination of genetic, racial, cultural, psychological, geographical, linguistic and mental factors, tempered by the blows of history, by shared suffering in war and peace, by humiliation and glory, by the memory of those gone before.

How can my English national identity be open to everyone? The answer is that it cannot. National identity that is open to everyone ceases to be a national identity; national identity that is open to everyone is just another way of promoting multiculturalism without using the m-word. In other words, it is a deceit, a ploy to disarm the critics of multiculturalism...

Dr Ellis also quotes the Turkish Prime Minister encouraging immigrants to resist assimilation as a "crime against humanity":

Nor do immigrants wish to share their identity with white Europeans. When, in 2008, he addressed a large Turkish audience in Cologne, the Turkish Prime Minister, Reccep Erdogan was quite clear by what he understood on the question of integration. He told his audience: ‘I understand the sensitivity you show towards the question of assimilation. Nobody can expect that you tolerate assimilation. Nobody can expect that you submit yourself to assimilation. Then assimilation is a crime against humanity.’ Erdogan’s vision of how he expects Turks to behave in Europe is just one of a number of reasons why a Muslim non-European state such as Turkey can have no place at all in the EU.

Finally, Lawrence Auster wrote a terrific post setting out the differences betweeen right and left liberals when it comes to issues of multiculturalism and assimilation. Again, if you haven't read it yet it would be profitable for you to do so. I'll quote the section most directly relevant to Cameron, in which Auster criticises the politics of right-liberals:

The second wing is right-liberalism, a.k.a. the "right." The "right" says that the West is good, but that it is good only insofar as it is defined as a universal society consisting of equal and interchangeable rights-bearing individuals. It is not good insofar as it consists of distinct historical nations, cultures, and peoples. The "right" believes in the West, but the only good the "right" recognizes in the West consists in those values and procedures that are the product of liberal individualism.

The "right" calls for non-discriminatory openness, not to alien cultures, but to the individuals who belong to those cultures. It says that people from other cultures must be admitted into the West, and that after they are admitted, they must "assimilate" and "integrate" into the Western culture. The "right" thinks this is possible, because it assumes that people from other cultures are entirely passive and have no cultures, cultural agendas, or cultural personalities of their own that they care about and seek to express. The "right" assumes that people from other cultures want nothing more than to earn a living, raise their children, and "enjoy our freedoms." In other words, the "right" sees people from other cultures not as moral actors in their own right, but as good little children whose only role in the world is to fit into "our" right-liberal program.

So, when the tens of millions of individuals from other cultures who have been admitted into the West turn out to be, not mere faceless ciphers wanting only to earn a living and "enjoy our freedoms," but carriers of alien cultural identities and of claims and grievances against our culture, i.e., actual human beings who are not like us and who want to make their own mark on the world, the right-liberals have no response except to dismiss such claims and grievances as irrational multiculturalism, and to say that we have not tried hard enough to assimilate the newcomers and must try harder. The call for "more assimilation"--meaning the assimilation of essentially unassimilable people--never has any practical program connected with it; it is the emptiest of rhetorical ploys, the only purpose of which is to defend from criticism and keep alive the right-liberal ideology.

As I said at the beginning, it's heartening to see such intelligent criticisms of right liberalism. It may not be enough right now to have a practical impact, but it's a step in the right direction. It's a model of what is needed on a larger scale in the years ahead.

A babe in the woods

Katie Piper is the Englishwoman who, as a beautiful 26-year-old, embarked on a relationship with a thuggish looking man named Daniel Lynch. When Lynch became possessive and angry, Katie Piper tried to break off the relationship. Lynch responded by raping her and then arranged for an accomplice to throw acid in her face, disfiguring her.

Why revisit this story? Katie Piper has now explained in more detail what happened in the relationship with Lynch. And I was struck by this brief description of her childhood:

Born in Hampshire in 1983, I had an idyllic childhood. My father David owned a barber shop and my mother Diane was a teacher.They doted on my brother Paul, sister Suzy, and me.

As a youngster I was independent and fearless. I never suspected there was any badness in the world. 'You can be anything you want to be,' Dad used to tell me.

There is a clash between the traditional and the modern here. Girls are not naturally independent and fearless. Traditionally they grew up in the protective warmth of the family. Katie Piper had a traditional childhood in this sense and seems to appreciate it.

But she was also raised with very modern expectations. Her father drummed into her that she could be anything she wanted to be, in other words, that the highest good to aim at was that of maximum autonomy.

If you aren't by nature independent and fearless, but need to become so to be fully autonomous, then you might well make a big deal about these qualities. You might see them as signature qualities that you identify with and cultivate.

And if you believe that anything is possible, that you can do anything or be anything you like, then you won't recognise the realities of fallen human nature which do restrict us, including the vices (the vicious behaviour) of others which bring danger to ourselves.

In brief, Katie Piper had been protected as a girl by her secure family life; she made a great deal of being independent and fearless; and she saw the world as perfectly open and unlimited and without the restricting presence of evil or malevolence.

Which left her like a babe in the woods. How could she learn prudence, a "caution or circumspection as to danger or risk," when she saw herself as a fearless woman in a world without evil?

There are Western women being left vulnerable by this lack of prudence. Another Englishwoman, Katie Cullen, lost her life in very similar circumstances to that of Katie Piper. Her mother told reporters that  "She saw only goodness in everyone."

This naivety exists despite the fact that feminists bang on about all men being rapists and/or abusers. The feminist campaigns don't help women much, because they are based on the idea that men as a class use violence against women to uphold a privileged status. Therefore, the idea is pushed that all men are equally likely to attack women. The feminist ads often show middle-class white men as the perpetrators.

So there is little guidance to women in these feminist campaigns about how to evaluate the risk of a particular situation or relationship. And sometimes feminists go further in hindering a sense of prudence in women, by fiercely objecting to any discussion of the issue on the basis that it represents "blaming the victim".  Feminists want to focus on "changing men," in the belief that the cause of violence is a political one so that it's possible to eliminate violence against women through political reform.

I suppose, for the time being, it's up to fathers to try to cultivate the quality of prudence in their daughters (without going so far as to scare them from relationships with men).

Cameron: you must believe in liberalism to be a Briton

Boy, do I feel vindicated. I've argued for a long time now that the British Conservative Party is not a conservative but a right liberal party.

And now the leader of the party, David Cameron, has come out as the most strident of liberals. He has made his commitment to liberalism absolutely, unmistakeably, crystal clear.

In a recent speech in Germany, Cameron discussed the problem of Muslim radicalism in Western countries. He thought the problem was that some Muslims supported an "extremist ideology". And they supported this extremist ideology because they lacked a sense of belonging and identity.

Cameron's solution is as follows:

we must build stronger societies and stronger identities at home. Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active muscular liberalism.

Cameron supports a muscular liberalism. But his endorsement of liberalism doesn't end there. He wants to impose liberalism as a state ideology which defines what it means to be British:

A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things. Now, each of us in our own countries, I believe, must be unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty.

This is not a new idea. It's a restatement of liberal civic nationalism, in which a community is bound together not by a shared history, kinship, religion or culture but by a common commitment to liberal political values.

Cameron isn't the only one wanting to ramp up the idea of liberal civic nationalism. I reported last year on a columnist from the Guardian newspaper, Theo Hobson, who insisted:

We as a nation are bound together ... by liberal values. Maybe it's time to be honest about that – even if it means a process of constitutional change.

... All we seek is a reassertion of liberalism as the nation's common ideology.

We need to clarify our national story. Liberalism is what unites us, and this must be made explicit. It is, in effect, our national creed...

We need a revolution that makes our latent national identity explicit. What unites us is ... liberalism.

We need to get a bit fundamentalist about the superiority of liberalism.

Liberal civic nationalism has its obvious weaknesses. First, it requires political conformity to a degree that traditional communal identities never did. It is not only Muslim extremists who would fail to meet Cameron's test of national belonging. So too would anyone else who disagreed with liberal political philosophy. Englishmen with the deepest of historic roots in the country would be considered not to belong to the nation because they were not philosophically liberal.

Second, it's not a distinctive form of nationalism. Most Western nations follow some kind of liberal civic nationalism. Therefore, there is no official difference between having a British identity, or an Australian, American, Swedish or French one. Why not then simply merge all these non-distinct nations together? As the Oxford Companion to Philosophy put it:

One difficulty with this view is that it provides no guidance on how the boundaries of distinct political communities should be drawn. Indeed, it provides no explanation for why there should be distinct political communities at all. Why shouldn't all societies that share liberal values merge into a single state, aiming ultimately to create a single world state?

Third, it's a shallow form of identity. Again, the Oxford Companion recognises the problem:

Some liberals suggest that the tie that binds the citizens of a liberal society is simply a shared commitment to liberal principles of freedom and equality. It is debatable whether this is a 'thick' enough bond to keep a multicultural society together...

Conservative critics have argued that the stability of liberal societies is based on a pre-liberal sense of shared identity. Citizens of England, for example, do not see each other primarily as individual rights-holders, but as fellow members of the English nation, with a shared history and culture. This gives rise to a sense of solidarity which is prior to, and deeper than, a shared commitment to liberalism. It is this national solidarity which explains why the English work together, and make sacrifices for each other. Conservatives worry that this sense of being members of the same 'people' or culture or community is gradually being eroded by the individualism of liberal rights, which treats people in abstraction...

There are other issues raised by Cameron's speech, but I'll discuss these in a future post.

Can classical liberalism get what it needs?

In looking at the American right in my last post, I noted that many of its leading lights are classical liberals. They hold to the idea of negative liberty (of being left free to do as you will, of non-interference), of free markets, of low taxes and a small state.

I pointed out that such a politics isn't likely, by itself, to be conservative. Genuine conservatism is concerned to uphold, in Lawrence Auster's definition, "a substantive spiritual, cultural and social order". But a politics based on the idea of doing whatever we like, as long as we don't impede the negative liberty of others, effectively denies the existence of such an order. And so classical liberalism in countries like Australia tends to be strongly socially liberal rather than socially conservative.

As a case study, I looked at the politics of Sean Hannity. He holds to a classical liberal philosophy but is not as socially liberal as his Australian counterparts are, because he goes beyond the concepts of negative liberty and the free market and recognises that society won't work without some traditional moral virtues.

What was the response to my argument? We had an excellent discussion at this site and someone also linked the post to the American Free Republic website. One of the most interesting responses was from a commenter at Free Republic. He argued that classical liberals had recognised from the start that their philosophy wouldn't work unless the population was virtuous:

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other"

John Adams

What the writer fails to realize about classical liberalism and our founding fathers is that morality and our religion was the fabric that weaved this country together and helped to make our government work.

Many on here (myself included) enjoy the writings of Ayan Rand. Yet, for all her wisdom she never understood how or why the philosophy she espoused worked. It worked because a moral and religious people followed it...

A writer that few freepers ever allude to understood why this country was so great and why classical liberalism worked. If you read Alex DeToqueville's "Democracy in America", he marvelled at our religous people and understood why it flourished. Because it was not forced upon them as in the state run religions of Europe but because a free people willingly lived under a moral and religous code.

He's right. The classical liberals did recognise that their philosophy required certain attributes of character and moral virtue in a population to succeed. It's noticeable even when it comes to someone like J.S. Mill, who was not a Christian, but whose liberal individual was to be high-minded, cultivated and morally self-disciplined.

But here's the catch. How do classical liberals expect that virtue and character in a population will be maintained? What is there in the classical liberal philosophy that will uphold the moral standards that the philosophy requires for its success?

J.S. Mill pinned his hopes on education:

Nothing hinders us from so training a man that he will not, even for a disinterested purpose, violate the moral law, and also feeding and encouraging those high feelings, on which we mainly rely for lifting men above low and sordid objects ...

Well, higher education has expanded massively since Mill's time, but culture has become more, and not less, oriented to "low and sordid objects". Mill also seems to have fundamentally misunderstood human nature in his claim that people could simply be trained not to violate the moral law. That, surely, is an overly optimistic, utopian claim.

So higher education, in and of itself, is not sufficient. Another option has been put forward by a reader of this site, Alte. She argues that it is the growth of the state which is responsible for moral decline:

Furthermore, in our country we have seen over the years that the growth of the state leads to a decline in values. The state is inherently anti-tradition because it undermines patriarchy (which relies on strict subsidiarity to survive). We generally believe that if the state would just back off and let men handle things on their own, the social situation would improve.

That's a better suggestion. It's true that the state has intervened in society in ways which undermine the virtues. If you're a teenage girl, for instance, the state now makes it much easier to be promiscuous and to have a child out of wedlock (in the UK, as I understand it, such girls even get a council flat as well as an allowance, so single motherhood becomes a means to an "independent" lifestyle). And what happens to the young men whom these girls would once have looked to in order to form a household? They are no longer subject to the same pressures to act responsibly as fathers or providers.

So Alte's argument does have merit. Even so, I don't think it's sufficient. Is it really the case that if people were left to their own devices that people would then be virtuous and follow the good? Isn't it the case that human nature is fallen? Won't at least some people, if left alone, choose to act for their own selfish purposes rather than for the good?

And there are other problems. Classical liberalism encourages the idea that the goods we follow are private virtues rather than public ones. That's because the focus on negative liberty means that we see things in terms of individual choice and non-interference. So even if I have had a stable marriage and believe that to be an important good in my life, I'll be reluctant to assert it as a public good for others.

But people do need a sense of common principles or standards in society. So the void gets filled by the general principles of classical liberalism, such as negative liberty and a free market. These become the public goods of society, rather than the traditional virtues. So an action might be validated as "good" if it fits in with the free market or with individual choice (e.g. "I'm just an entrepreneur providing a service" or "This is what I freely choose to do".)

So the more conservative private virtues are subordinated to more liberal public ones, even in a society dominated by classical liberals. But, of course, we don't even have such a society. In Western societies, there is a large cohort of left-liberals. And they have a vision of positive liberty, in which the state acts to establish the conditions of life favoured by left-liberals.

And left-liberals are handed a tremendous advantage by classical (i.e. right) liberals. The classical liberal might be a terrific family man, living his life successfully according to socially conservative principles. But he is likely to treat this as a purely private good.

The left-liberal who opposes the traditional family, on the other hand, is more than happy to use the power of the state to force his own view on the whole of society. So left-liberals get to march through the institutions and to win the culture war over and over.

Which then means that right-liberals, living as they do in this culture, are always being dragged to the left. They might put up some resistance to the latest leftist cause, but once it's established they get influenced by the culture and come to accept it.

There is one final problem with the idea that cutting back the state will protect the virtue and character of the citizenry. Right liberal parties, even when they are in power for extended periods of time, rarely cut back on the social programmes of the state. No doubt there are a number of reasons for this. But I suspect that one reason is that right liberals quietly support the existence of many such programmes, even when they have been established by the left.

Classical liberals tend to share the view with the left that individual choice should not be limited by inherited group affiliations, such as our membership of a sex or ethny. What is supposed to matter is individual character, rather than unchosen characteristics such as being a man or a woman, a Chinese or a Swede. Classical liberals are therefore often sympathetic to the larger liberal aim of making such group affiliations not matter.

So what happens if they continue to matter? It's true that classical liberals formally don't approve of coercive, state action to suppress group differences. But if left-liberals have established some sort of affirmative action programme, for instance, or special funding for a "disadvantaged" ethnic group, then right liberals in power may not be unsympathetic to it.

In practice, right liberals have preferred to cut back the economic functions of the state (e.g. privatisation) rather than the social programmes.

To summarise:

a) Classical liberalism requires something external to it to succeed: the existence of standards of moral virtue.

b) The classical liberal aim of limited government might encourage such standards in certain areas. But it's not clear that classical liberals in power would actually limit government by cutting social programmes they philosophically approve of. And even if such programmes were radically cut, and people were left to themselves, there is still considerable scope for people to use this negative freedom to act immorally.

c) Classical liberalism tends to reduce traditional forms of morality to private or personal goods. This makes them difficult to defend. First, because negative liberty and the free market are recognised over time as higher ranking public goods. So the standard is no longer the traditional morality, but whether an action accords with the free market or individual choice. The traditional forms of morality lose their standing.

Second, left-liberals have a vision of positive liberty, in which the state is used to guarantee individual conditions of life. So left-liberals are highly motivated to seize control of the state to implement their more radical social programmes. This means that a small number of left-liberals can use the state to influence society in an effective way. In contrast, a very large number of more conservative-minded family men will have little influence, because they regard the goods they follow as private or personal values.

If the larger culture is drawn leftward, the mainstream right will adapt to it.

It is therefore not enough for classical/right liberals to affirm that their philosophy requires a standard of virtue in society. They have to make clear how they would assert traditional forms of morality as high ranking public rather than private goods; and how they would effectively establish these public goods in society given the existence of a left that is willing to use the state to enforce its own vision of society.

Hannity & the American right

My interest at the moment is to try to understand more closely the American right. I've delved a little into the politics of a few personalities on the US right. It's not enough to write with great confidence on the topic, and I'm happy for American readers to jump in with their thoughts, but I think it's worthwhile to report on some early findings.

If I had to briefly summarise I'd say:

1. The professed political philosophy of leading personalities on the American right is often classical liberalism, i.e. it involves a belief in individual liberty, a small state, low taxes, and a free market.
2. But the personalities don't seem to identify as classical liberals. They prefer the term libertarian or occasionally conservative. This reluctance to identify as liberal is understandable, given that the term liberal in America is often reserved for those on the left (what we would call in Australia "left-liberal").
3. Classical liberals in Australia are usually very socially liberal, particularly those with an academic background. Commonly they will support the legalisation of drugs, gay marriage and even (I've had debates with them on this issue) polygamy. However, in the US those professing a classical liberal philosophy are more likely to take socially conservative positions on some issues, such as abortion or the family. It's possible, I think, that this is partly due to the influence of a Christian right in the US and partly due to the fact that there was an element of classical liberalism in the US founding and therefore classical liberals in the US are more likely to think of themselves as conserving traditional values.

Which brings me to the radio and television host Sean Hannity. He is described at one site as being "A conservative to the very core of his soul." But in one of his books he describes the kind of values he is trying to uphold as being "limited government, individual liberty, and the rule of law."

That's a typically classical liberal formulation. It's a vision of negative liberty, of being left free to do as you will (within the limits of the law and not impeding the negative liberty of others).

By itself, this classical liberal philosophy is anything but conservative. Genuine conservatives set out to defend what Lawrence Auster has termed "a substantive spiritual, cultural and social order". Telling people to do whatever, as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else, implicitly denies that there even is any significant substantive order to be concerned with.

And so the Australian classical liberals end up with the socially liberal positions I described above. If it's just negative liberty, then why not allow people to practise polygamy (or any other conceivable form of family arrangement) or to take any kind of drugs? As long as it doesn't impede on your own freedom to choose otherwise, then it fits the classical liberal principle.

But Hannity is not as socially liberal as this. For instance, he tore strips off the founder of a website for people wishing to commit adultery:

HANNITY: I'm looking at your Web site and looking it right here. And there's your motto, "Life is short, have an affair." You think it's good for people to have affairs? Do you think that's something that's good for people?

... I'm assuming that if the spouses find out that this is happening, that it's going to break up a lot of marriages. And you're facilitating that. You are assisting, you're helping, you're making money off the breakup of some marriages.

Now, granted they're going to make their own choices, they have their responsibility, but you're profiting from it. You're sort of like, you know, you remind me of a pimp. You know what? You remind me of a drug dealer.

You know what? Let's say selling crack was legal, I wouldn't sell crack because I know it would destroy people's lives.

Why would you not have a conscience bother you that this might hurt people's marriages?

BIDERMAN: You know, Sean, we're different people. I would build a service for same-sex couples. You probably wouldn't approve of that, but I did ... and I'm proud of it. Same way that entrepreneurs like me are needed all the time...

HANNITY: You have compartmentalized, you're rationalizing your contribution to the potential break up of marriages which, by the way, will not only affect the two people involved, but also the children that will no longer see their spouse.

Now maybe that's the way you want to make your money in life. But I think people that have a conscience and a soul don't want to make their money this way. In other words, you might make money selling drugs, but I wouldn't want to contribute to somebody's death and demise.

Where is your soul in this? Where is your conscience?

BIDERMAN: You are giving me too much credit, Sean. You're making — you're making it sound like I can persuade a happily married couple to go cheat on each other based on my TV commercial.

HANNITY: I'm saying, listen, people will make their choices. But if they're going to make bad choices, I'm not going to facilitate it, because I have a moral foundation that obviously you're lacking...

HANNITY: You're no different than a pimp.

BIDERMAN: That's not a crime in America, at least not that I'm aware of.

It's interesting that Biderman attempts to justify himself on classical liberal grounds. He points out that what he's doing isn't illegal, so he's not violating the rule of law. Furthermore, he is following the free market as an entrepreneur providing a service.

If Hannity held to classical liberalism by itself, he'd struggle to find a way to object. But Hannity adds in some other concepts: a moral foundation, a soul, a conscience. As I understand it, Hannity does talk explicitly of the need for Christian values as part of a functioning social order. And that, perhaps, is why he does come across as more socially conservative than his secular Australian counterparts, at least when it comes to certain issues.

Let me try to illustrate all this using one more example. On a Sean Hannity discussion board, someone asked the question "Over 50% of marriages end in divorce - where are you social conservatives?"

Leaving aside the exaggerated statistic, the question provoked some interesting responses. There were three types of answer. First, there were right liberal types (classical liberal/libertarians) who generally answered that although they personally had been happily married, it wasn't their business to concern themselves with what other people did. Then there were Christian conservatives who opposed the high divorce rate on biblical grounds. Third, there were traditionalist/conservative types who thought that a high divorce rate was cause for concern because of its effects on the social order.

So part of Hannity's audience are classical/right liberal types who believe in negative liberty alone. That's why they say things like this:

Can't speak for others but I've been married 24 years to the same woman. Have two kids, both born after we were married.

What others do and what values they follow is THEIR business, not mine.

There's no sense here of the existence of a social order to be defended. It's just whatever floats your boat. To put this another way, our classical/right liberals recognise a good for themselves (a stable marriage), but are paralysed by their philosophy from ever extending this recognition to others. So if the divorce rate hit 80%, or if all of their own children divorced, they would still not be able to act in defence of marriage as a general good in society.

The Khasis - an uncle society on the ropes?

A reader alerted me to an interesting story in The Australian about the Khasi people in north India:

TO MANY males it sounds the perfect existence. "The men here have no responsibilities," says Kaith Pariat, a member of the Khasi tribe, an ancient community of about a million people who live in the hills of northeast India.

"All we have to do is to eat, drink, play the guitar and produce children." For all their permitted fecklessness, however, the Khasi men are far from happy. Fed up with being branded the weaker sex and discriminated against, under centuries-old traditions, they have started what may be the world's only "men's lib" movement.

The tribe is a rare example of a matrilineal community. It is the youngest daughter who inherits property and children take their mothers' surnames. If a family does not have a daughter, it must adopt one to become its heir.

Men are expected to sleep in the house of the mother-in-law and to keep quiet. They are excluded from clan meetings, which are presided over by a network of matriarchs. This strict social hierarchy is supported by the Indian Constitution, which recognises the traditions of official ethnic minorities and gives them legal status.

Men say this was acceptable in the past, when activities such as hunting took them away from home for long periods. But today, thanks in part to the influence of Christianity, the trend is for nuclear families and men say they are mere dogsbodies.

"The father of the household has no power," Mr Pariat, 58, told The Times. "He has no rights. Even if he has a very good character but his wife is a loose woman, he cannot take custody of his children." He has founded the Syngkhong Rympei Thymai ("the wedge that supports the wobbly table"), a movement with about 2,000 members that is fighting for the law to be changed and social structures reorganised. He says its key demand is that children take their fathers' surnames.

"If children take my title they are part of my clan and I will have the weight of responsibility on my shoulders. That means I will have to lead a more stable life. It will take our men out of the rut they are in," he said.

"The lack of responsibility is killing us. Boys are dropping out of school. Men are taking to drugs and drinking themselves to death by the age of 40."

Here we have an example of a failing "uncle" society. In uncle societies there is usually little emphasis placed on marital stability and/or sexual fidelity. In the case of the Khasis it seems that it is marital stability which is missing:

According to Khasi laws, a woman ... may end a marriage at her will with no objection from her husband.

The lack of marital stability has consequences:

Divorces amongst both Khasis and Syntengs are of common occurrence, the result being that the children in many cases are ignorant of even the names of their fathers. For the mother, on the other hand, the children cherish a very strong affection, all their sympathies and affections binding them closely to the mother's kin.

Let's say you belong to a society in which there are basic forms of agriculture combined perhaps with hunting or fishing. If there is little emphasis placed on sexual fidelity or marital stability, then men either won't be sure of their paternity or else the paternal connection will be weak. It then makes sense for a man to put more effort into his nieces and nephews, since these are certainly closely related to him, and for descent and inheritance to be organised through the maternal line (a matrilineal system).

So there are societies in which the male role of uncle is more important than the male role of father. In such societies, a man on marriage might well go to live with his wife's clan. But his position there will be a minor one - he will be merely the "begetter" of children. Or, he might stay with his mother and sisters and merely visit his "wife" at night (the Mosuo system). If he earns or produces something, it will then go to his mother and sisters and he might have some standing in the maternal clan as an uncle (a matrifocal system).

Here are some more descriptions of how the Khasis once lived:

Not only is the mother the head and source, and only bond of union, of the family: in the most primitive part of the hills, the Synteng country, she is the only owner of real property, and through her alone is inheritance transmitted. The father has no kinship with his children, who belong to their mother's clan; what he earns goes to his own matriarchal stock...

The Khasis, when reckoning descent; count from the mother only; they speak of a family of brothers and sisters, who are the great grandchildren of one great grandmother, as shi kpoh, which, being literally translated, is one womb; i.e. the issue of one womb. The man is nobody. If he is a brother, u kur, a brother being taken to mean an uterine brother, or a cousin-german, he will be lost to the family or clan directly he marries. If he be a husband, he is looked upon merely as a u shong kha, a begetter.

These uncle societies might be matrilineal and matrifocal but they are not matriarchal. Tribal governance remains in the hands of men (the Khasis, for instance, were once ruled by kings). Even in the family, although there is much authority held by the senior female, the uncles also often have ultimate power:

Despite its matrilineal descent, Khasi society cannot be said to be matriarchal: although women have a word to say, the ultimate authority reside with the eldest males of the matrilineage.

The uncle societies may have functioned better when basic agriculture could be left to women and men focused on activities that drew them away from home, such as hunting or warfare.

But such societies have obvious weaknesses. The men who live in their wife's household have little responsibility either to provide or to assume paternal responsibility. And even when men do have responsibilities as uncles, that can't be as strong a connection as you would have to your own children in your own household.

So it was the father societies that proved to be more dynamic and which gave rise to the great civilisations.

The dysfunction of uncle societies is likely to be even greater today when there is less need for men to hunt or to live as warriors. Which leads on to the complaint made by the Khasi male liberationist quoted above:

"If children take my title they are part of my clan and I will have the weight of responsibility on my shoulders. That means I will have to lead a more stable life. It will take our men out of the rut they are in," he said.

"The lack of responsibility is killing us. Boys are dropping out of school. Men are taking to drugs and drinking themselves to death by the age of 40."

We often lose sight of why we have the customs we do. Take, for instance, the fact that our society is patrilineal and children take their father's name and descent is reckoned through the father's line. There was a purpose to this - it was part of creating a father society, of connecting men to a paternal role and responsibility - something which cannot merely be assumed or taken for granted.

The alternative is not some great, feminist, lost matriarchy. The historic alternative was to have an uncle society, one in which fathers had little role or responsibility within a community and in which society did not, therefore, develop civilisationally.

The delayed marriage debate

One of the looming battles in the culture war is the issue of when to marry and have children. Feminists have urged women to stay independent of men; this hasn't, in general, led women to reject the idea of marriage and motherhood outright. It has, though, encouraged the trend for women to defer family formation until some time in their 30s.

But this creates a number of problems including the following:

• women lose reproductive choice. If women only attempt to marry and have children in the final, declining years of their fertility, they may well miss out on having the children they want
• if women aren't serious about marriage or children in their 20s, then they are more likely to select the "wrong" sort of men - the bad boys, the narcissists, the thugs etc. This then discourages the family man ethos amongst men and encourages a player culture. Numbers of men who might have made good husbands will drop out altogether.
• when women do start taking family formation seriously in their 30s, they are more likely to find it difficult to meet suitable men. Some men will already have married, others will have dropped out and some will be players. The women themselves will no longer be at the peak of their youthful fertility and attractiveness to men and they might well be less able to pair bond due to the number of casual relationships already entered into.
• all of this combined is likely to encourage a more cynical and adversarial culture of relationships between men and women
• men and women will not be able to gift each other their youthful passions and they will be considerably older and more infirm as grandparents

Feminists are mostly winning this battle in the culture war. However, there do exist opposing voices, warning of the problems created by leaving things so late, such as the BBC Radio DJ, Lauren Laverne:

BBC radio presenter Lauren Laverne has criticised the growing culture of ‘freemales’ who choose an independent life over having a husband and family.

Lauren Laverne



The 32-year-old BBC 6 Music host says women who delay having a family in their twenties risk never finding ‘a sense of completion’.

Despite initially being seen as a ‘ladette’, the ex-pop singer married when she was 27 and had her first child, Fergus, two years later. She gave birth to her second son, Mack, in September last year. Her husband is DJ Graeme Fisher.

But she admits her decision to start a family is in stark contrast to her friends who are not interested in settling down until they are 35.



‘I was getting married when none of my friends even lived with their boyfriends, and then I had Fergus,’ she told Red Magazine.

‘It’s great that you get to be young for longer, but the downside is people worry too much. If you’re with the right person, do it, get married, have the baby, take a leap of faith. You can’t plan everything, you can’t wait and wait and wait.



‘The nice thing now is that I have a sense of completion about my family and the future. You can only really get that when you crack on when you’re young.’

Her friends are being foolish. They are not willing to settle down until they are 35 - exactly the age at which a woman's fertility starts to peter out. They are not even making relationship commitments in their late 20s.

Lauren Laverne is not alone in speaking out against trends toward delayed marriage. Two American researchers, Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker of the University of Texas, have recently published their findings on the state of play in relationships between young Americans. One of their conclusions is that women, by delaying a serious commitment to relationships, are creating a player culture amongst men, which then undermines women's desires later on to find a committed relationship:

Researchers found that since women in the 18- to 23-year-old group feel they don't need men for financial dependence, many of them feel they can play around with multiple partners without consequence, and that the early 20s isn't the time to have a serious relationship. But eventually, they do come to want a real, lasting relationship. The problem is that there will still be women who will have sex readily without commitment, and since men know this, fewer of them are willing to go steady.

"Women have plenty of freedom, but freedom does not translate easily into getting what you want," Regnerus said.

This issue was even openly discussed in the usually liberal Salon magazine. There was a very respectful interview with the two researchers about the issue of women having "lost control" of relationships, with increasing numbers of women reporting about modern relationships that "I don't like this script, it sucks." One of the researchers gave this advice:

I don't think it's in women's interest to play the field for a long period of time. It can get depressing, not only about their relationships but to see the pool of men in their 30s who are available. My advice is if you find somebody who you love and who loves you, make it work...

...Women need to somehow reacquire control over the direction of relationships. They feel like they don't have control.

Women who have been brought up to believe that independence is what matters most won't easily warm to the idea of marrying earlier. One woman's comment in reply to the two American researchers was that,

It strikes me as the typical fear tactics used to keep women's ambitions and autonomy in check because many men don't have the personal skills to succeed in equal partnership.

She ain't budging.

Some of the late marriage camp are also picking up on a statistic which claims that women with college education, their own income and who marry later are less likely to divorce. So you get comments like this one:

A woman is in the best position to avoid divorce if she is college-educated (the more the better), has her own income, and she marries no sooner than age 25. Women who fit this description have a very, very small likelihood of finding themselves in divorce court - WELL under national averages.

So this begs the question... is the goal for women to GET married, or to STAY married? Personally, I'm voting for the latter.

It's not that waiting until your mid-20s to marry is necessarily wrong. Some people don't mature into their adult personalities until this age. But the argument is sometimes used to justify a "wait until you're in your 30s and have done the whole education/career thing" position. So I do want to point out that the divorce rate difference between those who marry in their early 20s and those who marry in their late 20s doesn't seem to be that great. It's those who marry as teenagers who clearly have a higher divorce rate.

If you look at the following chart it shows that those women who married at less than 18 years of age had the highest rate of divorce; those who married at 18 and 19 had the next highest; those who married at 21 to 25 initially had the next highest but in the long run did the best; whilst those who married from 25 to 29 did the best in the early years of marriage but over time ended up with a higher divorce rate than those who married in their early 20s.

The lesson from this data set is that marrying below the age of 20 does significantly increase the risk of divorce for a woman, but marrying at 23 involves no greater risk than marrying at 29.

Aussie Muslim: let us take over

Ibrahim Siddiq Conlon grew up as an Australian boy in country NSW and has a masters degree in architecture. He is also a convert to Islam who preaches for the establishment of an Islamic state in Australia:

ISLAMIC preacher Ibrahim Siddiq-Conlon points heavenwards to emphasise his message for the governments of Australia -- there is no God but Allah and only his laws should be obeyed.

"My attack is on the Prime Minister of Australia," he said yesterday. "I hate the parliament in Canberra. I want to go straight for the jugular vein and advise the parliament that they have no right to legislate. They should immediately step down and let the Muslims take over."

An Australian-born convert to Islam, Siddiq-Conlon is the self-anointed leader of a group called Sharia4Australia, which is pushing for the introduction of sharia courts as a first step towards achieving Islamic law.

"One day Australia will live under sharia; it's inevitable," he said. "If they (Australians) don't accept it, that's not our problem. We hope, and our objective is to have a peaceful transition, but when you look at history that has never been the case. There's always been a fight. It is inevitable that one day there will be a struggle for Islam in Australia."

Here's some more:

IBRAHIM Siddiq-Conlon has a message for Australians, whether they want to hear it or not.

"One day Australia will be ruled by sharia, no doubt," he declares. "That is why non-Muslims are worried, because they know one day they won't be able to drink their beer, they won't be able to eat their pork and they won't be able to do their homosexual acts, because one day they know they will be controlled."

...Siddiq-Conlon is the face and voice of Sharia4Australia, a group formed in Sydney's southwest to agitate for Islamic law, starting with the introduction of sharia courts and ending, in his ideal world, with Islamic rule.

While he claims to eschew violence, he unapologetically preaches hate. An online video posted by his group describes its members as "uncompromising [in] their disallegiance, disloyalty and hate for the disbelievers".

"I hate the parliament. I hate [democracy] with a pure hate," he says. Moreover, it is obligatory for all Muslims to reject democracy, because it is a challenge to God's law: "They must hate it, speak out against it, and if that doesn't work, take action against it."

Siddiq-Conlon formed Sharia4Australia last year, styling himself as the new champion for Islamic law in Australia.

An online video announcing its emergence stated: "For far too long now Aust has been ruled by a corrupt evil infedile [sic] group of people who are clear disbelievers in the sight of Allah. It is time for change. Time at least for the truth.

"Today Muslim youth and the oppressed and weak Muslims march forward with their flags behind brother Ibrahim Siddiq-Conlon. O Muslims stand tall, take the vow and pledge allegiance to none other than Allah and his Messengerorting and vowing allegiance w the Muslims while disloyalty to the disbelievers and their kufr [infidel] ways."

In person, Siddiq-Conlon initially seems harmless enough. He dresses in a white cotton tunic, trousers and sandals, with a neatly trimmed beard and a touch of black kohl eyeliner, in the style said to have been favored by the original companions of the Prophet Mohammed.

He is quietly spoken, polite and articulate ... He converted to Islam while a student, travelled to Indonesia, found a wife there, and returned to Australia...

"I'm an Aussie, I'm a full-bred Aussie, you can't get more Aussie than me," he insists.

But his proclaimed love for Australia is followed quickly by a prediction that, ultimately, Muslims here will have to fight for Islamic law. He doubts the struggle will begin in the next 10 or 20 years, but hopes it will occur in his lifetime. "People don't give up [their land without a fight]. There's always been a fight. It is inevitable that one day there will be a struggle for Islam in Australia. We don't shy away from it. Whether it means we get put in jail, kicked out of the country. If it means harm to us, so be it."

Nor does his disavowal of violence extend to Australian troops in Afghanistan, who he describes as "evil".

"Obviously I don't support the killing of innocent people, but these American and Australian troops have gone there to kill Muslims. What do they expect? Yes, they deserve to die. Under sharia, yes they do. That is the judgment of sharia. They are eligible to be attacked."

When you view his YouTube videos you are immediately struck by a sense of how religion and politics are intertwined in Islam. Living rightly for Ibrahim Siddiq Conlon means not only living modestly and in submission to God but also fighting, literally, for the establishment of Islamic political rule.

At the moment, the balance of forces is not favourable for Siddiq Conlon. The Muslim population of Australia is still too small for any realistic challenge to state power. But numbers are growing due to influxes of Muslim refugees from countries like Lebanon and Somalia. In 1971, there were 22,311 Muslims in Australia, by 2006 there were 340,400. A Melbourne suburb like Dallas already has a 40% Muslim population, in Auburn in Sydney it's 41%.

The current refugee policy is leading us into dangerous territory. The problem with the policy is that it does not attempt to resettle refugees in like countries. For instance, it would be better if refugees from the Middle-East were resettled in a like country in the Middle-East, one that was closest in terms of standard of living, religion and ethnic tradition.

The "like country" policy would immediately discourage economic refugees and it would more easily allow both assimilation and repatriation. And it would help non-Islamic countries such as Australia avoid a descent into future political turmoil at the hands of those agitating for sharia.

It's not impossible for the "like country" policy to gain traction. Even in Sweden, there are politicians who recognise (in private) that issues of assimilation have to be considered. One of the more interesting of the wikileaks was the revelation that the Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, and the Migration Minister, Tobias Billström, met with the US Ambassador to Iraq in 2007 to try to put in place a system for returning Iraqis whose asylum applications had failed.

"Without rules and regulations for sending those without permits back, the immigration problem would be out of control in a country of 9 million inhabitants," Bildt allegedly said.

The ministers also spoke about several honour killings in Sweden, which led to demands from the Swedes to a stricter immigration policy.

Isn't that an admission that the numbers of refugees from countries with incompatible cultures needs to be limited? If even Swedish ministers can recognise this reality, then surely others can as well.

The Swedish Greens are up in arms about the wikileaks revelation and are threatening to report Bildt and Billström to various human rights committees, but you'd expect that from the Greens. The Green's spokeswoman prefers the status quo:

Ceballos said that the reasons that Bildt and Billström have referenced for limiting the number of Iraqi refugees should not be the deciding factors for the Swedish authorities.

"The Swedish National Migration Board should decide on the basis of each person's protection needs, not based on whether they are easy to integrate or whether they come from areas where honour-related violence occurs," she said.

Why can't their protection needs be met by resettling them in a like country? Why not at least try to harmonise protection needs with ease of integration? Isn't that the sensible, rational policy? To say "we'll take them regardless of whether we can integrate them" is hardly fair to the host population and is likely down the track to lead to a conflicted society.