Woods a living symbol of perfection?

Tiger Woods was in Melbourne recently. His reception was way over the top. He was fawned over and treated like something more than a great sportsman. The worst offenders were middle-aged white women; I still remember one at a press conference gushing over him, treating him like he was a demigod.

Woods himself seemed embarrassed by it all.

So when news of his alleged infidelity hit the papers I was interested in the reaction of his worshippers admirers.

Sally Morrell, a regular columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun, obliged by penning her thoughts on the matter.

In her column she admits that she has no interest in golf. She doesn't admire Woods for his sporting prowess but for what he represents as a man. She writes:

It is Woods the man that I so like and admire. It's almost like he's a living symbol of perfection.

A living symbol of perfection? Why? Well, Sally Morrell likes that he isn't brash, that he's close to his parents and that he's protective of his family's privacy. But the clincher is this:

I especially love that his ethnicity embraces almost every part of the world, with his ancestors including Thais, African Americans, American Indians and Dutch.

Perfection, for Sally Morrell, seems to be a man who is non-white, but who is non-threatening to her white sensibilities by being unassuming, genteel and protective toward his family.

But adultery is less than perfect, shattering the idyll:

So now you tell me he had an affair? Hello? It's like telling me Jesus kicked a dog.

It's not just that it doesn't compute, it's that it makes you doubt if anyone can be as perfect as we'd like to believe at least one man can.

Of course, we shouldn't be so naive and shouldn't need any one person to show us what perfection looks like.

Of course, writes Sally Morrell, we shouldn't be so naive - but she indulges her naivety regardless, projecting her liberalism onto a hapless golfer in something close to religious terms.

History in the remaking

Royal Auto has the largest circulation of any monthly magazine in Australia. It's read by half the adult population here in Victoria. So it's significant that the feature article in this month's edition (August 2009) is on the topic of history, ancestry and identity.

The article looks at a historical re-enactment society in the Victorian city of Ballarat. The young members of this society are quite articulate when it comes to explaining why they devote so much time to their hobby. For instance, David Waldron believes that it connects him to his heritage:

His participation ... is a way of "bridging the disjuncture from my heritage - my own history. I am recreating that sense of connection."

Another member of the society, Fred Cheney, an English and history teacher, has a theory about the loss of Western identity:

Fred ... has tried to connect with Asian spirituality but found immersing himself in the essentials of northern European culture is the better fit pyschologically. He says the transported gene pool of white Australia set his social lineage adrift.

"And in the absence of knowledge about our own ancestral roots, we tend to project our internal indigenous sense onto the exotic other - the Aborigines or the Asian races," he says. "Through these processes we are reclaiming our own roots. For me, enacting the Viking period is a way of engaging with my racial heritage. We get the sense it is still there. The costumes are profoundly respectful of our ancestors, but by wearing them you get that instant consciousness of The Great Then."

There are women involved too. Anna says of history that,

"reading about it just isn't enough." And best of all is the payoff in a real sense of connection. "This sense of tribal community is vital to sustain us now because it has a real integrity. We do operate as a tribe or an extended family."

If this sounds a little politically incorrect, it's because it runs against the grain of orthodox liberalism. According to liberal orthodoxy there is no collective good, only an immense set of self-chosen individual life paths. The overall aim is to achieve an autonomy in which we self-determine every aspect of who we are. We don't choose our ethnicity or our ancestry, so these are thought of negatively as impediments to the self-creating, blank slate individual. Furthermore, because liberals associate the West with power and dominance, they see Western forms of ethnic identity as being constructed for the oppression of others. So Western identity gets tagged as supremacist or discriminatory, whereas non-Western identity is tied much more positively to resistance to Western cultural and political dominance.

So there is a profound rejection of modern liberal orthodoxy when the Ballarat history players declare that their own Western ancestry is authentic and indispensable to who they are.

I personally have no desire to dress up like a Viking. Nor do I think that re-enactment is the most effective way of challenging the liberal status quo. But I do agree with the Ballarat history players that a sense of our ancestry and roots is important in forming our self-identity. It deepens and enriches our sense of who we are. It places us within a distinct tradition, so that we identify with a set of cultural ideals and achievements, rather than always being outsiders who are not actively involved in reproducing a culture of our own.

If liberal theory treats such an identity, at least for Westerners, as wholly negative, then this only shows that liberal theory is inadequate - that it limits too severely what can be expressed within our self-identity.

Who attacked the Indian student? ... finally the "shock" answer

In May an Indian student, Sourabh Sharma, was bashed by a gang on a Melbourne train. The attack sparked a massive wave of publicity in both Australia and India, with claims that Indian students were victims of racism.

At the time, I pointed out that CCTV cameras had caught the gang in action and that the attackers who appeared on camera didn't appear to be Anglo. I suggested that one of the attackers even looked South Asian.

Still, there was an assumption in some quarters that white Australians were targeting and bashing Indians. The Times of India went so far as to issue the following statement:

What's worrisome is the fact that there appears to be a racist undertone to these incidents. They are apparently part of a new fad ...

In any country there are bound to be extreme elements. It's worrisome that the tribe of extreme nationalists who champion an exclusivist, white Aussie identity seems to be increasing in Australia ...

Clearly, Australia cannot afford to be seen as a hostile country if it wants to continue attracting talent, and money, from outside its shores ... such ugly incidents are simply unacceptable, mate.

You can see what The Times of India is really focused on. The Times wants an open borders Australia and therefore labels anyone who defends traditional Australia as an "extreme nationalist" - as the type of person who would bash a foreigner on a train.

It seems the height of arrogance for an overseas newspaper to dictate what another country's national identity may or may not be. It seems hypocritical too for an Indian to demand that Australia have open borders, given that India itself prefers closed borders and a traditional identity.

But the story doesn't end there. The assumption that white Australians were bashing Indian students caught on in India and led to some angry outbursts in the Indian media. Here are three such angry comments left at online Indian media outlets:

An eye for an eye is it? Let's beat the Aussies up and deport them. This is how justice should be given in the 21st century.

These are a breed of people who were deported from Europe for criminal activities. They have criminal genes. It is also clearly visible in cricket. All Australians good or bad living in India must be thrashed and deported.

Repulsive, backward, Aussie filth, the laughing stock of the Western world.

There were some Indians who tried to defend Australians, though even they assumed that white Australians were responsible for the bashings. One writer pointed out that the number of Indians arriving in Australia each year was equivalent (in terms of population size) to 5.5 million foreign arrivals in India each year - something that Indians themselves would not react well to.

But this week came the following news in the Melbourne Herald Sun (30/06/09):

Shock revelation in attack that incited racial tension

Indian on bash charge

A man accused of a bashing that sparked racial tensions between Australia and India was of Indian descent.

The youth, among four boys charged with assaulting and robbing Indian student Sourabh Sharma on May 9, has been released on bail.

Victoria Police have confirmed the alleged attacker was of Indian descent ...

Mr Sharma siad he did not know any of the men were Indian. "I don't know who they were," he said. "It's definitely a shock."

The attack on Mr Sharma ... evoked widespread condemnation of Australians after the footage was beamed across India.

Federation of Indian Students of Australia president Amit Menghani said he was unaware any of the attackers were of Indian descent. "If it was an Indian, I would be disappointed," he said.

So I was correct in suggesting that one of the attackers was of South Asian descent.

One thing that's true is that there have been a lot of attacks on Indian students in Australia; 1447 last financial year according to the police. So the anger of Indian students at the unsafe conditions they face here is understandable.

But the gangs targeting and attacking Indian students aren't Anglo and traditional, but multicultural.

The diversity involved in the attacks on Indian students has been slowly coming through in the media. For instance, here's a report from the Melbourne Herald Sun:

Gangs assault cabbies. Melbourne's Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers are being bashed and robbed by African youth gangs.

This is the wikipedia account of protests in Sydney by Indian students:

On 8 June, 300 Indian students staged a protest in Harris Park late into the evening in response to an alleged assault, claiming they were considered "soft targets".

Some Indian protestors were reported to be carrying hockey sticks and baseball bats. According to police, the protest was sparked by an attack on Indians earlier in the evening allegedly by Lebanese men.

In retaliation the protesters attacked three uninvolved Lebanese men, who sustained minor injuries. This was believed to be the first violent reaction by Indian students against attacks on them. A police dog squad was called in to control the crowd.

A Bangladeshi man was attacked in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine (Beyond India Monthly, 08/02/09):

When I turned on Anderson Road I saw four black men standing over there. They were blocking my way. I requested them to make way and they started abusing me and my wife Nasir. I kept low, I preferred to step on the road and go around them. As I walked a bit further one of them came running behind us and hit me with the stick. Then they started hitting my wife ... I want action against those African guys. I want them arrested and punished so that they don't touch my lady again.

Simon Overland, the Chief Commissioner of Police in Victoria, has responded to the attacks by sending an additional 75 police officers into the suburbs of Sunshine and St Albans. These are possibly the most diverse, multicultural suburbs of Melbourne. In St Albans, for example, 27.9% of households speak only English at home, compared to 78.5% for Australia in general (and 91% for my own suburb not that far to the east of St Albans).

So the attacks on Indian students are taking place in the suburbs least populated by young Anglo men. It's possible that many Melbournians are already aware of this, as there's been uncommon resistance amongst Anglo-Australians to accepting the blame.

It's been one of the few positives to come out of the whole affair: a sceptical attitude amongst Anglo-Australians that they are, by default, the guilty oppressor group.

Norwegian professor: we have to deconstruct the majority

Thomas Eriksen is a professor of anthropology. In a recent interview, he was asked what topics Norwegian anthropologists should research more thoroughly. He replied:

The most important blank spot exists now in deconstructing the majority so thoroughly that it can never be called the majority again, to follow up on some of Marianne Gullestad's research from the last ten years. Something like this could contribute to both understanding and liberation.

Which raises the obvious question: why would Professor Eriksen want to deconstruct his own ethnic group?

The basic answer, the one I often put forward, is that liberalism insists that we must self-determine who we are. But we do not self-determine our ethnicity. Our ethnicity is based (at least in part) on an inherited culture, race, ancestry, kinship, descent etc. Therefore, liberals view ethnicity as as an impediment to individual freedom; they see it as something the individual should be liberated from.

There's some evidence that this is Professor Eriksen's view of things. First, he is a committed liberal, having stood as a candidate for the Norwegian Liberal Party. Second, he states that deconstructing the Norwegian majority would contribute to liberation. Third, he recommends the work of Marianne Gullestad and she focuses on the "problem" that Norwegian identity is connected to a common culture and kinship (i.e. ethnicity). For instance, Marianne Gullestad writes that,

My argument is that there is currently a popular reinforcement of the ethnic dimensions of majority nationalism, with a focus on common culture, ancestry and origin. In particular, the national imagined sameness rests on the metaphor of the nation as a family writ large.

... History, descent, religion, and morality are intertwined in this form of nationalism, ethnicizing the state as an expression of collective identity.

I'd like to add another possible explanation for Professor Eriksen wanting to permanently deconstruct the Norwegian majority.

Once humanism became part of Western culture there was no longer such an emphasis on a pre-existing, pre-determined good already put there for us to discover and live by. Instead, the focus turned to what man could achieve and determine for himself. It was this that became the source of value.

It then began to make sense to see social change, or what liberals call progress, as a value in itself. What mattered was an open-ended possibility for change, so that man could apply a deliberate direction to his own affairs. It was a case of "man makes who he is" and "man shapes his own destiny from his own resources".

This then has several further consequences.

First, the humanistic philosophy will appeal especially to secular intellectuals, as they will be the ones to create and to lead schemes of human progress. As John Stuart Mill put it when discussing the views of Auguste Comte:

I agreed with him that the moral and intellectual ascendancy, once exercised by priests, must in time pass into the hands of philosophers.

So Professor Eriksen gets to see himself as the guide of humanity in his status as a public intellectual.

Second, the allegiance of these "philosophers" won't be to their particular, historic communities but to "man", as it is on the capacities of man to direct his own fate and to secure his own good that their outlook is focused. So they will tend to look to the global, to "humanity", rather than to particular nations or ethnies.

Third, they will not want a "block" to schemes of change. They will prefer what is fluid and complex, to what is concrete, fixed or stable. It is better for them to have a blank canvas to work their schemes on, and so they will prefer to start with the idea of man as a blank slate and existing entities or identities as being mere social constructs.

So there are reasons for Professor Eriksen, as a liberal, to regard the existence of the Norwegian majority as a nuisance and a hindrance. The Norwegian majority has an identity which is relatively stable, distinct and definite. It fits individual Norwegians within a structure which can't be easily manipulated or directed by intellectuals bent on social change. It also impedes a shift toward a focus on man (humanity) rather than on distinct nations (Eriksen considers himself a "transnationalist").

A couple of other points occur to me regarding liberal humanism. There is a certain tension between the idea that man should be self-directing and determine his own conditions of life and the idea that man should apply a deliberate direction to his affairs through schemes of social reform directed by public intellectuals.

The tendency of those advocating schemes of reform will be to find an ideal form of social organisation, one which achieves a total transformation of man into his ideal condition of being, thereby bringing history to an end.

This, though, would then bring to an end the very thing that liberal humanists believe make man so great: his ability to self-direct and self-create. It would bring about a totalitarian society in which the room for individual self-direction would be limited.

Perhaps that's one reason why individual autonomy is emphasised so strongly within liberal culture. It's an antidote to the real possibility that a liberal humanism will lurch into totalitarian schemes of social reform.

Perhaps too it explains why some liberal humanists are much more comfortable with the destructive task they have set themselves (getting rid of traditional institutions which hinder a process of change), rather than a clear, positive view of what is going to constitute the future society.

Professor Eriksen, for instance, was asked during his interview "You said once that someone should study what holds society together?". The issue of what holds society together is treated here as little more than an afterthought.

And when Professor Eriksen is asked about "the greatest challenges in research", he says,

The greatest challenge is to accept that no final solution exists. We must find out that ... we "make the rules as we go along". The dream of something stable and finished is widespread, but society will never be finished.

So it's a permanent revolution, in which having a clear idea of where you're going isn't so important (we "make the rules as we go along"). We should not aim at a stable social arrangment, claims Eriksen - we have to accept instability leading on to an unending process of reform.

That's certainly one logical position for a liberal humanist to take; in some ways it's preferable to the alternative of a total, finished scheme of social reform bringing history to an end.

But what if we don't want to permanently banish ethnic Norwegians? Then we have to step outside the logic of liberal humanism. It becomes a matter of pushing past the debates generated by a humanist philosophy and taking the argument back to first principles.

Professor Eriksen's desire to deconstruct the Norwegians is a radically destructive position; we should in turn be seeking to deconstruct the philosophy which led to such a view.

A Deal? Maybe not, Andrew Bolt.

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt is about as right-wing as it gets in the mainstream media here in Australia. And yet he is clearly a liberal rather than a conservative.

This is most obvious whenever he writes about race and ethnicity. In his most recent column, for instance, he complains that Aboriginal activists who attack whites are often considerably of European descent themselves.

It's a fair point and one that is likely to appeal to the conservative rank and file. However, Bolt also uses the column to push the idea that race is artificial, trivial and should be made irrelevant.

For instance, he writes of Tara Jane Winch, who is of mixed ancestry but identifies as Aboriginal, that:

She could call herself English, Afghan, Aboriginal, Australian or just a take-me-as-I-am human being called Tara June Winch. Race irrelevant.

His comment on the phenomenon of mixed race activists identifying as Aborigines is this:

It's also divisive, feeding a new movement to stress pointless or even invented racial differences we once swore to overcome. What happened to wanting all of us to become colour blind?

He finishes this way:

... let's go beyond racial pride. Beyond black and white. Let's be proud only of being human beings set on this land together, determined to find what unites us and not to invent such racist and trivial excuses to divide. Deal?

Sorry, Andrew Bolt, no deal.

It's important to understand where Andrew Bolt is coming from. Andrew Bolt once criticised a group of Aborigines for wanting to hold onto some historic artefacts. He told the Aborigines that by identifying with their own communal tradition they were forgetting,

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race. In this New Racism, we're driven back into tribes.

This is standard liberal autonomy theory. According to this theory, we are made human by our ability to self-determine who we are. Therefore, we are supposed to reject as impediments to our individual autonomy anything significant to our identity that is inherited rather than self-created.

It's a theory with radical consequences. It means that we can't identify as men and women as our sex is a "biological destiny" rather than something we select for ourselves. And it means that we can't identify with our own race or ethny or nation as we are born into these.

We are not allowed to belong to distinct, particular human communities. Only to a single human one.

This is just about the opposite of a true conservatism: if the term conservative has any meaning it refers to the aim of conserving a particular tradition against the onslaught of liberalism.

Andrew Bolt has not always been so dismissive of ancestral identity. He himself is a Dutch migrant to Australia. As such he did not feel as strongly connected to the mainstream Australian tradition. This changed when he married an Australian woman. He once thanked his two Anglo-Australian grandmothers in his column for granting him this gift of an ancestral connection to country:

I do now have a deep bond to this country, its history and its culture, and a sense of belonging for which I am intensely grateful. Even better, my children have roots that dig deep in this soil. I thank my two Nans for this - for helping to make me and mine feel at home. (Herald Sun 20/10/2000)

This is more the reality of things. No talk here of a single human identity or trivial, invented differences. Bolt here admits the importance of ancestry, history, culture, roots, home and belonging.

Bolt in his more recent columns asks us to give up too much - stable forms of identity and belonging and a deep connection to country - for the sake of a radical political idea, an ideology.

We have to think beyond the limits of Andrew Bolt's right liberalism if we are serious about conserving our own tradition.

Who does Catherine Deveny want to purge?

Catherine Deveny is impatient. There are too many middle-aged, middle-class white men holding responsible positions in the workforce for her liking. They're not easy to get rid of. Catherine doesn't want to wait for them to fade away - she wants them culled. They're standing in the way of change.

That's the gist of a recent column Catherine Deveny penned for the Melbourne Age. Here are some choice extracts:

... there are too many rich, middle-aged, middle-class white men in suits running the place. They are the ones who got us into this financial and economic mess. An impenetrable wall of them is not the answer to getting us out of it ...

We're not saying Ians should be exterminated. God knows we need them. Who else would file the tax returns, perform hip replacements and keep Harley Davidson in business? We're just saying it wouldn't hurt to cull a few. My suggestion is to organise a program to reduce the number of Ians by 70% ...

Even more terrifying than the disproportionate number of Ians who have always held the power is the mindless chant of "It's just the way it is" when you mention it. This may be true, but it doesn't mean that ... it's not time to subvert the dominant paradigm ...

The Ians are not taking the involuntary redundancies ... The Ians are too expensive to sack ... Many being strapped to the rocket of power at the moment are Ians who've been waiting patiently in line ... Blokes being rewarded for playing the game by the rules ... They're out of touch. They're not the answer ...

The Ians set up the power structure and it's tricky for anyone else to get in without knowing the password, the secret handshake and the magic dance. Apparently you had to have your name down before you were born.

It's interesting to consider the way Deveny crafts this piece. She's trying to tell an audience of "Ians" - white male professionals - that they are redundant, holding back progress and should be shunted aside. She humanises the message somewhat by throwing in some humourous quips. Written any more bluntly and the message would come across as more obviously vicious.

Note too the way that Deveny slips in the idea that white Australian men are responsible for the world financial crisis. She doesn't debate the idea or make any arguments for it. She simply assumes it as a given.

Yet it's a ridiculous claim. The crisis began in America at a time when the Australian economy was strong. The origin of the crisis was a misguided egalitarianism promoted not by the average white collar worker but by those in the political class who demanded that banks equalise mortgages given to ethnic minorities in the US, even if this meant approving loans to those unable to repay them.

Deveny also simply assumes that she is a deprived outsider, locked out of a power structure dominated by white men. Again, we are supposed to simply assume this to be true.

It's difficult, though, to see Deveny as a marginalised, excluded outsider. She has a cushy, influential job, writing for a major newspaper with an audience of hundreds of thousands. How many men really have a greater chance to influence society than she does?

She wants us to think of her as the outsider, the dissenter, the maverick, the creative innovator. In reality she is yet another member of the left-liberal political establishment, which has fashioned the course of Western societies for generations now. She is an orthodox insider offering us the same politics and the same ideas which have dominated the West for decades.

There's craftiness too in her portrayal of white men. On the one hand, she emphasises the idea that white men have power that others lack. She doesn't want to give the impression, though, that this makes white men strong or capable. No, white men are old, stale, burnt out, and incompetent. White men are "Ians" - all too ordinary and comfortable. Pretenders in cardigans.

It's an odd picture; white men are "terrifying" in their power but at the same time to be ridiculed as bumbling suburban uncle types. We are invited to smugly look down on white men even as we complain about their "impenetrable" power.

Which raises an important question. Why would any self-respecting white man go along with the politics of the left? Why put up with this kind of treatment?

Lawrence Auster made a similar point in a column posted yesterday. He observed that the real development of liberalism is not toward a race neutral society, but toward the disempowerment and denigration of whites. In other words, if you're white then you're not going to be treated neutrally:

Liberalism is not a journey from a historically white society to a society in which race neutrality is the guiding principle. It is a journey from a historically white society to a society in which the advance of nonwhites as nonwhites—along with its corollary, the disempowerment and denigration of whites as whites—is the guiding principle. And if those are the rules of the game, why should any self-respecting, non-suicidal white person play?

Is Boris really a conservative?

Boris Johnson was an editor of the 'conservative' Spectator magazine, then a 'conservative' MP, then a shadow minister on the 'conservative' front bench, before becoming the 'conservative' Mayor of London.

But he is a liberal.

Consider his reasons for supporting Barack Obama in the upcoming US elections. He writes:

And then there is the final, additional reason, the glaring reason, and that is race. Huge numbers of voters, whether they admit it to themselves or not, will hesitate to choose Barack Obama for President because he is black. And then there are millions of white Americans who will undoubtedly vote Obama precisely because he is black, and because he stands for the change and the progress they want to see in their society.

After centuries of friction, prejudice, tension, hatred - you name it, they've had it - America is teetering on the brink of a triumph. If Obama wins, then the United States will have at last come a huge and maybe decisive step closer to achieving the dream of Martin Luther King, of a land where people are judged not on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

If Obama wins, then black people the world over will be able to see how a gifted man has been able to smash through the ultimate glass ceiling.

If Obama wins, then it will be simply fatuous to claim that there are no black role models in politics or government, because there is no higher role model than the President of the United States.

If Barack Hussein Obama is successful next month, then we could even see the beginning of the end of race-based politics, with all the grievance-culture and special interest groups and political correctness that come with it.

If Obama wins, he will have established that being black is as relevant to your ability to do a hard job as being left-handed or ginger-haired, and he will have re-established America's claim to be the last, best hope of Earth.

Consider the way Johnson frames this. On the one side there are the bad guys, the whites who won't vote for Obama because he is black. On the other side there are the good guys, the whites who will vote for Obama precisely because he is black and because he stands for change and progress.

So the point of the election is not to select the best candidate, the one who will conserve what is best in the American tradition, but for whites to prove something about themselves, namely that they are non-racist and in favour of more modernist "change and progress".

How is this genuinely conservative?

Note too that Johnson defines the American past in terms of "centuries of friction, prejudice, tension, hatred". But finally, with Obama, a "triumph" over this past is a looming possibility.

Again, what kind of conservative would so limit his appreciation for American history and culture to prejudice and hatred? It is subversive in the extreme to read a national history in these terms. It is an act of delegitimation rather than conservation.

Then there is Johnson's argument that Americans should elect Obama because that would smash a glass ceiling and provide a role model for blacks all around the world.

Is it really the case that a US President should be elected to encourage the aspirations of Africans? Would someone who really cared about the fate of the existing American tradition really make this a priority?

A genuine conservative would not make smashed ceilings a principle for electing presidents.

Then there is Johnson's shallow claim that electing Obama would make race irrelevant in the world, thereby ending race-based politics, political correctness and a grievance-based culture.

Sure.

This is much the same as believing that by electing Hillary Clinton, feminist women would realise that there was no office denied to them, thereby finally putting an end to a feminist inspired gender war.

Nothing of the sort happened when Margaret Thatcher was elected and why would it? Feminism has its roots in the modernist mindset, something that can't be overturned by a particular election result. Furthermore, why assume that feminist women would abandon a movement which gives them advantages in their pursuit of power? Why would feminist women agree to a level playing field when they have the benefit of positive discrimination legislation, quotas, public funding, university departments and so on?

Feminism is much more likely to lose position when men begin to set limits on what they will accept.

It's the same with the ethnic grievance culture Johnson refers to. When white Americans accept the premises put to them, namely that the American tradition is illegitimate because of its racism, and that whites must redeem themselves of guilt, and that any inequality is due to an institutional racism perpetrated by whites on the "other" - then the demands placed on white Americans will only grow.

Finally, there is Johnson's claim that an Obama victory, by making race not matter, will re-establish America's claim to be "the last, best hope of Earth".

I can't believe that a genuine English conservative would look to any foreign nation to be the "best hope" for the world. Was the song "Land of Hope and Glory" really composed for some other country?

Nor would a genuine conservative make the principle of non-discrimination the "telos" of the world - the end-point to which history is progressing and on which the moral fate of the world depends.

A conservative wishes to conserve his own tradition and to build on what is best in this tradition. He isn't likely to focus on a single, abstract, political telos, but on the health of family, community and nation.

On this basis, Boris Johnson is not a genuine conservative.

Nationalism & the liberal mind

There are many conservatives who don't understand the liberal attitude to nationalism. Why, ask such conservatives, would liberals want to destroy their own national traditions? Are they being manipulated by hostile outsiders? Are they unprincipled, or ridden by guilt?

Fortunately, liberal intellectuals like to record their views, so what we conservatives need to do is to look into the debates liberals have amongst themselves. By doing so we can begin to understand what is going on in the liberal mind.

Traditional nationalism

To make sense of things, what we have to do first is to define the kind of traditional nationalism supported by conservatives.

Traditional nationalism was nearly always some form of ethnic nationalism. In other words, it was a nationalism in which people felt connected to each other by ties of ethnicity: by some admixture of a common ancestry, language, religion, culture and history.

Over time ethnic nationalism came to have a negative connotation for liberals. This is because it is in conflict with the first principle of liberalism.

Liberals believe that our humanity is defined by our ability to shape ourselves according to our own will and reason. Our ethnicity, though, is not something we get to choose through individual will and reason: it is something we simply inherit.

Therefore, liberals have come to oppose ethnic nationalism as an unchosen "destiny" rather than a "rational attachment". In their usual style, liberals like to undercut traditional nationalism by arguing that such forms of national identity aren't real, but are merely imagined or constructed.

Ignatieff

So, liberals generally reject the idea of traditional ethnic nationalism. What though do they suggest should replace it?

One of the most influential of liberal theorists of nationalism is Professor Michael Ignatieff. As you might expect of a liberal, he rejects ethnic nationalism because it suggests "that an individual's deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen."

What he proposes instead is a "civic nationalism" which he describes as follows:

According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community.

This is basically the "official" nationalism we have today in most Western countries. The idea is that we are united by a common commitment to liberal political values and practices.

The advantage of this civic form of nationalism for liberals is that it is something, in theory at least, that we can rationally and voluntarily consent to. It's a form of community that we choose for ourselves. It seems to fit in well, therefore, with liberal first principles.

In theory, nobody is excluded from the civic nation by inherited factors, such as their ethnicity. As long as you agree to uphold liberal political practices and values you can choose to belong.

Radical criticism

From the conservative point of view, civic nationalism is a very radical imposition on society. Its adoption means that the political class no longer seeks to preserve the traditional nation. In the civic nationalist view, anyone can be a member of the nation, so there can be no principled objections to ethnically diverse mass immigration.

Conservatives are therefore inclined to look upon civic nationalist politicians as being at the radical end of the political debate. We don't understand why the more moderate liberal politicians don't stand up and oppose the civic nationalists.
But we've misunderstood things. The civic nationalists are actually, in terms of liberalism, not at the radical end of the spectrum. They are, in fact, strongly criticised by more radical liberals for not going far enough.

In a 1996 edition of Critical Review, the editor, Jeffrey Friedman, surveyed the arguments of the more purist and radical liberals. He summarises their basic objections to civic nationalism as follows.

For liberals what is important are the universal qualities which define our humanity such as our "ability to choose and will freely".

Therefore, our moral obligations can't be limited to some subset of humans, but must apply to humanity in general. Civic nationalism violates this principle of liberalism, however, by claiming that we have a special obligation to fellow citizens.

Civic nationalism is therefore inegalitarian. In contrast,

A truly liberal society would encompass all human beings. It would extend any welfare benefits to all humankind, not just to those born within arbitrary borders; and far from prohibiting the importing of "foreign" workers or goods they have produced, or the exporting of jobs to them across national boundaries, it would encourage the free flow of labor, the goods, and capital ...

To put this simply, the more radical liberal attitude is that it is not only wrong to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, it is also wrong to discriminate on the basis of citizenship.

Such liberals believe that we are morally compelled to accept open borders, and that we should even encourage the export of jobs and the the import of foreign workers.

How influential is this more radical version of liberalism? On the left, it now seems close to being an orthodoxy. For instance, the former Labor Party Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, is strongly against the idea of civic nationalism. He has sharply criticised those whose "exclusiveness" relies on,

constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is "citizenship". Who is in and who is out.

In fact, it's possible to understand Australian politics in terms of this division between "conservative" civic nationalist liberals on the right and radical open borders liberals on the left.

The right-wing Liberal Party are civic nationalists because they still accept the legitimacy of the citizenship distinction. This means that although they support multiculturalism and high levels of foreign immigration, they still take seriously the task of enforcing the boundaries of citizenship, for instance, by acting against illegal immigration.

In contrast, left liberals in Australia typically portray these efforts to maintain citizenship distinctions as being grossly immoral. It is nearly always assumed in a middle-class liberal paper like the Melbourne Age that the "moral" position is the one which undercuts citizenship distinctions in favour of open borders.

Special consideration

Friedman himself seems sympathetic to the radical view that we don't have a particular obligation to fellow citizens. His argument for this, though, actually betrays a weakness in the liberal position as a whole. He writes,

We would be miserable if we could not treat our friends, spouses, and siblings with special consideration; but is this necessarily true of our conationals?

This argument betrays what liberals are really committing themselves to. For if it's morally wrong to feel a special connection and a special obligation to a particular "subset" of humans, then it's wrong as a matter of principle to favour our own immediate family.

Few people, though, could really put this principle into practice (Professor Peter Singer famously tried and failed). So Jeffrey Friedman applies an unprincipled exception. He simply asserts that what we can do to our conationals we could never do to our family and friends.

Conservatives would turn this argument around and apply it consistently. The fact is that we do treat our own family with special consideration because we are more closely connected and related to it than to others.

Similarly we are more closely connected to fellow members of our ethnic group than to others, an ethnic group being like a very large extended family, related not only by culture, language and history, but also by "biology", better expressed as "kinship".

Therefore, traditional ethnic nationalism reflects the "special consideration" we apply even today in our daily lives. Liberal nationalism, though, leads to the idea that logically we shouldn't have particular attachments at all: a principle which seems unpalatable and unworkable even to the most radical liberals.

As I have tried to explain in this article, though, the difficulty for conservatives is not so much asserting the greater consistency of our beliefs. The difficulty is that we don't fully grasp just how far the political class has moved away from traditional nationalism.

What we see as a radical civic nationalism is actually the more right-wing or "conservative" position on the spectrum of liberal belief. We need, therefore, to stop looking to right-wing liberals for a solution, and instead begin to reassert our own conservative principles within the political debate.

(First published at Conservative Central, 14/05/2005)

What makes a European?

Should Turkey be allowed to join the European Union? The answer depends on what you think forms a European identity.

Conservatives believe that a communal identity is formed by ties of ethnicity, such as a common ancestry, history, religion, language and culture. In Europe there do exist ethnic differences, which is why conservatives oppose the idea of merging different nations into a single European super state.

However, it is possible to recognise common ethnic origins across Europe. For instance, languages are different, but nearly all derive from a common Indo-European root. Similarly, there are differences of race, but also similarities, reflecting again a common origin. And although there are different churches, they share a common Christian heritage. And so on.

Therefore, it does make sense to talk of people not only having a national identity, but a European one as well. In fact, most of us know immediately what people mean if they talk of someone being "European" or of a nation being a "European" country.

If we think about a European identity in this way then we have to answer no to Turkey joining the European Union. Turkey simply lacks the ties of ethnicity binding it to Europe.

This point has been made, surprisingly enough, by Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. On what is purportedly his own website he has declared that Turkey should not join Europe because,

Turkey is a tree, whose roots are in Asia, and only its branch touches Europe. It is an Islamic state of a Sunni denomination, with oriental traditions, customs, history, culture, attitude and taste ... Turkey historically did not look to Europe but was an arena for expansion and conquests ...

Admitting Turkey to the European Union is like an attempt to transplant a human organ into the body of another person with a different blood group, and they never have any biological compatibility. Their only link is that they live in opposite blocks across the street.

The Catholic Church has also supported a more traditional view of European identity. Cardinal Ratzinger, the most senior theologian of the Catholic Church, told a French newspaper that,

In the course of history, Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent contrast to Europe. Making the two continents identical would be a mistake. It would mean a loss of richness, the disappearance of the cultural to the benefit of economics.

The cardinal also noted that the Turkish Ottoman Empire had long fought to conquer parts of Europe (more on this later). He suggested that rather than seeking to be part of Europe Turkey "could try to set up a cultural continent with neighbouring Arab countries and become the leading figure of a culture with its own identity."

So what do liberals think?

Liberals don't define a European identity in the same way as conservatives. For reasons explained elsewhere, liberals have rejected the idea of ethnic identity. Instead, they believe that being "European" means sharing certain political values and practices. For liberals, our identity is based on a shared commitment to the liberal political order.

Liberals therefore have given a "maybe" to the idea of Turkey joining Europe. They will agree as long as Turkey can prove itself to be committed to liberal political values.

That's why when liberals discuss the issue of Turkey joining the EU they often debate whether Turkey is sufficiently secular, or feminist, or whether it will accept the Kurds as part of a multicultural state. It is these things which define, for a liberal, whether Turkey is European or not.

A meddlesome cleric

The liberal view is obviously the one which dominates in the mainstream media. It has, though, a number of questionable repercussions.

The liberal view, for example, makes it difficult to defend the existing culture and heritage of a community. You can see this at work in a New York Times editorial criticising Cardinal Ratzinger for his views on Turkey.

The editorial called the cardinal a "meddlesome cleric" and complained that,

he and his fellow doctrinal conservatives worry most about secularization and loss of Christian identity, both of which are implied if Turkey joins the union.

Most people would think it normal for a Christian leader to oppose a loss of Christian identity. But according to the New York Times editorial the cardinal is at fault for elevating "personal beliefs over universal values".

This, then, is the radical implication of the liberal view: a longstanding and deeply rooted religious tradition is no longer considered a legitimate part of a public, communal life. It is relegated to the status of "personal belief". Liberal political values, on the other hand, are treated not just as a personal belief. They are instead universal values to be applied everywhere and to everyone.

This assertion of the dominance of liberal politics is not the only way that liberals have sought to deal with questions of ethnicity. At times, leading liberals have simply reinterpreted history to make the ethnic differences between Turkey and Europe less apparent.

President Chirac of France, for instance, declared earlier this year that "the roots of Europe are as much Moslem as Christian". If true, it would obviously lessen the ethnic divide between Turkey and Europe, but it's absurdly false.

Then there are the thoughts of Chris Patten, the EU Commissioner for External Affairs. In a speech in May he spoke of the Turkish military incursions into Europe as follows,

At one time, particularly when Western Europe was a more savage place, Turkey and the Turks were the very incarnation of the threatening outsider ... We've moved on from that ...

Patten recognises the troubled history, but makes it seem as if Europe and not Turkey was the savage aggressor.

This is a foretaste of what might happen to the presentation of European history if Turkey actually does join the EU. The historical record is that the Turks seized Belgrade in 1521 and conquered Hungary in 1528. In 1529 they laid siege to Vienna.

Prior to the siege the Turks had slaughtered the inhabitants of Pest, and they also slaughtered a column of 4000 elderly men, women and children leaving Vienna itself, impaling some of their captives on stakes. The Viennese resisted over twenty assaults on their city before the Turks retreated.

The Turks set fire to Moscow in 1571, capturing tens of thousands of slaves, and invaded Austria again in 1594.

As late as 1664 Turkey achieved control over Transylvania and in 1683 Vienna was once again placed under siege and was only relieved when the Polish king left his own nation undefended and attacked the Turks outside the walls of Vienna.

For most Europeans this defence of Europe against the Ottoman Turks is something to be positively identified with as part of a shared history. But if Turkey joins the EU, history will no longer be able to play this role in a common culture.

At best history will be told from a "neutral" perspective, designed not to offend anyone's sensibilities. At worst history will be "Pattenised" and reinterpreted to best integrate the former "outsiders".

Are there limits?

One final consequence of the liberal view ought to be considered. Chris Patten at one point says,

Is Turkey European? If aspiration is any guide, the answer would have to be a resounding yes.

This statement is a reminder that for a liberal it's possible for a country to "aspire" to be European, as being European means having a liberal political order.

At one level, this might sound appealing, as it makes things seem open, rather than fixed. It brings with it, though, a problem: it means that potentially any country can become European. This makes the liberal definition of what is European seem too open, to the point at which it begins to lose stability or useful meaning.

Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times bureau chief, has already drawn out the implications of this point. He has noted that many countries could reach a satisfactory level "of political and economic democracy" for EU membership. This means that,

Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and possibly Russia could also become candidates. In the distant future, so might Israel, a Palestinian state, or even Morocco.

Why not Morocco? If you hold to the liberal view potentially any country could apply to join the EU, even if they have no connection of either geography or ethnicity to Europe. Why not one day Uganda or Nigeria or Syria?

When someone like Stephen Kinzer is willing to consider even Morocco as a European country, it's time to reconsider the way that liberals are choosing to define communal identity.

The liberal definition ultimately collapses because it's unable to draw meaningful boundaries. The conservative definition works better because it recognises what is particular about the existence of Europe and the Europeans, not just in relation to politics, but to a much wider sphere of people, culture and history.

(First published at Conservative Central, 24/09/2004)

Why go crazy over Palin?

The response to Sarah Palin is sometimes startling. There are some on the left who seem to literally hate her for being white and Christian. She is also routinely condemned by left-wing feminists as a misogynistic, anti-feminist patriarchal stooge. She seems also to bring out the elitist strain in the modern left: we are supposed to feel superior by looking down on her as an ordinary, unthinking, unsophisticated white person.

Cintra Wilson is guilty of all these things. She wrote a column on Sarah Palin which included the following:

Like many people I thought, "Damn, a hyperconservative ... Christian Stepford wife" ... Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms ... The throat she's so hot to cut is that of all American women ... the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House ... is akin to ideological brain rape ... I feel it is really time for women to be angry ... Not just with old white Christian patriarchs and their hopelessly calcified, religiously condoned misogyny, but also with the self-abnegating, submissive female Uncle Tommies ...

We must regard Sarah Palin as ... an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boys network ... The Republicans are in effect saying ... You don't like thinking. Here's an It Girl vice president who is easy on the eyes, you stodgy old white baby boomer ... Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty ...

And on and on it goes. Cintra Wilson manages to fit in negative references to whites; attacks on Palin as a woman-hating stooge; elitist sneers at Palin's "backwater" lifestyle; and undisguised hostility toward Christianity.

Alan Howe writes an opinion page for the Melbourne Herald Sun. He was less vitriolic than Cintra Wilson in his comments on Palin, but he followed the same themes:

we should all be very afraid ... Palin would bring to the White House not just the usual baggage of the deeply conservative American rural constituency, but a fearsome religious commitment ... Palin favours the language of ... inarticulate gum-chewing teenagers ...

A picture beneath Howe's column of Sarah Palin sitting on a bearskin rug was captioned:

Unlike the sometimes deadly evangelical white Homo Sapiens, the endangered grizzly is native to Alaska.

Finally, there's our own Catherine Deveny, regular columnist for the Melbourne Age. This is her considered view of Sarah Palin:

She's the closest thing Republican stragegists could find to a man with a vagina ... New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd likened the Sarah Palin story to the chick flick Miss Congeniality. I think of it more as an in-flight movie. Like Dumb and Dumber ...

The running mates look like an old rich bloke with erectile dysfunction and his white trash trophy wife ... the comedy writer in me really, really hopes Palin gets in ... God-fearing, anti-abortion, book-banning, homophobic, white trash moron. I'd love to see the White House lawn covered in cars up on blocks.

... like it or not, she'll be used as an example of a female politician. Regardless of the fact she should be filed under dangerous white trash fuelled by fear, propelled by power and supported by halfwits ...

Amazingly, having attacked Palin for her race and her class, Deveny goes on to write:

We're at the mercy of the morons. People who vote for race, gender, class ...

She then goes for an extra dose of hypocrisy by writing:

Sarah Palin personifies the cockiness of ignorance. Bertrand Russell said: "Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts".

Are Catherine Deveny's columns unedited? She writes a ranting, vitriolic attack on Sarah Palin and finishes by claiming that she, unlike Palin, is wisely full of doubts.

The message we get from these kind of columns on Palin is that there are leftists who hate whites and Christians, who are elitist, and who view Sarah Palin as an anti-feminist conservative.

Now, if you are white or Christian or anti-feminist or conservative or if you live an ordinary suburban or rural lifestyle, you might therefore conclude that Sarah Palin is your dream candidate.

I don't think anyone should rush to this conclusion. It's not exactly clear yet where Palin stands on important issues. However, there are reasons to believe that she is not, in her politics, what the left believes her to be.

For instance, it's unlikely that Palin is anti-feminist. She belongs to a group called Feminists for Life; she has written positivley about Title IX legislation, a feminist affirmative action law; and she has spoken of her candidacy as "shattering the glass ceiling" for women.

Camille Paglia, a leading academic feminist in the US, is excited by Sarah Palin's brand of feminism. Having watched a speech by Palin, Paglia tells us that:

I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist.

In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

Palin might not follow all the usual patterns of an established left-wing feminism, but this doesn't necessarily make her a traditionalist.

It would be a mistake to support Sarah Palin on the basis of left-wing denunciations of her as a conservative. We'll have to see how she performs as a politician, what political positions she takes and what larger political effect her candidacy has - and on this basis decide how well she represents a genuine conservatism.

A history of crossed lines

I had dinner with friends last week and caught up with an academic couple I've known for years. They are both solidly left-liberal in their politics, though traditional in their family life.

The conversation turned to the issue of the European Union. The left-liberal couple didn't express opposition to the EU, but they did take the view that some parts of Europe had a closer affinity than others and were therefore more suited to be joined together.

I wanted to see if I could push their Euroscepticism a bit further, so I pointed out that there was support for extending the borders of the European Union much further, to Turkey and even to northern African countries. The lack of natural affinity would then be even more marked.

Their response? They laughed dismissively and claimed that it would never happen. The same thing happened when I followed up by mentioning plans to form a Pacific Union, modelled on the EU, in our own region. They knew far less of these plans than I did and wouldn't entertain the idea that such a plan would ever go ahead.

It was as if they had drawn a line in the sand within which liberalism would be contained.

The problem is that this line in the sand is imaginary. There is nothing within liberal politics to keep it within certain limits. Over time, liberalism will be taken to its logical end point.

The left-liberal couple somehow wanted to reconcile contradictory things. They wanted to continue to comfortably identify with left-liberalism, perhaps as this serves a particular function for them, as a marker of both class status and membership of a progressive moral elite. They also wanted, though, to set limits on what would be lost to a liberal politics - they didn't want natural, traditional, historic boundaries to be entirely overthrown.

This just won't work. What is really needed are people who are so committed to a realistic view of where things are headed, that they don't dodge a recognition of what is going to be lost. Such people will at least avoid contradictions; they will either stick with liberalism knowing what the long-term costs will be, or they will choose to give up the comforts of a liberal identity in order to help conserve significant aspects of their own tradition.

Cut adrift in Harlem

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

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

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

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

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

But as time passed problems emerged. There was crime:

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

There was jealous hostility from black women:

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

There were political resentments:

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

There was violence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

She found herself friendless:

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

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

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

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

She concludes:

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

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

Harlem is no place for a woman without male protection.

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

Hat tip: Pilgrimage to Montsalvat

We can be better than neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The weirdness of the American idea?

How do American Jews form their identity? David Samuels believes there is a tension in the process. He thinks that most American Jews still have a traditional view of identity: that it is tied to an historic, ongoing ethnic tradition. The mainstream American identity, though, he takes to be modernist: it is based on relinquishing the past in order to be a self-made, future oriented individualist.

Samuels writes that there is a creative tension in trying to reconcile the two aspects of American Jewish identity; in maintaining the traditional and ethnic, whilst identifying with a mainstream identity in which heritage has been dissolved.

Samuels' argument has its strengths and weaknesses. The strong point is that Samuels has captured the point of transition between a traditional understanding of identity and the liberal modernist one.

In the past, communal identity was based largely on ethnicity: on membership of a shared ethnic tradition, which might involve a common ancestry, religion, language, culture, history and so on.

This kind of identity, though, was undermined by liberal modernism. In part, this is because liberalism has taken individual autonomy to be the highest good. Ethnicity is not something that is self-determined: it is inherited and not chosen by us as individuals. It therefore stands in conflict with autonomy theory.

As a result, liberal moderns have either treated ethnicity as a trap or prison from which the individual must be liberated, or else they have thought of ethnic identity as something that individuals might construct for themselves as part of a personal narrative (which ignores or denies the real, historic, objective basis of ethnicity).

Samuels doesn't connect the modern view of identity to liberalism. He sees it as a peculiarly Christian thing. This has one positive outcome: it means that he, as a Jew, feels sufficiently distant from the "Christian" mainstream identity to express his doubts about it. But there's a negative consequence too of seeing modernism as a peculiarly Christian affair: Samuels doesn't seem to be aware of just how deeply he himself as a Jew is influenced by liberal modernist assumptions about autonomy and identity.

Here is Samuels on the difficulty of combining a traditional and modern understanding of identity:

If Americans are self-made people who embrace an imagined future in order to escape the burdens of the past, American Jews seek to have their cake and eat it too by embracing the future-oriented American idea without relinquishing their historically bound identity as Jews. While I don't think that the American and the Jewish identity principles are always necessarily opposed, I do think that keeping both ideas in one's head at one time can be the source of a tremendous amount of creative tension.

It is also inherently deceptive, in the sense that one is quite often signaling to others that one has agreed to dissolve one's particular heritage and historically bound point of view into a common Christian-inflected, highly individualistic and alienating, yet incredibly productive future-oriented social whole that most American Jews view with a high degree of distance and skepticism. The only real parallel for the ungracious refusal of large numbers of American Jews to buy into the full weirdness and wonder and scariness of the American idea is the experience and behavior of blacks ...

Note the terms in which Samuels describes the mainstream identity: the aim is to be "self-made" (i.e. self-created or self-determined), which then makes the past not a positive source of identity but a "burden" (an impediment, a restriction). This is identity seen in terms of liberal autonomy theory.

And how does Samuels, raised within a more traditional ethnic identity, portray the mainstream, liberal identity? He is not altogether complimentary: although he describes the mainstream identity as being incredibly productive, he also thinks that it is weird, scary, alienating and individualistic. He believes that most American Jews view it with "a high degree of distance and scepticism".

Samuels has written a story based on the life of James Hogue, a con man who lied his way into Princeton. Samuels draws on liberal autonomy theory when linking Hogue to the mainstream American identity:

... I see James Hogue as a representative American who embodied the abstract logic of self-invention and being born-again, and took those ideas to an uncomfortable extreme. One purpose of my text is to create sympathy for Hogue's victims without denying Hogue his actual achievements or reducing his personal autonomy and the strangeness of his choices to a bunch of symptoms for which Prozac or some newfangled anti-psychotic pill might be usefully described.

Similarly Barack Obama is described this way:

I see him as a representative American - a self-made man, part con artist, part performer, living in an imaginary future that will make him and his audience whole.

Samuels is enough of a liberal modernist to reject the ethnic nationalism on which Israel is based. In correspondence with an Israeli Jew he writes:

The other reason this conversation scares you is that you are an Israeli, meaning that you are a product of a nineteenth century ideology that believes that blood, soil and language must be unified in order to form a healthy, unified self ... Israelis can't help but believe ... that the mark of being a healthy Jew is to be a member of a free nation living in its own land.

Here is Samuels arguing that American Jews don't follow the modernist line consistently - again because they don't follow the principle of autonomy:

Why do they (Jews) insist on converting their goyish wives or children's children to their religion instead of simply letting them choose to be whoever they want to be?

And some more on the difference between the liberal American mainstream identity and the more conservative Jewish one:

Americans believe, very deeply, in the value and necessity of abolishing the past and living in the future. Americans believe that each individual has the capacity for finding God's grace within him or herself, and can only find it by being born again --- independent of family history and ties. While you don't have to be a Christian to accept historically peculiar American ideas about the individual, the past and the future, it is hard to ignore the fact that these ideas are Christian in their history and, I would argue, in their essence.

The stories Jews tell ourselves are different. We tell ourselves stories about our unbroken connection to a common set of tribal ancestors to whom all Jews are connected by blood. We tell ourselves about the unbroken chain of interpretation that connects today's Torah sages to the medieval commentators to the sages of the Gemarra and Mishna to the revelation given to Moses on Har Sinai. We tell ourselves stories about our survival as a people through thousands of years of exile and persecution in which we still claim to be able to see the hand of God.

Similarly:

The ways that Jews see the individual and his or her place in the world contradicts core American beliefs about abolishing the past, living in the future, and making yourself up from scratch. Sometimes we acknowledge this contradiction to ourselves, and sometimes we pretend that we think and see the world the same way as everyone else.

But how does Samuels reconcile all this? He is clearly deeply influenced by liberal autonomy theory. Does he then reject his own Jewish ethnic identity as a "burden" to be cast aside?

He doesn't. He finds a way to preserve it within the terms of autonomy theory:

I am Jewish, not because I think things are rosy, but because I chose to be Jewish, because I feel lucky to carry the historical weight of 3500 years of contradiction and argument and exile, and because there is something irreducibly slippery and human and contemporary about having to be two or more things at the same time.

So his Jewish identity is legitimate because he chose it, and because it is complex, multiple and fluid - and therefore something difficult and challenging for the individual to negotiate (which preserves the idea that it's something the individual is constructing for himself, or at least participating in the construction of).

This might seem like a useful "out" - a way to stay Jewish whilst still holding to liberal orthodoxy. The problem is, though, that it doesn't provide a strong basis in the long run for a Jewish identity. Is it just a matter of an arbitrary individual choice? And why not find a complex identity to negotiate somewhere else? I just can't see generations of Jewish kids opting in for the reasons outlined by Samuels.

Liberal autonomy theory played a major role in undermining the mainstream heritage; it is likely to do the same if adopted elsewhere, no matter how cleverly Samuels attempts to fit his own ethnic identity within it.

The best of both worlds

Is the aim of my life to be autonomous? Is this what makes me free? If so, there must be no significant aspect of my life which I cannot choose for myself.

This is a problem when it comes to ethnicity. Ethnicity appears to be inherited as a tradition rather than being self-determined. Therefore, if I want to be autonomous I have to either "liberate" myself from the "prison" of ethnicity; or else I have to think of ethnicity as being something that I myself might construct - as something individual and subjective, a "personal narrative".

But is ethnicity really experienced by individuals as something negative, as an impediment to freedom? And is it really experienced as a self-constructed narrative, rather than as a real, objective tradition?

If the answer to both questions is yes, then how do we explain the case of Nirpal Dhaliwal. He is a man of Indian descent raised in Great Britain. He stayed away from India for many years due to its economic backwardness. But now that it is more economically advanced, he believes he can enjoy there both the modern lifestyle trappings as well as the sense of ethnic attachment:

So many Indians like me, born and raised in the West, are returning, wanting to reconnect with their motherland as much as seek their fortunes ...

It is now a society where we can be as modern and cosmopolitan as we want while immersing ourselves in its ancient culture.

India wields an irresistible ancestral pull - and is now the place where we can most truly be ourselves.

If autonomy theory were right, then Dhaliwal would experience India's ancient culture and ancestral pull as an oppression. He would feel burdened. Instead, Dhaliwal feels most true to himself when connected to his ethnic homeland.

Then there is the case of Melbourne artist Michael Peck. In a recent newspaper article, Peck explained the inspiration for his paintings:

Peck said he wanted his work to convey the experience of refugees and migrants trying to fit into a new culture.

"The figures in my paintings are there, but they always seem out of place ..."

Peck began exploring the idea after a difficult year in London. While there he taught art to underprivileged migrant children and found many were "lost" because they lacked a connection to their cultural roots ...

"Most of my work focuses on the idea of cultural displacement or dislocation, the concept of identity and how our identity is formed ..." (Diamond Valley Leader, June 18, 2008)

Again, if autonomy theory were right, then refugees ought not to feel lost at all, but unburdened. They should either experience a liberation from their cultural roots, or else control the process in terms of their personal narrative.

Instead, we are told that the refugees feel disconnected, lost and out of place.

Shouldn't then the aim be to enable people, as far as possible, to continue to enjoy a connection to their own ethnic tradition?

This requires a rethink of autonomy theory. It doesn't work to make autonomy an overriding principle in life; this doesn't bring either freedom or authenticity, but rather loss and displacement. A better option would be to think of autonomy as one good in life, to be balanced intelligently with other goods.

A hollow identity?

The nineteenth century liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill, once wrote that,

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his life plan for him, has no need for any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.

The irony is that Mill was merely echoing here an entrenched liberal orthodoxy, namely that to be fully human (and not like the apes) we have to be self-created by our own will and reason (rather than letting the world choose our "life plan".)

As I've noted before, the idea that we should be self-created by our individual will and reason sounds nice. But it has some radical consequences when taken logically to its full extent.

It means, for instance, that those things that we inherit, rather than choose for ourselves, become illegitimate. And this includes those things which modern liberals dismiss as a merely "biological destiny", namely our sex and our race.

Our sex and our race are physical things which can't be altered by any force of our own will (sex change surgery and Michael Jackson aside). Therefore, for liberals the two things which are most strictly forbidden as factors influencing human relationships and human identity are race and gender.

For liberals, to allow race or gender to count in any important way - to "discriminate" on the basis of race or gender - is logically (in terms of liberal principles) seen as a grave moral offence.

Abbott & national identity

I was reminded of this when reading a recent speech by a leading member of Australia's Liberal Party Government, Tony Abbott.

Abbott is one of the more "conservative" leaders of the right-liberal Liberal Party. Yet, when discussing the national identity of the founder of the Liberal Party, Sir Robert Menzies, he followed the usual liberal orthodoxy by denying that race had anything to do with national identity. He claimed that,

Although the English-speaking countries have handled difference badly (like everyone else but generally less so), race has rarely been central to any of the English-speaking national identities.

Starting from Roman times, England was one of the first "melting pot" nations. More than any other, the English-speaking culture is prepared to take people from anywhere on their own terms. No one who can speak English is really a foreigner in any of the English speaking countries.

The problem here is not just the historical inaccuracy (the main waves of settlers into England in historical times were Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Danes, who were not dissimilar in race. To call this a "melting-pot" is like considering a group of New Zealand settlers into Australia as creating a "melting-pot" nation).

The major problem is that once you dismiss race entirely, as Abbott does, you have undermined traditional nationalism. Nations were traditionally founded on an ethnic unity, in which people were connected by ties of ancestry (ie a real biological kinship marked by a common race), as well as a shared history, language, religion and culture.

Abbott has jettisoned the very idea of traditional nationalism, even its historical existence, because he wants, in his own words, to found national identity not on race but on values.

This is why the only thing he really insists on is that people share a common language, as this is all that is required for them to participate in the shared values which are to form the new basis of national unity and national identity.

Civic nationalism

The kind of values which liberals usually put forward as a basis of national identity are civic ones.

A leading spokesman for a civic based nationalism is Professor Michael Ignatieff. He has written that civic nationalism envisions the nation "as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values."

In a sense, liberals like Professor Ignatieff are saying that what will bind us together as a nation is our shared commitment to ... the liberal political order. Which means that the phrases "I am Australian" and "I am a liberal" are closely interlinked.

This is a very convenient way for liberals to define national identity. If you think it over, it veers toward a certain kind of political totalitarianism - at least in the sense that a certain understanding of politics is taking over and coming to totally dominate forms of self-identity which used to be non-political and more varied in character.

There are other significant problems with basing nationalism on shared political values. One of these problems is well known to the civic nationalists themselves. This is that civic nationalism is based on more shallow forms of attachment than the traditional form of nationalism.

For instance, Professor West of Suffolk College has defined the strength of ethnic national identity as follows:

... the sense of identity is so strong that it is an inseparable part of the personalities of most of the individuals in the group. People are born and raised to conceive of themselves as being a part of the nation, and rarely lose that self-conception in the course of their lives. There is a feeling of pride and a deep sense of loyalty associated with it.

Michael Ignatieff has conceded that this "psychology of belonging" of traditional nationalism has "greater depth than civic nationalism's".

Similarly, two academics from the University of Melbourne, Brian Gallagan and Winsome Roberts, have recently written a book titled Australian Citizenship in which they worry that civic nationalism is too insubstantial.

They pull no punches, describing an Australian identity defined solely in terms of shared political institutions and values as "hollow, lacking in cultural richness and human content." They talk also in similar terms of "an empty and flaccid citizenship based on abstract principles that lack the inspirational power to represent what it means to be Australian."

A parochial distinction?

Civic nationalism has a further defect. Even though civic nationalism doesn't discriminate on the basis of race, it does discriminate. It draws a line between people who are citizens, and therefore part of the nation, and those who aren't.

This is a problem for liberals, who believe that any kind of discrimination which impedes the individual will is wrong. Therefore, it's not hard to find liberals who find even civic nationalism to be morally indefensible, and who want to collapse all distinctions of national identity.

Former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, is one such liberal who angrily opposes even civic forms of nationalism. He has thundered against those whose "exclusiveness" relies on,

constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it is "citizenship". Who is in and who is out.

Then there are the views of Age newspaper columnist Sharon Gray. For her, even a nationalism which is similar to supporting your own football team is too much. She writes,

Although no one chooses one's nationality at birth, patriotism is held up as the Holy Grail, but I'm not convinced of its sanctity. [Note the liberal objection to a form of identity which we don't choose.]

Patriotism means you define one group as preferable to another. You will do more for them than for others. You want your group to win, which means you want other groups to lose. It breeds a football team mentality, which seems childish in this shrinking world.

There is, in other words, a tension within the theory of civic nationalism. Civic nationalism puts liberalism at the heart of national identity, but liberalism rejects the idea of any discrimination limiting to individual will. And civic nationalism, though more open to individual will than ethnic nationalism, does still discriminate.

The further "progress" of liberalism is therefore likely to undermine the moral authority of civic nationalism.

The challenge

Of course, none of this would be such a problem if Western societies weren't dominated by liberalism in the first place.

The older and deeper forms of national identity have only been rejected because they don't conform to a political theory, which itself is simply accepted unquestioningly.

The response of conservatives must therefore be, not only to point out the flaws of civic nationalism, but to begin to challenge the underlying principles of liberalism itself.

Does Catherine Deveny embarrass the left?

The destructive, self-loathing, suicidal aspect of left-liberalism has never been better revealed than in the columns of Catherine Deveny.

Deveny writes a regular column for The Age, a newspaper which claims to be Melbourne's quality broadsheet. Her latest effort is an argument against the baby bonus, a payment of $5000 to mothers on the birth of a child.

This is Deveny's gentle introduction to the issue:

From July 1 our Government will be bribing nice white, or almost white, women with $5000 to have a baby. When I say white or almost white, I'm referring to breeders born here or breeders deemed by the Government as acceptable to live here.

Deveny is shocked that white women might be encouraged to have children. It would be better, she thinks, if they were paid not to have kids. Why would you encourage white women to have families of their own when there are non-white families who could be brought here? The answer must be the evil racism of whites:

I see the baby bonus as an extension of the White Australia Policy ... What I don't understand is why the Government is trying so hard to get the Aussie girls breeding when there are hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers with young children gagging to live in Australia ... No one has any answers for me. Here's my answer. Racism.

Deveny herself is a white woman with three children. Is she therefore an evil white breeder? Her answer is very close to a yes:

To be honest, had I known about the environment what I know now, I never would have had three children ... I've met many people who've decided not to have kids ... Whatever the reasons, good on them. Give them a "no baby bonus" I say.

Having just made clear her opposition to family formation, Deveny then offers advice to the Government on how best to support families. Despite being an anti-market leftist, she wants family roles to be commodified:

If government was committed to families, it would be setting up low-cost, high-quality child care in conjunction with fully paid parenting and paid grandparenting ...

Read the whole piece if you want to get the ugly tone of it. Two things are particularly striking about the article. First, it doesn't matter to Deveny that both major parties are committed to very high levels of non-white immigration. In her mind, whites are the dominant oppressor group and therefore society is structured in a systemic way to maintain their privilege. Ideology trumps reality.

The second striking thing is the disdain and contempt for her own coethnics that this ideology produces. She is troubled by the thought of white babies, despite having several herself. Why would any self-respecting white person sign on to such a self-destructive leftism?

What's really happening in Deveny's mind? I suspect that she has absorbed the theory that a white ethnicity was artificially constructed for the purpose of power and domination. Whiteness is therefore to be treated as a uniquely evil phenomenon.

It's not a difficult theory to challenge. It's much more likely that the different Western ethnic groups developed over time in much the same way that the non-Western ones did. In both cases, ethnicity was valued primarily as a source of identity and meaning. Although Western ethnic groups have dominated others at various periods of history, so too have non-Western groups been dominant over others.

Deveny is an end product of an unlikely ideology. The first impression on reading her column is a sense of what is unhealthy and unviable in her mentality. It's difficult to miss, too, the inconsistency in what she herself has chosen to do (have a family) and what she suggests it is politically correct to do (remain childless).

It seems reasonable to doubt the moral authority of a writer like Deveny and to choose instead to subject her political beliefs to critical scrutiny.