Tolkien & the Sarehole Mill

Tolkien spent part of his childhood in Sarehole, England. He later wrote:

I could draw you a map of every inch of it. I loved it with an (intense) love...I was brought up in considerable poverty, but I was happy running about in that country.

One of the features of Sarehole is an old mill:

Tolkien had a happy childhood because he was blessed with a love of the beautiful countryside he inhabited.

I sometimes think that this is the true privilege: to feel closely connected to people and place, to family and nation, to the arts and culture, to masculinity or femininity, to the beauty of women, to one's history and heritage, to a church and to nature.

We lose sight of this when privilege is argued over endlessly in terms of degrees of political or economic status.

I do want traditionalists to contest for political and economic power, as without this we will remain forever marginalised. However, when it comes to what we use that power for, it helps to remember, I think, what true privilege means - that it is not status or power for its own sake, but for the sake of those things we feel meaningfully connected to and which inspire our love and commitment.

What do we think of this?

Below is a short, well-produced film about growing economic inequality in America. It's worth the five minutes it takes to watch it. I'm not sure how I feel about the message. On the one hand, it shows that for all the liberal talk about equality, liberal societies are becoming more unequal. On the other hand, I dislike the idea of statist redistribution of wealth. I particularly dislike statist wealth distribution which encourages people to make poor life choices.

Still, my ideal society would not be as economically unequal as current day America. But how then do you achieve a more even spread of wealth, without unjustly taking wealth from those who own it (and without discouraging people from creating wealth in the first place)?

The true history of the West

There's a post at American Renaissance worth reading which briefly summarises the challenges faced by the West over the past 1500 years. In the year 1900, it is true, the West dominated the world - a fact which has helped to feed a view of the West as being historically privileged.

However, if you go back further in history you find that the West has had to fight for its survival against powerful aggressors. If you're not already aware of this history, I encourage you to read the American Renaissance piece, as well as my own posts on the Harvest of the Steppe and White Gold.

I have only one criticism of the American Renaissance piece. It ends by explaining the problems facing the West today in terms of the rise of cultural Marxism. As I've explained previously, I'm open to learning more about the influence of the academics associated with cultural Marxism, but my reading to this point doesn't support the idea that they were a key influence. Explaining Western decline in terms of cultural Marxism also has the danger of leaving the politics of right-liberals unexamined.

Let me give some examples. Traditional Australia began to be dismantled from the early 1940s and was certainly in full swing by the late 1960s. The men who did the job in the early 1940s were part of the Labour left. The radicals of the time to their left were not cultural Marxists but your everyday Marxist-Leninist Marxists. The men who finished the job in the late 1960s were Liberal Party businessmen types.

Or look at Australia's contribution to 1960s radicalism. The most famous figures contributed by Australia, such as Richard Neville and Germaine Greer, were part of the Sydney "Push" - a loosely organised libertarian group whose politics were most influenced by a Scottish philosopher called John Anderson.

And if we look at feminism we find that it was alive and kicking by the mid-1800s, a long time before cultural Marxism was supposed to have gained its influence over the left in the 1960s and 70s.

Interesting feminist admission

I wrote a post last month called The Elite Consensus in which I made the following claim:

What matters in life? There seems to be a consensus amongst the social elite, whether on the right or left, when it comes to this question. It is assumed that the real aim of life is to make yourself in the market. What is considered important morally is that nobody be disadvantaged by factors outside their control, such as their class, race or sex, when it comes to workforce participation.

At one level the left criticises the free market. But at a deeper level they see the ultimate aim in life in terms of participation in the very same market.

I was interested, and a little surprised, to see a feminist in The Guardian make a similar point. Nancy Fraser begins by arguing that feminism had two possible futures:

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the movement for women's liberation pointed simultaneously to two different possible futures. In a first scenario, it prefigured a world in which gender emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social solidarity; in a second, it promised a new form of liberalism, able to grant women as well as men the goods of individual autonomy, increased choice, and meritocratic advancement. Second-wave feminism was in this sense ambivalent. Compatible with either of two different visions of society, it was susceptible to two different historical elaborations.

As I see it, feminism's ambivalence has been resolved in recent years in favour of the second, liberal-individualist scenario – but not because we were passive victims of neoliberal seductions. On the contrary, we ourselves contributed three important ideas to this development.

Personally I just don't see how feminism could ever have contributed to social solidarity. Any society in which men and women are viewed as hostile competing classes is not going to enjoy a high level of any kind of solidarity.

But she is right that the dominant strain within feminism is a liberal one that promotes individual autonomy (for women, not for men). And the ideal of maximising individual autonomy does encourage the idea that the goal in life is to "make yourself" within the market. What is it that we get to choose as atomised individuals? We get to choose our careers, our travel destinations, our entertainments and hobbies. Of these, careers carry the most weight, so middle-class liberals will tend to see careers as the means by which we best fulfil our autonomous selves.

Nancy Fraser is one left-wing feminist who doesn't want feminism to have this end point.

She even admits that feminists destroyed some of the barriers to the reach of the market when they attacked the ideal of a living wage for men:

One contribution was our critique of the "family wage": the ideal of a male breadwinner-female homemaker family...As women have poured into labour markets around the globe, state-organised capitalism's ideal of the family wage is being replaced by the newer, more modern norm – apparently sanctioned by feminism – of the two-earner family.

Never mind that the reality that underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household, exacerbation of the double shift – now often a triple or quadruple shift – and a rise in poverty, increasingly concentrated in female-headed households. Neoliberalism turns a sow's ear into a silk purse by elaborating a narrative of female empowerment. Invoking the feminist critique of the family wage to justify exploitation, it harnesses the dream of women's emancipation to the engine of capital accumulation.

Nancy Fraser is not a traditionalist but she does want to shift away from the idea that participation in the market is what makes a life:

First, we might break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorises unwaged activities, including – but not only – carework.

The question is what alternative you put forward. Nancy Fraser seems to think you achieve a "solidary" society merely by rejecting individualistic competition within the market. But solidarity is not just a question of uniting to defend conditions and pay at work - that is still an economistic view of society.

One step forward is not to see people as abstracted and atomised individuals, but to accept that people are defined in part through their social relationships. We are not abstracted individuals, but men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and we are members of nations, ethnies, churches and local communities. This is what brings us into close and loyal relationships with each other; these are natural forms of solidarity that are not defined by the market.

The Pope Francis interview

Pope Francis gave a lengthy interview a few weeks ago which provoked much discussion. I've only just gotten around to reading it. I don't claim to have fully understood every nuance of it, but I thought I'd share what I found interesting.

First, I thought this was of interest:

Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.

It's worth thinking about what Pope Francis means by this. Obviously, a traditionalist would agree that "There is no full identity without belonging to a people" - so it's a nice quote to have to hand. I'm not sure though that Francis means it in the same way we would. I suspect he means that we can't show our complete moral nature unless we are in a relationship with others. For us, though, it is more literally a matter of identity: we are so constituted that our sense of ourselves, of who we are, derives in part from the ethnic or national tradition (the people) we belong to.

Second, Pope Francis does seem to reveal himself to be a "progressive" in the interview. I have to be careful to explain what I mean here. I think there is a progressive attitude to life, one which emphasises the "creative spirit," not just in terms of art, but more generally of the way in which individuals and societies "creatively unfold" themselves over time.

Those who hold to this mindset tend to see change as a good thing, as a moving forward of the individual or society. They tend to emphasise open-ended and fluid movement in society, rather than hierarchy, order or convention. They are committed to the process of self-making and the re-making of society.

There is a positive side to this, as a progressive politics will often attract those who are committed to social change rather than passively observing from the sidelines. But the great weakness is that progressives, so committed to what is creatively open-ended, don't have as strong a sense of how we (and the reality we inhabit) are constituted in ways that provide us with our purposes - our intended paths of development that best fulfil who we are. Progressives, therefore, can seem more interested in the process of change rather than having an adequate measure of what the quality of that change really is.

Pope Francis is not radically a progressive, but he does err on the side of progressivism. For instance, he emphasises the idea of history as a movement of progress:

human self-understanding changes with time and so also human consciousness deepens. Let us think of when slavery was accepted or the death penalty was allowed without any problem. So we grow in the understanding of the truth

Here is another example of Pope Francis rejecting the "static":

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things.

I do have to say that we traditionalists could learn something from Pope Francis when he is in this "progressive" mode. He stresses the need to be dynamic, to be fruitful, to be searching, to be creative, to have audacity and courage. Here is an example of Pope Francis showing a commitment to shaping society:

We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics.

Somehow we have to take the best of the progressive mindset and meld it with the best of the traditionalist one. We have to take the strength of traditionalism, which is to have a close sense of what is good within created reality, and of an order within which these goods can be harmonised, which then gives direction and meaning (a telos) to human actions, and combine it with the strength of progressivism, which harnesses the creative spirit within human nature to shape individual life and to motivate a strong commitment to the shaping of society.

It's not just that feminists are anti-male...

The term feminist is very unpopular, even amongst young women. For instance, research by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK found that:

...the label 'feminist' is often forcefully rejected, particularly by young women. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) suggests that, in rejecting feminism, women are often seeking to position themselves within conventional norms of femininity and heterosexuality.

"In many contemporary European societies, the term feminism provokes unease and even hostility," says Dr Christina Scharff of King's College London, who carried out the research"...

Playing an important role in the rejection of feminism in both countries are the distorted stereotypes of the 'man-hating feminist', the 'unfeminine feminist' or the 'lesbian feminist'. Many participants in the study did not want to call themselves ‘feminist’ because of these stereotypes.

...Although none of the participants could point to specific individuals, most still viewed the pioneers of gender equality as 'lesbian, man-hating feminists'.

And then there's this:

A study commissioned by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) and published today found that feminism is regarded virtually unanimously in negative terms, ranging from old-fashioned to "ball breaking".

Those questioned felt women were more equal than ever before and believed that issues such as women's greater domestic role or concentration in lower-paid jobs are the result of individual choice and natural differences between the sexes which had to be addressed by individuals rather than, as the women's movement argued, society as a whole.

The findings of the Future Foundation study, Talking Equality, have sent shockwaves through the EOC.

The suspicions that young women have when it comes to the "pioneers of gender equality" are fully justified. And the problem is not just that a fair proportion of these pioneers were man-haters. Equally significant is that they were women who did not like or accept womanhood or femininity. Many were as anti-female as they were anti-male.

I was reminded of this when reading about one of the major pioneers of second wave feminism in the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone. She wrote:

The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

That is one of the drives of liberal modernity: to make sex distinctions not matter. If you believe that the end goal of politics is to maximise individual autonomy, then you will want to make your life as self-determining as possible, which will then mean that you will reject predetermined qualities, such as your own sex. As you cannot change your sex, the next best thing you'll be able to do is to make it not matter.

A generation earlier, the same ideas were in circulation. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir could describe the intellectual temper of her own times as follows:

If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.

That's particularly interesting as it traces the failure to accept sex distinctions to an even deeper change in philosophy: from philosophical realism (which accepted the real existence of masculine and feminine essences) to nominalism (which saw such categories as having no real existence but as being names to group things).

Can sex distinctions be made not to matter? Well, not very easily. A University of California neuroscientist, Larry Cahill, has just recently been interviewed on differences between the male and female brain:

The differences exist at virtually all levels, he says, from those of tiny cells to large structures in the brain, from brain chemistry to what he calls intriguing differences in the way men and women remember emotionally searing events.

And this:

What it is, is just a storm of sex differences, big and little, found all over the place – down to the level of single neurons. We see these differences everywhere, and we started to realize, damn, we simply assume they aren't there. And these sex differences have implications for how the brain works and how to fix brains. That's your big story right there.

For me it's the existence of this huge fire in neuroscience. We've been collectively in kind of denial about it. But we've hit some sort of critical mass in the last couple of years. It's really starting to change.

An Oberlin strong point?

My last post mentioned Oberlin College in the U.S. It's well known for its liberal politics. On its homepage it markets itself as follows:

Oberlin is a place of intense energy and creativity, built on a foundation of academic, artistic, musical excellence. With its longstanding commitments to access, diversity, inclusion, Oberlin is the ideal laboratory in which to study and design the world we want.

Last month I tried to develop some ideas about the way that liberals understand individuality (e.g. here). One part of my argument concerns human nature. We traditionalists accept aspects of human nature that are rejected by liberals, such as masculinity and femininity. We tend to think of ourselves as having a more comprehensive and realistic account of human nature than liberals.

And this belief is justified. However, there does exist one aspect of human nature that liberals do accept and focus on, namely the "creative spirit" aspect of our nature. Liberals express this creative spirit when they emphasise individuality as a creative unfolding of self; when they value the achievement of being self-made; when they reject (formally at least) convention; when they set out to shape the world after their own design; and when they look toward human progress.

That particular focus does bring some advantages to liberalism. It will tend to attract those who have an energy and commitment to making real world changes; who have a degree of idealism about social activism; and who will express themselves in idealistic language as being socially committed.

We need to take some of this ground for ourselves. That's one reason I'm not keen on labels such as "reactionary" or "curmudgeon" (there are even problems with "traditionalist" and "conservative"). We need to incorporate the creative spirit into our own politics, by bringing out the way that our politics serves individuality (as the creative unfolding of self) and contributes to the progress of human societies.

Look at the way that Oberlin markets itself. It is appealing to the creative spirit that I have tried to describe: "a place of intense energy and creativity" and "the ideal laboratory in which to study and design the world we want."

We should try to combine our own political advantages (a less abstract, detached and individualistic understanding of the human personality) with those of liberalism (a focus on creative energy, social activism and taking things forward).

How low can liberal solidarity go?

I've been writing a series of posts on the issue of liberal solidarity. To briefly recap: liberals have a concept of solidarity in which the liberal subject is supposed to offer solidarity to the most oppressed or "othered" group in society.

It's a concept which has very negative consequences. If solidarity is something that is offered to those who are "othered" in society, then I as a member of the mainstream can extend it to the "other" group, but they by definition cannot extend it to me (since I am not myself "othered"). So liberal solidarity is not mutual or reciprocal - it does not lead to a positive sense of fellow feeling.

Instead, the group being offered the solidarity is reinforced in its belief that it is suffering oppression and hardship from the very people offering the solidarity. That leads to resentment, anger and a sense of grievance. The solidarity-givers then have to adopt an attitude of repentance and seek redemption - they lose moral status relative to the group they want to be in solidarity with. And that then leads to a growing sense of contempt from the "other" group toward the liberal solidarity-givers who now stand in a morally inferior position to them.

That all sounds very abstract, I know, but it has real life consequences. Let me give just a small example. At Oberlin College in America a white student in a soccer team wrote to an Hispanic teammate letting him know that if he (she?) didn't want to go to a talk organised for Latino Heritage month, the team would like him (her?) to play:

Hey that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!

Harmless, right? Well, the Hispanic player decided that this was, in fact, an act of "microagression" from his white teammate. It was an act of aggression, first, because the white player used a Spanish word "futbol" which constitutes an act of cultural appropriation:

Who said it was ok for you to say futbol? It’s Latino Heritage Month, your telling people not to come to the talk, but want to use our language? Trick NO! White students appropriating the Spanish language, dropping it in when convenient, never ok.

And he (she?) followed up with this:

I’m not playing intramural once again this semester because you and your cis-dude, non passing the ball, stealing the ball from beginners, spanish-mocking, white cohort has ruined it.

And here's the contempt for liberal solidarity-givers:

And then I get this long ass email (warning it gets full of white guilt and really boring white liberal sh**)

In his email the white soccer player complains that he can't help being white and male:

Clearly you only see me at face value and yes I’m white and male, what do you want me to do about that?

The Hispanic player has a clear answer to the "what do you want me to do" question and it has little to do with solidarity. The Hispanic player's answer is: "Leave the team".

The white player then pleads that although he is of white ancestry he has been virtually raised by a second, Hispanic family. Does this get him a pass? Does this mean that he can now enjoy solidarity and fraternity? You probably know the answer. He is chided by the Hispanic player thusly:

We need to talk about tokenizing brown friends/family and taking them in to identify with people of color (or avoiding accountability for being racist).

So the white player then tries to seek redemption by confessing his sins. I've shortened it, but you'll get the idea:

Growing up as a white male in this society, I have benefited countless times from these advantages that I did not and do not deserve, but growing up I was generally not even aware that I was gaining an advantage - it was the only reality I knew. This is a question I have truly struggled with through my life - I don’t deserve these advantages, but they exist for me, I never sought them out, I didn’t want them and can't give them away, what am I supposed to do? How can I feel like any of my efforts are the product of my own effort and not simply my unequal social status? This made me very depressed for a time.

Solidarity is not supposed to make you depressed. It's not supposed to make you doubt the worth of contributing to society. It's supposed to give you a supportive sense of fellow-feeling.

And what was the response of the Hispanic student to the stupendous act of contrition from the white student? It was to the point. The best way the white student can help out is to get lost:

did you once address how you take up too much space and make this space unsafe? Did you once consider leaving this space?

So what is the lesson to be learnt? Simply this: it is no use whinging about the kind of attitudes expressed by the Hispanic footballer if we at the same time continue to support the concept of solidarity which breeds such attitudes. One thing leads logically to another.

Solidarity cannot be based on gestures of support for the most othered group in society. That is not solidarity, it is not fraternity. We need to recognise wherever and whenever this mistake is made and to patiently but firmly criticise it.

Is the housing market in Australia crazy?

Here's something on the Australian housing market from today's Australian newspaper:

A few weeks ago, real estate identity John McGrath sold an unremarkable house in Eastwood in Sydney's northwest for an eye-watering 77 per cent premium to its $1.35 million reserve.

The 16 registered bidders were all Chinese, based locally and offshore, with the lucky one...forking out $2.385 million.

I still can't get over this kind of thing. Housing in Australia used to be high quality and affordable. Now an unremarkable home gets sold for $2.4 million.

According to the real estate agents, this is not evidence of a property bubble. John McGrath claims that "This is just a normal period of post-financial crisis catch-up."

The cost of housing is increasing at three times the rate of wages growth. According to the Australian journalist this is something to celebrate:

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey welcomed the big gains last Friday, and why not?

Across Australia, there are millions of homeowners who are suddenly feeling enriched, with their number vastly overwhelming the people who are penalised by the latest bout of runaway prices and eroding affordability.

I don't think it's that straightforward. If you're a homeowner you might see the value of your house increasing, but if you sell you're then faced with the problem of having to pay a large amount of stamp duty and then a high price for your new house. How then are you better off?

It's really only those people with an investment property who are likely to make money out of the current market.

And the problem is that young local families are either being priced out of the market altogether or forced into high mortgages that will keep both spouses permanently in full-time work until they retire, without much of an opportunity to save or invest.

Update: There are pictures of the house here.

The Annandale Spire

If you walk around an Australian city you'll notice the very fine public buildings - town halls, universities, churches - that were built in the later 1800s.

Here's an example: the Hunter Baillie Memorial Presbyterian Church in the Sydney suburb of Annandale. It was commissioned by Mrs Helen Hay Mackie Baillie in memory of her husband and completed in 1889. It has the tallest church spire in New South Wales.

Here's the spire rising in the distance:

A closer view:

A detailed view:

Female bosses raise profits by how much? Really?

How's this for a provocative headline at the Daily Mail:

More female bosses mean more profits: Companies whose boards are made up of at least a third women make 42 per cent more

That seems very unlikely, so I checked it out. The source of the statistics is a group called Catalyst. One mission of this group is to promote women to company boardrooms. That doesn't necessarily mean the data is false, but it does raise the problem of potential bias.

I looked for some other research on the issue. What I found does not support the Catalyst claims. For instance, there was research conducted when the Norwegian government forced companies to make their boards at least 40 per cent female:

Amy Dittmar, associate professor of finance at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business has recently analysed the impact of the Norwegian decision...Dittmar and Ahern’s study found that when a board had a 10% increase in the number of women, the value of the company dropped. The bigger the change to the structure of the board, the bigger the fall in returns.

An even better alternative source of information on this issue is a paper by two Harvard University sociologists summarising the research to date. According to the paper most research has found that adding female board members does not improve company performance:

Analysts have explored the effects of board diversity on both profitability and stock valuation.

The overall pattern of findings across the several dozen studies that have been published to date tends to support the view that gender diversity inhibits performance (p.10)

The Harvard sociologists do recognise that the Catalyst research connected female board members to profitability:

Perhaps the best publicized study linking board diversity to profitability is Catalyst’s comparison of over 500 leading U.S. firms between 2001 and 2004.

However, they criticise this research for not considering the possibility of reverse causation. In other words, does appointing women lead to higher profits or do higher profits lead to the appointment of women?

According to the Harvard sociologists those research projects which do examine the issue of reverse causation either find that there is no difference in profitability when female board members are appointed or that there is a decline in profits. Here are some of the research projects they list:

• Zahra and Stanton find no effect generally, and some evidence of a negative effect, among large American firms in the 1980s.
• The Scandinavian countries were leaders in promoting board gender diversity. A recent study shows no effect of gender diversity on stock performance in a sample of 443 Danish firms.
• Smith, Smith, and Verner use panel data on 2500 Danish firms to explore several performance measures. Female outside directors show negative effects, though female inside directors show positive effects.
• In their 2009 study, Adams and Ferreira use panel data between 1996 and 2003 on 1939 large American firms. Theirs is possibly the most sophisticated, and transparent, analysis published to date. While they find that boards with more women do better at monitoring firms, they also find negative effects of women board members on both Tobin’s q and ROA (return on assets). In particular, they find positive gender diversity effects in OLS models, but two different techniques for handling endogeneity (fixed effects, and fixed effects with instrumental variables) produce negative and significant effects (for profits and stock value) and a third produces negative but non-significant effects for both outcomes. (pp.11-12)

The conclusion? This:

Taken together, these studies are consistent with the idea that firms that are having good runs are more likely to appoint women, but that once appointed, women have neutral or negative effects on performance.

Several studies address this directly. Farrell and Hersch examine a sample of 300, Fortune-500 firms between 1990 and 1999, showing that firms with strong profits (ROA) are more likely to appoint female directors but that female directors do not affect subsequent performance. Adams and Ferreira find that Tobin’s q, but not ROA, predicts the appointment of female directors but, as noted, female directors have subsequent negative effects. They conclude: "Although a positive relation between gender diversity in the boardroom and firm performance is often cited in the popular press, it is not robust to any of our methods of addressing the endogeneity of gender diversity." (p.12)

The last bit is an academic way of saying "don't believe what you read in the papers on this issue". The problem is that the Catalyst statistic is a useful one for those pushing for boardroom quotas, so you'll be reading it over and over.

A French bishop and the failure of leftist solidarity

I've been thinking through the way that the leftist understanding of solidarity fails.

I noted that the leftist exchange of solidarity fails because it is not mutual. The leftist extends solidarity to the group that he thinks is othered or oppressed. So he is the active partner in the exchange. But if solidarity means identifying with the oppressed or othered, then there is no reason why the group getting the gesture should reciprocate. Why should they make a gesture of solidarity with the group that is considered mainstream or privileged? That would go directly against the reigning liberal understanding of solidarity.

In fact, it is logical for the group getting the gesture of solidarity to be encouraged in the idea that they are underprivileged or oppressed. So they are more likely to respond to such gestures with a growing sense of anger, resentment or grievance.

So what exactly are the parties getting out of the exchange? A commenter in the previous post explained it this way:

The victim is morally exalted just for being a victim.

You become morally exalted by expressing solidarity with them.

This is the Leftist version of a "win-win" scenario...

But there's a problem here too. As we saw in the case of the University of Sydney women's collective, leftists might experience a feeling of moral exaltation at first, but it's soon followed by a loss of moral status, which then leads to being held in contempt by those occupying the "victim" role.

Which means that the leftist approach to solidarity works best when the leftists and the victim group don't actually have to have dealings with each other, but can maintain a suitable distance.

This "solidarity from a distance" is illustrated by a recent incident in France. A group of Roma gypsies had set up an illegal camp which the authorities dismantled. A French bishop, Jean Luc-Bronin

made a vigorous appeal on regional television for solidarity with the Roma..."Be careful, let us not turn our backs on fraternity."

What happened then is that some of the Roma gypsy families decided to take up the Bishop on his offer of solidarity. They went to live in his front yard. The Bishop then denounced the Roma's use of "force" and demanded that their camp be dismantled:

"I cannot accept this use of force...The Church alone cannot be made to settle the question of these families."

Solidarity is one of those concepts (like justice and freedom) which it's important to get right. The current understanding is unworkable. Solidarity can't be based on otherness and oppression - that doesn't give rise to mutual loyalties or to love of and service to a real human community, whether it be family, ethny or nation.

More on the failure of leftist solidarity

In my last post I contrasted the leftist and the traditional concepts of solidarity. Leftist solidarity is based on the idea of identifying with the most "other" or marginalised or oppressed group in society. I gave an example of how this doesn't lead to solidarity but to disunity. The University of Sydney women's collective has been in the throes of an argument between "feminists of colour" and white feminists. The feminists of colour, upset about the wearing of bindis by white women, have claimed that they are being oppressed by the privileged, racist white feminists within the collective. They want something like a capitulation from the white feminists, in which the white feminists agree to a loss of moral standing within the group.

That's led me to what is, I suppose, an obvious thought. The leftist understanding of solidarity cannot work for a particular reason, namely that there is no reciprocity or mutuality involved. If I am a leftist, then I can express solidarity by identifying with the most othered or oppressed group. So there is a one-way act of solidarity coming from me. But what of the people I am making this gesture to? Why should they feel solidarity with me, particularly when the very reason I am expressing solidarity is because I believe that they are being mistreated by the group I belong to. It is understandable, given the logic behind my act of solidarity, that the "othered" group should build up a sense of anger, resentment and grievance (and a heightened sense of otherness) - just as the feminists of colour have done within the Sydney collective.

So my gesture of solidarity as a leftist begins and ends with me. It doesn't create loyalty, trust and fellow-feeling between the two parties involved.

The traditional understanding of solidarity was based, in part, on particular forms of relatedness. This gave rise to group loyalties and identities which did have the reciprocity and fellow feeling lacking in the leftist understanding of solidarity.

When leftist solidarity fails

Solidarity is one of those concepts that separates the left from traditionalists.

The traditionalist concept of solidarity is based on relatedness. I am loyal to members of my family because I am related to them through ties of kinship. There is a solidarity between myself and my coethnics because we are related to each other through ties of ancestry, history, culture and language.

Is there a solidarity between myself and someone I have never met who lives in Nepal? Yes, there is as we share a common humanity, but the degree of relatedness is not as close as it is to, say, my brother, and so my loyalty to my brother is naturally stronger and more immediate.

The leftist concept of solidarity is the opposite to this. The leftist idea is that we identify not with those we are most closely related to, but with those who are most "other" to us, particularly with the most marginalised or oppressed "other".

But can this really create a genuine form of solidarity? I want to give a concrete example of how the leftist understanding of solidarity fails.

There has been an argument happening on the Facebook page of the University of Sydney women's collective. It seems that some of the "women of colour" are upset at seeing some white girls wear a bindi (the decorative dot worn on the forehead). They are calling it cultural appropriation.

My understanding is that the bindi is not really considered a sacred religious symbol in Asia but is worn for decorative purposes by a range of people, so I don't think there's a lot of merit to the claim of cultural appropriation.

But what's interesting is the way that the argument has unfolded. The women of colour are pulling rank over the white feminists on the basis that they are the more marginalised and "othered" group. Here's a typical comment from one of the women of colour:

As long as the majority of wom*n who actively participate in the wom*ns collective are white, it is not a safe space for wom*n of colour. most of the wom*n i meet who are exclusively involved with women's collective have little to no knowledge of the way racial oppression operates especially in australia and i don't count on them to be sympathetic or productive allies. white wom*n: it is YOUR JOB TO EDUCATE YOURSELF. and the best way to educate yourself is by listening. i if you want your feminism to be intersectional you can't just say "im intersectional". you have to work to unlearn these ways of thinking that place your precious whiteness... above other people's experiences. my anger is legitimate. and i am angry at the laziness of white feminism. i am angry at the refusal to step outside of the issues that directly affect you. i am angry at the lack of empathy. don't count on being educated by wom*n of colour if you're going to have a whinge about how angry they are. it only goes to show that you TRULY do not understand."

Leftist solidarity ends up meaning that the white feminists are expected to lose moral status in the argument and to listen passively whilst they are educated by the women of colour.

There is an insistence by many in the debate that feminism be "intersectional." That seems to mean that there are intersecting relationships of privilege and oppression having to do with gender, race, sexuality, disability and so on. So there is a complex pattern of who gets to claim moral status and who loses standing, depending on an attribute such as race, gender identity or sexuality.

There is, in other words, a complex pattern of division and disunity. Instead of a sense of solidarity, there is a focus on how some within a group oppress others and the guilt and anger that is thought to be the right response to this.

To try to keep a sense of solidarity with the feminists of colour, this is the attitude one of the white feminists took:

whenever I'm trying to cycle through my immediate gut reaction to white skin privilege, which is guilt and then getting defensive about how I'm a bit better than some real bad racists, I remember a really good people of colour-facilitated talk I sat in on....

Solidarity isn't meant to be as miserable as this. It isn't meant to be a lifelong sentence of guilt, defensiveness and subservience.

And what of the feminists of colour? This is what they think of the white women of the sisterhood:

DB: Racist girls expecting those that they oppress to ask nicely for their rights, to hold their hand and walk them through their racism while they still comfortably sit on the throne of privilege. Nice try... really cute.

TC: Hell no, how bout they kiss the brownest part of our asses and watch the big girls do feminism. The most radical thing they've done since the 70's is take off their tops for Femen.

The feminists of colour are claiming that white feminists are privileged racists who oppress them and who need to be replaced and re-educated by women like themselves.

It's not a very impressive kind of solidarity and the problem goes back to the way that solidarity itself is conceived.

Liberal professor stood down

William Penn, a professor of English at Michigan State University, made hostile comments against whites and Republicans in his lectures. The comments were recorded by a student:



He has now been stood down by the university.

There is nothing that new in what William Penn had to say. He is yet another campus liberal who looks forward to the demise of white people (he identifies as a American Indian). It's interesting though that he's been held to account for it.