Baillieu's negative identity

We recently had a debate here in Victoria on a "Relationships Bill" which permits same sex couples to officially register their partnerships. The leader of the Liberal Party opposition, Ted Baillieu, spoke in favour of the bill. What he said has a wider significance:

For me, this bill is about respect. We are a nation and a state of different people. Indeed, our diversity is at the heart of our collective identity - different people, different views, different lifestyles.

If you read this casually you might skim by the truly radical element of what Baillieu is saying. Baillieu has no problem using the term "collective identity", but consider carefully what he means by this concept. It is not a "positive" identity, in the sense that it represents a set of positive characteristics shared by a community of people. Instead, it is a negative identity, in which people identify with the absence of shared characteristics.

Baillieu has come very close to jettisoning a collective identity. All that he has retained is a very limited negative collective identity. It's little more than the bare bones of a communal identity.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, I think he is representing the liberal position honestly. There are Liberal Party leaders who claim that you can have mass, diverse immigration over many generations and still retain the strength of the older collective identity. It doesn't seem to me to be a likely outcome.

There are problems, though, in giving up on a collective identity. There are practical concerns like a lack of social cohesion; a decline in altruism; and a weakening motivation to defend the society you live in.

More importantly, there is a loss of the communal setting for people's lives. We gain much as individuals from a strong collective identity in which we enjoy a sense of shared history, of a common culture, of closely understood manners and mores, of a widely shared calendar of festivals and celebrations, of a distinct tradition linking generations to each other, and of art and architecture expressing the character of our own community.

Baillieu's position might be more candid than that of other Liberal Party leaders but it is also profoundly deracinated: it represents the mindset of the rootless, modernist individual who has become disconnected from his own communal tradition.

Bahrainis seek immigration reform

The Arab Gulf states have their own immigration problems. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have proposed a six year residency limit for foreign workers. The Bahraini labour minister believes that most of the foreign workers in his country cannot assimilate or adapt because of their cultural and social backgrounds. He recently complained that:

In some areas of the Gulf, you can't tell whether you are in an Arab Muslim country or in an Asian district. We can't call this diversity and no nation on earth could accept the erosion of its culture on its own land.

I can't fault the Bahraini minister for acting to conserve his own culture. However, the situation in the Gulf does raise some further questions.

For instance, if the Bahraini minister believes that non-Muslims cannot adapt or assimilate to an Arab Muslim culture, then the same difficulty of assimilation must also occur when Arab Muslims seek residence in foreign countries. If mutual adaptation or assimilation isn't possible in Bahrain, then why would it be possible in France or Finland?

Also, if the Gulf states are so dependent on foreign labour (there are currently 14 million foreign workers in the Gulf), and if this labour force is thought to be too foreign to assimilate or adapt, then why are Middle Eastern refugees being sent to all the way to the West rather than to the nearby Gulf states? The Gulf states are very wealthy and are very much in need of a more assimilable labour force. It would seem to be a good match.

Finding your way home

Thirty years ago Thao Nguyen's parents left Vietnam for Australia. The new country gave the family great opportunities and Thao rose above the ranks to become a corporate lawyer.

This would seem to be a copybook refugee success story. Yet, it doesn't work out exactly as those promoting open borders might expect it to. We are supposed to believe in all this that ethnicity doesn't matter and that people can be settled anywhere with equal prospects for success. Thao Nguyen herself, though, tells us something different.

Thao has written a column for the Sydney Morning Herald describing her return to Vietnam to work as an intellectual property lawyer. Despite the corruption and poverty she finds in Vietnam, she writes that it is her "dream" to live there because of what it means for her identity. It's clear too from her column that the opportunities given to her in the West haven't fostered a sense of gratitude or belonging. Instead, she presents herself as being an excluded outsider.

Here is Thao writing about her personal response to living in Vietnam:

For me, there is no detachment. I have returned to fill in the pockets of missing history, heritage and identity ...

Although she recognises problems in Vietnamese society, it doesn't affect her close identification with the country:

What I see as flaws through a Western liberal lens are part of the culture and the country, and I can't divorce these disappointments from my personal heritage. Undeniably it is a part of who I am. In many ways, I feel betrayed. Before my arrival I had a romanticised image of the motherland. Growing up with racism, along with social, economic and class exclusion, refugee kids create a haven in their minds. It is where they feel like they belong: the search for an elusive concept of home.

When I visit a floating fishing village in northern Vietnam that is surviving its struggle, I am in tears with pride. This nobility should also run through my veins.

I am finding answers to lifelong questions.

Another comment from Thao brought to mind Professor Putnam's recent claim that "an extraordinary achievement of human civilization is our ability to redraw social lines in ways that transcend ancestry". For Thao ancestry isn't a negative to be transcended, but something to be valued as a source of connectedness. Having spent a night at her family's village she writes:

I wake up renewed by the connection to the ancestry and mysticism that is essential to the Vietnamese spirit.

She finishes by describing her efforts to help a disabled Vietnamese man and his grandson into a taxi:

I pay for the cab but tailgate it until we reach the train station. They were finding their way home. So am I.

We are not interchangeable units. We have a connection to people and place, to a particular history and culture, which enriches our lives and anchors our identity. It is not a freedom but a misfortune to lose this connection.

Professor Putnam's challenge

Professor Putnam of Harvard University has found that ethnic diversity harms "social capital": that it leads to a loss of trust, friendship and happiness.

He has, nonetheless, argued in favour of ethnic diversity, claiming that it benefits the economy and creativity.

So Professor Putnam's challenge is to find a way that you can have diversity, but without the damage to social capital.

It's interesting to read how he proposes to meet this challenge, because it highlights the difficulties and contradictions involved in such a project.

In short, this is the Professor's argument:

a) Identity is constructed, therefore it can be made the way we want it to be.

b) Ethnic identity can survive at a personal level and this will maintain diversity.

c) We should strive to create a common social identity in which ethnicity doesn't matter, in part by mixing everyone together.

d) This new communal identity will be, like earlier forms of identity, strong enough to forge positive ties and allegiances between people.

I think the professor is wrong in each of these claims.

Identity as a construct

According to Professor Putnam:

Identity itself is socially constructed and can be socially de-constructed and re-constructed. (p.159)

... identities are socially constructed and malleable. (p.160)

This can't be right as ethnic identity is based on factors which can't be socially constructed. Ethnicity often includes, for instance, a shared ancestry as marked in some way by racial similarity; it also often involves a shared history over many generations.

It's important to point this out, as any attempt to "construct" a communal identity when there are no natural forms of ethnic connection isn't likely to create close ties of allegiance - thus undermining part (d) of the professor's argument.

In considering how "malleable" identity is, consider the case of the UK. It's true that a broader British identity was fashioned out of separate English, Scottish and Welsh ethnic identities. This was made possible by points of similarity and common interest between these three groups. When, though, it came to incorporating Catholic Ireland into a British entity, the "malleability" failed: the differences in history and religion proved too great. Furthermore, there are signs even today that the original English, Scottish and Welsh ethnic identities are still felt by many people in the UK as being more significant than the British one.

Identity is more than a mere social construct and therefore cannot be remade to suit any purpose.

The survival of ethnicity

This is perhaps the weakest link in the professor's argument. We are asked to believe that our ethnic loyalty will remain as important as it ever was when:

i) it is to exist as a personal identity only, rather than as a communal entity

and

ii) at a social level ethnicity won't matter; there will be mutual assimilation between natives and immigrants; racial and ethnic identities will be "deconstructed"; we will "transcend ancestry" with permeable, syncretic, hyphenated identities; and live in a melting pot society characterised by "ethno-racial change".

The following quotes are examples of how Professor Putnam puts things together:

It is my hypothesis that a society will more easily reap the benefits of immigration, and overcome the challenges, if immigration policy focuses on the reconstruction of ethnic identities, reducing their social salience without eliminating their personal importance. In particular, it seems important to encourage permeable, syncretic, 'hyphenated' identities; identities that enable previously separate ethnic groups to see themselves, in part, as members of a shared group with a shared identity. (p.161)

... the challenge is best met not by making 'them' like 'us', but rather by creating a new, more capacious sense of 'we', a reconstruction of diversity that does not bleach out ethnic specificities, but creates overarching identities that ensure that those specificities do not trigger the allergic, 'hunker down' reaction. (pp. 163-164)

This strikes me as an attempt to fit things together ideologically, rather than a genuine effort to think about things realistically.

How can our ethnicity be sustained at a purely personal level? An ethnic culture is formed when a group of people sharing certain characteristics live together and interact together over time. It's not something which can survive in isolation from such a public, communal setting.

And how can our ethnic loyalties remain strong when, at the public level, the emphasis is on their deconstruction: on ethnic change, mutual assimilation and intermixing.

A new us?

Let's say that the professor gets his wish and America continues to aim for mass immigration and an ever greater ethnic diversity. Let's say too that there is no exclusive sense of national identity.

Can there be, in these circumstance, a deeply felt sense of common allegiance and shared identity? Will there be no loss of loyalty to the national entity?

Professor Putnam himself betrays the likely outcome. He approvingly quotes Charles Hirschman's observations on what an American identity means:

American identity is rooted not in nationhood but rather in the welcoming of strangers. (p.162)

There is already for the professor nothing objectionable in basing an overarching identity on openness toward the 'other' rather than on nationhood.

There is further evidence in Professor Putnam's research report that identities based on diversity aren't likely to sustain group allegiances; this evidence appears when he considers the issue of religious affiliation.

Church identity

Professor Putnam believes he has found an example of how his theory works in practice. He recalls that in the 1950s church affiliation was so important socially that it was typical to know which church your classmates belonged to (e.g. Methodist, Catholic).

However, by the 1980s church affiliation was no longer important to social interaction. People intermarried across church lines and no longer held their church membership as 'an important badge of social identity'. Professor Putnam writes:

In that sense, Americans have more or less deconstructed religion as a salient line of social division over the last half century, even though religion itself remains personally important. In fact, our own survey evidence suggests that for most Americans their religious identity is actually more important to them that their ethnic identity, but the salience of religious differences as lines of social identity has sharply diminished. As our religious identities have become more permeable, we have gained much religiously bridging social capital, while not forsaking our own religious loyalties. To be sure, deconstructing divisive racial and ethnic identities will not be so quick and simple, but an extraordinary achievement of human civilization is our ability to redraw social lines in ways that transcend ancestry. (pp.160-161)

It all seems unlikely, doesn't it? Professor Putnam wants us to believe that our religious identities have become more "permeable" but that we nonetheless haven't lost our religious loyalties.

In fact, the decline of church affiliation has led to a major bleeding of membership in the mainstream churches and to a loss of religious belief and observance generally in society.

For example, between 1967 and 2002, the Episcopal Church in America (the equivalent of the Australian Anglicans) lost 829,000 members. Only 15% of young American Catholics now go to mass weekly. In Australia, recently released census information reveals that "Australians are abandoning traditional Christian denominations", with the Anglicans having lost 175,000 members. The number of Australians professing no religious belief has risen by about 800,000 in five years.

Isn't this a logical development? If I no longer identify closely with a church community and culture, but instead carry my religious belief at an individual level only, isn't it more likely that my level of observance will decline and that some individuals will be cut adrift from religious belief entirely?

The problem with Professor Putnam's article is a fundamental one. He wants identity to matter at a personal level, but not at a social level where it is to be patiently deconstructed as a grand moral aim.

In other words, the professor insists both that identity has to matter (so that individuals retain their diverse ethnicity), and that it has to be made not to matter (so that there is no loss to social capital via the "hunkering down" effect).

Furthermore, it's at the very social level at which identity is to be rendered insignificant that there is supposed to be generated a strong allegiance to a 'we'. The act of making people's identities permeable, hybridised and non-social is supposed to leave people with ... a higher, unifying identity!

It's more likely that the professor's proposals would lead to a loss of traditional identity and to a more atomised society with much weaker forms of social solidarity and commitment. The losses to "social capital" would continue.

In brief

Some recent items of interest:

Losers of the sexual revolution by Miranda Devine. Miranda Devine complains, rightly I think, that:

Mutual respect between the sexes, romance and a legacy of chivalry by men entranced by the feminine mystique have been trashed in the name of female equality and sexual liberation.

It was assumed, under the terms of autonomy theory, that the removal of impediments to sexual behaviour would liberate women. In practice there have been a number of negative consequences. Autonomy theorists failed to consider, amongst other things, that traditional moral restraints might have had a positive, protective function.

Migration 'tipping point reached'. A British think-tank has warned that the "seemingly reckless pace and scale" of immigration into the UK could fracture the sense of national identity. The shadow home secretary has called for a cap on the numbers of those arriving.

To those arguing that Britain has always been a nation of immigrants the author of the report replies that,

The view that Britain is a nation of immigrants suggests Britain has always experienced immigration on its present scale from time immemorial, which is by no means the case.

Another article debunking the myth of Britain as a nation of immigrants is The great deception by Sir Andrew Green. This article points out that since 1066 there have only been two significant waves of immigration into Britain, the first by the Huguenots which represented a 1% addition to the population and another by eastern European Jews representing a 0.5% addition.

Leo McKinstry has written an article describing his love for traditional England and his sadness at its passing. He objects to the Government's insistence that:

I should be embracing cultural diversity, not clinging to an England that is being systematically demolished. To me this is a morally reprehensible argument. If you genuinely love something then it is grotesque to be asked to celebrate its demise.

Hat tip: Lawrence Auster

Teen dope users 'life's future losers'. According to Professor Patton, who has conducted research on cannabis users for Melbourne University,

the overwhelming evidence was that cannabis was "the drug for life's future losers".

Couch entitlement presents evidence, drawn from data from 25 countries, that when paid work and domestic work are combined men and women spend the same amount of time each day working. The idea that women work longer hours than men is a myth.

Most child abusers are women. A report by Child Protection Queensland 2005-06 has found that women were responsible for 55.5% of cases of child abuse. Patriarchy theorists won't like this finding as it undermines the idea that domestic violence is a result of a patriarchal social structure in which men commit violence against women and children as an expression of control and dominance. This theory doesn't explain very well the fact that women are more likely to commit acts of domestic violence against children than men are.

Sex & the footy. Some myths, though, are being actively perpetuated. In a front page article in The Age Angela Williams claimed that:

One in three women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. The greatest cause of injury and death in women under 45 is not cancer or accidents or drugs, it's the men who purport to love them.

Patriarchy theorists use such bogus statistics to advance the idea that violence against women is "systemic" - that it stems from the very structure and culture of society.

Last year I did an investigation into the claim that the greatest cause of death for young Australian women is domestic violence.

Of course, it proved to be false. In 2004 in Australia by far the biggest killer of young Australian women was cancer (673 deaths). Then followed suicide (238) and car accidents (215). Deaths by external causes totalled 290, but this includes accidental deaths such as drowning, burns, falls etc. So there is no way that the claim that domestic violence is the largest killer of young women can be correct.

As for the rate of violence, about 1.3% of Australian women will experience violence at the hands of their partner in the course of a year. Drunkenness is a factor in about half of these cases. Throwing around figures of 30% of women suffering sexual assault (or, in the case of Swedish feminist academic Eva Lundgren, claiming that 50% of Swedish women are the victims of male violence and that men kill hundreds of Swedish babies in Satanic rituals) creates an overly negative picture of male attitudes to women.

Finally, let me give a plug for the Australian Traditionalist Conservative Network.

Singer not so doctrinaire

Jill Singer is not as doctrinaire a leftist as I thought she was. First there was her comment late last year in support of traditional men:

Just as men hanker for women who are more gorgeous but less clever than themselves, women will generally keep seeking men who can provide for their family in material terms.

I hear many women complain they feel dudded in their relationships, that gender equality means women's workload is made unbearable by both work and home duties.

Their husbands apparently benefit from their wife's income but don't put in more at home themselves.

We're not just talking about caring for children, but old-fashioned domestic duties that men used to do such as household repairs. Sure, there are lots of good handymen out there, but they're not married to anyone I know.

Now she has written an article on the importance of our home country and culture and the dislocation of migrants living in a foreign land.

She begins her piece by quoting an ancient Indian text:

One of the paths to happiness, according to an ancient Indian text, is not to leave your homeland permanently.

The wisdom of this has struck me during my visit to Vietnam.

Singer joined a party of Vietnamese men and women and noted:

... it was remarkable to witness their love of country ... The people here are so enthusiastic about their culture and prosperity that I feel sympathy for the Vietnamese who were forced to make their lives elsewhere in the wake of the Vietnam War.

One of the Vietnamese women has a sister living in Sydney who wants to return home but won't because of her Australian born children. According to Singer,

The expatriate sister longs for her family in Vietnam, but her children are Australian.

She lives a life amputated from her culture.

Of those Vietnamese refugees who cannot return home because of "newly formed bonds" Singer writes:

They have gained new homes and new opportunities, but they are also missing out on so much.

Nor does Singer exclude her own kind from the appeal of native land and culture. She writes of those Australians who move overseas that:

Being an outsider can be exhilarating as a visitor, but can prove tiresome over time.

She tells us too that,

I have often dreamed of living elsewhere ... And then I think of being permanently away from home, friends and family, and the appeal quickly fades. Travel is a tonic, but home is a haven.

The conclusion Singer draws from all this is not a conservative one. She argues that refugees wouldn't lightly forsake their homelands and therefore should be judged as genuinely in need rather than as aspiring to a better lifestyle.

It's a pity Singer didn't draw the more obvious, albeit bolder, conclusion, namely that those claiming refugee status should be resettled in places most similar to their home country and culture. This would be an effective way to test whether refugee claimants are genuine, and it would also mean that genuine refugees would suffer the least degree of cultural dislocation.

To illustrate this point, consider the case of a white farmer driven out of Zimbabwe. Would he feel more at home resettled in rural Australia or in a suburb of Beijing? It would seem perverse to place him in Beijing, where both he and his children could never feel part of the mainstream. Yet the refugee policies in place today don't consider this issue, and claimants are resettled without consideration of their prospects for a cultural identity.

Finally, it's worth noting that Singer's article represents something of a return to a traditional view. Throughout European history exile from your homeland was considered an unfortunate fate. Dante wrote in The Divine Comedy of the exile that:

You will leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You will know how salty
another's bread tastes and how hard it
is to ascend and descend
another's stairs ...

In Njal's Saga (written in Iceland in the 1200s) the hero Gunnar is sent into exile for three years. As he is leaving, though, his horse stumbles, causing him to look homeward. He decides to stay, even though this will leave him an outlaw and lead to his death.

Finally, I'm reminded too of Elizabeth Fenton, who travelled with her husband to Australia in the 1820s. In the Arab ship she sailed on were two men, both exiles of a kind, whom she pitied. Of the first she wrote:

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

The second was from Greece:

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

So Jill Singer, in writing of love of homeland and the loss of exile, is contributing to a longstanding tradition within Western culture.

An impossible demand

Word is that the next wave of refugees will be Tamils from Sri Lanka.

Well, my sources were right. I wrote the above line just a month ago, and now we have a new "boat people" incident involving 83 Sri Lankans.

Significantly, the Australian Government is organising with both Indonesia (where the boat sailed from) and Sri Lanka to repatriate the men.

You have to wonder why, if the 83 men really believe themselves to be refugees, they made the very long journey to Australia via Indonesia, rather than just travelling 30km to India.

As I wrote a month ago, India is a safe and increasingly prosperous and self-confident nation for Tamils to relocate to. Furthermore, the state of Tamil Nadu in India is an ethnic homeland for Tamils, in which Tamils from Sri Lanka could feel at home culturally and easily assimilate into.

Australia cannot be an ethnic homeland for Tamils in the way that Tamil Nadu in India can be. Therefore, young Tamils growing up here would likely suffer from a confusion in their identity, a disadvantage which isn't easily set aside.

What is it like to grow up without an easy identification with your country's mainstream culture and tradition?

I read a blog post recently which described the experiences of three young people in this position. The first, a journalist from Sweden with Kurdish and Lebanese parents, wrote of her identity that:

To be honest, I'm tired of defining who I am. Am I Swedish? Am I Kurdish? Am I Lebanese? I'm all of these things, and none. Sometimes I'm more Swedish than Kurdish, sometimes I'm more Lebanese than Swedish.

Then there is the actual author of the post (Osmond?) who is mostly of Chinese descent, though with some Spanish ancestry, and whose family have been living in Australia for 30 years. He writes:

I've rarely referred to myself as Australian or Chinese-Australian or even Chinese except when responding to people's questions. I've never felt honest or comfortable trying to define myself in those narrow categories ...

Do I give wholesale loyalty to one part of my identity and nothing to the rest or prioritise one over the other when I have a greater connection with different parts at different times?

Finally there's Randa Abdel-Fattah, an author of Muslim ancestry now living in Australia. She tells us that,

The inconsistency in my emotions and devotions used to faze me. It used to arouse in me a sense of disloyalty and insincerity ... I don't feel the need to be "fully Aussie". Not because I am not of Anglo background, but because it is an impossible demand ... One's past, whether ancestral or as a migrant, necessarily shapes one's present. The issue is the place of this construction of self in Australia's future.

There are some common themes running through these descriptions. One is a kind of irritation with the whole question of identity; a wish that it could just be made a non-issue.

How different this is to what most of us experience, namely a positive and affirming sense of communal identity which we would never want to give up.

The three writers also seem to share an identity which is shifting and unstable. At times, they feel more connected to their adopted culture, but at other times to their ancestral tradition.

This "multiple" and "shifting" focus of identity isn't the liberation some might think it to be. Randa, for instance, mentions that the "inconsistency" in her "devotions" aroused in her "a sense of disloyalty and insincerity". Osmond, similarly, admitted that he "never felt honest or comfortable" when having to define himself as either Australian or Chinese.

Again, most of us don't have to face this problem. Our loyalties aren't divided, and we don't have to doubt our sincerity or honesty in talking about our identity.

Finally, it's important to understand Randa's comment. She tells us that she can't feel "fully Aussie" because it's "an impossible demand". Why? Because we are shaped not just by our present, but by our ancestral past. I think she's right, and that politicians who insist on large-scale ethnically diverse migration, but who also expect straightforward allegiances to an existing tradition, are ignoring important aspects of reality.

Can you put trust in diversity?

Dr Andrew Leigh is an economist at the Australian National University. In a recent article he explains the importance of interpersonal trust to the healthy functioning of a society:

Trust is important because it acts as a kind of social glue that enables business and communities to operate more effectively. In regions where people trust one another, institutions, markets and societies seem to work better. Trusting societies have more effective bureaucracies, schools that function more efficiently, less corruption and faster growth.

Trust, though, is undermined by ethno-linguistic diversity. This, at least, is what Dr Leigh found when he researched data from the Australian Community Survey. Dr Leigh found that:

Neighbourhood-level analysis also throws up a startling finding: trust is lower in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods ... The effect of diversity operates on immigrants and locals alike. In more linguistically diverse suburbs, both foreign-born and Australian-born residents are less inclined to trust those around them.

Dr Leigh believes that this pattern, in which diversity is associated with low levels of trust, holds true elsewhere:

The negative relationship between trust and ethnic diversity is not unique to Australia. Separate studies looking at the US, Britain, India, Kenya and Pakistan have shown that diversity is associated with lower levels of trust and less investment in shared resources. In the US, work by Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara has produced very similar results to my own: holding constant a raft of other factors, US cities that are more diverse tend to be less trusting. Other research has reached similar conclusions.

Dr Leigh's research corresponds closely to the well-publicised findings of Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard University. Professor Putnam's research shows that:

the more diverse a community is, the less likely its neighbours are to trust anyone ... "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down ... We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined."

So what does Dr Leigh conclude from all this? He makes it very clear throughout his article that he supports continuing large-scale immigration, despite the negative effect that diversity has on trust.

Significantly, he concludes his article with this quote from Professor Putnam:

Growing up in a small Ohio town in the 1950s, I knew the religion of just about every kid in my 600 person high school ... when my children attended high school in the 1980s, they didn't know the religion of practically anyone, it simply didn't matter ..."

In my lifetime, Americans have deconstructed religion as a basis for making decisions. Why can't we do the same thing with other types of diversity?

So here we get back to a basic problem liberal modernists like Professor Putnam and Dr Leigh face, namely of having to make things which matter, not matter. The "hope" of these men is that ethnicity might be somehow deconstructed and made unimportant to people, so that high levels of immigration, and therefore high levels of ethnic diversity, might be able to coexist with high levels of neighbourhood trust.

Ethnicity, though, is what places people within a larger tradition, and connects them closely to a particular culture and community. It's not really the kind of thing which is secondary and which can reasonably be sacrificed to the goals, or the decision making processes, favoured by economists.

What happens when diversity does become the reality? As might be expected, it can be experienced negatively, as something alienating. As an example of this, consider the recently reported reaction of Oliver James, a prominent British author and psychologist, to modern Sydney. He thought the city itself was "beautiful and spacious" but he nonetheless became "unsettled" as he was driven into town:

Oxford Street was like the "Tower of Babel, a confusing polyglot in its diversity". There were people from "all the ends of the Earth", creating a feeling of "identitylessness, so you feel like you could be from anywhere.

English journalist, Peter Whittle, wrote along similar lines about the transformation by immigration of the London suburb he had grown up in:

Sometimes now, in streets I've used since Sixties boyhood, I'm struck by the sense that I should no longer think of this place as providing my identifiable roots, and that I am simply one of many who happen to be living here, with no greater claim to it sentimentally or historically. Such anonymity might be what people are looking for when they choose to live in the teeming metropolitan centre, but in a suburb which has shaped much of your life it's a much harder feeling to negotiate.

This part of south-east London has never been affluent ... But it had something which amounted to a collective identity. Now, it appears to me fragmented, with different ethnic communities existing side-by-side, sometimes uneasily, and always with a sense of nothingness in the air.

What kind of social policy can adequately replace this kind of loss? I don't believe there is one which can even begin to compensate. A better aim would be to support the continued existence of traditional community life, rather than insisting on ever increasing levels of diversity.

A better system for all?

Dandenong is a multiethnic working-class suburb in Melbourne's far south. A councillor and former mayor of Dandenong, Peter Brown, made the news last week when he queried the wisdom of bringing African refugees to Australia.

Following reports of a brawl involving 700 Sudanese youths in an area of Greater Dandenong, Peter Brown wrote a letter to The Age, in which he pointed out that:

If the Australian Government chooses to ease the ethnic problems of Black Africa by transporting their citizenry to Australia by the jumbo jetload, then the only achievement will be to remove the problems from one continent beset by them to another continent, Australia.

He made a similar comment to an Age journalist a few days later:

Africa is a basket case ... We're not going to sort out their problems by bringing out people here. Australia is not here to solve the problems of the world.

These are significant criticisms of the current refugee programme, but I'd like to add to them what I think is an even more fundamental objection.

Word is that the next wave of refugees will be Tamils from Sri Lanka. This strikes me as odd. It's true that there has been a conflict between the minority Tamils and the majority Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, so it's certainly possible that there are Tamil political refugees.

But why send these refugees to Australia? The Tamils originally came from the Indian mainland, only 30km away from Sri Lanka. After WWII a number of Tamils (those brought to Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century) were repatriated to India.

The Indian state closest to Sri Lanka is called Tamil Nadu and is a kind of ethnic homeland for Tamils. So doesn't it make sense for Tamil refugees to be sent there, rather than to an entirely foreign country like Australia?

It's not as if India is the worst destination in the world to send refugees to. In fact, there are Indian migrants to Britain who are now returning to India because of the lifestyle attractions. This is how Amrit Dhillon describes her decision to return to India in a recent Age article:

British Government statistics show that thousands of Indians who settled in the UK - mainly professionals - are returning to India in a reverse "brain gain" because India's booming economy offers great opportunities and a quality of life that is no longer irredeemably inferior to what the west offers ...

Indian cities now offer the amenities of the west but with some great extras. The most important of these is the new zeitgeist. India is on the move. It is vibrant, optimistic, confident.

And yet the society is still relatively gentle with relatively low levels of crime. Children can play in the neighbourhood parks and streets.

If you don't find this evidence persuasive, then consider the findings of a recent international wellbeing survey:

The MTVNI study tells a tale of two worlds; a developed world where young people who are materially wealthy but pessimistic about their futures, and a developing world where young people are optimistic and hopeful despite facing greater challenges.

And according to MTVNI's own Wellbeing Index, Indian young people have the greatest perceived sense of Wellbeing out of the countries surveyed.

According to the survey 91% of Indian 16-34 year olds were proud of their country, compared to only 33% of Germans and 35% of Japanese young people.

So the children of Tamil refugees are very likely to grow up happily in India. But what about in Australia?

They are likely to be caught between cultures and identities in Australia. Consider the case of Kabita Dhara, who is of Indian ancestry but grew up in Britain, Singapore and Australia.

She describes in another recent Age article how for 27 years she suffered an "anxiety ... growing up and straddling my Western reality and Indian identity".

She believes that she was only finally able to recognise how her "Indianness fitted into my Australianness" when she married an Australian man according to both Indian and Australian customs.

But why force a young person to go through such difficulties. Wouldn't it be better to have a system which places refugees in countries most ethnically similar to their own?

Such a system would have several advantages. First, it would discourage "economic refugees" from clogging up the system, as resettlement would tend to be in countries with a similar standard of living to the source country.

Second, it would allow the refugees themselves to assimilate most easily into the mainstream culture of their new host country. They wouldn't face the same loss of culture and identity as they would in an entirely foreign Western country.

Third, it would also better respect the ethnic rights of the existing Western populations.

Is it impossible to imagine the UN adopting such a policy? Let me just point out that the UN has already followed such a policy when it comes to orphaned children. When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in 2004, there were calls for the children orphaned by the disaster to be brought here en masse.

Carolyn Hardy, the Chief Executive of UNICEF Australia, politely declined these calls for exactly the reasons I am pointing to; as The Age report put it:

Ms Hardy said that UNICEF was trying to help children stay in their own community by finding extended family members to care for them.

While Australians wanting to adopt were acting with generosity, Ms Hardy said removing a child from their culture, language, customs and communities would add to their loss.

So it's not impossible to imagine the UN adopting a similar policy for refugees if Western politicians were to support such reforms.

Becoming the embodied subject

If you look at an Australian $50 note, you will see a picture of David Unaipon, an Aboriginal writer and inventor. Below this picture Unaipon is briefly quoted as follows:

As a full-blooded member of my race I think I may claim to be the first – but I hope, not the last – to produce an enduring record of our customs, beliefs and imaginings.

David Unaipon appears to be an admirable representative of the Australian Aborigines. However, what strikes me about his appearance on our currency is the double standard involved. Only an Aborigine could get away with expressing pride in his race, culture and traditions; if a white Australian were to do the same, he would not get his face on the $50 note, but would probably be denounced as a racist or bigot.

So why do we have such a double standard? Why is the majority population expected to have no serious pride in their own ethnicity, whilst at the same time celebrating the ethnicity of others?

The answer, I believe, has to do with the basic philosophy adopted by white intellectuals, namely liberalism. Liberalism asserts that to be human, we must be free to create who we are through our own will and reason. This means that we are most human when we are least subject to any qualities which might pre-set our identity or influence our choices.

To put this another way, liberals prefer to see the individual as an atomised, thinking and choosing mind, unconstrained by any inherited nature or tradition.

In a discussion at View from the Right, the American traditionalist, Jim Kalb, offered a similar explanation for the double standard:

My guess is that it’s a consequence of the nature of the liberal individual, which is the same as the Cartesian ego—a disembodied subject with no qualities at all other than the free-floating ability to have experiences and make choices.... The Cartesian ego isn’t really part of the world of experience. How, after all, could something with no qualities be embodied? So perhaps there’s a feeling that it’s more legitimate for Third World types, who don’t seem to be free floating Cartesian egos, to be embodied and thus part of the world of experience. The feeling then is that white people are Cartesian abstractions while nonwhites are vibrant concrete realities. [Emphasis added.]

If Jim Kalb is right, it would help to explain why some liberals are so willing to accept the demise of the West. For instance, Jens Orback, the Swedish Democracy Minister, said earlier this year,

We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.

Orback has already accepted the future dominance of Islam and a Muslim population in his own country. Perhaps he does so because he can only conceive of the existing Swedish population as being disembodied liberal subjects, whereas the non-Western immigrants carry a real, embodied tradition and identity – and therefore represent something of greater weight and worth in the world.

Could there be a clue to a strategy for Western survival in this? Perhaps what the Western remnant needs to do is to emphasise strongly that they do not belong within the category of “liberal subject”. If the remnant were to insist clearly enough on a separate identity as an embodied subject, then perhaps Western liberals would accept that we too belong in a different category to the liberal individual, just as non-whites do.

This would mean asserting, as a matter of course, that we embody qualities which we have not chosen for ourselves: it would mean, for instance, recognising the importance to us of our manhood or womanhood and of our particular national or ethnic traditions.

There was a time when we did do this as a matter of course. The further back in time you go, the less the influence of liberalism, and the more clearly you find expressions of European ‘embodiment’.

Let me give just two examples. Jorgen Jorgenson and Elizabeth Fenton were both settlers in Tasmania in the 1820s and 30s. Jorgenson had already had a colourful career. He was born and raised a Dane, but in 1809, when Denmark and England were at war, he led a coup against the Danish administration in Iceland, with the support of some English merchants. He ruled the country for two months, before being deposed.

Whilst in power, Jorgenson wrote letters to Icelandic officials, demanding that they pledge their loyalty. Here is how one Icelandic official, Jon Guthmundsson, replied to Jorgenson:

Who are you? You are born a Danish subject … But what are you now? You have not become a British subject, yet you have ceased to be what you were and should be, and also ceased to be a human being. Whoever and whatever you are, you have insulted me by assuming me foolish enough to be seduced, cowardly enough to be fearful, and dishonest enough to ignore honour and duty.

The Icelandic official berates Jorgenson for his betrayal of his native country and for the ambiguous status of his identity. He does not see such ambiguity as a liberation from the “prison of ethnicity”, but as a loss of an essential human quality. The Icelandic official is a fully embodied white subject.

Jorgenson was already living in Tasmania when Elizabeth Fenton set sail in 1828 to become a settler there. Her husband had served as a soldier in India, so she began her journey from India in a Muslim vessel, the Hamoud Shaw. After praising the Arab captain she wrote,

He has one European on board who holds the office of chief mate. He makes me quite melancholy. He is English by name and complexion, but his tastes, manners and his scruples, not to say his religion, are Arab.

He is the son of a Scotch clergyman, but for many years has been leading his present life, trading between Muscat and Mozambique. Muscat is, in his imagination, what Paris is to a Frenchman ... His converse turns on murders, executions, shipwrecks, his reading is the works of Voltaire and Paine, of which he has read just enough to unsettle his belief.

Poor fellow! though it always makes me nervous to hear him speak, I pity him too; he may not always have been what he now is; has he been made this [way] by disappointment or alienation from the humanising relationships of life?

Elizabeth Fenton was similarly disconcerted by the existence of a Greek convert amongst the crew:

The crew are a mixture of Bengalees, Arabs and negro slaves. Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it! – a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice.

Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

Couldn’t we apply this last sentence to your average disembodied modern liberal: “he would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors”? Elizabeth Fenton, though, pre-dates this mentality; for her, a connection to ancestry and to homeland is the natural condition of man, disrupted only by “alienation from the humanising relationships of life”.

She too associates the human with the embodied subject, and she does so with the confidence which we need to return to if we are to clearly distinguish ourselves from the suicidal category of “disembodied liberal subject”.

Twas not always so

Dr Peter Jensen is the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. He wrote an article for the Melbourne Age on the weekend in which he lamented the fact that "Jesus is slipping out of memory and imagination" and that "we seem to have become very modest about our own past, very nervous about identifying who we are."

And yet in the same article he declares that "I know we have embraced multiculturalism, and I myself am delighted by the new and different Australia that is emerging from our immigration policies."

Huh? On the one hand he is delighted by the new, non-Christian Australia being created by current immigration policies, and on the other he laments the fact that Jesus is slipping out of view and that we don't value our past.

There is a fatal inconsistency in this view. Dr Jensen is on the conservative side of Anglicanism, and yet he seems to want to find a niche for his church and religion within the liberal order. This is a mistake. If the Anglican church is to survive it will have to do so in resistance to liberal secularism, and not as a junior partner of it.

Nor is this a problem confined to Anglicanism. In August the speaker of Italy's senate spoke out against foreign immigration. He was attacked by leaders of the Catholic Church, one of whom, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, made the astonishing comment that,

A person who comes to our country to work does not only have worth because of how much he produces and how much his salary is, but also because of his identity, his culture, his religion.

This is similar to how secular leftists think. Cardinal Bertone assumes that the enemy is right-wing liberalism, in which people are thought of in terms of their economic role. In opposition to this, he asserts the value of identity, culture and religion, but only for "the other", and not for Italy's majority population. It never occurs to the cardinal that the speaker of the senate might have been defending the place of identity, culture and religion - but for the existing population of Italy.

It was not always like this. For instance, in the nineteenth century one of the most prominent Anglican theologians was F.D. Maurice. Maurice was not a conservative, but in the mid-nineteenth century you did not have to be a conservative to defend the patria.

Maurice believed that there was a spiritual component to the existence of distinct countries. He himself put it as follows:

"Let us be sure that if we would ever see a real family of nations, such as the prophets believed would one day emerge out of the chaos they saw around them ... this must come from each nation maintaining its integrity and unity"

"an Englishman has as much right to speak of his own nation as holy as had the Hebrew patriots of theirs"

"the Nation has lived, lives now, and will live in Him, who was, and is, and is to come"

"no man has ever done good to mankind who was not a patriot"

These quotes do place Maurice at odds with those modern church leaders who so readily accept the loss of the distinctive Western national traditions.

Osman & the Body Shop

I was at my local shopping centre yesterday when I came across the latest campaign by the Body Shop.

For those of you who don't know, the Body Shop is an international chain of shops selling female soaps and body products. It was established in the 1970s by Anita Roddick, who has used the stores to promote her particular brand of left liberal politics.

Anyway, the cause of the month is refugees. The Body Shop I visited had posters, postcards, a magazine and a kind of guestbook for customers to sign, all promoting the idea that Australia should accept an even greater number of refugees.

What I found most interesting was a postcard putting the cause of Osman, a refugee from Sudan. We were urged to support Osman, and others like him, because in coming to Australia he would be able to "achieve his full potential."

Now, to the conservative understanding of things, this is a strange claim. How can Osman and his family possibly achieve their full potential in such an alien country as Australia?

It is impossible for Osman to maintain in Australia his connection to his ancestry, or to uphold his religious and cultural traditions.

Even some European refugees have found it difficult to maintain a sense of identity living in Anglo-Saxon countries. For instance, Nathaniel Braden has described how,

Living in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon city of Toronto, my parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who had never really assimilated themselves into Canadian culture. A sense of rootlessness and disorientation was present in our home from the begining. I had no sense of belonging, in Toronto or anywhere else, nor was I even aware of what a sense of belonging would mean. To me the void seemed normal.

If someone who is of Russian background has this experience, how much more disorienting will life be for an African living in Australia.

For a conservative there is a need both to protect the physical security of refugees and also to allow refugees to preserve their connection to their own ancestry, religion and culture. The logical way to achieve this is to resettle refugees, as far as possible, within the nearest ethnically compatible region.

As it happens there are many wealthy Islamic countries which could fund this process for Islamic refugees. Refugees from poorer African areas could be helped by wealthier Western and Asian nations to resettle in other parts of Africa.

Why have Western nations not followed such a path already? Because the political establishments in Western countries are liberal. They follow as a principle the idea that we should be self-created by our own reason and will.

Unfortunately, if we are only allowed to be created by our own reason and will, we can't be shaped by our inherited ancestry and culture. That's why, over time, the attachment to a traditional ancestry and culture has taken on a negative connotation within the Western political elite, as being a mere expression of "prejudice."

The Western political elite, therefore, for as long as it holds to liberal first principles, is unlikely to adopt a refugee policy which aims to uphold the ancestral and cultural identity of both the refugees and the host populations, no matter how humane or logical such a policy would be.

And what of the Body Shop? I wrote a short summary of the above argument in their "support book" for refugees. When I returned an hour later I found I had started a small debate within the book with some customers supporting me and others opposed.

I also looked up Anita Roddick's site on the internet. Ms Roddick does a good job of presenting herself as a flaky left liberal. She even has a picture of her adult daughter, naked except for a gas mask, attending an anti-Iraq war protest in London. The picture has the following caption, written proudly by Mum,

Like mother, like daughter. My youngest, Sam, never stops surprising me with her creative radicalism. Outside her erotic boutique Coco de Mer in London last month, she organized a naked street protest against the war...

The theme was "liberate yourself from political bondage" and featured strippers and other sex workers wearing only gas masks and body paints and stencils...

Coco de Mer organized the event with the Belles of Shoreditch, a collaboration of strippers from the East-End (London) pub culture, and the International Union of Sex Workers.

There would seem to be few moorings of any kind left in Anita Roddick's world. At any rate, she is not a woman I would be accepting moral leadership from.

There is a better way to handle the issue of refugees than that suggested by the Body Shop.

(First published at Conservative Central 24/08/2003)

Caught between worlds

Liberals don't really know human nature. Take the case of sustained, mass immigration. Liberals present this blandly as a win-win situation for both immigrants and host population. What liberals fail to recognise is that it's a deeper part of our nature to identify with our own settled communities.

Not only does sustained, mass immigration disrupt (or even destroy) the established identity of the host community, it also does the same for many of the immigrants themselves. It strips them of their natural form of community identity, leaving them feeling caught between worlds, or confused, or outsiders to the society they live in.

The actor/singer Paul Capsis was interviewed in The Age newspaper on Saturday. His parents migrated to Australia from Malta and Greece, so he does have a common European background with other Australians. But this wasn't enough for him to identify with the established Anglo-Australian population.

He writes,

I hated being Australian as a child. We were like "why are we here?" ... we were welcome refugees ... When I was 12 , it hit me I was an outsider. I wanted to belong ... You don't know who you are. I tried to connect. At 14, I thought, 'I don't think I can live through this.' My family gave me strength.

Sustained, mass immigration is therefore not, in some straightforward way, of all round benefit. It's a policy which makes it unnecessarily difficult for people to establish normal forms of self-identity in which we feel strongly connected to the community we live in and to its culture and traditions.

A policy pitfall

Suad Almad came to Canada from Somalia 12 years ago. She says of her experience as a Somali migrant that "We come to Canada and we become lost."

This is one of the pitfalls of liberal refugee and migration policies. Liberals believe that ethnicity shouldn't matter, as our identity should be self-created and not defined by unchosen, inherited things like ethnicity.

Therefore, for liberals discriminating on the basis of ethnicity is wrong: it offends the liberal idea that ethnicity should not define who we are or how we are related to each other.

And so, millions of non-Western migrants are brought into Western countries even though they are effectively stripped of their ethnic identity in doing so.

Liberals believe that they are being high-minded in doing this, and it is true that they are being "principled" in carrying out their own philosophy. But their philosophy is misguided and does harm. It does harm to the migrants like Suad Almad who become "lost" and it does harm to the host population whose own ethnic and cultural identity becomes harder to sustain.

And there do exist better alternatives. There is no reason, if you think things through carefully, why refugees couldn't be resettled securely in countries with similar ethnic traditions. The financial costs of doing this could be met by international aid from wealthier countries.

But again, to the liberal mind, this is "discrimination" in a negative sense, and so is forbidden as a public policy, no matter how sensible it might seem to non-liberals.

Belonging

There is an interview in today's Age with Meyer Eidelson, the son of Jewish immigrants to Australia. As a youth, Mr Eidelson was radical enough to be kicked out of Melbourne High School. He then became a Marxist, and even today is still associated with the left.

But in some things he seems conservative. For instance, he says,

I believe places often fashion people rather than the other way around ... I strongly believe in the sense of belonging to place. Having come from an unsettled immigrant background I have this desire to make the most of my home town.

Why is this conservative and not liberal? Because liberals like to think that they are self-created by their own will. So it's not very liberal to admit that you are defined, in an important and positive way, by something you can't control: by the sense of place around you.

It's interesting too that Meyer Eidelson recognises a negative effect of immigration: that it unsettles the immigrant's sense of belonging. Liberals believe that what we need is an unimpeded will. Conservatives, in contrast, prefer to defend deeper, traditional forms of belonging and connectedness. Meyer Eidelson is someone who seems to want to build a conservative sense of belonging, rather than sacrifice it to a rootless individualism.