Liberal intolerance is getting noticed

Kirsten Powers, a Democratic commentator, is bewildered that liberals, who are supposed to be committed to the value of tolerance, are increasingly intolerant of opposing views:

How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

James Kalb has written a response agreeing that liberalism is intolerant but setting out why this follows from liberal principles.

I'd like to follow on in the same vein. Liberalism is neutral in a limited way. It is neutral only in the sense that individuals are supposed to define their own subjective goods and respect the right of others to do the same. That viewpoint isn't really neutral as it assumes a number of things philosophically, for instance, that objective values can't be known, or agreed upon, or don't exist; and that individual goods can be understood separately from communally held ones.

But leaving that aside, liberalism's limited neutrality runs into another problem. If my main moral responsibility to others is that I tolerate their right to subjectively define their own goods, then that means that what fills the gap in terms of public moral standards are values of non-interference such as tolerance, openness, non-discrimination, inclusiveness and so on. These values then become the new standard of public good that people can be thought of as contravening.

It sounds odd, but liberals can then declare their intolerance of violations of tolerance. Here for instance is the right-liberal Jonah Norberg:

It is time for our liberal societies to stop apologising, to get back our self-confidence and state that tolerance and freedom is our way, and those who are out to destroy that deserve no toleration...We should force everybody to accept every other human being as a free and autonomous individual with the same rights as himself. That is the law of a liberal, open society...Everybody who wants to enjoy that society must conform to it. (The Age, 24/9/05)

Force, conform, liberal law, no toleration - these are the terms employed by Norberg who then states that his highest values are tolerance and freedom.

The contradiction is made worse by the fact that it is so easy to run foul of liberal tolerance on a variety of significant issues. For instance, under Norberg's "law of liberalism" I cannot defend any distinction in what men and women do in society. For instance, I cannot defend the idea that women should not be combat troops, as that would place a limit on how women might define their own good. Similarly, I cannot defend border controls as that restricts immigrants defining their own good; nor can I defend traditional marriage, as that limits all those who cannot accept heterosexual fidelity from defining their own good.

The liberal principle forces the outcome on a great many of the most serious issues to be decided in a society. Instead of defining my own goods, I end up having many of the most important ones defined for me by the procedural principle that liberals have established.

In the traditionalist view, it is better for at least some goods to be decided on by a community, in part formally, through a process of politics, and in part informally, through a process of culture and tradition.

That's because some of the most important goods I am likely to hold are aspects of a communal life; if a community does not uphold them, then they are lost as individual goods. You cannot respect the life of the individual, without taking seriously the goods embedded within the community to which the individual belongs.

Second, the outcome of what goods are upheld within a society ought not to be left to a procedural principle, such as that asserted by liberals. That's a curiously mechanical way to decide what goods will triumph in a society; it is also a way that fails to find a harmonious balance between competing goods, or to weigh the real merits of the goods under consideration.

I'll give a concrete example. Brendan Eich, a man with much success in the technology industry, was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla because some years ago he made a small donation to a campaign to defend traditional marriage.

That's how things work in a liberal system. There is an issue of whether two men or two women should be able to marry. The issue is decided on a procedural basis: the principle is that we should tolerate people self-defining their own good, therefore it is decided that homosexuals should not be limited in defining their own good and should therefore be allowed to marry. People who oppose this are thought to be contravening the tolerance principle and are therefore treated intolerantly.

That's not how things should be done. It is both too contradictory (intolerance in the name of tolerance) and too mechanical (decided according to a procedural principle). What should determine the outcome are questions to do with the nature of marriage itself as an institution; the purposes its serves; of what upholds it as an institution; and of how it fits within the larger order on which a society is based.

The new girl guide promise & the origins of liberalism

The Girl Guides in the UK have changed their promise. No longer will the girl guides pledge to "love my God" but instead they will promise "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs."

This got me to thinking about the way one branch of liberalism may have developed over time. There is a certain logic to the change to the Girl Guide promise. There are now more people without religious belief in the UK. Therefore, the promise to "love my God" might have seemed to exclude these people. The new pledge "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs" would still allow Christians to follow Christianity but it would include atheists as well.

At the surface level, therefore, the pledge seems to be neutral and to allow for a variety of beliefs. It doesn't immediately seem to do harm.

But it does do harm. If we try to incorporate every possible belief or lifestyle by retreating to a position of being "true to myself and developing my beliefs" then we are establishing as the default public position a relativism and an individualism.

We are establishing relativism because the pledge to be "true to myself and develop my beliefs" sends the message that something is true only relative to myself and my own subjective beliefs. And we are retreating to an individualism in the sense that we are no longer recognising a shared belief within a community, but only an individual one.

But it is difficult for a community to operate without some sort of shared value system and so what is then left to liberalism is to make the commitment to being inclusive the focus of a communal, and publicly enforced, morality.

Furthermore, what is clearly lost within this kind of liberal value system is a commitment to shared objective goods and truths within a community. How might people feel compensated for this loss? By focusing on the freedom to make up our own individual goods. So a certain concept of freedom will then be emphasised.

It is said by some that liberalism developed from the attempt to deal with religious diversity in the wake of the Reformation and the various wars of religion. It is possible that the starting point was the well-intentioned one that I have described, but that the logic of the falsely "neutral" position it involved then went on to do great damage to Western societies.

So how then should a diversity of opinion or belief be dealt with in society? If we learn our lesson we would have to say that the relativism and individualism of the "neutrality" position should be the least favoured option. Other options:

i) The atheists are allowed to simply opt out of reciting that part of the pledge.
ii) That part of the promise is dropped and the focus is on other goods that are shared by theists and atheists alike.
iii) A separate group of guides is set up for those parents who wish to avoid the promise to God.

These are only suggestions, but I make them to show that it's not necessary to deal with a diversity of belief by turning to a principle that is perhaps intended to be neutral, but which in reality is anything but neutral and which instead strongly preferences a view of the world which is relativistic and individualistic and which leads ultimately to the intolerant enforcement of tolerance and to a dissolving view of freedom based on the idea of the self-defining individual.

Australia to have the most onerous discrimination law?

The Federal Labor Government is proposing a new Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination law which redefines discrimination as "conduct that offends or insults".

You just have to shake your head at that definition. It doesn't take much to offend some people, so the limits this law would put on free speech are potentially very onerous. The Victorian Attorney-General got it right when he observed that:

Many people may be subjectively offended or insulted by the simple expression or manifestation of views different to their own.

To make such expressions of views in workplaces, schools, clubs and sports prima facie unfavourable treatment and hence discrimination ... appears to substantially erode freedom of expression.

Even the Human Rights Commission is critical of the proposed law:

Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs thinks the broad definition will spark too many lawsuits.

She said the words offend and insult "have to go".

"There is no need to set the threshold so low," she said. "I would suggest the government consider taking the words 'offensive' and 'insulting' out (of the legislation).

"It does raise a risk of increased litigation".
 

And what does this say about liberal society? Liberals go on and on about individual freedom, and yet here we are facing a law which makes it an offence to say something that someone else, subjectively, thinks is offensive.

How do we explain this? I think part of the explanation is this: liberals pursue a freedom which is understood to mean an absence of impediments to self-determined choice. Because this is the liberal "good" it means that liberals focus on a "negative" morality, i.e. a morality of non-interference. The idea is that we all get to pursue our self-determined goals, only if we agree to leave each other to pursue these goals: therefore the good person is the one who shows respect for others and their choices, who is non-discriminatory, who believes in equality, who is tolerant, who is non-judgemental, who isn't prejudiced and so on.

The problem is that there is nothing to stop a negative morality of non-interference being pursued to the point that it itself becomes coercive or even tyrannical. And that is what we are seeing in the proposed Australian anti-discrimination laws.

I'll finish by congratulating the Law Society of South Australia for its submission to the inquiry on the proposed law:

The Law Society of South Australia told the Senate inquiry it "condemned" the new definition.

"The robust expression of opinions, short of incitement to hatred, is a strength of our social and legal system," its submission states.

"It should not be curtailed to protect subjective offence that individuals may feel when their beliefs or attitudes are criticised."

Does liberalism allow group survival?

The Democratic Alliance is the major opposition group in South Africa. It's a party that was historically made up of white liberals. In its 2009 election manifesto the party declared that it stood for a society in which:

...everybody has the opportunities and the space to shape their own lives, improve their skills and follow their dreams... People are not held back by arbitrary criteria such as gender, religion, or colour...

That's your standard liberalism. Liberalism claims that our human dignity depends on our ability to autonomously self-determine who we are and what we do. Therefore, predetermined qualities like our ethnicity or sex are thought of negatively as potential impediments to a self-defining life.

The problem is that this assumes that our "dreams" exist at a purely individual and self-determined level, i.e. that who we are as men or women, or as Afrikaners or Zulu, doesn't matter.

But not everyone in South Africa is a white liberal, so that assumption hasn't gone unchallenged. Former president Thabo Mbeki labelled it a "soulless secular theology" that was based on an atomised view of the individual.

Ryan Coetzee is the Democratic Alliance strategist. He has written a column in response to Mbeki's claims. It's an interesting piece as it shows a white liberal trying (unsuccessfully) to fit in a group identity within a liberal ideology. Coetzee tries his best to make concessions but he doesn't get very far.

Coetzee sets out the debate with this:

...during the 1980s and 1990s there was a detailed and sustained debate between liberals and communitarians concerning the liberal conception of the self, which does not need repeating here. Suffice it to say that it is perfectly possible and indeed desirable for liberals to hold a view of an autonomous self grounded in society without ceasing to be liberals.

The communitarians were a group of academics, some of whom made similar criticisms of liberalism to the ones I make. They did push liberals onto the back foot, but without changing any fundamentals.

Anyway, what Coetzee is saying is that he thinks it possible to retain the liberal view of an autonomous self whilst still, as the communitarians urged, having that individual grounded in a particular society. The liberals had not paid much attention for some generations to that communitarian concern.

Coetzee goes on to argue that liberals believe that despite the influence of predetermined qualities like our biology and our environment, individuals are unique and can choose "who and how to be".

Traditionalists would agree that individuals are unique and that individuals do choose aspects of how they live, but we would not make such a blanket assertion that it is an individual thing to choose who and how to be. Some of that is given to us. For example, if we are men, and attempt to realise that part of ourselves, then not every way of being is equally masculine. We will be naturally oriented to some ways of being rather than others. Similarly, if we have a moral conscience, and can recognise aspects of a pre-existing objective morality, then we will be oriented to some behaviours over others. And our ethnicity is not usually something that it is in our hands to choose. A Japanese man can choose to live in exile, or to make little effort to support his tradition, but he cannot suddenly make himself not Japanese in ethnicity.

Coetzee then makes a partial concession:

...individuals have a variety of identities, including group identities, and that these are perfectly legitimate. They are not atomized centres of consciousness with no connection to others: a person may be an Afrikaner, coloured, a woman, a socialist, a mother and a lover of classical music, and all these attachments (and many others besides) comprise her identity.

That's a lot better than the usual "ethnicity is a fetter" type of liberal argument. But note that some key aspects of identity (our sex and ethnicity) have been placed at the same level as an artistic taste (lover of classical music).

I'll take the concession, though, given that in many liberal societies a white identity is considered illegitimate. But as we'll see, the limited concession isn't enough by itself. Coetzee goes straight on to make this qualification:

....while individuals may be in part the product of biological and environmental forces, they are still able to exercise choice and thus can decide their identity and attachments for themselves, at least in so far as they feel alienated from the identities imposed on them by their history and environment. The woman described above can choose not to be Afrikaans, not to identify as coloured or as a socialist. She can even choose not to identity as a woman...

It's an insistence that identity has to be autonomously self-defined. And if you think that autonomously self-defining yourself is the key aspect of your human dignity, then your bias will be toward not accepting the predetermined aspects of your identity, i.e. you'll think yourself greater in dignity if you reject an identity as an Afrikaner or as a woman.

Second, it's odd to take the approach that we must decide for ourselves whether we are to identify as a man or as a Japanese. These things are so constitutive of who we are, that to deny them would mean failing to fulfil important aspects of self. Yes, a woman "can even choose not to identify as a woman" but that would be denying something that you already are.

Coetzee then makes this strange claim:

This is an optimistic and empathetic vision of what it means to be a human being. If we are mere representatives of larger entities (the middle class; Muslims; Africans; whatever) then there would be nothing about others to respect or with which to empathise. Indeed, there would be no other people (as we use and understand the term) at all – just ciphers representing abstractions.

This is an example of how liberal thought can be very alien to non-liberals. Surely I can identify ethnically as, say, a Frenchman and still respect a Bolivian for a whole range of qualities: being a good father, a good Christian, having masculine bearing, showing commitment to his own tradition, working productively etc.

Perhaps Coetzee really believes that if we identify with a communal tradition that we so merge into an abstracted mass that we lose all individual qualities. If that is what liberals think, then they need a good lie down on a sunny Queensland beach. If anything, individuals in traditional Western societies were more self-confident in asserting themselves rather than less so. Was Shakespeare just a cipher representing an abstraction?

Coetzee does give an example of what he fears. He criticises the "coconut" accusation levelled at some blacks by other blacks:

Blacks who think or behave or sound “like whites” are not real blacks, they are “coconuts”. The idea that one can be black, and think what one likes, and still be black, is anathema. In other words, the idea that you can self-identify as black and then define for yourself the meaning and significance of that identification is anathema.

Perhaps it's true that the "coconut" jibe is used to coerce some blacks into remaining within black norms. But there are norms generated in a variety of ways in every society, including liberal ones. There are norms of behaviour within social classes, for instance. In liberal societies, there are very strong norms about what makes you a good person or not, and what is correct or incorrect to say or believe. Norms can have a positive effect or a negative one, depending on what they are and what they push toward.

So we shouldn't be frightened of the existence of norms - they're always going to be with us. What matters is their quality. And nor can we do as Coetzee suggests, which is to define for ourselves the meaning and significance of an ethnic or sex identity. If that were possible, then such identities would have very little significance. If I could just make up what it means to be masculine, then that would be a merely invented, subjective identity which would not connect me to anyone else or to anything outside of myself.

That's not to say that the individual doesn't act upon such identities. Generally, we look to what's best within our tradition, or within masculine or feminine qualities, and try to draw on those things; and that means that there will be some individual variation and some changes in culture over time.

Here's something else from Coetzee:

We in the DA are a collection of complex individuals with many identities. We are not a collection of race or linguistic or religious or cultural groups that are immutable and that define the individuals in them, rather than being defined by the individuals in them.

It's the same problem. We are allowed to belong to a group as long as the group doesn't somehow define who we are; it is only allowed to work the other way  - we have to define for ourselves as individuals what identifying with the group means. But that makes belonging to the group less meaningful. Say I identify as a Catholic. If every Catholic self-defines what identifying as a Catholic entails, then you've reduced the sense that there is a real essence to being a Catholic.

The truth is that we are partly defined by being a man or a woman, by being an Afrikaner or a Zulu, by being a Muslim or a Catholic and so on. And although these identities are not strictly immutable, nor are they up for self-definition either.

Finally, Coetzee has an odd way of justifying social solidarity:

What makes solidarity possible for liberals is not the idea that other members of my group are facsimiles of me. In this conception of things, no solidarity (identification, care or compassion) is possible anyway, because there is no other with which to identify or empathise. In this (collectivist) conception of things, solidarity is really just self-interest masquerading as compassion for others who aren’t really other at all.

First, he assumes that solidarity means compassion and empathy rather than loyalty, a feeling of relatedness, or working toward common ends. Second, he seems to believe that you can't show compassion or empathy towards someone you are more closely related to because that would just be self-interest. That leads to his striking conclusion, that you can only experience solidarity with those who are most alien to you.

Coetzee supports this statement by Richard Rorty:

In my utopia, human solidarity ... is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increases in sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves ...

So solidarity with your own group is impossible because the very notion of solidarity has been redefined to mean compassion for people who are alien to you.

Now, having compassion for people who are other to you is a good thing. But it's no use for Coetzee to say that it's legitimate for people to have a group identity and then:

a) insist that there are no larger essences to these identities that help to define the individual, but that the individual himself defines what these identities are

and

b) redefine solidarity as something that only applies to those outside of the groups you belong to.

If liberals are going to declare group identity to be legitimate, then they have to commit to a philosophy which makes it possible for these groups to survive over time. Coetzee has not done this and so his concession to the communitarians isn't as significant as it might initially appear to be.

Why anti-clericalism in a secular age?

The Pope's visit to Britain has unleashed some astonishingly hostile reactions:

Journalist Claire Rayner:  I have no language with which to adequately describe Joseph Ratzinger, AKA the Pope. In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature. His views are so disgusting, so repellent and so hugely damaging to the rest of us, that the only thing to do is to get rid of him.

Scientist Richard Dawkins: the Pope .... A leering old villain in a frock

Philosopher AC Grayling: If the head of a drug cartel was involved in a conspiracy, we would ask some very serious questions once he came to the UK. Why should we treat the Pope any differently?

Author Philip Pullman: In one way, I hope the wretched organisation will vanish entirely.

Peter Tatchell: He has strayed from the moral and ethical values of most Catholics and most of humanity.

This is not just advocacy of secularism or atheism. It is so emotionally charged and hostile to the Church that it better deserves the name of anti-clericalism.

Which raises a question. Anti-clericalism has mostly featured in countries in which the Catholic Church played an influential role in society. There were intellectuals in these countries who, in rebelling against society, sought to attack and undermine the Church through acts of mockery, sacrilege, dispossession or violence.

But modern Britain is run along secular, liberal principles. So why would intellectuals there feel the need to kick so viciously at the Pope?

I'm open to ideas, but I would answer this way. For some decades, a pure form of liberalism has asserted itself. Liberalism no longer accepts values drawn from aristocratic codes of honour, or a family ethos, or identification with a national tradition, or ideals of masculine or feminine behaviour.

So there is no tempering of a liberal world view. Liberalism is going it alone and this is leading to ever more radical forms of liberal concepts of equality and justice.

Admittedly, there are some liberals (e.g. Tony Blair) who seem to want to take the Church with them, i.e. to liberalise the Church. But for those who don't, the gap between what the Church holds in principle and what they hold in principle will have grown - not because the Church has become more radical in what it holds, but because the secular liberals have.

To put all this another way, if you want your liberalism pure and "uncompromised", then you may not react too favourably to the Pope arguing that Christian institutions should be allowed to be run along Christian, rather than liberal, lines. The Pope's views would have been far less controversial even 30 years ago, but now they conflict with the expectations of a section of the political class - even to the point of rousing powerfully anti-clerical feelings amongst some of those most committed to secularism (and betraying the fact that liberal toleration isn't always so tolerant).

Liberalism itself intolerant?

Harriet Harman, the British Minister for Equality, has introduced a new Equality Bill which she hopes will build "a new social order".

One feature of the Equality Bill is that it will allow companies to discriminate against white men in order to boost the number of female or ethnic minority employees.

This effectively means that people will be chosen on the basis of race and ethnicity rather than merit, but Harman doesn't want to admit this. At the government website we're told that employers will be allowed to take "positive action" to hire women or ethnic minority applicants, but that:

Positive discrimination (employing someone because of a characteristic regardless of merit) will remain illegal.

In other words, they want to maintain the fiction that they're hiring on merit even when they're practising affirmative action. A necessary self-deceit perhaps.

Anyway, the Equality Bill was criticised by the Pope as it could potentially be used to force the Church to hire job applicants who acted against the Church's teachings.

Enter Simon Jenkins, a writer for the very liberal Guardian newspaper and a former editor of the Times. He decided to back the Pope in a column which I think is revealing of contemporary liberalism. It's revealing because it demonstrates the difficulty that a liberal like Jenkins has with religion, whilst also being an admission that contemporary liberalism has become intolerant.

This is how Jenkins frames the issue:

The ­Roman Catholic church may be a hotbed of religious prejudice, indoctrination and, somewhere in the United Kingdom, social division. But faced with Harriet Harman's equality bill and her utopian campaign to straighten all the rough timber of mankind, the pope's right to practise what he preaches needs defending.

A hotbed of religious prejudice? Is that how a former editor of the Times looks on the Catholic Church? I wouldn't describe my local parish that way. It usually strikes me as overly sedate and casual and flavoured heavily with a social justice doctrine derived more from secular liberalism than from Catholic orthodoxy.

Jenkins later describes the Church in these terms:

The church's historic aversion to religious debate and dissent, its pathological conservatism, its veneration of relics, its cruelty to its own adherents and its necrophilia make the pope's plea for tolerance ring hollow.

Pathological conservatism? Cruelty to its own adherents? Necrophilia? Again, I find it disconcerting that someone from the upper echelons of the media would write this way. (And why is the veneration of relics an act of intolerance - what is happening in the liberal mind here?)

Jenkins does not, though, support the use of the Equality Bill against the churches. He believes that this only furthers the imposition of state control. He goes so far as to admit that,

British liberalism has had a good half-century, but has begun to lurch into the intolerance it purports to oppose. It should loosen up and acknowledge that some communal space must be allowed the old illiberalism.

I'm not entirely sure how to react to this. Jenkins does recognise that liberalism has become intolerant, but his alternative is merely that we non-liberals be granted "some communal space". So much for liberalism supposedly being neutral. It is revealed here as the governing principle of society.

Nor am I sure how to respond to this attempt at sympathy toward traditionalists by Jenkins:

There are still large numbers of Britons who are uncomfortable with those whose behaviour diverges from what they see as traditional norms. These conservatives have swallowed much this past half-century, as authoritarianism has been steadily eradicated by liberal legislation on homosexuality, abortion, divorce and free speech.

Occasionally the liberalism has looked more like intolerance, as over smoking and aspects of "hate speech". Indeed to some people, liberalism's onward march has seemed more like a jackboot in the face. A few have reacted by retreating into a know-nothing fundamentalism, as witnessed in many parts of America.

Jenkins has already admitted that liberalism has become intolerant in imposing itself on society. So it's not really a case of liberalism ushering in a less authoritarian society, thereby upsetting traditionalists. There is still an authoritarianism, a liberal one, combined with the divergence from traditional norms.

Nor is the most significant reaction against liberalism a "know-nothing fundamentalism". What's more important is the growing sense of division between the liberal elite and the rest of society. Many people now have the sense of no longer being truly represented by the political class.

Knock Knock! Who's there? The police.

Another sign of the times. A Tory councillor in England made a joke at a public gathering which led to a summons by police who lectured him about homophobia and appropriate humour. What kind of a joke would warrant police intervention?

The question-and-answer session had started in unremarkable fashion.

As the 50 members of the public at the police liaison meeting were handed their electronic handsets to take part in a survey, an official told them: 'Let's start with an easy question to get us going.

'Press A if you're male or B if you're female.'

But it seems nothing is ever that simple. Someone asked: 'What if you're transgendered?'

'You could press A and B together,' quipped Conservative councillor Jonathan Yardley.

Not exactly incendiary humour, is it? If this is all it takes to get in trouble with the police, then free speech in England really is taking a battering.

Here is a more detailed description of what happened to the councillor:

He was then contacted by Tettenhall sergeant Mark Evans, who asked him to attend a meeting at the village’s police station with city centre Inspector John Smith.

Councillor Yardley said: “They put me through the mill and asked me to confirm what I’d said and told me that a complaint had been made and I could be prosecuted. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They explained the legal process and what had happened and how the complaint had been made and they said I could be subject to a civil prosecution.”

How could this happen? I'm assuming (I could be wrong) that the councillor was threatened under "hate speech" legislation passed only last year:

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 amended Part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986. The amended Part 3A adds, for England and Wales, the offence of inciting hatred on the ground of sexual orientation ...

In the circumstances of hatred based on religious belief or on sexual orientation, the relevant act (namely, words, behaviour, written material, or recordings, or programme) must be threatening and not just abusive or insulting.

If this is the relevant legislation, then consider how quickly it has been used as an instrument to drive a political agenda, rather than to deal with anything remotely "threatening". The legislation was only passed last year, but already it is apparently being used by the police to intimidate someone responding to a situation in a normal, light-hearted way.

Such laws are instruments of social engineering and should be repealed.

Strange university creatures

There's been a ruckus at Washington University in the American state of Missouri.

One of the graduates of the university is the conservative journalist, lawyer, author and activist, Phyllis Schlafly. She has been a prominent opponent of radical feminism since the early 1970s.

She received an honorary degree from the university at this year's commencement ceremony in front of 14,000 people. Some of the staff and students were displeased at a conservative being honoured this way and stood up and turned their backs when she received the award.

The 83-year-old Mrs Schlafly was unfazed by the protest and clearly enjoyed the moment. She later described the protest as "tacky".

And this is where it gets particularly interesting. Some of the staff and students are running a campaign to have the university take back the honorary degree.

Fourteen Washington University law professors have written a letter to the Chancellor, Mark Wrighton, in which they explain that,

Our objection to honoring Ms. Schlafly ... stems from the fact that she has devoted her career to demagoguery and anti-intellectualism in the pursuit of her political agenda.

Demagoguery? Anti-intellectualism? Compared to most political websites, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum is genteel in style - about as far away from demagoguery as you can imagine.

The claim has more to do with the inner workings of the professors' political mindset, which, in the closed environment of a university, has probably rarely been challenged.

One retired law professor did step in with an alternative view:

Jules Gerard, a retired Washington U. law professor who worked with Schlafly to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, said that if the university were to rescind the degree, then it would have to change its policy statements — to say that the school tolerates all views except conservative ones.

And what about the Chancellor, Mark Wrighton? He is acting more strangely than anyone:

Wrighton said the university will review the process for awarding honorary degres and will propose appropriate changes.

"Personally, I do not endorse her views or opinions, and in many instances, I strongly disagree with them," Wrighton said.

... Wrighton affirmed his personal commitment to strengthening diversity and inclusiveness and to improving gender balance at the university.

"Washington University -- or any other university -- is neither perfect nor are all its processes for making decisions. We can always do better. In the aftermath of Commencement, I am deeply committed to whatever work needs to be done to rebuild damaged relationships with members of our community -- faculty, students, alumni, parents, trustees and staff. I thank you for all that you do to make this a community so open, tolerant and inclusive ..."

He affirmed his commitment to strengthening diversity and inclusiveness and to improving gender balance? Perhaps you're thinking right now that Washington University is an unusual campus at which men vastly outnumber women and at which ethnic minorities are unfairly underrepresented.

But that's not the case at all. There are slighly more female than male undergraduate students at the university (52% to 48%). Exactly half of graduate students are female.

58% of the students are white. This is higher than the percentage of whites who live in the city precinct of St Louis (44%). However, it's much lower than the percentage of whites in the population of the state of Missouri (87%). So there is a strong case that it is whites who are underrepresented at Washington University.

Therefore, the chancellor is beating himself around the head for crimes against liberal diversity that don't even exist. It reminds me of the situation of apparatchiks under communist rule who also had to prove their loyalty to the system by readily confessing to phantom offences against Marxist-Leninism (although of course the stakes were higher in the USSR - Wrighton doesn't face a knock on the door at night).

And all this because of a single award to an 83-year-old conservative. What this demonstrates is that liberals, despite their mantra of tolerance, are radically intolerant.

A single, small manifestation of something non-liberal, something outside the system, being publicly acknowledged, and they immediately feel the need to confess their sins, to promise never to repeat the offense, to redouble their efforts to purge themselves of the intrusion and to take diversity and inclusion to ever more radical lengths - even to the point at which it becomes a kind of exclusion.

Sweden - not merely odd

The Lego toy company is in trouble in Sweden for breaching equality guidelines:

Sweden’s Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK) singled out images in a recent Lego catalog which featured a little girl playing in a pink room with ponies, a princess, and a palace accompanied by a caption reading, “Everything a princess could wish for…”

On the opposite side of the page, a little boy can be seen in a blue room playing with a fire station, fire trucks, a police station, and an airplane. The caption beneath reads, “Tons of blocks for slightly older boys.”

In its findings, the ERK singled out the images for preserving traditional and anachronistic views on gender roles, according to the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper.

Furthermore, said ERK, the pictures constituted a form of stereotyping which was degrading to both men and women.

When I googled the story I found it listed on several websites dedicated to odd, humorous or bizarre news. On one site, for instance, it was listed alongside an item titled "Man charged for catching, cooking squirrel" and another titled "Rabbit scares off burglar".

It's a mistake, though, to dismiss the story as a harmlessly eccentric aspect of Swedish life.

First, the Swedes are serious about creating a genderless society. The Swedes have adopted patriarchy theory as a state policy. This means that they consider the traditional male role to be the normal human one; the traditional female role they consider a social construct created by men to oppress women; therefore, it is state policy to deconstruct sex differences to create "equality" between men and women.

That's why Lego got in trouble in Sweden for distinguishing between girls and boys in its advertising - the distinction is now considered illegitimate.

Second, Sweden is not the only country to have followed this path. For example, Lego also got in trouble in Ireland. The Irish equality watchdog critised Lego for having a TV advert aimed at boys with the slogan "Who will win the battle?", whereas adverts for Barbie dolls for girls had the slogan "She's so soft and pretty".

Ireland's Equality Authority also complained that:

Blues and pinks were used to differentiate between toys directed at boys and girls ... Toy store owners were also found to be at fault for segregating toys into boys’ and girls’ aisles.

The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland code states that sex stereotyping should be avoided but the researchers say this may not be sufficient, pointing out that in Sweden, no advertising aimed at children under 12 is allowed.

Chief executive of the Equality Authority Niall Crowley said ...“An advertising process is needed that challenges gender stereotypes rather than communicating and reinforcing them.”

Nor is the US immune to this belief that equality requires the abolition of sex distinctions. Barack Obama said last year that women should be required to register for military service and he has now also declared that he would consider opening combat roles to women.

Here is how he put the case for requiring women to register:

... he did say women should be expected to register with the Selective Service, comparing the role of women to black soldiers and airmen who served during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated.

"There was a time when African-Americans weren't allowed to serve in combat," Mr. Obama said. "And yet, when they did, not only did they perform brilliantly, but what also happened is they helped to change America, and they helped to underscore that we're equal."

So Obama not only believes that women are equally able to serve as soldiers, he thinks they should do so in order to "underscore that we're equal".

The modernist mindset is especially striking here. What seems to matter to Obama is that society be regulated without regard to sex distinctions between men and women.

This means overlooking a lot of things. The young women I know have developed in a distinctive way toward an attractive womanhood. It seems like a slap in the face to who they are to suggest that they should be sent into combat. It is like declaring that what they are, distinctly, as women is seen by society as redundant. In old-fashioned terms, it is a dishonouring of their womanhood.

In the Obama mindset there is no essential masculinity or femininity. I find it difficult to believe, though, that the average man has never beheld a woman and recognised something essentially feminine in her. Isn't there in heterosexuality a sense of appreciation, and love for, what is essentially masculine or feminine in the opposite sex?

If we take what is essentially feminine from women, then where does that leave men? Imagine looking on women and not having a sense of their femininity. Does that not undercut our own masculine responsiveness to women? Doesn't it deplete important aspects of our own identity as men?

If there really were no essences, then heterosexuality itself becomes unreasonable and arbitrary. Why would men fall in love with women, if there were no real essence to either category. It would then make more sense for what modernists say about sexuality to be true - that sexual attraction is spread evenly along a continuum.

And if there does exist an essential masculinity and femininity? Then we have a definite nature to develop as best we can in order to "self-actualise" - as do all living things. If this is so, then it makes little sense to regulate society without any regard to sex distinctions. By doing so we only hinder the self-expression and self-development of individuals.

We should let boys be boys and girls and be girls - and value what is best in both sexes. The Swedish project is not oddly humourous - it's an intrusive aspect of modernism to be seriously resisted.

Father Demagogue

American readers might already have seen the following extraordinary video. It shows a Catholic priest, Father Michael Pfleger, giving a grotesque sermon at Barack Obama's church.



The video is striking because it's so unusual to witness a Catholic priest working an audience like this and straying so far from normal standards of dignity (which is my polite way of saying that Father Pfleger comes across as a buffoon).

Pfleger's message, though, is all too familiar. It is the common left-liberal response to inequality. In the liberal view what matters is the power to self-determine: to enact our own will. Therefore, if one group has less of this power they are being treated as less human - there is a fundamental breach of human equality. Why would this occur? The common left-liberal answer is that an oppressor group has organised society to maintain an unearned privilege at the expense of an oppressed group.

It's a theory which assumes that American society is structured in a racist way and is therefore morally illegitimate; that America will be morally illegitimate for as long as any inequality between white Americans and black Americans can be identified; that white Americans are well-off because they have forced down black Americans; and that there must be powerful, racist white Americans upholding the system of oppression.

(This last point helps to explain why white American college students are so often vilified on American TV shows. They are portrayed as domineering types: as arrogant and ready to enact violence against the less privileged. I watched an episode of Cold Case last night (set in the early 1960s) in which the formula was worked hard: the murderer was the only young white character with a flicker of human sympathy, the rest being cold, angry and violent.

Where does the left-liberal theory leave white Americans? With nowhere to turn. They get no kudos for hard work, or sacrifice for family, or financial responsibility, or commitment to education. Whatever they have is held to be a product of a racist, unearned privilege. Nor do any efforts, individual or social, to contribute to the welfare of the black community put them in better standing. The moral taint will be there until that day in which an absolute equality is achieved.

It's not how life is supposed to be lived. We ought to be able to celebrate our own communal identity; the left-liberal theory demands, instead, a defensive, apologetic, guilt-ridden identity. It is hopeless to attempt to satisfy the demands of the theory; a better response is to consider its defects and to speak and act against it.

I don't think it's a coincidence that speaking for the theory has lost Father Pfleger his dignity.

(BTW, I should note that Father Pfleger doesn't speak with the blessing of the Catholic Church. His Cardinal, at the last report, has suggested that Father Pfleger take some time off to reconsider what he's doing.)

The first gangs of summer

Normally people like us are some of the most vocal in the land. Yet we have become afraid.

Michael Williams is speaking here on behalf of the liberal elite of London. He is a journalist in the liberal press; his neighbours in one of the 'coolest' and most respectable parts of inner London include a senior diplomat, a professor and an eminent architect.

Who are they afraid of? A gang of youths who spend the summer nights in their garden square.

The youths flout the law, drinking and smoking dope, damaging property and making threats. The police won't respond and the residents are too scared to take action themselves.

Williams, despite his own liberal credentials, thinks that the liberal mentality might be partly to blame:

One of the main problems, I believe, is a middle-class conspiracy of silence. Not simply because of the fear of crime itself, but because of a fear of seeming illiberal or intolerant. Sometimes our local residents' meetings can be like a version of Radio 4's Moral Maze, with more hand-wringing than solutions.

Those who are bold enough to complain are mostly older and working-class. Many stay silent. None of us wants to be viewed as a reactionary ...

He recognises too the "Putnam effect": the hunkering down of individuals into social isolation in a diverse society,

In the meantime, our sense of civic responsibility and community continues to diminish. I see more of the youths than I do of my neighbours most days.

... What was meant to be an embracing live-and-let-live acceptance of difference has hardened, over years of soft-thinking, into a live-and-let-live indifference.

Nor is Williams a lone voice. Andrew Anthony is another left-liberal Londoner who has written lately on the same themes. He too writes sadly of summer crime:

After the third burglary, I bought a baseball bat for protection, and on a visit to a friend's house I noticed that he had the same make of bat in his bedroom ... He too had suffered one too many burglaries. The previous summer a burglar had gained access to his house through his two-year-old daughter's bedroom. He climbed over the little girl's bed as she lay asleep. Because it was such a balmy night my friend had left his daughter's window slightly open.

When I heard this, my first thought was, 'How could he have been so slack?' So adjusted had I become to the need to turn one's home into a fortress that I found it unnatural to allow air into a stuffy room. That an intruder would climb in I took, by contrast, as utterly normal.

What went wrong? Anthony is ready to criticise the left-liberalism he once championed. He no longer believes that "leave alone" values such as respect and tolerance are enough to inspire people to look out for each other:

A society that places emphasis on respecting others has next to nothing to say about protecting others.

He points to a contradiction in the liberal view of the police, in which the police aren't trusted and therefore are stripped of their powers, whilst still being expected to protect people from physical danger:

The standard liberal view of the police is a complex and sometimes mystifying affair. By convention they are perceived as the enforcers of the status quo, Little Englanders in blue, restrictive, authoritarian, abusers of the poor and minorities, defenders of 'them' rather than 'us'. That image has changed a little in the post-Macpherson era but a good liberal still errs in favour of not trusting the police. We want them to back off, we don't want them to stop and search, we don't want them to carry arms, and most of all we want them to be there instantly to deal with any situation that threatens physical danger.

After witnessing a particularly violent street attack, Anthony felt unable to process what had happened in liberal terms:

the more I thought about it ... the more I realised that there wasn't a liberal vocabulary with which to describe the situation. Indeed, even a phrase like 'civic decency' sounded fuddy-duddy, uptight, somehow right-wing.

He was no longer willing to find excuses for the event:

There was a liberal way of talking about the culprits. It involved referring to their poor education and difficult home lives and the poverty they suffered ... I had no appetite for that kind of reasoning. It blamed nebulous society and excused not just the individuals but also the community of which they were a part.

It seems that crime has London's middle-class liberals cornered. They haven't managed to remove themselves entirely from the consequences of their own politics.

As a result, at least some of these liberals are no longer as complacent in identifying with a mainstream left-liberalism. This is especially true in the case of Andrew Anthony, a point I'll develop further in my next post.

Why can't Sweden just accept it as normal?

From Sweden we get the following news:

The Swedish Consumers Association has reacted angrily to one of the ice pops in GB's new line. 'Girlie', a star-shaped, pink ice-cream with glitter make-up stored inside the stick, is entirely inappropriate, according to the association ...

According to GB, the 'Girlie' ice pop signals a "sense of summer", "star status" and "a disco feeling".

The Swedish Consumers Association however uses an entirely different word: "gender-profiling".

"Girlie, GB's new ice pop, is pink and has make-up inside the stick. It says a lot about what GB thinks about girls and how they should be," said the association in a statement.

According to the consumer watchdog, Sweden does not need more products that reinforce existing prejudices surrounding young boys and girls.

"Especially with a product as neutral as ice cream," said Jan Bertoft.

He would like to see alterations made to the product to make it less gender specific.

"They can call an ice pop 'Girlie' if they want, but it doesn't have to be so clearly aimed at young girls and telling them how they should be," said Bertoft.

GB's marketing manager, Christoffer Schreil, considers it unfortunate that some people have viewed the ice cream as being directed solely at girls ...

Schreil ... admits there have been a few complaints.

"We reply to everybody who gets in touch and tell them that we certainly did not mean to reinforce or cement gender roles in any way," he said.

I think I can explain this. An important strand of liberal thought is the idea that we are distinctively human because of our ability to self-determine who we are and what we do.

We don't determine traditional patterns of gender for ourselves, and therefore such patterns logically strike the liberal mind as being impediments to the self-defining individual.

Hence the fears that pink girlie ice creams might tell girls "how they should be" and reinforce gender roles.

The story doesn't end there, though. If traditional gender roles are oppressive, liberals have to explain how they came about. It's been common for left-liberals to claim that they exist as social constructs in order to shore up male privilege.

This means that there is even more reason for liberals to fear a traditionally feminine gender identity: it is thought to contribute to female oppression and gender inequality.

The Swedes are serious about this kind of ideology. Just a few years ago a Swedish minister, Jens Orback, declared that:

The government considers female and male as social constructions, that means gender patterns are created by upbringing, culture, economic conditions, power structures and political ideologies.

At about the same time a county government in Sweden removed funding for a book because it contained an interview with Annica Dahlstrom, a leading neurobiologist, who has recognised differences between the male and female brain.

If there are differences between the male and female brain, there might be reasons within human biology for traditional gender patterns, and this would violate the Swedish government policy of social construction. So there was to be no interview with Annica Dahlstrom and no book.

A Swedish newspaper editor wrote in support of the county government that:

Our Swedish gender equality policy is based on us being equal and socialised into different gender roles. Annica Dahlstrom is an essentialist feminist and believes that boys and girls are totally different. The county government cannot publish material with that opinion.

So the ice cream story isn't just political correctness gone mad. It reflects mainstream liberal politics within Sweden.

One interesting thing to note about the above quote from the Swedish editor is the sense in which the term "equality" is used. The quote suggests that men and women can't be equal if there is a real basis for gender difference. In other words, it is assumed that gender equality is based on a fundamental sameness between men and women.

Perhaps this is an outcome of the whole social constructionist argument. If you believe that gender differences are constructed to oppress women, then you will assume that eliminating gender differences will create gender equality. So gender sameness will be associated with equality between men and women.

This isn't an easy concept of equality to defend, since few people would really want, or think it possible, for men and women to be the same. So I think we could expect liberals to run both an argument that gender sameness equals equality, and a denial that gender sameness is an outcome they are aiming for.

There is also another difficult aspect of the liberal view of gender equality. If the liberal measure of equality is how autonomous or independent we are (allowing ourselves to be self-determined), and if men are assumed to be a privileged class, then men must be assumed to be highly autonomous and independent.

This would explain the assumption that I've heard expressed by feminists that men historically could do as they wished. Yet, when advocating for a modernist view of the family, liberals often tell men that they will have a liberating expansion of "choice" if they give up the breadwinner role.

So men are being given opposing accounts of their historical role according to the particular matter at hand: that they have had too much choice historically, as a privileged class, but that they have suffered from lack of choice in their traditional role within the family.

Note too another unfortunate aspect of the liberal view of gender equality. If the measure of equality is how autonomous or independent we are, and men are identified as the historically privileged class, then the male role is the one to be envied and sought after.

So you can expect liberals to fall into the idea that women, to be equal, must have more of the "superior" male role and men more of the "inferior" female role. In particular, this will mean advocating careers for women over a more traditional motherhood role.

Again, I don't think that even liberals find it easy to embrace the logic of this position. Most liberal women will retain at least an aspect of a traditionally feminine identity and instinct and won't want to regard this as inferior. So it won't be surprising if liberal women fluctuate uneasily between the claim to a "superior" masculine role, and an identification with the more traditionally feminine.

Finally, given that "equality", understood the Swedish way, requires men to act against a deeply embedded provider instinct, and women to act against an even more deeply embedded motherhood instinct, it's not surprising that the Swedes have accepted the necessity of state coercion in achieving equality.

According to Jens Orback, the Swedish minister quoted earlier, the achievement of gender equality requires government action in all policy areas:

Our work for gender equality is governed by our understanding that a gender-based power structure exists, meaning that we see that women are subordinate to men and that this is something we want to change.

To be successful in making these changes we must ensure that a gender perspective is present in all policy areas. The gender mainstreaming strategy is therefore essential if we want to achieve a gender equal society.

I have focused on pointing out some difficulties in making the liberal view of equality coherent or persuasive. The larger task, though, which I won't attempt now, is to question the liberal assumptions on which their view of equality is based.

Meanwhile, we'll have to expect "advanced" societies like Sweden to be flummoxed by the concept of pink ice creams for girls.

Can it only be politics or rugger?

Not everyone understood my last post. It was an attempt to draw out the "neutrality strand" within liberalism.

What is the neutrality strand? In the 1600s there was a period of religious conflict. As a means to restore social harmony, there was an effort to base the social order not on an assertion of religious truth, but on tolerance of different religious claims.

So there was a shift from an assertion of religious truth to an ideal in which the equal claim of others, their equal right in matters of religion, was focused on.

This established a framework in which traditional identity in general came to be associated with social antagonism and superior claim, whereas repression of traditional identity was linked to tolerance, harmony, and equality

There are liberals who filter reality through this kind of framework. They assume that all forms of traditional identity are based on superior claim and a denial of equality, and that the adoption of a neutral stance is the mark of high principle and a proper basis for a harmonious social order.

Traditionalists often have a difficult time penetrating this liberal mindset. We experience traditional identity in a radically different manner. It is felt by us to be a natural and positive aspect of self-identity, based more often on feelings of love and attachment than on hostile, antagonistic superiority.

So what is wrong with the liberal framework? In my last post, I endorsed the criticism of the liberal approach made by Mark from Western Survival. He argued that most of the traditional sources of identity targeted by liberals are based on real, meaningful and immutable differences between people. Therefore, attempting to eliminate them causes, in practice, more harm than good.

I added two further criticisms. First, that adopting a neutral stance toward things which matter causes a major defect in Western man, namely a failure to project. It makes Western man, as the liberal subject, fit only to observe the "colourful other," and unable to actively assert his own identity.

Second, I noted (following Mark) that liberals made an exception for political identity, and that it was therefore no accident that liberal intellectuals often sought distinction, and group allegiance, through holding "correct" political beliefs, in particular by disdaining the working-class as nativist rednecks and presenting themselves in contrast as tolerant liberal cosmopolitans.

I described this kind of distinction seeking as a lazy form of elitism, not requiring any real effort of character or achievement.

Which brings me to the updates. First, by coincidence there was published in yesterday's Melbourne Age an article by Catherine Deveny, one of the two leftist women I quoted in my own post. Deveny's article is a classic expression of lazy distinction seeking.

First we get the disdain for the working-class as nativist rednecks. Deveny describes the grand prix auto racing fans as "knuckle-dragging petrol heads" and "flag wavers". She tells them that if they need a grand prix to feel proud of their city to "please kill yourself at your earliest possible convenience. And take your 'I'm Another Australian Against Further Immigration' T-shirt with you."

Then there's her claim to superiority: she, unlike the average joe, appreciates not just immigrants, but the most radically "other" of immigrants, the recent Muslim arrivals. Furthermore, she loves to eat their ethnic cuisine: pide, gozleme and baklava.

Finally there's her failure to project. She's a master at this. She has taken a job as a Middle-Eastern bakery tour guide in northern suburban Melbourne:

Last week and again this week, I'll show folks around Sydney Road and take them into a handful of the many Middle Eastern bakeries along this lively and cosmopolitan strip of bridal boutiques, multicultural food, funky cafes, factory outlets and rampant tolerance.

Her role is not to be an exemplar of her own culture, but to be invisible to herself and observe instead the colourful other (note the combination of adjectives she uses to describe the other: funky, lively, multicultural, cosmopolitan).

She is happy with the role of tour guide to what is most foreign within her own hometown, and is proud that she is more advanced in this role than others. She apparently likes the fact that the people she shows around, unlike herself, feel disoriented by what they see:

"I feel like I am in another country," the wide-eyed Loafers say as they openly gawk at the young girls wearing the hijab and tight jeans.

So Catherine Deveny tries very hard to earn distinction through cosmpolitan political beliefs. The problem is that you don't really earn elite status through such ideological distinction seeking.

So what non-ideological qualities might justify a claim to belong to an elite? The Wikipedia article on elitism suggests the following:

- Rigorous study of, or great accomplishment within, a particular field of study
- A long track record of competence in a demanding field
- An extensive history of dedication and effort in service to a specific discipline
- A high degree of accomplishment, training or wisdom within a given field

It would be a step forward if we lived in a society in which the elite, at the very least, engaged seriously with high culture, personal character and matters spiritual.

We are a long way from this. My call for a non-ideological form of distinction seeking was not comprehended in some quarters. It was thought to be a call for a physical, corporeal elitism, based on sporting prowess.

Over at Larvatus Prodeo, a fairly mainstream left-liberal site, it was suggested that I was leaving the "healthy mind" part out of the saying "a healthy mind in a healthy body" and that I was advocating something along the lines of "cricket and rugger for the blokes, synchronised diving and beach volleyball for the sheilas."

Someone else thought I might be excluding Catherine Deveny from the ranks of the elite because she was no good at games. There was also a comment suggesting that the sports already occupied an elite position compared to culture and the arts.

So some on the left cannot conceive what a non-ideological form of distinction might be, let alone fill the role. Nor do they seem open to the idea that they are undeserving of status given the shallow basis on which they claim distinction. They hold the opposite view: that they are not accorded enough status, particularly in comparison to non-intellectual sporting types. This is the thought which engrosses them.

Why don't we have an elite?

Why do liberals wish to make things which matter not matter? Mark at Western Survival gives this explanation:

I think that what is going on here is that liberals, in their well-intentioned, understandable, and laudable desire to make the world a better place, wish to "deconstruct" - i.e., eliminate - any aspect of human identity that leads to friction, with the single (unprincipled) exception of political identity.

What Mark is describing here is the neutrality strand within liberalism. This is one of the strands of thought making up modern liberalism. I can't vouch for the historical accuracy of what this strand claims, but I do know that many liberals like to view their philosophy in its terms.

The argument runs something like this. After the religious conflicts of the 1600s, it was decided to order society not by religious authority, but "neutrally" according to a concept of equal rights.

The highest principle was less to assert a religious truth than to tolerate a variety of religious claims; to repress favouritism and discrimination toward one's own religious view in order to keep the peace; and to recognise the equal claim of others, their equal right, in matters of religion.

Equality, tolerance, non-discrimination as a means to secure social peace.

However, the highest principle was gradually extended in its reach to other kinds of truths and values on which society had traditionally been based. Western man increasingly adopted a stance of public neutrality toward the things which matter.

Mark himself describes this mix of equality, non-discrimination, neutrality and social harmony as follows:

Liberal thinking goes something like this:

Egalitarianism is what is right and moral. No one is better than anyone else, so no one should have any significantly better circumstances in life than anyone else. To be a good person, you must be an egalitarian.

Ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, nationality, language, religion, and culture are aspects of human identity that lead to favoritism and discrimination and thus power and wealth inequalities and social friction.

Because these sources of identity lead to inegalitarian outcomes, these sources of identity must either be eliminated or made unimportant.

If people's only significant source of identity were as liberals - people with no religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural identity - most of the strife in the world would be eliminated.

So what's wrong with the "neutrality strand" within liberalism? Mark argues that the problem is that the sources of identity targeted by liberals can't in reality be eliminated. Therefore, a more realistic goal would be the adoption of international norms in which important sources of identity could exist without friction or strife.

Mark sets out his argument persuasively, and I encourage readers to visit his site and read the entire piece. There are, though, a few additional arguments I would like to add.

First, the adoption of a neutral stance toward things which matter leads to a major defect in modern Western man, namely a failure to project. Mark captures this defect at the very end of his description of how liberals see things (as quoted above):

If people's only significant source of identity were as liberals - people with no religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural identity - most of the strife in the world would be eliminated.

If people have no religious, ethnic, gender, national, class or cultural identity, then they are empty men fit only to observe and admire the "colourful" life they witness in the non-liberal subject, in the "other". They lack a "self" to carry confidently into the world. They have too little to project on their own account.

Second, Mark is right to highlight the free pass given to political identity. Liberals do allow themselves to be passionate about their political identity, to identify with larger political entities (i.e. with political 'teams'), and to assert superiority on the basis of political beliefs. There isn't the same adoption of a neutral stance when it comes to political identity and belief.

As a clear (although unusually extreme) example of this, consider the views of Marieke Hardy, an Australian left-wing scriptwriter:

I'm afraid I can't get past politics in a friendship. It would be difficult for me to even get to friendship stage without working out which 'team' my potential friend may bat for, but let's just say for the sake of argument that somehow I've gotten all dizzy for paldom before discovering my potential best mate is a Young Liberal. Okay.

Me: Wanna go see a movie tonight?
New friend: My word, yes!
Me: Hey, funny thing. I've never asked who you vote for!
New friend: That is funny, isn't it?
Me: Hilarious!
New friend: Haha!
Me: So who is it?
New friend: John Howard!
Me: Goodbye forever!
New friend: Cheerio!

I know my parents have Liberal voting friends ... I'm glad that they could see past politics to break bread with their comrades and neighbours, but it's just too big a deal for me. It's too important.

I have a particular group of friends who I adore. They are rabid lefties. They also have two very close mates who openly vote Liberal. When I discovered this I was very shocked, and didn't deal with it very well. I'm now able to be at larger dinner parties with them and make polite conversation, but we all know that there will be no further friendship entered into.

Another Australian leftist, Catherine Deveny, has made it known that:

Even if the Liberal Party promised me everything I wanted ... I still wouldn't vote for them because they are not my team.

For these politically correct women, politics is a source of identity which is considered important and which allows a partisan loyalty to a larger collective.

Yet this is exactly what isn't allowed for the other sources of identity, such as traditional ethnic or national loyalties.

Not only is this a double standard, it represents a distortion in the way human loyalties are understood. After all, the distinction between the Labor and Liberal Parties isn't really that important. It hardly deserves the kind of passion given to it by the women quoted above.

Furthermore, if political identity is the one area in which we don't have to adopt a stance of neutrality, but can discriminate, assert a collective allegiance or even assert superiority, then it becomes one permissible means by which individuals can seek distinction in the modern West.

It's not surprising, therefore, that our cultural elite seeks distinction through holding the right political beliefs, rather than through (real) cultural refinement, or the expression of character, or service to family or nation.

This means that, despite the egalitarian idea within liberalism, there is still an elitism in Western societies, but a lazy one based on little more than holding to certain beliefs.

A recent example of this kind of lazy elitism is the argument of English columnist, Patrick West, that Australians are "white trash" because we are "some of the most coarse, racist people on earth".

West's complaint is not only that we lack refinement, but that we fail to measure up to liberal political belief by having too much ethnic loyalty and therefore being "racist".

West even seems to suggest that our deviation from liberal belief is so great that we better fit the role of "colourful other" rather than liberal subject:

I don't mean to be rude to the Australians, who are really quite charming and part of me does warm to their earthy sense of humour and childlike joie de vivre.

The Australian writer Guy Rundle thinks the Patrick West view of Australians is common amongst the English commentariat. According to Rundle:

As an Australian in Britain, you simply get used to it. More often than not such anti-Australian sentiments find their expression in the leftish mainstream press, where ostensible liberalism often serves as a mask for cultural elitism.

It is a cheap elitism. To claim it, you don't actually have to be elite in any field or in any aspect of personal character. You simply have to look with disdain on mainstream, working-class culture and hold to liberal, cosmopolitan views.

We won't have a true elite until we return to more demanding, non-ideological forms of seeking distinction.

What's twisting the sisters?

From the website of an Australian feminist (Kate) we learn that:

Some feminists do actually hate men. And if you're a man I think you just need to accept that.

So here is a feminist admitting that she belongs to what these days is termed a hate group (a hate movement?) and that the targets of this hatred should casually accept the situation.

What kind of a response did this get from her feminist sisters? The feedback was as follows:

Ariel: Bloody brilliant!

Mindy: Keep up the good work Kate.

Cristy: Great post Kate.

Dogpossum: I applaud the sentiments.

Janet: Right on, sister.

Lizzy: This is a fantastic post.

What could possibly twist the minds of these women so much that they would applaud an article which so casually discusses a feminist hatred of men?

It's notable that many of these women unquestioningly accept the ideas of patriarchy theory.

Patriarchy theory claims that society is organised on the basis of power and domination. Men are the dominant class and all aspects of society are designed to secure the subordination of women. There is no natural masculinity or femininity to explain the differing roles and behaviour of men and women. This too is a creation of the patriarchy designed to subordinate women, and must therefore be overthrown.

Imagine what it would be like to be a heterosexual woman who believed in this theory. You would be attracted sexually to the very group who were your oppressors. You would also have to question the expression of your own feminine identity. Talk about being conflicted!

Little wonder that "dogpossum" declares in the comments that:

Sometimes I think it would be easier to just become a lesbian separatist, and hate men.

The influence of patriarchy theory runs right through Kate's article. For instance, she justifies feminists hating men on the basis that it's harmless, as women like herself are powerless within a patriarchal system:

Even if I do hate men, so what? Do I have the power to do anything with my hypothetical burning hatred of human beings with penises? Nope ... I am a Man-Hater, in a world where the institutions of power favour the XY chromosome.

The problem is that reality doesn't fit the theory. Feminists have not been left as powerless oppressed women within a patriarchy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ever since the mid-1800s, feminists have been granted a great deal of power in Western societies.

In Australia, feminists have secured a special office to help shape government policy; they have had university faculties established for them; they have been helped into political positions via a quota system within the ALP; and they have been helped into positions of influence in the professions via affirmative action policies.

In the 1980s and 90s, as many of us will recall, feminists were powerful enough to establish their own views as politically correct.

The fact that feminists have been so readily promoted within the power structure means not only that patriarchy theory itself is wrong, but that a feminist hatred of men is not to be taken lightly.

Kate also tries to justify a feminist hatred of men on the grounds that women are callously victimised within a patriarchal system. She writes that she is a man-hater in a world:

where women are regularly raped and abused and murdered, where child abuse is rampant, and where my gender guarantees I'll make less money than a male colleague.

Again, this fits the theory of patriarchy well (as it reinforces the idea of women as a subjugated class), but not reality. In the comments to her article, I pointed out that it's actually men who are more likely than women to be victims of violence and that women are more likely than men to abuse children.

There was much resistance to accepting these facts. I was told I was ignorant, incorrect, dishonest and a poor role model for men. But when I linked to some persuasive evidence the counter-argument changed. It was accepted that women did in fact abuse children more often than men, but this too was blamed on the patriarchy (for "making" women spend more time with children than men).

Here again you see the concern to fit reality into the theory rather than the other way around.

Finally, Kate tells us that she doesn't really hate men, but just masculinity:

You see, I don't really hate you, if you're a man. If I criticise 'masculinity' I'm not being critical of you as an individual ... I'm being critical of an idea, a performance, a culturally inscribed set of ideals about how 'men' should behave.

Once again, this fits in neatly with patriarchy theory. Patriarchy theory explains the traditional male role in society as being a result of an oppressive, illegitimate power system and not as a natural expression of masculine drives. So Kate is being perfectly orthodox in her feminism when she describes masculinity negatively as a mere "performance" or "culturally inscribed set of ideals" rather than as a true expression of men's nature.

But once again there are problems. First, science has now confirmed that gender is not just a social construct but is hard-wired into human biology. So Kate is forced to complicate matters by adding on as a kind of postscript that:

I'm not a complete moron and I do think there are differences in male and female behaviour that come down to chromosomes and hormones and suchlike.

So Kate is running with two competing views: first, that masculinity is simply a "performance" and, second, that masculinity has a natural basis in human biology.

There are other tensions produced by the patriarchy theory view of gender. On the one hand, women like Kate are duty bound to reject both masculinity and femininity as pillars of patriarchal dominance.

But where does this leave a heterosexual woman? How is she then to secure a sense of her own feminine identity and her attractiveness to men?

It seems to me that the more that such feminist women reject femininity in theory, the more that they attempt to bolster it in practice. How else can you explain the feminist craze for the most feminine of interests, such as knitting, sewing, decorating, flowers and kittens.

Kate herself lists her primary interest as knitting; Mindy makes quilts; Laura likes baking and kittens; and Janet likes to sew pink clothes for her daughter. Janet, in fact, runs one website about her passion for laundry and another about her love for motherhood, her daughter, flowers, gardens and sewing.

So we have this very odd situation. The feminists who are adamant in theory that there is no essential masculinity and femininity are in practice the best living proof of the existence of essential gender differences between men and women.

Heterosexual feminists have done themselves a disservice in accepting patriarchy theory so uncritically. It is a theory which can only leave such women deeply conflicted.

Patriarchy theory leaves women with a conflicted view of men as being loving fathers, husbands and sons but also a hateful enemy who subjugate women in every facet of their lives. It leads feminist women to see themselves as hard-pressed, powerless victims at a time when feminists hold considerable power within the institutions of society. It puts feminists who view gender difference primarily as a social construct on a collision course with modern science. And it creates a powerful conflict between the rejection of femininity as a tool of patriarchal domination and the expression by feminist women of their own feminine identity.

If feminist women suffer it is not at the hands of hard-working, masculine men but more as a consequence of what their own theory imposes on them.

Pale, male & stale?

In yesterday's Business Age there was a report on the need to feminise the Australian workplace. According to Stephen Bevan, director of the British based group The Work Foundation:

If employers here think they need what I call pale, male and stale employees, they're going to be disappointed.

It's interesting that Stephen Bevan should refer in such a negative way to older, white, male workers. First, most of the employers he is appealing to are themselves going to fit within this category. Is he hoping that they won't twig to the fact that in attacking the older, white, male category of their workforce that he is spitting in their eye as well?

Second, I note that The Work Foundation has on its website the following statement:

With our emphasis on promoting respect and dignity within every organisation as a means of boosting performance, The Work Foundation is way ahead of the game on people management.

Respect and dignity? Not for everyone it seems.

Third, for a case study in grand hypocrisy take a look at the directors of The Work Foundation. Every single one "pale" and "stale" and all but one "male" as well. Maybe they should be the first to step aside for the younger, female, multi-ethnic workforce they are so keen to promote (for other people, just not for themselves).

Feminist: it's wrong to stay home

Gretchen Ritter, a feminist academic, doesn't like the idea of women staying at home to look after their children. She tells us that it's actually wrong for women to do so, for the following reasons.

It denies men the chance to be involved fathers ... What does it mean when fathers are denied the opportunity to nurture their kids in ways that are as important as their work? What do the children miss when they don't have fathers changing their diapers, picking them up from school ... On both sides, the answer is too much.

There are three flaws in this opening argument. First, men in traditional families don't miss out on the chance to be involved fathers. A recent major survey found that in more traditional households where men are the main breadwinners, fathers spend an average of 9.7 hours a week with their children. In contrast, in feminist type arrangements where women earn a larger percentage of the income, men spent fewer hours (8.7) with their children.

Second, Gretchen Ritter falls into the usual trap of trying to persuade men that child-care is an important and rewarding task to commit to, whilst arguing that women should be doing something else. There's an inconsistency in her message about the value of nurturing children.

Third, children are most sensitive to the absence of their mothers. There are many young women rejecting feminism because they grew up missing their mums.

Women who stay at home also lose out - they lose a chance to contribute as professionals and community activists ... we need women in medicine, law, education, politics and the arts.

Gretchen Ritter ignores the vast majority of women who are not going to be lawyers, doctors, teachers, politicians, artists and community activists. Ritter assumes that the word "women" refers to upper middle-class feminist women.

Obviously, a large number of women work in jobs they don't find rewarding (according to the survey linked to above, only 31% of young British women find their job fulfilling). Why should such women give up on stay-at-home motherhood to continue in relatively mundane and menial paid work?

Nor is it impossible for women to value stay-at-home motherhood, whilst later contributing to society as teachers or lawyers. This is, in fact, what a considerable number of professional women choose to do.

There's one other thing to mention here. Motherhood is at the centre of life in a way that careers can never be. It is a more intensely personal role, more embedded in women instinctively, and more a part of the inner world of emotions and spirit.

In the book The Bitch in the House there is a letter from a 1950s mum to her feminist daughter, explaining why she did not feel oppressed to be a housewife. The mother writes:

When you and your sister were growing up, I was what your generation calls a "stay-at-home mom" ... I can say now that those were some of the happiest years of my life. I was enchanted by my daughters, and watching them grow up from little helpless blobs into wonderful people was the most rewarding experience I ever had. I didn't then and still didn't consider it a job. It was joy.

This woman had worked prior to having children, and she became a teacher when her children were older. Yet, she doesn't sacrifice the idea of motherhood to her professional work, and, better yet, she doesn't even regard the two in the same way. There is a significance to the motherhood role that can't be reproduced in mundane work, not even in a professional career.

Full-time mothering is also bad for children. It teaches them that the world is divided by gender.

I had to laugh at this one. This is a case of a liberal panicking at the idea that gender differences might be thought to matter.

This movement also privileges certain kinds of families, making it harder for others. The more stay-at-home mothers there are, the more schools and libraries will neglect the needs of working parents, and the more professional mothers, single mothers, working-class mothers and lesbian mothers will feel judged for their failure to be in a traditional family and stay home with their children.

Interesting. Gretchen Ritter wants to "privilege" her own preferred family model by making the traditional family seem illegitimate. And yet her closing argument is that she doesn't like the privileging of certain kinds of families!

She makes her case by arguing that traditional women create inequity by setting a motherhood standard which makes other women feel bad. The problem with this argument, though, is that it undermines Ritter's previous claims of how inferior the traditional family is. If the previous claims were right, then you would think that traditional women would be glumly contemplating their more fortunate not-at-home sisters.

Instead, we are told that it is the non-traditional women who are feeling insecure about what they are doing, so much so that only by abolishing the traditional family will they recover their self-confidence.

(Gretchen Ritter's article "The messages we send when moms stay home" was first published in July 2004 in the Austin-American Statesman. The only link to the original article I could find is here.)

The left has its nutters

This is not serious political analysis. It's simply drawing your attention to a leftist rant, one which suggests that there exist individuals on the left who are consumed by hatred, paranoia and self-loathing. A commentator named "Earthrise" contributed the following to a left-wing Australian blog:

We have sold our souls for a flat screen TV, paid for with the blood and suffering of innocent brown people. The weight of our bad karma is darkening the sky.

You good people know the feeling after Howard won the 2004 election. Nobody cared that our once beautiful country brutally and illegally invaded a sovereign nation!! I am ashamed to say I am one of the people who considered moving to NZ. Not from disappointment, but out of fear (I have three young girls). Not fear of some pathetic terrorist, but of the creeping fascism in our country, and our people's acquiescence. Part of me wants these people to suffer, my countrypeople. They have betrayed everything that made this country great.

That part of me looks forward to the next Great Depression. For me, the poverty will be a kind of forced seachange. I am already making the adjustments. For the fat, lazy, greedy, apathetic majority, that dark part of me smiles at their coming fall. Then I remember, these are the people who voted for Hitler. To 'save' themselves, they will ride the wolf.

Charming, isn't it? It makes the political rants of Michael Leunig seem positively benign in comparison.

I'm not suggesting that Earthrise best represents the opinions of the mainstream left. But bear rants like this in mind when the left portrays itself as the caring, non-hating side of politics, or when a leftist media singles out figures on the right as extremists. The left is a little too smug about itself when categorising things this way.