So it doesn't matter?

What is interesting in the video below is how the last speaker, Johannes Leak, takes aim at leftist identity politics. He appeals to the underlying principles of liberalism:

This is what he said about the left:

Broadly speaking they are so focused on what makes everybody different. But at the shallowest level. Skin colour. What should not matter. The way that I was brought up was that that is one of the fundamental things that doesn't matter about people. The way they look. Where they come from. Their sexuality. These are the things they are obsessed with. And they're the things that shouldn't matter. It's beside the point. We're all people. I feel like they exist in a bubble they have to keep puffing up, while the rest of us are all getting on with it.

Regular readers will know that this is very close to how I describe the logic of liberalism. Liberals believe that we should be autonomous, self-determining individuals. This means that predetermined qualities, like our race, must be made not to matter.

So Johannes Leak is being orthodox in his liberalism in insisting that a predetermined quality like race should not matter. He therefore follows the traditional right-liberal view that we should be colour blind and not discriminate in any way when it comes to race or where people are from.

The fact that Leak's view is an ideological one doesn't necessarily make it wrong. So I'll briefly point out why we should reject it.

First, a person's race does naturally have some place in their identity. Race is a marker of a people who have a long shared history through time, who recognise something of themselves in each other, and who have developed over time a distinct culture, language and way of life. In other words, it marks the shared ancestry of those who belong to a distinct "ethny". In this sense, it is constitutive of a person rather than merely accidental to who they are.

To say that race shouldn't matter therefore undermines one of the larger identities that "moralises" people - that locates them within a tradition they can be proud of and act positively to uphold. It helps to ground the social commitments of individuals. That is one reason why there is such an effort in Australia to build up a positive sense of race for Aborigines - there is an understanding that young Aborigines are bolstered ("remoralised") in this way.

Think too of the ultimate logic of the liberal position on identity. If where people come from is accidental to who they are, then being a part of a nation, even a civic nation, is not significant to our identity. That's why another right-liberal, Andrew Bolt, rejected his family's Dutch identity in favour of,

asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

So what we are left with is identifying with ourselves. A kind of hyper-individualism. No ethnicity, no race and not even a civic nation - as even this is thought to be a merely "accidental" way of dividing people.

Which leads to the next problem with the right-liberal option. A group of people who are hyper-individualists will find it very difficult to defend themselves against those who act in solidarity with each other. This is one reason why the left has been more successful than the right in seizing control of the institutions and in forming their own communities. Hyper-individualism also leaves the right blind to the realities of demographic change. In the mind of a right-liberal, open borders should pose no problem, as it is assumed that those entering the nation will act only as individuals, rather than identifying with a group interest. They assume that others will assimilate, even as the former majority population becomes a minority. It's a dangerous assumption. If you want to live in a safe, secure, high trust society with a limited government and secure property rights, then you are better off maintaining a degree of homogeneity that the right-liberal position undermines.

Nor do right-liberals understand that the very principles they uphold help to create the left-liberalism they so dislike. It goes like this. Right-liberals assert that race, as a predetermined quality that is merely accidental to the individual, should be made not to matter. The solution, they believe, is for individuals to be colour-blind.

Left-liberals agree that race shouldn't matter. But they notice that it still does: in educational outcomes, in employment, in income, and in levels of representation within the culture and the government. And so they see racism as being systemic within society and believe that as a matter of "social justice" that "white privilege" must be dismantled, with people of colour leading the way. And so categories of race do still matter on the left - even though they share the same starting point as right liberals.

The point being that the left-liberal position is just as logical a response to the liberal starting point.as the right-liberal one. If you push the idea that race shouldn't matter, as Johannes Leak does, then it is likely that people won't rest content with a colour-blind society in which there are still racial discrepancies.

Another problem with the right-liberal position is that, as a matter of logic, it won't just be applied to race. If things that are predetermined "accidents of birth" shouldn't matter, then that means that our sex shouldn't matter either. Logically, Johannes Leak should insist that we not identify as men or as women, that these categories are divisive and that we should just see ourselves as individuals. Yet, the truth, again, is that sex is constitutive of who we are rather than being merely accidental to our identity, and that it helps ground our social commitments, such as our commitment to family.

If we shuttle back and forth between left and right liberalism, we'll continue to repeat the mistakes of the past decades. We'll either have the hyper-individualism of the right liberals, or the anti-white identity politics of the left liberals. Both are dissolving of the West. Better to assert that our communal identity does matter and should matter, so that we seek to carry it into the future.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Breaking the right way

Some encouraging news. The young women of the alt right are making up their minds on the national question and they are choosing to reject civic nationalism.

It began with a YouTube video by Lauren Rose which I have already posted on (here).

Then Faith Goldy posted the following tweet:

I find it interesting that civic nationalism has some emotional hold on her. I'm not sure why, as it seems emotionally empty to me. Instead of a deeper hold of shared ancestry, history and culture it is based instead on a shared allegiance to some wrongheaded liberal political principles - and in practice most Western nations don't even insist that new immigrants share these principles. Still, I have to accept that something about civic nationalism once appealed to her, but that she now recognises that there is no future in it, and that it leads to ethnocide.

The "coming out" of Lauren Rose and Faith Goldy emboldened the YouTuber "Blonde in the Belly of the Beast" to make the following thoughtful video explaining why she too has shifted away from civic nationalism:




Part of what motivated Blonde to make the video was her negative reaction to the following tweet by Jordan Peterson:

Peterson is good on many issues but this is straight out right-liberalism in which individualism is set against the evil of collectivism. I wish that Blonde had developed a point that she alluded to in her video, namely that this is a false opposition. If you support the individual, then you have to support healthy forms of collective life as well, because humans are in their natures social creatures who develop themselves most fully and readily through these forms of collective life.

The family is one obvious example. This is a collective, and not even a voluntary one. Nonetheless, it is how individuals experience maternal love and paternal guidance; it is how individuals are socialised through relationships with their siblings to have successful peer relationships; it is how individuals develop an appreciation for the efforts and achievements of past generations and part of how they form a commitment toward future generations; it is how men exercise masculine instincts to provide, to protect and to guide and how women exercise feminine maternal instincts; it is how individuals have the opportunity to experience enduring loving relationships that might endure into old age; it is how children experience the stability and "rootedness" that is part of creating an enduring resilience in later life....need I go on?

The right liberal opposition between the individual and the collective is a false one. Instead, the relationship between both has to be ordered the right way, so that individuals uphold the necessary forms of collective life, and make some sacrifices to do so, but without the dignity and significance of individual life being denied by the collective.

Does it not make sense, for instance, for an individual to make some sacrifices on behalf of family, if this is such an important institution in the life of the individual? The real point here is not to deny the importance of family as a collective, but to try to arrange things so that the individual sacrifice is worthwhile, i.e. to arrange things to that there is a viable and healthy culture of family life.

Blonde focuses on a different issue in her video. She notes that in practice it is only whites who are pressured to follow the idea of existing only as individuals, without a collective identity or a collective interest, whereas others are allowed to organise effectively as collectives. This leaves whites defenceless and unable to uphold any right to a future existence - or even to defend themselves against the aggressive politics that is increasingly being directed against them.

Haidt: The Righteous Mind

I have been reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". There is much for a religious traditionalist like myself to like and dislike, but I thought I'd begin with a quote. It is Haidt describing a moral theory developed by Richard Shweder.

The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other's projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies. You find it in the writings of utilitarians such as John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer (who value justice only to the extent that they increase human welfare), and you find it in the writings of deontologists like Kant and Kohlberg  (who prize justice and rights even in cases where doing so may reduce overall welfare).

OK, so that is the dominant ethics of autonomy to be found in the modern West. Shweden's theory goes beyond this and recognises two other ethics.

But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking  in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous - a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everything depends.

The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody's rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass (me: a moral scenario Haidt had raised earlier to examine the issue of disgust/purity), he still shouldn't do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degredation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity's baser instincts.

Swedish PM doesn't like the nation

Fredrik Reinfeldt is the supposedly "conservative" PM of Sweden. But just like David Cameron in the UK, it's not obvious that he is very conservative at all.

Last week he stridently rejected the idea of nationalism and national identity, setting this against the idea of individual rights and individual differences:

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Wednesday urged young voters to head to the European parliamentary polls on May 25th "to cure the European disease of nationalism".

"European cooperation has created a foundation where individual rights are paramount, and has created the possibility to move freely," Reinfeldt told students at Luleå Technical University, adding that his party encouraged diversity.

The prime minister said that while the union was not perfect, it was better than the alternative.

"Let go of the age-old and revolting thought that what sticks out is dangerous," he cautioned. "Safeguard the idea that we are individuals, who are different and can live together with tolerance and mutual respect."

That's a false way of posing things. Reinfeldt is setting the idea of the individual against the idea of belonging to a nation, as if the two things were at odds.

In fact, a strong sense of belonging to a national community will generally enrich the life of the individual and add to his sense of identity, his commitment to the society he lives in, his connection to a particular culture and the meaning of his work and his efforts to raise a family.

Nor does a national community erase individual differences. If you were to take, for instance, 100 ethnic Japanese you would find a diversity in character, personality and sensibility that would more than satisfy the human urge toward difference.

It's true that jingoism - the stirring up of national feeling to support an aggressive foreign policy - is a negative thing, but it should be remembered that nationalism can also be drawn on to resist aggressors. Was it not, for instance, a love of country that helped to motivate young Australian men to defend their nation in WWII?

It seems to me that the individual loses power when he is reduced to the status of an individual consumer or careerist in a modern, internationalist, liberal state. He is no longer part of a larger community existing through time. He is no longer a participant in a unique culture, nor does he share in the achievements of a national community. He no longer has the inspiration in his life of heroes whom he is related to in a particular way; nor does he feel a sense of ownership over the particular landscape of his national homeland.

If he feels himself to be just one atomised individual in a mass society, then how can he not feel smaller than the man who feels himself to be a part of a great tradition?

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.

Brandis 2

I've been looking at a statement on liberal belief by George Brandis (1984). Here is the next part of his essay:

This view of a society of free and autonomous individuals distinguishes in two essential respects Liberal social theory from the approaches of its most important contemporary rivals, conservatism and socialism. Firstly, conservatism and socialism have in common the belief that the basic units, the 'building blocks', of human society are structures much vaster than the individual.

The conservative sees society as a naturally ordered, harmonious hierarchy; while in the eyes of the socialist, the basic structures of society are irreconcilably hostile classes...Both agree that individual persons are but incidents of larger entities. Although liberal social theory does not deny the existence or significance of such larger categories, it insists upon the priority of the individual. It is the distinctive claim of liberalism that the individual person is the central unit of society and is therefore prior to and of greater significance than the social structures through which he pursues his ends.

Brandis doesn't frame things the right way. If you want to defend the individual then you have to defend the social entities which he belongs to, which express his social nature, which make his social commitments possible, which help to define him and which bring significance and meaning to his life.

So it's not helpful to think of the individual as being either prior to the social entities or subordinate to them.

If your starting point is the autonomous individual as the central unit of society, then you are not doing the individual any favours as you are taking him as an abstract entity and stripping him of important aspects of who he is and of how he fulfils himself in life.

It is a false and artificial starting point.

It's a new dating world for women too

Laura Wood has had several very interesting posts up lately. One of them is titled Going Mad. A young woman who was brought up to be a feminist wrote a letter to Laura Wood expressing her frustration at not being able to find a man who wants to form a family with her:

I am a young woman in my twenties. I have a Ph.D. and was raised to be extremely feminist. To make a long story very short, I am very lonely. I am attractive and pleasant enough and have never had trouble attracting men, but they (or at least the ones I meet) tend to want only one thing. Over time, I have discovered that I have very conservative …"tendencies" and have been lurking at your site and others like it for years, rather wistfully I must say. I long to be a wife and mother and to have a lifelong companion. I love art, music, and literature, and that is why I continued my studies, but while they have been rewarding, they have only made me lonelier in the end, because the students are all very liberal and even the ones who are married are not in it for the long haul. Divorce is always considered an option and many of them engage in behaviors I wouldn’t consider at all appropriate in a marriage, like flirting or even adultery.

In response I feel I have gone somewhat mad. My parents and friends have told me that I should focus only on my career and have treated my desire for marriage as a sickness, as if it should be a cherry on the top of my life instead of my life itself. So I feel that there is something wrong with me. On top of that, I have no idea where to find a community or a dependable, hard-working, masculine man who is looking for the same things I am and wants a marriage for the long haul, a true lifelong commitment.

The letter highlights a problem with the liberal concept of society. I quoted George Brandis's concept of society in a recent post of my own:

To the liberal, the most fundamental characteristic of any society is that it is a coming together of a number of individual persons, each of whom has a unique identity, unique needs and aspirations, the individuality of each of whom is equally important. The pursuit of individual ends, subject to the agreed mutual constraints necessary to social existence, is the dynamic force of human progress.

If it's true that all of our needs and aspirations are unique, then society is going to be thought of as a whole lot of atomised individuals each pursuing their own ends. That works if all you want in life is casual hook-ups with the opposite sex. Atomised individuals can interact with each other on this basis. But what if you want something more than this? What if you want to form a family?

Then things become more difficult. As Laura's reader points out, matters of culture then become important. It starts to matter if there is a culture of stable commitments within a community. It matters too if men are dependable and hard-working or not. And there needs as well to be a place, a community, where those who want to form families can meet together.

So a culture and a community, formed on the basis of shared or common aspirations rather than uniquely individual ones, become important in an area of life that is highly significant to us, namely our opportunity to marry and have children.

In a strongly liberal environment, like that on a campus, the effects of atomisation and the disruption to culture and community are likely to be stronger. So my advice to Laura's PhD reader would be to make a determined effort to meet men outside of the campus scene (even if this is counterintuitive, given the usual human drive toward assortative mating).

It's a pity that the traditionalist movement isn't developed enough yet to offer the kind of community she is looking for. I would point out to readers who are feeling a bit dispirited that if we did grow a bit more, so that we were even a small community, we would become a beacon for those people, like Laura's reader, who are searching for an alternative.

Jensen falls for false solidarity

There was a very interesting political debate on Australian TV this week. It featured Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen and the boorish leftist Catherine Deveny.

The first issue discussed was asylum seekers. I was disappointed by the unthinkingly complacent view taken by Archbishop Jensen. This could have come from a liberal:

One of the great things about Australia is our welcome and the welcome we give to people from all religions, all places in the world and we have become a little bit visceral in regard to the Muslim people coming here. I think we need to back off a bit, welcome them, make them feel at home and you will find they will take their part as all the rest of us who have arrived here take our part too. On Sunday I was with a Vietnamese who’d arrived here in a boat. He is now he's a pastor in a church, he's got a Vietnamese church, the Vietnamese community have brought us wonderful things. I said to him "What have you brought us, mate?" He said, "Good food." So I reckon welcome people, don't judge them.

There are three key errors here. First, Jensen is feeding the liberal belief in negative rather than positive values. That's not a wise move for a churchman. A liberal morality is built negatively around non-interference; you're supposed to be tolerant of difference, supportive of diversity, non-judgemental, non-discriminating etc. (That kind of morality doesn't necessarily make liberals nice people - Deveny justifies her aggressive rudeness in the debate by claiming she is "intolerant of intolerance".)

And so Jensen is proving himself a good person in the liberal sense when he takes the merely negative view that we simply don't judge or discriminate when it comes to borders. But by falling in line with "it is negative values which makes someone a good person" Jensen becomes blind to more traditional positive values, such as the value of people having a homeland in which they can maintain a larger ethnic tradition of their own, and develop their own culture, and fulfil the human desire to pass on their own tradition from one generation to the next and so on.

The second error is that in stating "welcome people, don't judge them" Jensen is encouraging the liberal idea that race or ethnicity, as predetermined, unchosen qualities ("accidents of birth") shouldn't matter. There is no way that a churchman should sign on to such a political position, as the logic of this position leads away from the Christian tradition. For instance, if ethnicity should be made not to matter because it is a predetermined, unchosen quality, then so too should our sex - the fact of being a man or a woman. But this then means that Biblical views of the family have to be jettisoned, something that Jensen is reluctant to accept. For instance, later in the debate Jensen defends the traditional family on these grounds:

What we're seeing, I think, is a clash of world views between what I’d call individualism and what you may call family or, in a sense, community. It's a clash of world views which is going on all around us and it has drastic consequences one way or another. If you agree with me that a man is a man and a woman is a woman and although they are we are absolutely equal, equal in the sight of God, both made in the image of God, both with the same destiny, both with the same value, all those things are inherent in the Christian gospel and they must remain in the Christian gospel, agree with that and yet, on the other hand, I would say there are differences between men and women which both sides bring to a marriage and we have not been good recently at working out what it is that men bring to marriage and women bring to marriage.

Jensen can't have it both ways. First, when it comes to refugees then he is the individualist who denies natural forms of human community in favour of the view that "we should all be seen as individuals who can fit in anywhere equally well". Second, when it comes to refugees he is happy to go along with the liberal idea that a predetermined quality like ethnicity shouldn't matter; how then can he expect to hold the line when he argues that a predetermined quality like a person's sex should be thought to matter?

Jensen's third error, and perhaps critical error, is to go along with the liberal understanding of solidarity. Traditionally solidarity was based on loyalty to those you had a close and particular connection to or relationship with, such as your family, your community, your ethny, your nation and so on. Liberals have stood this traditional notion of solidarity on its head, by asserting that solidarity is based on compassion toward the marginalised other.

In practice this means that white liberal women like Catherine Deveny will identify against their own men and in favour of those seen as most "other" - perhaps black men or Muslim men.

Jensen does nothing to assert the traditional view in response to women like Deveny. He only fans the flames when he says things like the following:

When you talk to refugees, my business means I catch taxis from time to time, which means I talk to all sorts of taxi drivers, many of whom have university degrees and are highly skilled people who are going to make this - build this nation for us. But they do come from different places. I have met some from Afghanistan but they do come from different places and we've got to remember that the struggles that have brought them here are true in many places in the world. Our program has got to be such that we'll bring people here, preferably the people who are suffering most

He believes that it is the suffering other who is going to "make this - build this nation for us". He has an elevated view of them and a correspondingly diminished view of us, who are presumably incompetent to do the job.

It's terribly unwise for someone in his position to go anywhere near the liberal attitude to solidarity. He is, after all, an older white male in a position of responsibility. Therefore, he is going to be one of the ones who is identified against -  it is a case of solidarity against white males just like him. And if he is tainted then so inevitably is his church.

Deveny reminded him of this during the debate. When Archbishop Jensen tried to defend the church by arguing that the church sees everyone as having equality, she interrupted him to deny that everyone has it:

I'm sorry, a white middle class man like you does have it. Try being disabled, try being an asylum seeker, try being gay, try being a woman, you’ll find it's not there.

He is being put in his place as "a white middle class man" - there is no solidarity with the likes of him.

And what of Jensen's complacent attitude that it is Muslim refugees who are going to build Australia and that we should just welcome anyone and not judge? The timing of his comments was not exactly great, was it? In recent times we've seen Muslims in Norway demand that part of the city of Oslo become a Muslim quarter; Muslims in Libya brutally murder the American ambassador; Muslims in Sydney hospitalise two police officers in demonstrations against a film made in the US by a Copt; and demonstrations and riots in many countries around the world against the same film.

We have embraced the wrong sort of solidarity, one in which natural ties of loyalty have been discarded.

Memo to Jeremy Clarkson: Britain abolished international slavery

Popular Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson isn't afraid of speaking his mind. That's increasingly rare and I commend him for it.

But his most recent comments are disappointing. Clarkson's dog had to be put down and some of this twitter followers responded with cruel comments. Which then led Clarkson to write the following in Top Gear magazine:

Britain is a nation of 62million complete and utter bastards. We are the country that invented the concentration camp, and international slavery.

Maybe he's being deliberately provocative. Perhaps he wrote it whilst still in a fit of anger and upset. Even so, it's a hopelessly negative attitude to take toward your own national tradition.

The jibe about inventing international slavery isn't even remotely true. Slaves have been traded across national boundaries for thousands of years. If Britain had a distinct role it was more for using its power to abolish the international slave trade rather than inventing it.

Which leads me to a theory about why so many Westerners have a self-contempt. One of my readers recently defended liberalism as follows:

Shame on both the conservatives and modern liberals and any “ism” for using the government to force people to act in ways they think they should act. The only thing that should be worth dying for is freedom from men using the government to force people to act out their ideals. Governments should only exist to protect peoples life, liberty and personal selfishness as long as their selfishness does not lead to stealing, cheating, lying or causing harm to another’s private property or themselves.

There is an assumption underlying such an attitude which is that there are no positive goods that can be known to us; instead, we are to think in terms of there being personal, subjective ideals. But this runs very close to a pessimistic nihilism, as it locks in the suggestion that real, objective goods either don't exist or can't be known.

The only thing that lessens the nihilistic blow is this: if you think that there are only personal, subjective ideals then you might be able to conclude that a freedom to pursue your own subjective ideal unhindered becomes the one significant good that can be recognised to exist.

Which perhaps helps to explain the tremendous emphasis placed on such a freedom by liberal moderns. It is something that is clung to in order to avoid an immediate descent into a nihilistic scepticism.

But it's not much to cling to. And hence the vulnerability to self-contempt and a desire for self-abolition.

The solution is to have the courage to discuss a mix of positive goods (which can include freedom and autonomy) and to develop these within the political, cultural and social framework of society. Obviously,  a society which does a better job of this will have a stronger foundation than one which doesn't, but ruling out the notion of positive goods ensures that you will fail.

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.

Is it really just a case of being you?

The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part.

Lawrence Auster

I've been reading the Times of India a bit lately, in fascination and dismay at how quickly India is picking up the modernist disease.

The paper even has a "new age" section which recently featured a short article titled "Be what you want to be". I found it interesting as it was a summary of ideas that are commonly held in the West.

According to the article, what matters in life is a freedom and power to be ourselves:

True freedom means the power to be really you. Every one of us is unique, with our own basic personality, wants, desires, likes and dislikes. The sum total of all these makes us what we are. However, few of us are lucky enough to be in control of internal and external circumstances to be able to express our true selves. So we could end up being what we’re not.

The core idea here is that we are the sum of our preferences. We are a bundle of wants and likes, so that what matters is the freedom to "express our true self" by following our desires.

The worst thing then is to be impeded by some external force in following our uniquely desiring "true" self:

Family and society, friends and colleagues create circumstances – albeit perhaps with good intentions -- that condition us, often forcing us to do or become what we are not. Invariably, it suits many of us too, to be what others want us to be, rather than to be ourselves.

Sounds nice, but remember what "being ourselves" is thought to mean. Our self is understood to be the "sum total" of our preferences, so being our authentic self means nothing more than following through with our self-generated desires rather than external ones that "force" us to be something else. Humans are being defined here by wants, likes and desires.

Once you accept this definition, other consequences follow. For instance, who knows better what we want than ourselves? It therefore will seem logical that the individual should be made as autonomous as possible, as there is no point for the individual to accept direction from any other source. What other source can tell me what my unique wants or desires are?

Note as well that if we follow this idea that our "self" is a unique combination of likes and desires that if we do something we dislike we are thought to lose our very self. There's not a very strong basis for the concept of duty here, of acting for the right or the common good rather than acting to fulfil a personal desire.

What happens if we are blocked in following our own wants? According to the article we become stressed and this leads to disease. The suggested cure is this:

So let’s give ourselves absolute or total freedom, to think, to speak and to do what we really want to.

Total freedom to do what we really want to? What if we want to spend our children's inheritance in a bar? The article cautions us as follows:

This does not mean becoming selfish or license to cause injury to others. On the contrary, a person who values his freedom will immediately realise the value of others’ freedom. Absolute freedom means freedom for all. It means giving up controlling ourselves and controlling others.

That sounds like Millsian liberalism. I don't see that it's necessarily true. If my purpose in life is to make sure that my desires are unimpeded, then what is to stop me taking the attitude that the fulfilment of my own desires should come before those of others? And even if I do choose to value the freedom of others to pursue their own desires that does not make me unselfish. I'm still just doing my own thing for myself, I'm not acting for others.

Nor is it the case that this formula, in which we are each supposed to act for ourselves but respect the rights of others to do the same, leads in practice to a happy mindset of mutual freedom. In the West, what it has led to is the breaking apart of the natural solidarity of a traditional society. If what matters is the power to define and follow our desires, then there will be a sharp focus on which group is thought to hold a controlling influence, thereby holding back all the rest from a genuinely human status. Western society has been riven by a focus on hierarchies of dominance, privilege and oppression.

And what about the idea, expressed in the quote above, that we should give up controlling ourselves? That makes sense if life is simply a matter of following our individual desires. If that is true, then we can simply move from one desire to another - control will be thought of as a block. The problem, though, is that we all learn soon enough that if we pursue our wants in an uncontrolled way that we end up harming ourselves. And we are more likely to live a lesser, rather than a greater, life.

As I suggested earlier, it seems to me that this "free to be me" view of life is a common assumption of modernist liberalism. It has the advantage of being a clear and simple way to view things; all we have to accept is that we are unique in our desires and preferences and that life therefore becomes a matter of individual preference satisfaction and "tolerance," "respect" and "non-discrimination" when it comes to the preference satisfaction of others.

(Here's something else about this system of thought. If you were not to respect a preference or want of someone else it would mean that you were not just rejecting the preference or want but their very personhood, as they are defined as a person by their wants.)

Why should we reject the "free to be me" ideas as set out in the Times of India article? First, it doesn't even work on its own terms. Many of our deepest wants require a social setting. If, for instance, I deeply want to marry a feminine and family-oriented woman, then I need a society in which such women exist in numbers. If I want to live in a community which respects moral virtue, then I need a society in which individuals maintain such standards. If I like my own ethnic tradition and want to see it continue, then I need for that aim to exist at something larger than an individual level.

How can I maintain such conditions of society if the understanding of what it means to be human is so radically individualistic? The "free to be me" philosophy emphasises that my wants are unique and that I fulfil them simply by not controlling myself or others. So how then am I supposed to uphold the social conditions that are necessary for the fulfilment of my deepest wants and preferences? What is likely over time is that my wants will become increasingly trivial; they will be limited to what is possible within the system.

The second reason for rejecting the "free to be me" philosophy is that it is a false statement of what it means to be human. We are not just a bundle of random preferences. We are creatures with a definite nature to be fulfilled and able to recognise a common good and a moral right existing over and above our fleeting desires.

The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt has written a book called "The Righteous Mind" which should be of interest to traditionalists.

Haidt is a "social psychologist" who until recently thought of himself as a liberal. He has a particular theory of morality; he believes that what really drives our moral beliefs is a "moral intuition," an immediate feeling of what is right or wrong, rather than our rational intellect.

Haidt studied the moral beliefs held within communities across the world and came to have a greater sympathy for non-liberal moral systems. A reviewer of Haidt's book summarised his position this way:

In the West, we think morality is all about harm, rights, fairness and consent....But step outside your neighborhood or your country, and you’ll discover that your perspective is highly anomalous. Haidt has read ethnographies, traveled the world and surveyed tens of thousands of people online. He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Alongside these principles, he has found related themes that carry moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation.

That's interesting. When I read it I immediately thought that liberal morality was very cut down compared to traditional morality. Of the twelve principles and related themes, liberalism only cares about the first three - and as we shall see, this narrower moral focus is recognised by Haidt.

The reviewer, William Saletan, goes on to address his liberal audience as follows:

The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality.

In other words, individual autonomy is not made the sole organising principle of society.

Haidt makes a sympathetic defence of the non-liberal moral beliefs. That's unusual and welcome coming from someone who identifies as a liberal, but unfortunately his chosen defence is flawed:

These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.

The problem here is that non-liberal morality is being defended not because it is rational or true, but because it fits an evolved human nature. Our moral sense evolved to like a non-liberal understanding of justice and therefore this preference has a basis within human nature. That is Haidt's position, according to Saletan, and as we shall see it allows Saletan to reassert the supremacy of a liberal morality.

But first, here is the quote from the book review which recognises that liberal morality is more cut down or reductionist compared to traditional morality:

You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.

This is what I've argued for many years: it's not that individual autonomy is necessarily wrong, but it needs to be balanced with a range of other goods. It cannot always be the overriding good in society.

I don't think it's right, though, that the Republican Party is committed to a non-liberal understanding of morality to the degree that Haidt/Saletan appear to believe it to be. Some of the Republican Party base might hold to the values of faith, patriotism and valor more than their Democrat counterparts, but there's not much evidence when it comes to policy direction that leading Republicans think all that differently on social issues than leading Democrats.

What follows next is a more detailed defence of traditional moral norms. Haidt agrees that for a society to hold together there has to be a level of cooperation (the moral capital of society) in which individualism is constrained:

One of these interests is moral capital — norms, prac­tices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition.

Here traditionalists would certainly agree with Haidt. Again, I've argued many times that the more that the state steps in to provide for women, the more that the role of husbands within a family is undermined, leading to greater instability within family life. This is also a better defence of traditional morality than the "it fits evolved human nature" one, as it is effectively an appeal to reason and truth. What Haidt is really arguing here is that the logic of liberal morality is to dissolve forms of cooperation that are important for the functioning of society.

Haidt also puts the case for particular loyalties or what he calls parochial altruism:

Another aspect of human nature that conservatives understand better than liberals, according to Haidt, is parochial altruism, the inclination to care more about members of your group — particularly those who have made sacrifices for it —than about outsiders. Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren’t natural. What’s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat.

Whilst I agree that it is natural to be more focused on serving those you have particular connections to and specific responsibilities toward (your own children, spouse, friends, ethny, conationals etc), I don't think it's sufficient to leave the argument at what is natural. The argument needs, at least, to be elaborated: what we feel particular loyalties toward, such as our family or ethny, have a distinct character and value - a goodness - that rightly inspires our love and attachment, and which it is therefore reasonable for us to want to uphold. We cannot easily substitute one loyalty for another, as (for example) my place within the larger Anglo tradition (my sense of ancestry, of a shared history, of language and culture) cannot be replicated within any other randomly chosen tradition - say the Chinese one. The Anglo tradition will necessarily be more meaningful for me than the Chinese one. Whilst I might like the Chinese tradition and wish it to endure, it is reasonable for me to want to primarily serve the tradition that is most meaningful for me; to which I am most closely connected; which forms a significant part of my identity; which most inspires my love and attachment; which I am best in a position to help reproduce (through children, contribution to culture etc); which is most likely to carry on what I love as distinctive features of my own ancestry and character and culture; and to which, therefore, I feel the greatest sense of duty and responsibility.

It's important to elaborate the sense in which it is reasonable to have particular loyalties rather than global ones, because otherwise it leaves things open for a liberal like Saletan to argue that we should transcend what is natural in order to adapt to the different conditions of the modern world:

Traits we evolved in a dispersed world, like tribalism and righteousness, have become dangerously maladaptive in an era of rapid globalization...

If we can harness that power — wisdom — our substantive project will be to reconcile our national and international differences. Is income inequality immoral? Should government favor religion? Can we tolerate cultures of female subjugation? And how far should we trust our instincts? Should people who find homosexuality repugnant overcome that reaction?

Haidt’s faith in moral taste receptors may not survive this scrutiny. Our taste for sanctity or authority, like our taste for sugar, could turn out to be a dangerous relic. But Haidt is right that we must learn what we have been, even if our nature is to transcend it.

See? It hardly makes a dint in Saletan's commitment to liberalism to argue that traditional morality fits better with human nature. He has an easy "out" which is to argue that we are to use reason to transcend an evolved nature. If it's just a question of what "fits" he can argue that what fitted a premodern society no longer fits, or may even be maladaptive to, a modern society.

We challenge liberals more effectively by exposing the arbitrary underpinnings of their own morality, on which their sense of what is just is based, and by defending our own positions as being not only true in the sense of being objectively moral, but as being rational and necessary for the long term functioning of society.

Rick Santorum: a principled critic of liberalism?

How's this? A leading Republican politician once made a principled criticism of liberalism. Back in 2005, Jonathan Rauch wrote a review of Rick Santorum's book It takes a family: conservatism and the common good. Rauch described Santorum's argument as follows:

In Santorum's view, freedom is not the same as liberty. Or, to put it differently, there are two kinds of freedom. One is "no-fault freedom," individual autonomy uncoupled from any larger purpose: "freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice." This, he says, is "the liberal definition of freedom," and it is the one that has taken over in the culture and been imposed on the country by the courts.

Quite different is "the conservative view of freedom," "the liberty our Founders understood." This is "freedom coupled with the responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self." True liberty is freedom in the service of virtue --not "the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be" or "the freedom to be left alone" but "the freedom to attend to one's duties--duties to God, to family, and to neighbors."

That's pretty good for a mainstream politician. Lawrence Auster once observed that,

liberalism consists in the belief that there is no good or truth higher than the self

Santorum explicitly rejects this liberal denial of a good or truth higher than the self; he believes that the self is rightly oriented to objective virtues.

Similarly, Santorum is not radically individualistic. He recognises that there is a common good and that families are a natural unit of society.

I don't write this as an endorsement of Santorum. I don't have a good understanding of his wider policy positions. Rejecting some of the philosophical foundations of liberalism doesn't necessarily turn you into a worthy traditionalist.

But it does demonstrate that it's possible to bring traditionalist criticisms of liberalism into political debate.

Solidarity & statism

It's very rare that the underlying principles of modern politics are debated. Usually it's just accepted that politics begins with abstracted, atomised individuals who seek to maximise their personal autonomy. The big debate then becomes how you hold together a society made up of millions of competing wills.

In general, the right has argued that the market can regulate individual profit seeking for the overall good of society. The left has preferred to rely on the state to regulate society and to bring about an equality of personal autonomy.

This second tier debate, of how best to regulate a liberal society, is both predictable and never ending. Recently Jon Cruddas, a British Labour Party MP, and Jonathan Rutherford, a Professor of Cultural Studies, reviewed a pamphlet published by the think tank Demos:

The think tank Demos celebrates its 16th birthday with this pamphlet on “liberal republicanism”. Richard Reeves and Philip Collins argue that “the good society is one composed of independent, capable people charting their own course” ...

Reeves and Collins are confident that the future lies in the historical legacy of liberalism, though they acknowledge that the conditions for a self-directed life do not emerge out of thin air. Independence requires what Amartya Sen calls “capabilities” – financial resources, education, skills and health. Liberalism asks that individuals become the authors of their own lives, “but republicanism demands that we are also co-authors of our collective lives”.

But what is the nature of this co-authorship? How do we achieve a good society? Here Reeves and Collins are less convincing. The devolution of power they endorse is limited to a transfer from the bureaucracy to the people.

So Cruddas and Rutherford have no problem with the underlying goal of autonomy, but they baulk at the idea of moving away from state regulation. They are therefore offering a standard leftism. They want more state in the mix of social regulation and less market. Which explains the following criticism of the Demos pamphleteers:

They do not think that wealth inequality threatens political equality. Unlike social liberals, they do not recognise the interdependency of individuals. So, what holds their liberal social order together? Friedrich von Hayek argued that it was the economic relations of the market. Reeves and Collins offer no alternative explanation. At the heart of their political philosophy is the absence of society.

Reeves and Collins write that the “beginning of a liberal politics is the individual”, but their liberalism ignores the ways in which individuals are products of complex social, cultural and economic relations. They argue that the failures and tragedies in people’s lives belong to each alone. But individuals do not decide the inequalities that determine their longevity, or the statistical likelihood of their succumbing to poverty, poor housing, unemployment, murder, prison, disease, mental illness, obesity and educational failure. Such problems are socially produced and are not the responsibility of individuals alone ...

Nothing holds this social order together except the moral imperative to gain maximum personal autonomy.

What Cruddas and Rutherford are arguing is that the "freedom" (i.e. autonomy) side to liberalism, as regulated by the market, only recognises the individual alone, not the individual in society. But society for Cruddas and Rutherford is only significant in how it affects equal access to autonomy. Which is why a commitment to "society" means little more than a commitment to state regulation. The state is supposed to be the guarantor of equal autonomy (equal "freedom"), even if this means state intervention to equalise factors such as longevity, obesity, housing, educational outcomes, mental illness, imprisonment and so on.

So they want a greater reliance on the state rather than the market to "hold this social order together". They call this leftist view "ethical socialism":

Ethical socialism also begins with the individual although, besides liberty, it values equality, because it recognises that there exists a common humanity despite people’s differences. It is based on a mutual recognition that the freedom of each individual depends on the freedom of all.

To summarise this view: we are individual wills seeking to maximise our autonomy, but we shouldn't do this at the expense of others, first because we have a common humanity and second because we maximise our own autonomy most securely in society with other autonomy seeking individuals.

This is still, from the traditionalist point of view, a breathtakingly individualistic perspective. But Crudd and Rutherford believe that they represent a "social" view of things in contrast to a classical, market-oriented liberalism:

In the past three decades, what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “ethical intention” in public life has given way to the pursuit of individual self-interest. The business elite have become a law unto themselves, while the political elite are divorced from the people. Enterprise culture, the flexible labour market and welfare reform have all generated anxiety and isolation, rather than the “independence” valued by liberals such as Reeves and Collins. The values of kindness, care and generosity are out of keeping with the dominant market culture. And the liberal individualism of The Liberal Republic is no remedy for this.

Crudd and Rutherford want to limit debate to the more left-wing subspecies of liberalism: "social liberals" and "socialists". They don't recognise as relevant a more market-oriented, classical liberalism:

Two institutions have dominated the life of this country for the past 30 years: the state and the market. How shall we reform both in order to confront the huge systemic problems we face and create sustainable, equitable economic development? The progressive future belongs to those who can find credible answers to such questions, and who are able to strike a balance between self-realisation and social solidarity. This politics will emerge from the long-standing argument between social liberalism and socialism. Unfortunately, The Liberal Republic places itself outside what will be an epoch-defining debate.

They are talking here of the self-realisation of individuals who have already been stripped of their most significant defining features. And social solidarity here means little more than accepting state intervention. Yet it is the holding in balance of these qualities which is supposedly going to define a future epoch.

What traditionalists have to do is reject utterly the terms of the debate set out before us. It is a tired debate that has repeated itself endlessly for some generations.

We change the whole framework of the debate when we take the social nature of man more seriously. If our sense of self is based, in part, on social qualities, such as belonging to national or ethnic traditions, to family roles or to a role within the polis (political society), and if we recognise the legitimacy of pursuing common goods rather than atomised individual ones then we don't need to rely on either the state or the market to re-socialise individuals who, as a starting point of liberal theory, have been set apart from each other.

What conservatism shouldn't be

Samuel Goldman, at Postmodern Conservative, invites his fellow Americans to raise their glasses "to Locke and the semi-hemi-demi-Lockeans who’ve served this nation."

Why? Because a Lockean inspired government regarded Americans,

as free men and women rather than as members of a class, church, guild, tribe, town, or race.

Cripes! Isn't this a fundamental statement of liberalism rather than conservatism? Isn't it liberals who believe that you make people free by stripping them of their communal attachments?

A Lockean politics takes things away from the individual: sources of identity; ways of life; a sense of belonging; objects of love and loyalty; a close connection to generations past; an attachment to particular forms of culture; a larger, non-hedonistic reason and purpose to act in the world; and culturally embedded ideals to strive toward.

If it's just us as stripped down, abstracted Lockean individuals what are we left with? What is our freedom? A freedom to shop and consume? To participate in our individual careers? To choose our own entertainments? Are these really the highest forms of freedom we can live by?

And where does the logic of a Lockean politics end? If I become free by setting myself against my class, guild, church, tribe, race and town, then why wouldn't I deepen the process by setting myself against my nation and my sex? Why does Samuel Goldman permit himself to speak as an American or as a man but not as anything else? Wouldn't it be more consistent with a fully developed, modern day Lockeanism if he spoke only as the individual Sam?

So I won't raise my glass to Locke as I don't believe that individual freedom is won at the expense of traditional forms of community. The stand alone Lockean individual has an impoverished sphere of life to exercise his freedom in. We are better off aiming at a larger, more significant freedom, one that is enjoyed within the communities and traditions we belong to.

Kasey's metaphorical baby

Kasey Edwards is thirty something and going through an existential crisis. She no longer finds her career fulfilling and she is looking for something more meaningful to commit to.

What about motherhood and family? This is not something she would have committed to as a younger woman. She was brought up, in a liberal, feminist society, to believe that motherhood was an inferior option, a "character flaw" as she describes it.

Which explains this passage in Kasey's book:

On the last day of high school my teacher asked everyone in the class what we saw ourselves doing in ten to fifteen years' time. When she came around to me I said, "Married with kids and a stay-at-home mother." The teacher and the class burst into laughter and so did I. It was obvious to everyone I was just being a smartarse ...

Later, a classmate confessed to me that she did actually want to be 'just' a mother. She looked ashamed and I looked indignant.

Not a good platform from which to launch into motherhood. However, Kasey does appear to gradually change her attitude. After meeting a woman who is dismissive of mothers, she writes,

I am shocked and slightly outraged at Karen's low opinion of motherhood, which makes me realise just how much I've changed in the last few months. I am ashamed to admit this, but twelve months ago I would have agreed with Karen's view on motherhood - a cop-out from the workforce, the loss of identity and the betrayal of the sisterhood ... I used to think that a pram was a symbol of no ambition, no status and a bleak future.

On page 189 of her book there appears to be a breakthrough:

I get into the car and instead of telling him how much I missed him, I say, "I want to have a baby." The words just pop out of my mouth as if they bypassed my brain. "I don't know where that came from," I say. "I swear, I have no idea why I just said that."

Chris smiles at me ... "I'm not surprised ... You'd make a great mother."

I am surprised how touched I am by the compliment and my eyes fill with tears.

She has finlly given herself permission, in her early 30s, to think about having a baby. However, even this is only a hesitant beginning. She notes at the end of the conversation with her boyfriend,

We agree to talk about it again in a year.

This seems a surprisingly long time to delay given her age. She is not unaware of the problems of older motherhood:

We are told all our lives that we need to do everything else first - get an education, establish ourselves professionally, buy property - but by the time we've done all that, our biological clocks have ticked. The older I get, the more I witness the heartbreak of women around me who are unable to get pregnant. And the harsh reality in many cases is that they just left it too late.

I've lost count of how many women I know who are undergoing IVF, or have tried it without success.

So why doesn't she commit herself to motherhood while she can? Unfortunately, she is still too strongly influenced by liberal notions of autonomy:

I'm prepared to accept that having kids could be one answer to being thirty-something and over it, but I don't want to accept that it is the answer. It seems so stiflingly predetermined to think that it doesn't matter who we are or what we have done with our lives up until now, we all have to breed in the end.

Stiflingly predetermined to be a mother. She has bought into liberal autonomy theory in which motherhood is thought to be a predetermined, biological outcome - a "biological destiny" - rather than a uniquely created life outcome.

Kasey also now believes that careerism is a predetermined life course for her, so she is no longer willing to commit to that either. So what does she opt for?

She decides to work part-time while writing a book. Writing is to be her baby:

Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I like to think that my friend Godfrey's metaphorical baby [being a writer] is an adequate substitute for a real one. Surely a metaphorical baby can still meet the needs that Erikson talks about, such as devoting ourselves to, and caring for, something ...

I decide to think more seriously about how I can devote myself to and nurture a writing 'baby'.

She rejects an offer from her company to pay her for writing if she works under their banner:

I'm not prepared to surrender editorial control of the book ... It won't be my baby ... I realise that I need more than just an opportunity to write; I also need autonomy. I want to have freedom in my life to do my own thing. And two days of freedom and autonomy are more important to me than two days of income.

All of which serves as a reminder of just how difficult it has become for intelligent, conscientious, middle-class Western women to have children. The ideological barriers have been raised very high. If autonomy and a uniquely created life path are the highest goods for you, then children won't be a priority - even if you have grown tired of the corporate grind.

One final point before saying good-bye to Kasey Edwards. One thing that struck me reading her book was the individualism of the culture she inhabits. Her colleagues are all looking for something to commit to, and those who are disenchanted with corporate values seem to only look to options such as work with international aid organisations.

I'm not sure this problem would have been so significant in earlier times. In a less individualistic culture the ordinary work we did was tied to something larger than our own momentary satisfactions.

Kasey Edwards does seem to have a glimmer of this when discussing one particular colleague:

Jamie has a purpose for what he does each day - to provide for his family. That means that he doesn't need to get innate enjoyment out of every single task at work because the bigger purpose - his family - is what makes working worthwhile.

She might have extended this thought. If a man was to think not just in terms of himself, but also in terms of his tradition, then he would also be connecting his everyday work to perpetuating a much larger, enduring communal entity. And if he recognised over and beyond himself the existence of a masculine "good", then in meeting his work commitments he would be connecting his own masculine self to a larger purpose.

There is, similarly, more to motherhood than just a biological destiny. A woman's heritage - of family, ancestry and nation - is perpetuated when she has children and raises them to successful adulthood. A woman also expresses her feminine identity - and connects this identity to a larger virtue - through qualities such as maternal love.

In place of this Kasey Edwards suggests a "project". Her own project has come to fruition and her metaphorical baby - her book - has been born. It's an achievement, but one that seems thinner to me than producing a human life.

Beyond the maze?

What is the difference between left and right?

Both start out with the ideal of an autonomous self-defining individual. So the mainstream left and right both share an underlying liberalism.

The difference relates to a second tier issue. If you think of society along liberal lines as being composed of millions of atomised, self-seeking individuals, then how do you successfully regulate society?

The right have looked to the role of the market. Individuals could act selfishly for their own profit and the hidden hand of the market would regulate outcomes to ensure both economic and social progress.

The left did not accept the priority given to economic man. They held an alternative ideal of social man, one in which society would be regulated in a more deliberate way by a class of experts/reformers/bureaucrats/officials/educators.

There is a strain of thought amongst left-liberals, therefore, which is sceptical of capitalism, markets and the pursuit of material gain.

But here's the issue. If you accept the underlying liberal ideal, that there should be no impediments to the self-defining individual, then human aims are limited to what we can determine for ourselves as individuals. The obvious things that we do get to choose at an individual level are careers, restaurants and dining, consumer purchases, travel and fashion.

But these aims won't seem appealing to left-liberals sceptical about the role of the market. They all seem to show the dominance of market values; they place us either as producers (careers) or consumers (shopping, restaurants, fashion).

So there is a type of left-liberal who is destined to remain discontent. These left-liberals are stuck with the underlying ideal of the self-defining individual, but they can't easily accept the limited materialistic and individualistic aims which follow on from this ideal.

Richard Eckersley, a director of research company Australia 21, appears to be one political thinker caught in this dilemma. He recently wrote an article for a magazine called Melbourne's Child (Beyond the Maze of Materialism, January 2009).

He writes, reasonably enough, about the problems facing young Australians today that,

While young people are materially better off, and have more opportunities for education, leisure and travel than ever before, social changes have made it harder for them to develop a strong sense of identity, purpose, belonging and security; to know who they are, where they belong, what they want from life, and what is expected of them; in short, to feel that life is deeply meaningful and worthwhile. Relational and existential issues, not material hardship and disadvantage, lie at the heart of youth problems today.

What is to blame? He identifies two problems. The first is materialism:

Materialism (giving importance or priority to money and possessions), research suggests, breeds not happiness but dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, anger, isolation and alienation. People for whom "extrinsic goals" such as fame, fortune and glamour are a priority in life tend to experience more anxiety and depression and lower overall wellbeing ... Consumer culture both fosters and exploits the restless, insatiable expectation that there must be more to life.

Although I agree, if this was all that Richard Eckersley had to say it would be nothing new. It's not uncommon for those on the left to criticise materialism and consumerism.

He ventures further, though, by making a limited criticism of individualism. It's interesting for him to do this, as he veers close to suggesting that the underlying principle of liberalism itself is a factor in what's wrong. But he's much too tentative to get anywhere useful. He starts out by indicating his general support for individualism:

Individualism (the relaxation of social ties and regulation and the belief that people are independent of each other) is supposed to be about freeing us to live the lives we want. Historically, it has been a progressive force, loosening the chains of religious dogma, class oppression and gender and ethnic discrimination, and so on associated with the liberation of human potential.

Having made all these claims on behalf of the liberal autonomy principle, he isn't left with much room to criticise it, even if he seems to sense that it's part of the problem:

However, individualism is a two-edged sword: as sociologists have noted, the freedom we now have is both exhilarating and disturbing, and with new opportunities for personal experience and growth also comes the anxiety of social dislocation and isolation.

The costs of individualism include ... a heightened sense of risk, uncertainty and insecurity; a lack of clear frames of reference ... a surfeit or excess of freedom and choice ....

This doesn't get us anywhere. Criticising individualism for giving us too much freedom and choice is like criticising a woman for being excessively pretty. It's not exactly a complaint which cuts deeply.

There are much more significant charges which can be levelled against liberal individualism. We are told by Richard Eckersley that young people have been left without a strong sense of identity, purpose and belonging. But how could they possibly develop these qualities when liberal individualism forbids so much?

For example, individuals once identified with their own ethnic group. They had a longstanding tradition of their own to belong to and to contribute to, which helped give meaning to their lives. Identity, purpose, belonging. But liberal individualism has made this illegitimate. If we have to be self-defined as an autonomous individual, then how can we accept a traditional, inherited identity that we are born into? Liberal individualism won't permit it, and Richard Eckersely himself tells us in a passage quoted above that by not discriminating in terms of ethnicity we are loosening people from chains and releasing their full potential.

It's the same when it comes to gender. This is another of the chains which Richard Eckersley claims has been broken by individualism, thereby allowing us to live the lives we want. But historically our manhood or womanhood was significant in forming our identity and providing some part of our purpose in life. But our sex is not something we choose for ourselves, it is a "biological destiny" and therefore it is once again disallowed by liberal individualism.

Richard Eckersley isn't able, as a liberal, to go far enough in his critique of modern society. He writes,

one of the most important and growing costs of the modern way of life is, I have argued, "cultural fraud": the promotion of images and ideals of "the good life" that serve the economy but do not meet psychological needs ...

He can go far, as a left-liberal, in attacking the ideal of economic man in favour of social man and he can even recognise that there has been fallout from liberal individualism. But he skates on the surface when it comes to recognising the effect of liberal individualism on identity, purpose and belonging.

And so all he suggests in the end as remedies are very general left-liberal bureacratic responses: reorienting healthcare to a "preventative, social model"; reorienting education toward "increasing young people's understanding of themselves"; and enforcing the UN Charter of Human Rights of the Child, such as the right "to protection from harmful influences".

Unfortunately, I don't think Richards Eckersley has taken us "beyond the maze of materialism". He hasn't dealt sufficiently with the ruling principles of our society, those which make many significant life aims illegitimate.

Manne's conservative moment?

Most Australians would know Professor Robert Manne as a left-wing academic and political commentator. He wasn't always associated, though, with the left. Back in the 1980s, he was thought of on campus as a right-wing anti-communist.

As late as 1998, he was still not easily categorised as a leftist. I was looking through some old files and I found a newspaper column he wrote in that year. Given some of his more recent, politically correct forays into politics, I was surprised by its contents.

His column is titled "Why Australia's cultural orthodoxy must be resisted" (The Age, 25/05/1998). The orthodoxy he wanted resisted was the liberal one:

Since the 1960s all Western societies have been caught up in one of history's most profound revolutions - the progressive liberation of the individual from those age-old social obligations to family and community, which once put severe limits on individual freedom and autonomy.

No one has captured the essence of this cultural revolution more deftly, than the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn in his Age Of Extremes. This revolution, he writes, is "best understood as the triumph of the individual over society or, rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past have woven human beings into social textures ... the world was now passively assumed to consist of several billion human beings defined by their pursuit of individual desire.

Both Arndt and Ackland belong to the generation that fought for, observed the triumph of and experienced the benefits of the '60s cultural revolution of modernity. Concerning this revolution, this generation - my generation - is now beginning to divide.

One part still looks on the progressive emancipation of the individual from the ties of family and community obligation, and from all restraints on the gratification of individual desire, as an unambiguous good. Their instinct is to close their eyes to the mounting evidence of consequent social disintegration and harm. Yet another part is beginning to feel anxious about certain unexpected or unintended consequences of the revolution in which they once invested their energies and hopes.

Professor Manne sets out the basic "first tier" point of contention in politics very clearly. I don't think he's right, though, in claiming that the "profound revolution" began in the 1960s - it goes back much further in time. Nor did his generation end up dividing between those who supported this revolution as an unambiguous good and those who felt anxious about its unintended consequences. A few public intellectuals have put up some moderate opposition, but overall Manne's generation have continued to go along with things. Manne himself has fallen into line.

It's really up to a new generation to make a more decisive break with the liberal orthodoxy.