Responding to Greer's rage

Germaine Greer has published an essay, On Rage, in which she blames white men for the domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.

The essay is yet another example of an ethnic double standard. Greer is a radical liberal in her attitude to white Australian society, but a traditionalist when it comes to Aborigines.

For instance, Greer complains that the effect of white society on Aborigines has been to set men and women against each other and to undermine the traditional male role, thereby marginalising Aboriginal men within the family. This, she argues, has fostered the rage of Aboriginal men which then leads to domestic violence.

Greer quotes an Aboriginal woman who laments that,

Our communities are like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other. (p.56)

Greer also voices disapproval of the effects of government welfare in increasing the autonomy of Aboriginal women to the detriment of the male role within the family:

The fact that government welfare payments are often made to women ... means that more and more women can live independently of men, and are doing so.

... When hunter-gatherer societies begin to break down, it is invariably the gatherers, the women, who combine to hold them together, but in doing so they further marginalise their menfolk, including their own sons. (pp.75,76)

To give you some idea of how Greer treats the Aboriginal family and the male role within it, here is part of her discussion of the issue:

According to anthropologists RM and CH Berndt, traditionally "the most cherished possessions of men were women, children and their sacred heritage," in that order ... The Aboriginal man's wife was not simply a woman he met by chance and fancied, but a kinswoman ... it is the level of avoidance which signifies just how fundamental, how absolutely shattering this loss and humiliation must be. (pp.56,57)

It's curious to find a Western feminist writing in this vein. After all, Greer led a movement to achieve in her own society the very things she is so dismayed occurred in Aboriginal society.

Take the complaint that Aboriginal societies have been left "like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other".

This view of society, in which men and women are set against each other, is built into the feminist theory championed by Greer. In feminist patriarchy theory, men are believed to have organised a power structure in society in order to protect an unearned privilege gained at the expense of oppressed women.

In this world view, the traditional male role within the family is a source of oppression to be overthrown; men are motivated by a desire to assert power over women; women must therefore compete with men for money, power and status.

Millions of Western girls have been brought up to follow this world view, almost like a religion.

The more radical feminists even go so far as to assume that men, by having organised society to oppress women, must be assumed to hate women. Greer herself, in her influential book The Female Eunuch, goes to great lengths to describe male hatred of women.

Nor has Greer overcome this negative view of men. As I'll describe a little later, Greer is all too ready to vilify white men in her essay on rage - the same essay in which she laments the setting apart of Aboriginal men and women.

It's a similar story when it comes to the issue of autonomy. Greer is terribly concerned that Aboriginal men have been emasculated and marginalised by the decline in their provider role (and in their leadership role); this may have made Aboriginal women more independent, but to the overall loss of cohesiveness of Aboriginal communities.

Yet it is exactly a radical individual autonomy which has been most keenly sought by Western feminists, regardless of the larger consequences to society.

There is another aspect to Greer's ethnic double standard. Greer is a traditionalist in wanting Aborigines to survive as a people, as an ethny. For example, when she discusses the problem of domestic violence in Aboriginal communities, she is concerned not with issues of patriarchy or gender equity, but with the survival of Aborigines as a race:

What is now undeniable is that violence towards women and children across the same spectrum has reached the level of race suicide. (p.91)

When Greer writes about Aborigines, traditional attachments are held to matter. She tells us that Aborigines have lost "what makes any human life worth living". What does she include in this category? Well, she holds that Aborigines have lost "all the important things" including "their families, their social networks, their culture, their religion, their languages and their self-esteem". Furthermore, Aborigines, instead of living in their own tribes, have been forced to amalgamate and live in "polyglot assemblages" (pp.30, 31).

So for Greer it is a terrible fate for Aborigines to live in "polyglot assemblages" as this destroys "what makes any human life worth living". Yet isn't "polyglot assemblage" just another term for "diversity". Is Greer willing to apply her principle to Westerners, just as she does for Aborigines?

I suspect not, as Greer vilifies whites frequently throughout her essay. She claims that Judy Atkinson "puts it as delicately as she can" when she writes of "marauding white males" (p.58); she uses terms like "Australian racists"; she claims that the rape of Aboriginal children by white men "prevailed on a massive scale across the continent, wherever the white man penetrated, in the words of Strehlow's superior, "all the time"" (pp.49-51); she writes too that "From the beginning of white contact in the 1780s ... the white man has considered Aboriginal women his for the taking" (pp. 39-40).

At the end of the essay, the derogatory treatment of whites hits a low point: she uses the term "Whitey" in an openly hostile way:

People now talk of establishing an annual sorry day, as if it would do Whitey good to remind himself how magnanimous he was on 13 February 2008. More useful would be an annual angry day, when Whitey would get reminded of just what he has done for Australia. (pp.97-98)

Little concern here for the "self-esteem" of her own race, despite having previously described it as one of the qualities "that makes any human life worth living".

What is happening here with Germaine Greer? The key thing is that Greer cares about Aboriginal society. She identifies with it and wants it to survive as a distinct entity. Therefore she does not apply liberal concepts to it. She takes instead a traditionalist view.

It's important to understand this, so I'll rephrase it. Here we have a leading figure of left-liberalism, who has expressed on many occasions her alienation from her own tradition and her concern for Aboriginal society. It is no coincidence that she pushes liberalism on her own tradition but refrains from doing so when it comes to Aboriginal society. She wishes to conserve Aboriginal society and therefore takes a conservative, rather than a liberal, stance toward it.

So the question then is why she cares for the survival of Aboriginal society but not her own. I can only speculate as to the reasons why.

Perhaps it has to do with a certain understanding of equality widespread on the left. If you assume that our status as humans depends on our autonomy (our power to enact our will), then an imbalance of power means that some people are human at the expense of others. Therefore, you have to either accept that some people aren't fully human (not a palatable option) or else claim that the inequality in the balance of power is the result of an unjust, unnatural, "racist" organisation of society. The group doing the oppression then loses its legitimacy - its moral status.

As whites were the dominant group for a period of time, it's easy for the left to regard them as the illegitimate, oppressive party - and to prefer to identify instead with a non-dominant minority.

Greer has, in fact, throughout her life identified with an ethnic minority. As a young woman she chose to believe that she was Jewish, despite little evidence of Jewish ancestry. More recently she has sought an Aboriginal identity; in one essay (Whitefella Jump Up, 2003) she wrote of Australians declaring themselves Aboriginal "as if by an act of transubstantiation".

In her essay on rage she also emphasises the powerlessness of Aborigines ("utterly powerless"), whereas white society is represented by "racist authorities". It fits the framework of a majority organised illegitimately around the oppression of a powerless minority.

The framework itself deserves to be criticised: it assumes that human equality is contingent and is to be measured by an autonomous power to enact our will; it makes any majority tradition illegitimate; and it falsely assumes that a majority tradition is organised primarily as an act of oppressive dominance over others.

The framework also distorts Greer's understanding of the real situation. She seems to believe that whites are so powerful that their existence can be assumed to be perfectly secure, whereas Aborigines are so powerless they are on the brink.

If anything, the position of Aborigines is advancing, whilst that of whites is declining. Aborigines are becoming more numerous; there is an increasing amount of land set aside permanently for their own use; they are free to celebrate their own existence and there are considerable government funds at their disposable to organise themselves as a community.

In contrast, whites have declining birth rates; are being relegated to minority status throughout the West by immigration; and do not have the same freedom to celebrate their own existence.

That Greer doesn't see this suggests to me that she is still working through the theory I described above. The distance of this theory from reality, and the double standard it encourages in Greer's own writing, are reasons for younger Australians to question the politics of an older generation of left-liberals.

Films & crisis

Is there a brief way to describe the problem of modernism? Spencer Warren has made a good effort to do so, in an article on film director Martin Scorsese. He writes:

Scorsese's more than three decades of such expression ... embodies the moral crisis of Western popular culture today and, indeed, of Western society: making a god of oneself in the name of "freedom", substituting the unfettered self for higher, transcendent truth, and utter disregard for thousands of years of civilized tradition based on moral and social self-restraint. (Hat tip: Lawrence Auster)

It's what I've tried to explain at this site, but perhaps Warren has put it in a way which works better for some readers. I don't believe Warren has his own site, but some of his work is available here.

Jim Kalb, meanwhile, has briefly defined the role of conservatism:

The role of conservatism is to maintain connection and continuity, between the past and future, the formal and informal, the explicit and unspoken, the secular and transcendent.

I hope this definition doesn't slip away; it seems to me to capture, at the very least, an important facet of the meaning of conservatism.

A balance of goods

In my last post I tried to explain the contradiction at the heart of liberal autonomy theory. In brief, autonomy theory requires two things. First, it requires that we be unimpeded in pursuing our life aims, setting our values and creating our identity. This aspect of autonomy theory leads to an insistence on neutrality, impartiality and non-coercion.

Second, we are considered human because of our status as an autonomous agent. Therefore, if a person leads a life which is thought to be less autonomous, he is no longer equally human: there is a serious breach of human equality. It is clear that liberals regard this as unacceptable, and so the response in practice is an interventionist, coercive one to remedy the situation.

I noted that when it comes to family arrangements the two requirements of autonomy theory come into conflict. According to the official government research body, women wish to organise family arrangements on motherhood principles, and they wish to be supported in doing so by their husbands. According to the first requirement of autonomy theory, they should be left alone to set these values and life aims.

However, the human rights agency believes that women, in choosing motherhood, are living a less autonomous life than men. Autonomy is to be measured through an independent careerism, and therefore the human rights agency believes that family arrangements should be judged in terms of female workforce participation rates and paid maternity schemes. The human rights arm of the government wants state intervention to change women's lives regardless of women's preferences.

Autonomy theory therefore generates a coercion which violates one of its own basic requirements: it generates its own significant impediment to autonomy.

But if autonomy theory doesn't work coherently, what is the alternative? There are two significant questions to consider here. First, it's important to reconsider one of the basic assumptions of autonomy theory, namely that our status as humans is contingent - that it depends on our enacting something, or being granted access to some kind of social condition.

Traditionally in the West, our humanity wasn't thought to be contingent at all. It was something we were invested with. We could represent this human status for better or worse, we could show different levels of personal character and achievement, but whether we were a wealthy aristocrat or a peasant, a man labouring in a factory or a woman working at home, didn't make us any more or less human.

Autonomy theory changes this. By defining our humanity in terms of our capacity for autonomous self-determination, it makes individuals more or less human, which then (understandably) creates feelings of guilt, resentment, illegitimacy and an unending drive to re-engineer the most basic forms of society.

It's difficult, once you accept a contingent humanity, to consider a range of human goods in balance with each other. Once you think of people as being made more or less human by social conditions, and by their own beliefs, values and identities, then addressing this "failing" of society will be given supreme moral status - it will override all other considerations.

Which then leads to a second major consideration. If we were to return to an "invested humanity" rather than a contingent one, then the logic of autonomy theory would be applied less intensely. Even so, autonomy would still be held to be a sole, overriding good: it would be used as the organising principle of society.

This too needs to be reconsidered. The counter-position is that there are, in reality, a number of possible goods to be weighed when thinking about issues. Autonomy can be one of these, but it shouldn't be singled out as the primary good.

For instance, when considering how family life might be arranged we might think about the following questions in terms of securing the good:

- What will help to perpetuate the distinctive community to which I belong, which forms the setting for an important aspect of my identity, and whose existence I take to be a good in itself?

- What will enable me to fulfil my identity/drives/instincts as a man or woman?

- What do I owe my spouse/children/community?

- What really furthers my sense of freedom and independence? (The answer won't always be a radical individualism.)

- What will serve the standard of what is objectively good, of what is virtuous in itself?

Often the answers we give to these questions will fit well together. If being a provider helps to fulfil one of my masculine drives, it can also reasonably be thought to fulfil a responsibility to my family and community.

It's possible, though, for the answers to be in conflict. In such cases, a community has to arrive at a balance of goods. This is where political debate, properly understood, has a significant role.

The nature of and opportunity for such discussion, though, is impoverished when there is held to be a sole primary good. The task becomes not to arrive at a balance of goods, but simply to manage and apply the one primary good. The emphasis shifts to politics as technique, to the process of managing and extending the primary good in society.

Women & coercive autonomy

A recent research project conducted by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) found that:

Australian parents seem comfortable in traditional gender roles - mother as the primary caring role and the father the breadwinning role - at least while their children are of preschool age.

The AIFS is the official government body charged with research on the family. It reports directly to the minister responsible for family affairs.

The AIFS report found further that:

Almost all the mothers reported that when they first had children, they arranged to stay home with the children as primary carer, perhaps returning to work on a part-time basis when the children were old enough to be left in the care of others ...

Eventually, though, many mothers reported that there is a point where their partners begin to talk to them about returning to work and the advantages of additional income for the family budget.

So women are choosing to stay at home until their husbands talk to them about returning to work to help with the family finances.

What's even more significant is that,

A focus on breadwinning rather than childrearing by fathers was not seen by mothers as a lack of participation in fatherhood, but reflected their role as a good father.

In the eyes of mothers who strongly believed that small children needed their mothers to be at home with them all of the time, a partner who 'worked hard' and was a 'good provider' enabled them to stay home and fulfill this crucial mothering role - and in their eyes fulfill a crucial aspect of fatherhood.

Compare this traditional view with the following "Mother's Day" story from the Melbourne Age:

Monday May 14 2007 'Punished' for having children

Rights chief renews push for paid maternity leave.

Australia's human rights chief says women are being 'punished' in the workplace ... Renewing a bid for paid maternity leave to be put on the Federal Government's agenda, the president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, John von Doussa, said failure to set up a universal scheme was 'unfortunate policy' and plainly wrong ...

"Women are getting punished for the simple fact that they, genetically, are those with the function to produce the next generation ... Why should they suffer the penalty?"

The remarks come as up to 60 women's groups prepare to meet in Melbourne next month to build momentum on the issue.

[Mr Von Doussa} said a more comprehensive plan was needed ... to secure better female participation in the workforce.

So the situation appears to be this. The information arm of the state is reporting that women want to care for their young children themselves and that they wish to be supported by a hard-working husband to do so. The human rights arm of the state, though, is advocating something quite different: that what counts is women's workforce participation rate, and that women should be funded by paid maternity schemes to care for their children.

What can explain the discrepancy? I believe it comes down to the liberal idea that what matters most is individual autonomy. We are human, in this theory, because we are creatures capable of self-determination. Therefore, the aim of politics is to ensure that we aren't impeded in our life choices, but can act as autonomous agents in creating our self-identity, in establishing our values and in pursuing our life aims.

The problem with autonomy theory is that it would only work coherently in practice if people really did choose autonomy as their highest good. People, though, generally don't view autonomy as a sole, overriding good in their lives. Therefore, there is a conflict within the theory.

For instance, the theory would work coherently if women were both unimpeded in choosing their identities, values and life aims, and if they then chose to maximise their autonomy by seeking financial independence through careers and bureaucratic paid maternity schemes.

But this is not what women are choosing. Women are identifying and prioritising goods other than autonomy; they might, for instance, in wanting to be supported by a husband, be valuing the love and commitment expressed through the husband's provider role; or the masculine role modelling this provides for their sons; or they might value the anchor such a role provides for their husbands, brothers and sons in terms of family and career commitments.

So the liberal theory in practice has an internal contradiction. Autonomy is supposed to lead to women choosing their own life aims, but autonomy is also supposed to lead to women living a maximally autonomous life. When women choose to sacrifice a degree of autonomy in the service of some higher good, then the two principles can't easily be combined.

The reality is that, over time, a liberal society enforces the "maximally autonomous life" principle, even if this means coercively limiting the "choose your own life" principle of autonomy. Hence, it's likely that a liberal state will implement paid maternity schemes in the service of independent female careerism, rather than allow women to follow their preference of taking the motherhood role itself as the organising principle and being supported financially by a husband rather than by public paid maternity schemes.

The result might be termed "coercive autonomy". We lose the chance to choose the very things that are most important to us and which we hold to be the higher goods and all in the name of autonomy.

The old left in change?

Phillip Adams was an icon of the Australian left in the 1980s and 90s. So it's noteworthy that, in discussing the English dramatist Dennis Potter, he should write:

How can anyone ever be bored anywhere at any time? Isn’t there’s always something to observe, to think, to feel?

Potter applied this intensity to his love of England. Not of Britain; he was repelled by its connotations of imperialism. He loved England and its “Englishness”. But he wasn’t xenophobic, fully expecting others to feel the same way about their countries and cultures. Yet there was much happening to his England and the English that he deplored. Admitting that he no longer saw himself as “of the Left”, that there were issues on which he felt conservative, and recognising that there were times the country had needed some radicalism from the Right, this son of a coal miner deplored the influence of Thatcherism ...

Even if Adams is just building up to an attack on Thatcher, it's still an unusually sympathetic account of national feeling to come from a figure like Adams. Adams is suggesting, reasonably enough, that it's not xenophobic to love your own national tradition if you expect others to do likewise. He also, in terms of a sympathetic account of Potter, presents us with the idea that England might have needed to counter the influence of the left with some activism from the right.

Sometimes I get the impression that members of the "old left" in Australia are discontented with the way things have actually turned out. There's a sense of loss in some of their writings. In the case of Michael Leunig the discontent has pushed him over the edge, to what sometimes comes across as misanthropic ranting and hatred. Adams, perhaps, is more inclined to a mellow re-evaluation of how things stand.

Kipling

In my piece on Anzac Day I mentioned the poem Recessional by Rudyard Kipling. I've read enough on Kipling to be wary of endorsing him as a conservative. Even so, he doesn't fit well into an orthodox liberalism either. The writer Evelyn Waugh summarised Kipling's politics this way:

He was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

Kipling's Jungle Books, which he began in 1892, are described by one biographer (David Gilmour, The Long Recessional, p.107) as follows:

he was not simply writing animal stories to amuse children. The tales are also fables with a moral, allegories with a message. The verses of "The Law of the Jungle," recited by the wise bear Baloo, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families and communities. Individualism must be tempered by loyalty to the tribe - "For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack" - while survival depends on respect for the rules.

Kipling came to greatly admire the soldier and administrator Lord Roberts of Kandahar. Roberts, in his maiden speech to the House of Lords in 1905, summed up the motivation behind his long years of service with these words:

we are links in a living chain pledged to transmit intact to posterity the glorious heritage we have received from those who have gone before us in this place.

How different this sounds to the opinions of a Michael Leunig or a Tracee Hutchison, who both fall over themselves to reject the past and their own place within a living tradition.

Who civilises men?

The modern university is now largely justified in economic terms, either as a recruiter of fee paying overseas students, or as a means to develop labour productivity.

Both sides of politics seem to agree on this. In a recent ABC debate, the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, said that:

Well, education at the tertiary level is an international enterprise. We're in a global marketplace for students, for academics.

Her counterpart, Labor's Stephen Smith, thought this attitude not economic enough:

This Government is living in the past. We've got to strike out for the future. We've got to strike out for the future with a fundamental change of attitude. Education at every level is fundamentally important to our productivity, to our capacity to compete.

It was something of a relief, then, to read an account by Anthony Esolen of his visit to Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia (via Turnabout). Esolen isn't just concerned about the economic aspect of education, but about culture and character.

Hampden-Sydney College is a rare thing, an all-male campus. Esolen was pleased to find that the young men he met at Hampden-Sydney had a well developed sense of honour and brotherhood. He found that the young men, in their masculine environment, developed "timocracies" - by which he means organisations based on a love of honour.

Esolen believes that Sydney-Hampden has preserved a more traditional understanding of the university as compared to the modern economic view:

At Sydney, though, something remains of the old meaning of the word "college" -- a group of people, in this case all of them men, who may have come together in the first place for all kinds of reasons, but who are made one, made brothers, by the common course of study, the venerable traditions of the school, and the polities of honor into which they are brought and in which they thrive, personally and intellectually.

It's a far cry from "college" as commodity.

Esolen goes on to make another significant point. It's his experience that boys educated in institutions like Hampden-Sydney are more likely to develop polities based on timocracy, and to be influenced positively in their character by this, than those in mixed-sex environments. This leads him to challenge the idea that it is women who civilize men. He writes:

Women do not in fact civilize men; they domesticate men, as I've said before. Men civilize men. There's a difference.

What is that difference? A soldier in a cavalry unit who spends most of his time in barracks or under the skies, may well be more civilized, more trained to think of and to act for the common good, to command other men or to obey, than many a high-priced lawyer or even college professor. He's not domesticated, though, and his new bride at first might find him pretty hard to live with.

On the other hand, men who live comfortable lives apart from other men, taking no initiative for the common good, considering only their wives and children and not the welfare of anybody else's children, never to be relied upon in time of public need, may be domesticated but not civilized. You might find plenty of men of the former sort at the inception of a great nation. You will find plenty of men of the latter sort at its decline.

It's an argument worth considering. I think perhaps my father's generation might fall into the domesticated but not civilised category. They were generally good family men, but they didn't seem to take a wider responsibility in the defence of their own tradition.

I wonder, though, if men will continue to be even domesticated, let alone civilised. There are larger numbers of men now, it appears, who have made the decision not to devote themselves to the welfare of a wife and child.

So perhaps the plea to men will have to be, not only to become more civilised in their commitments, but more domesticated too.

Skimpy ethics

What is the ethics of women dressing immodestly? According to feminist writer Barbara Biggs:

I think any woman should be allowed to walk down the street wearing skimpy clothes, or nothing at all, and be free from the fear of rape and harassment. ["Girls who just look available", Herald Sun, 08/11/06]

This sounds at first like a classic statement of modernist liberal ethics. Liberals begin with the idea that we become human only when we are unimpeded in shaping our lives.

This means, though, that any form of "outside" morality will be thought of negatively as a restriction on individuals choosing for themselves.

Therefore, liberals will want to "liberate" the individual from external forms of morality, such as moral codes or traditional moral beliefs.

Barbara Biggs only follows this line of argument part of the way. She goes as far as to suggest that women ought to be able to choose to dress skimpily in public or even go naked. But she doesn't see this as a liberation from a restrictive code of morality.

Instead, she labels such behaviour, even if permissible, as "a bad idea". She is especially concerned about the likely real world effects of a sexually libertine culture on girls:

Nobody tells girls that boys of their age have 18 times more testosterone than they do. Neither young boys nor girls are really taught, or have the life experience to know, how to conduct themselves in a way that respects themselves and the other person ... Nobody tells adolescents that there's sex and love, and sometimes they go together and sometimes they don't.

Barbara Biggs goes on to make a strong case that girls can be influenced by advertising, culture and peer group pressure, so that they act in ways that do not express authentic wants:

Don't we all remember looking around for clues among our slightly older peers and in our culture about what it meant to be grown up, desired and popular ...

I want to shout out to young girls, like someone in a pantomime audience: "Watch out! You're being had! ...

... through these images young girls are being manipulated into thinking that playing up to male fantasies is what they themselves really want and how they should express themselves ...

Do we really think that the girls in the children's clothing catalogues or clips would really, off their own bat, pout and seduce the cameras.

It's not surprising that Barbara Biggs should frame the argument around authentic wants. Once the liberal idea is accepted that the ethical thing is to allow individuals to pursue their wants, then one of the few available ways of criticising people's behaviour is to claim that that they are being manipulated by some external force so that their wants aren't authentic.

In other words, if modernist ethics says "It is moral to do what you want" and a young girl says "I want to dress like Britney Spears", then how does a concerned adult tell her it's not right to do so? Barbara Biggs' answer is to tell the girl "You don't really want to dress like Britney Spears, you're just being manipulated."

I don't like the trend to argue moral issues in terms of authentic wants, but I do agree with Barbara Biggs that peer pressure and cultural influences have a significant influence on how we choose to act, especially when we're young.

This is, in fact, an argument against liberal ethics. The liberal idea is that by rejecting traditional forms of morality we will be liberated to shape our own life as an autonomous agent. The reality, though, is that most individuals won't be any more autonomous, but will become more vulnerable to other influences, including the pervasive effect of a dominant commercial culture.

Similarly, by rejecting traditional moral belief liberal ethics makes each individual start from scratch in developing a moral world view. This is not such a good idea, as it can take a lot of poor moral decisions to learn the necessary life lessons about wise and unwise behaviour.

Consider the case of Barbara Biggs herself:

What I am is a woman with a lived experience of having accepted a grown man's fantasy about what it was to be an attractive adult. I believed that to be lovable I had to sexually please men. I was told this from the age of 14.

I lived that out, having indiscriminate and therefore bad and unsatisfying sex for a couple of decades. It took a couple of decades to work out how to stop shoving my real feelings about it under the carpet and to discover what I really wanted from intimacy.

This - surprise, surprise - was to have a loving relationship with someone who respected, honoured and valued me.

It's not possible to give people "a couple of decades" to arrive at such insights. By then it will often be too late.

It makes a lot more sense for a civilisation to try to preserve moral insight that has been accumulated over time and to pass this knowledge on to the next generation, as a form of guidance. This is only possible, though, when moral traditions are thought of in positive terms, rather than being assumed for ideological purposes to be an impediment to the self-determining individual.

What does diversity research tell us?

I returned to my childhood suburb of Melbourne during the week to visit my parents. Twenty years ago it was an ageing, but still largely monocultural middle-class area of Melbourne. Today it is multicultural.

It is genuinely multicultural in the sense that there are not just two or three ethnic groups living in the same area, but such a diverse mix of people that no ethnic groups stand out at all.

I find the experience of such diversity to be profoundly alienating. It gives me a sense of atomised individualism, in which I exist only as an individual for the pettier purposes of shopping or entertainment. I no longer have the sense of being part of a larger tradition, with a deeper place and more serious responsibilities to my own culture.

It is, I have to admit, always a relief when I head back to my own suburb, which is not exclusively Anglo, but predominantly so. I don't feel the same sense of alienation in such conditions.

I know it's not politically correct for me to write such things. However, I don't think I'm alone in experiencing things this way.

Earlier this year, the BBC ran an article titled "Does diversity make us unhappy?". The straightforward answer given in the article was yes.

Both the Home Office and the Commission for Racial Equality had commissioned research which found that diversity was associated with certain negative outcomes:

It is an uncomfortable conclusion from happiness research data perhaps - but multicultural communities tend to be less trusting and less happy.

Research by the Home Office suggests that the more ethnically diverse an area is, the less people are likely to trust each other.

The Commission for Racial Equality has also done work looking at the effect of diversity on well-being.

Interviewed on The Happiness Formula, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips accepts that people are happier if they are with people like themselves.

"We've done the work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren't other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness.

"People feel happier if they're with people like themselves ..."

To give some credit to Trevor Phillips he does draw as a conclusion from the research that "We need to respect people's ethnicity". This raises the question of how Western governments can respect the ethnicity of their mainstream populations, an important issue that has not been considered as part of public debate.

Three surrender monkeys

Not everyone has the spirit of survival in them. Just in the past week I've happened to read no less than three declarations of civilisational surrender. Readers can decide for themselves which is the most appalling.

First up is Christabelle Dinks, a script editor for a forthcoming BBC programme Rise and Fall of Rome. She sees Britain today as being in a,

period of transformation ... other civilisations are taking over ... and what's to mourn really.

What’s to mourn really? Can you get a more denatured, whimpering remark than this?

Next we have an Australian writer, Stephanie Dowrick. After pondering the violent situation in the world today she finally comes up with the following solution:

The crucial issue may, instead, be one of surrender. (The Age 16/09/06)

Stephanie Dowrick is so defeatist she wants us to wave the white flag.

Which brings us to Piet Hein Donner, the Dutch Justice Minister who said in a recent interview:

For me it is clear: If two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce Sharia tomorrow the possibility should exist. It would be a disgrace to say: “That is not allowed.”

Donner has accepted on principle the idea that Holland could come under Sharia law. No-one with a normal loyalty to his own tradition would so readily accept such a possibility.

Three people, each capitulating feebly in contemplating the end of their own civilisation.

The getting of wisdom

I've had the chance now to observe friends and family mature and settle into their adult lives of work and family. Gradually people figure out what's important and what's needed to make relationships work and how to deal with their own shortcomings.

So it certainly is possible for individuals to learn from their experiences and to get the basic things right.

The problem is ... it takes too long. I know a lot of people who finally reached their completed adult selves in their mid-30s, by which time their best chance to successfully partner and have children has often passed.

I was reminded of this when I read the following passage by American traditionalist Lawrence Auster:

The notion that man’s unaided reason is sufficient to form a good way of life and a good society is, of course, a defining belief of liberalism. By contrast, conservatives, starting with Burke, believe that one person or a group of persons do not know enough, that people cannot start from scratch in each generation and build a decent society, and therefore society depends to a great extent on the wisdom and experience of the past transmitted to the present via culture, laws, moral habits and traditions, religious teachings, accumulated know-how, and so on.

It is precisely a lesson of my generation that you can't expect every individual to start from scratch in acquiring knowledge. The kinds of lessons learnt by each generation need to be passed down as a kind of "short-cut" for the rising generation.

Of course this can be done directly through parents, but it helps too if the culture you inherit guides you to make wise decisions when young which your own experience later confirms.

And this cultural support my own generation did not have. The messages we received were derived more from political dictates than from traditional culture.

And so we had to battle through the confusion of being taught that there were no significant differences between men and women; that gender role reversal was the moral path; that it was liberating for women to act like "ladettes"; that the family was an oppressive patriarchal institution; that motherhood was demeaning to women; that men were collectively responsible for domestic violence; that the male provider role was oppressive to women; and that the Western tradition in general was privileged and prejudiced and to be considered in terms of guilt and apology.

We inhabited a kind of anti-culture, an imposed politics which acted rather as a hindrance to knowledge and development than as a vessel to pass on an accumulated wisdom.

I hope that my generation won't repeat the same mistake and that we will try to endow our own children with a supportive culture.

PS Take a look too at this item by Lawrence Auster on Angelina Jolie.

Scandalous art

It’s not difficult to mock modern art. The empty pretence at the heart of modern art is revealed all too frequently.

The latest scandal involves one of Britain’s most renowned art galleries, the Royal Academy. It seems that an artist sent in a sculpture of a human head to be exhibited, and in a separate box also included a chunk of stone and a small piece of wood to prop up the head for display. The Academy mistakenly thought the props were meant to be the art and proudly displayed them in a summer exhibition – minus the actual artwork.

How did high culture fall this far? I’d suggest two reasons. Traditionally high art was supposed to either represent or evoke some higher truth about existence or some higher state of human experience.

It’s difficult for high art in a liberal culture to aim for this. In a liberal culture there is not supposed to be anything to limit an individual freedom to choose. This means that liberalism does not like to recognise the “transcendent” – the real existence of goods existing outside of or independent of individual will.

In an advanced liberalism, therefore, the “good” is made radically subjective: it is the individual who invests art with meaning or value. There is no transcendent good existing outside of individual will for the quality of the art to be referenced to.

The art critic Professor John Carey concluded his recent book, What Good Are the Arts?, with a ringing endorsement of this modernist view by claiming that “anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art.”

The second reason for the decline of modern high art is that liberalism encourages not so much the development of tradition but its deconstruction. It is thought to be liberating to break down the existing forms of art, as limitations, rather than to work within them.

To be an “artist”, in the modern sense, is therefore to be someone who challenges the inherited forms of art. John Cage, the American music composer, is therefore thought of as a great modern artist because he broke down the forms of music entirely by composing completely silent pieces of music. Others have won fame as modern artists by exhibiting their own unmade beds as art, or urinals, or a pile of bricks.

This aspect of modern art is revealed in the efforts of Mark Lawson, the art critic for the Guardian newspaper, to defend the Royal Academy’s gaffe. He compared leaving out the sculpture and exhibiting the props to the following printer’s error:

Or imagine that the last chapter of a crime novel were accidentally omitted in a mix-up at the printers. Readers and critics who admired the ambiguity of the ending - and welcomed the author's departure from the convention that every loose end must be tied - are not wrong or stupid. They simply responded honestly to what they were shown and expressed a preference for work that was willing to ignore traditions.

The assumption here is that a departure from convention or a willingness to ignore tradition are such artistic virtues that they compensate for an artwork being accidentally shown in part.

Are we entering a feminist down phase?

Some years ago I was browsing through a pile of American magazines from the late 1940s in a second hand bookshop. The most interesting article I found was written by a female columnist (the magazine was from around 1946 or 1947). She argued that women had had enough of the hardships brought about by feminism (loneliness, childlessness etc) and that it would be a relief to return to more traditional values.

Which is what women did in the 1950s, thereby ending the first great wave of feminism which had begun (roughly speaking) in the 1860s (there had been individual feminists before then, but it seems to have been in the 1860s that feminism was first taken up as government policy in Great Britain).

I wonder if we are now poised on the brink of another feminist down phase. There seems to be a similar weariness amongst women - an unwillingness to continue shouldering the burden of overwork and poor family outcomes which are associated with modern feminism.

This wearing down of feminism from within is especially marked in a recent article in the Daily Mail by Amanda Platell (The Silent Conspiracy, 28th January 2006). The entire article is worth reading as evidence of a change in attitude, but let me cite some of the most revealing passages.

Here is Amanda Platell explaining that despite her glamorous career and lifestyle she wishes to question the feminist legacy:

Fortunate as I am to have lived the life I have done, my marriage ended in failure and I was never able to have the children I longed for (though in my case that owed more to biology than circumstance). Look around you and there are plenty of others like me; the women who inherited a new world order - and who now bear the emotional scars to prove it.

It's only now, as we start to look back, that we can see just how much we've scorched the social landscape around us. In our rush to embrace the new, we have systematically rejected much that, for centuries past, had brought women stability and happiness. Is it any wonder that the younger generation aren't sure what to think, and instead allow the thrill of youthful hedonism to drown out the conflicting signals around them.

On the one hand they are told they must strive to have it all; and on the other, they can see around them the evidence that this will never truly be possible. Or at least not without great cost to their physical and emotional well-being.

Far too often, it seems to me, the unwitting price of female emancipation has been heartache, stress and a life spent chasing false promises. But if we women are ever to feel truly happy with our lot, I believe we have to stop whingeing, stop blaming men and society, stop playing the victim and stand up and ask the unthinkable; are we ruining for ourselves? Could it be that the freedom we now enjoy is part of the problem?

Another revealing part of the article begins when Amanda Platell seeks a comment from author Fay Weldon, once a feminist icon:

"Women like you should be cursing women of my generation", she told me. "All we did was make you go out to work and earn money and have children and completely exhaust yourselves. I'm sorry". She called women like me 'the lost generation' - the ones who had inherited a barren landscape after the revolution had marched through.

"If you want to be like a man, then feminism hasn't gone far enough", she said, "if you want to be like a woman, it has gone too far.

And there, straight away, was the kernel of the matter: feminism was supposed to about equality, not sameness. We wanted to better our sex, not obliterate it. But that is what has happened. In striving to be the same as men, the only things we were guaranteed were the exhaustion and stress and guilt that came with the effort of labouring to become something we never were and never could be.

And striving to be like a man had other consequences. For a start, men don't like it - at least, not the kind of men you'd want to spend your life with. This has led to another unsayable truth. Women today take their 20's out for themselves, to pursue career and relationships - but not permanent ones - to experiment, to have fun. It's the 'me' decade of their life. I have no problem with that, but it does lead to a kind of independence that can make it hard for women to ever settle down with another person and willingly accept all the emotional and financial compromises that entails.

This, in turn, has led to another unintended consequence - this time biological. The principled and often pathological belief that men and women have to be treated the same has led women to believe they can have kids whenever they want and with whomever they want - or even by themselves if they choose. The principle legacy of that belief is not more contented mothers, but more women putting money in the pockets of a booming fertility industry as they discover the hard way that nature doesn't perform to order and pays no regard to social idealism.

Then there is the following extraordinary admission which Amanda Platell obtains from Tessa Jowell, the Minister for Women:

I felt sure the Minister for Women, Tessa Jowell, would have some right-on feminist response, so I tracked her down at the start of a countrywide tour where she was listening to women's concerns. I expected a sop: what I got was a shock.

Tessa said straight out that her daughter would not tolerate the stress of the impossible juggling act that women of her generation performed. Moreover, she admitted no amount of government policy would ever bring about the perfect work/life balance that might help make women happier. Part of the problem, she admitted, was that the anticipated participation of men in the home and parenting stakes has simply not materialised, and certainly not to the degree expected.

Women, even when they work full-time, are still the primary carers of children and elderly relatives, still do most of the housework, cooking and shopping. Only a fraction of men have taken up paternity leave.

Perhaps, as Tessa suggested to me, such characteristics are part of women's DNA - and no amount of legislation can change this fundamental difference between the sexes.

(This last statement of Tessa Jowell is the most significant. It represents a truly heretical thought within the church of liberalism: that perhaps we can't choose to be anything we will ourselves to be, because science has proven the reality of gender difference. Gender, in other words, can't be made not to matter, because our distinctive masculinity and femininity is hardwired into us.)

Time will tell whether Amanda Platell is representative of the spirit of the age, and that we really are to get some relief from feminism.

I'm not suggesting that institutional feminism will go away. Even in the 1950s there were UN women's officers jetting around the globe to various conferences and no doubt this will continue.

But perhaps at ground level some more space will open up for romance, marriage and motherhood.

Ignatieff's lesson from the crypt

One interesting result in the Canadian election was the victory of Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard academic who has written widely on the issue of nationalism.

Ignatieff set out his views on nationalism in his book Blood and Belonging, published in 1993. In this work Ignatieff explains that whilst he himself is a cosmopolitan, he nonetheless supports a civic nationalism.

Why a civic nationalism? Ignatieff is a liberal. As such, he believes that individuals should be self-defined. Therefore he rejects ethnic nationalism (in which national identity is based on a common ancestry, culture, language and so on) because,

Ethnic nationalism claims ... that an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited not chosen. It is the national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community.

The kind of nationalism preferred by Ignatieff is the “official” one operating today based on a common citizenship. He believes that it functions within liberal ideals for the following reason:

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

For traditionalists, the Ignatieff view seems radical. It spells the end of the European ethnies, as it opens up membership of a nation to anyone who can obtain citizenship. It allows no principled basis for maintaining the distinct European peoples and cultures.

However, the unfortunate fact is that Ignatieff is actually at the more conservative end of the liberal debate on nationalism. Ignatieff still believes in making a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Many liberals believe that such a distinction is immoral according to liberal principle.

And they have a point. After all, it is a myth that most people choose their citizenship any more than they choose their ethny. In other words, most of us are born into membership of a civic nation, just as much as we are into an ethnic identity.

Furthermore, civic nations still place restrictions on who may or may not become citizens. This means that civic nations are practising “discrimination”, by excluding some people from certain benefits and impeding what they can choose to become.

The more radical position, of rejecting even a civic nationalism, has been explained in a more difficult, academic style by Jeffrey Friedman as follows:

In attacking the privileges of birth, political or economic, liberals of both classical and contemporary vintage give voice to the conviction that one’s humanity, rather than accidental circumstances, should determine one’s rights.

This egalitarianism is traduced by the inescapable particularism of the modern state. A truly liberal society would encompass all human beings. It would extend welfare benefits to all humankind, not just to those born within arbitrary boundaries... (Critical Review, Spring 1996)

The former Australian Prime Mininster, Paul Keating, supports the radical Friedman view. He has lashed out at civic nationalism, complaining that its “exclusiveness” relies on,

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

Not all liberals, then, support a civic nationalism. Why does Ignatieff?

There are two factors involved in Ignatieff’s answer. The first is straightforward. Ignatieff declares that he is not a nationalist at all, but a cosmopolitan and that cosmopolitans require a strong nation state to enforce social stability and human rights. In his own words,

It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-state for granted ... The cosmopolitanism of the great cities – London, Los Angeles, New York, London – depends critically on the rule-enforcing capacities of the nation state ...

In this sense, therefore, cosmopolitans like myself are not beyond the nation; and a cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation-states to provide security and civility for their citizens.”

I am a civic nationalist, someone who believes in the necessity of nations and in the duty of citizens to defend the capacity of nations to provide the security and rights we all need in order to live cosmopolitan lives.

This is not an illogical argument for a liberal to make, but it’s quite a formal and dry kind of reasoning. There’s a more direct and personal reason given for Ignatieff’s reluctance to totally discard the nation state later in his book when he describes his visit to Ukraine.

Ignatieff’s great grandfather was a Russian aristocrat who bought an estate in Ukraine in 1860 when he was the Russian ambassador to Constantinople. The Ignatieffs lost control of the estate in 1917, and they became Russian emigres who settled in Canada.

When Michael Ignatieff visited Ukraine after it gained independence from the USSR, he toured the estate once owned by his ancestors and described his experiences as follows,

Then to the church, where the bell is tolling and the parishioners are assembling for a special pannihida in memory of our ancestors.

... Now another feeling began to steal over me, a feeling that, like it or not, this was where my family story began, this was where my graves were. Like a tunneler, I had gone through suffocation, and I had tunneled myself back to at least one of my belongings. I could say to myself: the half-seen track of my past does have its start, and I can return to it.

The choir sings, the priest names my father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, the names, some of them Anglo-Saxon, peeking through the seams of his prayers, the choir and their voices singing, the sound filling this church my great-grandfather built.

The priest then shows Ignatieff the crypt in which his aristocratic ancestors are buried and he learns that under the communists it was used as a slaughterhouse. There are cuts made by butchers' knives in the marble of the tombs. Ignatieff continues,

We stand and sing the viechnaya pamyat, the hymn of memory, the priest blesses the graves and then they leave me alone, with a candle.

Nations and graves. Graves and nations. Land is sacred because it is where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves. The graves were profaned. The butchers slaughtered on top of the marble. A person would fight to stop this if he could.

Looking back, I see that time in the crypt as a moment when I began to change, when some element of respect for the national project began to creep into my feelings, when I understood why land and graves matter and why the nations matter which protect both.

So Ignatieff is not entirely denatured. As an emigre, he might not respond to the Canadian ethnic identity, nor, given his Russian origins, to the Ukrainian. But he has illustrious ancestors. And in the crypt of these ancestors he feels a connection to a larger identity which it is right to defend.

More to offer?

Are identity, belonging and tradition important? Consider the following comments by Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, a prominent Australian psychologist. Writing in support of the idea of national service for young people (Herald Sun, 18/1/2006), he observes that,

one of the main developmental tasks of adolescents is to figure out who you are. Once you’ve done that it’s much easier to set goals, develop strategies to reach them and begin the journey

He notes further that,

a constant theme in youth policy over the past few years is the desirability of building resilience, that capacity to face, overcome and be strengthened by adversity ... A key component of resilience is a sense of belonging...

He then discusses the advantages of young people being,

actively mentored by older men and women who understand and can demonstrate the value of tradition, ritual, teamwork and discipline

So a leading psychologist believes that identity, belonging and tradition are important for the healthy development of young people. But how do you best foster these qualities?

In most societies gender and ethnicity are critical factors. Gender, for example, not only contributes powerfully to a sense of who a person is, but it helps to provide a purpose in action and a code of behaviour. Ethnicity places us within a tradition with its own ideals, to which the individual feels strongly connected.

Professor West of Suffolk College has described the effect of a traditional ethnic nationalism on the sense of identity and belonging of an individual as follows:

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

So if you wanted, say, an English boy to develop healthily during adolescence it would be helpful if you encouraged him to feel connected to his own ethnic tradition and to a masculine identity. But this is not, in fact, what Western societies tend to do. Western societies generally encourage adolescents to abandon a loyalty to the (mainstream) ethnic tradition and to traditional gender identity.

To put it bluntly, if the English boy were to show ethnic pride or a belief in a distinctive masculine identity he would very likely be accused of “racism” or “sexism”.

Why? The answer has to do with the theory of liberalism, which is the dominant form of belief amongst the Western political class. Ironically, gender and ethnicity are unacceptable within the logic of liberalism, precisely because they are so important to self-identity.

Liberal theory claims that our very humanity depends on the fact that we have a freedom to choose who we are and what we do according to our own individual will and reason. But this means that anything deeply embedded in our nature will be seen negatively as an oppressive limitation on our freedom to choose our own individual “self”.

Do we get to choose whether we are male or female? No. Is being male or female important to our self-identity? Yes. Therefore, traditional gender identity constitutes a problem for liberalism in which we are supposed to choose for ourselves the important things about our own lives.

So liberals have mostly claimed that gender identity is not in fact a natural and hardwired part of human nature, but an oppressive social construct to be overthrown. Just last year a Swedish minister, Jens Orback, announced that,

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

So Swedish boys will not grow up in a climate in which masculinity is considered an essential part of their identity, but will instead be taught something along the lines of masculinity being an outmoded patriarchal construct which is oppressive to women.

Liberalism, then, cannot offer ethnic or gender identity to the young because such forms of identity seem “unprincipled” within a liberal ideology. What then can liberalism offer?

A liberal society can certainly offer “voluntary associations”, such as service clubs or sports clubs, because we individually consent, as an act of our own will, to these commitments.

In his article Dr Carr-Gregg limits himself to the liberal view when he suggests “national voluntary service” as the way to “reconnect” young people and spare them from a “psychological wasteland”.

It would be better if we began to reject the underlying liberal theory which artificially forbids us from enjoying the stronger, more traditional forms of self-identity and connectedness.

Reality vs Orthodoxy

Minette Marrin has written a very interesting column on the issue of human rights.

She begins by suggesting that "the great post-war left-liberal ascendancy may be beginning to question its own certainties".

Her chief exhibit is David Goodhardt, a self-confessed "sensitive member of the liberal elite." Goodhardt recently abandoned left-wing orthodoxy by writing about human rights that:

People are not born with rights ... Rights are a social construct, a product of history, ideas and of institutions. You and I have rights not as human beings, but mainly because we belong to the political and national community called the United Kingdom, with its infrastructure of laws and institutions.

It's remarkable for someone from the left to declare such a thing. Usually the left trumpets the idea of abstract, universal rights. Minette Marin herself offers a good criticism of this left-wing tendency to base politics on claims of abstract rights when she writes,

This approach is incoherent ... it offers no explanation of what mysterious entity has conferred such rights or how they are to be enforced or who is to decide between conflicting rights.

There's one more worthwhile part of Minette Marin's column. She criticises the proposal that immigrants to EU countries should swear an oath of allegiance to EU laws, rather than to their nation of residence. She complains,

You almost have to pinch yourself at the folly of it. All across Europe, governments and bureaucrats and so-called community leaders have been forced, most painfully, to try to think more deeply and more critically about identity and the fragility of the ties that bind us in a shared sense of belonging and how best to strengthen them; their lazy, unexamined platitudes about immigration and celebrating diversity have been blasted, quite literally, away.

And what does Brussels come up with? A proposal that is quite astounding in its lack of the slightest understanding of feeling, sentiment, social solidarity, place, custom, ritual, symbolism or national tradition ...

This is not quite traditionalist conservatism, as it doesn't recognise ties of kinship as being one important aspect of national identity. It does, though, realistically accept the fact that questions of identity and belonging are important to individuals, can't be taken for granted and require a respect for the traditional life of a community.

Is Melanie Phillips conservative?

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author, perhaps best known for her columns for the Daily Mail. She has recently established her own website which features a statement of her political beliefs. This allows us to judge whether she is at heart a liberal or a conservative.

First principles

The first principle of liberalism is a belief in individual autonomy, in which individuals are left unimpeded to create themselves in any direction according to their own individual reason or will.

Conservatives prefer to uphold important attachments or forms of connection against the liberal principle of individual autonomy.

So, which principle does Melanie Phillips prefer? The liberal one of autonomy or the conservative one of attachment?

In her statement of belief she makes her preference clear. She criticises the prevailing idea that the "individual had to be free from all attachments to family, culture, nation, institutions, and traditions that might fetter freedom of choice."

Similarly she voices disapproval of "this radical individualism" which "worships autonomy and deems obligation to be oppressive."

She asserts that "Values dismissed as conservative are actually universal: attachment, commitment to individuals and institutions, ties of duty, trust and fidelity."

And she writes of people having a "fundamental need for attachments" and of liberty being "threatened by the relativistic pursuit of autonomy and rights."

In criticising a radical individualism which worships autonomy, and in defending attachments, such as those to family, culture and nation, Melanie Phillips is clearly a conservative in terms of her first principles.

Second principles

Given that her first principles are conservative, you would expect that Melanie Phillips would also tend to adopt the follow on principles of conservatism.

Which in fact she does. For instance, she rejects the liberal idea that human nature is malleable and perfectible and that therefore a utopia can be created by large-scale socio-economic changes.

She supports instead the conservative view that,

Human nature is not perfectible. It is neither intrinsically good or bad. Instead, human beings are capable of both good and bad deeds ...

... Small incremental steps are the most secure way of bringing about beneficial change. Radicalism or revolution are likely to implode and leave us worse off than before.

The liberal version of equality is also clearly rejected by Melanie Phillips. She observes that,

The trump card played by all group rightists is 'equality', the claim that all they ask is to be treated the same as everyone else. This, though, is another debasement of the language ... (equality) has come to mean ... identical means and outcomes. Yet people are not identical. Their behaviour and circumstances are very different from each other. To treat them as identical may therefore be unfair or harmful.

Finally, Melanie Phillips is also a critic of liberal attitudes to progress. She complains that "progress has been reduced to a hedonistic selfishness" and that,

it has become a positive merit to stand for nothing since this means that nothing can stand in the way of change ... The term progress has become vacuous, meaning merely change for change's sake. All tradition thus becomes a suitable case for disposal ... The idea that all pre-existing traditions or values are by definition just so much unprogressive baggage is as philistine as it is risible.

Labels

However, despite the obvious affinity with conservatism, Melanie Phillips continues to label herself as a liberal progressive.

She does so by drawing a distinction between liberalism and libertarianism. For her, the focus of authentic liberalism is on moral obligation, whereas it is only libertarianism which has recklessly pursued individual autonomy.

As she puts it, "we have to rescue progress from the so-called progressives. We need a liberal, not a libertarian, social order with deeper values than contract and other criteria for progress than material advances. Moral restraint is the glue that provides social cohesion."

The problem with this approach is that historically all the major liberal thinkers assumed that autonomy─the freedom to do what we have a will to do─was the fundamental principle to be achieved.

It's true that some liberal thinkers believed that to maximise this kind of freedom it was necessary to apply some limits (such as laws or voluntary moral restraint) in order to prevent social chaos.

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, for instance, believed in the establishment of laws, by consent, for the protection of life, liberty and property. For this reason he asserts that "Freedom then is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us, a liberty for everyone to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied to any laws." Instead, "the freedom of men under government is ... a liberty to follow my will in all things, where the rule prescribes not."

Note, though, that the only limitation is the need to obey laws which protect individual rights; apart from this liberty is still conceived to be "a liberty to follow my will in all things."

The pursuit of autonomy was therefore a core feature of Enlightenment liberalism, rather than a later libertarian deviation.

Nor can the average liberal of today really be described as a libertarian. Most mainstream liberals still believe in the legitimacy of government restrictions on the individual (whether economic or social) in a way that libertarians don't.

Liberals, for instance, might want softer drug laws, but libertarians go further and reject the idea that government has any place in regulating such matters.

Therefore, it's hard to support Melanie Phillip's notion that our society of today has been created by libertarians rather than genuine liberals. It's truer to say that we have reached an advanced stage of liberalism, in which there is much less emphasis on voluntary moral restraint than in previous generations.

To go back to an earlier stage of liberalism, in which there was more of an effort to distinguish "true liberty" (autonomy with moral restraint) from "wild license" (no restraints) would no doubt be an improvement on the current situation.

But it would leave the overall dynamic of liberalism in place, and not prevent a gradual return to the way things are now.

Melanie Phillips is, I believe, a conservative at heart, but she wants politically to be a conservative liberal (or more exactly an older style liberal). It will be interesting to read in her columns exactly which of these tendencies proves the strongest.

(First published at Conservative Central 16/11/2003)

Update: 28/03/2008 I had hoped that Melanie Phillips might move toward a traditionalist conservatism but she hasn't. She has remained closer to a right liberal politics.

Is tradition an evolutionary advantage?

There's a very interesting article on global birth rates in the current edition of the left-liberal magazine New Statesman (31/5/04 - not yet online).

The author, Phillip Longman, begins by pointing out that birth rates are falling even faster in the developing world than in Western countries. Since the start of the 1970s, fertility rates have fallen by 27% in the industrialised countries and 46% in less developed nations.

Brazil is one country which has experienced this fertility decline. Since 1975 its birth rate has dropped by nearly half to just 2.27 children per woman. Similar declines have been recorded in countries like China, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Mexico.

What this means is that within 30 years or so, the population pressures in developing countries will probably ease. Hopefully, this will mean less pressure from third world "refugees" flowing into Western countries. So Western conservatives shouldn't give up trying to retain immigration controls: we should do our best over the next 30 years to preserve what we can, before the pressures of third world population flows begin to ease.

Why is fertility declining globally? Phillip Longman gives what is a very significant answer for a left liberal. He believes that children are no longer seen as an advantage in modern, secular countries for several reasons. First, when people move from small farms into large cities, children become more of an economic liability than a resource.

He also believes that the message conveyed by television in third world countries is that "people with wealth and sophistication are people who have at most one or two chilren."

Phillip Longman also quotes the views of biologists who,

speculate that modern human beings have created an environment in which the "fittest", or most successful individuals are precisely those who have few, if any, offspring. As more and more humans find themselves living under conditions in which children, far from providing economic benefit, have become costly impediments to success, those who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves.

This scenario disturbs the left-liberal Phillip Longman. It means that those who adapt best to modern liberal societies won't be the ones reproducing. The ones who will reproduce will be those who "out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game [of secular, liberal societies] altogether."

Longman believes that this is already happening. He quotes birth statistics from the United States where the highest fertility rates (90 children per 1000 women) are in conservative Utah, compared to only 49 children per 1000 women in liberal Vermont, the only state to send a socialist to Congress and the first to enact gay marriage.

I believe that Longman is at least partly correct in all this. A man who is stubbornly conservative and wants to continue his own line (whether of his family or nation) is likely to choose to have children regardless of the economic cost, or loss of cultural status. Someone who has accepted modern liberalism is less likely to have this motivation.

For Phillip Longman the result is that,

Those who reject modernity would thus seem to have an evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons, or Muslims who remain committed to comparatively large families, or members of emerging sects and national movements that combine pro-natalism with anti-materialism".

So there you have it. An intelligent left-liberal concludes from the data that traditionalists have an evolutionary advantage!

Man and woman for eternity

The Pope has released a letter to Catholic bishops on the issue of feminism. One of the more conservative aspects of the letter is its reaffirmation of gender difference. According to the document feminism has erred in its "obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes" and that,

From the first moment of their creation, man and woman are different, and will remain so for eternity.

According to one newspaper report Catholic feminists responded to this criticism by claiming that "the letter presented a caricature of feminism as trying to deny any difference between the sexes".

But then up popped the feminist author Natasha Walter, who immediately confirmed the "caricature" by questioning "whether there were essential differences between men and women at all." Ms Walter then cast doubt on the existence of any special maternal instinct in women by arguing that,

We have centuries and centuries of acculturation towards a 'vocation' of maternity, and men have only had a couple of generations of acculturation towards active paternity. Until we encourage men [to do more] it's too early to call on whether there are innate differences. The weight of tradition is so strong that it precludes the freedom to choose.

This is an interesting quote for two reasons. First, it's one of those statements you sometimes come across nowadays which overlook the commitments that men have traditionally made to their families.

When Ms Walter talks about the recent advent of "active paternity" she means the sharing by men of traditionally motherly tasks, like the feeding, washing or changing of children. But this use of language excludes from "active paternity" the efforts that men make to provide for and protect their families, to socialise their children, and to maintain the formal, public structures of community life.

These traditional commitments of men can't just be taken for granted. They need to be recognised and encouraged within a society, particularly by women who are the chief beneficiaries.

The quote is also interesting as it brings out the conflict between liberal individualism and tradition. Liberals believe that we should be self-created by our individual reason and will. Tradition necessarily falls foul of this dictum because it pre-exists our own reason and will. In other words, tradition will often seem to liberals to be a hostile force as it is something that influences who we are and what we do but which we don't choose by our own will or reason.

Hence, all the talk by liberals about tradition "weighing" upon the present generation, rather than guiding it or inspiring it or adding identity and meaning to it. Ms Walter is therefore showing a typically liberal concern when she fears that a "weight of tradition" might interfere with an individual "freedom to choose".

Angry architects attack public

When I was a boy I spent many happy hours at the St Kilda pier, fishing for mullet and garfish. I'm therefore one of those people who grew to love the distinctive, historic kiosk at the end of the pier.

The bad news is that the kiosk, a St Kilda landmark, burnt down last year. The good news is that Parks Victoria has decided to rebuild it following its original exterior design (but with a modernised interior).

A simple decision? Not according to the Melbourne architectural profession. In an article in yesterday's Age, one "urban design consultant" labelled the decision as "pathetic and tragic" and unsuitable for a "socially progressive" community.

An architectural academic went further and said the decision was a "retreat from the real world" which showed "some sort of serious psychological problem on the part of the people who want to have irrelevant styles".

A letter writer in today's Age has eloquently replied to these architectural modernists. He writes:

How fascinating that a public requiring beauty, simplicity, charm and a sense of history from their city's buildings and structures should be accused of having "some sort of serious psychological problem.

Professor Miles Lewis - no doubt an expert in mental health - should perhaps consider that the right of his profession to use our city as a billboard upon which to promote abstract theories of geometric design to one another does not outweigh the the general population's right to go about their daily existence in a landscape that sustains a sense of local identity, tradition and pride of place.

Well put, and congratulations also to Parks Victoria for standing by local residents and preserving a much loved piece of St Kilda's heritage.