The BBC debate 1

It's no wonder that the Western countries are in such trouble when you consider the shallow ideas that dominate the minds of our intellectuals.

John Derbyshire has a report up at Vdare about a debate on immigration that took place on BBC radio. The positions taken by the participants were as disappointing as they were predictable.

Why predictable? There is a growing consensus amongst liberals of all stripes that the point of life is to be self-made, particularly in the market. If you believe this, then you will see economic migrants as the ideal sort of person, since they are the ones who take the most initiative to be self-made in this way.

One of the panellists on the BBC debate was Claire Fox, who is the director of the Institute of Ideas. This is what she had to say on immigration:

So I believe in freedom of movement and therefore open the borders, but I suppose morally my main thing is that, being human, one of the most inspiring things about it is that you can make yourself not accept your fate and create your own destiny. And in that sense the immigrant is an ideal moral figure, and could be seen to embody it. So that's what I find inspiring.

Isn't that a revealing statement? She is saying that what defines us as a human is that we are autonomous in the sense of being self-determining or self-defining. That's step one in the thought process. But how do we self-define? To be consistent, we can only self-define in some area of life that we can pursue as individuals, such as career, travel, lifestyle, hobbies and so on. Career is the weightiest of these, so liberals tend to put most of their eggs in this basket. So what it all boils down to in the end, for a liberal, is being self-made in your career and economic status.

An economic migrant goes to all the trouble to uproot himself in order to make himself in the market and so he becomes for the average liberal "an ideal moral figure."

The mistake made by liberals like Claire Fox is to think of human life in terms of a detached self-making. We are supposed to make our lives as abstracted individuals, as this abstraction is supposed to give us the greatest freedom to self-create.

But we are not detached or abstracted selves. When we make our lives we do so as created beings with given natures. Freedom means a liberty to unfold (or fulfil) the best within these given natures.

And we do that best within natural forms of community, such as family, tribe and nation. This is particularly true for men, as our masculine talents are especially directed toward our roles in upholding these forms of human community.

In arguing for a borderless world, liberals are not adding to but are taking away from our freedom to creatively unfold ourselves as individuals. They are dissolving the longstanding communities within which such creative self-expression best takes place.

There were also some arguments relating to Christianity mentioned in the BBC debate, but I'll leave these to the next post.

A liberal ethicist believes babies are not persons

A Melbourne academic has hit the headlines after arguing that killing babies is morally permissible:

Doctors should have the right to kill newborn babies because they are disabled, too expensive or simply unwanted by their mothers, an academic with links to Oxford University has claimed.

Francesca Minerva, a philosopher and medical ethicist, argues a young baby is not a real person and so killing it in the first days after birth is little different to aborting it in the womb.

On what grounds does she argue that a baby is not a real person? Here is her key argument:

If...an individual is capable of making any aims (like actual human and non-human persons), she is harmed if she is prevented from accomplishing her aims by being killed. Now, hardly can a newborn be said to have aims, as the future we imagine for it is merely a projection of our minds on its potential lives. It might start having expectations and develop a minimum level of self-awareness at a very early stage, but not in the first days or few weeks after birth.

On the other hand, not only aims but also well-developed plans are concepts that certainly apply to those people (parents, siblings, society) who could be negatively or positively affected by the birth of that child. Therefore, the rights and interests of the actual people involved should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion.

So her argument is this:

i) There is a difference between being a human and a person.

ii) To be a person you have to be capable of making aims. You are then harmed if you are killed because you can no longer accomplish your aims.

iii) Newborns and foetuses cannot make aims, are therefore not persons, and can be killed.

iv) Adult humans and animals make aims, are therefore persons, and therefore would be harmed by being killed.

v) Adult humans not only have aims, but have well-developed life plans, and therefore take precedence over merely potential persons.

Let's stay with this for a while. What all this shows is how important it is to get basic questions right. Liberals have an odd idea that value comes from a person adopting a self-determined life plan. It doesn't really matter what the plan is (though it's often assumed to centre on a professional, creative career). Furthermore, someone who becomes a concert pianist because his father wanted him to is thought to be living a non-human life, whereas someone who becomes a concert pianist after previously considering being a neurosurgeon is thought to be fully a person.

What matters isn't the activity, or fulfilling one's natural or given telos (ends) in life - but the very act of choosing autonomously what one's life will be. That is what liberals assume gives value to being human - it is what, in Francesca Minerva's view, makes us a person.

So it's logical, if you begin from this assumption, to make the criterion of personhood the degree to which you are able to have aims or, better yet, well-developed life plans. That is what is thought to matter in life, so therefore you can begin to be deprived of your personhood only after you begin to be able to make aims.

But what is the consequence of defining personhood in this way? You arrive at the very radical view that not only foetuses but even healthy newborns can be killed if they are thought to interfere with the life plans of "actual" persons.

It's a definition, too, that allows Francesca Minerva to define animals as persons but not newborn humans (though exactly how an animal has life aims that a baby doesn't isn't obvious to me - it makes me wonder if Francesca loves her cats too much to exclude them from the protected category of persons).

And, if truth be told, Francesca's position would make it permissibe for parents to kill not only their newborns but also their young children. Does an 18-month-old child really have a clear capacity for making aims? If not, that makes them non-persons and therefore, in Francesca Minerva's view, without a right to life.

Here are some more snippets from Francesca Minerva's article. They illustrate the radical outcomes of adopting her definition of personhood:

If the death of a [handicapped] newborn is not wrongful to her on the grounds that she cannot have formed any aim that she is prevented from accomplishing, then it should also be permissible to practise an after-birth abortion on a healthy newborn too, given that she has not formed any aim yet.

...Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.

...If a potential person, like a foetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all.

...The alleged right of individuals (such as foetuses and newborns) to develop their potentiality...is over-ridden by the interests of actual people (parents, family, society) to pursue their own well-being because, as we have just argued, merely potential people cannot be harmed by not being brought into existence. Actual people's well-being could be threatened by the new (even if healthy) child requiring energy, money and care which the family might happen to in short supply of. Sometimes this situation can be prevented through an abortion, but in some other cases this is not possible. In these cases, since non-persons have no moral rights to life, there are no reasons for banning after-birth abortions.

If your moral intuition is that these claims are false, then what's required is a different way of defining personhood. The value of human life can't rest on our capacity for an autonomously chosen life plan - otherwise all those who can't make such aims suddenly find themselves in the category of non-persons without a right to life.

So what does define the value of a human life? A Christian can answer that we are all made in the image of God and invested with a soul, which then makes every human a person. And a non-Christian could find many attributes which give human life value besides making and then acting out life plans. What about the capacity to experience love? Or the other joys of life?

And then there's the question of our telos - our proper ends in life. What if some of these are not self-chosen but are given to us as part of our created nature? Then part of our telos would be to fulfil the higher aspects of this nature. And that might include a maternal and paternal instinct to bear children, to show maternal love and paternal care, and to raise our children to adulthood. That would then make the choice to kill our own child, for being a hindrance to our life aims, a disordered act.

I'll finish with the thoughts of a liberal on Francesca Minerva's position . Nelson Jones, writing in the New Statesman, agrees with the logic of Francesca Minerva's argument:

Biologically, too, those who argue like Giubilini and Minerva are on firm ground. Human babies are, by most mammalian standards, born prematurely with far less autonomy than, for example, a baby cow.

But he doesn't like the argument, because he believes that it's better to base the case for abortion on the grounds of women's bodily autonomy rather than on the lack of autonomy of the foetus/newborn:

This is not how the case for abortion is usually put. As the term "pro-choice" implies, the emphasis is on the pregnant woman and her right to "do what she wants with her own body". The foetus is scarcely considered at all, which is why the moment of birth must be seen as crucial. The mother might be legally responsible for the infant, but it is in no sense still a part of her body. It's hard to argue that prohibiting infanticide impacts her bodily autonomy in the same way that restricting abortion inevitably does.

The JME paper is not, then, a logical extension of the pro-choice case. By switching the emphasis from the rights of the mother to the moral status of the foetus it in fact plays into the hands of the pro-lifers. For however logical the authors' argument, emotionally it is highly troubling. The natural revulsion it elicits can attach equally to late-term abortion, perhaps to abortion as a whole.

He is arguing that Francesca Minerva's position is logical but repulsive (but shouldn't that then lead him to wonder why the liberal position logically leads to repulsive outcomes?). He prefers the older argument which ignored the whole issue of the moral status of the foetus/newborn and which focused instead on the mother's bodily autonomy - once the foetus was no longer part of the mother's body it was then held to no longer compromise her autonomy and so no longer lost moral precedence to the mother.

It seems to be more of a pragmatic rather than a principled objection to Francesca Minerva's position. And Francesca Minerva could argue in reply that the newborn still compromises the mother's autonomy after birth, because of the time, energy and money the mother has to invest in the child. So the argument from autonomy ends up mired in inconsistency.

Hank Pellissier criticises male-identified males

I'm reading Liberalism & the Limits of Justice by Michael J. Sandel. The useful thing about these academic works is that they discuss issues at the level of underlying principles. You get a better feel for what the real motive points for liberal politics are.

In the preface, Sandel defines the liberal conception of the person this way:

According to this conception, my dignity consists not in any social roles I inhabit but instead in my capacity to choose my roles and identities for myself. (xiv)

That is, of course, the autonomy theory I frequently criticise at this site. If you read this definition carefully, you can understand why Western modernity has turned out the way it has.

What does it mean for me to choose my roles and identities for myself? It means that roles or identities that are unchosen in any way are thought of negatively as impediments that the individual must be liberated from.

And which roles and identities are unchosen? All those which are inherited, either as part of a tradition or through our biological nature. That includes our biological sex, any family roles deriving from our biological sex, our sexuality, the traditional family, our ethnicity and our nationality.

The liberal assumption becomes that all of these identities and the roles connected to them are merely passing social constructs. Perhaps they never really existed at all except imaginatively in a traditionalist utopia. Or, if they are recognised to have a real existence, they must then be transcended as immoral and outmoded. Either way they must be made not to matter when it comes to what people choose to do.

That's why there's such consternation in Australia right now that there are more men than women in company boardrooms. This is an instance of our sex still having an influence, still mattering, when it comes to the roles people play in society. And that is something that liberalism cannot easily tolerate.

It explains too even more radical expressions of liberal modernity, such as the opinions put forth recently by Hank Pellissier. Pellissier likes the fact that Japanese scientists managed to create a mouse (named Kaguya) by a process of ova-fusion in which no sperm was required. Why is he so keen on the idea of reproduction without men?

Well, he doesn't like the fact of gender distinctions:

Personally, I’m tired of today’s gender polarity, the boy-girl chasm, with segregated shopping and play, the dominance-submissive flirting games, the mating and marriage manuals, the seduction rituals, the opening lines, the Mars and Venus dichotomy. Yeah, I’m sick of it. I’m ready to try something else.

He wants the world to go unisex instead. He also wants to determine intellectually for himself, whom he will be attracted to and when:

Wouldn’t a unisexual culture of Kaguyas be preferable? They’d be conveniently sterile, unless aided by biotech. Another feature I’d like Kaguyas to have would be an ON/OFF switch for libido so they could carnally, ecstatically bond with anyone at an opportune time. Far better than being enslaved to awkward, inappropriate arousal, like I was, at puberty...

...Can’t we transform ourselves — via gene therapy — to fall head-over-heels in love with mere intelligence, wit, and integrity?

Pellissier is himself married with children. And yet he sees the transgendered as the symbolic leaders of society:

A unisexual world…

Transgenders already are heading towards this abolition of sexual differentiation. Last spring, in Australia, 48-year-old Norrie May-Welby became the first person to be granted citizenship with non-specified gender status. A commenter from the UK’s Gender Trust claimed, “many people like the idea of being genderless.” Some observers believe that, after gay and lesbian equality is secured globally, the next struggle will be for “gender neutral” rights.

And who does he think stands in the way of progress toward this genderless, unisex utopia of his? Well, us, the people he calls "male-identified males", anti-feminists, conservatives and traditionalists:

Male-identified males, like the “anti-feminists” who furiously write to me, will battle, as they always have, unwilling to surrender any turf in the civilization that they can arguably claim they created. Conservatives, traditionalists, and religionists will mightily resist, appalled that anyone would want to improve the “Adam & Eve” polarity that has plagued us.

The term "male-identified male" is significant here. Remember, the liberal conception of the person is that my human dignity consists in my capacity to choose my own identity and roles. I don't choose the fact that I am male. Therefore, it is consistent with the liberal view to believe that I should not be a "male-identified male" - that there is something backward or regressive in being a man with such an identity.

That's where liberal modernity takes you, at least if you're ideological enough to take the liberal conception of the person to that level. Hank Pellissier remains an outlier for now, but the principle he follows is a dominant one in the West, and we traditionalists would do well to live up to Pellissier's characterisation of us as being "unwilling to surrender any turf in the civilization that they can arguably claim they created."

Clarissa: motherhood castrates women

I found Clarissa just a couple of days ago. She's an American academic who teaches Hispanic literature courses. She's also very earnestly liberal.

If you remember, Clarissa was the one who claimed that modernity was worth its steep price because it liberates people from inherited norms, which then opens the way to a more self-defining life based on one's own choices.

To understand what is wrong with this liberal way of looking at modernity, consider a post that Clarissa wrote just a few days ago. The post is about the Katy Read story in Salon. Katy Read is a middle-aged, recently divorced American woman who has expressed regret that she spent years working part-time to be with her children rather than remaining full-time at work.

Clarissa, it turns out, doesn't like the idea of women choosing to stay at home with their children. She thinks that one positive effect of the economic downturn in the US is that fewer women will give up full-time work:

As with everything else in life, however, the crisis has brought about some positive things as well. Less and less women will be "choosing" to abandon economic independence and professional realization now that they see how costly such a decision is turning out to be to many former housewives. The fear of finding themselves indigent and with no way of proving their worth socially, professionally or financially will finally convince many women that the self-infantilization of housewifery is not worth the risk.

So already we have the career option praised as leading to economic independence and professional realization, whereas the stay at home option leaves women with no way to "prove their worth" and is merely a form of "self-infantilization".

There's more:

Katy Read, the author of the article, tries to suggest that she had given up on working for fourteen years for the sake of her sons. Nobody, however, needs a parent to be constantly at home until one is 14 ... Like many other women, Read simply didn't want to make the effort of going to work every single day ... It's much easier to pretend that you are a little girl who needs to be provided with everything by a big, strong man.

The traditionally male career role is associated here with independence and adulthood. Therefore motherhood gets turned on its head. It no longer marks a transition to adult womanhood but a regression to girlhood. All those women in centuries past who gave much of their adult lives to the care of their children were, in Clarissa's eyes, just pretending to be "little girls".

As evidence for her theory she calls in the testimony of her sister, who works as a recruiter:

During preliminary interviews with housewives she saw that they had one thing in common: an extremely infantilized mode of behavior. Whenever the conversation didn't go exactly as they wanted, they would become highly emotional, raise their voices, become irritable, cry, make unreasonable demands.

The insults peak in the final paragraph:

Read's advice to women is not to fall into the same trap of the patriarchal discourse that keeps suggesting to us that women are somehow not fully human and should be fulfilled with less than what men need to be happy. I hope many people read this article and abstain from castrating their lives in the same way as Read did.

Charming. Clarissa is suggesting here that it's the traditional male career role which makes people fully human and fully happy. Stay at home mothers are therefore accepting a less than fully human life. In fact, they are "castrating" their lives by looking after their own children (echoes here of Greer's "female eunuch").

I know some of my readers will immediately dismiss Clarissa as a mad lefty, not worth the time of day. But I think there's more to it than this. Clarissa is adopting one of the possible liberal options open to her.

Remember, the point of liberalism is to maximise individual autonomy. But this aim has an inbuilt contradiction.

One way that you maximise autonomy is by giving people greater choice. But if you do this, people are likely to choose goods other than autonomy. They are likely to choose to sacrifice a degree of autonomy for some other good, such as motherhood. So autonomy is not maximised.

Another way to maximise autonomy is to rule out the choice of non-autonomous goods. In other words, you only allow people to prefer goods that maximise independence, such as the financial independence that comes with careers. But the problem with this option is that it cuts back on the degree to which people can choose for themselves. So this option also fails to maximise autonomy.

The only way the contradiction might be resolved is if people, when given maximum free choice, were to naturally choose autonomy as the highest, overriding good. And therefore it's understandable that many liberals prefer to believe that people really would choose this way. For instance, in another post Clarissa approvingly quotes this opinion:

The natural desire for freedom and autonomy exists in women, and has always been nearly impossible to smother with bribery (the carrot of the wedding and the family and the home) alone. The stick also has to come out, and that's where the pervasive threat of rape comes into play.

The suggestion here is that women would in a non-patriarchal society naturally choose "freedom and autonomy" as the highest goods; that this natural preference cannot be smothered with other false and inferior goods such as marriage, children and home; that the patriarchy therefore has to force women to deny their natural desires coercively with the "pervasive threat of rape".

But that's a fantasy. Even after decades of feminist indoctrination, the majority of women still express a desire to spend time at home with their children (a recent survey put the percentage of women preferring to stay at home at 69%).

What this means is that in a liberal society there is likely to be a continuing conflict in how people attempt to resolve the contradiction. If some take the "choice" option, then others like Clarissa will point out that this does not, in fact, create maximum autonomy as it leads people to choose goods other than autonomy.

So Clarissa is carrying through logically with an aspect of liberal politics. She cannot just be dismissed as a one off.

Having said that, we should take the time to register exactly where Clarissa's liberalism has led her. It has committed her to the idea that the mothering of children, the core role played by women since the dawn of time, is a less than human option because it involves interdependence with a man.

It has led her to characterise motherhood not as a fulfilment of adult womanhood but as infantile. Motherhood is no longer associated in Clarissa's mind with fertility or fecundity but with sterility - with female castration.

Is it any wonder that in a liberal society young women so often defer a serious commitment to marriage and motherhood? Particularly those most exposed in higher education to liberal academics like Clarissa?

Finally, it's important to underline the fault I am pointing to in Clarissa's liberalism. In one post she tells us that liberalism frees us to self-define and to make our own choices. But a few days later she savages the idea of women choosing to be stay at home mothers. She leaves women with only one legitimate choice, that of being a full-time careerist. In fact, she establishes careerism as the only way for both men and women to be fully human and self-realizing adults.

Liberalism doesn't work out the way it is supposed to. Clarissa wants women to have a self-defining life, but she then rules out the life that the majority of women want to have. And along the way she manages to grossly distort a basic human good such as motherhood.

A more critical take than expected

How is liberalism presented in a work like The Oxford Companion to Philosophy? In a more critical way than I had expected. Here are some excerpts:

Liberalism. One of the major political ideologies of the modern world...Liberalism first emerged as an important movement in Europe in the sixteenth century. Today...it is the dominant ideology in many parts of the world.

Excellent. It is recognised here very clearly that liberalism is not only a political ideology, but that it dominates in many countries. It is effectively the state ideology in countries like Australia.

What we then get are two different explanations for the rise of liberalism, one favourable and one critical. The favourable one is that liberalism arose as a way of settling the religious conflicts of the Reformation:

both Protestants and Catholics accepted that the state could not impose a common faith ... Liberalism has simply extended this principle from the sphere of religion to other areas of social life where citizens have conflicting beliefs about the meaning of life. A liberal state does not seek to resolve these conflicts, but rather provides a 'neutral' framework within which citizens can pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life.

I've heard some liberals advance this kind of belief about liberal neutrality. It's not a view that's easily made coherent. First, it's not possible for a state to be neutral when it comes to conceptions of the good life. Second, the demand for neutrality undermines some key conceptions of the good life and privileges others (i.e. it pushes society in particular directions). Third, the reality is that the liberal state has imposed a set of liberal values on society, transforming society in radical ways, rather than remaining neutral.

The Oxford Companion also provides a more critical explanation for the rise of liberalism:

Liberalism's critics, however, argue that liberalism emerged as the ideological justification for the rise of capitalism, and that its image of the autonomous individual is simply a glorification of the pursuit of self-interest in the market. Liberalism replaced the web of mutual obligations which bound people together in ethnic, religious, or other communities with a society predicated on competition and 'atomistic' individualism.

It might well be true that the rising commercial classes found liberal ideas attractive because they tended to dissolve the older precapitalist order of society. But the connection to capitalism doesn't seem sufficient to me to explain why liberalism came to dominate.

The next criticism of liberalism is this:

A major challenge for liberal philosophers has been to explain why individual freedom should have priority over competing values such as community or perfectionism.

The phraseology here takes liberalism on its own terms. What liberal philosophers argue for is a particular understanding of freedom, one based on individual autonomy. So what needs to be asked is why liberals believe that individual autonomy should have priority over competing values such as community.

According to the entry, liberals give two main defences for prioritising individual "freedom". Kantian liberals believe that we are defined as humans by our autonomy and therefore to restrict autonomy is to treat people as being less than fully human:

Kantian liberals, for example, argue that the capacity for rational autonomy is the highest capacity humans possess, and so is worthy of inherent respect. To restrict someone's freedom of choice, on this Kantian view, is to treat them as less than a fully mature and responsible human being, and this is wrong, regardless of the desirable or undesirable social consequences that might follow.

As I've pointed out at this site many times, the undesirable social consequences of making autonomy the overriding good are many and severe. So severe that it would make a lot more sense instead to balance autonomy with a range of other goods. The Kantian approach is not without its critics:

This Kantian view has been very influential in the liberal tradition. However, it rests on a controversial claim about the nature of moral value and moral respect...many critics argue that using the state to promote the Kantian ideal of rational autonomy is as 'sectarian' as using the state to promote Protestantism.

Indeed. The modern liberal state, as noted above, is radically and intrusively ideological.

Critics of the Kantian approach argue that liberals should therefore avoid appealing to the value of autonomy, and instead defend liberalism simply as the only viable basis for peaceful coexistence in culturally and religiously plural societies.

Kantian liberals respond, however, that without appealing to the value of individual autonomy, there is no reason why coexistence between groups should take the form of guaranteeing the rights of individuals. Why not just allow each group in society to organise itself as it sees fit...

The Kantians have a point. If the underlying value of a society is "peaceful existence" then why would you adopt liberalism in the first place? Australia was a relatively unified society one hundred years ago. There weren't great schisms in society. If you had wanted a peaceful society, then it would have been best to let Australia develop along non-liberal lines.

Peacefulness doesn't catch the underlying dynamic of liberalism. After all, it's not as if liberals argue that society has unfortunately become so diverse and multicultural that peaceful existence is threatened and liberalism is required as a remedy. The liberal argument is very different. Liberals tend to argue that a traditionally unified society is boring or illegitimate and that such a society should be transformed by a deliberate policy of diversity or multiculturalism and that this more diverse society will add vibrancy etc.

There's one more criticism of liberalism that I'll finish on:

critics argue that the unfettered exercise of individual choice will undermine the forms of family and community life which help develop people's capacity for choice and provide people with meaningful options. On this view, liberalism is self-defeating - liberals privilege individual rights, even when this undermines the social conditions which make individual freedoms valuable.

In particular, what happens if making individual autonomy paramount dissolves communal institutions and identities? Is the freedom to be an atomised consumer as valuable as the freedom to live as a man, or as an Englishman, or as a husband and father?

In other words, there is likely to be a more significant freedom for the individual if autonomy is balanced with a range of other important goods, including those relating to family life and communal identity.

The Oxford Companion does make one last criticism of liberalism. It's a very good but lengthy one, so I'll leave it to a future post.

The Pope, Penny Red & the ecology of man

In his Christmas address, the Pope spoke about man and creation.

In his speech, he said that Christians believe that the world was created by God. Therefore, it was right that Christians sought to be good stewards for the environment - for creation. However, as man in his nature was part of this creation, it was equally right for the church to seek to preserve the nature of man himself here on earth:

Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Credo, the Church cannot and should not confine itself to passing on the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility for the created order and ought to make this responsibility prevail, even in public. And in so doing, it ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself. What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense.

In what way does the "ecology of man" need to be protected? The Pope raised as an example the issue of gender. He thinks it important that we continue to recognise that men and women were created with distinct natures. Sex distinctions can't just be explained in terms of a socially constructed "gender" which humans can re-create for their own purposes:

When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God.

That which is often expressed and understood by the term "gender," results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator.

The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition.

So the fact of our creation - of our having a nature as man and woman - does not deprive us of liberty, but is a condition of our freedom.

Is it self-destructive, rather than liberating, to deny the created nature of man? I believe it to be so. Let me take as an example the case of Penny Red, a young English feminist. She wrote a post attacking the Pope's speech and urging her readers to "hold on to our liberal ideals". But what do these ideals lead to?

Penny Red makes this clear in a recent post on gender. The first thing you notice about this post is how grim and grisly her views on gender are. Penny Red has rejected the idea that sex distinctions are a natural and positive aspect of creation; therefore, she explains them in terms of a violent, oppressive assertion of power:

School is where it all starts ... School is where girls learn that their bodies are objects of desire over which they do not automatically get sovereignty ... Most pupils of both sexes were learning what violence meant, which was power ... School is where those rules of gender, power and violence were laid down ...

Violence– whether sexual, physical or both – is almost always gendered, and remains gendered throughout adulthood, because it is about power, and gender as constructed by patriarchal society has always been about power ...

Sexual and physical violence has been ingrained as a method of asserting a primitive idea of ‘masculinity’ and of patriarchal might ...

For all our talk of civilisation, we remain an intensely divided, primitive and warlike society – and we will continue to do so as long as our young men ... grow up learning that instead of becoming whole human beings, they have to learn to fight.

This culture has been achingly slow to even begin to let go of the archetype of masculinity ... Women across the world remain unaware of the extent to which the Western model of masculinity is damaging – partly because we ourselves have spent way too long trying to emulate it ...

In reacting against the artificial prison of Western womanhood, liberated women have turned against their former masters with all the righteous rage of escaping slaves

So womanhood is reduced here to an "artificial prison" and manhood is thought of as an inhuman expression of violence, dominance and aggression. This reading of human nature as it really exists is extraordinarilay negative.

Where then is the liberation? Presumably, Penny Red's hope is that there is a utopian version of human nature waiting to emerge once the sex distinctions are cast off. The assumption is that once we are perfectly "sovereign" (i.e. self-determining) then we become fully human and more authentically self-realised.

The problem here is not only the overly optimistic view of the perfectibility of human nature. The deeper problem is the assumption that we become something greater by being wholly self-determined. But why should this be the case? If my "self" is something I make up (something self-determined), then it no longer relates to anything of objective significance outside of myself.

If, on the other hand, I have a masculine nature as part of my being, then my "self" gets to share in the objective significance of masculinity.

Penny Red goes on to admit that the liberal view has led to poor relations between the sexes. If social relationships are based on an assertion of power and dominance, then men and women will see themselves as existing within a hierarchy of oppression:

However, across the debate sphere for decades the cry ‘but men don’t have it easy either’ has been assumed as a direct attack on feminism – and sometimes it has even been meant as one. Otherwise perfectly intelligent commentators descend into petty fights over whose gender oppression trumps whose, not realising that everyone’s gender oppression is equally valid, not understanding that the expression of someone’s struggle is not an attack on everyone else’s.

Furthermore, writes Penny, men have failed to abandon their manhood, leading to an ongoing, unresolved war of the sexes:

Recent decades have seen the dissolution of the gender liberation movement into in-fighting, with men and women attacking each other as if each were somehow to blame for the other’s lot in life.

Men have remained unreconstructed, in the truest sense of that term, whilst women have gone on to socially evolve beyond recognition in the space of thirty years.

Instead of claiming their own reconstruction in tandem, men have reacted at the shock of having the ability to define themselves against women taken away. Feminists have reacted against that backlash in turn, and the whole thing has descended to wary stalemate, neither side trusting the other enough to put their weapons down and start drawing up a peace treaty.

Not exactly a happy, liberating scenario, is it?

Finally, there is Penny Red's solution to the mess, which is (as is usually the case) an even more intense dose of liberalism. She wants to persuade us that recognising distinctions between men and women amounts, literally, to fascism:

If we are truly to leave gender fascism behind, we cannot allow ourselves to think in binaries - men and women, boys and girls, us and them ...

So I have this dream about a new kind of feminism - one that recognises that it is not only about liberating biological women from the constraints and indignities associated with their sex, but about liberating all human people from the cruelties and limitations imposed on them by their gender ...

We have to recognise that the spectrum of gender prejudice extends into everyone's lives and places limitations on all of us ...

The best term for what is perpetrated by patriarchal cultural mores is not misogyny nor even organised sexism, but gender fascism. Fascism in its most literal sense, in its etymological notion of the fasces, the ordered bundle, everything in its proper, pre-ordained and rigidly socially determined place. Ladies, gentlemen and everyone else in attendance: gender fascism is what we need to set ourselves against.

And that is why ... we are all feminists ... every person trying to live their life as a complete human being is a feminist ally ...

So whatever isn't self-determined, whatever is pre-ordained, has for Penny Red the stigma of fascism attached to it. In this view, heterosexuality itself, in which there is a love for and attraction to the qualities of the opposite sex (and in which a binary recognition of male and female is central), must be tainted with fascism.

This isn't a path to liberation, but to conflict and self-deception - in which we are no longer able to live freely and openly as men and women.

Robert Jensen's faulty template

Here's a story with a happy ending. Back in October a professor of journalism by the name of Robert Jensen wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle attacking masculinity:

We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity. It's time to abandon the claim that there are certain psychological or social traits that inherently come with being biologically male. If we can get past that, we have a chance to create a better world for men and women ...

Of course, if we are going to jettison masculinity, we have to scrap femininity along with it. We have to stop trying to define what men and women are going to be in the world based on extrapolations from physical sex differences.

Why would Robert Jensen take such an attitude? Jensen claims that in his twenties he was an apolitical journalist:

Then I went to graduate school and studied, among other things, feminism. And feminism politicized me ...

Why would a feminist oppose masculinity and femininity? One reason is that feminism follows some of the assumptions of liberalism. One of these assumptions is that our humanity is contingent: that we only become human when we create who we are from our own reasoned choices.

Since women's lives were traditionally defined more by a biological role (motherhood) and by the emotions (love and marriage) rather than by a sphere of rational choice (careers and formal study) this seemed, under the terms of liberalism, to make their role inferior to that of men.

So from quite early on there were thinkers who were keen to "defend" women by asserting that women were "equal" to men; to do this they had to deny that existing sex roles were natural, so they claimed that such roles were the product of a social custom designed to artificifically perpetuate a male dominance.

So there are some basic liberal assumptions which lead on to the negative view of masculinity and femininity as oppressive social constructs.

Is the way that this issue is framed by liberalism helpful? I think the answer is clearly no. The liberal framework distorts the discussion of gender in several ways.

First, it forces us to define equality as sameness. Equality can't be defined as men and women being valued equally in their distinct roles. Instead, there is only one "human" role (the male one) which men and women must occupy to the same degree in order to be considered equal.

Second, it means that motherhood and marriage, which were once considered core human activities, are relegated to the non-human realm - to the animal realm of biology and the emotions.

Thus we find feminist Betty Friedan telling us that the traditional female role is to be rejected because:

Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals. Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from other animals by his mind's power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the future to it ... when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different from the past, he is a man, a human being.

A woman giving birth to a new life is no longer regarded with awe by Friedan, as this is not our intellect acting on the world to shape things according to our individual reason and will.

Third, the idea that masculinity and femininity aren't natural defies both everyday experience and modern science. Anyone who has been in a serious relationship knows that there are important, deeply grounded sex differences. Modern science has confirmed that sex differences are caused, at least in part, by hard-wired, biological factors.

Fourth, even though the masculine role is assumed to be the human one, it has its legitimacy undermined by the idea that it's upheld artificially as an act of domination over women.

For liberals, what matters is our will to act in any direction. So the power to enact our individual will becomes critical. If one group in society appears to have more power (more political power, money or status), liberals readily interpret this as an illegitimate power grab at the expense of an oppressed group.

At this point, we can return to Robert Jensen, as he very clearly thinks along these lines. Jensen speaks of masculinity as a "project of dominance" in which men,

seek to control 'their' women and define their own pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape and battery.

(It's no surprise that Jensen is also a "whiteness theorist". He observes that American whites live in a majority white culture and concludes that this makes them privileged - which, by his logic, makes their position illegitimate.)

Fifth, the liberal view that sex differences are artificial and unnatural runs directly against heterosexuality. In practice we don't want our future spouse to be androgynous; we're attracted by the more appealing qualities of the opposite sex.

In short, Robert Jensen is following a faulty political template when he attacks masculinity. This template generates a whole series of negative consequences, each of which invites serious criticism.

Which brings me to the happy ending. Robert Jensen's attack on masculinity didn't go unanswered. A female columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle has penned an excellent reply, drawing on several of the points I've outlined above.

I'd like to give her comments some space, so I'll leave her reply to Robert Jensen till tomorrow.

The silent apartment

Liberalism tells us that the highest aim in life, the very thing which makes us human, is our freedom to be self-determined. This means that liberals use words like autonomy and independence to describe the key goals in life.

The problem is that it’s not so simple to make people absolutely autonomous. It means denying that we have any inborn qualities, or any unchosen, inherited forms of identity, which might help define who we are.

It even means, as a matter of logic, downgrading the status of love in human life. After all, our highest ideal of love is a joining together of a man and woman in a kind of permanent union or bond. It’s not easy to reconcile this ideal with the liberal one of achieving an autonomous, unimpeded individual will.

This problem becomes especially acute for feminists, since feminism takes the basic principles of liberalism and applies them to questions of male and female relationships.

As evidence for this, take the case of feminist writer Vivien Gornick. She has written an honest account of her own love life in an article titled “What independence has come to mean to me” (published in the book The Bitch in the House).

She begins the article by declaring that her sixty-fifth year is a year of reckoning and that she is brooding now on her “lifelong struggle to become a human being: an independent human being”.

(Note how liberalism makes the status of being human contingent: it’s something you only attain through reaching a certain condition of autonomy or independence.)

She then quotes an article she wrote nine years ago, in which she looks at people walking along a New York street and is struck by the lack of firm relationships:

This is a population in a permanent state of intermittent attachment. Inevitably the silent apartment lies in wait.

Who could ever have dreamed there would be so many of us floating around, those of us between thirty-five and fifty-five who live alone. Thirty years of politics in the street opened a door that became a floodgate, and we have poured through in our monumental numbers, in possession of the most educated discontent in history.

Yet, we seem puzzled, most of us, about how we got here, confused and wanting relief from the condition. We roam the crowded streets, in naked expectation of a last-minute reprieve.

And how did Vivien Gornick come to be part of this mass of confused single people? She recalls that as a young woman she,

discovered the promise of revolutionary feminism; and then the loneliness that came with what I took to be independence – turning it quickly into a political position (“this is what we must endure to become ourselves”)

Much later she recognised that it was not so much “sexism” which kept her single but her politically inspired treatment of men:

In the name of equality I tormented every man who’d ever loved me until he left me: I called them on everything, never let anything go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both.

She then decided that work, with its promise of independence, could replace love.

Work … had come to seem everything. Loving a man, I had decided, would never again be uppermost in my concerns.

But this turned out to be more difficult than she imagined: the instinct toward love was difficult to suppress. She wrote an article in which she “examined the matter once more, and this time looked more clearly at the consequence of what I so easily claimed could be dispensed with – love, that is”:

Perhaps, in fact, the two (work and love) were incompatible. Love-as-I-had-always-known-it was something I might now have to do without. I approached the thought blithely, as though it would be the easiest thing in the world to accommodate …

The only important thing, I told myself (again), was work … If I worked, I’d have what I needed. I’d be a person in the world. What would it matter then that I was giving up on “love”?

As it turned out, it mattered … the idea of love, if not the reality, was impossible to give up. As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy and sentiment. It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones: so deeply embedded into the make-up of the spirit it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence.

Having admitted that her need for love couldn’t be denied, Vivien Gornick then recognized that her “autonomy” was not really what she had held it up to be, and that:

what I was calling my “choices” weren’t really choices at all, they were simply the impulses of a conflicted being: one of them had to be acted upon. And thus, more often than not, after I had “chosen” I’d end up feeling stranded, confused and disappointed; surprised it was turning out this way; and as shut up inside myself as before – neither free nor independent. Ah, there was the rub. Not independent.

Consciously I was undivided in my desire for autonomy. Independence, I thought, was what I valued above all else. But it was turning out that I had not understood the word at all. For years I had mistaken rebelliousness for independence. I thought that every time I treated the men in my life badly because “work comes first” I was asserting my independence. I thought dressing like a slob meant defying the social code. I thought reciting the history of women’s oppression ad nauseam explained all the writing I wasn’t doing.

What is there to say about all of this? Conservatives are by no means opposed to ideals of autonomy or independence. But these are part of a mix of goods which we might seek in life. They are not the be-all defining our humanity.

To choose to sacrifice a degree of autonomy in order to enjoy another good, namely romantic or marital love, doesn’t threaten the conservative world view in the same way it does for liberals. It doesn’t undermine a conservative definition of “personhood”.

It’s important that we build up our own conservative influence, so that there’s a more effective opposition to liberal orthodoxy. If we don’t, then we will periodically have feminist upswings, in which large numbers of middle-class, intellectual women will suppress the instinct toward love for the ideologically superior claims of autonomy.

Becoming the embodied subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The politics of bad faith

In 1970 Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics became a feminist bestseller. Today it reads like a template for the feminism which came after.

What inspired such an influential book? It’s hard to miss, as part of the answer, the role of orthodox liberal philosophy.

There’s even that most primal liberal idea: that we are made human by our ability to shape our own existence, in contrast to the animals who act from biological instinct.

What’s odd about this idea is that it means we can be more or less human, according to how much we are subject to forces we don’t decide for ourselves, such as traditions, or authorities, or behavioural codes or our own inherited nature. Our very humanity is put on the line.

This is particularly a problem for women, as traditional womanhood was centred on the biological act of motherhood and the emotional life associated with it, rather than an act of intellectual or wilful “self-making” as might be claimed by men competing in the public world of arts, sciences and politics.

This, at any rate, is how Kate Millett saw things. She wrote,

In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male.

This is a devastating way to understand the traditional female role. It means that women are lower even than slaves – they are not even living as humans.

Why would women be assigned such a role? Millett argues at length, as she must, that there is nothing natural about the female role. In fact, Millett doesn’t even accept that our “core gender identity” is natural.

Instead, Millett makes a distinction between our “sex”, which is biological, and our “gender”, which is a product of culture. As she herself puts it:

Important new research not only suggests that the possibilities of innate temperamental differences seem more remote than ever, but even raises questions as to the validity and permanence of psycho-sexual identity. In doing so it gives fairly concrete positive evidence of the overwhelmingly cultural character of gender.

So why then do women have a role which robs them of their humanity? Millett answers: as an act of power by men over women. For Millett all politics is to be understood as a will to power by one group over another:

The term ‘politics’ shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.

Millett believes that men are the dominant group who have subordinated women within a patriarchy:

the situation between the sexes now, and throughout history, is a case of that phenomenon Max Weber defined as herrschaft, a relationship of dominance and subordinance.

By this point there is no saving the position of love, marriage and family. They can only be understood as instruments of control by men over women:

Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family ... the family effects control and conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient ... Traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership over wife or wives and children, including the powers of physical abuse and often even those of murder and sale ... The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit ...

How to respond?

This then is the feminist path to bad faith, laid out so clearly for us by Kate Millett.

It begins with the idea that our humanity is contingent - that acting from a biological nature imperils our distinct status as humans. From this flows the claim that women’s traditional role, based around motherhood, denies women their humanity. This makes it awkward to view women’s role as natural; as an alternative the role is explained as a product of cultural influences. The leading position of men within public culture, the “human” sphere, similarly cannot be accepted as natural, but is explained as a politically organised dominance of men over women: a patriarchy. Love, marriage and the family, central as they are to relations between men and women, are then understood as “local” mechanisms of a male subordination of women.

There is, in other words, a chain of argument leading up to feminist expressions of bad faith. When Kate Millett writes of women being treated as chattels by men, or when she describes sexuality as an act of hostility by men toward women, or when she denies the real possibilities of love between men and women, denigrating love instead as a politically calculated manipulation, she does so within an ideological framework which appears to justify such claims.

However, in the feminist chain of argument there is no strong link – each argument can be easily pulled apart.

There is no compelling reason, for instance, to accept the idea that our status as humans is contingent. We certainly don’t feel this to be true. If I act according to instinct, or in obedience to a traditional authority, or from an inherited identity, I don’t feel my humanity to be under threat. Most of us, I expect, have a sense that our humanity is something that is with us as a matter of course and is more the sum total of our existence, rather than something we must self-consciously achieve as an act of “self-making”.

Once we view our human status this way, then we are more free to accept the significance of the traditional female role. Creating a new human life can be seen as important, even if it is connected closely to biology. Similarly, it becomes possible again to value the role women traditionally played as the emotional centre of family life.

Nor are we under the same pressure to deny that sex roles are natural. Millett wanted us to believe that the distinction between masculine and feminine was not natural: that it was an artificial product of culture and not biology. She claimed that “important new research” supported this view.

She has been proved wrong. Science has, in fact, proved the conservative view to be correct: that differences between men and women are hardwired into our biology. It is now accepted, for instance, that there are important differences between men and women in the structure of the brain.

Couldn’t this mean that the personalities of men have developed in a distinct way as part of their natural role as protectors and providers? Thousands of years ago, being a protector and provider might have meant organising to hunt together and establishing basic leadership councils to hold the tribe together. But as civilisation developed, these same functions might have been expressed in more sophisticated ways. The masculine personality might have been directed toward industry and economic development, and toward higher level political activity and interests.

The greater involvement of men in careers and politics might, therefore, simply be an expression of a positive and useful function played by men in society, something they are fitted for in their personalities, namely their traditional function of being providers and protectors. It does not have to be explained as an organised attempt to subordinate women. It might actually be something which has generally benefited women.

A failed experiment

Which brings us finally to love, marriage and the family.

Whereas a conservative might see love between a man and a woman as a finer part of human nature, leading ideally to marriage, an exclusive union for life of a man and a woman, Kate Millett regarded love and marriage as oppressive instruments of control over women.

And whereas a conservative might see the family as securing for women both emotional and material support, Millett took the more negative view that the family was a mechanism for subordinating women.

So which outlook has more validity? Millett herself decided to find out by living as part of a “sisterhood” rather than as part of a family. She used the money she made from the success of her book to buy a farm, which she invited other women to stay at.

According to Millett’s theory, by making this choice she ought to have escaped a patriarchal oppression and found happiness, freedom and fulfilment. What she actually did experience is recorded in a description of her life she wrote in 1998. It is too long to reproduce in full, but a few excerpts will do:

Another season at the farm ... the tedium of a small community, shearing trees, so exhausted afterward that I did nothing but read ... Back to the Bowery and another emptiness. I cannot spend the whole day reading, so I write, or try to. A pure if pointless exercise ...

I cannot get employment. I cannot earn money. Except by selling Christmas trees, one by one, in the cold in Poughkeepsie. I cannot teach and have nothing but farming now. And when physically I can no longer farm, what then? Nothing I write now has any prospect of seeing print ...

Frightening, this future. What poverty ahead, what mortification, what distant bag-lady horrors, when my savings are gone? And why did I imagine it would be any different, imagine my books would give me some slender living ...

Much as I tire of a life without purpose or the meaningful work that would make it bearable, I can’t die because the moment I do, my sculpture, drawings, negatives and silkscreens will be carted off to the dump ...

We [feminists] haven’t helped each other much, haven’t been able to build solidly enough to have created community or safety. Some women in this generation disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion. Or vanished into asylums and have yet to return to tell the tale, as has Shula Firestone. There were despairs that could only end in death: Maria del Drago chose suicide, so did Ellen Frankfurt, and Elizabeth Fischer ...

Elizabeth and I would eat an afternoon breakfast and chat, carefully disguising our misery from each other. Feminists didn’t complain to one another then; each imagined the loneliness and sense of failure was unique.

The outcome of Millett’s experiment was loneliness, insecurity and a loss of purpose. I don’t think that this is accidental. If the family has resilience it is partly because it offers the possibility of a refuge from these things. This, though, is not something to be admitted by those, like Kate Millett, who understand the family primarily in terms of “sexual politics”.

Getting it straight

If you’ve noticed inconsistencies in feminist politics there’s a reason. It’s not that feminists are irrational or hypocritical or unintelligent. There is a deeper problem: the first principles on which feminism is based generate contradictory aims.

Poor feminists! They are locked into a belief system which can never pass the test of consistency because the starting point of their theory calls for opposing outcomes.

Homeward Bound

A good way to illustrate the tensions within feminist theory is to look at the article Homeward Bound. This was published late last year and was written by feminist Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of women’s studies.

Homeward Bound begins with the question of why women are not entering executive positions in larger numbers. Some feminists blame the “glass ceiling”: they believe that women are held back in their careers by male employers or by unfriendly work practices.

Linda Hirshman disagrees. In 2003 she undertook some interesting research. She contacted the women who had announced their weddings in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times in 1996. These were women who belonged to a well-educated elite and who had prestigious jobs.

To Hirshman’s surprise a large percentage of these elite women had opted out of careers and were pursuing motherhood and home life instead. Only five of the thirty women with children she interviewed were working full-time and half were not in paid work at all.

The women had not left full-time work reluctantly. Hirshman found that when they had quit “they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work” and at least half “expressed a hope never to work again.”

Choice or judgement?

Why then are women not equally represented in upper management? Hirshman concludes from her research that it’s not due to discrimination in the workplace, but is the result of choices that women are making to leave paid work in order to raise their families at home.

Which raises a considerable problem in how feminists are to reconcile their own theory.

Feminism is basically liberalism applied to the lives of women. The starting point of liberalism is the idea that what makes us human, as distinct from the animals, is that we have the capacity to shape the course of our own lives.

This principle was stated clearly enough by the famous liberal philosopher J.S. Mill, who wrote in his influential work On Liberty (1859) that,

He who lets the world or his portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs his faculties.

This principle makes two clear demands on us. First, we must retain an individual freedom of choice over what we do or seek to become. Second, we must use our faculties of reason and will to plan our own unique, individual life rather than accepting a merely imitative path laid down by tradition.

What, though, if women are naturally drawn to a motherhood role? Then the two liberal demands come into conflict.

On the one hand, if motherhood is what most women would naturally choose to do then it would be “illiberal” to deny them an individual freedom of choice.

But, on the other hand, if women are adopting a traditional role based on gender, they are following a “biological destiny” rather than employing their rational faculties to shape a unique, individual life plan as careerist women might claim to be doing. Accepting this would also seem to be “illiberal”.

Hirshman is not unaware of this conflict in feminist theory. She admits that women who stay at home are justifying their decision in terms of a “choice feminism” and that as soon as feminism accepted the legitimacy of individual choice “the movement had no language” to challenge what was happening.

Hirshman, though, cannot accept the choices that women are making. This is because the other side of the liberal coin is more important to her: the idea that “human flourishing” cannot be found in a traditional role within the family.

She provides us with the following quote from fellow feminist Betty Friedan to support her point of view:

A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor – with or without makeup – is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity. Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals. Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from other animals by his mind’s power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the future to it. He shares a need for food and sex with other animals, but when he loves, he loves as a man, and when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different from his past, he is a man, a human being.

Hirshman sets herself against the “choice” aspect of feminism, in which women can choose to be homemakers, and does so by returning to liberal first principles about what makes us distinctively human.

Having determined on an anti-choice feminism, Hirshman does not hold back in attacking the motherhood role. She tells us that the family,

allows for fewer opportunities for human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust.

Hirshman believes it is unjust for women to stay at home because it does not accord with liberal views of what it means to be human. There is nothing worse than injustice. Therefore, it does not matter that women are made happy by the motherhood role. Hirshman can write that the “privileged brides of the Times – and their husbands – seem happy” but still judge them to be doing the wrong thing because “what they do is bad for them”.

Hirshman is drawing, in a principled way, on an anti-choice logic within feminist theory which was expressed most stridently in 1975 by the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir who proclaimed that,

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.

So the problem is this: how can feminism be consistent when its first principles generate both an insistence on individual choice but also an equally striking rejection of it?

[Note: conservatives don’t find themselves in this fix, because our starting point is different. Liberals pose things in such a way as to make individuals self-create their own value. Conservatives do not see individuals as creating what is good in man and nature, but as seeking to live by the good already existing as part of the human condition.

Therefore, it would not matter to a conservative woman that the act of creating a new human life was not a unique product of her own mind but part of a “biological destiny”. It would not alter the goodness or significance of the experience of motherhood.]

The rules

Hirshman admits that “Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy”.

She lists a number of rules to get women out of the home and into management positions.

The first rule is that women should reject arts degrees and choose courses leading to high incomes. She suggests that,

Feminist organizations should produce each year a survey of the most common job opportunities for people with college degrees, along with the average lifetime earnings from each job category ...

The second rule is to treat work seriously. This means that women should not be so concerned with finding work which is socially meaningful, or intellectually rewarding or prestigious. Instead,

The best way to treat work seriously is to find the money. Money is the marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family.

The third rule is to avoid household responsibilities. Hirshman advises women to marry down by finding “a spouse with less social power than you”. Marrying “a pure counterpart,” cautions Hirshman, is “risky”.

The final rule is to have only one baby, as research shows that women with two babies are more likely to opt out and move to the suburbs.

Equality & caste

What impression do you have of these rules? Many people will think that the rules are overly mercenary, and too much based on the pursuit of money and power.

Hirshman does little to dispel such an impression when she says of child-rearing that,

Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power and honor.

So why does Hirshman place such an emphasis on money and power?

Remember that liberalism starts out with the claim that we are made human by our capacity to shape our own lives.

But what if some people have a greater capacity to shape their lives? Liberalism responds to this problem with a strong egalitarianism: everyone must be equally human and therefore everyone must have the same opportunity to shape their life outcomes.

However, as Hirshman’s mindset warns us, there will always be tension within the liberal view. After all, what really matters in liberalism is the enabling of individual will: this is what defines our humanity. And what gives us the freedom to enact our will? Hirshman’s logical answer is: not equality but power, and money too, since money brings power.

Nor is the idea that we should equalise human wills convincing in terms of liberalism when you consider that we are most free to enact our will when we have power over others. Therefore, having power over others might seem (unofficially) to be an important good within the liberal value system.

If this is correct it might help to explain why feminists often accuse men of acting to consolidate power over women; feminists are assuming that the average man is acting within the same mindset as themselves, in which the significance of our lives depends on obtaining power over others.

It might not be said aloud, but it is not uncommon for feminist politics to be inegalitarian. Hirshman’s article, for example, assumes that women “arrive” when they reach the executive suite. But it can only ever be the case that a small minority of women will be leaders in their field. It’s not possible for all Western women to be rulers at work. Some must be ruled over.

So what Hirshman is attempting to offer is “justice” (in liberal terms) for a small caste of women; most women will necessarily be excluded.

We have here, therefore, a tension within feminism which is unlikely to be resolved. The same principle which generates a concern for equality of will, also motivates feminists to campaign for money and power for an elite of women, as these are held to be the things which matter.

What, though, if you don’t make an “enabling of will” the starting point for your politics? In this case, neither the breaking down of gender distinctions in the name of equality, nor the pursuit of money and power will seem to be necessary to a good life.

A conservative woman who values a love of family, of nation, of nature, of God, will not think it necessary to subordinate marriage and motherhood to a pursuit of money and power. She will not be caught within a political theory which leads her to such a view.

A great papal homily

There are still signs of life in the Catholic Church. Earlier this month Pope Benedict delivered a homily which firmly and eloquently rejected the modernist liberal mentality. It is a refreshing thing when a religious leader dares to move beyond accommodation to a hostile philosophy and actually attempts to refute it.

I must say that I was not so impressed by the first part of the homily. It is yet another attempt to place Mary at the centre of Catholic worship (“In her lies the true center in which we trust”).

However, further on we come to a passage which effectively rejects liberalism in the religious sphere. As you read the passage, remember that liberalism is the idea that to be fully human we must be free to create ourselves through our own individual will and reason. It is the philosophy of the sovereign, autonomous, independent, self-authoring individual.

Pope Benedict says, regarding the famous Bible passage in which Eve is tempted by the serpent,

What picture does this passage show us? The human being does not trust God. Tempted by the serpent, he harbors the suspicion that in the end, God takes something away from his life, that God is a rival who curtails our freedom and that we will be fully human only when we have cast him aside; in brief, that only in this way can we fully achieve our freedom.

The human being lives in the suspicion that God's love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God.

He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God's level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into emptiness, into death.

Love is not dependence but a gift that makes us live. The freedom of a human being is the freedom of a limited being, and therefore is itself limited. We can possess it only as a shared freedom, in the communion of freedom: Only if we live in the right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom develop.

We live in the right way if we live in accordance with the truth of our being, and that is, in accordance with God's will. For God's will is not a law for the human being imposed from the outside and that constrains him, but the intrinsic measure of his nature, a measure that is engraved within him and makes him the image of God, hence, a free creature.

There is more. Pope Benedict says that we all carry a drop of the poison of thinking this way and that,

We call this drop of poison "original sin." Precisely on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have a lurking suspicion that a person who does not sin must really be basically boring and that something is missing from his life: the dramatic dimension of being autonomous; that the freedom to say no, to descend into the shadows of sin and to want to do things on one's own is part of being truly human; that only then can we make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and women, of being truly ourselves; that we should put this freedom to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in reality, fully ourselves.

In a word, we think that evil is basically good, we think that we need it, at least a little, in order to experience the fullness of being. We think that Mephistopheles -- the tempter -- is right when he says he is the power "that always wants evil and always does good" (J.W. von Goethe, "Faust" I, 3). We think that a little bargaining with evil, keeping for oneself a little freedom against God, is basically a good thing, perhaps even necessary.

If we look, however, at the world that surrounds us we can see that this is not so; in other words, that evil is always poisonous, does not uplift human beings but degrades and humiliates them. It does not make them any the greater, purer or wealthier, but harms and belittles them.

This is something we should indeed learn on the day of the Immaculate Conception: The person who abandons himself totally in God's hands does not become God's puppet, a boring "yes man"; he does not lose his freedom. Only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great, creative immensity of the freedom of good.

The person who turns to God does not become smaller but greater, for through God and with God he becomes great, he becomes divine, he becomes truly himself.

I hope the significance of Pope Benedict’s words is clear to readers. In effect, the Pope is asserting that the liberal concept of what makes us human, namely a freedom to choose for ourselves, as autonomous individuals, who we are and what we do, is a false concept.

Instead, the Pope is arguing that there is a given truth to our being (not something we create for ourselves), which is not an impediment to freedom, not a “limitation,” because it forms the higher part of ourselves. We are free within a part of our nature, and therefore if we want freedom it is logical that we should aim, in what we will, to live in accordance with this higher part of our nature.

I do believe that this corresponds to the real experience of human freedom. Liberals would have us believe that we experience freedom when we are unconstrained in our choices. For example, liberals believe that we are liberated when we are not influenced in any significant way by the sex we are born to. Liberals want it not to matter whether we are born male or female.

So I am meant to feel free when I as a man am “unconstrained” by masculinity. But in reality I don’t feel free. I feel dismayed when I see signs of effeminacy in other men, or when I am hampered in fulfilling a masculine role in society. I feel most free when I witness the better and stronger masculine qualities in myself or others.

Which leads to a final point. It is encouraging that the Pope should reject the liberal mentality so firmly in the religious sphere. But the challenge for the Church is to understand how liberalism has also distorted other important spheres of life.

(I have already mentioned the issue of gender; the Church did, in fact, release a letter on gender last year which clearly rejected a liberal feminism, but only to replace it with a Catholic one.)

Is Margaret Thatcher a conservative?

Margaret Thatcher visited Melbourne in 1981, just a year or two after becoming British Prime Minister. Whilst here she gave a lecture at Monash University entitled "My Political Philosophy".

She was considered so right-wing at the time that the university authorities initially refused to make a suitable lecture hall available for her visit. It took a phone call from the then Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, to change their minds.

Mrs Thatcher was, of course, a leader of the British Conservative Party. You might think, that being a particularly "right-wing" leader of a "conservative" party, that her politics could be safely assumed to be conservative.

However, when you read the text of her Monash University lecture it quickly becomes apparent that her politics were actually not conservative, but were an orthodox kind of liberalism.

Right to choose

The starting point for Margaret Thatcher's lecture was "the right to choose". She began with the following comments:

What sets man above the rest of the living world is his sanctity as a human being, with the ability and the right to choose; to choose what to believe and what to do do ...

This right to choose, fundamental as it is to human life, is not man-given or government given, but God-given. That is the foundation of personal liberty.

This is such an interesting quote. It brings to mind the earliest explicit statement of liberalism that I have been able to find, that of Pico della Mirandola in the late 1400s. Pico imagined God saying to man that,

You, constrained by no limits, in accordance with your own free will ...shall ordain for yourself the limits of your nature ... We have made you ... so that with freedom of choice, as though the maker and moulder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer.

The starting point for both Pico and Mrs Thatcher is the attempt to define the way that God has made us distinct and special; in other words, the way that we have been raised above the birds and the beasts.

The answer they both give is that unlike the beasts we have been made by God to have free will. Our very humanity, what is most sacred about us, is our capacity to choose for ourselves what we are to do and what we are to be.

This too was a starting point for the father of English liberalism, John Locke. In fact, Locke took the argument to a logical conclusion. He wrote (in the 1600s) that if a man asserted an "arbitrary" power over the free will of another man, then by "so revolting from his own kind to that of Beasts ... he renders himself liable to be destroyed ... as any other wild beast or noxious brute."

In other words, our ability to exercise free will makes us human; fail to uphold free will in your conduct with others and you are not human but a beast, and can be hunted down as one.

Individual freedom

Margaret Thatcher's political philosophy is therefore within a liberal tradition which claims that God has given us a special human quality of freedom of choice.

If you believe that our very God-given humanity is defined in this way, then politically you will be committed to upholding liberal individualism: an ideal of personal liberty based on individuals not being constrained or limited in their individual choices.

It's not surprising then to find Mrs Thatcher insisting in her Melbourne speech that,

Where freedom to exercise personal choice exists, I seek to expand it; where it is under attack, I shall defend it; where it does not exist, I shall try to create it.

Mrs Thatcher does, it is true, also insist upon the necessity of order and the rule of law. But this is only to safeguard the freedom of individuals to exercise their individual choice without infringement by others. She writes that:

Order, in a free society, means the ability of ordinary men and women to go about their business and their leisure pursuits in freedom and without fear, so long as what they do does not harm or damage others.

It is to maintain this kind of order that she believes that,

...government must be strong. Strong to uphold the law. Strong to maintain the law. Strong to protect freedom.

Identity & meaning

Even if it's now clear that Margaret Thatcher is philosophically a liberal, it might still be asked why this is a problem. What's wrong with defining our humanity by our right to choose?

Think of the ultimate consequences of this belief. If your very humanity depends on the fact that you have individual choice, you won't like anything that limits your "right" to choose in any direction.

This sets liberals on a collision course with much of what was traditionally thought to add meaning and identity to the lives of individuals.

Take the issue of manhood and womanhood. In pre-liberal societies, our sex was viewed positively as something that made up part of our individual identity. However, it's hard for liberals to accept that our sex helps to define our self-identity. This is because we are simply born into our sex; we don't get to choose it for ourselves.

For liberals, therefore, the traditional view of manhood and womanhood is looked on negatively as something that limits the sphere of individual choice. That's why liberals tend to insist that masculinity and femininity are merely social constructs from which the individual needs to be emancipated.

In a similar way, liberals see a need to "liberate" the individual from other unchosen aspects of human existence, including our ethnic identity, stable and clearly defined forms of family life, and external moral codes.

Achievements

One biography of Margaret Thatcher has described her achievements in office as follows:

Margaret Thatcher's government followed a radical programme of privatisation and deregulation, reform of the Trade Unions, tax cuts and the introduction of market mechanisms into health and education. The aim was to reduce the role of government and increase individual self-reliance.

This is very clearly a programme of right liberalism. Right liberals focus particularly on "liberating" the individual from economic constraints. They typically prefer a smaller role for the government in the economy, and so wish to privatise and deregulate.

Mrs Thatcher was interested in extending free enterprise as a way of extending the realm of individual choice in general. Given this interest, she was hardly the person to oppose the onward march of liberal individualism in Britain in the 1980s.

And so Britain continued to be transformed by liberalism, despite the wishes of much of the population. For example, Mrs Thatcher did not act to restrict immigration in order to maintain Britain's traditional national identity, nor did she move against "third wave" feminism which seriously disrupted family life in the 1980s.

The one area in which she did make a stand against liberal trends was her unwillingness to completely cede British national sovereignty. Against some criticism, she went to war to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentinian invasion, and she was reluctant to replace the British pound with a European currency.

However, even her defence of national sovereignty seems compromised. In her Melbourne lecture she declared that,

I believe that, despite our growing interdependence, the day of the nation state is not over; that such states still have their contribution to make to the development of the human story.

Perhaps this statement can be read in different ways. To me, it seems to suggest that nations exist to further some larger goal of human progress, and that when this goal is reached they can be discarded.

This is not how a conservative would have chosen to defend the existence of nation states; for conservatives, nations have a value in themselves to be defended on an ongoing basis, rather than being vehicles to some further purpose.

Defining humanity

The original failing in Margaret Thatcher's philosophy is the idea that it is a God-given individual choice which defines our humanity.

Once this idea is accepted, we are likely to believe that a restriction on individual choice is an unacceptable violation of our humanity. This then undermines much of what gives identity and meaning to individuals, such as our ethnic identity, our sex, family life, and so on, as these are inherited or inborn rather than being individually chosen.

But is it true that what makes us distinctively human is our ability to exercise individual choice? Traditionally, it was thought that our humanity was created when God invested us with a soul. This more traditional belief allows us to value human life, even when the capacity to choose is not entirely present, for instance, in older people with dementia, or in the very young.

Furthermore, it seems a very crude understanding of what we are as humans, to rest our definition of humanity on individual choice. A more sophisticated understanding would incorporate much more than this, including important forms of human connectedness, such as our relationship to nation, family, manhood and womanhood.

We need to find better ways to define our humanity than the existing liberal one, which continues to exercise a destructive influence over Western societies.

(First published at Conservative Central 22/02/2004)