Wednesday, May 25, 2005

The feminism which ends in tears

Virginia Haussegger is becoming well-known in Australia as a feminist critic of feminism.

She already had a public profile as a TV journalist when she wrote an explosive newspaper article in 2002, The sins of our feminist mothers.

In this article she describes how her generation of women was brought up to believe “We could be and do whatever we pleased”. This is the basic principle of liberalism: that we should be “free” to create who we are and what we do through our own individual choices.

At first things seemed to go well. She writes of a generation of women who “crashed through barriers and carved out good, successful and even some brilliant careers.”

But the story ends unhappily. The feminist mothers forgot “to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships.”

Virginia Haussegger describes very well the incompetent attitude to relationships of women brought up in a culture of liberal individualism:

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside. Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.


Nor did the feminist mothers warn their daughters of the biological clock, so that:

We are the ones, now in our late 30s and early 40s, who are suddenly sitting before a sheepish doctor listening to the words:

“Well, I’m sorry, but you may have left your run too late. Women at your age find it very difficult to get pregnant naturally ...”


For Virginia Haussegger the end result is that,

here we are, supposedly “having it all” as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes ... It’s a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.

But the truth is – for me at least – the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless ... and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

It was wrong. It was crap.


Of course, Virginia Haussegger received a bucketing from the sisterhood for her bold complaints. She has, though, held firm in making criticisms of feminism, even publishing a book this month, Wonder Woman, in which she declares feminism to be “an inadequate structure from which to build a life.”

I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how far she goes in really challenging feminism. Not too far, I expect, as this would require a radical rethinking of the way things are valued in a liberal society.

Is the important thing in life, as liberals claim, establishing an unimpeded individual choice? If yes, then women who break down traditional restrictions on their choices, for instance by “breaking through” career barriers, really are the feminist heroines they are made out to be.

But what if this assumption is wrong? What if the important thing is to fulfil the better and deeper parts of our own inborn natures? Then the task would not be to break through traditional stereotypes but to create the best conditions in which we could fulfil our masculine or feminine natures – for instance, by protecting the conditions in which women could express and experience marital and maternal love.

Virginia Haussegger is trying to warn us that even when the liberal option is undertaken most successfully, even when we create the greatest level of individual autonomy, in which our individual choices are least impeded, all we get is a pleasant and comfortable, but barren and pointless existence.

Sunday, May 15, 2005

When surrender isn't enough

From Paul Cella the following story of rights gone wrong.

In America a school wrestling league allows competition between high school boys and girls. Two Christian schools, which don't "want to put our young men in a situation where they would be inappropriately touching a young lady" have responded by allowing their male students to forfeit their matches against female competitors.

This, you might think, is a kind of principled surrender on the issue. The girls win the matches, but the boys don't have to act inappropriately. But for some liberal parents even this passive evasion is an infringement of the girls' "rights" and they plan to take the Christian schools to court.

Again, this case highlights the radically different attitudes to gender held by liberals and conservatives. For liberals, our sex is something we don't get to choose and is therefore an impediment to our freedom to decide individually who we are and what we do. Gender therefore has to be abolished as a "limiting" factor to individual choice and hence the insistence that there should not be discrimination on the basis of gender.

For conservatives the point of life is not an unlimited freedom to create ourselves in any direction. Instead, it's an effort to draw out the better, higher qualities of our given nature, including our nature as men and women. One part of the higher nature of men is to be physically protective toward women. Therefore a "gentleman" would not agree to engage in physically rough contact sports with women.

Of course, it's the liberal view of things which currently holds sway, which is why even a passive resistance on the issue by the two Christian schools has come under attack.

Friday, May 13, 2005

Radically inconsistent

I'd like to hear a liberal explain this one.

In 2003 a pregnant woman was violently attacked in NSW and tragically lost her baby. The attacker couldn't be prosecuted for murder or manslaughter as the unborn child was not considered a "separate entity" from the mother.

In response, as Marcel White reports, the NSW Parliament has recently passed a new law which would make it an offense punishable by up to 25 years jail to kill an unborn child in an attack on a mother.

But where is the consistency in this? When a mother doesn't want to complete a pregnancy, the state will actually pay for an abortion. The state does so many thousands of times a year. Therefore, you would think, the state has determined that there is no moral problem in deliberately killing the unborn.

But when a mother does want to complete a pregnancy, the killing of the unborn child suddenly attracts a penalty usually applied to manslaughter or murder. The unborn child in this case attracts the stern protection of the law.

As Marcel White observes,

In the legal world, it seems like in some situations it's a baby, and in other situations it's a loose conglomeration of cells. All is contingent on whether the mother wishes to have a child.


So what matters, in a liberal society, is what a woman wills. What is "moral" is that which gives her the freedom of individual choice. If this requires the state to fund abortions on the one hand but to prosecute severely those who kill unborn children on the other, then this is what will happen, in spite of the radical inconsistency of the two measures.

Liberals are willing to accept the inconsistency because they don't want to break with their own way of describing the nature and purpose of human existence, namely that we are made fully human, and partake in our humanity, when we create ourselves through our own will and reason.

Placing limits on our will, for a liberal, means denying a part of our humanity. Hence, the idea that the most moral thing must be to allow a woman to choose "in any direction".

The liberal world view, though, is arbitrary. There is no compelling reason why it should be accepted. It makes a lot more sense to define our humanity not in terms of a self-creating will, but in terms of a complex inborn nature acting within a given universe.

Liberals have succeeded in imposing their understanding of things on society in general, and without a challenge to this ideological orthodoxy, it's unlikely that there will be a change of heart, or even a search for consistency, on this issue.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Rethinking the left: Judith Brett

Are we given a political choice in Western democracies? The answer is yes, but only within limits. We do get to choose between a left wing and a right wing political party, but these represent the left and right wings of liberalism.

In other words, we don't get a choice when it comes to political philosophies, as the major political parties are all liberal in their underlying principles. Both the left wing and right wing parties have a common starting point of liberal individualism: the belief that individual autonomy is the highest good, so that the goal of politics is to break down impediments to individual will and reason.

Where left and right liberals differ is their understanding of how best to create the autonomous individual. Right liberals focus on the idea that the economic activity of the individual should be unimpeded. They also tend to believe that a big central government is destructive of individual autonomy.

Left liberals, on the other hand, are willing to regulate economic activity, because they are more focused on social autonomy. They are also more likely to believe that central governments can create the best conditions in which individuals can maximise their individual autonomy.

For the parties to win office they tend to aim at the middle ground, which means that these differences tend to be downplayed in practice. But still, the basic distinction holds that right liberals support the free market and small government, whereas left liberals prefer economic regulation and a larger role for government.

A problem for the left

There are some left liberals who realise that their political approach has been self-defeating. By breaking down social impediments to individual autonomy, they have created a vacuum into which a free market, globalised, commercial culture has been more than willing to step. In other words, their own efforts have been preparing the triumph of their traditional "enemy", the free market right liberals.

The Australian academic Judith Brett is one left liberal who recognises this problem. She has written that:

Those on the left who are critical of the unfettered free play of market forces, but all for the freedoms of cultural transgression, also have to see how their cultural values and activities have enabled the progress of the forces they decry. (The Age 24/10/97)


She goes on to give some examples of how left wing movements have cleared a path for inroads by market forces:

The attack on religion, for example, has contributed to the processes of secularisation which are opening up all of nature and most areas of human life to exploitation by the market.

The commodification of sex and the body which has resulted in part from the liberation movements of the 1960s is an obvious example, as is the loss of any sense that nature is sacred.

Less obvious is the way the emphasis on the rights and freedoms of the self-realising individual undermines the commitments and obligations on which stable family and community life depend.


Transgression

Judith Brett also recognises that both left and right have sought to break down (transgress) those boundaries which limit or constrain individual autonomy, with right liberals focusing on economic constraints.

She uses the artist Andres Serrano as an example of a left liberal transgressor, and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard as a right liberal one. She asks:

What do Andres Serrano and John Howard have in common? They both represent, in different forms, Western civilization's deep intolerance of limits and the belief that the overcoming of limits is the sine qua non of progress...

Serrano's exhibition at the National Gallery was closed after fierce protests from people offended by his depictions of a crucifix in urine. Serrano is part of the last gasp of the Western avant-garde's fascination with the transgression of the codes of respectable bourgeois decency ...

Howard is not excited by cultural transgression ... His intolerance, however, is of limits which constrain economic rather than social or cultural activity.


Brett then makes the point that there is also a contradiction in the politics of right liberals. Right liberals commonly want society to be supported by civil institutions like the family rather than by big government, but their support for the free market often undermines such institutions.

As Brett puts it, one failing of John Howard's right liberalism is the refusal:

to see the ways in which continuous economic change undermines social and cultural stability.

He is quite happy to press for the abolition of penalty rates at the same time as he promotes the values of stable family life; or urge the unemployed to uproot themselves ... as he bemoans the breakdown of community values


Alternatives

In thinking through the reasons for the triumph of right liberalism, Judith Brett has made some clear sighted criticisms of both the right and the left.

The question remains, though, of what the alternative to traditional right and left liberalism should be.

This is the point at which conservatives should be pressing to become a real alternative to both kinds of liberalism. Because individual autonomy is not a starting point for conservatives, we are in a much better position to defend the culture, traditions and institutions with which most people in a society naturally identify and feel connected to.

There is no contradiction in conservative philosophy to prevent us from effectively defending a stable family life, an inherited national tradition, or a settled moral code.

Depending on liberals to think through the limitations of their own philosophy is not a good strategy; we need to put forward conservatism as a clear alternative to both the left and right forms of liberalism.

(First published at Conservative Central 01/02/2004)

Thursday, May 05, 2005

All brutes and barbarians?

Late last year I chose for the inaugural Biased History Award a school textbook which described the crusaders as follows:

They were all fanatics. Crusaders were fundamental extremists - mad warriors who were intent on causing havoc for whatever they believed. They were virtually religious terrorists.


This year's leading contender for the award has chosen the same theme. Film director Ridley Scott has made a $150 million feature about the crusades called Kingdom of Heaven. The New York Times pithily described the plot of the film this way:

Muslims are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything.


According to an excellent review by Robert Spencer, the film invents a group called the "Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians" whose multicultural solidarity is only ruined by the activities of the Knights Templar.

This is too much even for academic historians. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith called the movie "rubbish", "not historically accurate at all", "nothing to do with reality" and "utter nonsense". He complained about the bias of a plot which depicts "the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised" in contrast to the Crusaders who "are all brutes and barbarians".

But to really get a grasp of how false the film is I suggest you read a short article called "The Real History of the Crusades" by Professor Thomas Madden of St Louis University. Professor Madden reminds us in this article of the reality of the situation which gave rise to the crusades:

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered.

When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

War hero too blokey?

The Australian Government has set up a body to examine which values should be taught in Australian schools. My first thought was that the "values" promoted would be the familiar liberal ones of tolerance, diversity and respect: values which are really more about "non-interference" rather than a positive ideal of behaviour and character.

I was pleasantly surprised therefore when the list of values finally appeared. Although tolerance, respect and inclusion are three of the values, so are integrity, honesty, trustworthiness and responsibility. The list, in other words, goes a little bit beyond mere "non-interference" and includes some values that are genuinely important to character.

But all is not well. A row has erupted over the design selected to accompany the "values" publications. It is an image of the Australian war hero John Simpson Kirkpatrick. Simpson was a stretcher bearer at Gallipoli and he risked his life many times rescuing wounded soldiers under heavy fire before finally being killed.

Andrew Blair, who represents school principals on the values advisory body, has complained that the image is "very blokey" and he has asked "why would you go in with an image that is grounded in ... heroism in conflict, and not about tolerance, trust - all of the issues that are embedded in the program?"

The liberal orthodoxy bites back! For Andrew Blair it is the old liberal faithfuls of "tolerance" and "trust" which are the "issues" embedded in the programme. Poor old Simpson is just too heroic and too masculine a figure to represent these modern liberal "values".

Conclusions? First, notice how restrictive liberalism really is, despite all its talk about individual choice and personal freedom. It struggles to permit anything beyond the passive value of non-interference, which is re-badged in various ways as tolerance, trust, respect etc. It struggles even to accept the masculinity and heroism of a man who was a humble member of the Field Ambulance and who gave his life to help save his mates. How limiting is this to our ideals of human conduct and human nature! It ends up making us very small.

Second, if Andrew Blair really is representative of secondary school principals, it's highly unlikely that Australian schools will ever attempt to develop a positive masculine character in boys. This is a role, it seems, that fathers are going to have to undertake themselves.

Monday, May 02, 2005

Swedish PM proud of very high ....

At a May Day rally the Swedish PM, Goran Persson, praised the "Swedish model" with the comment,

Swedes are equal, safe, environmentally conscious, and, I can add, pay very high taxes. All of the economists I've talked to through the years have said "This won't work." But it does. We've had better economic development in the past ten years than any other country in the European Union.


If an Australian PM were to admit to going against the advice of economists to proudly enact "very high taxes" he would go down in a landslide at the next election.

The Swedish political class, though, seems very determined to remain at the forefront of left-liberalism. Unlike right-liberals, who think that the free market is the best way to regulate competing wills, mainstream left-liberals (social democrats) believe that the state can do the job in a more equitable way.

That's why left-liberals can view a big, high-taxing state as a positive achievement, rather than as a destructive intrusion.

And what of Mr Persson's claim that the high-taxing Swedish model is economically successful? There are reasons to be sceptical. In 1970 Sweden had the fourth highest per capita income in the OECD. By 1998 the Swedish income level had fallen to a tied 18th position.

This decline prompted Swedish governments to make reforms which cut back some of the extremes of the Swedish model. For instance, in 1991 the corporate tax rate was cut in half to a relatively low 28%. There has also been an effort to lower public expenditure as a share of GDP, with the rate falling from a massive 67.3 percent in 1994, to about 54% in 2001.

So, if the Swedish economy has been performing relatively well in recent years (and I don't know whether it has or not) it might be just as easily attributed to a cutting back of the Swedish model than as a vindication of high rates of taxation.

(Note that conservatives don't see society as a collection of competing wills and so don't need to find a regulator of such wills in either the state or the free market. For us, the point is to defend the natural ties existing between people, including those of the family and the traditional nation. Where either the state or the free market undermines such ties we are willing to oppose or to seek to modify the operation of either.)

Saturday, April 23, 2005

White Gold

When most people think of slavery they probably have an image of a white slave owner and a black slave. This is the picture of slavery we have been given through countless books, films and TV shows.

It's an image which fits in well with left-wing theories that white men have established a dominant power structure which oppresses other races, and that therefore white society is morally illegitimate and must be deconstructed.

Up to now, the main argument against such a left-wing view has been that it was actually white men who ended the slave trade. This is a good and effective argument, but it now appears that much more ought to have been said against the left-wing view.

Last year, Professor Robert C. Davis wrote a book which revealed that more than a million Europeans had been enslaved in Muslim North Africa over a period of three centuries.

And now Giles Milton has written a work of popular history on the same theme, entitled White Gold. Milton writes for the mass market, and his works are likely to be stocked by your local bookshop. So a hidden part of European history has now been well and truly revealed.

What's even better is that White Gold is an exceptionally well-written book. It follows the extraordinary story of one European slave, Thomas Pellow, whilst also giving the broader history of the trade in European slaves in North Africa.

Many of the European slaves were captured at sea by pirates, although there were also raids on coastal villages. For instance, in 1625 a corsair fleet attacked the coast of Cornwall. The pirates captured 60 villagers at Mount's Bay and 80 at the fishing village of Looe which they then torched. A second corsair fleet then captured Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel as a base and raised the standard of Islam. By the end of 1625 the two pirate fleets had captured about 1000 Englishmen for the slave market.

Many slaves were taken to the port of Sale on the coast of Morocco. There they were crowded into unhygienic underground pens before being sold. The slaves were shackled with heavy leg irons and many were employed by the sultan to perform hard labour on his grandiose palace building project.

Some slaves were allowed to remain Christian but many others were forced, often with the use of torture, to convert to Islam. A combination of meagre rations, hard labour and unhygienic conditions meant that the mortality rate was very high.

The European slaves were on the bottom rung of the hierarchy in the North African system. The Muslim slave owners were served by loyal black slaves who acted as bodyguards, personal attendants and palace troops and were also overseers of the European slaves. There are many accounts of beatings and executions by the black African overseers of the European slaves.

European slavery in North Africa only ceased in 1816 - nine years after the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. Even then it was only stopped by force of arms when Sir Edward Pellew led a British and Dutch fleet to Algiers and bombarded the city into submission.

This is, of course, only the most cursory description of the facts of European slavery in North Africa. To get a truer grasp of the extent and nature of this slavery you would have to read a book like White Gold.

Even so, it should be enough to show just how false the left-wing theory of a dominant power structure established by whites to oppress other races is. The left-wing theory has relied for effect on a "filtering" of history in which only those cases in which Europeans were dominant are emphasised.

So we hear a lot about slavery in North America because that's an instance where Europeans were generally in charge. The slavery in North Africa has been, in contrast, almost hidden away up to now, as it shows Europeans not in their ideologically assigned role as oppressors but very much as the oppressed.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

A less destructive humanity

This is from a report on American soldiers wounded in Iraq:

Oreskovic is very articulate and very up on the war mission: “The enemy just want to kill us, they’ll kill your wives, your children, they just want to kill us, not for anything we’ve done, but for what we are, that we give people the choice to decide how to live, and that’s what makes us human, and the enemy wants to take that away from us”.


Corporal Oreskovic is justifying the war on liberal grounds. It is liberals who believe that we are made human by our capacity to choose who we are and what we do through our own will and reason.

Note the radical consequences of this principle. If our very humanity depends on “the choice to decide how to live” then anything which impedes or limits this choice immediately loses its legitimacy. You can’t accept things which take away a person’s humanity.

Yet there are a lot of very important things which do impede our “choice to decide how to live”. Here are just a few:

1) Gender. There used to be an ideal of masculinity and femininity for individuals to live up to. But we didn’t get to choose which one to follow. It depended on an accident of birth of being born male or female. Therefore, for liberals it is more truly human if we act against gender norms, as this shows that we are deciding for ourselves how to live, rather than accepting what liberals call a “biological destiny”.

2) Traditional nationalism. Nationalism used to be based on a shared ethnicity. We were united to our conationals by a common ancestry, culture, language, religion, history and so on. But membership of an ethnic tradition is not something we get to choose for ourselves, but is something we inherit. So again, a liberal will think it more truly human to commit to the ethnic “other” as this is asserting our own choice.

3) Family. The idea that there is one basic type of family, and that our commitments to family need to be stable, will appear to liberals to impede our “choice to decide how to live”. There is more choice if we accept a “diversity” of family types and if we are easily able to break our family commitments.

4) Morality. The idea that there is an “objective” morality (that some things are inherently right or wrong) won’t appeal to liberals as this limits our own “choice to decide how to live”. Thus the liberal morality which says everything is OK as long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others.

It is, in fact, very difficult to assert any positive standards or ideals if our humanity depends on a purely personal choice to decide how to live.

We need therefore to challenge the basic liberal principle. To do this doesn’t require us to reject the idea of individual choice. Conservatives have no problem with individuals having a wide sphere of personal choice.

It’s important, though, that we reject the idea that it is a choice of who we are and how we live which makes us human. So what does make us human? One answer might be that God has invested us with a soul which gives us our special status as humans. Or the answer might be that there is a complex totality of a human nature, which includes our capacity for emotion and feeling and instinct as much as our capacity for rational choice.

In any event, we need to challenge the destructive liberal idea of what makes us human – an idea which is usually asserted arbitrarily without any stated justification.

Addendum: This is an important point, so let me try to clarify it. If all that liberals said was that "the choice to decide how to live" is a good thing, then the problems facing the west would be less profound. It would be possible to take this kind of individual choice as a "good" as well as accepting the existence of many other kinds of "goods" and to find a balance between them.

However, once liberals say that "the choice to decide how to live" is what actually makes us human, we are left with just one superior organising principle, which cannot be limited or restrained as this would deny our own humanity. Politics then becomes morally charged with removing any impediments to an individual freedom to choose how to live, even though this destroys many goods which might have enriched individual life and made human life more meaningful.

The tragic thing is that there is no compelling reason why we should ever have accepted the liberal view of what makes us human. It's a coarse and simplistic view, with no compelling logical justification.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Having it both ways

Lindsay Tanner, the Labor MP for Melbourne, has an article in today's Herald Sun on immigration.

It's an odd piece. He begins by reporting that a Sydneysider emailed him complaining about immigration. Tanner's response was to tell this man that he was a lone voice and that "very few people" had complaints about immigration.

Yet, if Tanner had turned back a page in today's Herald Sun, he would have seen the results of a readers' survey asking whether Victoria should try to lure more migrants. Out of 1500 respondents, only 47 answered yes. The vast majority, 1453, answered no to more migration.

But Tanner changes tack anyway. When talking about asylum seekers, Tanner suddenly reverses his earlier view and talks of the "manipulation" of "a lot of deep-seated anti-immigration opinion." He writes that the detention of asylum seekers is "continuing testimony to the strength of that [anti-immigration] sentiment."

So Tanner is willing to use any argument to justify his support for high immigration. If it suits his purposes he will claim that no one has complaints about immigration, so that anyone raising objections should be ignored. But, when it suits his argument better, he warns of a strong anti-immigration sentiment amongst the general public that might be cynically manipulated by politicians.

I think what this shows is that you have to distinguish between primary and secondary arguments. Primary arguments are what really convince someone to take a particular stance on an issue. Secondary arguments are then brought in as persuasive tools to try to convince others to support you.

It's little use trying to understand or persuade someone like Lindsay Tanner on the basis of secondary arguments. As we've seen, it doesn't matter to Tanner if immigration has mass support or mass opposition - he will try to use either circumstance in support of his underlying position.

So what actually does make someone like Tanner support high immigration? What are the primary arguments that have led him to adopt this position?

The answer, I think, is that Tanner is a liberal in his political principles. Liberals believe, as a first principle, that we should be self-created by our own will and reason.

Adopting this principle makes it difficult to legitimately defend our own ethnic identity and ethnic tradition. After all, we don't get to choose such a tradition through our own will and reason, we simply inherit it.

That's why there's such a gulf between the liberal political class and the rank and file. For the rank and file, who don't hold to liberal political principles, it's natural and normal to identify with and to want to preserve your own ethnic tradition.

But for a member of the liberal political class, such traditions violate first principles, and must be overcome through the creation of "diversity".

There's a couple of important conclusions to be drawn from this. First, our aim has to be to persuade a section of the political class to break from liberalism. We can do this by pointing out how arbitrary liberal first principles are, and what negative consequences they have.

Second, we have to be patient and persevering in doing this. At the moment, liberalism is a well-entrenched orthodoxy in the political class, shared by the Liberal Party, the Labor Party, by business and union leaders and by most academics.

So we can't look to any official institutions of society to do the job for us. It's up to us to keep building an opposition to the pervasive liberalism which makes possible the radical transformation of Western societies.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Rethinking the left: Paul Kingsnorth

Generally speaking there are two kinds of liberals. Both kinds believe that people need to be "liberated" from whatever impedes their individual will and reason.

Right liberals, though, have a special focus on economic activity. They see the individual more as an economic unit and stress the removal of restrictions on labour and capital.

Left liberals prefer to focus on social activity. They typically emphasise the "liberation" of the individual from unchosen forms of national identity, family life, sexuality, gender etc. They are more supportive of the idea of state planning over the economy and society than right liberals.

Usually, most of the political debate in the West is between right and left liberals. Even though they share a common philosophical starting point they still often see each other passionately as the enemy.

Paul Kingsnorth is a young British writer. He is a left-liberal, though more opposed to the role of the state than most on the left. He has written a column for the Melbourne Age (The Citizens of Nowhere 20/9/03) which is interesting in the way it goes beyond the usual distinction between left and right liberalism.

In part the column follows the usual pattern. Kingsnorth, as you would expect of a left liberal, hammers the enemy (right liberals) for their focus on the individual as an economic unit.

Kingsnorth chooses, for instance, to criticise Bill Emmott, editor of The Economist, by claiming that Emmott's version of progress is "posited on turning everyone on earth into a wap-wielding, choice-chasing consumer, drifting through a global pleasure garden in which each place is much like every other and everything is for sale".

It's usually difficult for a conservative to remain patient with these kind of left liberal attacks on right liberalism. It's not because conservatives can't see some truth in the claims. Conservatives don't want a society based on a shallow consumerism any more than left liberals.

The problem is that left liberals usually remain blind to the way that they themselves have prepared the way for a consumeristic, materialistic, globalised culture. After all, it is the left who have led the charge to break down alternative standards of culture based on national traditions, a stable family life, accepted standards of morality and so on.

Having "deconstructed" such traditions, it seems a bit naive for the left to then complain when the gap is filled by a shallow commercial culture.

Kingsnorth, though, is different. He is willing to admit that the left has contributed to the rise of a globalised, commercial culture. He says of the supporters of globlisation that:

it is not just The Economist reading right who swell their ranks ... While the neo-liberal [ie right liberal] citizens of nowhere celebrate the birth of a global market ... another group, the liberal [ie left liberal] citizens of nowhere help them along...


Nor does Kingsnorth see this as being only a recent phenomenon. He notes that:

For longer than a century, sections of the idealistic left have dreamt of a world made up ... of "global citizens" casting off the chains of geography and nationality


Kingsnorth gives the particular example of the left-wing novelist H.G. Wells who in 1933 encouraged "modern-minded people" to reject traditional governments and to "make over the world into a great world civilisation."

Kingsnorth is to be congratulated, therefore, on his clear-sighted recognition that left-liberals, in wanting to be "unrestrained" by national traditions, have helped pave the way for right-liberal economic globalisers.

Which leaves one final question. How does Kingsnorth choose to oppose the globalism of both left and right liberals? Remarkably, Kingsnorth takes a conservative approach. He views the attempt to break down traditional forms of connectedness in order to create an unrestrained, unimpeded individual as creating not true liberty, but an unhappy rootlessness and alienation.

This is implied, firstly, in his description of the new global class:

Rootless, technocratic, unburdened by the baggage of locality or the complications of history, they exist in every nation but feel attached to none.


It is more explicit in the following comments:

It has long been a touchstone of "progress" that place, and attachment to it, is an anachronism ... Barriers are broken down by the mass media, technology and trade laws. Rootless, we gain freedom, placeless, we belong everywhere. Yet placelessness and rootlessness create not contentment but despair...

The rising tide of this global progress, we are told, will lift all boats. The trouble is that some of our boats are anchored; anchored by place, tradition, identity, a sense of belonging...

...the citizens of nowhere ultimately inhabit an empty world ... Disconnected from reality, they can make decisions that destroy real places, to which people are connected, at the stroke of a pen.

The rest of us can join the citizens of nowhere in their empire of the placeless, or we can build new relationships with our own landscapes and our own communities. We can build on our pasts or dismiss them ...


As you might guess, Kingsnorth, coming as he does from the left, is not very reliable in his conservatism. I took the trouble to read a book he has recently published called One No, Many Yeses. It was disappointingly orthodox in its left-liberalism (or more exactly left-libertarianism).

Still, I think he's to be congratulated for the approach taken in the newspaper article. He has thought his way through to a more consistent opposition to globalisation than most left-wing writers.

(First published at Conservative Central 26/01/2004)

Do women need protecting?

When I was in my mid-20s and looking for Miss Right I observed a troubling phenomenon. Many women seemed to be rejecting the kind of men they could have serious relationships with. It was as if you would be rewarded as a man if you showed yourself to be an addict, or a player: you had to find some way to prove that you were ineligible for a long term relationship.

It's the kind of observation you can never be sure about and which you usually keep to yourself. Still, I've seen evidence at times that tends to confirm what I thought the situation to be. The most recent proof comes from the pen of Sarah Wilson, a journalist for the Melbourne Herald Sun. In an article (18/1/04) about modern relationships she confesses that,

For the greater part of my mid-20s my love life consisted of a gnarly string of dalliances with inappropriate men.

This was no stroke of bad luck; I would handpick them according to their dysfunctionality...

Every one of them epitomised what I was not after in a relationship. Which meant that I would never fall for them and get hurt.


Sarah Wilson admits though that her strategy of avoiding hurt didn't work,

If I were to be honest with myself, I'd say the "not quite relationship" is impossible to pull off once you hit your 20s ... when it ends, being dumped, is being dumped.

It's also impossible to invest energy─emotionally or sexually─in a bloke and not give part of yourself ... [it] always ends in tears.


It doesn't really surprise me that Sarah Wilson chose inappropriate men as boyfriends to try to cushion the blow of relationship breakups. The romantic aspirations that young women nurse seem to be especially vulnerable to disappointment or betrayal.

There is some confirmation of this in a recent British study on relationships and mental health. The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health concluded that "Enduring first partnerships were associated with good mental health ... partnership splits were associated with poorer mental health ... Women seemed more adversely affected by multiple partnership transitions and to take longer to recover from partnership splits than men."

Looking back

Perhaps what has happened in recent years helps to explain why things were arranged differently in earlier times.

We've seen above how modern girl Sarah Wilson, having become used to falling for men and then getting hurt, responded defensively by dating only the most dysfunctional men she thought she could never fall for.

In the nineteenth century there was some attempt to protect young women from casual relationships. One positive result of this is that the Sarah Wilson's of that era did not have to protect themselves emotionally by consorting with inappropriate men.

In fact, the rewards went to functional men. There was even a saying in the nineteenth century that "Beauty in a wife is a reward for goodness in a husband". There was, in other words, an encouragement for men to follow their better instincts.

Today

Could we be more protective of young women in our own times? The main problem in doing so is that it goes against basic liberal principles.

Liberals want people to be self-created by their individual reason and will. This means that for a liberal it is important that people be unimpeded to act as they desire. It also means that liberals don't like to recognise the influence of gender on men and women.

Therefore, it's difficult in a society dominated by liberalism to argue for a policy based on the specific nature of women and which implies that there needs to be some limitation on, or direction to, individual behaviour.

Even so, it's important for both men and women that we do become more protective of young women. Although the romantic instinct in men and women is natural and strong, it won't survive everything.

It is a warning sign when women start to deliberately choose dysfunctional men as boyfriends that the romantic instincts of women are under excessive stress.

We should be concerned to protect young women so that they can sustain their romantic feelings to an age at which they are settling into lasting relationships with men.

(First published at Conservative Central 19/01/2004)

Saturday, April 09, 2005

What's unbelievable in Spanish?

Oh boy! Now it's the turn of the Spanish. A new law in Spain will make sharing housework part of the marriage contract for men.

To be honest, I don't know if this will change much in practice, but it shows the fanaticism of the political class in their efforts to wipe out traditional gender roles.

Imagine the romance of a Spanish wedding! What a day of political fulfilment! The sheer feminist joy of promising to be a good boy and to uphold the feminist credo.

Compulsory feminism in Norway

How do you like this. Laila Daavoey, who is the Norwegian Children and Family Affairs Minister (of all things!) has announced that Norway will simply shut down companies which don't recruit at least 40% of women to their boards.

Typical of left-liberals to use state enforced quotas. Right-liberals would have been more subtle.

Why the insistence that company boards have more women? Liberals think that individuals should be self-created. It's the first principle of their religion. Therefore, they hate the idea that gender might influence the course of our lives, as this is something we don't get to choose.

So when liberals see more men on company boards, they refuse to consider the idea that men, via their masculine drives, might be there because of a greater motivation, interest and commitment. Instead, they assume that men are there because of some artificially imposed inequality, which it is the government's duty to overcome.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Sweden, a new feminist party has been established. However, one of its founders, Susanne Linde, has been questioned for taking advantage of Sweden's remarkably lax welfare system. For the past five years, Mrs Linde has been claiming sickness benefit for being "burnt out". This benefit actually increased her income by over one third, from 200,000 to 330,000 kronor.

When asked whether she thought it right to gain such an advantage from welfare, Mrs Linde claimed to be unaware of her personal finances, which she left to her husband to handle, including the tax returns. Some feminist! I wonder if she is the kind of feminist quota material soon to be imported onto Norwegian company boards.

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Are there limits?

I found the following letter in this month's Melbourne's Child magazine. In it, a mother eloquently describes the effect of fatherlessness on her three-year-old daughter. She writes,

Last night as she sobbed due to fatigue and other issues I can only guess at, she cried for her father. She told me she missed him and accused me of forgetting to ring him ... Just before throwing herself into my arms, she tearfully declared that she just wanted a daddy.

As you can imagine, the burden of your child's confusion and pain is intolerable. Although I try to dilute it through honest communication, plenty of physical and emotional love, tough love where it is required, and contact with as many other loving role models as possible, it does not compensate for the loss of a bond that was criticial to her.

Everyone says she will survive due to my efforts and her character. Why should she have to survive? Her God-given right to a father who chose to have her was something she should have taken for granted.

My ex-husband lives interstate, which means she sees him at most every eight weeks. He left his first wife when his son was three years old. He left me when our daughter was two and I was five weeks pregnant ... his new partner [is] about to give birth to his son.

My feelings in all this are mostly irrelevant. I am an adult and I will move on. What concerns me is the lack of any mechanism in our community to control this sort of behaviour. Surely we must be accountable for the children who are brought into the world and then abandoned due to a self-serving quest for greater happiness and satisfaction.

No-one expects families to stay together in abusive situations, but in all other cases, surely it is incumbent on those who stood in front of witnesses and swore to love each other in sickness and health ... to exhaust every avenue to protect the family unit ...

I hear the outraged cries from the civil libertarians and the exponents of freedom to make choices and follow our hearts, but what about the hearts of our children? I am tired of watching my child's heart breaking due to a narcissist who continues with impunity to disrupt the lives of children and is unlikely to stop.


What is especially impressive about the letter is that it clearly identifies one of the main reasons for high rates of divorce in the West: the (liberal) idea that the highest value in life is an individual freedom to choose.

If unimpeded individual choice overrides all other values, then the decision to choose divorce can be seen as an act of freedom or liberation.

But, as the mother points out in her letter, perhaps it's not enough to focus only on individual choice. Isn't keeping our promises an important value in its own right? Isn't our parental responsibility to our own children an important value?

It seems to me that the idea of individual freedom of choice as an overriding moral value is hopelessly misconceived and that, if anything, morality means setting limits to what we can and cannot rightly choose.