Doris Lessing, feminism, secular religion

Doris Lessing was a celebrated novelist, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.

She was born to English parents and grew up in Rhodesia in the 1920s. She moved back to England in the 1930s, got married, had children and then divorced in 1943, leaving the children with their father.

She became part of the great shift of Western intellectuals toward communism at this time, although she left the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Later in life she became interested in Sufism.

I found an interview with Lessing in the New York Times from 1982 that raises some interesting themes.

The interview begins with Lessing distancing herself from feminism:

The idea that she has abandoned feminist concerns particularly irks her, since she never wrote from a consciously feminist point of view but was adopted by feminists in search of a heroine: ''What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.''

There are three themes here. First, Lessing identifies feminism as being hostile to men and as setting men and women apart from each other. I think that's worth noting as you sometimes hear the argument that feminism was somehow friendlier in the past than it is today. That is not how Lessing experienced it, despite being supportive of leftist causes herself.

Second, there is the utopianism of the radical left, the idea that human nature can be acted on, perhaps through education, or the dismantling of oppressive social norms or institutions etc., to create an ideal society  - a "golden dawn" in which an ideal of freedom and equality will be realised. This helps to explain the first theme - the hostility to men expressed by feminists. If it is men, acting through the patriarchy, that are the brake on achieving utopia, then men become the enemy of humanity and the villains holding back the realisation of humanity's ultimate purposes. Little wonder, given this world view, that feminists would be so hostile to the opposite sex.

Third, there is the idea that leftism is, to some degree, a kind of secularised religion. Lessing goes on to draw out this point:

''There are certain types of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason,'' she says, digging dirt ferociously out of the kitchen table. ''I think it's fairly common among socialists: They are, in fact, God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth. A lot of religious reformers have been like that, too. It's the same psychological set, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future - always taking it for granted that there is a better future. If you don't believe in heaven, then you believe in socialism.

''When I was in my real Communist phase, I and the people around me really believed - but, of course, this makes us certifiable - that something like 10 years after World War II, the world would be Communist and perfect.''

''I was once an idealistic and utopian Communist,'' she said, ''and no, I am not proud of it. The real politicos are a very different animal, and I'm angry that I didn't notice that very evident fact.

I think it's worth pointing out here that the alternative to being a utopian socialist is not to be unconcerned with "the city of man". It is to recognise that human nature is flawed, and therefore social institutions and norms have an important role in limiting the ill effects of the baser aspects of our nature (as well as fostering the nobler ones). You do not make progress in society by abolishing all restraints on human nature; the task is a more complicated one of making some sort of good order out of the biological, social and spiritual nature of man, a task that draws more on the steady accumulation of wisdom, the making of culture, and the fostering of virtue than on simplistic political formulas.

Liberalism, secular religion, vulnerability

There is a terrific review of a new book on liberalism over at First Things. The book is by a Polish philosopher named Ryszard Legutko, who was a dissident under the communist government and who believes that communism and liberalism share a similar secular religious framework.

The review, by Adrian Vermeule, is difficult to improve on, so I will limit myself to some commentary on one of the key points raised and then encourage you to go and read the whole thing yourselves.

What I found most interesting was the discussion of some contradictions within liberalism. For instance, liberalism emphasises both a materialist determinism (i.e. everything we do is predetermined by forces of history, genetics etc.) and a belief in the radically autonomous individual, including the idea that individuals, absent certain social conditions, will use this autonomous freedom to choose the good. How can you have a radically self-determining individual if you believe that everything is materially predetermined? One part of liberal philosophy insists that the individual is radically predetermined, the other that he only has dignity if he is radically self-determined.

The most interesting contradiction discussed, and one that is complained about all the time in alt-right discussions on social media, is why liberals seem uninterested in seriously illiberal policies in places like Saudi Arabia but come down heavily on mildly illiberal policies in places like Hungary. I think the answer given by Legutko, as summarised by Vermeule, is very interesting:

Why do Western liberal academics and EU technocrats object so stridently to the mild illiberalism of the Fidesz parliamentary party in Hungary, while saying little or nothing about Saudi Arabia and other monarchical or authoritarian nations, nominal allies of the West, who routinely control, punish, and dominate women, gays, and religious dissenters? Why are the EU technocrats, whose forte is supposed to be competence, so very bumbling, making policy mistake after policy mistake? How is it possible that while the sitting president of the United States squarely opposed same-sex marriage just a few years ago, the liberal intellectuals who supported him passionately also condemn any opposition to same-sex marriage as bigotry, rooted in cultural backwardness? Why was the triumph of same-sex marriage followed so rapidly by the opening of a new regulatory and juridical frontier, the recognition of transgender identity?

Legutko helps us understand these oddities. We have to start by understanding that liberalism has a sacramental character. “The liberal-democratic mind, just as the mind of any true communist, feels an inner compulsion to manifest its pious loyalty to the doctrine. Public life is full of mandatory rituals in which every politician, artist, writer, celebrity, teacher or any public figure is willing to participate, all to prove that their liberal-democratic creed springs spontaneously from the depths of their hearts.” The basic liturgy of liberalism is the Festival of Reason, which in 1793 placed a Goddess of Reason (who may or may not have been a prostitute conscripted for the occasion, in one of the mocking double entendres of Providence) on the holy altar in the Church of Our Lady in Paris. The more the Enlightenment rejects the sacramental, the more compulsively it re-enacts its founding Festival, the dawning of rationality.

Light is defined by contrast, however, so the Festival requires that the children of light spy out and crush the forces of darkness, who appear in ever-changing guises, before the celebration can be renewed. The essential components of the Festival are twofold: the irreversibility of Progress and the victory over the Enemy, the forces of reaction. Taken in combination, these commitments give liberalism its restless and aggressive dynamism, and help to make sense of the anomalies. Fidesz in Hungary is more threatening than the Saudi monarchy, even though the latter is far less liberal, because Fidesz represents a retrogression—a deliberate rejection of liberalism by a nation that was previously a member in good standing of the liberal order. The Hungarians, and for that matter the Poles, are apostates, unlike the benighted Saudis, who are simple heretics. What is absolutely essential is that the clock of Progress should never be turned back. The problem is not just that it might become a precedent and encourage reactionaries on other fronts. The deeper issue is that it would deny the fundamental eschatology of liberalism, in which the movement of History may only go in one direction. It follows that Brexit must be delayed or defeated at all costs, through litigation or the action of an unelected House of Lords if necessary, and that the Trump administration must be cast as a temporary anomaly, brought to power by voters whose minds were clouded by racism and economic pain. (It is therefore impossible to acknowledge that such voters might have legitimate cultural grievances or even philosophical objections to liberalism.)

The puzzle of the EU technocrats, on this account, is no puzzle at all. They are so error-prone, even from a technocratic point of view, at least in part because they are actually engaged in a non-technocratic enterprise that is pervasively ideological, in the same way that Soviet science was ideological. Their prime directive is to protect and expand the domain of liberalism, whether or not that makes for technical efficiency.

Liberalism needs an enemy to maintain its sacramental dynamism. It can never rest in calm waters, basking in the day of victory; it is essential that at any given moment there should be a new battle to be fought. The good liberal should always be able to say, “We have made progress, but there is still much to do.” This is why the triumph of same-sex marriage actually happened too suddenly and too completely. Something else was needed to animate liberalism, and transgenderism has quickly filled the gap, defining new forces of reaction and thus enabling new iterations and celebrations of the Festival. And if endorsement and approval of self-described “gender identity” becomes a widely shared legal and social norm, a new frontier will be opened, and some new issue will move to the top of the public agenda, something that now seems utterly outlandish and is guaranteed to provoke fresh opposition from the cruel forces of reaction—polygamy, perhaps, or mandatory vegetarianism.

If this is true, then it gives liberalism both a strength and a weakness. The strength is that people hold to liberal beliefs like a religion, and therefore as a source of meaning that is difficult to step away from. The weakness is that the force of the religious belief depends on an "eschatology" in which there is always a progress toward an ever more radical application of liberalism in society. Therefore, once liberalism is forced back it is vulnerable to collapse. In other words, if liberalism is seen to be obviously stopped, and some aspect of traditionalism restored, it is likely to trigger a psychological demoralisation amongst liberalism's adherents.

Liberalism needs opposition, it needs a force of reaction to battle against, but it needs to always win.

So we must not be content with being "house traditionalists" who exist merely to play a role within "the liturgy of liberalism." We need to be serious about building to the point that we are obviously regaining ground. At that point, liberals become vulnerable to psychological confusion and demoralisation. There may not be great depths of resistance once they lose a sense of inevitable progress.

What does a liberal think unites us?

I like Theo Hobson for one reason only. He is a liberal who says what is usually left unsaid.

Some background info on Theo: he is an Englishman who writes a column on religion for the left-liberal Guardian newspaper. It's not surprising that he got the job. He has the vaguest kind of allegiance to the Anglican Church, but at the same time strongly supports the secular liberal order in the UK.

In a recent column, Theo imagined Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats leader, giving the following speech:

In the past decade, religion and secularism have been coming into conflict in a new way. On one side, some religious groups feel hard done by, as if their rights are denied by the secular state. And on the other side, many secularists feel that faith communities are given too much leeway.

There's a conflict between the churches feeling they are losing their rights to follow their beliefs in a public setting and secularists who think the churches are given too many exceptions to liberal principles. How does Theo want Clegg to answer the conundrum? The imagined Clegg speech continues:

I think that the Labour government has got the balance wrong: it has been over-respectful of the claims of religious institutions, and has allowed the principle of secular liberalism to get rather lost.

Well, that's a clear answer. The churches lose out. Why? Because the ruling ideology of the UK is liberalism. Clegg is imagined continuing his speech as follows:

many of us in the party, myself included, feel that the whole idea of an official national church is outdated. We as a nation are bound together not by Anglicanism, or any other form of religion, but by liberal values. Maybe it's time to be honest about that – even if it means a process of constitutional change.

Now of course our change of emphasis will be accused of being anti-religious, as if we want religious believers to be persecuted by the secular state. But this is wrong. All we seek is a reassertion of liberalism as the nation's common ideology.

Isn't that just swell. According to a liberal like Theo, the one thing that is allowed to unite the residents of the UK is liberal ideology. That must make the 5% of the country committed to liberal ideology feel just great.

Theo goes on to describe the UK as a "liberal nation" and in another column he writes:

We need to clarify our national story. Liberalism is what unites us, and this must be made explicit. It is, in effect, our national creed...

We need a revolution that makes our latent national identity explicit. What unites us is not Anglicanism, or any form of Christianity; it is liberalism. That does not make us anti-religious, but it does make us suspicious of any form of religion that is at odds with liberalism.

We need to get a bit fundamentalist about the superiority of liberalism.

So religion is OK if it is not "at odds" with liberalism, liberalism being held to be the superior creed. Of course, any serious kind of religion will inevitably find itself at odds with liberalism, since modern liberalism holds that the source of morality is in the self and its desires and that the highest aim of man and society is to achieve an equal measure of individual autonomy.

(Nor is a political ideology like liberalism much of a basis for national unity. First, it's non-distinct. Liberalism is the orthodoxy in all the Western countries. So someone who is a liberal in England is not distinct in his identity from a Canadian, a Swede or a New Zealander. Second, it requires a level of group think that more traditional national identities don't require. Third, it's shallow, as it doesn't connect people as deeply as kinship, history, culture, language and religion. Fourth, the trajectory of liberalism is toward internationalism and open borders, making it even less suitable as a vehicle for maintaining a national entity.)

Once Theo has pronounced liberalism to be the superior creed, much else follows. For instance, Professor Robert Trigg has written a report which complains that when there is a clash between freedom of religion and other human rights, the freedom of religion is usually held to be secondary and sacrificed. Theo replies:

Trigg has a point: why should one human right trump another? If the right to religious freedom is real, then why should it have to bow to some other right as a matter of course? ... He is right that the current orthodoxy is to limit the right to religious expression: it must not interfere with other rights, so it is only fully operative in the private sphere.

What Trigg's argument proves is that, when it comes to pondering the place of religion in society, the language of rights is a mistake. There is no such thing as "human rights" in relation to religion. Some may say that there is no such thing as human rights at all, but the concept is generally benign: for example talk of the human right not to be tortured motivates opposition to the practice. In relation to religion, by contrast, the concept of human rights is simply not helpful...

... religious liberty is the creation of the liberal state, and it's a non-absolute condition: religious forms that are deemed reactionary, or illiberal, will necessarily be curbed. The classic example is the proscription of Roman Catholicism in early modern England. Was this illiberal, a denial of the Catholics' rights? Sort of, but to say so gets things the wrong way round. The old illiberal form of religion had to be banned, for relative liberty to be allowed to grow...

Does this mean that the liberal state has the right to curb whatever forms of religious expression it wants? Quite simply, yes. It must protect the new space it has created, of relative religious freedom, from reactionary religion. It must decide what is tolerable and what is not – we must trust our elected representatives to draw these ever-shifting lines.

Some interesting admissions here. Theo doesn't really believe in the notion of human rights, though he supports the concept when it serves the liberal cause. He states bluntly that there are no human rights when it comes to religion.

As there are no rights when it comes to religion, other secular rights are to rule in society. Religion is to vacate the public square.

Catholicism is held by Theo to be an illiberal religious form.

The liberal state, according to Theo, has the right to curb whatever form of religious expression it wants. We are supposed to trust our elected representatives to draw the ever-shifting lines between what is to be permitted and what isn't.

(The lines shift not because church beliefs change but because liberalism continues to push its principles in more radical directions. So a church belief that is acceptable today might not be considered so in 20 years time. The churches are expected to keep adapting to the "superior" creed of liberalism.)

So Theo is an honest liberal. He doesn't try to hide liberal rule behind claims of neutrality. He wants liberals to be out and proud. He wants liberal ideology to be recognised as the state creed. Nor does he attempt to uphold a pretence of liberal toleration. He expects that liberals in power will curb, on principle, that which is illiberal.

But there is a lot in the life of man which is illiberal, not just in the realm of religion, but in our national identity, our family life, our relationships, our moral beliefs and our masculine and feminine identities.

We can reject these things or we can reject liberalism. Theo has made his decision, but I'd like to think as the failures of liberalism mount that many others will choose differently.

Are we all American?

On what do we base a national identity? Rudolph Giuliani, a prominent American Republican, has given this answer:

Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of one’s Americanism was not one’s family tree; the test of one’s Americanism was how much one believed in America. Because we’re like a religion really. A secular religion. We believe in ideas and ideals. We’re not one race, we’re many; we’re not one ethnic group, we’re everyone; we’re not one language, we’re all of these people. So what ties us together? We’re tied together by our belief in political democracy, in religious freedom, in capitalism, a free economy where people make their own choices about the spending of their money. We’re tied together because we respect human life, and because we respect the rule of law.

Those are the ideas that make us Americans. And those are the ideas that I leaned on when it was time to lead, both after September 11 and long before.

This is a useful quote. Giuliani begins by rejecting, as liberal moderns do, the traditional basis for a national identity, namely a shared ethnicity.

Why reject a shared ethnicity? Part of the reason, as I've argued before, is that there is a strand of liberalism based on the principle that to be fully human we must be self-defining.

Ethnicity isn't something we can define for ourselves. It's something that we're born into, that we inherit. Therefore, it has come to have negative connotations within liberalism, as something limiting or restricting to the individual.

If, though, ethnicity is thought to be illegitimate as a basis for national identity, what is to replace it?

According to Giuliani, an American identity is to be based not on ethnicity, but on ideas and ideals. In particular, it is to be based on the ideals of democracy, religious freedom, free market capitalism, respect for human life and respect for the law.

So is this a realistic replacement for a traditional nationalism? I think there are reasons to believe it isn't. I'll let Lawrence Auster explain one important defect in Giuliani's model of national identity:

having told us the things that don’t make us Americans, he tells us the things that do make us Americans: belief in democracy, freedom, capitalism, and rule of law. But other countries believe in those things too. So how is America different from those other countries? If a person in, say, India believes in democracy, freedom, capitalism, and rule of law, how is he any less an American than you or I or George Washington? And how are we any more American than that Indian? Giuliani has removed everything particular and concrete about America and defined America as a universal belief system, not a country.

The Giuliani view of what makes someone American potentially makes everyone an American. This has a number of consequences. First, it means that being an American is not such a distinctive thing. There can be (and are) many different countries claiming much the same basis for their identity.

Second, it means that being an American is not really a "national" thing - it's not about being part of a nation, since the ideals defining Americanism exist in many different places.

Third, the Giuliani view makes the concept of a "nation" unstable. It is likely to lead to an open borders policy, in which the existing population is tranformed by mass immigration, as anyone can be thought of as successfully adopting an American identity.

Similarly, there is nothing to fix the borders of America. If Canada or Mexico were sufficiently committed to a free market, democracy and the rule of law, then there's no reason, under the terms set out by Giuliani, why these countries shouldn't merge into a larger entity.

(If you think this is an unlikely consequence, think of what is happening with the European Union, or even the proposal to set up a Pacific Union comprising Australia, New Zealand, PNG and a dozen smaller Pacific nations.)

The Giuliani view of national identity has other dangers. In effect, Giuliani is defining America as a political ideal. Politics, therefore, rises above its natural place, and becomes, as Giuliani himself puts it, a kind of secular religion.

The casting of politics as secular religion hasn't had a happy history. It tends to lead to mistaken attempts to impose abstract political ideals on unwilling recipients. Politics becomes the primary morality by which we are supposed to live, and (if understood to be universal) by which others are supposed to live.

Finally, I doubt if people really feel as closely tied together by a shared commitment to political democracy as they are by ethnicity.

The depth of a traditional identity has been described by Professor West of Suffolk College as follows:

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

The Canadian liberal Michael Ignatieff has conceded that this "psychology of belonging" of traditional nationalism has "greater depth" than its modern, civic replacement.

Similarly, two academics from the University of Melbourne, Brian Gallagan and Winsome Roberts, have written a book titled Australian Citizenship in which they describe an Australian identity defined solely in terms of shared political institutions and values as "hollow, lacking in cultural richness and human content."

Similarly they complain of,

an empty and flaccid citizenship based on abstract principles that lack the inspirational power to represent what it means to be Australian.

So, if you think through the Giuliani concept of identity, it doesn't hold. It can't adequately define a nation which is distinct and stable in its character or deep in its identity.

It cannot successfully replace what came before.

Further reading:

What happened to nationalism?

A hollow identity?

The humanist as mad scientist

Where is political modernism taking us? There is an unsettling answer laid out for us in a recent issue of Dissent, a prominent Australian left-liberal magazine. In an article titled “It’s the IQ, stupid” (Dissent, Number 20, Autumn/Winter 2006), retired scientist Stanley Schaetzel takes “the logical next step” for political modernism, a step which has momentous consequences.

Positivism

Schaetzel’s article is a striking example of positivism, a philosophy which has been around since the early 1800s, which claims that science alone can determine the truth about the world and reality.

Schaetzel believes that religion should be replaced completely with a scientific world view. He bridles at the commonly held attitude that science has worked out best in certain spheres only, such as the development of technology. For him, there is a scientific method which can be applied everywhere:

Scientific methods either work everywhere and present a valid view of reality across all aspects of life – or they don’t. There is no alternative.

Two objections to this kind of positivism spring immediately to mind. First, the attempt to apply a “scientific method” outside of the natural sciences has usually produced a negative result. One clear example of this fault of “scientism” was the effort to make motherhood more scientific in the 1920s and 30s.

For instance, in 1928 a Dr Watson wrote a book on childcare in which he declared that,

No one today knows enough to raise a child. The world would be considerably better off if we were to stop having children for twenty years (except those reared for experimental purposes) and were then to start again with enough facts to do the job with some degree of skill and accuracy. Parenthood, instead of being an instinctive art, is a science, the details of which must be worked out by patient laboratory methods.

And what kind of results did such “patient laboratory methods” yield? Dr Watson informed mothers that they should not show affection toward their children:

Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job of the difficult task.

Dr Watson did not even like children to see their mothers, except for the necessary tasks of feeding or changing nappies. For the kind of mother whose heart was “too tender” and who needed to see her child, Dr Watson gave this advice:

make yourself a peephole so that you can see it without being seen, or use a periscope.

Modern mothers should not show emotion, but should instead,

handle the situation as a trained nurse or a doctor would and, finally, learn not to talk in endearing and coddling terms.

Nor is it an accident that Dr Watson should give this advice. If you want to apply a “scientific method” to all things, then you will be biased toward what is more tangible and easily measured, rather than the unpredictable and subjective realm of emotions.

The second objection to Schaetzel’s positivism is as follows. Schaetzel believes that religion ought to be replaced by science. However, he is confronted by the fact that most Westerners continue to have religious beliefs.

Schaetzel chooses to explain this setback to positivism by claiming that most people are too stupid and uneducated to understand a scientific world view. It is Schaetzel’s view that only people with an IQ over 115, and who have the right kind of education and sufficient time can belong to a scientific elite who understand the systems which control human society.

But, alas, it is not the scientific elite who have the power to run things. Schaetzel laments that,

You need a high IQ to push science forward, but you don’t need great intelligence to make money, to be a media star or a famous athlete or – even – to get elected to the Presidency of the USA. Politics is the only profession without any educational criteria … This seems to be the biggest problem of the current period. It’s the IQ, stupid.

For Schaetzel this is tragic because the scientific elite now have everything figured out and could run the globe smoothly and scientifically:

We are being led by people most of whom are not able to see – and do not comprehend – the Big Scene ... We have now the means of knowing what is going on everywhere, of classifying this information and of exerting control at a distance.

These are big claims. It makes you think that Schaetzel has an original and insightful view of world problems not available to the rest of us. But here is his analysis of the terrorist situation:

The presently advocated cure for the world’s problems – free trade and the market economy – is in reality a return to the Darwinian system of survival of the fittest. Currently the strong and the big are getting bigger and the weak are getting weaker – and some of the weak have only terrorism as an answer.

This is just standard left-liberalism. It is a traditional left-liberal opposition to a free market ideology and to an inequality of condition. There are dolphin loving hippy women who could have granted us the same “insight”.

And note too the contradiction in Schaetzel’s politics here. He accepts the leftist view that it is inequality which causes social problems. But at the same time he is radically elitist: he believes that power belongs properly to a small group of people like himself – scientific experts who alone have acquired knowledge of “the big scene”.

Humanism

It is not, though, the positivism of Schaetzel’s argument which is the main cause for concern. It is his perfectly logical effort to upgrade traditional humanism.

At the time of the Renaissance, thinkers like Pico della Mirandola argued that what made man special was his capacity to self-determine who he is. Man did not occupy a fixed position in a chain of being, but could choose to be as low as an animal or as high as God.

This humanist philosophy made man a magnificent, heroic being to be idolised. Here is Pico himself, extolling the virtues of man:

Imagine! The great generosity of God! The happiness of man! To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to be! ... Who could not help but admire this great shape-shifter? In fact, how could one admire anything else? ... Who would not admire man ... because he fashions and transforms himself into any fleshly form and assumes the character of any creature whatsoever ... For this reason, Euanthes the Persian … writes that man has no inborn, proper form ...

... let us not even yield place to them, the highest of the angelic orders … If we choose to, we will not be second to them in anything.

This view, or at least a secularised version of it, ultimately succeeded in shaping the modern Western world. The liberal orthodoxy of today continues to insist that our humanity depends on our freedom to choose who we are and what we do according to our own individual will and reason.

The liberal humanist view has, though, a fatal flaw. It depends on the assumption that, as Pico puts it, man has “no inborn, proper form”. This means that liberals usually adopt the idea that individuals are blank slates.

Conservatives have disagreed with liberals on this point. We believe that there is a human nature, which is not just produced by education or social influences, but is inborn: that we have a nature which is hardwired into us.

And this is where traditional humanism has come unstuck. Stanley Schaetzel’s beloved science has progressed to a stage where it has confirmed not the liberal but the conservative view.

Take the example of gender. Liberals believe that we are human when we self-define who we are. This means that liberals don’t like the idea that being a man or a woman should influence our identity or our social roles, as being male or female is not something we get to choose.

Liberals have therefore explained traditional gender identity and roles as being a product of socialisation only, from which men and women are to be “liberated”.

Science, though, has confounded these liberal claims. It is now clear that there is a biological basis for gender differences – that men and women are influenced by differences in hormones and brain structure.

We are not, therefore, the blank slates liberals took us to be.

So, are we then not special in the way that Pico claimed? Do we not have the freedom to choose to be whatever we will?

This is where Stanley Schaetzel attempts to tidy things up, but with dangerous consequences. He admits that humans are not entirely born as blank slates, but are influenced by genetics:

At birth the human brain is partially plastic (by this I mean not completely tabula rasa) and partially genetically programmed (in computer parlance hardwired) ... Quasi-hardwired programs are subsequently developed during the formative years (1 to about 16) of children and adolescents.

Having ceded this, Schaetzel then accepts that humans are not so special after all, that we are simply a big-brained animal:

We are one of the results of evolution: an animal classified as Homo Sapiens, which has 98.4% of its genes identical with the chimpanzee ... Its main difference from the rest of the primates is an evolved brain ...

At this point, Schaetzel seems to be rejecting the liberal humanist philosophy. But he then pulls out his trump card. We might have been animals up to now, suggests Schaetzel, but we are about to become something more, because we are about to truly self-determine who we are.

How? By taking control over our own hardwiring, over our own genetic structure. He writes,

What if we agree that, at the beginning of the third millennium, we ceased to be an animal? Not because we have in us some immaterial agent – but because our brains have created the digital age and now understand and control our genome and thus evolution.

Schaetzel follows up this thought, of man raised again above the level of animals, with a renewed idolisation of man:

And if, as I think, we still need to worship something why not worship the idea of the latent man – of everything man has achieved and is capable of achieving, of all his good intentions and noble aspirations? The temples of this faith would be various museums, great universities and research institutes.

The irony is that Schaetzel, the arch enemy of religion and tradition, has not strayed far from the outlines of a theology laid down by Pico more than 500 years ago.

Summers & sex differences

Genetic technology is with us for good. Most people, I expect, would prefer that any tinkering with the human genome be done with extreme caution. Such caution, though, is unlikely to be preferred when the tinkering itself is seen as the very thing which gives us a special status as humans.

What’s worse is that the tinkering is likely to be done to fulfil the liberal project. Let me give just one example of the kind of attitude which some modern intellectuals are likely to take.

In January 2005 the President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, gave a “controversial” speech. He suggested that one possible reason for men outnumbering women in top engineering and science jobs was that men may have more “intrinsic” (ie hardwired) ability for high-level science than women.

Predictably, Summers was attacked for his comment. Liberals don’t like the idea that we might be influenced in a significant way by our sex. It upsets their belief that we are free to choose to become whatever we will.

Summers made a grovelling apology, committed Harvard to spend $50 million on the recruitment of female staff and resigned.

In March 2005, Time magazine ran an eight page feature on the Summers’ controversy. Time is an establishment liberal magazine, and the purpose of the feature was to attack Summers’ suggestion that men might be, on average, intrinsically better at high-level science.

The problem for the Time writers is that by 2005 there was a lot of evidence that men’s brains were, in fact, demonstrably different to those of women. So they could not simply argue that men and women were mentally just the same.

Instead, the feature writers conceded that the male and female brain were different. They argued, though, that the differences could be made not to matter. How? First, by “training” the female brain to overcome any intrinsic disadvantage in high-level science and second by physically manipulating the female brain through modern science.

One of the Time reporters wrote cheerfully,

Now that scientists are finally starting to map the brain with some accuracy, the challenge is figuring out what to do with that knowledge. The possibilities for applying it to the classroom, workplace and doctor’s office are tantalizing. “If something is genetic, it means it must be biological. If we can figure out the biology, then we should be able to tweak the biology,” says Richard Haier, a psychology professor who studies intelligence at the University of California at Irvine. Maybe Summers’ failure was not one of sensitivity but one of imagination.

So, according to the Time journalist Lawrence Summers ought to have exercised more imagination and considered the “Frankenstein” option: that the female brain could be made less different to the male brain by human tampering.

This “tweaking” of genetics to overcome gender difference is what appears as the “optimistic” scenario to a liberal, but to a conservative it points to the likely abuse by liberals of a powerful new technology.

Conclusion

So what’s to be done? As noted earlier, the technology is likely to become a fact of life, so it’s the political ideology we need to change.

There are two key things to be asserted against the prevailing liberalism. First, that our humanity is not contingent. We don’t need to “prove” our human status by demonstrating our ability to manipulate the genome. For religious traditionalists, our human status is something guaranteed in virtue of our possession of a human soul (the “immaterial agent” referred to by Schaetzel). But even without this traditionalist view, it’s possible to think of humans as having a distinct status, based on a “sum total” of our qualities.

We need to challenge liberalism, also, in what it claims about human freedom. There is a truer sense of freedom when we succeed in recognising and living through what is best in our nature, rather than pretending our own nature to be limitless.

Science is not as important in the effort to acquire this kind of freedom as positivists like Schaetzel would have us believe. We can be grateful for the improvements science makes in our lives, for instance through medical technology or modern communications. But working our way toward what is most significant in our natures is not something done in a laboratory by technocratic experts. It is something available to all of us, requiring us to draw on personal qualities such as wisdom, self-discipline, depth of experience, and intuition.

We can be helped also by the depth of culture existing in the society we inhabit – a depth which is unlikely to extend far if we limit ourselves to a dry, technocratic scientism.

Tying it all together

Please don't miss this short piece by Lawrence Auster at View from the Right.

Auster looks at two of my own commentaries and ties them together to explain why Australian liberals think that opponents of multiculturalism must be "white racists" or "white supremacists".

The key passage is the following:

Among the "socially imposed" categories that liberalism wants to liberate us from are ethnicity, race and nationality. From the liberal point of view, people who have been so liberated should not care if their culture is transformed, since all that people really care about and should care about is their own free and fulfilled self. People such as the Cronulla rioters who resist the disruption of their society by cultural aliens must be Nazis. In fact there are no Nazis ...

But there is a lot more worth reading in the Auster piece, including a response from a beleaguered Swedish conservative, who rightly understands that liberalism (which he calls cultural leftism) is effectively the "prevailing religion" in the West.

Accepting substitutes

Intellectuals are people who need to identify purpose and meaning in their lives. Liberal intellectuals will therefore often have some kind of "religious" world view, even when they are determinedly secular in their views.

Take the case of Jason Soon, a Chinese-Australian who helps run the right-liberal Catallaxy website. In a recent discussion he wrote,

The day that both Western and non-Western countries live up to the ideals of Western liberal civilization will be the closest we come to Heaven on Earth, and a true End of History.

In the meantime we hasten the coming of that day by enhancing our soft power by (1) Westernising every corner of the globe through trade and cultural imperialism; (2) living up to our ideals and therefore appearing credible when urging them on others; (3) Westernising to the greatest extent possible and consistent with our national interest the rest of the world by taking in immigrants.

What did Jason mean by the phrase "The End of History"? He confirmed later in the discussion that he meant the permanent global dominance of liberalism, this being the final achievement which human progress has always been working toward.

It seems obvious to me that this is a kind of secularised religiosity. There is still a striving toward heaven, but it is toward a heaven on earth which is achieved as a kind of decisive political act. Human life, in this view, has always had meaning in terms of a progress toward this decisive and definitive end point of history.

There is a moderate kind of utopianism about this, and even a resemblance to millenarian ideas.

Understandably, Jason Soon is willing to sacrifice much to bring about the End of History. He is willing to foist a Western cultural imperialism on other cultures, which presumably means letting loose Britney Spears and friends into societies where traditional family life and traditional morality are still strong.

He is also willing to try to Westernise other peoples by actually bringing them physically to live in the West. Anything, it seems, is justified which brings closer the day of the End of History.

Of course, I think Jason Soon is misguided in the way he attempts to construct meaning and purpose in life. The advance of liberalism tends, if anything, to hollow out human existence, rather than to bring it to a meaningful perfection.

My advice to a young intellectual would be to seek meaning within the more enduring aspects of human life, such as we can experience within the core of our identity as men and women, or through our sense of connectedness to our own ethnocultural tradition, or within a commitment to moral virtue, or through the fulfilment of our natures as men and women within the family, or through our deeper responses to art and to nature, or, for the most spiritual, through a real religious feeling rather than through a secularised substitute.

Liberalism as a secular religion

This issue might well appear to some to be a case of social engineering gone crazily immoral...

Liberals sometimes act as if they are following a kind of secular religion, rather than a political ideology.

I was reminded of this when reading an editorial from the Brisbane Courier Mail (15/5/2001). The topic was whether women should be accepted into the frontline as combat troops.

The editor did a reasonable job in listing the possible objections to such a move. He asked,

Are women indeed physically up to the task of lugging around a 30kg pack for weeks on end? Will their presence in the frontline ranks prove a distraction to the male soldiers whose protective instincts towards them might undermine unit efficiency? Or, conversely, might they be exposed to widespread sexual harassment?

Might women, too, undermine that fierce, tightly knit loyalty and interdependence on which military morale is built? Might they even, perversely, be responsible for higher casualty rates in battle...

And so on.

However, having taken the trouble to raise these objections, he then dismisses them out of hand by writing,

Yet all of these objections, however practical and well-meaning, represent a denial of the right of women to choose for themselves what roles they will fill in time of war.

Think about this. The editor will not consider objections "however practical and well-meaning" if this conflicts with the liberal principle of individualism: the idea of individuals being free to create themselves in any direction.

The principle of individualism is to be preferred, even if it potentially weakens the armed forces, and therefore the continued existence of the liberal society itself.

This is not a very pragmatic approach to politics. The editor seems to be aware of this as he goes on to admit that,

Yes, this issue might well appear to some to be a case of social engineering gone crazily immoral, but the irrefutable fact is that society has changed since the dark days of WWII.

Women have chosen to throw off the limitations imposed on them, even those limitations intended for their own protection.

The editor recognises that his beliefs may be considered immoral, and that they might leave women unprotected. His response?

He invokes something he considers to be of greater importance: the progress of society toward an individualism in which we "throw off the limitations imposed" on us (ie we deconstruct those aspects of society that we did not choose for ourselves).

It's important that we try to understand the liberal mind so that we know what we're up against. The views presented by the Courier Mail editor make it clear that liberals don't always follow a pragmatic self-interest.

They do have first principles which they treat almost as "articles of faith" and are willing to follow through to the end. This is the sense in which liberalism can be seen as a kind of secular religion.

(First published at Conservative Central, 27/05/2002)

A Marxist laments

Kenneth Mostern was employed as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee for six years. He recently resigned and has written a lengthy article explaining his surprising decision.

He puts the issue this way: "Academics have, compared to most workers, a substantial amount of freedom to make their own schedules and a significant amount of time off. Academics are mostly doing what they want to be doing ... Thus the question: why are academics so miserable? Why has my resignation produced the most profound joy?"

To understand his answer you need to know some background to the situation. Kenneth Mostern is a white Jewish male Marxist who chose to work in the field of African American Studies. He is, in other words, a radical left liberal: he wants to be a creation of his own will and reason, and so has rebelled against any inborn or inherited forms of self-definition (such as being white, or Jewish, or male). He himself admits that:

I am also a symbol of what for some, however unconsciously, African American Studies is imagined to be a revolt against: a white, Jewish, male marxist.

It was the very dominance of radical liberalism within his English department, though, which created problems for Mr Mostern.

In part, this was because the logic of liberalism leads on to a denial of the existence of any objective forms of truth. If the assertion of individual reason is the highest good, then it will be thought offensive to assert an objective truth which transcends (and places limits on) individual reason.

If, however, there is not permitted to be any measure of objective truth, then what grounds are there to discuss or evaluate academic work? And, if there are no such grounds, then on what principles do academic departments operate?

According to Mr Mostern one answer to these questions is that "Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it."

Mr Mostern, most surprisingly for a Marxist, found himself yearning for "a conservative program with a coherent sense of its intellectual mission in relation to the national community" as this might have turned the department into "a place of vigorous engagement." Instead, the department continued to be "the independent source of my most extreme alienation."

Mr Mostern's response was to reject the notion of "ambivalence" about truth, and instead assert the idea of "commitment". In effect, Mr Mostern shifted to some degree from the liberal ideal of the free-floating, self-creating autonomous individual, in order to accept certain forms of conservative connectedness.

He himself lists three such forms of connectedness in response to his original question of why his resignation produced such profound joy.

The first is marital love. His marriage had previously been under intense strain because both he and his wife had put their careers ahead of their relationship (they lived in different cities). He now feels confident to assert the value of marriage as being something that is "nonarbitrary", in other words, that has a real objective value.

He declares that "Commitment is the choice to act in practical terms on the premise that you want to be with someone, that you believe in something as true. As an academic I was ambivalent, not committed, and nearly lost my marriage. This did not make me happy. And it is not idiosyncratic."

The second form of connectedness is to local community and the particular tradition it embodies. He asks the reasonable question of how in a place where he had no "community of familiarity" he could know "what one's work is, let alone accomplish it."

And finally, he asserts the value of what he chooses to call "congregation." He admits that having rejected his Jewish faith, he hoped that the department would become a kind of substitute secular congregation. It didn't fulfill this role, though, as academics were people who could not even "address each other as seekers, without fear."

Mr Mostern, it must be said, has not broken very thoroughly from his Marxism. His article is interesting, though, as an example of the stresses created when people try to follow liberalism consistently, and how even a minimal form of conservatism can serve as a liberating alternative.

(First published at Conservative Central 17/05/03)