Tolkien & the Sarehole Mill

Tolkien spent part of his childhood in Sarehole, England. He later wrote:

I could draw you a map of every inch of it. I loved it with an (intense) love...I was brought up in considerable poverty, but I was happy running about in that country.

One of the features of Sarehole is an old mill:

Tolkien had a happy childhood because he was blessed with a love of the beautiful countryside he inhabited.

I sometimes think that this is the true privilege: to feel closely connected to people and place, to family and nation, to the arts and culture, to masculinity or femininity, to the beauty of women, to one's history and heritage, to a church and to nature.

We lose sight of this when privilege is argued over endlessly in terms of degrees of political or economic status.

I do want traditionalists to contest for political and economic power, as without this we will remain forever marginalised. However, when it comes to what we use that power for, it helps to remember, I think, what true privilege means - that it is not status or power for its own sake, but for the sake of those things we feel meaningfully connected to and which inspire our love and commitment.

Wordsworth's pedlar

What makes human life feel blessed? For William Wordsworth the experience of being deeply connected to nature brought about such a feeling. This experience was open to all, even to those of humble rank. The following lines are from the poem The Pedlar and the Ruined Cottage:

Claude Lorrain

From early childhood, even, as I have said,
From his sixth year, he had been sent abroad
In summer, to tend herds: such was his task
Henceforward till the later day of youth.
Oh! then what soul was his when on the tops
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light. He looked;
The ocean and the earth beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle; sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being: in them did he live,
And by them did he live: they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not. In enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power
That made him: it was blessedness and love.
A Herdsman on the lonely mountain tops,
Such intercourse was his, and in this sort
Was his existence oftentimes possessed.
Oh! then how beautiful, how bright appeared
The written Promise! He had early learned
To reverence the Volume which displays
The mystery, the life which cannot die:
But in the mountains did he feel his faith.
There did he see the writing. All things there
Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving: infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite, and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe - he saw.
What wonder if his being thus became
Sublime and comprehensive! Low desires,
Low thoughts had there no place, yet was his mind
Lowly; for he was meek in gratitude
Oft as he called to mind those ecstasies
And whence they flowed, and from them he acquired
Wisdom which works through patience; thence he learned
In many a calmer hour of sober thought
To look on nature with an humble heart
Self-questioned where it did not understand
And with a superstitious eye of love.

Why does Andrew Bolt admire Lady Gaga?

I should begin by making clear that there are things I admire about Australian columnist Andrew Bolt. He doesn't follow along timidly with political class opinions, but is willing to go out on a limb on a range of issues. In doing so he has helped to shake up the left-liberal orthodoxy in this country.

But it has to be said that he is nonetheless a liberal in his politics. What matters for him is that we self-determine our own individual identity. Therefore, he believes that it's wrong for people to have predetermined national or ethnic identities.

I've given examples of Bolt arguing for this previously. For instance, Bolt once criticised a group of Aborigines who wanted an historic artefact returned to them on the basis that the Aborigines were forgetting:

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race.

Bolt has also related the story of how he once, as a Dutch migrant to Australia, attempted to identify with his Dutch heritage:

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

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

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

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

That is a radically liberal, rather than a conservative, position to take. He is only allowed to identify with himself rather than with a communal tradition. It is his own self-determined, individual identity that is allowed to matter, rather than a predetermined one that is treated negatively as "a mere accident of birth".

One of the problems with taking this liberal view, that what matters is that we are autonomously self-determined, is that a whole raft of other positions logically follow on.

Bolt himself this week provided a small example of this. He has expressed his admiration for Lady Gaga on this basis:

Lady Gaga’s music is irrelevant. Her real art is in reinventing her identity, and for that alone I like her.

As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.

Gaga has demonstrated this possibility to millions.

There’s her personal story – of going from a bullied loner at school to the brash superstar.

And there’s her professional guises – tramp to vamp to sophisticate, costumed from the barely there to the heavily lacquered.

With every change, let the critics complain, Lady Gaga would be who she pleased.

What matters to Bolt is not whether Lady Gaga is virtuous, but that she is adept at being a self-creating individual. Freedom, asserts Bolt, is an ongoing act of self-definition - and doing and being what you please.

Bolt is supposed to be the leader of conservative opinion in Australia. And yet what we've ended up with is the idea that we should admire those who do whatever they please in order to define their own individual self.

There's no sense here that people might be oriented in a stable way to an objective good, or that our deeper sense of identity is tied to things we don't invent but that are given to us (which then means that those who trangressively reinvent themselves over and over might be thought of as disconnected rather than as liberated).

One of Bolt's readers left this comment:

“As a boy I moved from town to country to town, and learned how powerfully liberating it could be to define afresh who you were.”

With all due respect, you’re not a true conservative, AB. I too moved from town to town as a child because of my father’s employment, but I always longed for the stability and rootedness that I saw others had, even more so now, 40 years later. Conservatism is rooted in the stability of place, family, community and religion, and it transcends the Right/Left paradigm, knowing that the modern Right can be as destructive of community as the Left can be. Read Russell Kirk or Wendell Berry. No, you’re not a conservative, you’re more a reactionary modernist. Anthony of Toowoomba

That's well-observed by Anthony of Toowoomba. And yet for all that Bolt still manages to be a voice in opposition to the main current of left-liberal thought in Australia.

Feeling connected to your suburb is now a sin?



Rush at the station

Camberwell is one of the nicer historic garden suburbs of Melbourne. It is also also the boyhood suburb of comic Barry Humphries and the home of actor Geoffrey Rush. Both Rush and Humphries have taken part in movements to protect the heritage of the suburb from overdevelopment, including proposals to build a nine storey car park and office block over the historic railway station (they lost).

Their efforts to protect the heritage of Camberwell have drawn fire from a leading architect, Professor Kim Dovey. According to Dovey, people who resist modernity are ... well, racists and whatnot:

Melbourne University academic Kim Dovey has also accused some residents of trying to defend their patch from ethnic and class differences.

"There's an element of 'well, we're not racist, we welcome different kinds of people as long as they behave exactly the same as we always have," Prof Dovey said yesterday...

Prof Dovey said Rush had dramatised the issue by making people feel if they accepted change "they would be giving up something of themselves".

So bad luck if you feel attached to your lovely, green, historic suburb. According to Professor Dovey you're not allowed to try to conserve it for yourself or your children. If you do try, you're just resisting modernisation/globalisation and must be a racist. And Professor Dovey gets even more Orwellian. You're not even allowed to think, as your suburb gets transformed, that you're giving up something of yourself - that too is a forbidden thought.

The Latham Diaries

I bought a copy of The Latham Diaries on the weekend. The former Labor leader sets out his political beliefs clearly enough in the introduction.

Latham worries that there is a crisis in civil society. He believes that individuals have become alienated from their communities and are less willing to trust and cooperate with each other:

It is the alienation of the individual from community life that is the cause of so many social problems. (p.16)

He focuses on two culprits for this. One is the market. He criticises "a grotesque expansion of market forces into social relationships" and also consumerism as a form of middle-class escapism.

The second culprit is conservatism. Latham believes that there is a conservative establishment which stymies change and is intent on hoarding power for itself. He sees himself as one of the outsiders attempting to break down hierarchies of power.

It's a flawed view. I'd agree with Latham that individuals are increasingly socially alienated, that our culture is excessively individualistic, that there is too little political engagement and that consumerism and a cult of celebrity are ultimately empty forms of escapism.

But how do you achieve a real depth of community? I would argue that you need to allow stable forms of social life to develop over time and that you need a shared identity based on real forms of connectedness.

This is not what Latham is looking for. He does not want to maintain either stability or commonality. He believes instead that community should be encouraged as the basis for "a sweeping program of social justice" and so that people will "reach out and trust in strangers" from around the globe and support "the redistributive functions of government":

As a society we are poorly equipped to meet the challenges of globalisation: building strong communities that are prepared to reach out and trust in strangers - people, values and information from across the globe.

The crisis in social capital is also a crisis for social democracy. If people do not practise mutual trust and cooperation in their lives, they are not likely to support the redistributive functions of government...

The task of social reformers is extraordinarily difficult ... Not only must they rebuild the trust and cohesiveness of civil society, they also need to motivate people about the value and possibilities of organised politics ... they then need to win majority public support for a sweeping program of social justice. (pp. 16-17)

In one sense he is right. When people are more closely connected to their communities they are likely to have more altruistic attitudes. Social reformers have, in the past, drawn on this altruism to win support for programmes that were not in the interests of the mainstream.

Such reformers could, as an alternative, rely on the apathy of a socially alienated population to force through their programmes. But Latham seems to have too much of a populist streak to find this an appealing option. He sees himself as representing those who are outsiders to political power (the insiders are by his definition the bad guys, the "conservatives"). Latham seems to want to lead a grassroots movement of "social democracy" to push through his sweeping changes - and that can't be done when altruism and social engagement are low.

Finally, Latham is wrong to claim that the establishment is conservative.  His line is that those in power (the insiders) want to preserve their control and therefore are in favour of social hierarchies and the status quo. That's why, surmises Latham, he met such opposition to his reform programme.

But much of the opposition to Latham came from within his own party. So he is led to the idea that the ALP itself is a conservative organisation, run as an oligarchy by half a dozen union officials. He describes the ALP as follows:

The Party's defining purpose now revolves around power and patronage, the fuel that sustains its factions but that ultimately drains the True Believers of conviction and belief. It has become a conservative institution run by conservative people, the worst elements of machine politics. (p.8)

In contrast to this, Latham presents himself as in no way attached to the status quo:

Over time, our national political culture has become more conservative and uniform ... I battled against this tendency inside the Labor Party, determined to maintain a bold approach to public policy. I believed in adventurism as a way of public life. (p.20)

It's a misleading picture of Australian politics. Yes, there is entrenched power. But it is power at the service of an increasingly radical liberalism. When Kevin Rudd, for instance, raised immigration to record levels, it was difficult to see this as a conservative measure designed to keep things as they are.

The orthodoxy is a liberal one. Latham doesn't see this because he has in his mind the idea that being progressive means attacking power hierarchies as a dissenting outsider. Therefore, the insiders who hold the power are, by definition, the non-progressives - the "conservatives". He ends up believing that ALP powerbrokers, ABC journalists and the like are Tories.

But this means that he can't engage with the liberalism that is so influential amongst the political class as a whole. And I don't think you can truly understand the shifts in modern society, including those toward social alienation, without considering the role played by this liberalism.

Manne's conservative moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberalism vs community?

I've just begun reading Liberalism & Community by Steven Kautz. He is an Associate Professor of Politics at Michigan State University.

The book is a reply to those who have criticised liberalism for undermining community. Admittedly, I've only read the first chapter, but so far I've been more disconcerted than persuaded by the way Kautz puts his argument.

I'm going to quote some sections of the text and then briefly comment underneath, beginning with this admission by Kautz:

We have been taught by our classical liberal ancestors to think of ourselves as free individuals above all, rather than as children or parishioners or citizens, or as members of a racial or ethnic group - or, indeed, as members of any other communities. (p.19)

I'm still astonished that people can think this way and build a politics on such an understanding of life. Kautz is happy to support a liberalism in which we become "free" to the extent that we diminish the role in our lives of communities. Kautz thinks of "freedom" as the highest good, and he identifies communities as a threat or hazard to this freedom.

Such a perspective makes no sense if you think of people as social creatures, whose lives are naturally embedded in distinct communities. In this view, freedom is something that is achieved within a society and not against it.

Kautz is aware of such objections. He goes on to quote some communitarian critics of the liberal outlook:

But this idea of the free individual is based on a confusion, say its critics: one's deepest attachments to other human beings are not freely chosen, adopted, and then discarded like articles of clothing, but are given prior to such choices and "partly define the person I am" ...

Indeed, the human being who overcomes such "constitutive" attachments is not liberated, but is rather, says Sandel, "wholly without character, without moral depth"; an honorable human being must surely "feel the moral weight" of these primary loyalties.

The criticisms here are quite good. Liberalism holds that to be free we must be self-defining, self-determining individuals. But much of what is most significant in our lives is unchosen, including our communal identity and a great part of our family commitments. If we lose this unchosen aspect of life, then we will be poorer in our sense of ourselves and our place within a community.

Kautz seems to take this criticism seriously. He therefore sets out to prove that the asocial, "free" liberal individual can also stake a claim to "moral depth":

All of this is undoubtedly partly true: the liberal idea of the free individual too often, in liberal practice, produces eccentric, passive, lonely individuals. But it is perhaps not exhaustive.

Even for contemporary admirers of community, praise of the loyal and devoted citizen is commonly tempered by an awareness of the moral gravity of those who contributed to liberalism's past and present victories over intolerant and oppressive communities: moral freedom may require rebellion against moral community.

Those free individuals who secured for themselves, and for us, the blessings of liberty, even at the price of rebellion against a father or a priest or a prince, are perhaps not wholly "without moral depth," but deserve both our admiration and our gratitude: the truly free human being possesses a moral dignity that at least rivals the dignity of a human life that is animated by love or piety or patriotism.

Once again, Kautz, the defender of classical liberalism, writes of community as a kind of natural competitor against, or even enemy of, freedom. He even contrasts the "truly free human being" with the human being animated "by love or piety or patriotism".

I don't like Kautz's radically individualistic "truly free human being". I don't even think he is all that free - what, after all, is his freedom for, once he becomes asocial and discards membership of a distinct community and tradition, and once he steps aside from a life animated "by love or piety or patriotism"? Isn't it better to be free to participate in the greater aspects of life, rather than to discard them in order to be an autonomous loner?

We can be better than neutral

Here's a more upbeat story to report on. Over at Abandon Skip, there's a post on the popularity of the song De La Rey amongst Afrikaners in South Africa. The song has become something of an anthem for Afrikaners, expressing a pride in their own identity.

There are a couple of things about the situation which impress me. First, it seems to be predominantly young Afrikaners, both male and female, who are generating enthusiasm for the song. Second, some of the Arikaners have clearly rejected the idea that it is a mark of distinction to be neutral about ethnicity.

For instance, Bok van Blerk asks the audience before singing the song, "I'm proud of my language and culture. Are you?". He has also made the comment that, "Tswana, Zulu, Sotho, English or Afrikaner, take pride in who you are, it gives you backbone and direction in life."

This is exactly the shift Westerners need to make. For a long time, the neutrality strand of liberalism has set a different tone. The gist of this strand of liberalism is that it's best to be neutral about important public goods, and to orient ourselves instead to the pursuit of our private, individual interests. At best, ethnicity is then recognised as a purely personal sentiment, not to be defended as a good in a formal, public setting.

We are therefore supposed to win admiration by proving how neutral we are about our own ethnicity. The most advanced practitioners of this art achieve status by identifying the most "othered" ethnic group and displaying sympathy toward them. In general, though, the effect is to produce a Westerner who has little sense of his own culture and who thinks of culture instead as something he consumes according to taste from a range of other ethnicities.

It's not a sustainable way of ordering things. If everyone were to do it, and we were all neutralists, then there would be no range of "other" ethnicities to consume. In other words, even to maintain things as they are now, there have to be groups of people who reject the ideal of neutrality and who continue to produce distinctive cultures.

There is another problem with the neutrality strand: it trivialises our life aims. Much of what is significant in life requires a communal setting. If we limit ourselves to the pursuit of private interests, we undermine the opportunity to fulfil important aspects of life.

We can be better than neutral. We can identify positively with our own culture; we can defend its value as a real entity and not just as a personal sentiment; and we can admire those who show themselves to be most connected to their own ethnic culture and who represent it at its best.

(If you follow the link to Abandon Skip's post there are several short You Tube videos showing the response of young Afrikaners to the De La Rey song.)

The best of both worlds

Is the aim of my life to be autonomous? Is this what makes me free? If so, there must be no significant aspect of my life which I cannot choose for myself.

This is a problem when it comes to ethnicity. Ethnicity appears to be inherited as a tradition rather than being self-determined. Therefore, if I want to be autonomous I have to either "liberate" myself from the "prison" of ethnicity; or else I have to think of ethnicity as being something that I myself might construct - as something individual and subjective, a "personal narrative".

But is ethnicity really experienced by individuals as something negative, as an impediment to freedom? And is it really experienced as a self-constructed narrative, rather than as a real, objective tradition?

If the answer to both questions is yes, then how do we explain the case of Nirpal Dhaliwal. He is a man of Indian descent raised in Great Britain. He stayed away from India for many years due to its economic backwardness. But now that it is more economically advanced, he believes he can enjoy there both the modern lifestyle trappings as well as the sense of ethnic attachment:

So many Indians like me, born and raised in the West, are returning, wanting to reconnect with their motherland as much as seek their fortunes ...

It is now a society where we can be as modern and cosmopolitan as we want while immersing ourselves in its ancient culture.

India wields an irresistible ancestral pull - and is now the place where we can most truly be ourselves.

If autonomy theory were right, then Dhaliwal would experience India's ancient culture and ancestral pull as an oppression. He would feel burdened. Instead, Dhaliwal feels most true to himself when connected to his ethnic homeland.

Then there is the case of Melbourne artist Michael Peck. In a recent newspaper article, Peck explained the inspiration for his paintings:

Peck said he wanted his work to convey the experience of refugees and migrants trying to fit into a new culture.

"The figures in my paintings are there, but they always seem out of place ..."

Peck began exploring the idea after a difficult year in London. While there he taught art to underprivileged migrant children and found many were "lost" because they lacked a connection to their cultural roots ...

"Most of my work focuses on the idea of cultural displacement or dislocation, the concept of identity and how our identity is formed ..." (Diamond Valley Leader, June 18, 2008)

Again, if autonomy theory were right, then refugees ought not to feel lost at all, but unburdened. They should either experience a liberation from their cultural roots, or else control the process in terms of their personal narrative.

Instead, we are told that the refugees feel disconnected, lost and out of place.

Shouldn't then the aim be to enable people, as far as possible, to continue to enjoy a connection to their own ethnic tradition?

This requires a rethink of autonomy theory. It doesn't work to make autonomy an overriding principle in life; this doesn't bring either freedom or authenticity, but rather loss and displacement. A better option would be to think of autonomy as one good in life, to be balanced intelligently with other goods.

Happiness

There is a new battleground between left and right liberals, namely, happiness. Their debate about what makes us happy reveals a great deal about the mindset of both the left and the right, so it’s well worth looking at.
 
I will take as a representative of the left, the Australian “think-tanker” Clive Hamilton, and on the right, another think-tanker, the Swede Johan Norberg.
 
The left: Clive Hamilton

Last year, Clive Hamilton published a discussion paper called The Disappointment of Liberalism. He began this paper by noting that liberalism had succeeded in its basic aim.

What is the basic aim of liberalism? Let me put it this way, as simply as I can. Liberals believe that we are made human by being self-created through our own individual will and reason. This means that for liberals it is important that the individual is “liberated” from anything which impedes individual choice.

What kinds of things limit individual choice? Most notably, those things which are important to our self-identity, but which we inherit or are born to (and therefore don’t get to choose). This includes our sex (whether we are man or woman), and our race and ethnicity.

For a liberal, it is important that these unchosen things be made not to matter. Therefore, someone who defends them, for instance, by accepting different social roles for men and women will be called “sexist” by a liberal. Similarly, a white European who defends his own ethnic tradition will be labelled a “racist” – because such a view conflicts with liberal first principles.

Hamilton, though, doesn’t do much name calling as he is confident that the liberal project has succeeded. Note how clearly he expresses the basic principles of liberalism in the following passage:

Now that the constraints of socially imposed roles have weakened, oppression based on gender, class and race is no longer tenable, and the daily struggle for survival has for most people disappeared, we have entered an era characterised by ‘individualisation’ where, for the first time, individuals have the opportunity to ‘write their own biographies’ rather than have the chapters foretold by the circumstances of their birth. For the first time in history, the ordinary individual in the West has the opportunity to make a true choice ...

We’ve never had more freedom to shape ourselves in the way we want ...

This liberal concept of “freedom”, though, creates a particular difficulty. It leaves you with a society made up of millions of atomised individuals, each acting according to their own individual wants. How then do you hold a society together?

This is exactly the issue Hamilton wishes to discuss. He writes,

this essay is a prelude to answering the question of how we can reconstruct the social in an individualized world. In a world where we are no longer bound together by our class, gender or race, why should we live cooperatively?

In the nineteenth century, liberals thought they had found an answer to the dilemma. If individuals sought to follow a profit motive, no matter how selfishly, the hidden hand of the market would regulate the outcome for the overall benefit of society: for growth and progress.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, a group of “new liberals” were decisively rejecting the free market solution, because it generated inequalities of outcome. They preferred the idea of a “rational” regulation of society, particularly by the central state.

Today, the nineteenth century “classical liberals” are the right-wing of politics, and the twentieth century “new liberals” are the left-wing.

You would therefore expect a left-liberal like Clive Hamilton to be critical of free market solutions. And he is. In fact, his basic argument runs as follows.

First, as we have seen, he celebrates the overthrow of a traditionalist “social” conservatism. He believes that today,

the shackles of minority oppression and social conservatism have been cast off. The traditional standards, expectations and stereotypes that were the target of the various movements, dating from the 1960s – the sexual revolution, the counter-culture and the women’s movement – ushered in an era of personal liberty.

And yet, continues Hamilton, people don’t seem to be any happier. He notes “the extraordinary proliferation of the diseases of affluence” which,

suggests that the psychological wellbeing of citizens of rich countries is in decline. These diseases include drug dependence, obesity, loneliness and a suite of psychological disorders ranging from depression, anxiety, compulsive behaviours and widespread but ill-defined anomie. Perhaps the most telling evidence is the extraordinary prevalence of depression in rich countries.

What can explain the failure of the liberal project to create happiness? Hamilton’s answer is to blame the influence of the free market. He believes that people aren’t using their new found freedom to make reasoned, considered choices, but are being manipulated by the market to follow more shallow, consumeristic impulses.

It is Hamilton’s belief that “The market itself has, in recent decades, evolved into an instrument of coercion” and that “The activities of the marketers, given unbounded licence by the free-market policies of neoliberals [he means right-liberals], reinforce daily the promise of instant gratification ... So forceful and pervasive are the messages of the marketers that they now provide the raw material from which people construct their identities.”

The right liberal: Johan Norberg

Johan Norberg has also written a paper about happiness: The Scientist’s Pursuit of Happiness.

We know from this paper that Norberg is a liberal because he expresses in it the underlying liberal principle that individuals should choose their own identity, and reject inherited ones. He writes that,

a liberal and market-oriented society allows people freedom to choose. In the absence of authoritarian leaders ... forcing us to live the way they think is best for us, we can choose the kind of identity and lifestyle that suits us ... In traditional societies, on the other hand, the individual has to adapt to pre-fabricated roles and demands.

We can also tell from Norberg’s paper that he is not only a liberal, but more specifically a right-liberal. Unlike Hamilton, he is a devotee of the free market, and tends to see man’s economic activity as central to his life.

For instance, he writes that, “If you want to meet a happy Australian, ask someone who thinks that people like themselves have a good chance of improving their standard of living.”

He believes also that happiness reached a peak after WWII, because “With economies growing rapidly, people began to think that their children would enjoy a better life than they had.”

He is even willing to place economic activity ahead of family life, by citing a survey in which people recorded more happiness while working than when spending free time with their families.

Note too his idea that “Belief in the future grows when poor countries begin to experience growth, when markets open up, when incomes increase and people’s decisions begin to affect their place in society.”

Norberg, in fact, is such a devotee of the free market, that he wants no controls at all on the movement of labour. He believes in unfettered immigration, stating that “If people were allowed to cross borders at will, they would take their ideas and their labour and skills with them. This is all part of free trade...” (The Age, 24/9/05)

Of course, left-liberals also support open borders. However, whereas left-liberals typically support multiculturalism, Norberg follows the more usual right-liberal policy of wanting high immigration plus assimilation. In his view,

It is time for our liberal societies to stop apologising, to get back our self-confidence and state that tolerance and freedom is our way, and those who are out to destroy that deserve no toleration. The idea that we shouldn’t impose our values (on immigrants) is bizarre. Of course we should.

We should force everybody to accept every other human being as a free and autonomous individual with the same rights as himself. That is the law of a liberal, open society, and that is what has created the most creative and humane societies in world history. Everybody who wants to enjoy that society must conform to it. (The Age, 24/9/05)

Note that Norberg in this quote writes as a kind of upbeat booster to his own liberal society. This is, again, typical of right-liberals. Left-liberals are more inclined to see themselves as “outsiders” (even when they are very influential) and to be negative and critical of their own societies.

The fact that left-liberals often see themselves as “dissenters” is illustrated by a recent university study which found that 20% of candidates for the left-wing Australian Labor Party declared themselves to be either not very proud, or not at all proud, to be Australian.

Finally, as you would expect of a right-liberal, Norberg is anti-statist. He believes that the free market is the solution, and so doesn’t like the idea of state interference. It is no coincidence, therefore, that he believes that the state can’t create happiness.

It is his view that “it does not seem like the growth of the welfare state has increased human happiness” and that “A government that says it wants to make us happy misses the obvious fact that a government can’t give us happiness.”

A conservative reply

How might a traditionalist conservative respond to Hamilton and Norberg? I have already written a reply to Hamilton, so I will focus here on Norberg.

One thing a traditionalist can do is to reply to Norberg within the current framework of debate. For instance, Norberg claims that,

the most happy and satisfied places on earth are the ones that are most dynamic, individualist and wealthy: North America, Northern Europe and Australia.

If so, this doesn’t say much about the human capacity for happiness. As Hamilton has already pointed out, there is an epidemic of mental ill-health in North America, Northern Europe and Australia. Hamilton notes that the incidence of depression in the US grew tenfold in the five decades after WWII, despite this being a golden age of economic growth. He also cites reports that nearly one in four French people are taking tranquillisers, anti-depressants, antipsychotics or other mood-altering drugs.

Even more remarkably, in Norway, which has reputedly become “the richest country of all time”, one in four adults seeks psychiatric treatment each year.

What is also significant is the survey result, quoted by Norberg himself, showing that 48% of Americans had “downshifted” in the last five years, by reducing their working hours, declining promotions, lowering their material expectations or moving to a quieter place.

So the idea that careerism and rising material standards of living are sufficient to produce human happiness doesn’t seem to fit the facts. The free market doesn’t provide everything we need to be happy.

However, it’s not enough for traditionalists to respond at this level. We leave too much of the liberal mentality intact if we do.

First, we need to engage at the level of underlying principles. Norberg wants us to be free to choose as long as we don’t choose traditional, “pre-fabricated” roles and identities. This might not seem too much of an imposition, but we need to remember that many traditional identities became accepted and generally applied (pre-fabricated) because they reflected significant aspects of human nature.

Women being maternal and caring for their own children is a traditional role and identity; but it is no light imposition to declare this role to be illegitimate for being “prefabricated”.

In other words, it is those things we are most likely to want to choose which Norberg’s liberalism will frown upon and want to “liberate” us from.

Second, traditionalists need to question an even more basic assumption underlying the whole debate. Is it really true that the aim of human life is the pursuit of individual happiness?

In liberal societies, this assumption is widespread. One of the inalienable rights of man listed in the US Declaration of Independence is “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. A radical right-liberal, Ayn Rand, was even bold enough to assert that her philosophy was “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

This assumption, that our life’s purpose is the pursuit of our own happiness, seems false to me and even a little degrading.

It’s not that happiness doesn’t form part of a good life, but that we are made to reach beyond this to more significant things.

It’s difficult to give a complete picture of what these significant things are, but I’ll make a start. I think, for instance, it’s important for individuals to experience certain forms of “connectedness”. This might include a love of nature, an appreciation of art, romantic or marital love, a sense of ancestry, an ethnic or national identity, and our own masculine or feminine natures and the virtues associated with these.

The importance of such forms of connectedness is not just that they make us “happy”, but that they anchor us, provide a significant moral framework, add meaning to our life efforts, and most importantly provide the deeper forms of self-identity: our enduring sense of who we are.

Liberalism doesn’t want us to be connected in the way I am trying to describe; the liberal aim is for the individual to be free-floating and self-scripting, always independent and autonomous, with multiple, fluid, negotiated identities (to use liberal jargon).

It may well be possible to find a kind of surface happiness in the liberal way, through the pursuit of a purely individual happiness (shopping, careers and so on), but much of the traditional significance of life will be left out.

At any rate, we should not fall into the trap of accepting the liberal terms of debate. If we feel uncomfortable with the idea that our life’s goal is the individual pursuit of happiness, our challenge is to step outside this view and to advance a clear alternative.

(First published at Conservative Central, 27/09/2005)

Fictional identities

For some time the difference between left and right liberals on the issue of nationalism has been quite clear.

Right liberals (such as those in the Australian Liberal Party, or the American Republicans) have supported high rates of foreign immigration, but, out of a concern for social cohesion, have emphasised the idea of assimilation. In other words, they have welcomed the idea of the "melting pot".

Left liberals, on the other hand, have been more consistently supportive of multiculturalism, rather than assimilation. They too have supported high rates of foreign immigration, but with the idea that society would be made up of the many diverse cultures brought by the immigrants.

The left liberal ideal was always a short term fiction. This is particularly true in Australia where migrants arrive from such a diverse number of countries, in relatively even numbers, and are mixed together in the large capital cities.

In these circumstances, it was unlikely that 150 or more different communities would continue to flourish independently of each other, no matter how much government funding they received to do so. The connection of migrants to their home culture was always going to weaken.

A shift

Mark Latham is the new leader of the left liberal Labor Party here in Australia. He recently made a speech on the issue of national identity in which he moved Labor Party policy a little closer to the right liberal emphasis on social cohesion and assimilation.

It's possible he did this because of the war on terror. After all, both Britain and Australia have had to face the fact that a number of terrorists have emerged from within their Islamic populations. It's noteworthy that both the British and Australian Labor Parties have recently changed their policies to more greatly emphasise assimilation and social cohesion.

However, the reason Mr Latham himself gave for the shift was that the older concept of multiculturalism was unrealistic - that it did not really describe what was happening in the general population. That, in other words, it was now more fiction than fact.

The new approach

Mr Latham has outlined what he claims to be a more modern and realistic approach to multiculturalism. One which brings people together, rather than separating them. He says,

If we treat multiculturalism as as static concept, as something frozen in time - each of us pigeon-holed into past habits and identities - then inevitably, it will be a policy based more on difference than diversity. A policy that separates people from each other, rather than bringing them together to share each other's cultures and the goals of a good society.

We shouldn't assume that a person's culture comes from a narrow set of attitudes and beliefs, that they are restricted to their nationality-of-origin or ethnic group. The reality is more complex and dynamic, with people picking and choosing from a range of cultural influences. This is true of many second-generation migrants. They do not necessarily see themselves as "Chinese Australians" or "Greek Australians" but rather, citizens with a range of interests and identities.

Government policies and definitions of multiculturalism need to catch up with this reality. They should not automatically treat nationality-of-origin as a marker of cultural identity. They should recognise that multiculturalism lies, not so much between individuals, but within them - the habit of living one's life through many cultural habits.

This should be a unifying idea in Australia's national identity - a new and realistic way of thinking about multiculturalism. In a diverse nation, social cohesion is as important as respect for difference. It provides the foundations by which people of different cultural backgrounds can interact and learn from each other. This is the key to national progress: our capacity to absorb the best of the world's cultures and create a stronger Australia ...

Liberal Man

Mr Latham's vision of national identity is still firmly within a liberal framework. Liberals want people to be self created by their own will and reason. Therefore, they reject traditional ethnic nationalism because it's something we're born into, rather than choosing for ourselves.

That's why Mr Latham uses the language of "limitation" when talking about ethnic identity. He uses terms like "pigeon-holed", "narrow" and "restricted" when rejecting the ethnic identities of migrants. There is a logic to this choice of language. If you believe that we should be self-created by our own will, then an inherited ethnic identity does represent a limitation. It limits the extent to which you are a self-defining individual.

The same logic explains why Mr Latham proposes that people ought to deliberately choose a complex, diverse and evolving identity from the best of many cultures. This is a vision of the self-defining Liberal Man, creating himself directly from out of his own reason and will, rather than accepting a traditional or inherited identity.

Commercial Culture

Joseph Wakim, the founder of the Australian Arabic Council, was quick to support Mr Latham's new approach to multiculturalism. However, in a newspaper column praising Mr Latham's new policy (Herald Sun 29/4/04) he unintentionally highlighted a flaw in the policy. He wrote,

...much of the evolving cultural identity of our home-grown Lebanese youth is actually made in the USA. Anyone who spends time with the youth in question would immediately recognise the influence of the American rap culture on their wall posters and in their language; phrases such as "Yo bro" are direct imports from the cultural West, not the Middle East ...

Their attire also resembles their hip-hop heroes, with their baggy jeans, Fila jackets, adidas shoes, Nike baseball caps and goatees...

Can we stop the tidal wave of US culture into our living rooms, market place, media and streets ...?

The truth is that the average person is not making a rational choice to form a distinctive identity from the best of many cultures. This is just another liberal fiction.

As Mr Wakim let slip, what really happens is that once a traditional identity is weakened the dominant commercial culture, wherever it is from, is likely to make inroads. At the present time, the dominant commercial culture happens to be American.

Mr Latham is therefore replacing one fictional identity, that hundreds of cultures can flourish equally within a mixed population, with another fictional identity, that we can rationally construct our own identity from the best of many cultures.

We can't for several reasons. First, the truth is that we don't, in Mr Latham's words "pick and choose" our identity. The Australian Lebanese youths did not each individually decide to opt for American popular culture. With a weakening of their ancestral identity, and a weakening of the traditional Australian identity, they were simply influenced by a mass marketed popular culture. It was a multitude of commercially marketed ads, films, songs and so on, which created the Americanised Australian Lebanese youth, not individual rational choice.

Secondly, we don't necessarily get to be influenced by what is best in the many cultures around us. Sometimes we are influenced by what is worst or at least mediocre. For instance, I can still remember a "fight fair" ideal among young Australian men. The idea was that you should fight with your fists and that you should have roughly even size and numbers. This ideal is unsustainable when other ethnic groups have a tradition of carrying weapons or king-hitting (sucker punching). In this case, there is no choice but to give up the better local tradition for something worse.

Finally, a self-selected identity will not be of the same quality as a traditional, inherited ethnic identity. It will necessarily be more superficial. An ethnic identity connects us to generations past and future; it connects us deeply to a particular cultural tradition; to a church and the tradition embodied by the church; and to a particular history of achievement and sacrifice.

In comparison, the liberal identity is something easily made and easily discarded. It is, in theory at least, a temporary creation of our own will and nothing more. It does not connect us deeply to others, nor to a particular place or culture. It is, at best, "identity-lite" for those liberals who still feel the instinctive need that we have as humans for forms of connectedness and self-identity.

For these reasons, Mark Latham's new approach to multiculturalism is neither better nor worse than the old one. Neither are realistic accounts of human identity, and both are hamstrung by the liberal need to reject traditional identities in favour of self-created ones.

It's difficult to see real progress being made in terms of building up the deeper and more satisfying forms of self-identity until we open our minds to alternatives to liberal orthodoxy.

(First published at Conservative Central, 05/05/2004)

What happened to nationalism?

One of the first questions a conservative needs to ask is why the Western elites refuse to uphold traditional nationalism.

The answer, I believe, is that the Western political and intellectual classes adopted liberalism as their orthodox belief some hundreds of years ago.

Liberalism is the idea that we are human because we can use our own individual reason and will to shape who we are. The idea, in other words, is that to be fully human we must be free to define ourselves according to our own will and reason.

Liberals have therefore sought to increase individual "freedom" by removing any impediments to the self-defining individual. And, unfortunately, traditional nationalism is one of these impediments.

Why? Because traditional nationalism is based on ethnicity. What binds a people together as a nation, in the traditional understanding, is some kind of common heritage, whether it be a shared ancestry, culture, language, religion or history.

Belonging to such a national tradition is an important part of our self-identity: of our sense of who we are. But it's something that is inherited, and not chosen. So it offends the first principle of liberalism: that we must be self-created by our own reason and will.

Michael Ignatieff

For people who are not liberal intellectuals, this might all sound a little unfamiliar. But listen to intellectuals themselves, and you quickly discover the importance of such concepts.

For instance, one of the most influential intellectuals on the issue of nationalism is Michael Ignatieff. He is a Canadian born writer and a Harvard professor, who made a BBC TV series and wrote a book on nationalism in the 1990s.

You can see the influence of liberal theory even in the way Michael Ignatieff chooses to define nationalism. He distinguishes between a "good" nationalism, which he calls civic nationalism, and a "bad" nationalism, which he calls ethnic nationalism (which is effectively traditional nationalism).

In defining the "bad" form of nationalism, Professor Ignatieff writes that "Ethnic nationalism claims ... that an individual's deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen. It is the national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community."

Why define ethnic nationalism in this way? Because it highlights what is wrong with ethnic nationalism, when liberal first principles are considered.

That's why ethnic nationalism is here defined negatively as something "inherited, not chosen" and as something which "defines the individual" rather than being defined by the individual. These features of ethnic nationalism are unacceptable to the liberal ideal of the self-defining individual, and so are emphasised in Professor Ignatieff's definition.

It's much the same when Professor Ignatieff defines the "good" form of nationalism, namely civic nationalism. He writes that,

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

In this quote, civic nationalism is defined positively, in terms of liberal first principles. Civic nationalism is good, by definition, because individuals aren't connected by (unchosen) "common roots", but merely by an agreement to live within a democratic system. So, rather than being shaped by something inherited, they are free to "shape their own lives".

Cosmopolitanism

Michael Ignatieff is therefore acting consistently with liberal first principles when he rejects traditional ethnic nationalism in favour of civic nationalism.

And what can we say about civic nationalism? Can a common commitment to democratic politics give people an adequate sense of national community?

Most conservatives would probably find such a form of connection to be superficial compared to traditional ethnic nationalism. And, in fact, Michael Ignatieff concedes this. He admits that traditional nationalism's "psychology of belonging" has "greater depth than civic nationalism's".

This is not such a problem for Professor Ignatieff, as he is not interested in national belonging anyway. He confesses that he is not really a nationalist of any kind but a cosmopolitan, and that the point of civic nationalism is merely to help maintain social order.

He describes his overall outlook as follows:

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

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

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

This could hardly be more clear. Civic nationalism is not supposed to provide a form of national belonging. It's real purpose is to uphold the nation state, so that we have the order and security "to live cosmopolitan lives".

Provincial confines

So the logic of the situation goes something like this. Conservatives like traditional ethnic nationalism because it's an important part of our self-identity and helps us to feel rooted within a particular tradition.

Liberals, though, are ultimately led to reject such nationalism, because they want to be self-defined through their own reason and will, rather than through an unchosen form of nationalism.

That's why liberals talk about traditional nationalism negatively as something limiting to the individual, as when Michael Ignatieff reminisces of the 1980s that,

With blithe lightness of mind, we assumed that the world was moving irrevocably beyond nationalism, beyond tribalism, beyond the provincial confines of the identities inscribed in our passports, towards a global culture that was to be our new home.

It is no accident, that Professor Ignatieff dismisses traditional nationalism here because it "confines" our identity to something "provincial". Anything which impedes our own self-creation will be regarded as something small or limiting or constraining by a liberal.

So what is the task for conservatives? Obviously, it's not enough to complain to liberals that they are creating individual rootlessness. For liberals, this is not necessarily a bad thing - Michael Ignatieff, for instance, is happy to defend the existence of what he unselfconsciously calls "rootless cosmopolitans".

The Canadian columnist Mark Steyn made a similar point recently when he observed that,

As an idea, the multicultural welfare state is too weak to have any purchase on us; that, indeed, is its principal virtue in the eyes of its few fanatical zealots ... politically speaking, it's an allegiance for those who disdain allegiance.

It is, to put it the Steyn way, no use complaining about weak forms of national allegiance to people who view national allegiance negatively as a constraint.

What we have to do is challenge the philosophy which leads people to think of nationalism as something limiting to the individual, rather than as a fulfulling part of our self-identity.

And this means challenging liberalism as an orthodox belief among Western intellectuals.

(First published at Conservative Central, 15/04/2004)

Does diversity allow for local attachments?

In yesterday's Herald Sun came news of a horror car crash in Footscray, a western suburb of Melbourne.

An African migrant, panicking when her car mounted the kerb, hit the accelerator instead of the brake. The car ploughed into an outdoor dining area, killing a man, himself a migrant from Korea.

A Herald Sun journalist at the scene reported as follows:

A big crowd had gathered behind the blue and white police tapes. There were tall men in colourful patterned shirts and tall women in vivid turbans and long dresses.

It could have been in downtown Mogadishu or Addis Ababa. There wasn't a word of English being spoken in the hubbub.

But this was Footscray, not Somalia or Ethiopa ...

Once this street was almost entirely a Vietnamese strip.

Now it's in transition again, and yesterday, in the wake of the tragic accident outside Cafe D'Afrique, racial tensions ran high.

So Footscray is changing yet again. It was once an Anglo working class suburb, then a mixed European one, then Vietnamese and now increasingly African. All in the space of about 35 years.

Which raises the issue of local attachments.

The attachments people have radiate outward. First, you might identify with your local town or suburb, then perhaps your city or region, then your state, then your nation.

But to invest yourself emotionally in a place requires some degree of confidence in its continuity. If we think that we will all too easily lose something we love and identify with, then we tend to withdraw emotionally from it.

So how is anyone supposed to form that key, original, local attachment to Footscray? If you held a reasonable belief that the cultural character of Footscray would change dramatically many times over within just a few decades, then how could you lay down roots there in the sense of identifying with its character and culture?

And if we can't develop a deeper attachment to the place we live in, then won't this also disrupt our larger attachments, such as to our nation?

Yet Footscray is our future unless the current policy of diversity and mass immigration is reconsidered.

Whilst on this theme it was interesting to read the comments of Emeritus Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki in yesterday's Age. The professor was one of the architects of multicultural policy in Australia. He now admits that his immigration policy is necessarily a very expensive one.

He said of black African migrants to rural Australia that:

You cannot dump people in a rural community unless you make a special provision for resettlement services on the widest possible scale.

Immigration includes, very prominently, the lengthy process of resettlement - an always expensive process.

Return to Pleasantville

Robert Bosler is a creative kind of left liberal. In a recent web article he invites us to go on a journey with him into a "world of vision" which will give us a "treasure of insight" into the heart and soul of the Australian nation.

The purpose of this journey? To discover why the right-liberal Liberal Party is in danger of becoming irrelevant. He asks us first to meditate a while, and then to dive into the depths of the warm soft pulsing body of our nation's heart and mind.

Once there, he suggests that we go back in time to 1944, the year in which Sir Robert Menzies founded the modern Liberal Party. What do we discover about Australians at this time? According to our guide, Mr Bosler,

It's grey, it's all grey. There's no colour. They're all doing what they're doing but they seem like they are all boxed in. They're all sort of trapped within themselves.

This image of Australia in the mid-1940s reminds me of the film Pleasantville. In Pleasantville a teenage boy and girl are transported back in time to the 1950s. The small American town they find themselves in is pleasant to live in, but literally grey. The residents are "liberated" and first experience colour in their lives when the teenage girl starts to sex things up with the local boys.

So, we are supposed to accept that 1940s Australia was another grey Pleasantville, in which everyone was boxed in or trapped. But trapped by what? Mr Bosler explains that,

It looks like every man has set jobs to do, as the breadwinner. That's all. It looks like every woman has to have a baby and clean the house. That's all. This is no joke; it's not much better than that for man or woman. That's not life as we know, from where we come; but there it is, all grey and boxed in, in 1944.

Mr Bosler does, at least, give us a straightforward answer: Australians in 1944 were trapped by traditional gender roles. His claim that this is all there was to life is difficult to accept in a literal sense, but at least we know what he is driving at ideologically.

What happens next? Robert Menzies realises what has to be done and promises to "provide people with more individual choice and freedom". He inspirationally establishes the Liberal Party to achieve this goal.

Mr Bosler, in other words, approves of Mr Menzies' liberal platform of "more individual choice and freedom". But, on travelling forward to the the 1950s, when Menzies became Prime Minister, we find that things have not improved:

It's still grey. The men and women of Australia are still all trapped and caught up in the roles life has set for them. It's like they are living on traintracks. It's a stilted existence, this. What is it gonna take for them to be free?

What will it take to liberate the people? An explosion. And this is what happens when we move forward again to the 1960s. In the 1960s the eruption of freedom is,

Huge. Boundaries break and boxed in lives burst, exploded. Colour!

And what happens after our liberation, when colour has arrived in the world? Well, the 1970s are a bit of an unstable experimentation with new freedoms, but in the 1980s personal freedom is securely in place. Mr Bosler describes the 80s in the following, excited terms,

... look at the colour! Look at the vibrancy and richness of life. There's a woman excelling in a professional career, heading up a boardroom. There's a man staying home looking after his children. The people are, individually, free. If only Mr Menzies could see this. These people have individual choice. Look, they can do what they want, be what they want ...

The crying need for the fully free individual, the time of individual choice, has arrived. Achieved. Done. Mr Menzies, and your Liberal Party, what you set out to achieve is now here, in abundance. Whatever any individual wants to do ... they can set out freely to do it.

History

So, what can we say about Robert Bosler's imaginative outline of modern history? Perhaps the most obvious thing to say is that it is a fully-fledged liberal history.

Liberals believe that we should be self-created by our individual will and reason. One thing that we don't choose according to our individual will and reason is our sex. Therefore, liberals don't like the idea that who we are and what we do might be influenced by our manhood or womanhood.

This explains why liberals view traditional family roles so negatively. Such roles are decided by our sex, rather than by our individual reason. For a liberal this is an impediment to free choice. In Robert Bosler's words, it's something that we are boxed in by, or caught up in, or trapped by.

And what is the best way to show that we have escaped such sex-based family roles? By choosing to do the opposite of what is traditional. We show that we are personally "liberated" from sex-based family roles when, as Robert Bosler puts it, a woman becomes the breadwinner and heads up a boardroom or when a man stays at home to look after his children.

But are we really liberated by such sex-role reversal? Is our sphere of choice really so enlarged that colour finally enters our lives?

I don't think so. I doubt if the men of the 1940s and 50s were yearning to swap places with their wives. It's highly unlikely that they felt terribly restricted by being limited to a masculine role within the family.

And as for the men of today, the 60s revolution which gave us a theoretical choice to become househusbands also took away a great deal. We no longer have the family stability that the men of the 40s and 50s enjoyed. A lot of men today will experience divorce and separation from their families.

Nor is there the same kind of positive respect and reward for our efforts to be breadwinners. The mass media is too concerned with issues of female independence to accord men respect for working hard to provide for their families.

The men of the 40s and 50s had a stronger national identity, a stronger masculine identity and a more stable family life to give their working lives a meaning. There is more "vibrancy" and "richness" in this, than in a theoretical choice to become a househusband, a role which only 1% of modern Australian men have actually taken up.

Relationships

There are some things that Robert Bosler gets right. He recognises that a right liberal like Robert Menzies shared the same underlying philosophy as a left liberal like himself. He finds some warmth for Robert Menzies as a fellow philosophical liberal, something that most Labor Party types are not perceptive enough to do.

Also, although he is wrong to suggest that Robert Menzies' liberalism was somehow new or courageous in 1944 (liberalism has been orthodox for many generations) he is right to portray the period from the late 60s to the mid 90s as a radically liberal period in Western history.

In other words, Mr Bosler is right to claim that from the late 1960s there has been a particularly intense effort to achieve the goals of liberal individualism: to bring about a situation in which individuals "can do what they want, be what they want."

The problem as conservatives see it, is that to achieve this goal you have to destroy whatever impedes individual will, and this includes most of the things which give meaning and identity to our individual lives.

What you end up with are highly atomised individuals, who are free to pursue relatively superficial things. The traditional "anchors" to life which once gave people a sense of connectedness are lost, leaving people free in a more negative sense of being "free-floating".

This more troubled side to liberal individualism is not entirely lost to Robert Bosler. After explaining that the goals of liberal individualism had been secured in the 1980s, he then points out that individuals were now just that: individuals. And that the task now is to find ways to bring individuals into some sort of relationship.

The Liberal Party, claims Bosler, is losing relevance because it is continuing to seek greater individual choice when this has already been achieved, and what is required is to bring individuals back into relationship with each other.

One problem with this argument is that it's not only the Liberal Party which is continuing to push an individualistic philosophy: the Labor Party under Mark Latham is pursuing the same thing. Latham, for instance, believes that the solution to the social alienation of men is a further breakdown of traditional sex roles, so that more men become primary caregivers at home.

Latham, in other words, wants to cure a "relationships" problem created by liberal individualism with more of the same individualism.

Furthermore, Bosler is not very good at suggesting ways in which people might establish better relationships. He talks much about a better relationship with nature, which is admirable, but a relationship with the environment is hardly adequate to fulfil our social natures.

Apart from that all we get are general assertions such as the following:

Cut the relationship, and each individual withers and dies. Cut the ties that bind us together, cut the bond, cut our brotherhood and sisterhood, and we suffer.

All too true. But this is a lesson that all liberals need to learn. Our sense of connectedness, our given sense of who we are, whether as members of a particular ethnic group, nation, sex, or family is too important to be sacrificed to the goal of an individualistic freedom to choose in any direction.

This was just as true in the 1940s and 50s as it is now. Robert Bosler would have us believe that liberal individualism was a liberating force 50 years ago, rescuing us from grey lives, but is only just now interfering with human relationships. In fact, it has been undercutting such relationships for generations and will continue to do so until we decisively reject it as the orthodox philosophy of the West.

(First published at Conservative Central, 28/03/2004)

When the wheel turns

I left school in the mid-80s expecting to spend a few years of single independence at uni before embarking on a career and marrying.

Was I in for a shock. By the time I was ready to settle down (at about the age of 23) relationships between men and women had changed so radically that marriage seemed an unlikely prospect.

Young middle class women had been brought up to value independence above all else. I was aware of this and thought that I would have to make some compromises to accommodate this within a marriage.

What stunned me was how quickly any notion of compromise was lost. Many of the most attractive girls went "all the way" with their commitment to independence by simply deferring the very idea of marriage and children until some unspecified point in their mid to late 30s.

What is more, there was a kind of feminist triumphalism in the media. It was common to be told that women were now happily independent and self-sufficient and that traditional men were obsolete.

The situation was made more difficult by the personal behaviour of many young women. A lot of young women acted in a coarse, mannish way and chose to date "the wrong sort of guy".

Added to all this, the divorce rate was rising and divorce laws seemed to leave men with little legal protection in a marriage.

The question to be asked is how do men react when put in such a situation? When the normal process of settling down is made so difficult, how do men adapt psychologically?

I believe that many of the men caught in this situation did make a kind of psychological transformation. They found a balance in their relationships with individualistic women, by becoming more individualistic in their own outlook.

They found that now that they weren't expected to take care of women, that their lives were lighter and more "free-floating". They tried to live by the benefits of this, as this was what was now available to them.

They had been forced to become more self-sufficient, and to set their own personal goals, rather than to fulfil goals related to romantic love or family life.

For some men, this meant deferring their own commitment to family and career, for others it meant chasing their own materialistic, lifestyle goals to which their partners were expected to contribute, without making burdensome demands.

Lone women

How have things worked out for my generation now that we've reached our mid-thirties? Not so well, I think.

The first problem is that many women reached their thirties and found that they no longer wanted to do the careerist, single girl lifestyle anymore. They now wanted to marry and have a family.

Unfortunately, they were all too successful in attacking the traditional "family man" ethos when they were in their 20s. Men have gone through a major psychological adaptation away from their protector, provider instincts: it's not easy for men to change back.

And so you get the kind of lament made by Martha Kirkland, in an email to Henry Makow. Martha is a 30-something woman living in New York, who, despite being bright, thin, attractive and funny, finds herself without a partner.

Martha is understandably unimpressed by the fact that many men ask her on the first date how much she earns or whether she has a trust fund. She can't understand "how grace, charm and feminine essences no longer seemingly have a value".

She has observed that "The last thing my men friends want is any woman to be dependent upon them, especially emotionally and secondarily financially."

The conclusion Martha has drawn from this is that it is she and many of her women friends who are "at a relatively young age dinosaurs".

It's interesting for Martha Kirkland to put things this way because it mirrors what traditionally minded men felt in our twenties, rather than our thirties. That back then it was women who did not sufficiently value their "grace, charm and feminine essences"; that it was women who did not want to depend emotionally or financially on a man; and that it was traditional men who found themselves at a young age declared obsolete.

Meaning & identity

So the wheel has turned. It is now women, rather than men, who want to follow their instincts to marry, and who are disoriented by the individualistic values of the opposite sex.

Should men take comfort from this? I don't think so, because as Henry Makow rightly points out in response to Martha Kirkland's email, the situation is hardly ideal for men either.

He writes that:

Feminism lets men "off the hook". We no longer have to take responsibility for families. Instead, we can do as we please. In my case, that meant a search for meaning and identity.

Ironically, I learned that these are rooted in the masculine role feminism allowed me to forego.

In other words, a large part of meaning and identity for men is derived from our masculine role within a family, whether as husbands or fathers. So, even though a genderless, individualistic role might feel lighter and less burdensome, it is less likely to leave a man feeling fulfilled.

Martha Kirkland herself makes another good criticism of the newer, individualistic role for men. She explains that,

I attempt to persuade [these men] that the wildly successful feminist does not become the Dove Girl at home. That they are asking the impossible, a totally womanly creature that is utterly self-sustaining, emotionally, spiritually and financially. I attempt to illustrate how this creature in fact cannot co-exist. Or rather co-exist, in the same female body, mind, spirit.

What Martha is saying here is that a woman who is forced to become emotionally and financially independent is less likely to be attractively feminine at home.

I think this is generally true. A woman with a husband who intelligently protects her from some of the harshness of life, is much more likely to reveal her softer, more vulnerable feminine qualities.

It's not realistic to expect that most women will be ruggedly self-sufficient and softly feminine at the same time: this would be to expect a woman to be contradictory things.

So men ultimately have to choose one thing or the other; fully-natured, heterosexual men are more likely to want feminine women, even if this means taking on the "burden" of a protective role within the family.

Responses

I have seen a number of different responses to the situation women now find themselves in.

The relationships columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun, Toby Green, has for some years now urged men to ignore the feminism of the 80s and 90s and to return to an authentic masculinity.

She has spoken of the treatment of men by feminist women that:

We huffed and puffed and blew your masculinity down. Maybe it was the headiness of the battle, but we got carried away. At some point, we needed to be saved from ourselves ...

Has it not occurred to you that you could not really be as terrible as we keep telling you you are ...

As a mate, I will tell some in-house secrets. Some of us know we are out on a limb and do not know how to tell you without losing face that, although we may not need to be protected (I did not say dominated) and taken care of, we like it. It feels good."

Robyn Riley, another Herald Sun columnist, has taken a different approach to the situation of contemporary women. In a recent column she angrily attacked those men who, in their late 30s, still "don't want to deal with the responsibility of family, housework and career".

She doesn't want to admit that the male attitude is a predictable reaction to an earlier feminist individualism. To the suggestion that the lack of commitment is because "in the 90s, men felt they were repressed" she responds that "If they were, it was only for a decade, for goodness sake."

And she then admits that "What bugs me is that the minute women look like winning some equality, these delinquents start stamping their feet and having tips in their hair and riding around on scooters." (Herald Sun 12/2/04)

And here we have the problem. For an orthodox liberal feminist like Robyn Riley "equality" means female independence. This is because liberals believe that we should be autonomous, in the sense of being created by our own individual reason or will.

It would be very hard for an orthodox liberal to admit that we need someone else to help us to fulfil our lives. And so Robyn Riley is committed to the idea that women should be independent, and that men should do whatever is required to uphold this kind of female individualism.

There's little room here for understanding real world psychology, including how men are likely to psychologically adapt to the presence of feminist women. It is just the imposition of ideology onto one area of life which is intensely personal and instinctive.

The angry, feminist, anti-male approach of Robyn Riley is unlikely to convince a new generation of men to recommit to family life. The more sophisticated approach of Toby Green, which is able to recognise gender difference, and which allows a natural interdependence of men and women, is much more likely to allow men and women to reestablish healthy relationships.

(Professional duties still call. Regular services will resume Saturday. This article was first published at Conservative Central on 14/02/04.)

The Bahai vision of unity

I was walking through a local arcade recently when I came across a pamphlet from the Bahai church.

I'd heard of the Bahais before but didn't know much about them. I was surprised to discover just how intensely liberal the Bahai faith is.

The Bahai church originated in Persia in the mid-nineteenth century. It operates now in many countries, including America and Australia, and claims a membership of around 6 million.

The central tenet of the Bahai faith is the unity of mankind. The idea seems to be that as God made us out of a single substance we are to aim at a kind of single identity.

Thus one of the Bahai prophets is recorded as saying:

Since we have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest.

The result of this belief is that Bahais must attempt to transcend particular forms of identity in favour of a single universal one. As the Bahais themselves put it:

Bahais see unity as the law of life ..."

Guided and inspired by such principles, the Bahai community has accumulated more than a century of experience in creating models of unity that transcend race, culture, nationality, class, and the differences of sex and religion, providing empirical evidence that humanity ... can live as a unified global society.

What's interesting is that the Bahais have arrived, through their religious beliefs, at a similar political outlook as Western liberals. Western liberals also want the individual to transcend particular forms of identity, as these are believed to impede our self-creation through individual will and reason.

In fact, Bahai writings sound remarkably like liberal ones, promising that the abolition of particular distinctions will bring about peace, liberation, equality and progress.

The thing is, though, do we really want to abolish particular forms of identity? Would we really want to live in a world in which, according to the Bahais, there would only be "one common fatherland," "one universal langauge," and the abolition of anything, including "cultural expression" which would make one portion of humanity "intrinsically distinct from another portion."

Think about what this would mean. We would no longer be able to enjoy a special sense of connection to our own particular national tradition, nor appreciate contact with other distinctive national cultures.

We would no longer be able to enjoy the more positive aspects of gender difference, nor identify in a positive way with our own sex (one Bahai pamphlet specifically outlaws the practice of men identifying as being a "masculine soul in a male body").

We would no longer be able to uphold the positive aspects of class cultures within our own countries. These class cultures traditionally provided standards of behaviour and distinctive forms of culture within a national community.

What we would have, instead, is a further descent into a society built on atomised, rootless, denatured individuals. Such societies seem to be easily dominated by a globalised commercial culture of little depth. They are not characterised, as the Bahais would have as believe, by a profound spiritual life.

In short, what the Bahai church offers is a religious pathway into liberal political activism. Even though the origins of Bahai lie outside Western liberalism, by asserting an absolute and abstract unity between people, the Bahai faith requires, just as Western liberalism does, the abolition of particular distinctions - an abolition of the very things which enrich our lives spiritually and which a church concerned for the spiritual life of its adherents should seek to support.

(This is one from the archive. It was first published at Conservative Central on 24/09/2003. It's the busiest few days of the year for me professionally, so I hope readers don't mind me cross-posting.)

A patriotic Bragg?

Back in 1990 Billy Bragg released his own version of the socialist hymn The Internationale:

So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one earth on which to live.

Today Bragg’s message has changed. He is no longer vowing to “end the vanity of nations”. Instead, he has written a book describing his love for his country, England.

In The Progressive Patriot: A Search for Belonging Bragg tells us that he loves his country in the same way he loves his son, as both are a part of him for which he wants the best and shares responsibility. He asks why he should be any less proud of one love than the other.

So Bragg does experience patriotism as something positive – as a kind of love. But can he effectively defend his own national tradition?

I think not. What comes first for Bragg is his “progressive” (i.e. liberal) politics. So he can only accept a national identity which fits within this politics – and this isn’t much.

Why? According to liberalism what counts is that we are self-determining. We are to shape who we are according to our own choices. It is then thought unjust if we restrict the choices of others by discriminating against them.

This understanding of things is lethal to a traditional national identity. Traditional nationalism was based on a shared ethnicity: on a common culture, ancestry, language, religion and history. This is what established the idea of a distinct “people”.

But we don’t determine membership of such a national tradition for ourselves: it is something we are born into. So an ethnic nationalism comes to be thought of negatively within a liberal politics as an impediment to individual choice.

Worse yet, an ethnic nationalism is thought discriminatory and unjust as it places a restriction on the choices of the “other” – on those who aren’t part of the nation.

So how does Bragg manage to negotiate the idea of a liberal patriotism? One argument he makes is to compare multiculturalism to class:

Class, he says, is a social distinction which still exists but no longer acts as a barrier to achievement. “So perhaps we should think of a multicultural society in the same way we perceive our present classless society, as an evolutionary process which does not necessitate the abolition of cultural differences or the assimilation of one group into another. The multicultural society would be one in which ethnicity, like class, no longer matters.

Notice the emphasis here. The concern is with ethnicity as a potential barrier to the individual. It is allowed to exist as long as it is made not to matter.

(And this is the more soft-line liberal rejection of ethnicity. The hardline attitude is to treat an ethnic tradition as an oppressive social construct, thereby denying its real existence.)

How can there continue to exist distinct peoples, each with their distinctive culture, if ethnicity is not allowed to matter? Bragg apparently believes his British identity can be based on a tradition of tolerance or fairness, rather than ethnicity. But as is frequently pointed out, such values are hardly unique to any one country. As it happens there are Australian liberals who think that our own national identity should be based on exactly the same thing – the tradition of a “fair go”.

Trying to base a national identity on values which are compatible with liberalism tends to make all national identities the same – and therefore meaningless.

To have a love of our own tradition is part of being fully natured as a man. Even though we don’t determine for ourselves the tradition we belong to, it is not a restriction on us, but the very opposite, as it allows us to live through our nature more completely.

Its absence – its being made not to matter – is the more serious barrier to what we might have become.

What does diversity research tell us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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