Liberal intolerance is getting noticed

Kirsten Powers, a Democratic commentator, is bewildered that liberals, who are supposed to be committed to the value of tolerance, are increasingly intolerant of opposing views:

How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called intellectuals. They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

James Kalb has written a response agreeing that liberalism is intolerant but setting out why this follows from liberal principles.

I'd like to follow on in the same vein. Liberalism is neutral in a limited way. It is neutral only in the sense that individuals are supposed to define their own subjective goods and respect the right of others to do the same. That viewpoint isn't really neutral as it assumes a number of things philosophically, for instance, that objective values can't be known, or agreed upon, or don't exist; and that individual goods can be understood separately from communally held ones.

But leaving that aside, liberalism's limited neutrality runs into another problem. If my main moral responsibility to others is that I tolerate their right to subjectively define their own goods, then that means that what fills the gap in terms of public moral standards are values of non-interference such as tolerance, openness, non-discrimination, inclusiveness and so on. These values then become the new standard of public good that people can be thought of as contravening.

It sounds odd, but liberals can then declare their intolerance of violations of tolerance. Here for instance is the right-liberal Jonah Norberg:

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...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...Everybody who wants to enjoy that society must conform to it. (The Age, 24/9/05)

Force, conform, liberal law, no toleration - these are the terms employed by Norberg who then states that his highest values are tolerance and freedom.

The contradiction is made worse by the fact that it is so easy to run foul of liberal tolerance on a variety of significant issues. For instance, under Norberg's "law of liberalism" I cannot defend any distinction in what men and women do in society. For instance, I cannot defend the idea that women should not be combat troops, as that would place a limit on how women might define their own good. Similarly, I cannot defend border controls as that restricts immigrants defining their own good; nor can I defend traditional marriage, as that limits all those who cannot accept heterosexual fidelity from defining their own good.

The liberal principle forces the outcome on a great many of the most serious issues to be decided in a society. Instead of defining my own goods, I end up having many of the most important ones defined for me by the procedural principle that liberals have established.

In the traditionalist view, it is better for at least some goods to be decided on by a community, in part formally, through a process of politics, and in part informally, through a process of culture and tradition.

That's because some of the most important goods I am likely to hold are aspects of a communal life; if a community does not uphold them, then they are lost as individual goods. You cannot respect the life of the individual, without taking seriously the goods embedded within the community to which the individual belongs.

Second, the outcome of what goods are upheld within a society ought not to be left to a procedural principle, such as that asserted by liberals. That's a curiously mechanical way to decide what goods will triumph in a society; it is also a way that fails to find a harmonious balance between competing goods, or to weigh the real merits of the goods under consideration.

I'll give a concrete example. Brendan Eich, a man with much success in the technology industry, was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla because some years ago he made a small donation to a campaign to defend traditional marriage.

That's how things work in a liberal system. There is an issue of whether two men or two women should be able to marry. The issue is decided on a procedural basis: the principle is that we should tolerate people self-defining their own good, therefore it is decided that homosexuals should not be limited in defining their own good and should therefore be allowed to marry. People who oppose this are thought to be contravening the tolerance principle and are therefore treated intolerantly.

That's not how things should be done. It is both too contradictory (intolerance in the name of tolerance) and too mechanical (decided according to a procedural principle). What should determine the outcome are questions to do with the nature of marriage itself as an institution; the purposes its serves; of what upholds it as an institution; and of how it fits within the larger order on which a society is based.

Mistaking the state

From a comment at Bonald's site we get the following:

Rachida Dati, herself a Muslim and former French Minister of Justice (garde des Sceaux) told the National Assembly that “The Republic is alone capable of uniting men and women of different origins, colours and religions around the principles of tolerance, liberty, solidarity and laïcité making the Republic truly one and indivisible”

When I read that I was struck immediately by its cruelty: it establishes the Republic as a neutral space with "procedural values" (values aimed at function) at its heart.

But France is not a neutral space, it is the homeland of the French and the one place that the French tradition has a chance to exist.

It would be different if representatives of the French state were to proclaim "We represent and defend the French tradition, but we will provide protection within our society for those minorities who do not belong to the mainstream tradition."

And what happens if you do belong to the mainstream tradition in a society which decides to be a neutral space ruled by procedural values? Most likely the state can't wait to reduce you to one amongst many, as this fits in better with the concept of such a society. Why should one group predominate if the focus is on neutrality?

The beginning of thought

Bonald threw down the gauntlet to liberals earlier this year in a post titled "Rejecting the Enlightenment is only the beginning of thought".

He began by noting that liberals tend to reduce possible alternatives to either the liberal position or something nasty:

One way that the Enlightenment controls the minds of billions, locking them into a degrading and absurd mental slavery, is by making people imagine they know what’s on the other side. “Without the social contract…tyranny! Without separation of Church and state...religious warfare! Without feminism...rape! Without capitalism...communism! Without cosmopolitanism...Nazis!"

Bonald hits liberals where it is likely to hurt most, by noting that this poverty of vision represents "a narrow, unimaginative, and parochial worldview."

Furthermore, liberals - in claiming to be neutral - evade the task of having to justify their particular conception of the Good as being objectively true:

The key to rejecting liberalism (the political expression of the Enlightenment project) is to realize that it’s a swindle. It claims to stand above every particular conception of the Good, granting freedom to all and favoritism to none, when in fact it imposes its own narrow vision on all of us. Its claims to neutrality just mean that it gets to impose itself without ever being forced to argue (or even assert) that its claims are objectively true, and that it never has to assume the responsibility that comes from being a recognized establishment.

But in rejecting liberalism it becomes possible to take a more sophisticated approach to issues of human flourishing. Bonald gives the example of relations between the sexes:

Now that you realize that gender roles are not inherently iniquitous, you can finally start thinking about the proper relationship between the sexes. Just because you notice that women are being treated differently than men in some context, you can no longer automatically conclude that the women are being treated unfairly, as you would have done when you were a liberal. On the other hand, it is possible that the women are being treated unfairly. What’s more, there is the new possibility–undreamed of by liberals–that the men are being treated unfairly. You must dig into the particulars of the case, the historical context and social functions; you must then apply general principles of natural law (none of which are as simplistic as “gender equality”). You must try to conceptualize the universal masculine and feminine virtues that society should foster, remembering that any given instantiation of masculine and feminine roles will be conditioned by culture and economic organization. Given this background, do the laws and culture provide a path for the achievement of masculine and feminine excellence? Or are the man’s protective instinct and the woman’s nurturing instinct being thwarted or deformed? These are subtle questions.

It's a long paragraph, but it gives a good picture of how traditionalists tend to think about such issues and why traditionalism can't be easily expressed through simple slogans.

Excellent chapter: The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America

I've now completed the fourth chapter of Eric Kaufmann's The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. I have to say it was a tremendously interesting chapter of the book.

If you recall, the first few chapters made the case that up to the 1880s the American elite had a double consciousness. On the one hand they saw themselves in positive terms as a dominant Anglo-Saxon ethny. On the other hand, they were committed to a policy of open borders that changed the demographics away from the Anglo-Saxon founding stock.

The fourth chapter looks more specifically at attitudes toward immigration in the 1800s. Up to the 1880s, immigration was opposed by various working men's organisations, as it was thought to erode workers' conditions and also from a patriotic consciousness. It was favoured, though, by the Republican business elite, as well as the media and religious elites.

Some of the employers were very blunt in their reasoning:

"All I want in my business is muscle," declared a large employer of labor in California in the 1870s. "I don't care whether it be obtained from a Chinaman or a white man - from a mule or a horse!"

...a New York merchant boasted that machinery and immigration made the American capitalist as independent of American workingmen "as the imported slaves made Roman patricians independent of Roman laborers"

There were also political reasons for supporting mass immigration:

Generally speaking, radical liberals in the northeastern United States prior to 1900 affirmed two basic principles: individual liberty and equal opportunity. This meant a repudiation of legislated immigration restriction.

The Protestant elite, at this time, also favoured open borders. One of the reasons for this was the prevailing climate of laissez-faire in which it was thought that leaving things to work out for themselves would bring the right outcomes. For some people, this meant leaving things to the market; for others it meant a Darwinian survival of the fittest; and for some Protestants it meant leaving things to Divine Providence. For this reason, some of the Protestant elite did not want to interfere with the free movement of peoples:

Commentators of the day were just as tenacious in arguing that it was wrong to interfere with the providential hand of God which had served America so well: "Why have we to make a better plan for the Almighty than He has made for Himself," complained George Seward. "Can we not be just above things and leave consequences for themselves?" Popular preacher and Protestant intellectual Henry Ward Beecher concurred with Seward and Williams, provoking fury in the San Francisco press by insisting that the white residents of California should refrain from trying to impede the will of God and the evolution of nature.

So there were major similarities and major differences with the situation today. A similarity is that the Republican Party elite was connected to big business interests which wanted open borders as a source of cheap labour. The church elite was also in favour of open borders, just as it is today.

One difference is that organised labour was at this time committed to patriotism and to restrictions on immigration. Another difference is that the American elite, in spite of their commitment to open borders, still looked on themselves in positive terms as a dominant Anglo-Saxon ethny.

How did the elite try to reconcile their support for open borders with their desire to identify as Anglo-Saxons? Some tried to convince themselves that open borders would not lead to massive population transfers. S. Wells Williams, for instance, claimed that the Chinese were not as numerous as some thought them to be and that they would probably return home. Anyway, Williams was sure that it was part of America's destiny to remain a Protestant Nation:

"To my own mind, there is no fear of a great or irresistible immigration....Thirty years have passed since the providence of God placed this region [California] under the control of a Protestant nation."

As for George Seward (quoted above) he believed that you could have mass immigration from China and keep the races socially separated (he said there was no obligation to offer your daughters in marriage to the newcomers).

I'm not sure that this dual consciousness is not a more general part of the liberal mind. It's not uncommon for liberals, when embarking on policies that will radically reshape society, to dismiss claims that the policies will destroy older institutions. And here is what a former Australian PM, John Howard, said around the time that he was greatly increasing Asian immigration into Australia:

It's perfectly possible for an Anglo-Celtic Australian who sort of has a lot of reverence to the traditional institutions of the country, and the traditional characteristics of Australia, and to want to hang on to those, to be completely tolerant and colour-blind and so on.

It's possible that the less nihilistic of liberals have to have a kind of double consciousness. They are politically committed to policies such as open borders (because of ideas about non-discrimination or neutrality in public policy), but still value the older traditions and identities. And so they are forced to cling "optimistically" to certain beliefs about how things might still work out alright in the end, for instance, by claiming that open borders won't attract a transforming migration, or that private preferences might keep a tradition going even if public policies aren't allowed to do so.

In the 1880s, the intellectual climate began to change. A social gospel movement emerged in the churches which rejected the idea of laissez-faire and which therefore allowed itself to support a deliberate policy of restricting immigration in order to improve working-class living standards.

Sections of the Anglo elite also began to lose confidence, faced with the demographic reality then emerging in the larger cities, that America would always be dominated by an Anglo-Saxon yeomanry (independent, rural farmers). Furthermore, a progressive intellectual movement emerged which, at this time, remained patriotic rather than cosmopolitan. Finally, the workers' movement also continued to push for immigration restriction as a means of protecting living conditions.

This changing of the political outlook (the creation of an alliance between churches, labour organisations, progressive intellectuals and elite Anglo-Saxons) was sufficient to bring in immigration reform in the 1920s, which was designed to limit any further demographic transformation of the United States.

I will be very interested to read Eric Kaufmann's explanation of how this coalition was eventually defeated. I'm expecting, similar to what happened in Australia, that part of the explanation is the shift amongst progressives to a cosmopolitan view - but we'll see what Kaufmann has to say.

Kaufmann's book has been a very informative read so far; it can be purchased via Amazon here.

The new girl guide promise & the origins of liberalism

The Girl Guides in the UK have changed their promise. No longer will the girl guides pledge to "love my God" but instead they will promise "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs."

This got me to thinking about the way one branch of liberalism may have developed over time. There is a certain logic to the change to the Girl Guide promise. There are now more people without religious belief in the UK. Therefore, the promise to "love my God" might have seemed to exclude these people. The new pledge "to be true to myself and develop my beliefs" would still allow Christians to follow Christianity but it would include atheists as well.

At the surface level, therefore, the pledge seems to be neutral and to allow for a variety of beliefs. It doesn't immediately seem to do harm.

But it does do harm. If we try to incorporate every possible belief or lifestyle by retreating to a position of being "true to myself and developing my beliefs" then we are establishing as the default public position a relativism and an individualism.

We are establishing relativism because the pledge to be "true to myself and develop my beliefs" sends the message that something is true only relative to myself and my own subjective beliefs. And we are retreating to an individualism in the sense that we are no longer recognising a shared belief within a community, but only an individual one.

But it is difficult for a community to operate without some sort of shared value system and so what is then left to liberalism is to make the commitment to being inclusive the focus of a communal, and publicly enforced, morality.

Furthermore, what is clearly lost within this kind of liberal value system is a commitment to shared objective goods and truths within a community. How might people feel compensated for this loss? By focusing on the freedom to make up our own individual goods. So a certain concept of freedom will then be emphasised.

It is said by some that liberalism developed from the attempt to deal with religious diversity in the wake of the Reformation and the various wars of religion. It is possible that the starting point was the well-intentioned one that I have described, but that the logic of the falsely "neutral" position it involved then went on to do great damage to Western societies.

So how then should a diversity of opinion or belief be dealt with in society? If we learn our lesson we would have to say that the relativism and individualism of the "neutrality" position should be the least favoured option. Other options:

i) The atheists are allowed to simply opt out of reciting that part of the pledge.
ii) That part of the promise is dropped and the focus is on other goods that are shared by theists and atheists alike.
iii) A separate group of guides is set up for those parents who wish to avoid the promise to God.

These are only suggestions, but I make them to show that it's not necessary to deal with a diversity of belief by turning to a principle that is perhaps intended to be neutral, but which in reality is anything but neutral and which instead strongly preferences a view of the world which is relativistic and individualistic and which leads ultimately to the intolerant enforcement of tolerance and to a dissolving view of freedom based on the idea of the self-defining individual.

Memo to Jeremy Clarkson: Britain abolished international slavery

Popular Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson isn't afraid of speaking his mind. That's increasingly rare and I commend him for it.

But his most recent comments are disappointing. Clarkson's dog had to be put down and some of this twitter followers responded with cruel comments. Which then led Clarkson to write the following in Top Gear magazine:

Britain is a nation of 62million complete and utter bastards. We are the country that invented the concentration camp, and international slavery.

Maybe he's being deliberately provocative. Perhaps he wrote it whilst still in a fit of anger and upset. Even so, it's a hopelessly negative attitude to take toward your own national tradition.

The jibe about inventing international slavery isn't even remotely true. Slaves have been traded across national boundaries for thousands of years. If Britain had a distinct role it was more for using its power to abolish the international slave trade rather than inventing it.

Which leads me to a theory about why so many Westerners have a self-contempt. One of my readers recently defended liberalism as follows:

Shame on both the conservatives and modern liberals and any “ism” for using the government to force people to act in ways they think they should act. The only thing that should be worth dying for is freedom from men using the government to force people to act out their ideals. Governments should only exist to protect peoples life, liberty and personal selfishness as long as their selfishness does not lead to stealing, cheating, lying or causing harm to another’s private property or themselves.

There is an assumption underlying such an attitude which is that there are no positive goods that can be known to us; instead, we are to think in terms of there being personal, subjective ideals. But this runs very close to a pessimistic nihilism, as it locks in the suggestion that real, objective goods either don't exist or can't be known.

The only thing that lessens the nihilistic blow is this: if you think that there are only personal, subjective ideals then you might be able to conclude that a freedom to pursue your own subjective ideal unhindered becomes the one significant good that can be recognised to exist.

Which perhaps helps to explain the tremendous emphasis placed on such a freedom by liberal moderns. It is something that is clung to in order to avoid an immediate descent into a nihilistic scepticism.

But it's not much to cling to. And hence the vulnerability to self-contempt and a desire for self-abolition.

The solution is to have the courage to discuss a mix of positive goods (which can include freedom and autonomy) and to develop these within the political, cultural and social framework of society. Obviously,  a society which does a better job of this will have a stronger foundation than one which doesn't, but ruling out the notion of positive goods ensures that you will fail.

There will always be a good - but what will it be?

In a recent post I argued in favour of a masculine and a feminine ideal. A sympathetic reader, Tim T, raised the following objection:

To me one problem with this idea of clearly-defined gender roles is with authority - who gets to decide what those roles are? Why do they make those decisions? I'm not convinced anyone has sufficient authority to make that decision.

That's not an uncommon view. It was raised, for instance, in the debate between Lawrence Auster and Robert Spencer. Lawrence Auster argued that the guiding principle of society should be the good rather than freedom. Spencer countered with this:

Left unexplained, however, is how a commonly accepted understanding of “the good” is to be arrived at, and particularly how such an understanding could be restored in 21st-century America without imposing an authoritarian regime of some kind.

So there seem to be two objections to the idea that a society might follow some vision of the good:

a) It's not possible to know what the good is

and

b) It would be authoritarian to put forward a common good

So how do traditionalists respond? At this site, J.M. Smith replied to Tim T. by arguing that an ideal of masculinity or femininity wouldn't be decided by committee but by people seeking to emulate those men and women they most admired and who lived the best kind of lives. So the ideal wouldn't arise in an authoritarian way, but through social interaction over time.

Over at View from the Right Jim Kalb made a similar point:

Man is social, so leading a good life, like doing anything else well, is something we mostly learn from other people and carry on in cooperation with them.

Jim Kalb admitted that some societies have defective understandings of the good, usually because they are obsessed by some one thing and so the good is understood too reductively - it leaves too many things out.

Ed H. also made an argument that an understanding of the good is not merely asserted in an arbitrary way but arises over time in a society that is oriented to "finer levels of genuine feeling":

Such cultural “authority” was not arbitrary. It was the result of a living and truly “free” society actively searching out the finer levels of genuine feeling and manners and refusing to be intimidated by the vulgar and shallow. By definition, Culture meant self awareness, discrimination, broad understanding. It was the opposite of “arbitrary.” 

The one argument I'd like to add for now is that there is no society, not even liberal society, that doesn't have some ideal of what it means to be a good person. Liberals might claim that there are no such goods in a liberal society, but it doesn't work out that way.

First, liberals haven't let go entirely of the idea that there are standards that can be recognised in society. I can't, for instance, sell drugs, or practise polygamy, or walk around naked at the shops, or publish defamatory comments.

Second, even if liberals push the idea that we should just as individuals make up our own subjective goods, this then generates an ideal of what it means to be good anyway. It produces the idea that the good man is the one who doesn't discriminate, who is non-judgemental, who celebrates diversity, who is tolerant, who identifies with the other and so on.

Here in Melbourne, amongst the liberal Anglo middle-class, that has all boiled down to a very specific sense of what the primary good is. The primary good is what you might call "anti white racism". You are a good person, in this culture, if you demonstrate your commitment to anti white racism (i.e. that you are against white racism).

As I've mentioned before, this version of the good is no longer held just by highly political left-wingers. It is no longer held just by those suffering from nihilism or rancour. It's more at the level of "I'm a nice person and therefore I follow this good that society tells me defines the good".

Which suggests that there will always be embedded within a culture a moral ideal - i.e. an understanding of what defines you as a good person.

And here we get to the problem. It is inevitable that a society will have a moral ideal embedded within its culture. So the big issue isn't whether or not there should be such an ideal - there is going to be one regardless. The big issue is what the quality of the ideal is - is it, in Jim Kalb's words, defective or not.

Western societies once held that it was good for men to be masculine, to uphold the best within their traditions, to be loyal to family and compatriots etc. Now the good is defined in terms of how much you demonstrate an opposition to the racism of whites - which for white societies is a paralysing kind of good.

In short, we shouldn't hold back from asserting a positive good out of concern that we are being authoritarian or that we could possibly be wrong. That effectively allows the current defective understandings of the good to linger longer than they need to. We should at least be confident that we can do considerably better than what we have now.

A more critical take than expected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next criticism of liberalism is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The realm of freedom?

I have time now to get back to Liberalism & Community, a defence of classical liberalism by Steven Kautz.

Kautz supports the classical liberal view of human nature, namely that humans are by nature solitary, selfish and acquisitive. The natural condition of man is thought to be a war of all against all.

This dire understanding of human nature led to a radical world view: the human passions were held to be a dangerous source of division, peace was the only public good to be recognised, and men were to limit themselves to a private pursuit of happiness.

This is the "neutrality strand" of liberalism. To give you some idea of just how unreasonable and artificial it is, I'll comment on some passages from Kautz's book.

Our passions do not by themselves bring us together in political communities, other than by way of war for the sake of partisan or private advantage, and the liberation of the passions from the constraints of reason cannot bring peace to existing political communities ... (p.34)

What does this mean? Human motivation is divided here simplistically into "passions" and "reason". Because human nature is thought to be solitary, the passions can only bring about community in a coercive way: one group of individuals might get together to force their sectarian interests on others. Therefore, "reason" has to be used to promote a higher goal of peace for the benefit of all individuals.

This is a one-sided and limited understanding of reality. Humans are considerably social in their natures. Therefore, there are "non-rational" (non-intellectual) instincts, loyalties and identities through which communities are formed and held together. The "passions", therefore, do play a positive role in building stable forms of community.

It is wrong, therefore, to believe that humans are so much pushing toward sectarian self-interest, and so devoid of sociable instinct, that the only public good that can possibly be permitted to be expressed is that of peace.

Kautz goes on to discuss goods of the body versus goods of the soul. He criticises a communitarian writer, Michael Sandel, for asserting that a community might choose to pursue goods of the soul:

[Sandel's] book is more or less silent regarding the possibility of war, not only because Sandel denies that the body is the principle of individuation ... but also because of a remarkably optimistic view of the goods (or passions) of the soul. For Sandel, as for many recent advocates of community, it appears that the goods of the body are trivial and (besides) are easily satisfied, and that the goods of the soul are principally common goods, not private goods. (p.34)

So for the classical liberal Kautz, it is right that communities should focus on meeting bodily wants rather than goods of the soul. Kautz is surprised that Sandel doesn't treat the goods or passions of the soul in an entirely negative way as assertions of sectarian self-interest - Kautz believes that Sandel has a remarkably optimistic view of human nature, just as I believe that Kautz has a remarkably pessimistic view.

Note too that Kautz rejects the idea that the goods of the soul are common goods. Kautz believes that they are rightly private goods. This is a tremendously significant disagreement. If love of a nation is a good of the soul, can it really be limited to a private good? Isn't it a good which is formed, experienced and defended at a public, rather than a private, level? If you think, as Kautz does, that goods of the soul are private rather than common goods, then you change and limit what these goods can conceivably be.

Here is another snippet from Kautz:

Reason understands, says the classical liberal, what the (more warlike than sociable passions) do not feel, that there is a common good (p.35).

Again, here is the assumption that the passions are anti-social, so that community is formed through reason - through an intellectual rejection of warlike passion in favour of peace.

Creating this peace requires us to give up our naturally solitary condition - it requires common action and deliberation (i.e. setting up a police force, establishing forms of civility). Community, therefore, has shallow roots for classical liberals; it has little to do with significant forms of identity, of kinship, or of a shared history, culture or tradition. It only exists for a single pragmatic purpose: to secure the peace.

Furthermore, whatever virtue exists derives from this aim of maintaining the peace. So virtue too has shallow roots in the classical liberal world view:

Peace is a good, to repeat, because it is the necessary condition of all private pursuits of happiness; and peace is a common good, even requiring common deliberation and common action, because it cannot be made secure in the absence of various forms of civility and self-mastery. Here is the origin of the liberal virtues. (p.35)

Which leads on to this:

And then, where peace is secure because rights are respected and habits of moderation observed, human beings are liberated to engage in their various private pursuits of happiness, privately defined.

Or not. What if humans really are social creatures, who live well in relationship to each other, and who therefore must be concerned with the forms and quality of public life, rather than a purely private existence? What if our personal identity is derived from communal forms of existence rather than a solitary life? What if we express ourselves as men and women within social institutions rather than in isolation? What if we recognise communal traditions as significant goods in themselves which we naturally wish to commit ourselves to?

Finally, look at how reductive the classical liberal view is:

The liberal view of the political community implies a radical diminution of the dignity of political life: liberalism has turned "the political order into an administrative agency" that seeks to provide a plentiful and secure world ... As Walzer says, in the liberal welfare state, "the policeman and the welfare administrator will be the only public persons" ...

In part this situation obtains because the very questions of politics have been greatly transformed: we quarrel endlessly about how to provide, efficiently and justly, the instruments that are necessary ... for every private pursuit of happiness ...

Thus, the manifestly instrumental questions of economic policy now dominate our political life: politics today is concerned primarily with the largely technical problem of how to ensure prosperity ... Indeed it is possible that liberalism implicitly favours commercial ways of life, and associated conceptions of the good, over other private ways of life, as well as over public life.

... politics is best understood as an arena in which individuals, or groups of individuals, pursue their (primarily economic) interests: liberal politics is interest-group politics.

So it is perhaps not surprising that we have turned many of these questions over to bureaucrats and experts, for these technical and instrumental problems are just the sort of necessary burdens that a free human being will ... leave to his public "servants". (pp.35-37)

What are we left with under the terms of classical liberalism? The bias is toward a pursuit of economic self-interest, with public life being left mostly to technocrats and economic administrators. This is the realm of the "free human being" as conceived by classical liberals.

Would we really be surprised if classical liberalism were to hollow out human culture rather than deliver individual freedom?

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.)

Why would feminists switch voices?

I've had a brief response from the Hoyden about Town feminists, Lauredhel and Tigtog. If you remember, Lauredhel had advocated lesbian separatism as a reasonable "survival strategy" for women:

I don’t see what’s inherently irrational about positing lesbian separatism as being one possible survival strategy in this world.

Similarly, she admitted to cheering on the "radfem separatism" of a group of young American girls who, it was reported, had made a pact to become single mothers:

I agree that I felt a little radical cheer when I heard of their plans to support each other. And I think this is exactly what the mainstream finds threatening about it. Women supporting each other, raising families, deliberately and clearly saying “We can do it”? Nothing like a hint of something that might look a little like radfem separatism to get the Patriarchy frothing at the mouth.

Tigtog also approved of single motherhood for these girls, all of whom were under the age of 16:

This is a model that could actually work really well for these girls.

The Hoyden feminists noticed my posts and responded briefly as follows:

...it’s definitely an overweening matriarchal conspiracy and it’s got Ozcon Mark really worried!

19 tigtog
Jun 25th, 2008 at 7:18 am
I saw reference to that, Helen. But after all, he’s worried about the family-destroying ideologies of two feminist bloggers who are actually happily and productively cohabiting with the fathers of their respective children, because we happen to believe that there are other equally valid family models for raising children. I suspect he spends much of his time worried about overweening shadows.

21 Lauredhel
Jun 25th, 2008 at 11:04 am
I suspect he spends much of his time worried about overweening shadows.

“Hey! Who turned out the lights?”

This is a real switch of voice for the Hoyden feminists. One minute they're cheering on the cause of radical feminist separatism, the next they're taking a "Who us?" position and claiming that I am imagining hostility on the part of feminists toward the family.

Tigtog makes two points in support of her claim. The first is that both she and Lauredhel are happily living together with the fathers of their children. The two feminist women, in other words, are championing the cause of radfem separatism for other women, whilst living in a relatively traditional family arrangement themselves.

Isn't there some kind of warning in this for young women reading Hoyden about Town? Isn't there a message here that the feminists at Hoyden are preaching one thing, whilst choosing another for themselves?

The second point Tigtog makes is that I'm overreacting to the fact that she and Lauredhel "happen to believe that there are other equally valid family models for raising children."

The "other equally valid family model" she is talking about is single motherhood for young teens.

Now it's one thing to accept that teen pregnancies will happen and that the best has to be made of the situation. It's another to claim that it's an "equally valid family model".

How can single motherhood for young teens be equally valid when the mother is left without a husband and the child without a father? Or when the mother has to be supported by the taxpayer? Or when the father is left without the same motivation for work or social responsibility? Or when the child will later have a statistically higher risk of involvement in crime or drug use?

And if single motherhood for young teens is equally valid, then how do you ever draw the line in rejecting something as invalid? How do you, for instance, reject polygamy? I wasn't exactly surprised to find that Lauredhel supported the call by several Australian Islamic officials to legalise polygamy, on the basis that it would help protect the rights of women already living in polygamous relationships.

It's difficult to disentangle all the threads here. We have a case of two feminist women living happily with the fathers of their children who claim that they only want to recognise other relationships as equally valid, but who at their website are strident in their opposition to the traditional family, seeing it as a product of the patriarchy.

(Lauredhel in one recent post describes marriage as a "problem" and writes that "abolishing the concept of marriage or domestic partnership" sounds "superficially attractive" to her.)

So what's going on? One way to explain the feminist attitude is to see it as a consequence of the "neutrality strand" within liberalism. The basic idea of the neutrality strand is that the way to achieve peace, security and harmony is to take a neutral stance toward important goods. Therefore, adopting a neutral stance is thought to be a mark of high principle; from this comes an insistence on non-discrimination, tolerance and equality.

The way to prove your neutrality is to endorse and point to the virtues of "othered" ways of life, particularly those most dissimilar to your own. Perhaps this explains, in part, two happily partnered women describing the "advantages" of single motherhood for young teens.

It's possible, too, to explain the situation in terms of the "autonomy" strand within liberalism. If you want to be free to choose in any direction, then you will want reality to be open-ended - you will want to have a situation in which a whole range of models of family life are "equally valid".

At the same time you will be most hostile to the longstanding, socially sanctioned, mainstream model of family life, as this is the one you will feel is less a product of individual choice or negotiation, and more a result of tradition or custom or social expectation.

The situation is made worse if you accept the claim of patriarchy theory, namely that the institutions of society were established to buttress the dominance of men over an oppressed class of women. This casts a pall of suspicion on the traditional model of family life, as being formed to oppress women.

If somewhat different influences are at play, then the "switching" attitude of the Hoyden feminists is more easily comprehended. The neutrality strand means that they don't like to be labelled as being biased against the existing model of family life or to be thought of as harming the existing model; it also encourages them to prove their neutrality by identifying advantages in models of family life dissimilar to their own.

The autonomy strand explains the willingness to declare an unsustainable form of family to be "equally valid" - there is a need for reality to be open-ended in order for autonomy to be perfectible.

The hostility to marriage and the traditional family, even though it contradicts the claim to be unbiased, can be explained both in terms of autonomy theory (not wanting to be constrained by tradition or social expectation) and patriarchy theory (in which the traditional family is regarded as an institution designed to oppress women).

Germany, the new family & coercive autonomy

There are reports that Germany's fertility rate has started to recover a little, which is good news. However, I wasn't impressed by comments from Dr Ursula von der Leyen, the current family minister and a member of the "conservative" Christian Democrats.

Her plans for the future of the German family do not include the traditional option in which women stay at home to care for their children. According to one newspaper report:

Dr von der Leyen insists that the question is not whether women will work. "They will work. The question is whether they will have kids," she said.

It's significant that Dr von der Leyen should choose this way of expressing her point. "They will work" makes it sound as if some impersonal, inevitable movement is driving forward such an outcome for all women.

The reason for formulating things this way is to paper over a major contradiction in modernist politics. Liberal moderns believe that our status as humans depends on how autonomous we are. Therefore, it is important for liberals that we are free to choose in any direction who we are and what we do. In particular, the state is not supposed to interfere in our choice of a life project.

You would think, therefore, that a liberal state would remain neutral and allow women to choose whether to pursue a career or remain home with their children. However, the problem is that careers are thought to maximise a woman's autonomy as careers give women financial independence and a self-defining role. Therefore, liberals want women to pursue a career rather than be stay at home mothers.

So it's not possible for the principle to work consistently. If the aim is to maximise autonomy, then allowing women to choose motherhood is a negative, as it is careers which seem best for autonomy. On the other hand, not allowing women to choose motherhood is also a negative, as this restricts women's autonomy in determining their own life projects.

That's why, I expect, Dr von der Leyen opts for the pretence that women will choose careers, but as some impersonal, historical, inevitable process, rather than as a policy preference imposed by the state.

Why doesn't the principle work the way it's supposed to? In short, most people don't accept, as liberal modernism assumes, that autonomy is the sole, overriding good. Therefore, if people are given the autonomy to choose, they will often choose other goods, even if this places some restrictions on their personal autonomy.

So how is the contradiction resolved in practice? The lesson of modernity is that over time the state restricts the degree to which we can choose non-autonomous paths, even if this means that the liberal state violates its own principle of neutrality and restricts its own principle of allowing individual choice.

So we get the Dr von der Leyens who announce that a motherhood role going back to the dawn of time simply won't exist any more - meaning that the state doesn't want it to exist any more, having decided on our behalf that it is illegitimate.

What should the conservative response be? We need to return to the idea that in any society there will be a number of goods which people will legitimately pursue, and that the aim is to get the right balance between them. It won't always be the case that autonomy is predominant and, as the example of women and careers shows, the attempt to artificially make it so leads only to an irresolvable contradiction.

When is it right to discriminate?

Nehemia Shtrasler wrote an article last week for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which he worried about demographic changes within Israel. Not only is the percentage of Palestinians increasing, but so too is the percentage of ultra-Orthodox Jews, whom Shtrasler believes are less likely to serve in the military or join the labour force.

Shtrasler's piece was then attacked by an Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, who believes that any discussion of a "demographic threat" within Israel is illegitimate. Levy found a supporter in the Australian Jewish writer Antony Loewenstein, who wrote the following at his website:

Talking to a moderate Jew today, it struck me yet again that the concept of a Jewish state that equally treats all its citizens is still a challenging concept for many Zionists. "But why can't Jews have just one state that's for them?" I was asked. It's a simple answer. No state can be allowed to discriminate against one race/religion/group over another.

Loewenstein is putting the liberal non-discrimination principle into effect here, but in doing so he is showing a defect in the principle. It doesn't seem reasonable that Jews cannot discriminate in favour of the survival of a distinctively Jewish state. First, it is natural for Jews to regard the existence of their own nation as a significant good, and so they will reasonably act for its benefit and preservation, rather than from a neutralist, non-discriminatory stance. Second, the Jewish state is a means of security for Jews in a region generally ill-disposed toward them. Therefore, to relinquish control over the state, in the name of non-discrimination, seems especially ill-advised.

To uphold a blanket ban on state discrimination, Levy is forced to adopt a number of "follow-on" beliefs. First, he identifies Israel itself not with any particular people or tradition, but with a set of liberal values. He writes that anyone who views the loss of a Jewish majority in Israel as a danger is:

endangering the character of society far more than the tectonic demographic shifts.

So in his view it is not the Jews or the Jewish tradition which give the Israeli nation its character but a liberal principle of non-discrimination. Similarly, Levy writes,

There is no "demographic threat". There is a threat to society's values, which will be determined not by statistics but by the amount of social justice.

By identifying the nation with a set of political values, Levy can then imagine that the non-discrimination principle won't change the essence of the nation. Even if there is a "tectonic" change in the population, the non-discrimination principle will endure, and therefore so will the "nation".

I doubt if I were a Jew that I would find this comforting. My people and tradition would be lost, but an abstract political principle would still carry on. Again, it's not a reasonable view to expect people to adopt.

And anyway, it's not even plausible that a Palestinian dominated Israel would preserve the liberal political principles which Levy identifies with the national essence.

Which leads on to a second issue. Levy needs to explain how the Jews would remain secure if they lost control of the state. His answer is that:

Both the left and right are afflicted with this lethal racism, which stems from arrogance and fear of the other. The right wing is trying to scare us with dire predictions about the natural increase of the country's Arabs ...

Which seems to suggest that there is no objective basis for security concerns; that such concerns are simply an irrational manifestation of racism and fear of the other. Is this, though, a realistic view? Isn't it reasonable for Jews, given the history and politics of the Middle East, to be concerned about their security in an Arab dominated state?

So is it always wrong, as Levy and Loewenstein assert, to discriminate? I can understand that it's appealing to the modern mind to find a moral principle which operates as simply and unswervingly as a law of nature. However, in practice applying the principle of non-discrimination universally as a key value of society leads to an unreasonable and unrealistic politics.

When, though, is it right to discriminate? I won't suggest a complete answer. It's possible however that there are two considerations which we normally apply when determining an answer to this question.

The first is that the discrimination should serve a real good. It's possible to think of a purely arbitrary form of discrimination as unjust, but not so when it is designed to uphold a significant good. For instance, in the case of the argument about Israel, the maintenance of the national tradition might be identified as such a good.

However, what then has to be balanced against this first consideration is the actual form of the discrimination to be applied. If the discrimination serves a trivial good but involves a serious loss to those discriminated against, we are likely to consider it unjust.

So the issue of discrimination requires a more sophisticated treatment than simply asserting non-discrimination as a universal principle. We need to judge the balance between the significance of the good being protected and the severity of the form of discrimination.

Feminine rebellions: the Viking princess

Sweden has taken feminism much further than most other countries. Although I've criticised the theory behind this feminism at length, I've done so from a distance. So I was very interested to discover the Viking princess website, written by a Swedish woman now living in London. When the Viking princess criticises Swedish style feminism she does so with first-hand knowledge of its effects on her as a woman.

Amongst the more revealing articles are:

Femininity and womanhood today? In this article the Viking princess notes that she is effectively living the lifestyle of a man. This is what Swedish feminism aims at: it identifies autonomy as the key good in life and the male role as the autonomous one. Therefore, it insists that men and women are similar in nature and that women should pursue the "superior" male role in equal numbers to men.

If the Swedish feminists were right, then the Viking princess should be happy with her autonomous lot. But she's not. She feels as if she's lost something central to her own self, namely her femininity. She writes:

I can do most things that a man can do; I am independent, competent and earn a high salary. All this might make me think: What do I need a man for?

Yet, what do I crave more than anything? To be a real, old-fashioned woman. To have a man who cares for me and to have a home to manage (as opposed to managing stupid IT projects.)

She adds:

I get very little satisfaction from my ‘high-powered’ job. Why is this?

I think it is because what I am doing is against nature!

Everything I wanted to prove to myself and others about my competence or career, I have already proven. And to be honest, I wasn’t that fussed to start with. I just needed the money and happened to like IT.

But now I need to prove that I can be a real woman! I don’t even know where to start! I spent most of my life trying to emulate men and male behaviour!

I am sick of being so independent, of often being cleverer than men who fancy me (which is a turn-off). I am sick of wearing the trousers, metaphorically and in practice.

Furthermore:

Another problem is that the more time I spend emulating male behaviour at work, the less feminine (and more masculine) I become. I have learnt military leadership techniques for goodness sake! I can push my guys as if I was a drill sergeant… And every time I do, it kills of another bit of my female soul.…

All my feminine qualities are undesirable at work. Being caring, giggly, pretty, emotional etc, are all negative things to a greater or lesser extent. In my reviews at work I have had negative feedback involving all of these qualities, believe it or not.

What all this suggests is that for women like the Viking princess independence through careerism is not the most important good in life. What she finds more important is to fulfil deeper aspects of her own given nature; it is most significant to her to reconnect to her feminine soul, something she feels she can't accomplish adequately whilst living a masculine lifestyle.

Growing up a unisex girl. This article describes the experience of growing up in a country in which gender difference was suppressed rather than celebrated. Even at nursery school feminist gender politics was drilled into the young children:

There was constant talk even in nursery school about how traditional split of work between the genders must stop. There certainly was no question of having pretty dolls for girls to play with; we all played with nice but very gender-neutral toys. I suppose there was a slight bias towards the kinds of toys you’d traditionally give to a boy actually.

It's interesting to note here a contradiction in modernist politics. Autonomy, in the sense of being unimpeded in selecting who we are or what we do, is the ruling principle. The Swedish government follows this ideal of autonomy. The end result, though, is a greater state intrusiveness into what people would normally choose to do or be compared to more traditional societies. Autonomy theory doesn't result in people being left alone to make their own way, as most people if left alone would choose things considered illegitimate under the terms of autonomy theory (most people would follow their natural instincts and adopt a pattern of gender behaviour; they would also choose to sacrifice some part of their autonomy in order to fulfil other aims, such as marriage and parenthood).

Our Viking princess accepted the unisex ideology until she became old enough to choose to read some classic girl's books:

Gradually I started to notice that the heroines of these books generally put a big emphasis on being girls and on taking pride in that. It was something I had never done. I started having a feeling I was somehow missing out on the experience of being a girl.

When going abroad to Southern Europe, I noticed that little girls there usually wore skirts and frequently even pretty dresses. I and my friends very rarely did. In fact I very rarely wore traditionally girly clothes at all. My parents told me that the Southern Europeans wore such clothes because they were old-fashioned, religious and couldn’t afford much clothes anyway. They made all these things sound very bad, which I as a child of course latched on to.

I also dreamed of wearing pink, or perhaps yellow clothes. But looking at photos, it would appear I was mainly in brown corduroy or navy cotton! ... I remember fantasizing about being asked to be a bridesmaid so I could wear a frilly dress and carry a bouquet of pretty cut flowers!

I was aware though that I was not supposed to want such things.

At puberty it was even more difficult to accept the unisex view:

When I started getting breasts and boys started changing their voices I felt somehow cheated.. There wasn’t supposed to be any difference between boys and girls! But we all started changing to be more and more different. The boys were getting violent, always fighting each other. They seemed to enjoy watching and teasing us girls while we started becoming interested in fashion, make-up and pop music.

Eventually, the Viking princess rejected unisexism in principle:

It started becoming increasingly clear to me as if man and woman are two pieces of a puzzle that fit together because they are essentially differently shaped… That their physique and psyche complemented rather than duplicated each other. The idea that they are identical pieces seemed to me as a tremendous misconception and I was terribly irritated at having been fed an incorrect version of things all through my childhood. What I had been told simply wasn’t true. All my recent experiences showed that men and women were different and that men could no less be like women than women could be like men.

Since I wouldn’t want a man who behaves and looks like a woman, it makes sense that a man wouldn’t want a woman who behaves and looks like a man! True?

Why this ridiculous pretense that we are the same, when we very obviously are not? If I had been brought up more as a girl/woman instead of a gender-neutral being, I would have been stronger and more confident as a woman today! As it is, I had to discover the hard way that I was not the same as a man in a multitude of ways. I spent many years at work, trying to emulate an ‘alpha’ male in my behaviour…

I have no idea how the unisex ideal affected the boys around me. They too were brought up in a ‘unisex’ way.

I can tell you this though: In Sweden it is not common for men to help women with bags on public transport. Also, men expect women to regard sex in the same way as they do (i.e. casual unless expicitly stated otherwise…) They normally do not pay on dates, walk women home or pull out the chair for you etc.. Imagine my surprise when these things happened in England. I felt like a princess!

Until quite recently, every time I noticed a difference between me and men I kept thinking; this is wrong… I ought to be like the men… I felt like I was letting other women down unless I constantly strived towards the male ‘ideal’ that was set for Swedish women. I forced myself to carry heavy things (hurt my back badly when I moved!) to take work extremely seriously (with the result that I got very stressed out) and to never be scared or cry. These were girly, i.e. bad things. But let me tell you, it’s hard work hiding your true nature and pretending to be something you are not! (I still do it all the time, at work .)

Discovering that being feminine is not a ‘crime’ (in fact, it can be a positive thing) was a big revelation for me. I don’t actually want to be like a man!

I wish Northern European society would stop denying women the opportunity to be female! What good does it really bring? Who benefits?

This is nothing less than a feminine rebellion against liberal modernism and the Viking princess carries it through with a certain skill and style.

Letting liberals explain II

Do liberals think that identity matters? In my last post, I looked at one liberal's attempt to claim that they do. He argued, following the autonomy strand of liberalism, that liberals only differed from conservatives in believing that identity was a social construct, rather than natural, and that as a human construct it could (and should) be remade.

Another Larvatus Prodeo reader, Cliff, also defended the liberal attitude to identity. He, though, followed the "neutrality" strand of liberalism. The neutrality strand is the idea that you will have social conflict unless people adopt a neutral stance toward important truths, beliefs and values in the way society is organised.

Cliff, in response to my claim that those without identity are "empty men fit only to observe and admire the "colourful" life they witness in the non-liberal subject", wrote:

To argue that someone is “empty” simply because they believe that their religious, ethnic, gender, national, class, or cultural, identity, should not be used as a basis for coercion of, or discrimination against, “the other” is a pretty “empty” argument, if you ask me.

The basis for liberal reasoning on these factors is not that they should be “erased”, but that they should not serve as a basis for political action, inclusion or exclusion, because of, not despite, the fact that they are such powerful and basic determinants of an individual’s identity.

Religion, for example, is so strongly based in the conscience and identity of citizens, that to make religion a substantial factor in politics could only result in conflict.

Liberalism is not about erasing the non-negotiable factors in one’s identity, but about basing politics upon the negotiable factors, because only by doing so, can peace in a pluralist society be assured. If a liberal wanted to erase religion, ethnic and national identities etc in society, he would be defeating his own logic because he would be making these factors a basis for coercion.

Whilst it is true that Liberalism has a “neutralizing” tendency, its neutrality is based on intersubjectivity, not subjectivity. If a liberal argues that, in our political and social relationships, religion should not be a basis for our inclusion or exclusion of others, this does not mean that a Liberal is themselves devoid of religion.

It's true, as Cliff asserts, that the neutrality principle doesn't directly disallow the holding of a personal identity. It doesn't stop someone, for instance, from identifying themselves as a Catholic or a Canadian.

In practice, though, the principle doesn't allow a significant place for identity. There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary reason is that identity is often sustained in a communal, rather than a purely private, setting.

For instance, an ethnic culture can't be sustained over time "subjectively" by private individuals. If there are only a few members of an ethny in each suburb, their culture won't survive to the next generation, no matter how important this culture is to them subjectively.

An ethnic culture requires a communal setting in order to be absorbed, expressed, developed and reproduced. To maintain a communal setting does require at least a limited form of discrimination in its own favour, particularly in terms of immigration.

Also, if identity is thought of as a danger to social harmony and therefore is excluded from the organisation of political or social life, it won't be associated positively with the higher, ordering values of society. Some individuals, at least, will then treat identity negatively as a less important sphere to be ruled over and controlled:

Cultures and religions are either about weddings and music and fancy clothes or they're about to get their asses kicked. I think Nietzsche called it "The Will to Power," and it is that which we Americans possess and which we cannot allow in the cultures and religions we take in. If all religions and cultures are equal then none is superior, and that is how we keep them in line.

There are also problems with the coherence of the neutrality principle itself. For instance, Cliff wrote that:

Liberalism is not about erasing the non-negotiable factors in one’s identity, but about basing politics upon the negotiable factors, because only by doing so, can peace in a pluralist society be assured.

There are several things which strike me as false about this statement. First, it makes it sound as if liberalism only excludes things which are locked in a dangerous, non-negotiable impasse.

Identity is excluded, though, even when there is no such dangerous impasse. There was a recent case in America in which cheerleaders were told they had to cheer for female sports teams, despite the fact that neither the cheerleaders nor the female sports teams wanted this to happen. There was no dangerous impasse, but simply an insistence on following the principle of excluding gender as a basis of social organisation.

Second, liberalism insists on excluding identity even where there is no pluralism to be negotiated. In fact, it is often the liberal principle itself which creates the pluralism, which then sets up the potential for conflict.

Sweden, for instance, was until recently an ethnically homogeneous nation, and yet the political class there still adopted the idea that the Swedish state should be neutral in terms of ethnicity, which then led to large-scale foreign immmigration, which has now created a degree of ethnic conflict which previously hadn't existed.

In fact, liberalism seems to work best, and to be taken furthest, in the least pluralistic of communities. Holland and Sweden, for instance, were relatively homogeneous countries, well-known for stability and orderliness. At least some aspects of liberalism were taken further in those countries than elsewhere.

They have now become less stable and orderly. Holland, for instance, has witnessed in recent times the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, ethnic riots in Utrecht and a spate of school stabbings. So the effect of liberal neutrality has not been to take a violent, pluralistic society and to render it peaceful, but to make a relatively orderly and homogeneous society more pluralistic and more violent and disorderly.

There is another reason to be sceptical that the neutrality principle orders societies peacefully. The principle itself can become an article of faith, thought to be universally valid, and therefore to be imposed everywhere. It can, in other words, itself become the justification for coercion and force.

So does identity suffer under the terms of liberalism? It suffers more, it seems, than some liberals are willing to recognise. It is subjected to a one-two punch, the first blow coming from autonomy liberals who treat identity as an unnatural and oppressive social construct, the second from neutrality liberals who won't allow society to be organised in ways which recognise identity.

Keeping culture in line

John Derbyshire wasn't happy with the compliant behaviour of the British sailors captured by Iran:

How on earth can Britons behave like that? A previous generation would not have done so ... What on earth has happened to the British?

His answer is that the British were once animated by a sense of superiority toward other nations but that this has been effectively suppressed by multiculturalism. It is Derbyshire's view that multiculturalism fails to draw on the deeper human instincts and that George Orwell was right to claim that:

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war.

My intention is not to critique Derbyshire's (or Orwell's) views in all this. What interests me more is the response Derbyshire drew in the comments section from someone calling himself (herself?) "Laika's Last Woof" (whom I'll refer to as LLW).

LLW is strongly committed in his politics to the "neutrality strand" within liberalism. This is the aspect of liberalism which arose following the wars of religion in the 1600s. The idea was to secure social harmony by having the state treat the competing religious views neutrally.

The problem with the neutrality strand has been explained by Lawrence Auster in these terms:

As Jim Kalb has pointed out, whatever is the highest public principle of a society tends over time to make the rest of the society conform to it.

Since neutrality with respect to religious truth was now the highest ordering principle of society, men progressively adopted a stance of neutrality with respect to other substantive truths and values - natural, social, and spiritual - on which society had historically been based.

LLW is an interesting example of what happens to someone who adopts the neutrality strand. In theory, it's possible for someone holding to the neutrality ideal to still give allegiance to his own tradition. All that's really required (in theory) is that the state not give preference to one tradition over another.

However, in practice having neutrality as "the highest ordering principle of society" does generally lead to a loss of particular cultural, religious and national allegiances.

In the case of LLW, the important "transcendent" allegiance is now to neutrality itself: to "the Constitution" or to "liberty" conceived in terms of an absence of any significant claims of culture or religion or nation.

LLW begins his reply to Derbyshire by insisting that Americans, as good neutralists, have something worth fighting for:

I think perhaps we Americans have retained our fighting spirit because we've never fought for such empty-headed "virtues" as "racial pride", "leader-worship", or "religious belief" ... Our soldiers aren't serving a race or a President or even a God. They swear their oath to the Constitution. Perhaps if Britain had fought for some kind of principles she would not have lost her fighting spirit. "For King and Country" means little in the age of Democracy. Liberty, though, is transcendent.

For LLW acting "for Country" means "little" in a modern age. He goes on to argue that neutrality does not allow multiculturalism to be as significant an agent as Derbyshire believes it to be:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" ... Multiculturalism is a dead letter so long as our Constitution's Bill of Rights stands unamended, not because we believe our culture is superior but because we believe that NO culture is superior.

He then adds the following:

Any culture that threatens our freedom we will remorselessly, relentlessly, and if necessary violently transform. "Death to Sharia!", and may it burn like Tokyo under the Stratofortress, because it is the enemy of liberty, not because we have some better God to pray to, some superior Mecca to pray towards.

We bow to no one, we apologize to no one, and we pray to no one. The Constitution is the only true authority in all the Universe, and only because it declares we are free.

What does freedom mean for a neutralist like LLW? It means a freedom from any claim of culture or any claim of religion ("we pray to no one").

Ironically, this development of the ideal of neutrality overrides the original concern to secure harmony and peace. Neutrality itself has become, in LLW's mind, a superior allegiance which may rightly maintain its supremacy through violent conflict.

Later, when LLW is asked whether he believes American culture to be superior to that of the head-hunting tribes of New Guinea, he replies:

The litmus test for any culture transplanted to America is whether it is compatible with liberty. Liberty is what we use to keep the world's religions and cultures in line when they come here. This supreme authority in a sense makes liberty transcendent, a value beyond culture, a belief beyond God.

Again, consider how far "neutrality" has distanced LLW from any cultural allegiance. What interests him is the restraint to be placed on any claims of culture, rather than what any culture positively represents.

Note too the seriousness with which neutrality as an organising principle of society is taken: it has become so authoritative that it is thought to be "transcendent" and beyond even "a belief in God".

There's more. Here's LLW again illustrating the aggressive claims of the neutrality strand:

Any culture that threatens our liberty we'll transform or destroy; cultures which believe in their own superiority will inevitably run afoul of us and have to be dealt with. As we are the strongest force on the planet, any culture that cannot accept the supremacy of the Constitution is inferior ...

And then there's this:

Cultures and religions are either about weddings and music and fancy clothes or they're about to get their asses kicked. I think Nietzche called it "The Will to Power," and it is that which we Americans possess and which we cannot allow in the cultures and religions we take in. If all religions and cultures are equal then none is superior, and that is how we keep them in line.

Neutrality means, in practice for LLW, that the claims of culture and religion are not to be considered seriously: they are to be relegated to the realm of "weddings and music and fancy clothes" or else they face getting "their asses kicked". Again, the adoption of a neutral stance toward culture and religion, in which we don't consider any to be superior, has come to be associated with the idea of culture and religion as a negative, oppressive, dangerous threat to be kept in line, rather than something we might personally give a positive allegiance to. A particular culture and religion, even our own mainstream culture and religion, are not to be ceded any authority within society.

Finally, LLW explains that his allegiance is to a concept of freedom rather than to a particular culture or nation, and therefore he welcomes the rise to power of any "free" nation, even if this entails the loss of pre-eminence of his own:

Our power as we conceive it expands with the rise of free democratic nations such as India, even if India ultimately surpasses us in military capability. If India had the will and power to intervene in Darfur or sign a credible mutual defense pact with Taiwan we Americans would be tickled pink. We're worried about the rise of China not because they threaten American hegemony but American ideals ... If Britain is to find the enduring will to fight you must find it within yourselves to love America, India, Poland, Israel, and Australia as you love yourselves.

I'll finish with two brief points of my own. First, the neutrality strand explains why liberals so often believe conservative allegiance to be based on a belief in supremacism or superiority.

For instance, people who want to maintain the mainstream ethnicity of Australia are often accused of being "white supremacists". To conservatives this can be surprising, as we often simply want to conserve a tradition we love and have a natural allegiance to, rather than wishing to assert supremacy over others.

A liberal neutralist, however, is used to a theoretical framework in which any assertion of preference is tied to a denial of equality and to a claim of superior right. Liberal neutralists seem to find it difficult to step outside of this intellectual framework to understand the conservative mindset.

Second, conservatives should not be falling into line with liberal neutrality. Rather than consenting to an ideal which distances us, in practice, from particular allegiances, we should admire those who are most connected in their lives to natural loves, affinities and identities, including a sense of connectedness to our ancestry, our national tradition, our culture, our sex, our church, and our ethny.

To remain close to these allegiances doesn't necessarily mean asserting their superiority over others (though some may do this). Nor does it necessarily mean wanting to impose them on others.

The alternative, of accepting neutrality as the highest organising principle of society, will often mean replacing natural allegiances with a single artificial one, one which has no less potential for social conflict.

Hat tip: an excellent post on the same theme by Vanishing American titled Is our civilization a 'goner'?

Further reading: Tackling neutrality

Why don't we have an elite?

Can it only be politics or rugger?

Can it only be politics or rugger?

Not everyone understood my last post. It was an attempt to draw out the "neutrality strand" within liberalism.

What is the neutrality strand? In the 1600s there was a period of religious conflict. As a means to restore social harmony, there was an effort to base the social order not on an assertion of religious truth, but on tolerance of different religious claims.

So there was a shift from an assertion of religious truth to an ideal in which the equal claim of others, their equal right in matters of religion, was focused on.

This established a framework in which traditional identity in general came to be associated with social antagonism and superior claim, whereas repression of traditional identity was linked to tolerance, harmony, and equality

There are liberals who filter reality through this kind of framework. They assume that all forms of traditional identity are based on superior claim and a denial of equality, and that the adoption of a neutral stance is the mark of high principle and a proper basis for a harmonious social order.

Traditionalists often have a difficult time penetrating this liberal mindset. We experience traditional identity in a radically different manner. It is felt by us to be a natural and positive aspect of self-identity, based more often on feelings of love and attachment than on hostile, antagonistic superiority.

So what is wrong with the liberal framework? In my last post, I endorsed the criticism of the liberal approach made by Mark from Western Survival. He argued that most of the traditional sources of identity targeted by liberals are based on real, meaningful and immutable differences between people. Therefore, attempting to eliminate them causes, in practice, more harm than good.

I added two further criticisms. First, that adopting a neutral stance toward things which matter causes a major defect in Western man, namely a failure to project. It makes Western man, as the liberal subject, fit only to observe the "colourful other," and unable to actively assert his own identity.

Second, I noted (following Mark) that liberals made an exception for political identity, and that it was therefore no accident that liberal intellectuals often sought distinction, and group allegiance, through holding "correct" political beliefs, in particular by disdaining the working-class as nativist rednecks and presenting themselves in contrast as tolerant liberal cosmopolitans.

I described this kind of distinction seeking as a lazy form of elitism, not requiring any real effort of character or achievement.

Which brings me to the updates. First, by coincidence there was published in yesterday's Melbourne Age an article by Catherine Deveny, one of the two leftist women I quoted in my own post. Deveny's article is a classic expression of lazy distinction seeking.

First we get the disdain for the working-class as nativist rednecks. Deveny describes the grand prix auto racing fans as "knuckle-dragging petrol heads" and "flag wavers". She tells them that if they need a grand prix to feel proud of their city to "please kill yourself at your earliest possible convenience. And take your 'I'm Another Australian Against Further Immigration' T-shirt with you."

Then there's her claim to superiority: she, unlike the average joe, appreciates not just immigrants, but the most radically "other" of immigrants, the recent Muslim arrivals. Furthermore, she loves to eat their ethnic cuisine: pide, gozleme and baklava.

Finally there's her failure to project. She's a master at this. She has taken a job as a Middle-Eastern bakery tour guide in northern suburban Melbourne:

Last week and again this week, I'll show folks around Sydney Road and take them into a handful of the many Middle Eastern bakeries along this lively and cosmopolitan strip of bridal boutiques, multicultural food, funky cafes, factory outlets and rampant tolerance.

Her role is not to be an exemplar of her own culture, but to be invisible to herself and observe instead the colourful other (note the combination of adjectives she uses to describe the other: funky, lively, multicultural, cosmopolitan).

She is happy with the role of tour guide to what is most foreign within her own hometown, and is proud that she is more advanced in this role than others. She apparently likes the fact that the people she shows around, unlike herself, feel disoriented by what they see:

"I feel like I am in another country," the wide-eyed Loafers say as they openly gawk at the young girls wearing the hijab and tight jeans.

So Catherine Deveny tries very hard to earn distinction through cosmpolitan political beliefs. The problem is that you don't really earn elite status through such ideological distinction seeking.

So what non-ideological qualities might justify a claim to belong to an elite? The Wikipedia article on elitism suggests the following:

- Rigorous study of, or great accomplishment within, a particular field of study
- A long track record of competence in a demanding field
- An extensive history of dedication and effort in service to a specific discipline
- A high degree of accomplishment, training or wisdom within a given field

It would be a step forward if we lived in a society in which the elite, at the very least, engaged seriously with high culture, personal character and matters spiritual.

We are a long way from this. My call for a non-ideological form of distinction seeking was not comprehended in some quarters. It was thought to be a call for a physical, corporeal elitism, based on sporting prowess.

Over at Larvatus Prodeo, a fairly mainstream left-liberal site, it was suggested that I was leaving the "healthy mind" part out of the saying "a healthy mind in a healthy body" and that I was advocating something along the lines of "cricket and rugger for the blokes, synchronised diving and beach volleyball for the sheilas."

Someone else thought I might be excluding Catherine Deveny from the ranks of the elite because she was no good at games. There was also a comment suggesting that the sports already occupied an elite position compared to culture and the arts.

So some on the left cannot conceive what a non-ideological form of distinction might be, let alone fill the role. Nor do they seem open to the idea that they are undeserving of status given the shallow basis on which they claim distinction. They hold the opposite view: that they are not accorded enough status, particularly in comparison to non-intellectual sporting types. This is the thought which engrosses them.