An Indian woman in the West

Via Sunshine Mary I found an intriguing story about a single 32-year-old Indian woman living in the U.S.

Her tale goes like this. Her two siblings followed their parents' advice and married fellow Indians at a relatively early age and are now happily raising children. But she decided to follow the lifestyle of her white female friends. She admits to sleeping with 18 white men in her 20s, but now she is unhappy in her early 30s.

Why the discontent? Well, it seems that all those white men were happy to sleep with her but not marry her. So whilst her white female friends were able to marry in their late 20s she wasn't.

Furthermore, she has discovered in her early 30s that her Indian heritage and identity do matter to her. She now wants to marry an Indian man. But these men have options. They have a choice of traditional Indian women in the U.S. or they can go to India and find a young, family-oriented woman to marry.

There are several interesting aspects to her story. First, she actually believes that she's been sexually modest:

I just wanted to make things clear I didn't "sleep around." Most of my relationships have been long term I have only been with 18 guys.

How does she figure that 18 guys aren't so many? Because it is considerably less than what her friends managed:

My number is actually lower than some of my friends who were in the 30s and 40s...

What a strange culture we live in. These women are breaking the connection, and the ties of fidelity, with their future husbands even before they get married. (I'm glad to say that the young women I work with don't seem to follow this pattern; one very sweet and pretty young woman in my office got married this year - she met her husband whilst still a teen, has been with him ever since and is looking forward to having children with him. As is so often the case, she comes from a close knit, loving family herself).

Here's another aspect to this story. The narrative we are told to follow is that white men are the privileged ones, whilst non-whites are the oppressed other. But clearly Indian men living in the West have a big advantage when it comes to family formation. They have three choices: they can follow the modern Western lifestyle; they can marry a traditional Indian woman in the West; or they can go to India and choose amongst the younger and prettier women there to marry. As the Indian woman herself puts it:

I don’t know what to do, it seems like the dating pool dries up rather quickly. No guys really see me as anyone they want a future with. The few progressive Indian guys I met that I really felt like I had a future with ended up leaving me for a younger virgin bride from India. One of my exboyfriends (Indian) told me "You are great and all, but I can get a much better looking girl if I go to India, and one that will also cook for me."

So don't tell me that white men are privileged. Family formation is one of the key goods in life and clearly white men are at a disadvantage compared to Indian men.

One final angle of the story to comment on is a problem that is created by mass immigration. Our Indian woman finds herself in a no man's land when it comes to identity and culture: she can't identify as white but she is no longer part of a traditional Indian culture either:

I don't have any culture because I am not "actually white" and I am not Indian because I am "white washed."

In her case diversity did not lead to multiple cultures but to a sense of having no culture.

Important research: diversity is incompatible with community

Liberals believe that solidarity is based not on relatedness between a group of people but on otherness. It is with the marginalised other that we are to achieve solidarity.

And so liberals envisage diverse communities which express communal solidarity: diversity is our strength is the liberal mantra.

Some years ago Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard University cast doubt on the liberal project when he discovered that diversity and solidarity don't go well together:

The evidence that diversity and solidarity are negatively correlated comes from many different settings.

Professor Putnam found that there was less trust in highly diverse communities and that individuals tended to "hunker down" in such communities:

Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

Now another important research project has come to similar conclusions. Two researchers from the University of Michigan, Zachary Neal and Jennifer Watling Neal, decided to test whether it was possible to build diverse and cohesive communities.

The answer? A clear no:

After 20 million-plus simulations, the authors found that the same basic answer kept coming back: The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive.

Similarly:

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”

And this:

These findings are sobering. Because homophily and proximity are so ingrained in the way humans interact, the models demonstrated that it was impossible to simultaneously foster diversity and cohesion “in all reasonably likely worlds.” In fact, the trends are so strong that no effective social policy could combat them, according to Neal. As he put it in a statement, “In essence, when it comes to neighborhood desegregation and social cohesion, you can't have your cake and eat it too.”

In brief, these researchers are now convinced that you can either have diversity (desegregation) or social cohesion. One or the other.

The journalist covering the story suggested to the researchers that it might still be possible to have diversity at a city level rather than a neighbourhood one:

On a more positive note, it may be possible to have such sorting by neighborhoods and still have diverse cities. I asked Neal whether he thought that cities that were made up of a federation or mosaic of distinct neighborhoods were more likely to succeed than ones comprised of several more fully mixed neighborhoods.

That would, at least, give some room for distinct communities to exist. The traditionalist ideal, however, is to enact the same principle at a global level, in other words, to enjoy the diversity of distinct national cultures. It's more realistic to have cultures maintain themselves at the national level rather than a neighbourhood one.

However, credit to the researchers and to the journalist for accepting the scientific findings that you build community (solidarity) on the basis of like qualities or relatedness (homophily) rather than on diversity. Right now, getting the underlying principle right is what is most important.

One final point. In traditional communities, in which solidarity is based on forms of relatedness, there is still a diversity of sorts. Such communities have a deep sense of solidarity but there is still diversity based on distinct class and regional cultures. That remains the best way to reconcile the enjoyment of both diversity and community.

Three attacks in Five Points

We are encouraged by our schools and by the media to believe that it is whites who are violent toward blacks. That leads some white people to have a complacent view toward life in a multiculture. How can there be any danger for white people, when it is whites who are the violent ones?

But the reality is different. I'm going to post a video, but I should warn you that it is sickeningly violent. It shows an attack on two white men by a group of 8 to 10 black men in Columbia, South Carolina.

One of the white men is punched and when his friend, Josh Bosworth, goes in to help he is king hit (sucker punched) from behind. The group of black men are clearly excited by what they have done. It is left to a white woman to tend to the unconscious and bloodied Josh Bosworth.

Later on the same night in the same area a group of black men bumped into a white man and when he remonstrated he too was attacked and left with a broken arm.

In yet another incident an 18-year-old white man, Carter Strange, was left in a critical condition after being beaten by a group of 8 young black men. He was jogging through the same area (Five Points) of Columbia.

Here is the video:



My point in posting the video is not to malign all blacks as a group. It's to show the reality of what life is likely to be like when young white men are left as a minority. There is not going to be justice in this situation. It won't matter how courageous you are, or how good a fighter you are, or the rightness of why you are fighting, you will be overwhelmed. The only possible outcome is your humiliation.

The answer is not impotent rage, or revenge fantasies, or hating on blacks or any other group. It is for whites to get real - to no longer think in terms of abstract ideologies in which it is lazily assumed that whites are the invulnerable oppressor group victimising the other.

If we are to be smart we need to give ourselves permission to think about what we need to do as a group to maintain communities in which we remain predominant, so that our sons aren't left in the same hopeless position as Josh Bosworth or Carter Strange.

Amnesty calls for homelands for all ... well for some anyway

Amnesty International has found that the Aboriginal policies of the Northern Territory and Federal Governments have "fallen below international human rights standards".

Why? It seems that the current policy is to focus on 20 or so large settlements rather than funding many smaller ones. Amnesty is worried that this will push some Aborigines off their traditional lands. An Amnesty spokeswoman, Claire Mallinson, said:

Aboriginal people live healthier and more fulfilling lives on homelands.

Funny, when it comes to everyone else we are told, endlessly, that diversity is a strength. Those who object are labelled xenophobic or worse. But here we have Amnesty telling us that diversity is not a strength at all for Aborigines and that it is "healthier and more fulfilling" for them to keep their homelands.

The England riots

 Riots which began in the London suburb of Tottenham have now spread more widely throughout England. I was curious to learn more about Tottenham and had a look at the wikipedia entry. It seems to be a very diverse place:

Tottenham has a multicultural population, with many ethnic groups inhabiting the area. It contains one of the largest and most significant populations of African-Caribbean people. These were among the earliest immigrant groups to settle in the area, starting the UK's Windrush era. Soon after West African communities - notably the many Ghanaians - begun to migrate into the area. Between 1980 and the present day there has been a slow immigration of Colombians, Congolese, Albanian, Kurdish, Turkish-Cypriot, Turkish, Somalis, Irish, and Portuguese populations. South Tottenham is reported to be the most ethnically-diverse area in Europe, with up to 300 languages being spoken by its residents.

There is a crime problem:

Tottenham has been one of the main hotspots for gangs and gun crime in the United Kingdom during the past three decades. This followed the rise of gangs and drug wars throughout the area, notably those involving the Tottenham Mandem gang and various gangs from Hackney and all of the areas surrounding Tottenham, and the emergence of an organised crime ring known as the Turkish Mafia was said to have controlled more than 90% of the UK's heroin market.

Not a place I'd choose to raise a family in.

The riots have spread outside of London to places like Manchester. Which is curious given the story on the Manchester riot police from just a couple of months ago. A 51-year-old female officer was awarded £31,000 after failing to complete a shield run training exercise on time. It was claimed that she suffered "indirect discrimination" because as an older woman she wasn't able to keep to the established standards. She later passed the test when it was made easier for her.

I thought when I first read the story that it was a sign of the times in Britain that the riot squad was being organised to be non-discriminatory against older unfit women rather than to fulfil its proper purpose of keeping the streets in order. If it were me in charge, I'd be hiring young, physically intimidating males for the job. What if an event occurred in which it was important that every trained officer was able to fulfil the job to the highest level ... such as the riots that have been taking place for the past three nights.

What will British politicians do about the situation? Probably they'll try to buy off the "disaffected youth". But it won't work. There will be more trouble in the years to come.

Greg Sheridan: another liberal mugged by reality

Back in 1996 Australian journalist Greg Sheridan was an enthusiastic supporter of high immigration and multiculturalism:

There is nothing in multiculturalism that could cause any worry to any normal person.

He still supports high immigration but has had a change of heart on multiculturalism. Why? He explains as follows:

IN 1993, my family and I moved into Belmore in southwest Sydney. It is the next suburb to Lakemba. When I first moved there I loved it.

On the other side of Belmore, away from Lakemba, there were lots of Chinese, plenty of Koreans, growing numbers of Indians, and on the Lakemba side lots of Lebanese and other Arabs.

That was an attraction, too. I like Middle Eastern food. I like Middle Eastern people. The suburb still had the remnants of its once big Greek community and a commanding Greek Orthodox church.

But in the nearly 15 years we lived there the suburb changed, and much for the worse.

The multicultural suburbs he chose to live in developed a less appealing culture:

Three dynamics interacted in a noxious fashion: the growth of a macho, misogynist culture among young men that often found expression in extremely violent crime; a pervasive atmosphere of anti-social behaviour in the streets; and the simultaneous growth of Islamist extremism and jihadi culture.

The changes were felt directly by the Sheridan family:

The anti-social behaviour became more acute.

One son was playing cricket with friends when they were challenged by a group of teenagers, whom they presumed to be Lebanese but may have been of other Middle Eastern origin, who objected to white boys playing cricket. A full-scale, if brief, fist fight ensued.

One son was challenged by a boy with a gun. Lakemba police station was shot up. Crime increased on the railway line.

I was in the habit of taking an evening constitutional, walking a long route from the station to home. At some point it became unwise to walk on Canterbury Road. A white guy in a suit was a natural target for abuse or a can of beer or something else hurled from a passing car...

The worst thing I saw myself was two strong young men, of Middle Eastern appearance, waiting outside the train station.

A middle-aged white woman emerged from the station alone. She was rather oddly dressed, with a strange hair-do.

The two young men walked up beside her, began taunting her and then finished their effort by spitting in her face. They laughed riotously and walked away. She wiped the spittle off her face and hurried off home. It was all over in a few seconds.

According to Greg Sheridan, it is recognised amongst the Australian political elite that multiculturalism in Europe is a failure. But some Australian politicians claim that Australia is exceptional, and that multiculturalism will work out differently here.

Sheridan no longer believes this to be true and so suggests measures to discourage large-scale immigration from certain Muslim countries. He is still, though, a supporter of high immigration from elsewhere.

I find it interesting that Sheridan is so surprised by the way things have turned out. For instance, he writes:

No one in Europe, 25 years ago, thought they would be in the mess they're in today.

No one? I think this speaks more to the inability of those like Greg Sheridan to think through the consequences of the policies they champion. And I'm reminded here of the following idea of Lawrence Auster:

A reactionary (or shall we say a traditionalist?) is a person who sees a threat to his society the moment it appears. A conservative is a person who sees the threat to his society after it's already done a lot of damage. A liberal is a person who only sees sees the threat to his society after it's too late to do anything about it—or he never sees it at all. 

The choppers of Sao Paulo

Liberals want all the Western nations to become ethnically diverse. But what effects might that eventually have?

One nation with a long history of diverse immigration is Brazil. And the most diverse city in Brazil is Sao Paulo with a population of 11 million:

The demographics of São Paulo City are evidence of a uniquely large and ethnically diverse metropolis, with 111 different ethnic groups. It is the largest city in Brazil with a population defined by a long history of international immigration.

There are liberals who think of Sao Paulo in very positive terms. Some years ago I wrote about an Australian writer, Ryan Heath, who thought that Sydney needed to bump up its immigration levels so that it could catch up with Sao Paulo and become a real "world city":

The truth is that Australia doesn't really have a world city - and it's too deluded to realise what it needs to do to create one.

Reading the morning papers in the aftermath of the 2005 London bombings, I was struck by the faces of London. Thirty-two of the 39 photos of victims that stared at us that next morning were under 35 and looked like the United Nations. That's when I realised what a real "world city" is. It's not easy; it's not white; it's not old. It's crazy and colourful and out of control in a way I don't recognise in Australia. Sydney isn't the fifth column after New York, London, Tokyo and Paris ... Sydney is middle-ranking and miles ahead of its Australian rivals at that.

Indeed, it takes no great leap of the imagination to put Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro or Johannesburg on the same footing as Sydney. But it's a real challenge for white chauvinists to think that a Portuguese-speaking city might be more interesting.

I remembered Ryan Heath when a reader recently forwarded me an article on Sao Paulo. It was written back in 2002 but is well worth taking the time to read. It describes the fears of the upper classes in Sao Paulo, who are so frequently targeted by crime that they buy helicopters to fly above the city they work in, rather than risking the roads below, and who live in gated suburbs, protected by massive police forces.

Here is how one Sao Paulo businessman gets home from work:

En route to his mansion in Alphaville -- a walled city where the privileged live behind electrified fences patrolled by a private army of 1,100 -- Klein quietly stared out the window. His pilot clipped low over the honeycomb-like slums and clogged highways below. More than halfway through a nine-minute commute, the copter grazed over a cluster of inner-city prisons. A squad of machine-gun-toting guards stood near a perimeter wall, their gaunt faces squinting upward as Klein's copter buzzed by.

"The perspective is different from up here," remarked Klein, a graying hulk of a man and executive director of Casas Bahia, one of Brazil's largest electronics retailers. Over the din of the blades, he told a reporter that "it even looks beautiful sometimes. Up here, however, it is safe. Down there -- ." He paused, staring across the metal and glass horizon. "Well, it's another story."

Sao Paulo ... is, by some accounts, a vision of future urban life in the developing world. As homicide and kidnapping rates have soared to record levels, civilian helicopter traffic here has become what industry executives describe as the busiest on Earth. Helicopter companies estimate that liftoffs average 100 per hour. The city boasts 240 helipads, compared with 10 in New York City, allowing the rich to whisk to and from their well-guarded homes to work, business meetings, afternoons of shopping, even church.

And this is why the upper class resorts to such measures:

One result is city life dominated by fear. The homicide rate in greater Sao Paulo, South America's largest city, has more than tripled during the 1990s, to about 60 murders per 100,000 residents, compared with 7.4 in the Washington metropolitan area and 7.8 in New York. Already 63 kidnappings have been reported this year in Sao Paulo, up from only 15 during the same period last year, according to police statistics. The surge in abductions has produced a cottage industry of plastic surgeons who specialize in treating wealthy victims who return from their ordeals with sliced ears, severed fingers and other missing body parts that were sent to family members as threats for ransom payment.

Despite a lackluster economy, a $2 billion-a-year security industry is thriving across Brazil. Brazilians are armoring and bulletproofing an estimated 4,000 cars a year, twice as many as in Colombia, which is in the midst of a 38-year-old civil war. A wealthy Sao Paulo businessman, who spoke on the condition his name be withheld, said he allows his daughter to boogie at nightclubs only under the eyes of a commando turned bodyguard. In a city where the wealthy are known for ostentation, many are now buying low-profile economy cars to fool kidnappers and thieves.

"We have become prisoners in our own homes," said Ellen Saraiva, the elegant wife of a construction magnate, as she sat in her tasteful living room in a heavily guarded building in Sao Paulo's fashionable Jardims neighborhood. After a series of high-profile kidnappings on nearby streets last year, she and her husband paid $35,000 to bulletproof their understated gray Volkswagen. The armoring cost twice as much as the car.

"I pray to God every time I leave my building," she said. "I live in fear for myself and my family. One of my daughters is studying abroad right now, and as much as I miss her, it makes me feel at peace to know she is not here living through this nightmare."

Sao Paulo's population is 70% white (mostly of Italian, Spanish, Greek, German & Portuguese ancestry), 3% Asian (Korean, Chinese, Japanese), 5% black and 22% multiracial.

So what went wrong? The article suggests that the problem is due to an excessive gap in wealth. But that begs the question. Why would there be such a large gap in Sao Paulo? Couldn't one reason be that there is no longer such a sense of solidarity between the upper and lower classes, when they do not feel a sense of common ethnicity and a common purpose in advancing a shared heritage? And couldn't another reason be that the lower classes have less motivation to hold together a productive culture of family life and a work ethic when society is more atomised?

What will happen to those Western nations which undergo a fall in living standards, with the welfare state no longer able to fund large numbers of people? Won't these nations then be vulnerable to a similar kind of social development that has occurred in diverse Sao Paulo?

I can't help but think that it was short-sighted for the Western political classes to give up the advantages - the social solidarity - of a more homogeneous population. There is a strong chance that they will one day pay the same price as the upper classes in Sao Paulo.

As for Ryan Heath, he might like to consider this question: if Sao Paulo is such an "interesting" world city, then why do its leading residents choose to spend large sums of money flying over it rather than experiencing it on the ground? And is the word "interesting" really the best one to use to describe living in a gated suburb guarded by a private army of 1100?

Woods a living symbol of perfection?

Tiger Woods was in Melbourne recently. His reception was way over the top. He was fawned over and treated like something more than a great sportsman. The worst offenders were middle-aged white women; I still remember one at a press conference gushing over him, treating him like he was a demigod.

Woods himself seemed embarrassed by it all.

So when news of his alleged infidelity hit the papers I was interested in the reaction of his worshippers admirers.

Sally Morrell, a regular columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun, obliged by penning her thoughts on the matter.

In her column she admits that she has no interest in golf. She doesn't admire Woods for his sporting prowess but for what he represents as a man. She writes:

It is Woods the man that I so like and admire. It's almost like he's a living symbol of perfection.

A living symbol of perfection? Why? Well, Sally Morrell likes that he isn't brash, that he's close to his parents and that he's protective of his family's privacy. But the clincher is this:

I especially love that his ethnicity embraces almost every part of the world, with his ancestors including Thais, African Americans, American Indians and Dutch.

Perfection, for Sally Morrell, seems to be a man who is non-white, but who is non-threatening to her white sensibilities by being unassuming, genteel and protective toward his family.

But adultery is less than perfect, shattering the idyll:

So now you tell me he had an affair? Hello? It's like telling me Jesus kicked a dog.

It's not just that it doesn't compute, it's that it makes you doubt if anyone can be as perfect as we'd like to believe at least one man can.

Of course, we shouldn't be so naive and shouldn't need any one person to show us what perfection looks like.

Of course, writes Sally Morrell, we shouldn't be so naive - but she indulges her naivety regardless, projecting her liberalism onto a hapless golfer in something close to religious terms.

The only freedom worthy of the name?

I recently reviewed a pamphlet titled Liberal Republicanism. The authors of the pamphlet were adamant that there could be no common good. There are only individuals pursuing their own individual purposes. The authors began their work by quoting the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.

What are the consequences of taking such a view? If you believe in a common good, as traditionalists do, it's easier to accept a certain kind of social differentiation. It's possible to accept that there are differences between people, and between different groups of people, that might affect their social role and the way they contribute to society.

For instance, if there is a common good, it's possible that men and women might contribute to it, on average, in different ways. So might the middle classes and the working classes. A working class person might not, on average, contribute as much to high culture. He might, though, contribute to popular culture, to the economy, to family life and so on.

A liberal cannot so easily accept this kind of social differentiation. If individuals must be free to author their own lives in terms of whatever purposes are selected by them, then all life paths must be equally open.

But how do you make all life paths equally open? There are two basic approaches. The first is to assume that social roles are so flexible and robust that they can be filled by anyone without any negative effect. They can, in other words, only be added to and enriched.

So if women were to become 50% of the combat troops in the army, a liberal would be likely to have faith that this would not pose a risk to the existing culture and role of soldiering, but that the distinct qualities of women would only enrich and add to what already exists.

A few years ago, Lawrence Auster discussed another example at View from the Right. A Muslim woman in a headscarf, who was opposed to the public display of hair, applied for a position as a hairdresser at a very trendy, cutting-edge, punky hair salon in London. She won a considerable payout when she complained about not getting the position. Here we have the liberal insistence that all life paths be made equally open, alongside the assumption that this won't impact negatively on an existing social role or institution.

What is another way that liberals can make all life paths equally open? They can do so by assuming that the differences between people aren't so great; that the differences are mostly socialised and can be evened out.

This is what the authors of the Demos pamphlet seek to do, albeit in a relatively moderate way. They want to make the "capability" of people more even. Their argument is that justice means doing what we want and that we must therefore make people more evenly capable of leading lives of their own choosing. Here are some excerpts from the pamphlet to give you an idea of the thought processes at work:

Where people lack capability they lack the opportunity to make of their life what they would ... Injustice flares up when people cannot do things they want to do, things they value ... A capability approach focuses on the ends of life rather than the means ... It is about the independent power of people to live as they would like to live ... the opportunities of people to lead lives of their own choosing ... the hope that every person can become the author of her own life ...

Some liberals go further than trying to even out "capability". They accept that in order to make all life paths equally open, people have to be considered to be the same (i.e. they have to be interchangeable or, to put it best, undifferentiated).

Here is how one liberal describes her view of men and women as being undifferentiated:

We are all human beings. We are all similar lumps of fleshy matter that moves and grunts and goes around its daily business.

In practice, modern liberalism follows both the approaches that I have set out. If difference is recognised it is assumed to have no negative effect on existing social roles, only the possibility of enrichment. Alternatively, difference is downplayed: it is assumed to be socially constructed and to have no necessary influence on an individual's life path.

So it doesn't mean all that much when liberals claim to welcome diversity. It's not difficult to welcome diversity if you assume that it can only enrich and if you think that people are essentially the same anyway.

What is it that liberals enthuse about when speaking of diversity? It isn't the fact of significant differences between people, sufficient to change the real character of a society, including some of its distinctive, finer points. Rather it's merely a change to the surface aesthetics of a society: its colour, bustle, taste and accent.

It's not easy for liberals to accept that they might be wrong on these secondary points. If liberals are wrong about the effects of diversity, then it means that the underlying principles of liberalism are, at the very least, impractical. And liberals seem to prefer hope to doubt when it comes to their own first principles.

A chameleon nation?

What should Australia's national identity be? Matthew Albert and Samah Hadid believe they have the answer. In a feature article in Melbourne's Age newspaper, they have called for Australia to become a chameleon nation.

Their argument runs briefly as follows. There are now a lot of ethnic minorities in Australia and therefore,

it is perplexing that our projection of Australian identity is built around stories that still have Paul Hogan-like Australians at their centre.

This is a quick and unsympathetic way to dismiss the older Anglo tradition in Australia. Samah Hadid represents a very recent wave of migrants who have really only arrived in numbers over the past decade. And yet she is already expressing impatience that Anglo-Australians aren't getting out of the way fast enough.

What this betrays is how little modernist intellectuals really care for cultural traditions. And if you think I'm wrong in this then read on a little further.

If Hadid and Albert don't appreciate the existing culture and identity and want it immediately replaced, then what do they propose putting in its place? To their credit, they are open and honest about their aims:

Australia needs an identity that the world recognises as being global, and therefore, like the world, multicultural. The new identity will make our diversity a high-profile asset. We need an identity of a chameleon nation ...

Culturally diverse societies are able to adapt more successfully to rapid global changes, including increasing global population mobility. Australia is increasingly becoming part of a global community. In the same way that G20 finance ministers and Central Bank governors committed themselves last Saturday to tackle national financial security by rejecting protectionism, so too should we reject protectionism concerning our national identity "security", which tends now to reflect a cliche.

Australians from culturally diverse backgrounds have contributed to Australia's entrepreneurial skills, bolstering our country's ability to trade and interact with other nations. Migrants have thereby contributed to Australia's economy and significantly broadened business opportunities. The line of business builders from Belarusian-born Sidney Myer to Czech-born Frank Lowy attests to this. This will continue. And, it should be at the centre of our national self-image.

Metaphors of the past will not suffice for a changing future. Australia should move away from aiming to be a melting pot or a mosaic. It should be, what we call, a chameleon nation. A chameleon nation adapts to fit in with its context.

It is a nation that draws on the full spectrum of its diversity to respond holistically and intelligently to global change. The chameleon nation we envision draws on, and builds all the differences it contains to ensure that Australia is a nation of the world and continues to contain the world within our nation. Our chameleon spirit can be manifested in the way we welcome migrants and refugees, and the way we accept changing demographics.

The chameleon spirit could make Australia's community of globally literate people its greatest asset and its multiculturalism a brand to sell on the global market. Our multiculturalism could be our marketing pitch, one to allow Australia to better adapt to emerging situations internally and externally, economically and socially ...

What a national identity! We are to proudly have a "chameleon spirit" which means adapting ourselves utterly to the needs of the global market. What a rank and empty technocratic vision is spelled out above. The real message is: you are not to have a stable identity at all, culture doesn't matter, it is proper to change your identity for the purposes of trade, and you are to be so open that you will come to perfectly represent the global elsewhere rather than something distinct of your own.

This is a long way from a real national identity. It is almost a way of telling us that there is to be no national identity. There will just be a global technocratic order in which culture doesn't count for much.

Even the Age cartoonist seems to recognise this. The cartoon drawn for the article shows a "Chameleoroo" - an old, jaded, money-grubbing creature - with its young progeny in the pouch hungering eagerly after money.



Is the cartoonist disappointed in what things have come to? That a national identity should be thought of in such spiritless, uncultured, technocratic and materialistic terms? Is this what he thought his liberal politics was going to lead to in the end?

In order to promote diversity in Canada .....

Things are getting ever more Orwellian in Canada:

Queens University in Kingston, ON is coming under criticism for hiring six "dialogue facilitators" to roam its campus and intervene in student conversations in order to promote “diversity” and deal with what they deem to be any “offensive" material.

The six graduate students from diverse backgrounds have been hired to encourage discussion on race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and other social issues, as well as step-in when they hear conversations that could be deemed "offensive." Each facilitator went through an 11-day training course to prepare them for their roles and have been granted free room and board as well as a yearly stipend as payment.

The phrase "in order to promote 'diversity'" reminds me of a something Jim Kalb wrote in his new book, The Tyranny of Liberalism:

The fate of liberalism is displayed in the fate of words like "diversity" and "tolerance." Contemporary liberalism honors diversity and tolerance above everything else, but its diversity excludes and suppresses people with a traditional understanding of normality, and its tolerance requires speech codes, quotas, and compulsory training in correct opinions and attitudes.

... substantive tolerance requires pervasive administrative control of human relationships. (p.92)

Queens University is apparently determined to prove Jim Kalb 100 per cent correct.

If you're interested in Jim Kalb's new book, there's a good, brief review over at the Conservative Book Club, an interview with the author at the publisher's site, and it's also available via Amazon.

Hat tip: Pilgrimage to Montsalvat

Missionaries attacked in Sydney

Here's a news item which the American media has reported on but which the Australian media hasn't been willing to cover.

Two young Mormon men from America were walking home through an area of Sydney known as "Little Lebanon" (thought to be the suburb of Auburn) when they were suddenly attacked by a group of six men of Middle Eastern appearance. The two young Americans were beaten and stabbed.

According to American media sources:

... the United States embassy in Australia is said to be investigating the incident. An official motive has not been released, though Collinsworth's mother believes it was a combination of racial and religious reasons.

"Chris is in a real melting pot, there's guy from all over the world," said Alisa Collinsworth. "He said the guys who came after him were Lebanese Muslims and they were grown men... they were big guys."

Why hasn't the Australian media reported on this story? Are there Lebanese Muslims in Sydney who are willing to launch unprovoked attacks on people because they are white? Or because they are missionaries for another religion? Is this a "hate crime" committed against two white American Mormon men?

There's more information on the attack here and here.

Cut adrift in Harlem

You might have heard the saying that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. Well, here's a story to illustrate the quote.

Susan Crain Bakos is an older, white, female liberal. A few years ago, she wrote a column announcing that she'd given up on white men and now preferred the company of black men. She wrote that she deliberately chose black men because of the racial difference and because black men not only had "more energy, style and edge" but were also "gentlemen, something which white men no longer are".

Well, she's now written another column. It turns out that she acted on her decision to only date black men by moving to Harlem and socialising in a Harlem bar. At first, things went well. The bar, St.Nicks Pub, was a bubbling hub of diversity:

On that Saturday night when I first went with friends to hear the Africa Band, I thought the pub — Harlem! — welcomed me. And I rhapsodized about the experience to friends. Striding into St. Nicks on a balmy August night, working my embroidered denim Halle Bob skirt with the deep front slit, I felt Harlem gently kissing my thighs. Nelson, the bar manager, smiled at me and brought folding chairs up from the basement to arrange seating for us because, he said, “I want you sitting here where I can keep an eye on those pretty white legs.”

I was surrounded by the kind of crowd that I imagined assembled in small Harlem jazz bars during the Renaissance and again in the 1940s and the 1960s, time periods when the excitement in the air was inextricably linked to a sound appreciated by sophisticated people who sought out diversity. Africans and African Americans, whites, Latinos, European and Japanese tourists — a mélange of ages, races, sexual orientations and interracial couples — they were jostling against each other in this tiny crowded space without animosity ...

But as time passed problems emerged. There was crime:

It was always a place where cash disappears from unwatched handbags, a jacket or cashmere shawl tossed casually on the back of a bar stool may be sold to another patron and “salesmen” come through hawking everything from tube socks to portraits of the Virgin Mary. Between the casual theft and the men who asked, “Will you buy me a drink? Lend me some money? Help me buy a new car?” — Yes, a car! — I had stopped carrying more cash than I would spend on two drinks and a cab home. Drugs, of course, were available for purchase in the backyard, which usually smelled of pot smoke.

There was jealous hostility from black women:

... the undercurrent of anger that I’d seen as an occasional flash in a black woman’s eye turned into more open hostility. The African-American girl bartenders, especially on Sunday nights, brazenly overcharged white customers and told them to leave for “being disrespectful” if they complained. Black women “regulars” made loud negative comments about white women ...

There were political resentments:

One of the regulars, an educated, successful black man, lectured me repeatedly: “America must apologize for the original sin of slavery and offer reparations.” “The prisons are full of young black men caught with nickel and dime bags,” he declared, “Incarcerated on the three-strikes-you’re-out rule.” “Reverend Jeremiah Wright! Why is he being pilloried for saying what black ministers say every Sunday in Harlem!”

There was violence:

...the violence was escalating, too ... There were stories of one musician slashing another in the backyard, of fist fights among drug buyers and sellers, of guns waved but not shot. One Friday night, I was in the pub when some thugs came in and roughed up some other thugs. Most of the African-American regulars bolted for the door; the white people stayed.

Then there was Mykul, a thug who knocked her to the ground to steal her handbag:

Mykul, my assailant, is a thug; and I was naive to have ignored that.

I discovered during chatty conversation at the pub that Mykul—pronounced Michael—was a hairdresser who initially learned his craft while in prison. Liberal white woman that I am — was? — I believed in rehabilitation, so I made an appointment with him at Big Russ’ Barber Shop on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. And I even returned a second time.

I’m sure he stole my wallet on that second hair appointment, though he blamed a gypsy cab driver for its loss. I wasn’t going to make a third appointment. Then the shakedowns for more money began. He called asking me to pay more “because you would pay it downtown.” Apparently desperate to cover the debt with his drug dealer, he’d told me he had — or maybe just to buy more drugs — he stepped up his game.

When I hit the concrete with the back of my head and the small of my back, I knew that I was forever changed. I was mugged once before, but it wasn’t personal. No one I actually knew by name had ever raised a hand to me. Born and raised in East St. Louis, Ill., I had nevertheless lived my life — until that night — in a world where men do not hit or shove women.

She found herself friendless:

No one outside the pub that night would loan me a cell phone to dial 911. Crying, I went inside and borrowed a phone from Melvin. Two uniformed cops responded to the call, a man and a woman, young and as unsympathetic as the patrons at the bar — who hugged me in greeting most nights — and now wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Nobody knows you,” the cops said. “Nobody saw anything,” they said.

“It’s always like that in there. Someone gets stabbed in the backyard and nobody saw nothing, nobody knows nothing."

... The next day, a friend who has written about Harlem said: “I am sorry you lost your idealism and innocence; you held on to it far longer than most people do ..."

She concludes:

Often I think that African Americans give us too much power. White people aren’t the primary force keeping them down. Thug Life is. I haven’t seen Mykul since that night in May. If I did, I’d probably find a safe building and hide. The physical sense of violation I felt when Mykul attacked me was so profound that I could not understand how my neighbors could stand by and offer no help, no sympathy.

She began by glamourising the diversity of Harlem, but her own experiences there led her to observe that:

Harlem is no place for a woman without male protection.

Having cut herself adrift from her own community, she found herself in a place where she no longer felt, in her own words, "emotionally safe".

Hat tip: Pilgrimage to Montsalvat

Falling down in Koreatown

Back in 1996, at the age of 43, Heather King found herself married but childless, and living in Koreatown, a suburb of Los Angeles crowded with large immigrant families.

The experience led her to break with the liberal culture she had grown up with. As a young woman, Heather King believed "passionately" in the freedom to have casual sex and to take drugs. She fell pregnant a number of times and ended up having three abortions; she refused to consider motherhood out of fear that it might limit or restrict her lifestyle:

Coming of age in the '60s, I believed passionately in sexual freedom and the concomitant right to choose abortion. Also a staunch supporter of drinking and drugs, I became deeply alcoholic and sobered up in my mid-thirties to discover that I had somehow graduated from law school. I have now been married for six years, and, at forty-three, am childless.

It is difficult to admit that two of the babies I aborted were conceived with married men, one of whom was a one-night stand, and that the third abortion was performed during the course of a long-term relationship. I would like to be able to say that I agonized over the decisions, but the fact is that they were based on expedience and fear.

Motherhood would have disrupted my life in every conceivable way. It would call upon resources I was not at all certain I possessed--patience, selflessness, the ability to go without sleep--and I viewed it, frankly, as a kind of prison sentence. It seemed inconceivable that a woman would actually invite the upheaval that a baby entails. I don't care how much joy they say it brings, I said to myself, no way am I getting sucked into that trap.

She then devoted herself to a career as a lawyer:

When we arrived in Koreatown, I was working as a litigation attorney in a Beverly Hills office. I could scarcely have been more temperamentally ill-suited for the job, but it was the first time in my life I had made decent money and I was desperately afraid to give it up. My eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue, fell upon the bimonthly paycheck with the same grim relish a buzzard displays for carrion; I dragged through each day consumed by anxiety and the hideous fear that I would contract some stress-based disease and keel over dead at my desk.

Finally she began to reconsider the values on which her life had been founded:

During those four years my life felt, oddly enough, like a prison sentence--the sentence I had hoped to avoid by exercising intelligence backed by the unfettered exercise of free will. As a matter of fact, although I had enjoyed virtually every purported freedom that modern life has to offer, I realized that in one way, my life had always felt like a sentence. I had drunk and smoked and slept around to my heart's content, yet the apotheosis of my personal freedom had consisted of servitude to a bottle of booze and getting pregnant by someone whose name I barely knew ...

I had followed my own unguided will, and it had led me straight to hell on earth: an existence characterized by guilt, shame, doubt, insecurity, and the inability to love or be loved.

So the freedom to act in any direction guided by nothing more than individual reason was not liberating for Heather King. She had been misled, first by the belief that it is the absence of limit or restraint which represents human freedom, and second by the idea that individual reason alone is sufficient to guide us successfully through life.

Individual reason is important but it's not enough: not only does it vary in quality from individual to individual, even when it's strong it will still often take too long for individuals to learn important life lessons from scratch. As Burke famously wrote:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

Which brings us back to Koreatown, Los Angeles. Heather King moved there for the cheap rent, but felt alienated rather than enriched living in the midst of diversity:

It is a neighborhood under physical, mental, and spiritual siege. Here, encircled and infiltrated, we live in the agora. As I write, a man ten feet from my desk puffs a cigarette on his porch; I can see the whites of his eyes ...

Here it is not an exaggeration to say that somebody will steal it if it's not nailed down. Somebody, for instance, stole my brand-new bicycle, then somebody stole my car ...

The majority of our neighbors are Latino and Korean and the place is lousy with children. Mothers and fathers - mostly mothers - throng the sidewalk with their litters of offspring. I used to wonder with irritation why these people give birth so relentlessly ...

Three times a day the produce truck parks out front, blaring "Turkey in the Straw" or "O'er the Bounding Main" for twenty minutes at a stretch. At 8 P.M., a man who sells bread out of the back of his car pulls up and emits a haunting wail, like a mullah calling the devout to prayer ...

We fall asleep to the whirr of circling helicopters and the staccato lullaby of gunfire. Crack addicts propel their shopping carts through the alley; car alarms shriek like wounded animals; the spray cans of the graffiti "taggers" hiss audibly. Girlish screams follow the thud of fist against flesh.

The litter is ferocious. A set of unspoken rules prevails: when holding something you no longer have any use for--a newspaper, a napkin, a styrofoam cup--open your hand and let the thing drop to the ground where you stand. When finished eating, throw what's left - a chicken bone, a corn cob, a banana peel - in the street ...

When I do the dishes, I can see the Korean mother across the way stirring a pot and wiping her table. A kind of blue-net birdcage, housing what appear to be dead sardines, dangles from an eave; kimchee ferments below in an earthenware crock ...

There seem to be two things going on here. First, an understandable reaction to crime, overcrowding, and unfamiliar sights, sounds and social mores. How could Heather King relax and feel a sense of home in these conditions of diversity?

But it seems too that Koreatown challenged her liberal-left hostility to motherhood and family. She was confronted daily with the sight of large families and women surrounded by their children. This too was alien to her own social class and she records her negative response: "lousy with children", "litters of offspring".

But in re-examining her underlying values, she also came to question her negative attitude to motherhood. She has come to believe that the reasons she gave herself for her abortions were false:

The vague notion underlying my abortions, and I suspect of the vast majority of other women's as well, is the idea that there wouldn't be enough to go round--not enough time, not enough energy, not enough space, not enough people to help. But when I examined my motives honestly, I realized that though I said not enough for the kid, I meant not enough for me.

I mouthed platitudes about the global population boom; in fact, I was most worried about overcrowding in my own bedroom. I chafed against the "enforced labor" of motherhood while accepting without question the prevailing consumer ethic that sentences the vast majority of us to a lifetime of economic servitude.

The truth in my case is that there was not only enough to go round, there would probably have been more than most of the rest of the world will ever enjoy: maybe not an expensive home or fancy cars--I don't have those things now--but nourishing food and a roof over our heads and comfortable clothes. There would have been books and music and museums. It would have meant sacrifice, deferred plans, missed vacations, no slipcovered down sofa, no hundred-dollar shoes, but there would have been enough. The truth was that I simply did not want to share.

She now believes that motherhood might have changed her for the better:

If I discovered today I was pregnant, I hope my convictions would be steadfast and unwavering. I hope I would know enough to weigh my fear--of birth defects, of making do with less, of not being a good parent, of noise and anxiety and lack of sleep--against the possibility that a child would change me in ways I cannot imagine, in aspects of my life that probably desperately need changing.

What a pity, though, that this change of heart came so late in life, when the time for motherhood had probably passed by.

Baillieu's negative identity

We recently had a debate here in Victoria on a "Relationships Bill" which permits same sex couples to officially register their partnerships. The leader of the Liberal Party opposition, Ted Baillieu, spoke in favour of the bill. What he said has a wider significance:

For me, this bill is about respect. We are a nation and a state of different people. Indeed, our diversity is at the heart of our collective identity - different people, different views, different lifestyles.

If you read this casually you might skim by the truly radical element of what Baillieu is saying. Baillieu has no problem using the term "collective identity", but consider carefully what he means by this concept. It is not a "positive" identity, in the sense that it represents a set of positive characteristics shared by a community of people. Instead, it is a negative identity, in which people identify with the absence of shared characteristics.

Baillieu has come very close to jettisoning a collective identity. All that he has retained is a very limited negative collective identity. It's little more than the bare bones of a communal identity.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, I think he is representing the liberal position honestly. There are Liberal Party leaders who claim that you can have mass, diverse immigration over many generations and still retain the strength of the older collective identity. It doesn't seem to me to be a likely outcome.

There are problems, though, in giving up on a collective identity. There are practical concerns like a lack of social cohesion; a decline in altruism; and a weakening motivation to defend the society you live in.

More importantly, there is a loss of the communal setting for people's lives. We gain much as individuals from a strong collective identity in which we enjoy a sense of shared history, of a common culture, of closely understood manners and mores, of a widely shared calendar of festivals and celebrations, of a distinct tradition linking generations to each other, and of art and architecture expressing the character of our own community.

Baillieu's position might be more candid than that of other Liberal Party leaders but it is also profoundly deracinated: it represents the mindset of the rootless, modernist individual who has become disconnected from his own communal tradition.

Roebuck: it gets worse

One man I would never put in charge of defending a national culture is Peter Roebuck. He's the English cricketer turned Australian sports journalist, who now seems to specialise in knocking white Australians.

A couple of months ago Roebuck wrote a column calling the Australian cricket team a "pack of dogs" and suggesting they be sacked. He followed this up by writing of native born Australians that:

The game is up for that lot. It is time to move on. It is debatable whether people born in this country should be allowed to vote.

In case we didn't get the message he's penned another column claiming that racist Anglo-Australians have excluded other people from playing cricket, and that only now with the emergence of some non-Anglo players is the country finally advancing toward the light.

Roebuck's column begins:

Lily-livered lilywhites have held cricket back

OVER the years, Australian cricket has been dominated by players of Anglo-Saxon extraction ...

He then proceeds to describe Anglo-Australians in negative terms, claiming they represent what is narrow, limited and insular, and that they have taunted, sledged, scorned and drummed out non-white players (he also fits in a reference to massacres).

In contrast, the non-white players are described in more glowing terms: they are "brilliant", "blessed with lively pace", and "gifted". One player's mother "made the best dim sims in Sydney" and a Muslim player is a "fully-qualified pilot".

Which leads Roebuck to this conclusion:

Australia is advancing. A bright-eyed 17-year-old girl is making her Test debut in Bowral. Aboriginal sides from every corner of the country are taking part in the Imparja Cup in Alice Springs. And a government led by a Mandarin speaker has just issued a formal apology to the first tenants of this vast, hostile continent. It is all part of the same process, a long-awaited and stiffly resisted move towards enlightenment.

So the existence of a country of white Australians represents for Roebuck a kind of dark ages, a backwardness to be overcome. The past is to be disparaged as necessarily racist and parochial; whites are to be denigrated as a negative force in history resisting progress to equality and diversity.

My first instinctive response to Roebuck is to ask: what kind of a man is this? A more fully natured man would feel a positive connection to his ancestry, to the history of his own people, and to the unique culture they have produced together.

Those who feel connected in this way to their own tradition are most likely to be the ones who drive things forward, who are motivated to make a productive and creative contribution to the ongoing community they love and identify with.

Roebuck not only lacks a natural loyalty to his own tradition, he has turned against his coethnics and placed them in a most difficult position - that of playing the role of cosmic enemy to human progress.

Hat tip: Abandon Skip

Are diverse suburbs vibrant or boring?

9000 Melbournians were asked to list the most boring suburbs in their city. The results? Broadmeadows, Dandenong, Melton and Footscray were voted the least interesting places.

If you live in Melbourne you'll know straightaway the significance of these results. Broadmeadows, Dandenong and Footscray are arguably the three most ethnically diverse, multicultural suburbs in Melbourne (Melton is an outlying satellite suburb).

For many years we've been told that it was the more traditional suburbs which were boring and that diversity would enrich them and make them more vibrant and interesting. As recently as August, Tony Calma ran this kind of line in defending multiculturalism:

Australia is one of the most diverse nations on earth ... The interaction between our cultures is producing new, exciting ways of life and relationships.

It seems that the very opposite is true. The more ethnically diverse a suburb is the more likely it is to be rated as boring.

Whiteness studies

I wrote this article for the Autumn 2007 edition of The Independent Australian. It draws on a number of pieces written earlier for Oz Conservative.

Ten years ago there were no such courses. Now “whiteness studies” is being taught at over 30 American campuses. In Australia too there are academics teaching this subject; in 2003 they formed their own whiteness studies association.

So what is it? In short, it’s a field of studies based on the theory that whites invented the idea of biological race in order to oppress indigenous peoples and to benefit from unearned privileges.

An Australian whiteness theorist, Damien Riggs, has summarized the new field of studies as follows:

Whiteness is seen as a thoroughly racialised project that aims to legitimate the authority of certain groups over others by drawing on a legacy of ‘biological’ explanations of race … Whilst this approach starts from an understanding of race as a social construction, it also acknowledges the very concrete ways in which race shapes experiences of oppression and privilege.

What is the effect of these studies on white students? One young Australian woman, Veronica Coen, tells us that her whiteness studies course led her,

to recognise that my privilege as an educated middle-class white woman was directly attributed to my ancestor’s theft of indigenous land and their exploitation

She then,

took a frightening journey into Australia’s violent history … The path was at times very distressing. My study journal was often wrinkled with tears.

Nado Aveling, who teaches whiteness studies to student teachers at Perth’s Murdoch University (it’s a mandatory part of the course) tells us of the students’ reactions that:

responses are often strongly emotional, and resistance, misunderstanding, frustration, anger and feelings of inefficacy may be the outcomes.

A social construct?

So whiteness studies confronts students with the claim that their identity is a false social construct, built around the oppression of Aborigines, and that the lives they lead are built unjustly on unearned privilege.

It’s a significant claim to make, but not one which is intellectually coherent. Even its starting point makes little sense.

Damien Riggs tells us that his approach “starts from an understanding of race as a social construction” and that we should reject “the legacy of ‘biological’ explanations of race”.

So we are meant to accept the idea that a “white race” exists not as a biological fact, but as a social construct – as something simply made up by society for its own purposes.

Why would someone make this claim, when it contradicts the visible evidence of a biologically existing white race? The answer has to do with certain intellectual assumptions existing within liberal modernism.

Liberal modernism asserts that to be fully human we must be autonomous in the sense that we are able to determine for ourselves who we are to be. Therefore, liberal modernists don’t like to recognise the existence of a “biological destiny” in which we are influenced in our identity by our sex or our race (or by other inherited or traditional qualities which we don’t choose for ourselves).

Liberal modernists therefore often prefer to believe that qualities like race are oppressive social constructs whose real existence can either be denied or made not to matter.

Inconsistency

Riggs is therefore following a modernist ideology in claiming that race is a social construct. However, even in ideological terms, this claim is incoherent.

Why? One reason is that whiteness theorists don’t simply want to declare race null and void. They want to pin down whites as guilty oppressors. Therefore, they are concerned to emphasise the idea of “whiteness” as a racial category at the same time as they deny the real existence of a white race.

To make this clear, whiteness theorists are strongly opposed to the idea of whites being race blind. They want to make whites more conscious of their “racialised” existence, whilst still claiming that there is no such thing as a really existing white race.

It’s a difficult distinction to hold and Damien Riggs himself warns that,

It is important to recognise that in talking about race we run the risk of reifying race as a ‘real entity’

Similarly, whiteness theorists dismiss the idea of really existing races and yet they recognise Aborigines as a real entity, even to the extent of claiming that Aborigines are sovereign over other groups (Riggs states that “indigenous sovereignty is the ground on which we stand”).

Then there is the issue of “complicity”. Whiteness theorists don’t want to allow any escape routes by which whites can escape the guilt of their unearned privileges. Robinder Kaur, a whiteness theorist at York University has explained that for whites,
“there is no 'safe space', no haven of guiltlessness to retreat to.”

Therefore, whiteness theorists emphasise the idea of “complicity”: that all whites, even the whiteness theorists themselves, are complicit in white guilt. It is made clear that you are still complicit, even if you renounce all privilege, or choose to identify with Aborigines, or dedicate your life to anti-racist causes. You remain a guilty white.

This may serve a useful purpose within whiteness theory. However, it adds to the intellectual incoherence of whiteness studies. After all, the original purpose of liberal moderns declaring race to be a social construct was to allow individuals to autonomously choose their own multiple, fluid identities. Now, though, we have whiteness theorists, as liberal moderns, talking about whiteness as the most absolute, fixed and inescapable of racialised categories.

Whiteness theorists simply haven’t thought through such implications; they haven’t made a good enough effort to formulate a consistent ideology.

Privilege

Whiteness studies claims that all whites enjoy unearned privilege at the expense of indigenous peoples. How, though, is this claim justified?

Veronica Coen, the student I quoted above, thinks that white Australians benefited from Aboriginal labour in colonial times. This seems an unlikely explanation for the prosperity of modern Australia. Though Aboriginal labour was important in some areas of Australia, its economic importance overall must have been small compared even to white convict labour let alone to that of free settlers.

Even the claim that whites are privileged from having taken Aboriginal land has its problems. The prominent Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has pointed out that Aborigines who were never dispossessed of their land experience similar problems to those who were:

the problems are pretty similar between communities that have never been dispossessed of their land – like in the western Cape York peninsula – and those that had been positively uprooted. It wasn’t about poverty, and it wasn’t about land, and it wasn’t about the degree of trauma experienced in history.

Pearson blames the dysfunction in Aboriginal communities not on whites having taken wealth from them, but rather on having given it to them in a misguided transfer of welfare money. He remembers a more intact community in the time before such transfers:

Everybody in Hope Vale of my generation or older grew up in a family, or household, where parents worked hard, the kids were looked after. They were bequeathed a real privilege.

Pearson is exactly right to identify these social norms as being a real privilege. It’s much easier to prosper when you are surrounded by people with a strong family and work ethic. Whites who aren’t exposed to this ethic in their homes or communities tend to experience the same loss of living standard as non-whites do.

There is one other way in which whiteness theorists have tried to explain white privilege. According to Peggy McIntosh, an American writer, she experiences a daily privilege as a white person on the following grounds:

- I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

- I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my own race widely represented.

- I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions

- I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my own race.

- I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my own race.

One way to criticise this approach is to point out that American blacks, who Peggy McIntosh is taking to be the oppressed group, don’t really have that much trouble finding their own areas to live in, or their own music, or food they like, or films and posters in which they feature.

The more important criticism, though, is once again a lack of coherence. White Americans are told endlessly that diversity is a blessing which will enrich their lives. Peggy McIntosh, though, is basing her case that whites are privileged on the idea that whites can more easily escape the effects of diversity than blacks.

In other words, to accept Peggy McIntosh’s argument requires us to believe that it is oppressive to live in diverse areas in which we are no longer the majority race. If this is the case, though, why would white Americans choose to accept diversity, if the consequences are really so undesirable?

In fact, the logical consequences of Peggy McIntosh’s argument go much further than this. If I lived in a country with a million white people, but not a single non-white, then I would not be privileged and I would not need to feel guilt about my existence. However, if a single non-white was allowed to live in my country, then I would be privileged in comparison to them, I would breach the morality of modern equality, and my identity would be called into question.

It seems to me that Peggy McIntosh needs to reconsider her intellectual assumptions as they lead her to political absurdities.

Identity

What else is wrong with whiteness studies? Remember Robinder Kaur? She was the Sikh woman I quoted above who told whites that there was no escape from their guilt.

As it happens, Robinder Kaur is an editor for a magazine called Kaurs. This magazine celebrates the identity of Sikh women as follows:

The magazine will encourage the Sikh woman to rediscover herself in the light of the glorious heritage and current meritorious achievements of the Sikh community.

And how does the magazine think that the Sikh community has prospered? The editor thinks that life is full of challenges, which leads to this advice:

... how to overcome these challenges and emerge as a winner? Hard work, confidence, dedication and, of course, the blessings of the Almighty are a sure recipe for success.

So we have here a clear double standard. For Robinder Kaur her own identity as a Sikh woman is a positive thing, and Sikhs are to think of their past as a “glorious heritage”. If Sikhs have done well it is due to hard work, confidence and dedication. For whites, though, there is only guilt. Our past is to be regarded negatively as a history of oppression of others, and our prosperity is unearned.

Obviously I don’t think whites should lamely accept such a double standard. It’s natural for Robinder Kaur to think of her own ethnic identity in positive terms, and we should follow her lead in regarding our own identity a similarly positive way. What kind of life would it be if we accepted the double standard in which our role, unlike others, was one of inescapable guilt? How could a psychologically healthy life be built on the assumptions of whiteness studies?

Racism

There’s one final issue to deal with. Whiteness theorists would regard themselves as being cutting edge anti-racists. Yet, in one further act of incoherence, it is they who are peddling a dangerous racism.

Whiteness theorists are creating a picture of whites as a “cosmic enemy”: as a force in the world standing in the way of justice and equality. Groups who are regarded this way shouldn’t be surprised to find themselves targeted for removal. Here, for instance, is the “solution” of Dr Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard academic and whiteness theorist, to the “problem” of whites:

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.

... The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition.

... we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed – not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.

... treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.

The problem is that it’s not a few radical cranks pushing this line, but a growing academic movement within our universities. This movement has the power to influence the minds of students and to set an intellectual and political agenda. We should therefore be concerned about the appearance of whiteness studies and be ready to take up a political fight against it.

Grayling's progress is Lagonda's loss

Lagonda is a young Dutchwoman who loved the community she grew up in. She remembers tranquil Sunday mornings, marked by familiar sights and sounds:

That is how I remember the Sunday mornings of my childhood. Calm and beautiful, saturated in a slow light.

She remembers a well-knit community, decent and caring, in which people looked out for each other and respected basic social norms.

Sadly, she is now grieving for a lost community:

That was less than 20 years ago. But who still knows what is normal? When I walk into my town now, the inevitable conclusion forces itself on me: The Netherlands is gone and will never come back.

In the last 20 years cheap apartment blocks were built, a diverse population moved in, ethnic violence broke out, parts of the town became off limits to locals, drugs and crime increased, and the new suburbs became run down and poorly maintained.

As a result,

the town closed up definitively: the last remains of the old spirit have disappeared. People have become closed, cautious, frightened.

Lagonda directs her ire at a section of the Dutch political class:

There is a force active in the Netherlands, that lives on this fear, a force that savours tearing apart the textures of traditional society. It is the force of the progressives: it hates contentment, it hates the citizen that dares to be satisfied with his life, it hates the soap bubble of safety that the common man wishes for himself ...

I think Lagonda is right to blame the political progressives. Perhaps she's right too that some of these progressives are motivated by sheer animosity toward the comfortable middle-classes, by a desire to shock, upset and outrank the average citizen.

I doubt, though, that progressives are motivated chiefly by malice. It's best to look at the political beliefs of progressives to understand why they act as they do.

We have a prominent progressive visiting Melbourne this month, namely Professor A.C.Grayling. He's here to discuss his most recent book Toward the Light, in which he argues that Western history since the 1500s has been a progress toward ever greater amounts of liberty.

Grayling claims that as a progressive he is following a great ideal and bringing a blessing of "liberty" to ordinary citizens. But what does he mean by liberty?

As you might expect, he means individual autonomy. For Grayling, the measure of human progress is the advance toward ever greater levels of individual autonomy:

The most congenial moment in the moral progress of humanity for Grayling seems to be the Enlightenment. This is the age whose best minds affirm the fundamental good of personal and political autonomy.

But what does it mean to have more autonomy? First, the existence of social norms, which Lagonda valued as giving shape and purpose to community life, will be looked on negatively as restrictions. Grayling writes:

A living community has to tread this line, always; once a static moral orthodoxy is enforced, the effect on the community is a stifling one. Take the examples of divorce and homosexuality, both of which in living memory were regarded with distaste and opprobrium, and both of which have become acceptable and part of the mainstream, thereby liberating people to more generous possibilities for living flourishing lives.

Grayling has to take this view. If you believe that the fundamental good is individual autonomy, then the existence of a community standard will be thought of negatively as a "stifling" limitation on the self-determining individual.

Similarly, the mainstreaming of divorce will be described as part of the progress of society, as a step toward "liberating people" from a settled pattern of family life.

Grayling is enough of an intellectual to also take this logical step:

One measure of a good society is whether its individual members have the autonomy to do as they choose in respects that principally concern only them. The debate about heroin, cocaine and marijuana touches precisely on this. In my submission, a society in which such substances are legal and available is a good society not because drugs are in themselves good, but because the autonomy of those who wish to use them is respected ...

If a good society is one in which individual autonomy is paramount, then Grayling has a case. Restricting drugs like heroin and cocaine is "stifling" to some other individual's liberty to self-determine his own life and therefore impedes his opportunities to "flourish".

The problem, of course, is the gap between theory and reality. Lagonda didn't experience the trafficking of drugs and the breakdown of social norms in her town as a liberating progress, but rather as a demoralising erosion of community life.

In Professor Grayling's homeland, a wave of murders by teenage gangs has led even some of those on the left to decry the extent of family breakdown in England. People see the fatherless boys, the street gangs and the crime and they don't easily interpret it all as a further step toward liberation and human flourishing.

Then there's the issue of religion. If your aim is to be autonomous, you won't easily accept a higher authority. Consider the following online discussion between Grayling and some admirers:

tarav: Grayling discusses how the Christian story of Satan was based on a pagan myth. Grayling tells of "the fall of Satan, once an archangel high in the ranks of heaven, but whose pride - he desired autonomy, independence, self-determination - was the cause of his being cast from heaven"

tarav: if this is evil, then I am evil too!

MadArchitect: if God is merely a personality of authority, and heaven is merely a territory of the good, then there's much reason to sympathise with the fall of Satan

acgrayling: Tarav and Milton would agree "me too!" ...

Which brings us to a further question. Why should individual autonomy be cast by progressives as the overriding good?

In part, it's because of a tradition within Western thought which answers the question of what makes us human with the idea that it is our ability to determine for ourselves who we are that sets us apart from other (lesser) creatures. Therefore, to hold on to our human status we must assert our autonomy; if some are denied autonomy they are being treated as less human and the principle of human equality is being denied.

Perhaps another reason for the emphasis on autonomy is that modernists tend not to recognise goods existing objectively outside of our own selves. Therefore, the "good" for modernists often consists in the satisfaction of our own preferences or the achievement of our own goals.

Grayling has at least partly confirmed that this is his understanding by writing that:

"the good" is not exclusively a matter of human satisfactions and achievements, because there is the non-human world to be taken into account too.

So, with the proviso that we need to consider the welfare of animals and nature, Grayling seems to connect the "good" with what he terms "human satisfactions and achievements".

If preference satisfaction is the goal, then autonomy will be valued because what matters is that I am unimpeded in pursuing what I want.

If achievement is the aim, then the argument is usually that it is the individual who can best determine what life projects interest him and suit him and that autonomy will therefore best serve the pursuit of the good.

So liberal modernists have a theory of being (regarding what makes us human) and a theory of value (of what constitutes the good). These theories are supposed to lead to human flourishing: to a society in which we flourish as autonomous individuals, each of us pursuing our own career or lifestyle goals, within materially prosperous, differentiated, neutral/respectful, open societies.

That the theories are inadequate is suggested by the fact that the societies don't flourish as they are supposed to. This is not because the whole project is held back by an "irrational" opposition to extending full human equality (i.e. equal autonomy) to all people. Lagonda herself points out that the Dutch, more than any other nation, have tried to adapt to the demands of modernity and to accommodate to newcomers. Yet, the effect isn't a sense of flourishing, but rather a loss of moorings, confusion and a sense of powerlessness:

Nothing is natural or obvious anymore, everything has become guilt-ridden and corroded. Who knows what is normal anymore? Who knows anymore what behaviour may be expected, or even demanded, from fellow citizens? The average citizen, who time after time tried his or her hardest to adapt, is completely lost. All that he knew has been taken away, all the ways he could arm himself have become powerless. We are made to walk as if on eggs through our own society, yelled at by the propagandists of the progressive congregation, who tell us it is our own fault.

Even those presenting Grayling's views to us no longer truly believe that theory matches reality. One columnist declares himself to be sceptical about Grayling's account of progress because:

it seems to me that another delusion the success of science has fostered is that there might be no limits to human capabilities or knowledge. It is not just that technology has downsides as well as upsides ... It is that a scientific account of the world is not enough to live by, though meliorism would have us act as if it is.

When interviewed in the Melbourne Age, Grayling pressed the idea that religion is to blame for society's problems. The interviewer, James Button, wasn't persuaded:

Yet given the world's problems, I ask him, is this a top-order issue in countries like Britain and Australia? Surely a larger concern is the pervasive feeling that the consumer society is empty, devoid of value?

Many of the responses to Grayling run along such sceptical lines. The progressive theory is more difficult to accept now as it is difficult to read modern societies in terms of "onwards and upwards".

It is time to rethink modernist theory. We need a theory of being which is willing to consider as key human qualities our defining forms of identity and attachments, and our place as social beings within communities. This would allow us to recognise that there is a good in how we have been made and not just in the process of self-making.

We need too to rethink the theory of value, so that we recognise "transcendent" goods: higher goods embedded in institutions and traditions, in which individuals partake, but which are grasped as larger, encompassing entities. In doing so, we would open our eyes to the reasonable desire of most people who, just like Lagonda, wish to conserve what is good within the traditional texture of society.

The collected Putnam

Professor Putnam's research on diversity is having an effect. In the past few days there's been another round of discussion on his research, with some former supporters of open borders now having second thoughts.

I've already written a number of posts on Putnam, so rather than repeating myself I'll just give the following links:

Professor Putnam: hunkering after diversity

This post presents Professor Putnam's research results which show that diversity encourages social withdrawal. A higher level of diversity decreases solidarity, happiness, friendship and trust.

What really drives Putnam?

Here I look at the arguments put forward by Professor Putnam for continuing to embrace diversity despite its negative effects on social capital.

Professor Putnam's challenge

Professor Putnam ends his research paper with a (convoluted) attempt to explain how diversity might be maintained without the damage to social capital.