Split mind politics

Here in Melbourne about 40% of students attend private schools. The private schools have good academic results but they are usually liberal in philosophy. As an example, consider an advertisement for St Michael's Grammar that ran last week in The Age. The advertisement consisted, in part, of quotes from the Head of School, Simon Gipson:

St Michael's is therefore a school committed to coeducation and to striving to assure a diverse community that reflects the rich, urban multiculturalism that is contemporary Melbourne.

"Gender is only one of a range of differences between people," he says. "Naturally, there are physiological distinctions and differences but as we know only too well, gender is a social construction that changes over time across cultures.

"What we should be focusing on are individual young people ... rather than homogenising them on the basis of gender ...

"If you create a culture of acceptance of difference, then you also create a culture of inclusion ... You also begin to see that gender is just simply one of an almost infinite number of potential differences between people."

According to Simon Gipson, Head of St Michael's Grammar, there are physiological distinctions between men and women, but otherwise gender is just an insignificant social construct.

This is an orthodox liberalism in which not only is the individual will sovereign, but it is unbounded by created reality. Therefore, individuals aren't thought to be significantly shaped by something they are born to, such as the fact of being a man or a woman.

There are several grounds on which I could criticise Simon Gipfel's liberalism. On the St Michael's website it states:

About the School

St Michael's Grammar School is an Anglican co-educational school established by the Community of Sisters of the Church in 1895.

Is it really part of an orthodox Anglicanism to believe that gender is a social construct? Don't Christians believe that it was God who made us male and female as a central act of creation?

Out of curiousity I typed Christian and gender into google. One of the top search results was from a Christian site which, after stressing the equality of men and women, went on to state that,

Equality does not mean sameness. Unity does not mean sameness. Thus Genesis also teaches us that there is differentiation : that God created human beings male and female [1:27b]. The unity shared by the male and the female is not the unity of being identical, but the unity in which one complements and completes the other, each enabling the other to live their God-ordained life, each enabling the other to enjoy the divine blessing, and each enabling the other to fulfil the divine command, in a way that one alone can never do.

We ought not be surprised to discover that men and women think differently, perceive differently, feel differently, and act differently. Nor ought we to try to make our marriage partners conform to ourselves, or try to make ourselves duplicates of our marriage partner: the existence of male/female differences is not wrong, rather, it is an intrinsic part of our creation by God.

So Simon Gipfel's view on gender runs counter to the Christianity his school was founded on. It is also anti-scientific. Scientists have discovered significant differences in the way that the male and female brain is structured. So gender differences aren't just limited to body shape and reproductive organs; the male and female mind is hardwired differently.

But it is the third criticism to be made that I'd like to focus on. Simon Gipfel has worked in education. Teachers more than anyone else know that there are significant gender differences. We work daily with teenagers and have the chance to observe the different ways that boys and girls act and interact.

So I have to suspect that Simon Gipfel is somehow compartmentalising his thoughts. He might well have a sincere, consciously held belief in the liberal idea that gender is merely a social construct. I expect, though, that below this level of formal belief, there is a part of his mind which does recognise that women are different in significant ways.

Could Simon Gipfel really have loved women without having a sense of what was distinctly feminine in their natures? Does he really not have a sense of a feminine ideal by which he judges some of the women he meets more positively than others? Could he really not have observed some of the typical ways that girls interact? The group hugs to console each other? The complex forms of verbal bullying? The particular sensitivities of teenage girls?

To show how possible it is for liberals to operate with a dual mind just look at the photograph accompanying the St Michael's advert:



Interesting, isn't it? The school seems to have pitched itself to the parents on two different levels. In the text of the advert, the school set out its formal liberal beliefs. Presumably it was felt that parents would respond well to the liberal talk of the school being richly diverse and multicultural, as reflecting the larger community, as promoting individual differences rather than homogeneity and so on.

The photograph, though, conveys a very different message - one appealing to the less formalised values and beliefs of the parents. In the photograph the emphasis is not on diversity or individual difference. The students are very neatly uniformed, good-looking, middle-class, young Anglo-Australians, with the girls looking happily feminine. It's as if the school is attempting to reassure the parents that their children will be raised to carry on a very particular and distinctive Anglo upper middle-class tradition and way of life.

I think it's a worthy aim. But why pretend that you are representing a whole community? There are no non-Europeans in the picture. No tomboys. No working-class kids. No overweight children. And why pretend that you're emphasising difference and rejecting homogeneity when the students have been groomed and uniformed to within an inch of their lives?

Perhaps one of the reasons I'm not a liberal is that I wouldn't feel comfortable asserting a formal set of principles, whilst operating in the world with another "hidden" set of values and beliefs.

If I wanted my daughter to grow up according to a feminine ideal, then I would say so openly. If I wanted a school to instil a traditional, upper middle-class culture then I wouldn't pretend that it was reflecting the entire community.

A liberal culture operates as a kind of a game with unwritten rules. You are supposed to believe one thing as a superior moral position, whilst really doing something else. What does this cost the liberal personality? Even if you do well in the game, doesn't it cost a certain amount of self-respect (for not being honest with yourself)?

A curious debate

Should the liberal state permit the existence of non-liberal communities? There has been a debate amongst academics in recent years on this issue.

One curious feature of this debate is the concept that the liberal academics have of themselves. They usually take themselves to be free, autonomous individuals leading self-directing and self-chosen lives in contrast to the unreflective, non-liberal individuals in traditional communities.

One academic has described the way the debate is framed as follows:

The philosophical issue centers on the questions of who is entitled to freedom, and what sorts of lives they are entitled to create with their freedom.

Are all persons entitled to have their choices respected and their lives left alone? Are persons as we find them in the world — culturally and socially influenced, holding many beliefs heteronomously and only because they were raised to believe them — already suited for liberty?

Or is the moral case for freedom dependent on people having some level of autonomy or intellectual attainment? To put it another way: If persons are living lives into which they have been socialized, if they are making decisions solely on the basis of what tradition demands, or if they are unreflective about their choices, can they really be said to be living freely?

And if their choices are not free to begin with, can one make a moral demand that these choices be respected by the state? We do not think that children, the insane, or the brainwashed are free in a morally desirable sense if they are simply left alone to follow their whims. Why, then, should we consider as free those who hold a religious belief simply because it was instilled in them while they were young?

(The quote is from an article by Professor Jacob T. Levy who is not endorsing the above view but describing a commonly held position amongst his fellow liberal academics.)

To summarise, the question being asked is whether the liberal state should respect the choices made by those people, such as those raised within a religious tradition, who are not autonomous and therefore not free.

What is the problem with putting things this way? Well, one considerable problem for liberal academics is that they themselves are condemned by the very principle they are putting forward.

Who is really the most unreflective in the adoption of their values? The liberal academic or the church-goer? These days it would have to be the liberal academic. A Westerner who makes a serious commitment to a church is acting against the stream and will usually be making an individual choice. Liberal academics, on the other hand, are simply falling in with a reigning orthodoxy.

Another major problem with the framing of the debate is the assumption that what really counts is that I have autonomously chosen a life path rather than being influenced by culture or tradition.

There is a denial here that what really matters are real goods that can be known to individuals and to communities. If, say, we recognise courage and honour in a man as a real good, then we would think it a positive thing if a culture and tradition encouraged these qualities. What would matter would be getting to the particular good.

In the liberal view, though, the priorities change. The liberal is less concerned that a man is honourable and courageous and more interested in the fact of self-direction. If I self-direct against honour and courage I have satisfied the liberal principle.

The end result is not a society of independent free-thinkers. Nearly everyone in the political class today follows the same unexamined first principles. Nor have human vistas been opened up. All the talk about life projects, life plans and so on usually boil down to nothing more than selecting a career for ourselves.

This is the bland side to liberalism: it is what is left when the individual is removed from culture and community and the goods embedded within a tradition.

A shaky foundation

Here's a comment left at this site a while ago by Apashiol, a supporter of liberal modernism:

I will try to be clear on what I actually think.

For me the proposition of a "highest good" has no meaning ... I see absolutely no evidence that we have been created with a purpose or goal ... Humans must create their own meaning.

I believe in the ideals of secular democracy. I believe in individual liberty and equality. Nobody has a god-given right to coerce or otherwise define what the meaning of life should be for anyone else.

Individual liberty and equality are not ends in themselves, but necessary preconditions from which people can endeavour to discover what is good in life and create their own meaning.

All people are entitled to the same basic rights. They are not entitled due to belonging to a privileged race, class, gender, sexuality or whatever kind of category can be created to contain them.

All human beings should be judged on their character. Not on any incidental attribute.

It's an argument which fails at the very beginning.

For Apashiol there is no natural created order through which human life gains meaning and status. Instead, individuals must each create their own meaning.

It's not a very solid basis for a new philosophy of life. Is meaning really something that we create for ourselves? If so, is meaning all that meaningful?

And what does it boil down to in practice? How do individuals set out to self-create meaning? What are they supposed to do? Pursue career success? Prove their reproductive fitness? Achieve social status?

It's all left vague and unspoken. All that we are really left with is the picture of millions of individuals striving through their life efforts to create their own unique life meaning.

Once you accept this background, then the rest follows on. In particular, you are likely to endorse the liberal understanding of freedom and equality.

Apashiol wrote that freedom isn't an end in itself, but is necessary for people to self-define and self-create their own lives. So freedom will be understood as a liberation from impediments to the self-defining, self-creating individual.

What are such impediments? Whatever is predetermined, which includes aspects of life which are given to us as part of our tradition or as part of our given nature. Logically, then, liberals will attempt, in the name of freedom, to make our sex not matter, to make our ethnicity not matter, to make conventional forms of family life not matter and so on.

It's much the same with equality. If an individual is held back or handicapped in any way in the pursuit of their unique, individual life meaning, then a major injustice will be thought to have occurred - perhaps the very meaning of their existence will have been compromised.

So equality will be linked to a concept of social justice. The rule will be that individuals must not be handicapped, in the sense of being limited in their possible life choices, by circumstances beyond their immediate control. Class barriers, cycles of poverty, discrimination on the grounds of gender or ethnicity - these will be thought to place limitations on some individuals, which might then destroy their chances to create life meaning.

You can understand why liberals would be so upset by the thought that some groups of people were better at some things than others. This would inject a kind of cruel hoax into the Apashiolian world view: it would mean that efforts to self-create our unique life meaning as individuals might be thwarted by some sort of "incidental attributes".

You can understand too why liberals think so poorly of those who resist modernity. In their eyes, life is about the pursuit of individual life meaning; therefore, it is a question of those who are privileged in this pursuit (by not being held back or handicapped by inherited social factors) and those who are not. Therefore, race, class, gender and sexuality will be thought of in terms of privilege, discrimination and inequality: those who defend the "privileged" categories will be thought to be denying the full humanity - the equal opportunity - of others: something which will be explained in terms of supremacy or hatred or bigotry or prejudice.

Of course, if we take away Apashiol's life philosophy, things change radically. The categories referred to above might then be seen positively as sources of self-identity and as aspects of a natural and meaningful order of existence.

Are men and women equal?

In a recent post I claimed that it is liberalism which leads to the feminist belief that women are the victims of oppression and inequality:

The liberal starting point ends badly: in feelings of loss of humanity; in assumptions of oppression and inequality; and, for some, in a rejection of love and relationships.

A regular reader posted a comment suggesting that the feminist belief in inequality was more than an assumption, as men really are superior:

The inequality of men and women is not an assumption, it's a reality. It's evolved. Unless you are a female spotted hyena, you just have to like it or lump it.

I thought this comment worth responding to at length, as it involves some important issues. I'll say at the outset that I disagree with the idea that men are superior to women. This is not because I hold to a politically correct belief that everyone is equal. Furthermore, I think it's healthy for men to assert themselves confidently in their relationships with women.

So why don't I think men superior? The big issue, I think, is how we judge the quality of people. If we follow modernist ideas, and reject the existence of "transcendent" (i.e. really existing) goods, then the measure of man is power. I will be held to be superior if I prove my dominance by holding power over others. I can achieve dominant status through money, through a professional career and through political power.

If we accept this "proof" of superiority, then I cannot blame feminists for acting the way that they do. It's inevitable that some women will be too proud to accept an inferior status, particularly when they know that they have the ability to prove themselves dominant in careers, money and politics over many men.

It's a pity, though, if women accept such a proof of their own quality. It means that they are forced to compete to prove themselves on traditionally masculine terms; the more feminine side to life will inevitably be neglected.

Which leads to the question: what happens if we accept the existence of transcendent goods, as Western societies traditionally did? We then have an alternative way of judging the quality of people, namely according to how finely they embody some aspect of the good.

Looked at this way, there is a lot to admire in both men and women. Men, at their best, are loyal, courageous, persevering and good-humoured, and their dispassionate intellect serves them well in acting justly and in seeking knowledge. Women, at their best, are warm, vivacious, graceful, beautiful, empathetic, considerate and intuitive. Women, more than men, are often present in the moment for others.

So which constellation of goods is superior? The question makes little sense for two reasons. First, it's difficult to measure in any objective way whether the finer female qualities represent a higher good than the male qualities or vice versa. It might be possible to have a personal preference, but there's no obvious way to prove such a preference to be true.

More importantly, the question of superiority is misconceived because the male and female goods grow out of each other; therefore, if you think of the masculine qualities as being particularly fine, you must recognise that they wouldn't exist without the feminine qualities being strongly present (and vice versa).

If the women of a society no longer embody the higher feminine goods, then it's unlikely that men will be inspired to fully develop their masculine qualities. Similarly, femininity can only flourish when men are moved to create a protected space for it.

So it's not even so much a question of stating that men and women are equal, as this tends to miss the point of what determines our quality as men and women.

What is man?

In my last post I quoted the following lines from the feminist record for children, Free to Be ... You and Me (1972):

A person should wear what he wants to wear
And not just what other folks say
A person should do what she likes to
A person's a person that way

The last two lines are significant. They sum up the modernist philosophy that the modern West is being refashioned on.

Note that we are not just being told that we should do what we like to. We are being told that doing what we like is what makes us a person - it is what gives us our distinction as a human.

If this is the philosophy that my generation of women was reared on, it's not surprising that when a political party for Australian women was set up recently it was simply called What Women Want.

In general, I think it's striking how important the question of "What makes us human?" is to political philosophy.

The modernist approach to the question is difficult to accept. Modernists seem to think that there is a single quality, like autonomy or (more specifically) "satisfaction of individual desires", which confirms our human status.

This assumes that there are different degrees of being human, which we might or might not attain (which then sets the scene for an over-zealous quest for human equality).

If I were to consider the question of "What makes a person?", I would think more along the lines that we are varied in nature, in the sense that there is an intellectual, an emotional and an intuitive aspect to our nature; that we have basic physical appetites alongside more spiritual and creative faculties and so on.

The particular mix varies between people and doesn't make them more or less human. We remain a person no matter which of these qualities we show.

The aim, though, is generally to live by our higher nature. This means that we won't always do what we want. We might reject a passing want as being incompatible with our better nature or with what we owe to others.

When modernism was less advanced than it is today there was a greater emphasis on the cultivation of character and on the quality of the inner life (art, nature, manhood, virtue etc). The ideals of service and of loyalty were also more prominent.

It's odd to think that we are now considered distinctively a "person" simply because we do what we want to. It would seem to reduce us to the level of the average pet cat.

I believe we can do better.

Do we really think that women and children aren't human?

The operator of a popular feminist website notes that:

we end up arguing ... whether children, the only life form lower than we, are human.

It strikes the conservative mind as odd to debate whether children are human, or which rung on the human scale people are. That's because conservatives see our status as humans as being already invested in us. It's not something which can be added to or taken away. Individuals can be unequal in their talents or attainments, but not in their human status.

So why would feminists assume that there are variations in our status as humans? It's because liberal autonomy theory, on which feminism is ultimately based, doesn't begin with the concept of an "invested humanity". Instead, a starting point for autonomy theory is that our humanity is contingent. We are made human, according to this theory, by the fact that we are self-determining agents. Therefore, the more we are self-created, as autonomous, independent beings, the more human we are.

Feminists see women as being less autonomous than men (because it's easier to think of a male career path as being a unique, self-created, independent role than motherhood); children are obviously less autonomous than men, being dependent on their parents. Therefore, feminists logically conclude that men are, in a "patriarchy," more human than women and children.

The Italian beach

The feminist debate about children was sparked by the decision of an Italian businessman to set up a women-only beach, from which not only men but also children were excluded.

This led to a controversy at I blame the patriarchy, a popular radical feminist site. On one side of the dispute were feminists who supported the removal of children from the beach. Some adopted this stance because they didn't want women to be assumed to be the natural carers of children. Many, though, professed a dislike of children in general, finding them too noisy, boisterous and annoying.

Those in favour of children on the beach argued that mothers shouldn't miss out on women-only beach time and that children are an oppressed minority group just like women and that it is therefore wrong to discriminate against them.

The debate was finally closed after about 450 comments on two different threads.

Wanting to become human

There are countless references in the comments to women and children being relegated to a non-human status. As I mentioned earlier, this complaint only makes sense if you think that individuals can be more or less human, depending on their degree of autonomy.

Here's a selection of references in the comments to the idea of a contingent humanity:

Sean: it simply sounds like what feminists are pushing for in the 'real' world, that is, basic structures allowing women to participate in the world as humans.

Zora: I have tried time and time again to explain to folks that children are, in fact, people and deserve to be treated thusly.

Cafe Siren: What if they [women] took this new knowledge of themselves as fully human back into the wider world, and demanded changes.

Catherine: The comparison that is being made is not, therefore, between women's struggle to be seen as human ...

Dairon: The story in question encapsulates so many horrific underlying ideas about social hierarchy and what can and can't be human ...

Dr Sue: I don't think the choice is between "permissiveness" and repression, but between treating children as fully human ...

Blandina: ... father who told me I was a valueless thing and not a human being ...

Physio Prof: it treats children as an oppressed class without bodily or mental autonomy ...

Tigs: ... radical education that values children as human beings is a revolutionary act in and of itself ... Treating children like human beings is part of a revolutionary program ... it might be about the same amount of hard as is treating women like human beings!

Crys T: The whole idea that so many see children as some sort of separate group (often not even a human one) ... is the problem here.

Kiki: Wow, I am always amazed when people act as if children are somehow not fully human.

Gayle: Children, like women, are "othered" and treated as a sub-human species.

Recasting nature

Such ideas lead to further complications. For example, feminist women are not going to happily accept a non-human status. Therefore, they must explain their lack of human status as being a product of the way society is organised, rather than as a reflection of the real nature of women.

The first task, that of blaming social organisation, gives them their catchcry of "I blame the patriarchy" (they blame it for everything). It also turns them into self-described utopian revolutionaries, waiting for the day that the whole system is overthrown.

The second task, of denying that women or children are naturally lacking in autonomy, is more perverse. For instance, it leads many commenters to claim that childhood is a sentimentalised fiction and that it's not desirable for children to be raised by their biological parents. In order to present children as independent, autonomous mini-adults, and therefore as fully human, the reality of both childhood and parenthood is denied.

Similarly, the operator of the site argues that children currently are unruly, as many feminists on her site complain, but that this is not an expression of their true nature, but a neurosis brought on by their non-status under patriarchy:

I have stated on numerous occasions ... children are an oppressed class. Their universal and legitimately reviled unruliness is not natural. It is a product of neurosis generated by patriarchy's two main replicatory units ..

What this means is that we are to consider children to be neurotic when they behave childishly. It also means that children aren't to be considered fully human until they stop acting boisterously.

Things are equally bad when attention turns to women. As I have already mentioned, women are thought to be less autonomous than men because they are more likely to be mothers rather than careerists. This means that a number of commenters seriously ask whether it is politically correct for a woman to become a mother. One commenter complains:

Patriarchy wants us to love babies.

There is apparently to be no oppressive mother love under the matriarchy.

One feminist mother doesn't give up without a fight. She asks those suggesting that motherhood is a patriarchal trap: "Well, what's the alternative in your opinion? Just Don't Breed?" The answer comes back:

For those of us who do have this choice, I would suggest that you strongly consider it.

It's also thought a good thing at I blame the patriarchy for women to be selfish, as this involves a pursuit of one's own autonomous wants. There's one comment I'll use to illustrate this point, though I'm not exactly sure if it's meant to be taken in earnest or if it's a clever, tongue-in-cheek send-up of the feminist ideal of selfishness:

Dawn Coyote: Speaking only for myself, I'm lazy and selfish, and the idea that I might not at any moment through my day have a space that is perfectly adjusted to my needs is vexing for me. It's all about me and what I want, after all.

I think the problem is one of entitlement, certainly, but also of independence as a worthy goal, because it's my independence, my autonomy, my right to the free enjoyment of my own pursuits in any space I occupy that has given me the idea that children are a nuisance. If I had more of a sense of responsibility to my fellow humans, be they big or little, I would not so cavalierly wish them into the cornfield.

A misanthropic humanism?

You would think that people who devoted themselves to achieving a full human status would hold humanity in high esteem. In fact, many of those feminists complaining about their lack of human status dislike humanity and wish it would be destroyed. Another selection:

Marcy: yes, I know that humans will go extinct, and I'm OK with that.

Crys T: Like you, I don't think it'd be any great tragedy for the human race to die out.

Silence: Do we need the next generation? I mean, do we really expect the human race to go on and on forever? Because I sure as sh.. don't.

It seems odd for a person to declare that "I want to be human but I don't want humanity to exist." Perhaps, though, this attitude is not such a contradiction. The demand that people have a completely free and equal autonomy is impossible to meet. As the feminists themselves admit it requires a utopian revolution.

Therefore, humanity is being set up to fail a basic test of decency. If it's impossible to achieve "free and equal wills", then humanity won't deliver to every person a full human status. There will forever be a serious breach of "human equality".

This is how "Marcy" seems to see things. In response to a commenter who thought that it was unethical to look forward to the extinction of human beings she wrote:

Ethical? It depends on whose point of view you're working from. If you're working from the planet's and the ecosystem's point of view, then it becomes very much ethical to talk about getting humans out of the picture altogether. As far as I know, it's not birds who are polluting the rivers with toxic waste. Cheetahs don't oppress other cheetahs. Elephants don't find a cure for syphilis and then withold it from some other elephants who have darker skin. I could go on. I'm sure you get the point.

Oppression and inequality have tainted humanity in Marcy's view, so humanity doesn't deserve to survive.

All of this stems, at least in part, from the logic of making human status contingent. It's an aspect of liberal autonomy theory which deserves to be challenged.

Films & crisis

Is there a brief way to describe the problem of modernism? Spencer Warren has made a good effort to do so, in an article on film director Martin Scorsese. He writes:

Scorsese's more than three decades of such expression ... embodies the moral crisis of Western popular culture today and, indeed, of Western society: making a god of oneself in the name of "freedom", substituting the unfettered self for higher, transcendent truth, and utter disregard for thousands of years of civilized tradition based on moral and social self-restraint. (Hat tip: Lawrence Auster)

It's what I've tried to explain at this site, but perhaps Warren has put it in a way which works better for some readers. I don't believe Warren has his own site, but some of his work is available here.

Jim Kalb, meanwhile, has briefly defined the role of conservatism:

The role of conservatism is to maintain connection and continuity, between the past and future, the formal and informal, the explicit and unspoken, the secular and transcendent.

I hope this definition doesn't slip away; it seems to me to capture, at the very least, an important facet of the meaning of conservatism.

Tackling neutrality

How is liberal modernism to be understood?

There is an important current within liberalism focused on "self-authorship"; this is the aspect of liberalism I most often write about and criticise (see here).

Liberalism, though, so dominates the modern West philosophically, that it's unreasonable to expect that it has been formed from just a single intellectual current or influence.

There is another important aspect of liberalism which focuses not so much on self-authorship, but neutrality.

The importance of the "neutrality" strand within liberalism was highlighted in a recent column by Lawrence Auster. Auster's column considered different explanations for the origins of liberalism, including this one:

Liberalism began, in the 17th and 18th centuries ... by declaring that convictions about God and religion should play no role in politics because they lead to deadly conflict. Instead of being ordered by religious authority, society was to be ordered according to neutral procedures based on the recognition of everyone's equal rights.

Modern liberalism developed from this starting point because:

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.

At the same time, with the steady extension of state power, the liberal rule of neutrality spread to more and more areas of society where men had once been free to assert and order their lives according to traditional beliefs.

I have to say, first, that I don't believe that this explains the origins of liberalism. The seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke is often associated with this aspect of liberalism, and if you read his works it is striking just how fully developed his liberalism is (Locke's starting point is the abstracted, presocial, contracting, autonomous individual.)

So it's not as if Locke's ideas about neutrality later led to the development of a liberal mindset - the liberal worldview was already in existence when Locke was writing his works.

However, the argument as set out in Lawrence Auster's column does impress me in other ways. It does explain certain characteristics of modern liberalism.

First, I do believe that some liberals operate according to the principles set out above. In other words, there are intellectuals who think they are being good liberals (and acting ethically) in adopting a stance of neutrality not just toward religion but toward other substantive goods.

Here, for instance, is Australian liberal Gary Sauer-Thompson recently discussing the place of ethnicity in modern society:

"Ethnic tribalism" is like religion in a liberal democracy---it's a personal matter premised on the public private distinction.

Notice how clearly the point is made here. Sauer-Thompson believes that ethnicity should be treated by liberals just as it was decided to treat religion. So it is not just religion which men are to adopt a neutral stance toward in terms of public policy, but ethnicity too.

Once you agree to such a stance, you are left in an awkward position in terms of your own ethnic loyalties. I think two postures are common. One is to speak warmly of your own ethnic identity, but to dismiss or relegate this identity as being mere "personal sentiment".

The other is to be a kind of cellophane man. If you are the liberal "subject", the one who embodies neutrality, then your role is to observe the ethnicity of others, rather than to project your own. There was a strong element of this in Australian culture in the 1980s and 90s.

The "neutrality" argument might also help explain the particular way that liberals understand equality. I imagine that it's easier psychologically to maintain a neutral stance toward competing goods if you consider such goods as equal. Therefore, given the natural preference for what is familiar, liberals might seek an equivalence between competing goods by building up what is alien, or seemingly inferior, in comparison to the goods or values traditionally accepted within their own culture.

Finally, let me note just a couple of obvious flaws within the neutrality strand of liberalism. The first, as just touched on, is that neutrality in theory doesn't become neutrality in fact. There are obvious double standards, such as the fact that, with government support, we have been expected to celebrate minority ethnic traditions, whilst denigrating our own mainstream tradition.

Second, the "solution" of managing religion and ethnicity by relegating them to the private sphere is no solution at all, as they cannot survive as private goods.

This is especially obvious when it comes to ethnicity. An ethnic culture is a communal culture not an individual one. It isn't sustained at a purely individual level and therefore can't be upheld as a private good.

This is, admittedly, just a sketch of the whole topic of liberalism and neutrality. It's an argument which needs fleshing out, so I will try to develop some of the points in future posts.

In defence of what matters

There is a logic within liberalism by which what really matters must be made not to matter.

The reason for this runs as follows. Liberal modernity has been formed from a number of factors; one of them is the idea that our distinction as humans is that we are "self-authored".

To achieve a fully human status, therefore, we must create who we are from our own individual reason and will. There are impediments, though, to our achieving this aim.

If we are defined or guided by tradition or by biology, for instance, we are being influenced in an important way by what we inherit, rather than what we create for ourselves. Therefore, a strict liberalism will logically reject such influences.

The problem is that it's unlikely that aspects of the self would have been hardwired into us as part of our given nature if they weren't important. Similarly, it's unlikely that at least some aspects of culture, belief and identity would have survived in the long term as a tradition if they weren't important.

Liberalism, therefore, faces the task of making certain aspects of reality which matter most not matter.

Liberalism, for instance, must make our sex, our being a man or woman, not matter. It must make our membership of an ethny not matter. It must make uncontracted forms of authority, such as the authority of fathers, not matter. It must make external, objective or traditional moral codes not matter. It must make a singular, traditional form of the family not matter.

How does liberalism attempt to do this? One drastic method liberals use is to frame political debate in terms of an asocial, blank slate individual. This individual is "abstracted" to the point that the things which matter don't even have to be acknowledged within political discussion.

Liberals might also cast the things which matter as being oppressive restrictions on the self, from which individuals must be liberated. Negative labels might be applied; for instance, a belief that our sex matters might be harshly labeled "sexist" and a belief that our ethny matters might be condemned as "racist".

Liberalism also makes inroads by limiting political contest to second tier disputes within liberalism itself. If you have a liberal view of society as being made up of millions of competing, atomised wills, each seeking to enact their own will, you then have to explain how such a society might hold together.

Over the years, liberals have proposed a number of solutions. Some have put their faith in the idea that humans are naturally good and are only corrupted by faults within their living conditions which might be remedied. Some, in contrast, have looked to a state imposed rule of law to uphold social order.

There have been those who have hoped that an enlightened elite might act to manage such a society. However, there are two other suggestions for regulating competing wills which have dominated politics for the past century.

The first is the "right liberal" (or classical liberal) idea that individuals can behave selfishly for their own profit, but that the hidden hand of the free market will regulate such activity so that society as a whole will progress.

The second is the "left liberal" (or social democratic) idea that society can be regulated by the state via neutral expertise.

When we think of the political contest between left and right it's really about this "second tier" liberal issue of how to regulate competing wills. Right liberals will talk about preserving individual liberty through the free market and a small state; left liberals will put things in terms of liberation movements and social welfare and reform.

If the political contest is kept at this second tier level then it becomes easier to exclude a consideration of the things that matter.

So what do we do? It would take too long to attempt a complete answer. So I'll focus on one thing: conservatives need to disentangle themselves from a right-liberal politics.

This means being careful not to reduce a conservative politics to a belief in the free market. If our focus is just on the free market, then we are allowing political debate to remain at the second tier level I described above, so that it's difficult to raise the more significant first tier debate we need to have.

There's another problem with focusing our politics on the free market. A conservative might well make the case for a free market on a pragmatic basis of what works best for society. Right-liberals, though, are attached to the free market for reasons of political principle. For them, it's the big solution to a much larger issue of making a liberal society function.

This leads to free market politics being more absolute and ideological than it ought to be. For instance, as right-liberals see our economic activity within a market as serving much larger ends, they tend to focus excessively on "economic man". Also, an ideological commitment to the free market can lead right-liberals to support the free movement of labour, as a principle, overriding more practical concerns about the real-life consequences of open borders.

The effort to disentangle conservatism from right-liberalism also means exercising care when adopting "individual liberty" as a slogan.

Liberalism has been dominant for some time now, so when liberty is spoken of it is commonly understood in terms of liberal politics. This can mean that liberty is thought of, in right-liberal terms, as the freedom of an abstracted individual against the state or against any kind of collective. It can mean too that "liberty" is understood in more general liberal terms as a freedom from what matters: as a "liberation" from significant aspects of our own selves which aren't self-authored.

A conservative politics can't be based on liberty understood in these terms. If we are to be free, it must be as complete, non-abstracted men living as social beings within given communities.

But even if liberty were better defined, it still wouldn't be for conservatives a sole, overriding, organising principle of society. It would be seen as one important good to be defended amongst other important goods.

Our ancestors, for instance, would have considered other qualities to also be significant, such as honour, honesty, loyalty, integrity, piety, courage and nobility.

One important step, therefore, in defending what matters is for conservatives to reach beyond a right-liberal politics. The politics of the free market and individual liberty, as defined within right-liberalism, isn't adequate for our purposes.

We need to stake out a politics of our own and not attempt to conduct business within a theoretical framework established by liberalism.

Huxley's utopian family

In 1962 the writer Aldous Huxley published his last book, Island. In this work Huxley describes his vision of a utopian society, one which he hoped would be taken seriously by readers.

I recently read a brief excerpt from Island, in which we are told about family life in Huxley's utopia. A visitor to the island of Pala asks "How many homes does a Palanese child have?" and the surprising answer runs as follows:

"About twenty on the average."
"Twenty? My God!"
"We all belong," Susila explained, "to a MAC - a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples."

What does such a family system have to offer? According to our utopian guide Susila it produces in comparison to the "bottled up" nuclear family:

"An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages."

This is a strikingly liberal justification for Huxley's utopian family. We are supposed to be impressed by the Palanese family being inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary. This makes sense only in terms of an underlying liberal politics.

According to a liberal politics we are made human when we are self-determining: when we can choose at any time and in any direction the nature of our being.

This requires liberals to assert (usually to assume) that we begin as blank slates, without a significant given nature.

It also means that social institutions must be made radically open so that they don't impede our self-determining will. If, for instance, I define the family as consisting only of my own close blood relations, then I make it exclusive and deny the possibility of membership to another human will. I close off the sphere of what another individual will can possibly determine for itself. To a strict liberal this will seem politically illegitimate.

Similarly, if the family is defined as consisting of a married couple and their offspring, then the form or shape of the family will remain stable over time and appear "predestined", as it will exist in a single, inherited form rather than in multiple, uniquely gathered forms.

Nor is it difficult to see why a strict liberal would object to the traditional family as being "involuntary". If couples, having once married, are expected to remain together faithfully and if children remain within the family home by virtue of birth/biology rather than choice, then membership of the family unit is not wholly "voluntary".

Huxley, therefore, was not being merely eccentric in dreaming up his "adoption club" system of family life. To someone who doesn't accept liberal politics, the idea of having a child raised by twenty different households of various types will seem unnatural and unappealing.

If, though, the aim is to make the family as open as possible to least impede a self-determining individual will, then Huxley's system becomes intelligible.

That's why other radicals have proposed similar reforms to family life. Germaine Greer, for instance, suggested in 1971 in The Female Eunuch that children should be raised in a "rambling" family structure on communal farms, which the parents would visit "when circumstances permitted". Some parents might "live there for quite long periods, as long as we wanted to". Greer didn't think it necessary that her child should "know that I was his womb-mother".

Alexandra Kollontai, as a spokeswoman on family issues in Lenin's communist government in 1918 went even further in attempting to break down the "exclusive" nature of the traditional family. She wrote:

a woman should know that in the new state there will be no more room for such petty divisions as were formerly understood: "These are my own children, to them I owe all my maternal solicitude, all my affection; those are your children ... Henceforth the worker-mother ... will rise to a point where she no longer differentiates between yours and mine ... The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it embraces all the children of the great proletarian family.

Mainstream society hasn't adopted such modernist utopian visions. There has, though, been a considerable effort to modify the family along liberal lines. The attempt to make the family less exclusive, predestined and involuntary can be seen in the advent of easy, no-fault divorce, in the enthusiasm for role reversal within marriage and in the insistence that there are many, equally legitimate forms of family life and that "family" can't really be defined and is whatever you make it.

Further reading: Whatever that may be

Explaining bad faith

Here's one of the questions conservatives sometimes ask themselves: why do liberals refuse to engage conservatives on matters of substance?

Whenever the conservative voice is heard in some way, liberals rarely reply in terms of a measured argument. This is despite the fact that there are hundreds of professional liberal academics and journalists who could be called on to put the liberal case.

Instead, liberals usually try to dismiss the conservative position as reflecting some temporary hardship in the general population or as being an illegitimate expression of fear or hostility or prejudice.

Lawrence Auster has a short and persuasive explanation for such liberal behaviour at View from the Right. I think it does provide at least part of the reason for the liberal failure to argue reasonably against conservatism.

Setting the target

Think of a political trend which conservatives dislike, such as feminism. The typical approach of conservatives is to attack the outward manifestations of this trend, which in the case of feminism might include the masculinisation of women or the effeminacy of men.

These conservative attacks never seem to be really effective. Feminism marches on oblivious as do all the other political trends opposed by conservatives.

This isn't surprising. If you look at the origins of a political trend like feminism it goes like this.

Item 1: The fundamental liberal principle that individuals should be self-created by their own reason and will.

Item 2: Our sex is not created by our own reason and will. Therefore, society may not be organised around the fact of sex.

Item 3: Women are encouraged to adopt traditionally masculine social roles and vice versa.

As stated above, conservatives typically attack item 3, the end product of the liberal process. However, because liberals accept item 1 they will continue to believe that item 3 is the right thing to do, no matter how much conservatives ridicule it, and no matter how much it goes against the personal instincts and preferences of liberals themselves.

An important part of what conservatives need to do is to target item 1. Perhaps conservatives could stress in opposition to the liberal principle something like the following:

Reason and will are gifts which are not ends in themselves but are a means by which individuals can elevate themselves to the higher part of their given nature.

This principle is not sufficient in itself as it doesn't fully delineate the limitations of individual will and reason. However, it does suggest that the task of individuals is not to remove all impediments to individual will and reason, but to learn how best to use reason and will within a given set of conditions.

(First published at Conservative Central 05/07/03)

Cardinal condemns liberalism

The leader of New Zealand's 480,000 Catholics, Cardinal Thomas Williams, has published an essay titled "The Spiritual Bankruptcy of Liberalism".

In the essay, Cardinal Williams compares modern politicians to barbarians, writing that "The perennial work of the barbarian is to tear down existing standards, and to debase ideals that have come to characterise a society built on sound moral principle."

He writes also that "Relativism and permissiveness have been deliberately promoted, and morality reduced to purely subjective preference. Our failure to protect basic values and rudimentary citizenship is fast converting our country into a moral wasteland."

Intolerant liberals

Liberals like to think of themselves as being tolerant, supporting diversity and freedom of speech. The reality is somewhat different. The latest casualty is a major political party in Belgium called the Vlaams Blok. A liberal judge has effectively outlawed the party because of its opposition to immigration and multiculturalism.

I'd suggest a boycott of Belgian products, but the only ones I know of in Australia are some expensive brands of chocolate and beer.