A trimmer Frum

In my last post, I made a distinction between two entirely different types of conservatives.

There are principled conservatives who wish to conserve aspects of society, such as family and nation, that are threatened by the unfolding logic of liberalism.

Then there are the "trimmer" conservatives who wish to conserve liberalism and its institutions, particularly against too rigidly ideological an implementation of the liberal program ("The ‘trimmer’ is one who disposes his weight so as to keep the ship upon an even keel.")

A principled conservative opposes liberalism at its philosophical starting points, including its understanding of the nature of man and his purposes. A trimmer conservative supports liberalism, its institutions and values, and wishes to sustain it.

Mainstream conservatives are nearly always trimmers. They call themselves conservatives whilst still supporting liberalism (or libertarianism).

My colleague Mark Moncrieff, of the Upon Hope blog, alerted me in the comments to my last post of a good example of a trimmer conservative, namely David Frum.

Frum recently debated Steve Bannon and he described the event as follows:

The debate in Toronto focused on a prediction: whether the future belonged to populist politics...or to liberal politics, in the broadest sense of the word liberal. As I told the audience, I’ve spent my life as a conservative, but what I’ve sought to conserve is not the Spanish Inquisition or the powers of kings and barons. I’ve sought to conserve the free societies that began to be built in the 18th century and that have gradually developed and strengthened—with many imperfections and hypocrisies and backsliding—in the 250 years since. When I was young, the most important challenges to those free societies seemed to come from Communists and Marxists. When I was not so young, the most important of those challenges seemed to come from Islamists. Today, they seem to come from—again, speaking politely—populists. The vector of the challenge changes, but the thing to be cherished and protected remains the same.

This is trimmer talk. He describes himself as a lifelong conservative but it is liberalism that he cherishes and wishes to protect. His mindset is that people like himself must flexibly change position to meet the different challenges that beset liberal societies (he does not consider the issue raised in Patrick Deneen's book, Why liberalism failed, that liberalism will fall because of its own inner workings rather than any external threat).

The tragedy is that trimmers have been able, for so long, to lead the socially conservative rank and file by seeming to be what they actually are not. They present themselves to the rank and file as "conservatives" but they have no intention of halting the slide of Western societies into an ever more radical liberalism.

The trimmers dislike the emergence of populist leaders, who are willing to at least voice the concerns of the rank and file. What would be even better would be the emergence of a new leadership of principled conservatives, who would challenge liberalism at the level of core principles, so that there was a solid ground to the defence of traditional forms of family, culture and nation.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Are conservatives just trimmers?

It's common on social media to come across young people on the right dismissing conservatism with the question "What has it ever actually conserved?"

It's a good point. What I want to try and explain in this post is this very issue: just what is it that modern conservatism has actually tried to conserve? The answer is critical in understanding one aspect of what has gone wrong with the conservative movement.

But I'll begin with something else, namely what a principled conservatism would be trying to conserve. A principled conservatism would be trying to conserve those important aspects of society that a liberal ideology is committed to dissolving.

Liberals believe that the overriding good is to maximise individual autonomy, understood to mean that the individual is able to self-determine or self-define who they are and what they choose to do. Those aspects of life that are predetermined are therefore thought to be fetters on individual freedom. This includes anything we don't get to choose for ourselves, such as our sex, or our race, or our ethnicity, so these things must ultimately be made not to matter in a liberal society.

Liberalism has therefore sought to undo traditional forms of communal identity (based on ethny); distinctions between the sexes, including within the family; ideals of masculinity and femininity; and ideals of monogamous marriage.

Similarly, anything that is thought to restrain or limit individual choice is also likely ultimately to be attacked or quietly abandoned within a liberal society, and this includes notions of duty, of service, of loyalty, of honour and so on. The informal cultural standards that once regulated behaviour toward higher ends are gradually dissolved (and replaced by bureaucratic, statist forms of regulation).

A principled conservatism would challenge liberalism at its ideological roots, i.e. at the level of first principle, in its efforts to uphold nation, family, manhood & womanhood, as well as to defend a different concept of freedom, of man and his nature, and the purposes of life.

The important thing to understand is that twentieth century conservatism was not principled in the way I have set out above. It did not challenge liberalism at the level of first principle, but instead saw its purpose as upholding liberalism, as preventing liberalism from running too far ahead too quickly. The purpose of conservatism, in other words, was to conserve liberalism, the very thing that was dissolving traditional Western society. Which is why the following tweet, criticising the modern conservative outlook, is so well directed:

So the meaning of the word "conservatism" was colonised by liberalism (as were so many other terms, such as freedom, justice, dignity, flourishing etc.). It went from being a word that challenged liberalism, as a matter of principle, to one that supported it.

You can see this in a recent column by Andrew Sullivan, a well-known American political commentator, whose wiki page tells us that he "describes himself as a conservative and is the author of The Conservative Soul."

But what does Sullivan mean by the term "conservatism"? These excerpts from his column make his position admirably clear:

The retirement of Anthony Kennedy is an obituary for conservatism in America.

...What he was able to do was to hold two ideas in his mind at the same time: that history moves forward and laws and institutions need to adjust to those changes or die; and that the core conception of individual liberty should remain the animating principle of America and the West.

...This, to my mind, is the conservative temperament, fully understood...I’m with David Brooks in his view that Republicanism has become conservatism’s worst enemy — worse even than the social-justice left. But I’d argue that this variety of conservatism is still essential to the project of liberal democracy...

The key to this conservatism is restraint, reform, and concern with the stability of the society as a whole. Conservatives see the modern liberal order as a fragile, precious, and rare historical human achievement...without its attachment to precedent, to gradual change, to evolution rather than revolution, chaos and convulsion would make any justice unsustainable.

It’s not an emotionally satisfying tradition. The point is merely to keep liberal democracy vibrant, to sustain its legitimacy, and to protect its institutions...And that’s why I loved Barack Obama. In his heart and mind, he is and was a moderate conservative, trying to blend new social realities with the long story of America, rescuing capitalism from itself...He desperately tried to keep this country in one piece, against foam-flecked racism and know-nothingism on one side and left-wing ideological purity and identity politics on the other. And he almost did.

And this is why I despise Donald Trump...And Republicanism — in its shameful embrace of this monster, its determined rape of the environment, destruction of our fiscal standing, evisceration of our allies, callousness toward the sick, and newfound contempt for free trade — has nary a conservative bone in its putrefying body.

A liberal society is always in need of this conservatism. The greatest recent philosopher in this tradition, Michael Oakeshott, described the kind of conservative politician he favored, and he used George Savile’s term for such a character: a “trimmer.” His account reads pretty much like Anthony Kennedy:

The ‘trimmer’ is one who disposes his weight so as to keep the ship upon an even keel. And our inspection of his conduct reveals certain general ideas at work … Being concerned to prevent politics from running to extremes, he believes that there is a time for everything and that everything has its time — not providentially, but empirically. He will be found facing in whatever direction the occasion seems to require if the boat is to go even.

No figure is more mocked or ridiculed in our contemporary culture than this kind of moderate. And yet no one right now is more integral to the survival of our way of life.

I'm grateful to Andrew Sullivan for bringing this type of "conservatism" so clearly into the light. The role of conservatives, in this view, is to be "trimmers" who keep the ship of liberalism on an even keel. As Sullivan puts it, the role of conservatives is to conserve liberal institutions against the ideological purity of the more radical liberals.

Is it any wonder, then, that society drifted in an ever more liberal direction during the course of the twentieth century? That there was never any pushback once liberal measures had been put in place? That the "conservative" parties never really represented the rank and file who wanted to conserve not liberalism but family, culture and nation?

This kind of "conservatism" has been prominent within the Liberal Party here in Australia. Sir Malcolm Fraser, a former PM, described the role of conservatism within his party this way:

As its name implies, ours is a liberal government holding liberal principles...

I have stressed the commitment of the Government to liberal principles and values. Precisely because of that commitment it is also concerned to conserve and protect those principles and values.

Once liberal institutions are installed in a society, a government which wishes to preserve them must in some sense be conservative.

The last sentence deserves to be carefully read. Liberalism requires a conservative element "once liberal institutions are installed in a society". The aim is to conserve liberalism, not to challenge it. Unsurprisingly, Fraser himself instituted radically liberal policies whilst PM, including nullifying the older national identity (which he saw as belonging to the previous century) in order to proclaim the advent of multiculturalism.

Tony Abbott, another former PM and often considered to be the leader of the most right-wing faction of the Liberal Party, once gave a keynote address to the Young Liberals, in which he approvingly quoted Fraser's definition of conservatism and added to it that,

In a world where nothing exists in isolation and everything is connected, “liberalism” and “conservatism” turn out to be complementary values...The difference between the ways liberals and conservatives value freedom is, perhaps, more the difference between love at first sight and the love which grows over time.

Which makes conservatives sound more like laggers than trimmers.

But neither term describes a principled conservative. A principled conservative is not there to defend the liberal concept of freedom against a too radically purist and non-pragmatic attempt to impose it on society; nor is he simply slower to embrace the liberal understanding of freedom.

He rejects it. A principled conservative rejects the liberal understanding of freedom as false and harmful. He does not exist to conserve it but to conserve what it threatens.

As Sulla Felix suggested in his social media post, it cannot be our aim to conserve the principles that destroy us and so we cannot be liberalism's trimmers. The trimming version of conservatism is a colonised one in which it is possible for someone like Andrew Sullivan to identify Barack Obama as the true conservative. We should abandon it for something of our own.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Standards & the liberal formula

The current liberal understanding of liberty is that we are free when there are fewest constraints on individual choice. The one constraint that liberalism formally recognises is that we are not in our own choices to limit the choices of others (we are not to discriminate, or be intolerant, or judge, or lack openness toward what others choose to be or do).

I don't want to address in this post the lack of internal coherence of the liberal formula. I simply want to point out some of the ways that traditional societies believed that individual choice should rightly be constrained.

I am pointing out a conflict between the traditional view and the liberal one. A liberal society, in attempting to maximise the realm of individual choice, must eventually push against the traditional constraints on choice.

In other words, you cannot operate on the liberal formula and hope to preserve, in the longer run, those cultural standards within a traditional society that constrained individual choice.

Some of these standards held within traditional societies, in no particular order, included:

1. What might be thought of as aristocratic codes of behaviour, including standards of honour, nobility and dignity. These ruled out choices or actions that were thought to be base or dishonourable, including cowardice and dishonesty.

2. Loyalty. It was thought right to be loyal to family and to country (hence the motto "God, King and country"). If we are loyal, then we are constrained in our choices from putting our own immediate material self-interests above the well-being of our family or nation.

3. Manhood & womanhood. In traditional societies men were expected to act according to standards of courage, resilience, self-control, reliability, industry and strength; womanhood was measured by a loving heart, patience, tenderness, kindness, grace, modesty and beauty.

It is perhaps no coincidence that in eras that were focused on dissolving restraint that sex distinctions between men and women were deliberately flattened (e.g. the flappers of the 1920s or the hippies of the later 60s).

4. Duty. I remember as a young man having a serious talk with an older male who told me "there is no such thing as duty." He had been raised in a culture that had already rejected duty as a standard. That's not so surprising, as duty really does suggest a constraint on our choices.

Duty seems to arise, in part, from a sense of what we owe to those who have brought about our being, and nurtured and raised us, and made sacrifices for us. In many cultures, therefore, filial duty is prominent (a duty toward our parents). Similarly, it can be felt that we have a duty to past generations, to our country and its traditions, and to God. (Duty can run the other way as well, in that we have duties to those under our care, such as our children.)

In the ancient world, duty was connected as a concept with piety. Cicero, for instance, defined pietas as the virtue "which admonishes us to do our duty to our country or our parents or other blood relations." For the Ancient Greeks, eusebeia (the Greek counterpart to pietas) was represented by the demi-god of piety, loyalty, duty and filial respect.

5. Reverence/respect. This is a constraint on transgressing certain places or offices that are thought to hold a deeper meaning within a community. For instance, in some communities it might be thought irreverent to shout obscenities in a church, or to damage a flag that soldiers have fought for and died under, or to insult the monarch, or to blaspheme. In modern Australia, there is the example of the reverent way that ANZAC Day services are carried out.

Liberals still sometimes make appeals to an ideal of respect, as when they call for respect for women. But this works differently to the traditional concept. In a liberal society, women are encouraged to self-transgress (to act against moral ideals associated with their sex), as this then widens the realm of individual choice. Similarly, the very notion of womanhood is transgressed when liberals treat it as an oppressive social construct that is, at best, a merely subjective identity open to all.

So there is no deeply held meaning to the idea of womanhood in a liberal society that it might be thought wrong to transgress. We are told to respect women in a general sense, more as a way of upholding women's unconstrained choices, rather than as a response to something within womanhood itself that might naturally draw respect from men.

6. Integrity/self-respect. A desire to maintain moral integrity constrained choice in traditional societies. A person begins with moral foundations that provide a sense of "wholeness" (perhaps the term "wholesomeness" comes from this). If these foundations collapse, there is a loss of the sense of being an integrated, complete person. The feeling of integrity that is so valuable a part of our identity is damaged.

Similarly, a person who routinely yields to vice (to sloth, gluttony, avarice etc.) will eventually feel less respect for themselves (hence the reprimand "a self-respecting person would not do that"). We do not wish to lower ourselves in our own eyes; self-respect therefore places constraints on what we might choose to be or do.

7. Love. If we genuinely love someone, we will wish to protect them from harm. More than this, we often seek to serve and defend that which we love. This could be our family, our nation, our friends, our church, or the larger tradition we belong to. We wish too to uphold the conditions in which such loves can flourish. All of this places constraints on individual choice. There have been some very radical moderns who have rejected love because of this; they have identified it as a brake on "liberation" movements or as a fetter on personal freedom.

8. Service. An impulse toward service is one aspect of our created nature. The use of our strengths and talents in service to others gives us a sense of purpose and fulfilment. Even though it makes claims on us, and therefore places limits on choice, service adds to the richness of our commitments, as when a man acts to protect his family, or a woman nurtures her children, or perhaps when there is a calling toward a higher service to God to uphold the good.

In a liberal society, the call to serve is most often heard from the churches. Some of these churches have accepted the fundamentals of a liberal philosophy and so service is interpreted through a social justice framework as meaning a commitment toward the "equal autonomy" of individuals.

This creates a negative loop. The churches, in response to a largely self-centered culture, preach service to others, but by keeping to a modern philosophy they support movements which further dissolve the traditional, common bonds of historic communities, leading to ever more withdrawn, self-centered forms of culture.

Service shouldn't be just tacked on to an otherwise socially dissolving ideology, but should flow from the commitments that grow naturally within settled, stable, traditional forms of community.

These are some of the key cultural standards that acted as restraints on individual choice in pre-modern societies. If the aim of a modern society is to maximise such choice, then there is going to be a problem in attempting to retain these standards - there is a danger that they will be lost.

Now, a liberal might reply to all this by saying that if choice is unconstrained that people could still choose as individuals to be honourable, or manly, or loyal. If I remember correctly, John Stuart Mill was confident that people who were "liberated" to unconstrained choice would, particularly if they were educated, choose to act like gentlemen.

But there's the problem of the logic at play. If the aim of society is to enlarge the realm of unconstrained choice, and these traditional standards constrain that choice, then they are likely ultimately to be seen as barriers to be taken down. The reality is that these standards will eventually come to be thought of as old-fashioned & out of date, or regressive, or quaint. And if the words themselves survive within a liberal culture ("service," "respect," "manhood"), it is likely that they will have been redefined to better suit liberal purposes.

They don't survive intact as cultural standards. The logic of the liberal formula works against this.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Our first conference

Last weekend was the first ever Melbourne Traditionalists Conference. We had a very good turnout, with 25 in attendance. Mark Moncrieff, of the Upon Hope blog, planned the event well. We began with a meet and greet on Friday night, which was low key but very helpful in introducing newcomers to the group. Then on Saturday we had a series of presentations on varying topics ranging from Shakespeare and Aristotelian ethics; the way forward for traditionalism; distinctions in world view between Christianity and paganism; lessons from the anti-suffrage movement; and the keynote address by Dr Frank Salter on Anglo-Australian identity.

The highlight for me came next: an evening banquet at a local restaurant. This was more informal, a good chance for discussion, and it finished the conference with a high level of positive energy.

Special thanks to Mark Moncrieff for his efforts in organising the conference; to all the presenters, but particularly to Dr Salter; to those who made the long trip from Adelaide and Sydney; and to the newcomers who made the step to meeting up in real life.

If you missed out, I have no doubt there will be another conference at this time next year.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

A warning unheeded

George Essex Evans was one of Australia's Federation poets. He was described by Alfred Deakin, Prime Minister in the early 1900s, as Australia's "national poet whose patriotic songs stirred her people profoundly."

He wrote a poem "Australia" (published 1906) which is notable for its prophetic warning about a false understanding of liberty - one which unfortunately went unheeded.

Liberalism pushes towards an expansion of the realm of individual autonomy. That means, logically, that liberalism pushes against traditional restraints on what I as an individual might choose to do or be.

Evan's poem doesn't look at freedom this way. He wants Australians to be free, not as atomised individuals, but as a people. And freedom does not mean throwing off traditional restraints, but being "proved" as a people in them.

The first two stanzas run as follows:

Earth's mightiest isle. She stands alone.
The wide seas wash around Her throne.
Crowned by the red sun as his own.

The world's grey page lies bare today -
The rise of nations - the decay.
Will She, too, rise - and fall as they?

There is already a challenge here to liberal orthodoxy. Evans is acutely aware that history is not a story of linear progress toward a liberal utopia, but that civilisations rise and fall. He suggests that the old world is already experiencing decay.

He continues:

The trust is ours - to us alone.
We are the strong foundation-stone,
The seed from which the flower is grown.

Again, this focus on intergenerational trust is out of line with modern liberalism, which encourages the view that every generation must live for itself.

Evans then writes:

What shall it profit Her if we
Make gold our God, and strength our plea,
And call wild licence Liberty?

This is, first, a plea against materialism. Evans would not have been pleased to hear Liberal Party Prime Ministers talk about Australia as if we were just an economy, a kind of factory writ large, with political decisions being based mostly on economic considerations.

It is, second, a criticism of freedom being defined as "licence" - which means behaving however we wish, without restraint.

If, in our scorn of creed and king,
All reverence to the winds we fling,
And fall before a baser thing?

Evans identifies here two of the traditional restraints on the realm of individual choice. The first is reverence. A free people does not fling all reverence "to the winds". If it does so, it is likely to adopt something more base. And it is this rejection of the base that is a second traditional restraint on the realm of individual choice. A people is free when it is liberated from what is base, rather than when the distinction between what is base and what is honourable is no longer made.

What though her sword unconquered be,
Her armoured navies sweep the sea,
If still Her people are not free?

To be a people proved and strong -
True freemen of the Poet's song
For whom the world has waited long.

Evans wanted Australians to be "proved and strong" in terms of national character, and it was this that defined being "true freemen" rather than a freedom to be base.

Power without justice

I've written a lot on feminism at this site, mostly about the connection between feminism and the liberal project of maximising individual autonomy.

I happen to know a few high profile feminists and this has given me some insight into the way they think. I've come increasingly to believe that gender politics is used by these women not for the purposes of securing their vision of justice (maximum autonomy for women) but simply for competitive advantage against men in securing the markers of a successful upper middle-class lifestyle, such as professional status, income and cultural/political influence in society.

It's a dreary and demoralising vision of society, one in which men and women are divided into opposing social classes, competing eternally against each other for material things.

Which brings me to a review by Laura Kipnis in The Atlantic of a new feminist book. Laura Kipnis describes the vision of society outlined in this book in similar terms to what I set out above:

One of the unfunny witticisms going around during Hillary Clinton’s first presidential run was that she’d never get elected, because she reminded men of their first wife. When a male friend relayed the update during her second run—no, she didn’t remind men of their first wife; she reminded them of their first wife’s divorce lawyer—I recall barking with laughter. The joke distilled all the male anxieties of the moment: Something was being taken away from them, their balls were in a vise, pissed-off women wanted men’s stuff and were going to be ruthless about trying to get it.

I recalled this joke while reading Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, which shares what might be called a divorce-court view of the gender situation in America. Men and women are on opposing sides, and women will succeed only by quashing men and seizing the spoils: the big jobs, the political offices, and the moral high ground.

The rest of the review is by now very familiar. Social enemy no.1 is the white male:

The primary target for this accumulated rage is, of course, men—white men

But white women are also coming under attack:

83 percent of Democratic women were furious at the news at least once a day. But the oppositional fury isn’t exactly tidy, Traister acknowledges. For many of the women of color whom she quotes, the anger is equally directed at white women.

Rebecca Traister blames "white heterosexual marriage" for the continuing loyalty between white men and women:

the real culprit behind his election, as Traister sees it, is white heterosexual marriage. Analyses of 2016 voting patterns reveal a stark partisan divide between married and never-married white women

Imagine reaching a state of mind in which loyalty between a husband and wife is condemned as undermining the more perfect division of the sexes into hostile, competing social classes.

Patrick Deneen, in his book Why Liberalism Failed, writes about how liberalism, even in its earliest forms, preferred to base itself on "the low" (e.g. harnessing self-interest) rather than aspirations to the high (such as appeals to a common good). He notes of current social problems that,

These maladies include the corrosive social and civic effects of self-interest - a disease that arises from the cure of overcoming the ancient reliance upon virtue. Not only is this malady increasingly manifest in all social interactions and institutions, but it infiltrates liberal politics. Undermining any appeal to a common good, it induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized polarization for a citizenry that is increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns.

Instead of men and women working together selflessly for a common good (e.g. the family, the nation), and thereby creating stability, trust and improving social standards, the left is pushing a vision of a "nationalized polarization" with men and women standing against each other in competition for power and social resources.

It strikes me as being so bleak a vision of society that it is likely ultimately to bring about a collapse rather than an enduring social order.

Melbourne Traditionalists Conference 2018

The inaugural Melbourne Traditionalists Conference is coming up soon - Friday 19th and Saturday 20th October. It's open to anyone sympathetic to traditionalist politics. Keynote speaker is Dr Frank Salter.

Details, including how to register, can be found here.

Thoughts on freedom

If you were to ask a liberal what freedom is the simplest answer you might get is that it means doing what you want to do. And, it's true, there is a sense in which this is a particular type of freedom.

But taking this as a first principle of society leads to some unusual outcomes. The highest circulation newspaper in the UK ran a story recently with the headline "Trans woman, 41, pretended to be a boy to groom a girl." Accompanying the story was a photo of the "trans woman":

If freedom means doing what you want, then logically this would include a man identifying as a woman, if this is what he wanted to do.

But there is another, and I believe more significant, way to define freedom. In one of Chesterton's books, a character is asked to define freedom and he answers "First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself".

If this is true, then freedom cannot mean being able to choose anything. To be free, we must necessarily limit the choices we make, so that they fit with, and help to develop, our personhood. The better we "self-limit" in this sense, the more freedom we have to be powerfully and admirably what we were created to be.

And this is what most people instinctively aim at. We ask what it means to live excellently, in a fully natured way, to best fulfil our created natures.

And this necessarily means that we are oriented to ordering our lives. We think of ourselves as living within a moral universe and we try to adhere to the natural law that we discover through reason, conscience and experience, so that we maintain the moral integrity that is important to our sense of ourselves, and so that we perfect, as best we can as fallible creatures, our moral nature.

We seek as men to fully develop our masculine qualities. We wish for ourselves a muscular frame and physical strength and athleticism; we attempt to fulfil, to a high degree, the roles and duties associated with being a husband and father; we cultivate the harder virtues of courage, endurance, self-discipline and resilience; and we seek to work effectively with other men to uphold the existence of our communities and traditions.

We wish also to live through our spiritual natures. We value experiences of transcendence or communion. We seek to remain open to deeper experiences of love and connectedness. We appreciate the higher experiences available to us through the arts, through an appreciation of female beauty and through a love of nature.

A mind that can govern itself to be oriented to this line of development is a mind that experiences itself as free. It is a mind that is able to self-consciously guide the person along the path that best fulfils our created nature. But our right minds are not always in charge. Sometimes fierce passions (e.g. anger) clouds our reason, or sometimes bad habits (sloth) prove too strong. Perhaps there is an addiction or a temptation that proves stronger than our right minds.

And so part of life is the effort to cultivate habits of virtue, so that we maintain the freedom to self-consciously and successfully pursue our better purposes - so that we, rather than bad habits or addictions or temptations - are in charge and we can develop freely toward our ultimate ends .

There is a lifelong effort to order ourselves; it stands alongside the effort to accumulate wisdom and self-knowledge.

Trump's homeland speech

There were some significant highlights in President Trump's recent speech to the United Nations. He went well beyond the usual right-liberal talking points in defending national sovereignty against those pushing for global governance.

He said, for instance:

Each of us here today is the emissary of a distinct culture, a rich history, and a people bound together by ties of memory, tradition, and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on Earth. That is why America will always choose independence and cooperation over global governance, control, and domination. I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions.

He also argued for a change in refugee policy:

As we see in Jordan, the most compassionate policy is to place refugees as close to their homes as possible, to ease their eventual return to be part of the rebuilding process. This approach also stretches finite resources to help far more people, increasing the impact of every dollar spent.

He firmly rejected ceding power to UN agencies:

...the United States will provide no support and recognition to the International Criminal Court. As far as America is concerned, the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority. The ICC claims near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating all principles of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy. America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism. Around the world, responsible nations must defend against threats to sovereignty not just from global governance, but also from new forms of coercion and domination.

He spoke out against uncontrolled, illegal immigration:

The United States is also working with partners in Latin America to confront threats to sovereignty from uncontrolled migration. Tolerance for human struggling and human smuggling and trafficking is not humane. It is a horrible thing that is going on, at levels that nobody has ever seen before. It is very, very cruel. Illegal immigration funds criminal networks, ruthless gangs, and the flow of deadly drugs. Illegal immigration exploits vulnerable populations and hurts hardworking citizens and has produced a vicious cycle of crime, violence, and poverty. Only by upholding national borders, destroying criminal gangs can we break the cycle and establish a real foundation for prosperity.

We recognize the right of every nation in this room to set its own immigration policy in accordance with its national interests, just as we ask other countries to respect our own right to do the same, which we are doing. That is one reason the United States will not participate in the new Global Compact on Migration. Migration should not be governed by an international body, unaccountable to our own citizens. Ultimately, the only long-term solution to the migration crisis is to help people build more hopeful futures in their home countries. Make their countries great again.

There was support for Polish efforts to stand up to the EU:

In Poland, the great people are standing up for their independence, their security, and their sovereignty.

There was a powerful endorsement of a humanity made up of distinct, unique nations:

Many countries are pursuing their own unique visions, building their own hopeful futures, and chasing their own wonderful dreams of destiny, of legacy, and of a home. The whole world is richer. Humanity is better because of this beautiful constellation of nations, each very special, each very unique, each shining brightly in its part of the world. In each one, we see also promise of a people bound together by a shared past and working toward a common future.

He spoke of his patriotic feeling as an American:

We celebrate our heroes, we treasure our traditions, and, above all, we love our country. Inside everyone in this great chamber today, and everyone listening all around the globe, there is the heart of a patriot that feels the same powerful love for your nation, the same intense loyalty to your homeland, the passion that burns in the hearts of patriots and the souls of nations has inspired reform and revolution, sacrifice and selflessness, scientific breakthroughs and magnificent works of art.

Our task is not to erase it, but to embrace it—to build with it, to draw on its ancient wisdom, and to find within it the will to make our nations greater, our regions safer, and the world better.

And he finished with this:

Together, let us choose a future of patriotism, prosperity, and pride. Let us choose peace and freedom over domination and defeat. Let us come here to this place to stand for our people and their nations. Forever strong, forever sovereign, forever just. Forever thankful for the grace and the goodness and the glory of God. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the nations of the world.

It's unusual to hear this from a mainstream politician. If you read through these quotes, President Trump recognises that:

1. It is the uniqueness of nations that truly enriches and embellishes the world, not open borders.

2. It is the souls of nations that have inspired great art and a willingness to act selflessly for the common good.

3. That loyalty matters.

4. That nations help to preserve our legacy and to create a sense of home.

5. That nations are made up of peoples united by memory and traditions.

6. That a genuine refugee policy would seek to return people to their own homelands once the conflict finishes.

7. That those attempting to migrate illegally should instead work towards making their own homelands better places to live.

This is not a blanket endorsement of President Trump (he has yet, for instance, to secure the southern border of the U.S.). But he is continuing to push the Overton window toward a more open discussion of significant issues.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Living in fear in South Africa

An exceptionally well-spoken young South African woman has made a video describing the fear that white farming families live under in South Africa:

Grown ups make a guess?

This is from a book being used at American kindergartens:

The text reads: When babies are born people ask "Is it a boy or a girl?"

The next page:

The idea here is that our bodies don't tell us whether we are male or female; our sex is something now cut off from our physical self, they are two different things. At best you can make a guess whether someone is male or female from looking at their body.

If we were to accept this, then the body would no longer hold the same depth of meaning as it does now. If a man looks at his body, at how he is built physically, he can read there some of his telos - of what he is supposed to develop toward in his whole person.

There is a French group, Vigi Gender, which seeks to uphold the more traditional view about our bodies being sexed. In their manifesto they write:

Become what you are

We are born male or female. Our whole being is gendered in its physical, psychological and spiritual dimension. Male and female cells are different: all male cells are XY and all cells of the woman XX. Sex hormones of men and women are different: testosterone in men; in women, estrogen, the hormone of femininity and progesterone, the hormone of motherhood...

Man is an incarnate being endowed with a mind capable of reason and will. Our body is a source of meaning; it expresses the person, "my body is me." To deny the body, to deny the influence of the sexed body on behaviour, interests, psychology, skills, not only contradicts numerous scientific studies, but is to deny that the human person is an embodied being and to make of it a pure spirit, a being which only defines itself.

We are born male or female and all our life we fulfil ourselves as man or woman, we become what we are in completing what we received at birth (nature), and by what we receive throughout our lives through culture (relationship to the father and the mother, education, history, language, customs ...)

If what we received from the culture was completely separated from our bodies, we would not be united, as we would be torn between the meaning carried by our body, and what we received

The next page of the kindergarten book has this:

This is the page that fits most readily into the beliefs of liberal modernity. It suggests that I am truly myself when I am no particular ready made sexual category. Being "just me" means being both a girl and a boy, or neither, or perhaps one of countless boutique sexes, making me a uniquely sexed creature.

Liberalism tends to see our sex negatively as a potential fetter on our autonomous self. Being born either male or female is something predetermined, and therefore potentially limiting to the liberal, autonomous self. These categories therefore have to be made not to matter.

And so the kindergarten book sets "being me" against being either male or female. The two things are set apart rather than being interwoven. The book also promotes the idea that there are any number of possible sexual identities, making this aspect of the self more amenable to a liberal "self-expressive individualism".

Pope Benedict (as Cardinal Ratzinger in 1997) observed this larger trend within liberal modernity, describing it this way:

The idea that 'nature' has something to say is no longer admissible; man is to have the liberty to remodel himself at will. He is to be free from all of the prior givens of his essence. He makes of himself what he wants, and only in this way is he really 'free and liberated'. Behind this approach is a rebellion on man's part against the limits that he has as a biological being. In the end, it is a revolt against our creatureliness. Man is to be his own creator - a modern, new edition of the immemorial attempt to be God, to be like God.

It is not a step up in our dignity as humans to be denatured in this way. The liberal understanding is that I am "just me" either as a desexed personality or as a uniquely sexed one. And so there is no essence that exists as part of the created order that I share in and that gives substance and signficance to who I am and that gives a coherent unity that integrates - gives integrity to -  mind, body and soul.

Our limits as a biological being are also how we are concretely "natured". It is within this given, created nature that the deeper aspects of our self are to be experienced, not within what we make up ourselves as an "expressive choice".

In other words, we will find more, and be more, if we fully develop the masculine essence given to us as men, than if we assert, as an act of choice, our independence from this, either as a desexed personality or as a personality with a self-created sex, one that fails to connect our physical being and sexual being, body and mind.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Debating morality in a liberal age

If liberalism is to be reduced to any single position it is the belief that autonomy is the overriding good in life.

I was reminded of this when reading a Twitter debate about abortion. The anti-abortionists were arguing that a woman should not take the life of the fetus in her womb. The pro-abortionist rejected this on the basis that the woman's autonomy trumped everything else.

He took this position to its logical conclusion in tweets like the following:

Something becomes moral, in this point of view, not because of its intrinsic nature, but if it is consensual. If a fetus fails to gain consent from its mother to live in her womb, its position becomes morally untenable. That is where the logic of making autonomy the ultimate test of morality - the ultimate good - takes us.

Update: A participant in the debate added what I think is a good insight into the possible mindset of liberals like "idahogie". It's worth considering:

Digging a deeper hole

A reader of the left-wing Guardian sent the following problem to the paper's agony aunt, Mariella Frostrup:

Like me, most of my friends are in their 30s, some turning 40...

We’ve tried all of the dating things, found no one and biological clocks are ticking. One friend said her life is not worth living because she hasn’t got a partner or a child.

...life isn’t going how we thought it would. We’re being left behind and without the financial ability (or housing) to freeze eggs or go it alone, or adopt.

I get harassed by some friends, almost bullying me into going on dating apps...But I hated it – men were rude, unkind and I felt physically threatened. I found myself despising all men.

The idea that single people in their 30s are all having fun is a lie. We are the have-nots and we are sad. What now?

Mariella's advice? She wants the reader to focus her energies on bringing about more feminist social revolution. The problem, according to Mariella, is that women still aren't equal enough, so more feminism is needed to fix the condition of "sad singleton" women:

What a fascinating dilemma...in the 22 years since Bridget Jones was published, life hasn’t changed much for women in their 30s. I’m not convinced that even millennials will have a radically altered experience of women’s still untenable position.

While Helen Fielding’s book was dismissed as “women’s writing” at the time, it was a zeitgeist novel that summed up the state of the world for sad “singletons”. Women were told they had equality in a still wholly unequal world. Now here you are, over two decades later, experiencing the same old story. Truly society has not yet shape-shifted enough to fully integrate us.

Your letter confirms what I’ve long suspected – that the seismic changes needed to make the world more bearable for our sex aren’t happening fast enough or with enough focus. Women are still penalised for pregnancy, bear the main burden of domestic life (so often now combined with full-time work) and, despite increasing lifespans, have the same short window in which society deems them to be fully contributing members.

...There will, I firmly believe, come a time when women’s lives truly are equal and breakthroughs in medical science will be welcomed instead of fuelling hysterical headlines about pensioners giving birth....I’m convinced that if you and your friends focus further on shaping the world you want and worry less about what the fates will bring, your chances of fulfilment and happiness will soar...

There's nothing of substance in this advice. Just an abstract call to more equality and a hint that science might solve the problem by allowing women to give birth later in life. It is, at heart, a refusal to even consider that feminism might share some of the blame for disrupting family formation.

So what might help women form families in a more timely way? You could write a book on this, but here are a few suggestions on my part.

First, it would help if women weren't encouraged, from girlhood onwards, to believe in a radical form of autonomy. As an example, here is a quote that I noticed in a girl's magazine my young daughter was reading:

"Women are empowered and strong, and don't have to be saved by some male hero, but can take care of themselves using their intelligence and power."

I agree that women don't need to be "saved" by men. Where, though, in this quote is the recognition that it is natural for women to live as part of a family? What is the point in telling a girl, at age 10, that she can "take care of herself" as an empowered woman, and then consoling her at age 35 when she is in grief at being single and childless?

Second, it doesn't help that feminists see the world as a contest between men and women as hostile social classes. How can this not disrupt family formation, especially among the more highly educated, left-wing women who take these ideologies seriously? I know myself how frustrating it is to hear my work colleagues frequently blaming "white men" for social problems. There is no way I could develop romantic feelings for women with this mindset, i.e. for women who saw me politically and socially as the enemy.

Third, there has to be a recognition that the sexual revolution has had negative consequences. Mariella Frostrup is all for this revolution: on her social media accounts she pushes the idea that there is no such thing as a woman being too "slutty". But if women (and men) do not self-limit when it comes to sexuality, much else follows, including a decline in the ability of women to successfully pair bond, and a rise in the rate of divorce that follows (leading to a decline in trust between the sexes and cynicism about marriage).

The Guardian reader disliked dating apps because she found the men rude and unkind, but if feminist women press the idea that there is to be no self-limitation when it comes to sexuality, then it is likely that standards will be coarsened.

Fourth, reform to family law would help to revive marriage. Currently, a man who marries is heavily exposed to abuse from a divorcing wife. He can lose children, house and future income. There are perverse incentives at the moment for a woman to marry a man without seeing this seriously as a life commitment. If divorce really does have to exist, then there should be an expectation of shared custody, with the wife supporting herself rather than expecting a now ex-husband to continue his former role of provider.

Fifth, the feminist push for "equality" runs hard up against female hypergamy in relationships. Women want to marry men they can look up to and who they perceive to be worthy in terms of social status, resources and so on. But the pool of high status, high resource men is in decline. The greater the success of feminists in pushing women into higher education and high status professions, the greater the problem these women face in finding men of equal or higher status to marry.

It is a similar story with "empowerment". If women are hypergamous, and are drawn to men who they perceive to be powerful relative to themselves, then the more that women are empowered the more difficult it is for these women to find men who will impress them.

Sixth, feminism has encouraged the collapse into merely economic values. We live in a market economy and the values derived from this way of organising society, such as career and consumer lifestyles, have become too dominant. Feminists very clearly believe that it is a higher thing for a woman to work in an office as an employee than to be a mother within a family. There is little acknowledgement of how important family roles are in terms of our identities as men or women, or in fulfilling a deeper instinct to reproduce and carry on our traditions, or in the natural drive to experience parenthood and maternal or paternal love, or in our basic human relational needs of having the love and close support of those we are closely related to.

Finally, it is difficult to secure family formation in a culture that has rejected virtue. The question of what qualities should be cultivated so that a man might be a good husband and father, or a woman a good wife or mother, are rarely asked and, in the case of women, would probably be considered regressive. But it cannot be merely assumed that individuals will develop in a way that allows them to be good candidates for marriage. A woman, for instance, needs to develop qualities related to emotional regulation, loyalty and patience, a self-sacrificing love, prudence, gratitude, and appreciation of the worth in everyday things - and none of these can simply be assumed, they need rather to be fostered both within the culture and within the individual soul.

It is part of the nature of genuinely masculine men (men with the warrior instinct) that they wish to defend the good not only in themselves but within their own people. There is an order that can be won from the flux and chaos of the world, that represents things being set right. Ultimately, a people lives or dies by the presence or absence of such genuinely masculine men (men with chests, as C.S. Lewis put it).

Family formation is part of what has to be set right for a people to flourish. It is where we need those genuinely masculine men to re-form and to take charge of the culture. The grieving single women won't find any solutions in the Guardian, let alone from Mariella Frostrup, and nor from Western men who have collapsed into a view that either sets economic values as paramount, or who believe only in a discordant reality, so that there are only individuals and their own autonomous choices, with no choice having any more significance or value than another.

We have to retrieve something within the culture that is not entirely lost, but that has been put away for some time.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

Has the left resisted market values?

Liberalism as a political ideology has had a deep effect on Western society. But so too has the way that our society is organised economically.

What matters in a market economy is the individual as a producer and a consumer. Given that our society is organised around this "economic mode" there is a pressure on individuals to fit in with this imperative to maximise both individual production and consumption.

I think it's fair to say that for many people the measure of success in life is based on earning and consuming: more specifically on career status and income. And the basic orientation of many urban dwellers is on a consumer lifestyle of shopping, dining out, travel and entertainment.

It has reached the point that not much else is thought to matter, except perhaps a commitment to liberal political values which are thought to provide the "moral" aspect of life (and family still holds some ground).

In theory, the left is supposed to be a point of resistance to this dominance of market values. But, apart from a preference for working within the public sector, I can't see that this is true. The leftists I know have bought completely into the idea that success in life is measured by career status, money and a consumer lifestyle.

This helps to explain, for instance, the focus of modern day feminism. Western feminists use gender politics as leverage in the competition for upper middle-class employment. This is almost entirely what holds their attention.

It leads to the odd situation in which highly privileged feminists, promoted to positions of great influence with corresponding incomes and lifestyle trappings, nonetheless continue to portray themselves as belonging to an oppressed, disadvantaged class.

And what about traditionalists? We have to take the task of keeping the market in its place much more seriously. We ideally want to create a culture in which the purposes of man are much wider and more varied than simply earning and consuming. We want a culture which upholds communal identities based on family and ethny; which deeply connects the individual to people and place; in which men participate meaningfully in the polis; in which commitments to family and especially to motherhood and fatherhood can flourish; in which the spiritual nature of man can be nurtured; and in which an appreciation of the arts can be widely developed.

If there is no resistance to the mode of "earn/consume" then much else follows. For instance, if 20-something women are guided into a way of life in which the idea is to push toward maximum work commitments and productivity combined with the "glamour" of a high spending consumer lifestyle of dining out and travel, then the prospect of children can be rejected as one burden too many, as well as an unwelcome lifestyle impediment.

Just to show how far this mentality has already wormed its way into the culture, here is a poster from the British National Health Service which simply assumes that women would not want children to get in the way of a "sex in the city" lifestyle:

I don't mean to suggest that traditionalists cannot, or should not, aim to succeed in their careers. We do have to think through, though, how in a practical way non-economic values can be upheld within society.

Mistaken at its core

A reader sent in this criticism of feminism made by a rabbi. I think it's well argued.

“Feminism,” the rabbi said, “like other associated liberal concepts, is mistaken at its core. Feminism sees people solely as individuals, that they are not members of a family, of a nation, or even of society at large. Feminists are not good neighbors. They prefer loose personal connections so they can focus on themselves. This is not appropriate human behavior, which should involve concern for those around you. It’s no wonder that feminism has destroyed families, with both men and women as its casualties.

“People are not meant to live in isolation; they are a part of something. All of halacha (Torah law) regarding families does not relate to individual men or women but to a formula for healthy family life, which automatically includes how life is best lived by men and women — as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. Feminism promotes external individual achievements, such as female army service, without much interest in family life.

“Due to the feminist movement, many men are more reluctant today to form connections with women. They feel that they are looked upon with suspicion and that they need to prove their innocence. They feel that they are constantly being scrutinized under the watchful eye of the feminist police."