The Antigones

You may have seen at Laura Wood's site a report on a new French women's group called the Antigones.

They have been set up in opposition to Femen, a feminist group originally from Ukraine, but which has also spread to France. The Femen women often protest topless with obscene comments daubed on their bodies.

The Antigones want to be feminine and dignified. I've read some of their published material and it seems to be quite good. They are definitely opposed to the "gender theory" I reported on a little while ago. This is the idea that our identity as men and women is merely a false social construct and that we should be liberated to choose whatever sex identities we like.

This gender theory is obviously very closely tied to the liberalism which is dominant in the West today. Liberalism claims that we should aim to maximise individual autonomy, which means being self-determining or self-authoring, which means that predetermined qualities like being male or female aren't allowed to matter. That then means that there cannot be complementary masculine and feminine essences as part of the reality of things.

The Antigones have set themselves in a principled way against the liberal position. Here are some quotes from a YouTube clip:

Femen, you assert that machismo dominates our society and you fight men. We reply that it is only with men that we will be women in the full sense of the word.

Femen, you demand sex equality. We reply to you that complementarity between men and women is a source of wealth for our society.

From their "Who are we?" statement:

Daughters of our fathers, wives of our husbands, mothers of our sons, we do not reject men. Instead, we are persuaded that it is with them, in complementarity, that we will build our future.

And from an article published at their website (the Google translation isn't perfect but gives a clear idea of the arguments being made):

Everyone has an intuition, an immediate impression, sometimes confused, of what are the male and female identities. Sometimes these are clichés, but we must nevertheless admit that the physiology and psychology of both sexes have specific irreducible genetically transmitted and define their respective idiosyncrasies.

Beyond the visual evidence of the different conformation of the body, biology, cognitive science and ethology have shown that brains are physically different and how they work, how they process information, as well as hormone levels and differentiated control their behavior in response to the same stimuli. Cultural identity unfolding from the image represented the body, so there is a thread invariant of female identity, a feminine essence, an eternal feminine, a "feminine genius", that is, a way of being in specifically feminine world. It seems that the female nature is expressed by what we might call a "sense of closeness" what Julia Kristeva calls "intimate."

At the very least, all this demonstrates that things don't have to be the way they are now. We don't have to have a women's movement which is anti-feminine and anti-male. It's possible to envisage something else.

It's interesting to contrast the Femen women with the Antigone women. The Femen women are rancorous and destructive like so many movements of the Western political class before them. I don't know what the flaws of the Antigone women may prove to be. But these women do seem to have turned in a different direction, one that at least has the potential to be more creative and affirming.

I will watch their further development with great interest.

Challenging Amnesty

I went to the Eltham library yesterday and I was surprised to find that Amnesty International had a large stall there with banners and literature promoting the boat people cause.

It's so rare to get a chance to talk things through with open borders people that I took the opportunity to engage them in a discussion. There were two women, an older, very warm-hearted Anglo woman and a younger, well-spoken Persian woman from Iran.

I told them that I opposed the current refugee system because it took people from very different ethnicities and put them all together in Australian cities which would make it impossible for any group to keep their own tradition and culture going. There would be a melting pot in which no particular culture would survive. A better alternative would be for the wealthier nations to contribute to a fund which would be used to settle refugees in whatever country was closest both ethnically and in living standards to the country the refugees were coming from.

The Anglo woman was receptive to these arguments. She told me she had noticed that the Somalis she worked with in Melbourne seemed to be culturally dislocated here. But the Persian woman disagreed. She said she had no problem with all the cultures and peoples of the world merging together. I asked her if she really had no problem with people living only as individuals rather than belonging to a particular culture and people and she replied that it would be OK as long as everyone obeyed the law.

Now, that's an easier position to take if you belong to an ethnic group, like the Iranian Persians, which is growing quickly rather than facing decline. If you're in this position, the idea of losing your own tradition won't seem as real.

But here's another problem with the position taken by the Persian woman. At the same time that she was making these arguments to me she was distributing a pamphlet called "No place like homelands". It was about the importance of Aborigines having their own homelands in which they could retain their own traditions and culture rather than having to assimilate into the mainstream.

Here are some quotes from the pamphlet:

"Living on homelands allows Aboriginal people to ... raise their families within their traditional culture ... Having a strong connection to culture, family and land allow Aboriginal Peoples to have more control over the lives... language and culture can be passed down to future generations."

The pamphlet also quotes an Aboriginal woman who complains that without a homeland Aborigines will "lose our identity".

So Amnesty wants different things for white Australians and Aboriginal Australians. Aborigines need a homeland, an identity and a traditional culture. But, according to Amnesty, white Australians don't need the same things. Apparently we are so different we can just accept life in a melting pot of different cultures, rather than preserving one of our own.

A Viking objects

I got told off for my last post. Norway has introduced conscription for women. I complained that women aren't made, either physically or emotionally, for combat and that they won't fulfil their feminine nature in such a role.

This upset a Norwegian reader:

We have lost brave women in combat in Afghanistan. And you ramble about the size of a girl's forearms? Please google Marit Bjorgen. And Suzanne Svanevik. They are women that Norwegian girls idolise.

I could have told you to google a lot more, like our F16 bombings in Libya. But I wont. Because when people are so lazy that they don't even bother to check out basic facts before writing something, then its not about getting a story right. Its all about having something to rant about. I feel sad for your lack of ability to adapt to information.

Yours Viking.

OK, so that made me curious. Norwegian girls idolise Marit Bjorgen and Suzanne Svanevik. I've never heard of either of them, so I decided to follow Viking's advice and google them. It turns out that Marit Bjorgen is a cross country skier:

And Suzanne Svanevik is a weight lifter or body builder:

Now it's true that these photos do show that there are women who, as professional athletes, can develop muscle. But at what cost? These women look like half men/half women. And that's not surprising since the model of society they are following tells women to follow a masculine ideal, but to pragmatically retain just enough feminine attractiveness to hold male interest.

If that's what Viking wants, he can have it. For myself, I want women who are female in every way - they are the women who command my respect and admiration.

Norway introduces conscription for women

Liberals want to make sex distinctions not matter. Logically that means that both men and women have an equal duty to serve in the army. And so it's not surprising that Norway has become the first European country to begin conscripting women into its army. The new policy was supported on both the left and the right.

The thinking behind the policy was put simply enough by one of the young women who is liable to be called up. Cana Elgvin said "I think it is natural that in an equal society girls and boys have the same duties."

That attitude casually assumes that men and women are made the same way for the same purposes. I think Cana herself is living proof that this assumption is wrong. Cana is the 17-year-old Norwegian girl on the right of the photo below. Was she really made for aggressive physical combat? For the physical rigours of combat? Look at how slender her forearms are. Could she really lug around a heavy weapon with those arms? Is she equipped with hard chest muscle and muscular limbs? And does she look like she has the emotional hardness and the aggressiveness to stand up for herself in a bayonet fight? And should she, as a woman, be expected to be hard in this way? Would that be the highest realisation of her feminine being?

And what message would her conscription into the army send to Norwegian men? Men are inspired by the beautiful womanhood they perceive in women, a beauty which has a softness and vulnerability to it. The sense of duty men have to protect women from harm is in many ways a response to this perception of beautiful womanhood. But what if the message is that men and women are just the same, with the same duty to serve in the armed forces? Will Norwegian men then have the same sense of duty to protect women? Will they maintain the same masculine culture that breeds good soldiers?

A French awakening

The government in France is pushing what is called "gender theory" into schools. What is this gender theory? It's the liberal theory that sex distinctions between men and women are oppressive social constructs that should be made not to matter.

If you remember, liberals believe in individual autonomy. That means that the individual has to be self-determined. But the fact of being born a man or a woman is predetermined. Therefore, liberals see this "gender binary" of male and female negatively and would prefer for the individual to choose their own individual sex identity from across a whole spectrum of "gender".

Tiberge at Gallia Watch describes gender theory this way:

a hair-raising innovation being promoted by the diabolical minister of Education, Vincent Peillon. Imagine yourself back in grade school, being informed by your teachers that you were born neutral, and that you will be free to choose your sex when you grow up

Marguerite Peeters explains it as follows:

According to the social engineers who have been fabricating the gender theory since the 1950s, the feminine and masculine identity, the ontological structure of the woman as spouse, mother and educator, the anthropological complementarity of man and woman, fatherhood, heterosexuality (“heteronormativity”, dominant in all cultures), marriage and the traditional family would not exist per se, would not be good in themselves, but would be social constructs: sociological phenomena, social functions constructed over time, stereotypes to deconstruct by way of education and culture as they are deemed discriminatory and contrary to equality.

The French elite is serious in trying to push ahead with gender theory. One French agency wishes to replace the terms "boys" and "girls" in schools in order to "prevent sexual differentiation":

Grégor Puppinck reminds us that the report by IGAS (General Inspectorate of Social Affairs) recommends "replacing the terms 'boys' and 'girls' by the neutral terms 'friends' or 'children', telling stories in which the children have two dads or mums, etc." According to the report, the aim is to "prevent sexual differentiation and the interiorisation by the children of their sexual identity."

Now, none of this is new. If you're interested I've listed many examples of liberal "gender theory" in the chapter on sex distinctions in my e-book. But what is new and encouraging is the level of resistance to gender theory that is taking place in France right now.

The first victory was that 270,000 people signed a petition against an amendment to a bill that would have made the teaching of gender theory compulsory in all French schools. That amendment was then defeated in the French senate.

In Lyon an association has been established to bring together teachers and professors in opposition to gender theory:

We are creating a new organization to be called "Teachers for Children" said Jean-Baptiste to LyonMag.com...It will aim to federate a maximum of professors and teachers, ranging from primary to preparatory classes, and mobilize all the people to fight against gender theory...We do not agree with these absolutely crazy ideas.

In Paris there was a demonstration against the gender theory:

Xavier Breton, who seems to be the most vocal member of the French National Assembly in opposing these kinds of measures, has criticised gender theory for suggesting "that man and woman are interchangeable". The Catholic Church has also criticised the theory for undermining "sexual differences that are intrinsic to humanity". Bishop Ginoux has also rightly pointed out that gender theory cannot fit within a Christian world view:

“This issue is serious and lays the foundations of a society which, by rejecting nature and thus creation, considers man to be his own creator, one who chooses his sexuality and organizes his lifestyle based on personal choice,” wrote Bishop Bernard Ginoux of Montauban this past June.

It's interesting too how people are criticising liberalism in much the same terms that I have done here at this site. Here, for instance, is a comment from Antoine Ginesty, aged 29, an art buyer:

But we fear that this law, if passed, will erode the difference between men and women. It will impose the theory that gender does not matter – with potentially calamitous consequences for the values of our society.

And many of those protesting are young people, both male and female. There's more to report about this, but I hope I've made the point for now. Liberalism is not set in stone. It's not the way that things have to be. Many thousands of ordinary people don't want it, even after decades of intense campaigning in its favour, with the media, the schools and the universities on its side.

We need in each Western country a real opposition. That doesn't just mean voting for an establishment right-wing party every three years - that won't do much at all, not when these parties are mostly liberal in philosophy anyway.

The fight is not between Labor and Liberal, or Democrat and Republican, or Labour and Conservative. It goes much deeper than this.

There is a France that wants to live and endure and another France that is set on deconstruction along the lines of a dubious theory. The living part of France is, for now at least, asserting itself and organising and leading the way.

Sheridan on border protection failure

Greg Sheridan has written a lengthy article (registration required) about the boat people arriving in ever larger numbers in Australia. There are two interesting facts that he points to. The first is that the boats have become an organised Muslim channel of immigration to Australia:

This boatpeople phenomenon is essentially a determined Muslim immigration...A former senior officer of the Immigration Department spoke to me this week, on condition of anonymity, on the way the illegal immigration trade to Australia has become regularised, from Iran in particular. When he first got involved in this issue, Iranians and others would go to Malaysia, then on to Indonesia, and it would be months before they could find a people-smuggler. Now, he says, it is more often like a travel agent service, with everything arranged inside Iran.

Sheridan is concerned that this wave of Muslim immigration will bring to Australia ongoing security problems. So far there have been 40,000 boatpeople arrivals under Labour and this number will increase through family reunion. If you have 80,000 most will be law-abiding, but there will be some who will get involved in terrorism. The larger the overall number, the more difficult it becomes for the security organisations to control the situation.

The other interesting information that Sheridan provides are the unemployment numbers for the boat people. Most of those arriving are low-skilled and with poor English language skills. The rate of employment, even after five years, is abysmal:

The Immigration Department's figures, released last year, revealed that five years after arrival the rate of employment - not unemployment but employment - of Afghans was 9 per cent, while 94 per cent of Afghan households received Centrelink payments. From Iraq, 12 per cent were employed while 93 per cent of families received Centrelink payments. Overall, households that came under the humanitarian program had 85 per cent receiving Centrelink payments after five years. The family reunion cohort had 38%, and skilled migration 28 per cent.

Those are sobering figures. Even the skilled migration programme has 28% of families receiving Centrelink payments. But you can see how costly to the public purse the arrival of boat people really is: roughly 90% are unemployed even after five years in Australia. At the moment there are 3000 arriving every month or 36,000 per year. Of those 30,600 will require ongoing unemployment benefits. In just over three years there will be 100,000 requiring unemployment benefits, plus other family and rent assistance payments, plus the costs of education, health care and so on.

I should point out that even if the economic costs weren't so high traditionalists would still be opposed to mass, ongoing, diverse immigration. That's because we believe that the different ethnic and national traditions are important to preserve, and so we don't want them to be undermined by open borders.

Reichsburg

The Germans do picturesque very well. Below is a photo of the little town of Cochem. The town dates back as far as Roman times and the name is recorded as early as 886.

The town is located on the left bank of the Moselle River in the west of Germany:

The castle on the hill, named Reichsburg, has an interesting history.

It was built in about 1000 and survived until 1689 when it was destroyed by French troops during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. A German businessman purchased the ruins in the 1800s and used them in rebuilding the castle.

Peillon's conceit

I want to spend some time in France in my next few posts, as important things are happening right now in that country.

France has a left-wing government and the Education Minister is a man by the very French name of Vincent Benoît Camille Peillon.

Monsieur Peillon has stirred some controversy in setting out his vision for French schools. He wants to have courses on "secular morality" taught in French schools. But what is this vision of morality?

The purpose of secular morality is to allow each student to be free, because the starting point of secularism is the absolute respect for freedom of conscience. To give freedom of choice, we must be able to remove the student from all determinisms, family, ethnic, social, intellectual...

The Minister of Justice, Christine Taubira, has said much the same thing in the National Assembly:

in our values, education aims to relieve pupils of social and religious determinisms and make them free citizens.

When questioned in the National Assembly Vincent Peillon had this to say:

Regarding freedom of expression and "remove the student from all determinisms," I remind you that the purpose of the republican school has always been to produce a free individual.

The possibility of building your own autonomy, that is to say the ability to give yourself the rule, means being able to take some distance from all heritages. This does not mean that we abandon these legacies, but simply that one is able to choose for yourself.

These ideas are clearly very similar to those of liberal autonomy theory. This is the theory that politics is about securing a certain kind of freedom, namely the freedom to be an autonomous individual. Autonomy itself is understood to mean that the individual is free to be self-determining rather than being "trapped" by whatever is predetermined.

We do not get to choose membership of a family or ethny, so these are considered to be 'determinisms' and are set against the ideal of the "free citizen".

I could spend some time looking at Peillon's efforts to push a "secular morality" when he himself declares that he does "not believe at all in a fixed moral order." But I want to focus for now on his idea that students must be removed from all "determinisms".

Part of the traditionalist response to this was made in the National Assembly by Xavier Breton. He reminded the members of the Assembly that family and ethny are not to be written off negatively as impeding freedom, but are important for fulfilment and self-development:

The environment, especially a family one, is not a determinism to fight absolutely, but unavoidable and possibly a place of fulfilment. For us, being part of a group, an ethnic community, or perhaps a social, intellectual or family one, may be a factor in development...the intention of the State should not be to "snatch" members...

I want to go even further than this by looking at the specific liberal conceit that is being pushed by Vincent Peillon. If you read through Peillon's interview, you get a certain picture of reality, one in which Peillon imagines that liberals like himself are far enough removed from any inherited determinisms (e.g. beliefs, values or ways of life that you get from parents or from your ethnic culture) that they are able to assume the status of free-thinking, critical, reflective, rational individuals able to pursue a universal morality.

The traditionalist answer to this conceit is important. It gets to the crux of the significant differences in outlook of traditionalists and moderns.

A traditionalist accepts that there are important ways in which we are "determined". But we do not see this as inhibiting or limiting our reason, or as leading to arbitrarily held beliefs or values, but rather as providing a necessary platform from which we are able to seek to understand the truth of an order of being.

Let's go back a bit to look at what it means to be determined as a traditionalist or indeterminate as a liberal. The traditionalist has specific grounds for identity, for relatedness, for solidarity and from all this for telos (ends or aims). But if you have made yourself indeterminate or abstracted as a liberal, then you must make up for yourself what you are (self-create or self-determine). This might be presented as a freedom to self-define, but it means that you could be one thing or just as easily another. You become something merely as a matter of choice, and this not only seems arbitrary, it also has a sense of lacking meaning or significance. How then is an individual supposed to be oriented to a truth of his own being?  How can you actively seek the truth when you begin from a point of emptiness and then make things up as an act of your own individual will?

A strength of the traditionalist position is that humans clearly do have a created being, for instance in the fact of being a man or a woman. It is through our created being that we come to experience who we are physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. And from this come the forms of relatedness through which we express our social natures. From the cultural traditions we belong to we experience a real endeavour over time to make the different layers of our experience (the natural, the social etc.) work together within a larger social setting.

It is through our engagement with this particularity that we are more likely to seek and to be brought to universal truths about man, rather than by abstracting ourselves from it and dealing with individuals as indeterminate and interchangeable.

Traditionalists, therefore, would contest the notion that in rejecting determinisms people are no longer "trapped" in beliefs and values but can rise to a universal, secular morality as free, rational and reflective citizens. Instead, it is more likely that, in becoming indeterminate, individuals will lose an orientation to pursue the truth of their being and they will deny themselves the particular context through which the universal is made known to us.

And apart from all this, the liberal position is not a neutral one and so itself "catches" people in certain beliefs and values and ways of life. For instance, the liberal position suggests that we have not been created in specific ways for specific purposes, which will then lead over time to a secular outlook. Similarly, by advocating a distance from "determinisms" like family and ethny, the liberal position will encourage over time an atomised individualism. The emphasis on autonomy will lead to a preference for uniquely chosen careers over inherited and gendered family roles and so on.

Liberals arrive at certain positions, then, not because they have freely, rationally and critically decided on the merits of these positions, but because liberalism itself has a set character that inclines them this way.

Homosexuals are better parents?

Some research conducted at the University of Melbourne is being widely reported in the media. It is being used to claim that gays are better parents.

In reality the research doesn't prove much one way or the other. Why? Because it is based on a self-selected sample and the data was self-reported (the gay parents themselves filled in a questionnaire about their family life).

The researcher who conducted the survey is himself in a gay relationship and raising children.

For what it's worth, I know of one lesbian couple who are raising children. They are of a very high income and educational level. Their two children were more emotionally turbulent as young children than the average, but settled a lot as they got older. The boy is very likeable but at this stage probably won't be as masculine as average (we'll see). From that tiny sample, it seems to me that this type of family will give its children a better start than some heterosexual families where one or both of the parents has poor parenting skills. But two capable heterosexual parents will give a child the best start.

One final point. The recklessness with which some people in the media are reporting the "gays are better parents" line is very interesting. It's like watching people lob around an atomic bomb. Imagine if the idea caught on that lesbians were better parents than heterosexual couples. The implication of that would be that men don't add anything to family life as men. And the implication of that would be that men should turn their focus to things other than the family, things where their masculinity actually mattered and made a difference.

It is utterly foolish for a society to promote ideas that are likely to demoralise the male paternal instinct.

The state drifts ever closer in Scotland

This is a disturbing development:

Under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill, every child from birth will be given a “named person”, charged with keeping an eye on that child’s interests until it reaches adulthood.

Every child will be assigned a named individual by the state to oversee the interests of that child. This role, of overseeing the interests of a child, once fell naturally to the parents of that child.

What is this named individual going to do? According to the Bill, the named person is responsible for:

doing such of the following where the named person considers it to be appropriate in order to promote, support or safeguard the wellbeing of the child or young person—

(i) advising, informing or supporting the child or young person, or a parent of the child or young person,

(ii) helping the child or young person, or a parent of the child or young person, to access a service or support, or

(iii) discussing, or raising, a matter about the child or young person with a service provider or relevant authority

The politicians who have queried the measure seem most interested in how a personal relationship will be developed between the named person and the children they are responsible for:

SNP MSP John Wilson asked how children would be made aware that they had a named person, and how that named person would be identified to the child.

"How do we make sure that this named person is actually identified to the young person, and the young person has the confidence and the ability to actually directly speak to that named individual?" he said.

Conservative MSP Jackson Carlaw suggested the measure is "a very huge enterprise".

"How many named persons do you anticipate there will be? What will the turnover be in named persons? And how in practice does that really establish a bond of confidence on which people feel they can rely?" he asked.

The main intent seems to be to have a personal contact between a child in need and one named individual responsible for the child's welfare. For children from highly dysfunctional families who are in some kind of danger, that might be a good idea.

But it's an unnecessary and dangerous extension of the role of the state to have a named individual for every child. Can we really trust the modern administrative state to direct its intervention only to those children in real danger, once an administrative structure and authority has been established over all children? Especially when the role of the named individual is defined so broadly, as being to promote the wellbeing of the child they have been appointed to look after.

It's dangerous too to have such a measure at a time when the family is being redefined in a way that diminishes the importance of the "filial" connection between child and parent. This is not the time to further undermine the significance of biological paternity in establishing in normal circumstances both authority and responsibility in relation to a child.

Some marriage research

I'm not someone who thinks that the only important role that men play in the family is a provider one. Still, it is a significant role as it's part of the way that a man tries to create a protected space for his wife to have children and create a warm home life for the family.

So upending normal arrangements and having the woman instead be the breadwinner is likely to create tensions within at least some marriages. Here are some research findings released back in 2010:

a 25-year study that tracked 2,500 married couples found that female breadwinners were 40 percent more likely to divorce their lower-earning husbands than women who raked in less than their partners. Reporting his findings in the October issue of Journal of Family Issues, sociologist Jay Teachman at Western Washington University noted that the distinction only becomes apparent when women earn 60 percent or more of the family's income. After that marker, couples became 38 percent more likely to divorce over the 25-year period. Researchers were "surprised about the strength of the effect," Teachman said...

Why might the divorce rate have been significantly higher when wives earn 60% or more of the family income? There are no doubt various reasons, but some suggestions were made in research released in 2007. This research found that when women became the primary breadwinner husbands did less "emotion work" in the marriage, and that more traditional arrangements led to more "expressive" forms of marriage in general:

women who are in marriages that are characterized by more traditional gender beliefs and practices are happier with the emotion work they receive and do receive more such emotion work from their husbands.

...adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also - surprisingly enough - to expressive patterns of marriage ...

Sydney Traditionalist Forum update

The Sydney Traditionalist Forum is continuing its good work. In April it held a documentary screening with Senator Cory Bernardi as the guest of honour. There is a report on the evening's events at the Sydney Trads website. I particularly liked this opening comment from the Convenor:

The Convenor opened proceedings by noting the apparent crisis of conservative politics in the Anglosphere. “Conservative seem to be always on the defensive” he said, and that “the best we can apparently expect from our leaders is a compromise with the Left.” He noted how this does not lead to a viable alternative to the mainstream’s liberal politics. “What this amounts to is a form of incremental triumph, over time, for the Left. All we have to do is look at other supposedly conservative parties of the mainstream to see where this will lead. The prominence of the John McCains, David Camerons and Malcolm Turnbulls within major non-left parties suggests there is a crisis of faith among the conservative mainstream.”

The Convenor then said that if conservatives want to address this problem, we need to openly and energetically analyse what it is to be a conservative in the first place. “If conservatism is simply the ‘praxis of preservation’, or merely preserving the status quo, then such a definition would mean that a conservative living in Soviet Russia in the 50’s would have to be a communist. Obviously this is a nonsense. There is more to conservatism than just preserving what we have, especially if there is a great deal around us that we may not wish to see preserved at all.

From Senator Bernardi:

He discussed the importance of building a strong community-based grassroots movement while also avoiding the stifling effects of personality based politics. Senator Bernardi emphasized that genuine conservative activism is principled activism, and indicated that for too long conservatives have been too accommodating to the demands of the unscrupulous left. Due to the inroads that leftist politics has made in popular culture over the last several decades, Senator Bernardi mused that “in a way, we are the radicals of today”. Although a great deal of cultural capital has been lost, “we should always have faith in the truth of our position”

There's also a report at the Sydney Trads site of a more recent meeting of a Conservative Cave group.

"The West has lost all capacity for self-love"

I went to mass today at Our Lady of Victories in Camberwell. The priest officiating this morning was very impressive. He spoke clearly and concretely and he managed to uphold both the universal values of the Church but also the particular traditions which carry forward the good over time.

He began the homily by talking about how man was made for community. He then asked why so many Catholics no longer take part in the community of the Eucharist. He thought that part of the reason was that Western societies have become more individualistic and that traditional communal identities have waned in modern multicultures.

Included in the mass were two prayers, which I wish I could remember verbatim, but they were about preserving cultural and civilisational traditions and how we are links in a chain connecting generations past, present and future.

Whilst on the topic of the Catholic Church, I was interested to read a lecture given by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict, to the Italian Senate in 2004. It is about European identity and the crisis of European civilisation. The lecture has faults, I think, but it does at least take seriously the gravity of the situation facing Europe:

At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen—at least by some people—as a liability rather than as a source of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare today's situation with the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice its vital energy had been depleted.

Another excerpt:

This case illustrates a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self-acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive.

Multiculturalism, which is so passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one's own things.

So what do the German green youth want?

The German Greens get a bit over 10% of the vote. They are apparently one of the more radically leftist parties around. Last month, their youth wing passed a resolution called "Queer your world". When I begin quoting it, you'll understand how radical it is. But at the same time it can also be seen as fitting in with trends in modern society.

Here is the part where sex distinctions are discussed:

8.9 Overcoming the sexual binary

The categories "man" and "woman" are social constructs, but the idea of two sexes does not accord with reality. We understand a human not as a person who is subject to a lifelong gender identity as a man or a woman. Our goal is to create a society in which everyone can freely decide for themselves which gender identity they would like to adopt. As Green Youth we argue for the diversity of gender identities to be finally recognised. A first step to envisage this is a third option when specifying sex to government agencies and in official documents. There should also be the opportunity to refuse to specify. Our perspective is that specifying gender should completely disappear as a category.

Such ideas are no doubt attractive to those homosexuals who do not have a clear identity as men or women. But they also fit in with the liberal idea that our lives should be individually self-determined and that predetermined qualities, such as our sex or our race, are artificial social constructs that should be made not to matter.

The Green Youth resolution is more radical than the typical liberal attitude: when liberals want to make our sex not matter they do so by advocating unisex parenting and such like rather than wanting the categories of man and woman to be abolished. In some ways, though, the Green Youth position is the ultimate expression of the liberal position: it demands a diversity of freely chosen sex identities to replace the binary of man and woman.

And is the Green Youth position all that much more radical than where liberalism has taken us when it comes to our communal identities? For Westerners, at least, these identities have been declared to be social constructs and abolished in the name of diversity. The Green Youth want to complete the job already begun in a liberal society and abolish our identities as men and women in the same way.

The Green Youth also have ideas on how marriage could be "queered":

3.3 As Green Youth we reject the privileging of marriage between "man" and "wife" and are committed to a family contract that allows all people to express their love equally and to take responsibility for one another. Since intimate relationships exist outside heterosexual and monogamous partnerships, it must be finally legally recognised when non-heterosexual couples or people living in polyamorous relationships or female friends take over the care of children together. Queer people shouldn't be discriminated against any longer in tax law nor in adoption law. In respect to this, we also demand that more than two people should legally qualify to be regarded as parents of a child. Family is when people care for each other and take on responsibility. We therefore demand that any form of family is supported and valued by society and before the law to the same degree. However the protection of marriage should no longer be anchored in the Basic Law. We want to abolish marriage as a state institution. Families deserve state protection, not marriage.

What's to be said of all this? First, note how open-ended the definition of family has become. It is just any arrangement of people who care for each other. And note the radical consequences of accepting such an open-ended definition. You can have any number of people being recognised as the parents of a child; you can have groups of friends becoming parents to a child; you can have polyamorists doing the same. The link to biological paternity and maternity is entirely disregarded, as is the role of motherhood and fatherhood. Literally any form of family will do.

Again, this is a more radical expression of ideas that are already fairly mainstream within a liberal culture. A lot of people now understand marriage to be a "love ceremony" and that tends to suggest the idea that a family can be anything. An Australian newspaper columnist, Andrea Burns, expressed the modern view well when she wrote:

the days of the white bread, nuclear family are over. There are many ways to commune, love and create a home ... It’s inconsequential who makes up that circle of love...

There is a weakening or a loosening of ties in all this. Just consider the definition of family offered by Sam Page as executive director of Family Relationship Services Australia:

The definition I like now is whoever you share your toothpaste with, that’s your family.

I'm not sure that toothpaste sharing quite measures up to fulfilling your masculine nature in the role of a husband and father, or the biological relationship of paternity connecting father and child, or the complementary union of a man and a woman within marriage and family.

How does a liberal philosophy measure up?

How do liberals choose to present their political philosophy? One recent attempt to do so was made by Richard Reeves and Philip Collins. They are both influential figures: until recently Reeves was a director of policy for the British Liberal Democrats and Collins was the chief speech writer for Tony Blair.

In 2009 the two men wrote a piece for Demos titled The Liberal Republic. It is a restatement of basic liberal philosophy. Here is how it begins:

The ideal animating this essay is that of a liberal republic, in which individuals have the power to determine and create their own version of a good life. The 'good society' is one composed of independent, capable people charting their own course, rather than a perfect shape to be carved by the elite, out of the crooked timber of humanity.

Liberals demand that people be permitted the space to construct their own life; republicans insist that power be held in people's hands. A republican liberal prospectus recognises that a self-authored life requires both independence and individual capability. But it is founded on the conviction that people are in charge of their own wellbeing. By contrast, conservatives on left and right prefer power to be exercised by institutions, rather than people. They fear that, in the end, people do not know what is good for them.

That's very orthodox. The "animating ideal" is that of autonomy: individuals, it is claimed, should have the power to live self-determining and self-authored lives. What matters is the self-determination, not what individuals happen to choose. Part of the justification for this is that only individuals know what is best for them.

But does liberalism really end up, in practice, looking like this?

The answer is largely no. For instance, Reeves and Collins seem to imagine that liberalism will make people more capable and independent. So far, though, it has done the opposite: it has made a larger number of people dependent on state welfare and it has dissolved the moral beliefs and standards which once encouraged people to make the kind of life choices which would leave them "capable and independent".

And just stating it this way makes clear what the problem is. If you tell people that there are no right choices, but only the goal of making your own choices no matter what they are, then how can a society hold to the standards which once encouraged the more sustainable kind of life choices? How, for instance, do you maintain a culture of family life through which women can be supported to raise a family without state welfare? How do you support a culture of masculinity which encourages the stronger and more resilient qualities in men?

Second, liberals do end up telling people how to live their lives. It's interesting, for instance, that Reeves was a policy director for Nick Clegg until 2012. Nick Clegg is the political leader who has called the traditional family "absurd"; who wants men and women to be "liberated" from their traditional identities; and who wants "international governance" to replace that of the national state. Those are three radically intrusive interventions into people's lives and hardly neutral.

So why does this contradiction come about? The problem is that it is not neutral to choose autonomy as the "animating ideal" of society. That in itself is a value assertion - and, as it happens, it is a very radical value assertion. Therefore, liberals will be biased in how they want people to live and they will have to intervene radically in society to make their value the dominant one.

For instance, take Clegg's hostility to the traditional family. Clegg doesn't want people to be interdependent, he wants them to be independent. That means women must be independent of men. So instead of relying on a husband for financial support, a woman must instead fund herself through a career or be supported by state spending. Furthermore, if your ideal is a self-authored life, then motherhood, which is a traditional and "biologically predetermined" role won't seem as good as a uniquely chosen career path. And so the focus becomes the question of how to liberate women from a motherhood role, which then requires radical interventions into family life, into our identities as men and women, into levels of state subsidies for childcare and parental leave and so on.

Third, the liberal claim is that they are allowing people a greater opportunity to create their own version of the good life. If that were true, then the ordinary person would feel immense gratitude to the liberal politicians of the past 50 years. Instead, the ordinary person feels disempowered and cynical toward the political process.

One reason for this is that there is a built-in flaw in the liberal claim. If your ideal is that of a society in which millions of individuals are each pursuing their own version of the good life, then you have already greatly restricted the kind of life that individuals can lead. Since humans are created for a life together, within families and communities, the deepest ways that we express and fulfil ourselves require a social setting. But if your field of vision is limited to the self-determining individual pursuing his own independent course, then how do you get around to upholding the social settings which make the most important expressions of self possible?

What tends to happen is that liberals end up focusing on those aspects of life which can be chosen at a purely individual level. That might include travel, consumer choice and entertainment (i.e. lifestyle choices). Most of all, though, liberalism ends up being boiled down to "self-expression through a creative, influential and high status career." You need to be an academic, or a medical specialist, or a concert violinist, or an author, or a speechwriter to a prime minister or something like it to really live up to the liberal ideal.

That's one reason why the liberal ideal leaves many people with more ordinary jobs cold. It's difficult to fit such work into the liberal narrative, and so many people continue to attach importance to more traditional values, such as those of family, identity and community. Although liberalism has certainly had an influence over popular culture, it has mostly been an elite view that has been pushed in a top-down way onto society.

That's another reason why it jars to hear Reeves and Collins claim that liberalism is the populist position in contrast to a more conservative, elitist view. It is not conservatives who dominate the institutions; if anything, there is a flaw in the conservative understanding of politics which makes conservatives not take institutions seriously enough. It is liberals who have dominated the institutions and forced "elite" views onto the general populace.