The three prides

It's clearly the case that many Westerners lack pride. But when I write that I'm referring to positive rather than negative forms of pride. So how do we distinguish between them?

I can think of three kinds of pride, two of them of the positive variety, one of them negative.

Self-full or egoistic pride

This is pride in its negative aspect - the one that many religious traditions, including Christianity, condemn.

It is not necessarily bad in its origins. To live well we do need to exercise a controlling or directing will, one that at its best is guided by reason and prudence. This controlling will then regulates our appetites, thoughts, actions and impulses for our larger well-being.

When, instead of being controlled by our appetites or impulses, we do instead control them, we can feel a sense of self-mastery, of enhanced being and of masculine strength.

And the risk is that these benefits can lead us to think that the controlling will is itself the end good in life. And that can lead to a self-worship, an egotism, a will-full pride in self which then sets the limits of what we are receptive to very narrowly at the borders of self.

Little wonder that, as a counterbalance, many religious traditions then emphasise humility as a virtue. But we should understand humility as a counterbalance and not as a quality that should lead to self-erasure or to a lack of assertion of controlling will in its positive aspect.

Loving pride

This is the inspired pride that we feel on perceiving the good in that which we are closely related to, for instance, the beauty of our spouse, the cuteness of our child, the achievements or the finer qualities of our compatriots or ancestors or race. To feel loving pride is a sign of health, of wholesomeness of spirit.

The lack of such pride in many Westerners is an aspect of an alienated existence, something we should seek to overcome.

Masculine pride

I take masculine pride to be a mostly good thing - that is, unless it spills over into egotistic pride. What, after all, does masculine pride often involve? It involves a willingness to prove ourselves in life's challenges; to pit ourselves against adversity; to be emotionally strong; to keep to standards of honour; and to be courageous and loyal. There are good reasons for this kind of masculine pride to be fostered amongst boys, not the least of which is that it cultivates those qualities which men need to effectively fulfil an adult male role in society.

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A car sticker for jaded women?

I was in the parking lot of my local shopping centre and I noticed the following sticker on the back window of one of the cars:

In case it's not clearly visible, the sticker reads: "I believe in unicorns, good men and other mythical creatures".

It's meant to be humorous, but even so if I were a woman I wouldn't put one on my car. People are likely to assume that you've had unhappy experiences with men and have become a bit cynical. It's not exactly good self-advertising.

And, fairly or not, it might even be thought that you're the kind of woman who is drawn to the wrong kind of men like a moth to the flame, who gets burnt each time, but who isn't self-reflective enough to figure out what's going wrong.

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From the horse's mouth

Anne Summers is a very influential Australian feminist. She has been editor of Ms magazine, head of the Office of the Status of Women in Australia, and chairwoman of Greenpeace International.

She recently gave her two cents' worth in the Melinda Tankard Reist controversy. Melinda Tankard Reist is an Australian feminist who is anti-abortion, anti-porn and against the sexualisation of girls.

But can a feminist be anti-abortion? Anne Summers, a grand old dame of Australian feminism, thinks not. And her reason for thinking so is revealing:

Can you be "pro-life" and a feminist. I say an emphatic, No.

Let me elaborate. Feminism might be blandly defined as the support for women's political, economic and social equality, and a feminist as someone who advocates such equality, but these general principles need practical elaboration and application. What does economic equality actually mean? How can women in practice achieve social equality? As far as I am concerned, feminism boils down to one fundamental principle and that is women's ability to be independent.

There are two fundamental preconditions to such independence: ability to support oneself financially and the right to control one's fertility. To achieve the first, women need the education and training to be able to undertake work that pays well. To guarantee the second, women need safe and effective contraception and the back-up of safe and affordable abortion.

That confirms what I've written about feminism for many years now. Feminism is liberalism applied to the lives of women. And the key principle of liberalism is autonomy - the aim of a self-determining, independent life.

Equality is a secondary principle. If you think that you, or the group you belong to, are disadvantaged in achieving an independent, autonomous life, then you will call for equality (or for an end to discrimination, or for social justice etc). In other words, when feminists demand equality what they are really asking for is a greater degree of autonomy/independence/self-determination, which they believe has been denied them by privileged men.

So how do influential feminists like Anne Summers believe they can make women more independent? She is very clear about this. The first way is to make women independent of men by having them successfully pursue well-paying careers (and, in practice, by making women financially independent of men via transfer payments such as welfare payments, alimony and child support payments, paid maternity leave payments etc).

Second, a pregnancy is likely to impede women's independence in a number of ways. It might make it more difficult to complete her education, or to progress in her career, or to use her sexuality for purposes of power. And it might make her focus on family rather than career or to become financially or emotionally dependent on a man as a father to her child. (Anne Summers is childless herself.)

So feminists take very seriously having the choice to abort. It goes back to their first principle of achieving autonomy/independence.

What really needs to happen is for that liberal first principle - that autonomy is always the highest, overriding good - to be challenged openly. That's what would open up moral and political debate in the West.

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Wild attack in Perth

More Australia Day news, this time from Perth. A gang of 20 young men of African descent went on the rampage in Perth, targeting a young white man to chase down, to rob and to viciously beat:

A PERTH teenager has spoken of his terror after he was violently bashed by a gang of thugs who repeatedly kicked him and stomped on his head after being racially taunted.

Perth detectives are hunting up to 20 youths, believed to be of African descent, who were involved in the attack in the city at 11.30pm last night.

James Claxon

The police described the attack this way:

Detective Sergeant Steve Coelho said the gang appeared to have been walking from the McIver train station on a "rampage" last night.

"They have singled out white Australians and for no reason whatsoever, completely unprovoked, they've attacked one of the males. That led to a vicious assault. He's had severe facial injuries and his head literally stomped on,'" Det-Sgt Steve Coelho said.

(A brief TV report gave further details.)

The Australian media has picked up on the fact that the white teen was stomped so hard in the face that the attacker's shoe print was clearly left behind. But that's been happening in the U.S. for some time - Lawrence Auster at VFR has reported on attacks in which the victim is repeatedly stomped on the head, e.g. here, here and here - it seems to be a trademark of these kind of attacks.

I'll make just one political point about this. The liberal assumption is that whites are a false category oppressor group, who use violence against the non-whites they have "othered". That's why hate crime legislation is assumed to protect non-whites from whites. It's also why so many Daily Mail readers, when commenting on the Prime Minister fleeing from Aboriginal protesters, assumed that Aborigines in Australia are victims of mistreatment by whites.

But the reality on the ground is in most cases very different. The Perth bashing is an example of this. Here we have a relatively small non-white immigrant group who feel so bold in a new country that they form a gang and mercilessly bash the white native born inhabitants. It's difficult to imagine this the other way round. If a group of a few thousand white Australians decided to migrate to Nigeria, is it likely that their teenage sons would form gangs and stomp the faces of the local Nigerians?

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Prime Minister flees Aborigines

Extraordinary photos were published yesterday on Australia Day of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, fleeing Aboriginal protesters:

It's yet another example of the way that Australia Day has become dominated by race politics. Here's another example. A rising young tennis star, Bernard Tomic, has a luxury $150,000 car that, as a probationary driver, he is only permitted to drive to and from training. On Australia Day he apparently breached these conditions and was pulled over several times by police. He is now claiming that he is a victim of racism (he is of Croatian descent):

Bernard Tomic allegedly accused Gold Coast police of harassing him because "you think I'm not Australian" as he was pulled over three times yesterday for breaching driving restrictions in his high-powered BMW.

Tomic, a rising star of Australian tennis, was fined $600 and copped enough points to lose his licence.

The claims began a bizarre spinout from the teenage P-plater, who can only drive his bright orange $150,000 V8 BMW M3 to and from training.

He appeared to defy police and did laps of the trendy Broadbeach restaurant strip with a mate before locking himself in his home.

Police sources said Tomic alleged officers pulled him over because it was Australia Day, referring to his European heritage.

Again, I find that extraordinary. Tomic is one of the most privileged young people in Australia. He has money, fame and public adulation. And yet when something goes wrong he immediately claims that he is a victim of racism - for being Croatian of all things.

And to return to the Aboriginal incident again, it was disappointing to read the comments on the story from Daily Mail readers. Many of the most upvoted comments spoke about Aborigines being treated as second-class citizens in Australia. It makes me wonder what people overseas have been taught to believe about the treatment of Aborigines in this country. Are they aware of the vast tracts of land owned by Aboriginal tribes? Of the positive discrimination in education, such as free tutoring and mentoring, university admissions programmes and liaison officers? Of the encouragement to Aborigines to identify positively with their own tradition, an encouragement not offered to the mainstream?

At an official level Australia Day just isn't working as a day of national celebration. Lawrence Auster made a brief comment about my Australia Day posts that "Australia sounds far more PC than America" and if you were to jet in during the lead up to Australia Day and read the papers and watch the TV you'd most likely agree. But at an unofficial level it's not so bad; there seem to be young people, in particular, who take the chance to get together and celebrate the day more positively.

What can you do if you identify with the mainstream tradition in Australia? A right-liberal like Andrew Bolt would argue that everyone should just forget about race, ethnicity and nationality and interact on a purely individual basis. But that means giving up on our larger identities; it's a solution based on an impoverished identity.

Left-liberals believe that the mainstream is a dominant group which practises racism to uphold its privileges. So the left-wing solution is for the mainstream to give up its racism and its privileges. But as we've seen many of those who push these ideas are much more privileged than the average person in the mainstream. Tomic the tennis star is more privileged than I am; so is Professor Fozdar who complained about Australians flying flags on Australia Day - she has a plum job as an academic and has received $2 million worth of grants so far in her career; so too is leading neurosurgeon Dr Tao who complained about racism in his Australia Day speech.

In other words, it doesn't seem to matter that other groups are becoming more privileged than the average Anglo - the claims of the newly privileged classes to be racially oppressed just keep growing.

So what should we do? I don't think we should give up our identity out of frustration with the abuse of racial politics. That's too high a price to pay and won't stop the attacks anyway. Nor should we think that if only we treated other groups more nicely that the attacks would go away - that's clearly not going to happen as evidenced by the Aboriginal protest yesterday.

We just have to act in a resilient, principled way, which means continuing to identify positively with our own tradition and rebutting any unfair attacks on it. We might also have to learn to close the newspapers and turn off the TV at times, and celebrate our identity in our own way, unofficially, as many young Australians seem to do.

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Criticism of White Ribbon Day in the mass media

Here's some good news. A week ago I again criticised White Ribbon Day, a day when men are asked to wear ribbons to show their opposition to domestic violence. Unfortunately, the White Ribbon campaign is dominated by a feminist ideology which only recognises men as perpetrators of violence; which holds traditional social norms to be at fault for violence; and which exaggerates the extent of violence.

Bob McCoskrie, the national director of Family First NZ, wrote in to support my stance and to point out that he made similar criticisms of White Ribbon Day in a column in the New Zealand Herald last year. His column is very well written: it is clearly explained, balanced and has a lot of supporting information. It's a model of how we could get a point across in the mass media.

The comments from readers were very supportive, but as you might guess Bob McCoskrie was attacked by the political class for his stance:

Women's groups and political leaders have rounded on Family First director Bob McCoskrie for refusing to wear a white ribbon today to oppose violence against women.

I went and looked up the Family First NZ site. It's very good. Some of its policies that are worth considering include:

• optional income splitting for couples for tax purposes
• considering fault when allocating levels of child support to remove economic incentives to divorce
• child support to take into account the income levels of both parents
• presumptive shared parenting
• measures to reduce divorce rates, including affordable premarital counselling 

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Patriotic flaggers worry academics

Here's a classic example of what Australia Day has become in the hands of the liberal political class. The lead article on the Melbourne Age website last night was about residents of Perth who fly the Australian flag on their cars in the lead up to Australia Day:

They are a regular sight across Perth as January 26 approaches - drivers flying Australia Day flags from their cars.

But the popularity of the annual trend might be about to fall, after research from the University of WA found drivers with Australia Day flags are likely to be more racist than those with un-adorned cars.

As I wrote on Monday:

You would think that Australia Day would be time for a little patriotic pride. Unfortunately, that's not how it's treated in the media. The media is obsessed in the week leading up to Australia Day with endless handwringing about whether Australians are racist or not. They just can't leave the issue alone...

So what constitutes "racism" according to the academics? It seems that the flag flyers are a little less likely than others to embrace an open-bordered multiculturalist view:

Professor Fozdar said 43 per cent of those with car flags said they believed the White Australia Policy had saved Australia from many problems experienced by other countries, while only 25 per cent without flags agreed.

And 56 per cent of people with car flags feared the Australian culture and its most important values were in danger, compared with 34 per cent of those without flags.

Professor Fozdar said 35 per cent of those with flags felt people had to be born in Australia to be truly Australian, while 23 per cent believed that true Australians had to be Christian, compared with 22 per cent and 18 per cent respectively for the non-flag group.

Interestingly the flag flyers came from a wide variety of backgrounds:

Professor Fozdar said there was no clear link between education, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, voting pattern or income and flag flying, although her survey showed a slightly higher likelihood of younger rather than older people adopting the practice.

The whole thing makes me think that in five years' time if you wave a flag on Australia Day you're likely to have a team of anthropologists from the local university come knocking on your door.

Edit: Neil Mitchell has a column in today's Herald Sun making much the same point. He complains that:

Australia Day has developed into "kick an Australian Day".

And that:

the negative navel-gazing seems to have overtaken the party to the point that the event is turning sour.

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