The Newsweek story - some background

I was pleased to hear of the recent demise of Newsweek as a print magazine.

Newsweek was very much liberal in its politics, as is illustrated by a story it ran in 2006 on the topic of race/ethnicity.

The story was a left-liberal criticism of the right-liberal attitude to race.

The right-liberal attitude to race is easy enough to spell out. Liberals want individuals to be self-determining. Therefore, they believe that predetermined qualities like race shouldn't matter.

Right-liberals hold to this consistently. They believe in a colour blind society in which the only thing that matters is who we are as individuals. In Australia this right-liberal position is a minority view, though it has an influential supporter in columnist Andrew Bolt. Bolt has written of how he once attempted to identify with his family's Dutch heritage but that,

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

Traditionalists like myself reject this attitude because it means that we only identify with ourselves - a tremendously individualistic if not narcissistic position to take and one that denies a love of a larger tradition that we belong to.

But left-liberals are also dissatisfied with the right-liberal view. Left-liberals believe that if we are colour blind that race distinctions, in particular racial inequalities, will remain in existence. Therefore, to make race not matter (i.e. equal outcomes) it is necessary to "see" race rather than be blind to it, in order to deliberately intervene to bring down the better performing race (the "privileged" race) in favour of the underperforming one (the "oppressed" race).

Why do left-liberals believe that racial inequalities will continue if a society is colour blind? That's a really interesting question, because if we really are all equal in the sense of being on average the same, then a colour blind society should produce equal outcomes over time.

There are several possible answers to the question. The official one is that left-liberals believe that "whiteness" itself is an artificial social construct invented to justify the systematic oppression of the non-white other. Therefore, anyone who supports a white identity is assumed to be a defender of "white supremacy" (since left-liberals believe that whiteness has the purpose of creating a privilege over others). It means too that the achievement of equality depends on the deconstruction of a white society.

So for left-liberals being colour blind in a white society won't create equal outcomes, even if we are all born the same. The white society itself has to go.

The left-liberal view is therefore more complicated than the right-liberal one. The aim remains that of making race not matter, but to achieve this one has to "see" race and treat races differently. And because whiteness is thought to be the origin of racism, discrimination and inequality, then a white identity is morally tainted, whereas other identities are more positively associated with the struggle for justice, or else are simply regarded as expressions of culture.

The right-liberal view is strongest in the U.S., but in most of the West the left-liberal view has triumphed. And perhaps one reason for its victory is that a colour blind society hasn't led to race not mattering. On a range of indicators some races do better than others. This strengthens the hand of those who believe in direct intervention to force equal outcomes.

That's a lot of theoretical background, but I think it explains the Newsweek story, which I'll cover in my next post.

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Don't be that guy 2

Here's a link to a young man who says that he needs feminism. He could be a contender for the face of unmanliness. My eyes rolled especially at his declaration that "I married my best friend, who happens to be a woman". In other words, he's claiming that it's normal to marry your best friend, regardless of what sex they are.

He is a shadow of his real self and desperately in need, not of feminism, but of a father.

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An old man is tired of his country

Hidenori Sakanaka is an old man and a revolutionary. He wants the Japan that is to be no more. His solution to Japan's low fertility rate is to invite 10 million immigrants from around the world to become Japanese and to transform Japan into a utopian multiethnic community. He believes that Japan can do what others have failed to do and make this transition without friction.

The most relevant quote is this:

"A new Japanese civilization will realize a multi-ethnic community, which no nation has ever achieved, and, in due course, it will stand out as one of the main pillars of world civilization."

He is right that no nation has ever achieved it. Even the U.S., which is proud to call itself a "nation of immigrants," has never been free from racial and cultural frictions. He is right, too, to maintain that a Japan that does achieve it will be "new" — so new, in fact, that a reader might reasonably wonder: Will it still be Japan?

 

Here is where talk of revolution comes in. "In Japan in the age of population decline," Sakanaka writes, "there is a need for a social revolution equal to that of the Meiji Restoration" — the modernizing and Westernizing revolution that began in 1868. "The very fundamentals of our way of life, the ethnic composition of our country and our socio-economic system will have to be reconsidered and a new country constructed."

Sakanaka writes of his plan,

"This is a grandiose project that will transform the Japanese archipelago into a miniature of the world community," he declares, "a utopia to which people from all around the world dream of migrating."

This is sadly misguided. I have lived in Japan. It is its own unique society with its own distinct pulse. Who would want it to be razed to become yet another "miniature of the world community"?

Fortunately, Sakanaka's plan hasn't been embraced by politicians or intellectuals:

"I can't exactly say that the plan I've been advocating over the past three years has generated much enthusiasm." In fact, "Intellectuals and politicians basically ignore me."

I hope that continues to be the case. The worry is that Japan won't sort out the decline in its family culture. As I understand it, marriage is being delayed increasingly as is childbirth. Following almost inevitably from this, numbers of young men aren't seeing much of a reason to commit to adult male responsibilities.

There are all sorts of ways for traditions to be defeated. Long term family decline is one of them and it could prove to be Japan's fatal weakness.

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When radical is the new normal

Sorry for the lack or recent posting, work commitments are to blame. I'll start posting on the weekend again, but in the meantime I thought the following quote from Lawrence Auster worth pondering:

“In America,” Jim Kalb recently remarked, “everything is normal”—meaning that no matter how radical, extreme, and perverted things become in our society, they are and must be seen as ordinary, traditional, and unthreatening. The result is the peculiar phenomenon that I have described as the “radical mainstream.” On one hand, liberals and their mainstream-conservative enablers boast of America’s transformational progress since the mid-twentieth century; on the other hand, they claim that we haven’t changed at all. The fact that all kinds of moral and constitutional norms have been shattered, and that nihilism, gross sexual libertinism, and statism are the new norm, is never allowed into public consciousness. The liberals suppress the ugly truth of what America has become, in order to maintain the legitimacy of liberal society; and the conservatives join in the suppression, because their goal is to keep their place at the liberal table; they know that anyone who speaks the truth about the radical transformation of America will no longer be welcome in respectable circles.

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The gravest danger facing young women is?

English columnist Esther Rantzen watched a TV documentary which followed the work of the emergency services and was shocked by the behaviour of the young women on display:

The central focus of this shocking, despairing documentary shot with the emergency services in Blackpool is that the gravest danger facing young girls, right here in Britain, right now in 2012, is not from a stranger or a violent partner, but from themselves.

She continues:

More young women than ever are deliberately crippling themselves with binge drinking, putting themselves in real peril by fighting and carrying knives, and using their fists and foul language as offensive weapons.

And I have to ask, echoing that police officer and speaking as a mother of daughters myself, where are the mothers of these loutish, brutalised girls?

These extremely young women seem so determined to self-destruct that it makes me wonder if they ever had a loving role model — namely, their own mother.

...Is it because they have been brought up to believe themselves to be so utterly valueless that they numb themselves with huge quantities of strong drink, spending £100 a night if they have it, drinking ten or 12 glasses of ‘Jager Bomb’ until they vomit or pass out and have to be rescued?

...Most shocking is the violence perpetrated by some of these girls. They don’t just hurt themselves, they injure others.

...The Channel 4 documentary showed men with blood running down their faces, stabbed by women who the police said habitually carried knives, ‘like mobile phones’, said one officer, ‘in their handbags’.

Esther Rantzen throws out a number of ideas in trying to explain the rise of this ladette culture. I thought her instincts best when she asks,

Is it liberation to behave like a violent, brutal, drunk man? The police in the programme who deal with girl binge drinkers said they seem to set out to be even worse than men. If men have ten or 12 shots lined up, women will try to keep up with them.

That's a key question. What does it mean to be a liberated woman? Liberalism assumes that our sex is a straitjacket, that it is something that we didn't choose and therefore constrains our autonomy. Liberalism further assumes that men are the privileged group in society, the ones with the gold standard autonomous lifestyle.

Put those two beliefs together and what you get is the idea that women are liberated when they can prove that their sex doesn't matter and that they can match it with a male lifestyle. If masculinity is coarsely associated with drinking and violence, then that then becomes a measure of liberation.

Against this, Esther Rantzen correctly asserts something decidedly non-liberal, namely that there are feminine qualities which are both innate and admirable and which provide "boundaries" (i.e. a direction) for women's behaviour:

If a girl becomes a banshee, something has gone terribly wrong.

Watching my daughter with her new baby son confirms my belief that women are instinctive nurturers, that we naturally respond to tenderness.

The young women in this documentary seem to have lost that instinct and, with it, all their boundaries, exposing their skin to a grabbing, drunken stranger, vomiting without shame. With proud grins, they boast how much they drink, and proclaim they never get a hangover, or claim that being stabbed by a girlfriend was just a ‘drunken mistake’.

What kind of mothers will they become in their turn? Is there any hope for their children? There may be: if they are given different role models, they may be able to change their behaviour and their thinking. The revealing ITV series Ladettes To Ladies showed girls like these, drinking and then throwing up, using every swear word, fighting and having mindless sex, believing that way they proved themselves ‘as good as men’.

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Third female journalist attacked in Tahrir Square

First it was the American journalist Lara Logan who was violently assaulted covering a demonstration in Egypt's Tahrir Square. Then the British journalist Natasha Smith suffered the same fate. Now it's a Frenchwoman, Sonia Dridi, who has been sexually harassed by a group of men whilst covering a demonstration in Tahrir Square:

You can see Sonia Dridi being hustled off by a group of young Egyptian men in this video:




It's interesting that news services are still sending young female reporters to do this job, with such little protection, given the nature of these crowds. Are they trying to prove a point by exposing female journalists to such obvious dangers?

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The European Union chose to display this poster

A reader has alerted me to the following poster. It seems to have been produced by the European Social Forum, a movement made up of various left-wing organisations. But what's significant is that it is displayed in the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

Europe4ALL poster

As you can see the poster says "We can all share the same star. Europe 4 All." The star is made up of the symbols of a wide variety of religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Shintoism and Buddhism.

There are two things I'd say about the poster. The first is that the hammer and sickle, the symbol of Marxist communism, is included amongst the religious symbols. That suggests, as many of us have long supposed, that Marxism has the role for its adherents of a secular religion. It's interesting too that the EU feels so comfortable with Marxism that it would publicly display the hammer and sickle. Marxism imposed itself by revolutionary means and ruled through the use of show trials, labour camps and secret police. Does the EU really want to associate itself with such a discredited ideology?

The second thing to note is that the poster is not just calling for tolerance amongst religions. It is announcing that Europe is "for all". With a stroke of a pen, the idea of Europe being at least primarily for Europeans and European culture has been erased.

That means that we have Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians but Europe for everybody. That doesn't exactly strike me as a balanced and fair global outcome.

If you compare the poster being displayed by the European Union to the poster currently being promoted by the African Union the difference is striking:

The Africans are calmly asserting their identity, in contrast to the Europeans whose focus is more negatively on the deconstruction of their own unique identity and tradition.

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