OCTOBER 2012

A march of folly
by Kenneth Minogue On progressives, Feminism, and gay rights.

Burke was right!

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The basic question in life is

!hat is actually going on"# and it

often requires a great deal of time to pass before one can find the answer. That is why $ have only %ust begun to understand what is actually at stake in the proposal to recogni&e civil partnerships as marriages.# 'nd the clue came when $ discovered that (tonewall, the homose)ual rights group in Britain, was proposing a memorandum that the terms husband# and wife# should be removed from the *+,- .arriage 'ct and replaced by parties to the marriage.# This apparently trivial bit of semantics carries a large moral significance. $t is part of a two/stage operation. $n the first stage, some new liberating move is proposed, and anyone with an eye for personal freedom0libertarians and conservatives alike0will support the move. But then comes a new development1 the propaganda that seeks to persuade us0and usually also the luckless children in schools0that the new situation must change our attitudes to the world. Freedoms, in other words, become parado)ically entwined with the repressions of political correctness. 2et me elaborate this thesis. !e associate the *+34s with a set of liberations# that set the seal on a decent way of life, opening up choice and a clean sweep of out/of/date restrictions on our conduct, especially in se)ual matters. 'bove all, it is associated with Feminism as liberating

women from the household, conceived of in those terms as a kind of prison. 5hanging attitudes and technology had been opening up new areas to women for at least a century, but now came a breakout by a set of female graduates who wanted to liberate the entire se)0or should we say gender. 'nd the best they could think to do was to demand that women should advance into the workforce. To become a unit of production, to acquire a boss 6and perhaps eventually become one7 was not everybody8s notion of liberation, but there8s no accounting for tastes. .en, it was thought, were respected for the work they did, and women in the workforce would get the same respect. This vast pro%ect had a number of important dimensions. One was that family life moved from the center of female life to the margins, requiring important ad%ustments in social life and a massive reconfiguration of the duties of men as well as women. 9or of course were all women happy about this move. :ven those who wanted to have it all# often had their doubts. Feminists, one should remember, may claim to represent# women, but this is bluff; no one ever legitimi&ed such a claim. 'nother vital dimension of feminist liberation consisted of a passionate re%ection of the chivalric idea that women, as physically vulnerable, were to be protected by husbands, fathers, and men in general. (uch complementarity between men and women was thought to entrench the idea that women, because weaker, were not equal to men. The solution was to switch the issue from one of fact to one of legal and moral status. Both kinds of status were covered in the dominant codification of the moral life in recent times1 namely, declarations of rights. The basic assumption of the moral life as the en%oyment of human rights is that all human beings are

vulnerable creatures, as no doubt they are, and that tolerable lives depend on respect, by individuals but especially by governments, for a set of rights. These rights kept on getting more numerous, and they continue to do so. They began in the philosophers8 labs 6as it were7 as freedoms from interference, but modern versions 6such as the <9 <niversal =eclaration of >uman ?ights of *+@A7 moved into the positive, requiring advancing such claims as a human right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family# 6'rticle BC7, and much else. 's equipped with such rights, women moved from the protection of fathers and husbands to the much more powerful protection 6as it seemed7 of the state. The realities of rape or harassment might not have greatly changed, but women, as bearers of human rights, could no longer be thought of as more vulnerable than men. 9or were they still burdened by those responsibilities of sustaining social decorum that had often been central to respectable life. !omen were liberated to manage their lives as men had often conducted theirs1 sometimes, for e)ample, in enterprising ways, se)ually, alcoholically, commercially, etc. This change in the social role of women was generally accepted by liberals as the removal of one more oppression from society, and the opening up of choice to women previously restricted by inherited conventions. $ts real significance, however, could only become evident with the passing of time. !e now know that this liberation was part of what some .ar)ists call the slow march through the institutions.# The technique e)ploits small, apparently liberal, changes that become, as they develop, devices for transforming society. 2iberations that had the appearance of merely advancing opportunity turned out not

to be matters of choice at all. :veryone, meaning especially all women, had to fall in with this new line.

The idea of

liberation# has many problems, but the crucial one

in this case is that the position of women had been changing for decades before the *+34s, partly in response to feminist pressures, but much more importantly because of developing attitudes and advancing technology 6medicine and press button machinery, for e)ample7. !omen had been e)ploring new worlds for over a century. The violent and resentful presentation of these changes in the *+34s, as if they were unprecedented uprisings against oppression, was no more than melodramatic public relations. 'nd it served to obscure the fact that women# as a class of persons were now losing elements of feminine identity because they were embracing an essence in which they were notionally non/gendered units of production in a modern economy. The idea that women in general could move into the workforce was certainly more plausible in the later twentieth century than it could possibly have been at any earlier period of history. Before, agricultural work and craftsmanship required physical strength, life was shorter, and the family world itself was vitally different. By the twentieth century, as we have seen, advancing technology had transformed these earlier realities. $n the modern world, women could certainly take up about A4 or +4 percent of the %obs men did because these %obs now seldom demanded physical strength, and there were certainly plenty of bright and capable women available. $n a few areas such as building skyscrapers or furniture removal, for e)ample, women could not really replace men, and in a variety of other %obs such as servicing motor cars they had very little desire to do so. $n

combat situations women were certainly not appropriate, but feminists insisted that they should be trained to work on destroyers and fly high tech airplanes. That being said, if you were putting down a riot, only male policemen were really of much use. 'll of these changes, however, were standard features of developing modern societies. They did not seem to signify modifications in our culture. But other changes were emerging. One of them was the march of welfarism, which compassionately took up the travails of young pregnant girls without a man to support them. They were accorded places to live along with subsidies, and became an increasing class of person. 'nd they came to be described, by an e)tension of the term family,# as one/parent families.# !hy not"# one might think. Dlenty of actual families, through death or divorce, operated with one parent. 'nother development was the removal of all criminal sanctions attaching to homose)ual conduct. This, again, was an impeccably liberal pro%ect. !ho could seriously support the criminali&ation of whatever consenting adults might do in private" 'll of these reforms were no problem in a liberal society. The significance of their con%unction only emerged a little later.

The industriali&ation of women was widely accepted, and the

most evident repression associated with it was the re%ection of se)ism,# an offense covering any suggestion that women were not, in whatever relevant respects were advanced, the equals of men. $t did, however, involve significant unrealities, many resulting no doubt from the brutishness of men, which required some legal concern with these vulnerabilities. (e)ual harassment

legislation is, of course, in principle universal but its main impact is to allow women to get redress for male aggression or for failures in promotion. .aternity leave raises problems for employers, and had to be entrenched in law, and then supplemented by paternity leave in order to sustain the presumption of equality. But it took the gay rights movement to make progressives8 agenda entirely clear, for it generated in its wake politically correct campaigns 6often targeted in the first instance at schools7 affirming 6for e)ample7 that se)ual preferences were merely matters of taste, and one preference was as good as another. :very liberal reform, it turned out, came now to demand attitudinal conformism. 'll these forms of conduct had to be recogni&ed as equally virtuous. To prefer some to others was merely a survival from illiberal dogmatism. Dre%udice, however, remained, because many people regarded the heterose)ual family marriage as the basic institution of society. (o, too, did 'rticle *31- of the <niversal =eclaration of >uman ?ights. >eterose)ual family life was obviously essential to society in a way that homose)ual unions were not, because the notional basis of marriage involved the likelihood of requiring the disciplines involved in the nurture of children. >eterose)ual unions were, further, unique because they incorporated both male and female e)perience in the way they worked. By contrast, homose)ual unions were the formali&ation of desires that were certainly covered by the right of choice and privacy, but were eccentric in terms of the basic drives that sustained a society. They no doubt might well be admirable in many ways, but there was no obvious reason why they should be officially recogni&ed and accorded some respectable status, beyond what happens in an individualist world of personal inclinations. (ome people taking this view were 5hristians, but

members of other religions often e)pressed a much more violent revulsion against this new order. 'nd that, perhaps, provoked the new development. The suggestion that the law should give some recognition to homose)ual unions is, again, an admirably liberal thing to do, and civil partnerships were recogni&ed. !e have now, however, reached the ne)t stage of the march through the institutions, in which the demand is the one tiny step forward of recogni&ing gay marriage.# The proposal is in fact the desire finally to remove the distinction between men and women entirely from social recognition. >usband# and wife,# as we saw, must go, and in (pain, it seems, that father# and mother# must also go. (ince a law of B44C, they have been superseded by Drogenitor '# and Drogenitor B.# $ imagine soon the toddlers will have to call the old folk progs.# But0one must not deride, mock, disapprove, %udge, laugh at, etc., any of these new categories, because that would be discriminatory, and indeed a whole barrage of laws has developed to sustain illusions about the non/vulnerability of women and the respectability of these various forms of conduct. $n other words, the advance of these notable forms of liberation, this moderni&ation# of our society, demands a servile response from all of us. (laves knew very well not to deride, mock, disapprove, %udge, or laugh at their masters, and so must we. The long march through the institutions is in part a matter of engineering the right attitudes, and the servility which that entails.

!hat then does this sequence mean for !estern societies" $t is

increasingly clear that the central point of *+34s feminism was in

fact the destruction of the idea of women altogether. Feminists assimilated the class of women, in all essentials, to men. The feminine as traditionally understood had to go, because women were to be recogni&ed as se)ually undifferentiated or genderless units of production in the workforce. The economy here becomes the fundamental aspect of society from which all other %udgments must flow. $t is very odd, but certainly significant, that the basic assumption of liberatory feminism, as of (oviet communism, was that the conceptions of economic production must take precedence over everything else. The movement advanced itself as enhancing the choices made by women, but that is misleading. Eohn (tuart .ill had argued that one ought to be free to act as one wished provided one did not harm others, but, as philosophers such as =erek Darfitt have pointed out, .ill8s question is not 6or may not be7 enough. The basic question ought to be1 !ill my act be one of a set of acts that will together harm other people" 'nd of course the vast movement of liberated women into the labor force in the second half of the last century obviously so depressed returns to labor that many women who would have preferred to stay in family life 6with the freedoms and enterprises that family life makes possible7 also found it necessary to get %obs. >ere was indeed a slippery slope. $n the course of little more than half a century, our conception of human beings and of the structure of society has been steadily transformed. $n the inherited conception, human beings were as male and female moral agents, and responded both to their desires on the one hand, and to ideas about what they ought, rightly or honorably, to do, on the other. $n this conception of human life, both freedom and love were disciplines that certainly needed to be worked at. Freedom was our self/

regulation in terms of the rule of law, good manners and consideration for others, a form of independent life unique to :uropean societies. This self/discipline set clear limits to the powers that states might claim in order to sustain peaceful order. !ithin the law, we, as sub%ects of civil society, disciplined ourselves. 2ove required the discipline of commitment beyond the initiating desire. Only such an institution could give its members both a memory of the past and a commitment to the future. 'nd in this conception of human life, male and female were recogni&ed as the indispensable components of the family as the institution on which our social order rested. $t is that recognition that is now under attack. $n that world, being a man or being a woman had an anchorage in nature, and these roles entailed a certain institutional discipline, along with the generali&ed respect that went with it. .anliness# went with a sense of responsibility 6in ideal forms approaching the model of the gentleman#7 while womanliness# involved a sense of decorum along with e)pectations of a specific kind of human understanding. .en controlled their tendency to use vulgar words of language# in the presence of a woman. $t is significant that both of these ideal forms of complementary respect between men and women have been significantly weakened, most notably in se)ual conduct, and in such phenomena as binge drinking.# !omanliness# as a discipline has been abandoned as oppressive. !e are now, then, for these and many other purposes, no longer to be understood as either male or female, but as essentially human and sub%ect to universal human rights. (ome of us are hetero, some homo, some bi or trans. But all of these are equal as legitimate preferences in the en%oyment of affection

and pleasure. They are all modes of relating# to one another amid the ceaseless group/grope of a population of identicals bent on e)ploring the many ways in which we may en%oy satisfactions, including se)ual satisfaction. !e belong to a single all/inclusive continuum. $t is not altogether easy to follow the many odd ramifications of this new conception of what we are and how we live, and ought to live. But there is no doubt that the central concept is the all/ inclusive continuum of human beings who must not be differentiated in terms of se)uality or of se)ual preference. $t is a very abstract conception of what we are, and one may well wonder where it begins and where it ends. For in the (panish parliament, the idea has been seriously floated that the higher primates0gorillas, for e)ample0share with us some of the specifications of personhood, and ought therefore to be accorded human rights. 'nd at the other end of this inclusive chain of humanity will be found a parallel idea that newborn babies have not yet attained the 6presumably 2ockean7 identity of personhood, and therefore might, if necessary, be sub%ect to what are apparently known, in the reflections of some ethical think tanks, as post/natal abortions.# >ere, then, is a fascinating new world of quite remarkable possibilities. 'nd all of this seems to hang on nothing more formidable than a tiny semantic modification of how we use the term marriage.#