To all who look upon the bedtime propinquities of David Blunkett with haughty disdain the life of the late John Cordle stands in wise rebuke.  He it was who, being an indignant and apparently righteous soul and a loud defender of public morals, raised himself up in 1963 to denounce John Profumo, Harold Macmillan’s disgraced Minister of Defence, thus:-

“Men who choose to live in adultery ought not to be appointed to serve our Queen and country… I was appalled to hear that our beloved Queen should be so wrongly advised as to give an Audience to a minister who has proved himself so untrustworthy… it is an affront to the Christian conscience of our nation.”

Unfortunately, Cordle – Conservative MP for Bournemouth East and Christchurch from 1959 to 1977, a disciple of Billy Graham and, for many years, owner of the Church of England Newspaper – was not exactly Snow White of Westminster himself.  He was twice divorced amid tremendous public acrimony at a time (1956 and 1971) when marriage was not yet a revolving-door arrangement and a certain moral standing was expected of our elected representatives.  Alongside his several appointments to Christian evangelical bodies he cultivated a sparkling social life, rising to the station of a Gold Staff Officer at the Coronation, a friend of Princess Margaret and an usher at her wedding.  During the 1960’s his business life became entwined with John Poulson, the international property developer who was to be jailed some ten years later for bribing civil servants and councillors.

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Partisans of either the “pro-life” or “pro-choice” positions on abortion will have us believe there is no middle ground between these poles. This is, of course, nonsense. For example, the “pro-choice” American libertarian scholar Murray Rothbard opposed the US Supreme Court’s “Roe Vs. Wade” decision. This effectively made abortion a right for Americans. Rothbard dissented on the grounds that it centralised decision making on an issue rightfully and best left to state and local jurisdictions. A “pro-life” colleague of Rothbard, Martin Anderson takes up the decentralist argument against Roe Vs. Wade here. The Rothbard / Anderson example shows that compromise here is possible.

What interests me is the amazing extent to which abortion has now been made sacred. To criticise abortion or people who have abortions is to expose oneself to all sorts of tut tutting and the moralistic tones of disapproval that, we are told, are supposed to be reserved for those who “fart in church”. Even learned Church leaders, from Churches doctrinally opposed to abortion, treat the consumers and suppliers of the abortion industry with kid gloves. Even attempts to deal pragmatically with the economic and military consequences of what amounts to a de facto small-l liberal population policy, of which abortion rights is certainly an inherent part, are inhibited by the sacred status of abortion.

This is by no means a local Australian or even western issue. That sanctified and august body, the United Nations, an outfit Roger Kimball calls a “saintly institution”, even believes it has the right to bring Poland into line for not following small-l liberal dogma.

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In a recent Melbourne Age newspaper column Joanna Murray-Smith questioned the feminist values she had been brought up with. She felt that feminist careerism hadn’t left her enough time to properly mother her children.

Predictably there was a backlash. There have been five newspaper columns in the Age attacking the single Joanna Murray-Smith column. On Friday alone, there were two such columns.

There was nothing terribly new in these opposing pieces. One of the Friday columns, by a single mother and full-time writer, Allison Croggon, was most interesting for the kind of liberal language it used.

According to Allison Croggon motherhood has been a lot more fun than she expected. However, she describes the “role” of being a mother, rather than the “tasks” (which she enjoys), as an “iron cage” from which women have to seek “freedom”.

Why attack the “role” of motherhood in this way? Because liberalism (on which feminism is based) insists that we choose our own roles. Traditional motherhood is not a role that women choose for themselves but is, according to liberal thought, a mere “biological destiny” from which women have to escape. That’s why Allison Croggon can simultaneously confess that she enjoys the actual work of motherhood, but still insist that women need to “escape” from the “iron cage” of the motherhood role.

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Is there such a thing as “natural society”? The difference between the traditional and modernist outlook is that the former believes in it and the latter does not, at least if “nature” is taken to refer to anything substantial and not simply to content-free abstractions like freedom and equality. The traditional standpoint is that basic institutions like family, property, religion and ethnic affiliation are natural. Secondary features and particularities of line-drawing vary here and there, but the institutions themselves are tied to basic human realities that don’t change much and require social relations — if they are to function at all well — to settle into certain forms that follow a logic and order of their own. That natural logic and order are affected by circumstances to some extent, and they can be supported or disrupted, but for the most part they go their own way and we can’t make of them what we will.

Advanced modern thought of course rejects all that. Ethnicity is constructed, family is whatever we accept as family, religion has no content of its own, and property has a bad conscience even though it has turned out surprisingly hard to abolish or change as an institution. That outlook is held with extraordinary absolutist vehemence. To reject it, to think those basic social categories have to do with important realities that can’t be made into whatever people want, is not simply to hold a different view of things. It is to be racist, sexist, homophobic, fundamentalist, and a greedhead — the personification and agent of everything that is worst and most oppressive in humanity.

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I suppose the year must have been 1984 when I read not Orwell but Milan Kundera’s masterpiece of conflicted love and lust, fidelity and possessiveness.  I had come across a wildly approving review in one of the nationals written by a Tory MP which, what with the naked mirror-walking and Tomas’s other rutting male adventures, seemed a bit strange.  Then again, considering all the sleaze stories that appeared in the press during John Major’s time as PM, perhaps not.  Anyway, this was actually a book less about nookie than those debilitations of the soul inflicted by an interfering state.

Now, I never needed my view of eastern European communism to be confirmed.  That didn’t really interest me.  No, it was just the title of the book that caught my imagination.  For some years I had been railing within, as blow-hard right-wingers tend to, at the declining morality of the nation.  Of course, it’s one thing to bemoan standards of public morality which are sinking into the morass.  It’s another to formulate a socio-political path to redemption.

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The world is watching Ukraine.  In Kiev and in all the cities across that 75% of the country which is Ukrainian-speaking the rights of the electoral majority are being asserted.  The only question would seem to be whether peaceful protest will be enough to dislodge Viktor Yanukovich.

It is not certain that it will.  The results of Sunday’s run-off are to be officially announced today.  If Yanukovich is declared the winner, as he has insisted he was, a highly unpredictable trial of strength will ensue.  Yanukovich has powerful friends, among them State President Leonid Kuchma (who in 2001 was embroiled in the extraordinary scandal of the disappearance and gruesome decapitation of an opposition journalist, Georgyi “George” Gongadze).  Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is another, and has already welcomed Yanukovich’s self-declared victory.

The great unknown was the position of the army, security services and the police force.  Only the Defence Ministry was thought to be definitely loyal to the President.  But this morning Defense Minister Oleksander Kuzmuk has declared neutrality.

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Picture for a moment an early morning, say, next Spring.  It is the middle of the rush hour in a city in the north of England.  But this is not to be just any city or any morning.  This morning will be remembered as long as men draw breath.  This morning local radio has reported that three identical backpacks, each equipped with a tank and motorised aerosol, have been discovered - one at the railway station, two on busy street corners.  The tanks were said to be empty.  How many more there are out there nobody knows.  Shock and rumour spreads.  Al Qaeda.  People are talking about biological weapons, smallpox possibly.  Could it be true?  It doesn’t matter.  Everyone knows what it means if it is true.

By nine the broadcast media are reporting the events and speculating on their cause.  Scheduled programming has been suspended.  A few talking heads – opposition politicians, terrorist experts, ex-military men, an ex-scientist at Porton Down – are wiseacring at short notice in the way they do.  But as yet there is no official statement.

In any case almost as one, people are drawing the obvious conclusion and deciding what they must therefore do.  An exodus of citizens terrified for their children and themselves bursts into being.  Schools just filled are quickly emptied.  Cases are packed, cars loaded and driven out into streets in which no law, no bar to progress is tolerated.

It takes another sixty minutes for central government to act.  There is no great appeal for calm.  Calm, if that is what it is, will be enforced.  Everyone attempting to leave or who has left the city is to return.  Everyone contemplating leaving the city is to remain where they are.  All are to obey a 24-hour curfew to be effected from 6pm.  Ominously, there is no confirmation or denial of the rumours, no attempt to appear other than authoritarian.  Public fear reaches a point of conflagration.

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Joanna Murray-Smith confesses

in a recent Age article,

“I am leading the life the feminists of the ‘70s dreamed of: successful professional and mother - but it’s no dream.”

Why not? Because of the mental anguish she feels at not having time to spend with her children. She asks,

“Where is the play time with our kids? Where are the long hours of unhurried togetherness?”

She admits that “I go to bed at night asking myself over and over again how much our working lives really benefit our children?” and that “increasingly I resent the dishonesty of pretending that our children are not guinea pigs in an experiment that is, in many ways, a failure.”

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