Guardian Woman is such a contradictory creature.  She will convince her childless self that kids are an enslaving burden to her, yet proclaim an humanitarian love for everybody else’s.  She will tear your reputation into tatters if you say the wrong thing, yet proclaim herself the very embodiment of tolerance.  She will consider men as irredeemable oppressors, and may even have proved to herself that “gender” is a social construct.  Yet she will invest hours each day patiently finessing away as many of her physical imperfections as she possibly can.  Just in case an interesting oppressor comes upon her in the poetry section in Foyles.

Given her alarming propensity to walk on both sides of the street at once in opposite directions we should, I suppose, always anticipate a new psychological dichotomy.  And she may be developing one right now, albeit extremely patchily.

If it exists – and I am only suggesting the possibility, that’s all - it is still very nascent and based solely on the calculation of what so much childlessness adds up to: race replacement, for good or ill.  Let’s sketch out the historical process I see just beginning to form through the mist.

It’s not news anymore.  The creeds of feminism and sexual liberation have cheated a very substantial proportion of high IQ Western women of life’s purpose.  There is no escaping it.  I’m sure they think about it a lot.  Do they regret listening to those clever “older sisters” when they were still so young and angry, and could not know where it would all lead?  Do they ever reflect how arid and useless to them now is the ridiculous assertion that they are no part of Nature, but a being who, if fully-individualised, may arise into the shining human firmament through no more than an exercise of will?  Do they search for the answer to that biggest of questions, that question which crawls slowly towards you out of the silence of the night – my God, what have I done?

All that, perhaps.  But mostly I think they must walk around their cheated motherhood, eyeing it from all angles for the one flaw that might justify their “choice”, and finding none.  They hate it, but time and biology have brought them to a profound sense of their own failure.  They invested their fertile years and, therefore, their whole lives – and their men’s - in a lie.  The hyper-freedom of liberalism is unreal.  And no one can “have it all”.  As a woman, if you haven’t borne a child you haven’t had a damned thing.

With that, roughly half of the liberal ideology - the most vital half for Guardian Woman, the half she really gave her soul for – is next to useless.  Just legalism and man-hatred.  OK, a few ambitious policewomen and lady financiers can sue for sexual harassment.  But is that what is was all for?

The old bounce is all burned out, with the old bra.  The scolds have had their barren day.  Nature has won.

As Lionel Shriver wrote in the books section of the Guardian review last week:-

after talking myself blue about “maternal ambivalence”, I have come full circle, rounding on the advice to do as I say, not as I did.  I may not, for my own evil purposes, regret giving motherhood a miss, but I’ve had it with being the Anti-Mom.

Shriver’s article was featured at Amren and attracted a lengthy and sometimes interesting thread.  The article itself was, as she infers, full of defiance, ambivalence, regret and self-accusation.  That ought to be impossible.  For a man it would be.  But Guardian Woman is a damned contradictory creature.

Shriver interviewed three friends travelling behind her on the road to disillusionment.  At 44 “Gabriella” knows, if only intellectually, that she should have passed on her genes.  She cannot formulate a conception of white extinction, and she has only the vaguest inkling that Western civilisation will be ruined by the Third Worlders.  But, that aside, it’s notable how sensible she is.

“If people like me don’t reproduce, civilisation may be the worse for it. On both my mother’s and my father’s sides, I come from generations of academics, historians, diplomats - thinkers and doers - and as the years go by I begin to see that, far from being an exception or maverick, I am, in fact, the very obvious carrier of a certain genetic inheritance. I am a typical product of my family; I can see the thread stretching back through the generations. Do I think it’s a shame that this genetic inheritance won’t continue? Yes, I do. I’m arrogant enough to think that the world will be a poorer place without my genes in it. But the fact is that I don’t care enough to do anything about it. There wasn’t time to do that and the other things on my list.

When I press her on the implications of a contracting European population, she readily concurs that “many western cities will be largely black/ Hispanic/Asian in 50 years’ time. Does that bother me? Well, I vaguely regret the extinction of gene lines that in their various ways played a part in the establishment of western civilisation. But the gene lines coming in from the developing world will have their own strengths, energies and qualities.”

Friend number two, Nora – a 46 year old Irish-American – is more superficial.  Perhaps Irishness is sufficiently close to minority status to permit Nora to approach a bit closer to the idea of ethnicity.  Not too close, of course … “habit, wilderness, biodiversity, fish.”

Nora’s maternal regrets are skin deep.  “I think I have a lovely life. I can see myself continuing to have fun, to enjoy my job, to meet interesting people, to go on great holidays, to read interesting books, to support my family and friends.” …  Still Nora sorrows, “I think my parents came from an excellent gene pool, and it’s a shame that, to date, that hasn’t been passed on.”  Though she has many cousins, the loss of the combined heritage of her particular parents is “a sadness”.  As for perpetuating her ethnicity, her parents both taught Irish, and she has “a mother tongue that is under threat.  But in the wide scheme of things, I am conscious that languages disappear every year. …  We are of a generation grown accustomed to loss - of habitat, wilderness, biodiversity, fish.  Why not Irish, too? …  I live in a decadent age where that doesn’t seem such a problem. Anyway, devoting my whole life to promulgating my ethnicity is a big ask.”

Leslie, the youngest of the three at 26, is the most in thrall to culture politics.  This might be because she is still young and has not crossed the biological Rubicon, or it may be because she has been subjected to the New Marxism, whilst the older women dutifully imbibed second-wave feminism way-back-when from the original Jewish-American teat.

Shriver admits the distinction.

Like most of her generation, Leslie isn’t concerned with maintaining the Anglo-Saxon identity of Britain.  “Is there any true British race now, anyway? I think it’s far too late to start worrying about its preservation at this stage.”  She has embraced multiculturalism, and faces the prospect of western cities going majority-minority with cheer.  “Most of my friends are from different ethnic backgrounds, and I feel lucky to live in London, a city full of such diverse cultures, religions and races.  I think diversity adds to British culture rather than destroys it.”

Leslie has time to comprehend the rule of biology.  Disabusing her of culture politics may be tougher.

As for Shriver, she is grappling gamely with both sides of her personal contradiction.  Her struggles have carried her out into the shallow margins of racial awareness.  What’s missing is a capacity to project the trends and factor in the differences.  But, then, if she possessed sufficient raw data to accomplish that she would already be freed of contradiction and determined upon saving her ethny and her civilisation.

As it is, this is what she says:-

If I feel, oh, a little wistful about the fact that my country of birth, the US, will within my lifetime no longer be peopled in majority by those of European extraction (I’m German-American on both sides), that passing dismay has never been considerable enough for me to inconvenience myself with giving lifts to football practice.  Frankly, if I can’t be arsed to replace myself with a reasonable facsimile, immigrants willing to nurse sick little boys through their fevers have truly earned the right to take my place.

Of course, that “wistfulness” is political dynamite. Yet maybe the multiculturalism debate is sufficiently matured for us to concede that white folk are people, too.  We encourage minorities of every stripe to be proud of their heritage - Jamaicans, Muslims, Jews - as well they should be.  We don’t assume that if an immigrant from China cherishes his roots and still makes a mean moo shoo pork he is therefore bigoted toward every other ethnicity on the planet.  So can Italians not champion Italianness?  Or the British their Yorkshire pudding?  Indeed, the tacit consensus - that every minority from Australian aboriginals to Romany should be treasuring, preserving and promulgating their culture, while white Europeans should not - is producing a virulent, sometimes poisonous rightwing backlash across the continent, and a gathering opposition to the immigration that Europe sorely needs if it is to maintain itself economically.  In the interest of civil, rational thinking on this matter, we should at least allow ourselves to talk about it.  The long-dominant populations in most of Europe are contracting, and maybe by the time they’re minorities in their own countries they will have rights, too - among them at least the right to feel a little sad.

A little sad.  It’s something I suppose - actually quite something.  I have spent years spying on the Guardian left and this is the first time I have seen such regrets in print there.  Does it signify a “new contradiction”?  I think it must, though I don’t think it will be significant unless it has some real momentum.

Before I close I should redress the balance really, because Shriver is most obviously an unusual liberal: a woman who has thought more freely about life and with less respect for the usual taboos than most.  In the main, however, Guardian Women is what she has been for four decades: a committed liberty-junkie and egalitarian, and dedicated political activist.

Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting is certainly one of those.  I have written about her before, on the matter of English identity.  But Bunty’s real love is not the English but Moslems.  She is a dogged and faithful defender not only of women’s rights but of every Muslim in the West.  She writes about Muslims again and again and again and again. 

So, on the subject of Turkey’s unwanted entry to the EU we are told:-

… Turkey offers the tantalising possibility of exorcising the “clash of civilisations” ghost.  If there was a secular, democratic, economically successful Muslim state it would kill off intense arguments about the incompatibility of Islam with democracy or Islam with human rights and modernity.  Furthermore, 80 million Turks within the EU would also kill off the EU’s credibility deficit in the Muslim world, where it’s seen as a Christian, white club with a dodgy imperial past ...  Finally - the coup de grace - it would strengthen the claim of Europe’s 15 million-strong Muslim minority to a home in Europe.

… But this is the nub of the problem - vast swaths of Europe don’t buy it.  Either they don’t believe a peaceful accommodation with Muslims is possible or they fear it requires such a dilution of European identity that they don’t want it.

… The figures from a recent Eurobarometer poll tell it all: 80% of Austrians are against, and only 10% in favour; 70% of the French are against and 74% of the Germans.

… Will self-interest - put crudely, young Turks might pay for ageing Europe’s pensions - be trumped by the unpredictable politics of identity as an insecure Europe, aware of its shrinking demographic and economic weight in the world, pulls up the drawbridge and opts to define itself more narrowly around its historical Christian identity?

… Can such history be laid to rest when it has sunk such long and deep roots into the national identity? …  The EU ploughs funds and diplomacy in to achieve an affirmative.  How hollow does that ring if Europe itself, despite all its vaunted values of freedom and tolerance and its envied prosperity, fails the test and lets history win. Watch Turkey’s accession process in the years to come as the barometer of Europe’s degree of civilisation.

Bunting belongs to that class of political animal for whom good requires the self-sacrifice of the West.  No alternative acceptable.  No negotiation possible.  She is quite devoid of that blessed gift of doubt which redeems Shriver.  She’s had children, for all the difference it’s made to her.  So she will never come to that point in life to which Shriver has come – and upon which I speculate that a patchy but non-trivial portion of the sisterhood could be facing reality at last.

Bunting is focussed, gimlet-eyed, on “fairness” and defeating “racism”.  She is a fanatic.  She is the enemy.  So one must applaud Shriver’s halting acknowledgement of regret but at all times remember Bunting.

It’s just another contradiction.