Drinking alone is a miserable business, so this is one alcoholic experience no lady should be asked (or able) to undertake solo.

I’d like to throw into the ring a theory about homosexual politics I’ve been musing on.

One approach to homosexual politics is to assert that homosexuality is genetic, meaning that it’s inborn. The response of a liberal modernist to this will be to insist that it therefore be made not to count, so that an individual is not limited in his will in any way by his homosexuality.

This means invoking the principle of non-discrimination. However, even if everyday forms of discrimination are outlawed (employment, club memberships etc) there is still the limitation that homosexuals cannot choose to be heterosexual. Therefore, a more radical version of non-discrimination is applied, in which it is insisted that homosexuals not be excluded from important forms of heterosexual life, such as marriage and the bearing and raising of children.

The emphasis of this approach, therefore, is on bringing homosexuals within heterosexual norms. This is the way that the “unimpeded individual will” is created.

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“All the particularistic cultural communities that comprise particular liberal democracies stand under a ... civic obligation. Each such community must identify within its own cultural traditions resources that encourage its members to cultivate capacities for civic freedom and civic justice. Communities without such a commitment will effectively exclude their members from participation in liberal democratic political life. Every such community that refuses or fails in this commitment will with all certainty contribute to the failure of the institutions of liberty bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment.”

The closing paragraph of an essay God and the Space of Civic Discourse to be found at this forward-thinking liberal website - well worth a browse.

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Well, it’s a war.  People die in wars.  So that’s alright then.  No need to mention it.  Right?

In the first part of this double post I focussed on the good, hard look a Conservative must take of his position if he is ever to start thinking seriously about his - and our - deepening troubles.  For, the West is entering upon a period of crisis of proportions unseen since the fall of Rome.  It is a crisis that touches upon all areas of life except, by and large, the economic.  And it is NOT the crisis of Conservatism.  That departed over the horizon a hundred years ago.  It is the crisis of advanced liberalism.

I argued that our newly introspective Conservative must think on the causes of his political enfeeblement.  He must acknowledge as fact the victory of liberalism throughout Western society.  In so doing he may realise that liberalism extends to him, too, in all but name.  If he is even to begin to understand the grave responsibility to the future that inhabits the mantle of Conservatism he must first resile from all the anti-Conservative beliefs and values he has imbibed.  Then, if he is wise, he will acknowledge that even that may not be enough.  There are additional difficulties posed him by economism and globalised capital and by democracy which could well be insoluble.  Still, as a Conservative there is only one direction in which he can tread. 

I hope that my Part 1 post made depressing reading.  It was certainly intended to.  But now we are going to change to a major key (well, almost).

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There is a belief dear to the more intellectual if sometimes extreme political elements that political power on the ground is nought but the ebb and flow of a great battle of ideas.  Thus philosophy is both the king of abstract human contemplation and the pawn of human instrumentation.

The Achilles heel of this view is that Nature is also expressed, and rather viscerally, through our hearts and minds and thence through our deeds.  But Nature is not an idea.  The battles between “isms” have no application to it.  Even race realism, for example, is only about Nature - just intellectuals protesting an anti-Natural ideology.

That is not to say that Nature cannot speak pretty directly through us.  It can.  But do you want to listen?

John Ray left a comment on Mark’s “A disappointed liberal” post which, as John’s comments often do, piqued my fancy.  He wrote:-

The pervasive power of advertising is a favourite Leftist theme but it is a crock.  Ask anybody in the ad game and they will tell you that they only wish they had such power.  Brand-shifting is all they usually can do - NOT “create demand”.  Read up about the Edsel if you doubt it.

Now, John is a man who has studied the human mind.  I am merely mindful of my lack of study.  So in response to his, of course, properly researched and, if required, extensively referenced point of view I will offer that scientifically useless device: personal experience.

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Not all liberals are pleased with what they have created. Clive Hamilton is a leading left-liberal thinker here in Australia. He has written a lengthy 50 page article titled The Disappointment of Liberalism.

In this article, Clive Hamilton describes very well what liberals set out to do. The basic idea of liberalism is that we should seek a particular kind of freedom, namely, a freedom to shape who we are and what we do according to our own individual will and reason.

The main impediments to this kind of freedom are the important parts of our personal and social identity which we don’t choose, but are born into, such as our gender, race and class. If only, thought the liberals, we could abolish the “oppressive” influence of such things, we could create an autonomous, independent, self-defining individual, free to pursue his own happiness.

Here is Clive Hamilton himself telling this story of how liberalism has made people “free” to define themselves according to their own will and reason:

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