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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

national security and conservative anxiety « Previous | |Next »
October 19, 2006

Janet Albrechtsen continues to thunder away about the West's cultural surrender. By this she means that multiculturalism has caused the West's cultural timidity:

When it's easier to stay quiet for fear of provoking violence from some Muslims or attracting accusations of racism from Western appeasers, then the West is already living under the shadow of Islamic fascism. We're stuck with silent feminists who prefer cultural rights and the burka over women's rights and the silly noise of some on the so-called progressive side of politics marching to the tune of "We're all Hezbollah now".

There is a lot of unconscious anxiety buried in that paragraph. An anxiety that is then deployed in a politics of fear. It is a politics, as Carmen Lawrence poiints out in her Fear and Politics, that invites us to feel insecure, encourages us to be anxious, manipulates the panic button, and suggests that it is 'them' or 'us.' It is a politics about division to ensure the conservatives and the Coalition remain in power.

Albrechtson's basic thesis is that:

...multiculturalism has become a far bigger and more insidious concept during the past three decades. Its basic proposition is cultural relativism: that all cultures are of equal value, none can be criticised (except for the majority one), and that encouraging integration is racist... Multiculturalism makes the private part of you - your religion - your most valuable public asset. And it's off bounds to criticise any part of it....That powerful multicultural concoction of separateness and victimhood has left the West fractured, neutered of a confident and united identity.

Albrechtson is gunning for the political culture bequeathed to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s when liberals and leftists toppled legalised racial and gender hierarchies, championed an activist judiciaryand increased the rights of dissenters. These reforms they have come to stand for the larger culture of freedom that conservatives have loathed. Hence their general backlash against the loosening of sexual mores and gender roles.

Today conservatives, such as Albrechtson, blame a decadent liberalism for supposedly hampering the government's ability to fight evil-doers at home and abroad. As Corey Robin points out in the London Review of Books conservatives hold that a decadent liberalism has created a devitalised society that lacks the will and wherewithal to face down foreign threats. So we need to affirm the priority of security over freedom and social cohesion or sameness over diversity or difference. National unity is held to be an essential weapon of war, opposition undermines the war effort, and dissenters are either subversive or traitorous.

Corey says that:
When we speak about a balance between freedom and security what we really mean is a balance between power and powerlessness. It makes perfect sense for conservatives to use the metaphor, for it conceals and protects their natural constituency. The real question is: why do liberals oblige them?
After all it was utilitarian liberals who argued that individuals should be free to say and do whatever they wish, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. Liberal democracies should use coercion only to punish acts or attempted acts of harm, including threats to the security of the nation.

Corey adds that one can see variants of this argument in Locke’s account of religious toleration, which could be sacrificed only for 'the safety and security of the commonwealth'; Mill’s theory of liberty, which could be limited only to avert harm; and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s defence of freedom of speech, which could be abridged only to thwart 'a clear and present danger'. He says that:

The problem with these arguments is that it is nearly impossible to define harm----or danger, threat, menace--in a neutral way. Every definition of harm and its national security cognates rests on ideological assumptions about human nature, morality and the good life. And in this regard, liberals are as guilty as conservatives. The only difference is that they have less power to act on their convictions-- and to stop their opponents from acting on theirs.

Albrechtson argues that emphasising difference through diversity causes sharm because it ends up dividing us more. As she says the multicultural concoction of separateness and victimhood has left the West fractured, neutered of a confident and united identity and this has fuelled home-grown terrorism.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:39 AM |