David, I am enjoying your section on Noel Pearson and also the chapter on family values.

For the cultural revolution to even up the divison of child raising efforts between men and women, or more generally the sharing of nurturing activities, you can get some help form the work of the late Ian D Suttie. I think you will especially empathise with his account of the Taboo on Tenderness.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/Revivalist4/Suttie.html

For some time I have been convinced that the left right division has ceased to signify anything that is illuminating or helpful. In many contexts I have stopped talking about the right altogether because there are non-left groups that find each other as objectionable as they each find groups on the left.

I have major reservations about a lot of your political economy and I hope you are prepared to consider revisions in that area if suitable evidence and arguments present.

cheers!

David, I think you will enjoy this extract from Suttie's chapter on The Taboo on Tenderness. The url is the link to that chapter.

It is quite conceivable then that features of our mode of upbringing, which I have vaguely generalized as a tenderness taboo, create an artificial mental differentiation and consequent emotional barrier between adult males on the one hand and women and children on the other. Women, of course, can never, consistently with their rearing functions, lose touch with the child so completely as is possible for men. Besides the prospect of having children of their own, their own development differs from that of their brothers in that neither the Oedipus wish nor custom can ever bring about the same kind of cleavage between themselves and their mothers and they may even be associated with the latter in the care of younger children.

There is no need to postulate an instinct of maternity when we find the disposition and the habit developing unchecked from infancy, and this is bound to have an influence upon the formation of the general character of women.

My point is that the taboo on infantile activities, gratifications, and relationships to mother, the condemnation of regression, spreads to harmless and even necessary feelings and attitudes of mind. It artificially differentiates men from women, making them bad comrades and throwing the women back upon a dependency on their children, thus further widening the breach and aggravating jealousy. But its worst effects lie in separating parent from child. The former, unconsciously resisting and defending himself from regressive longings, is impatient with childishness and forces the child to grow up and to abandon its naïve, unguarded, emotional relationship to its social environment. Such a parent, while denying the 'right to childhood', presents to his children as the goal of life an adult nature and relationship which is unattractive to the child's mind or even productive of anxiety and depression. 'If that is all maturity has to offer', we might imagine the child feeling, 'I had better stay as and where I am.' Thus a puritan intolerance of tenderness increases the unconscious regressiveness it hates, and interposes unnecessary moral obstacles in the way of the maturation it designs to accelerate. It forces development to proceed by a violent change with repression instead of by gradual process. It does not produce really mature minds, but merely a hardness and cynicism with a core of anxious, angry infantility. It loses the generosity of the child without acquiring the stability and integration which should belong to the adult.

At any rate it appears that the notion of a taboo on tenderness, related as it is to the general hypothesis of the nature of love which this book is sketching out, throws new light upon certain facts of character-differentiation between men, women, and children and between different races, and places them in a new relationship. As such it seems worth working out.

Hi David - welcome to the weird and wonderful world of blogging! An excellent (if ambitious) site title!

If you haven't already discovered so, you'll soon learn that this is a place where sh#t happens!

Yes, welcome, David. So far you've attracted some of the nicest folks in blogdom (ie the three of us!).

I might take this opportunity to let you know that the second instalment of my review of your book has now been posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Being a lefty, you are of course wrong.

I hope I'll have the time to explain the reasons why in more detail later on.

Yes, it's nice to see a forum such as this, David.

It doesn't look like Kim's url made it - the discussion on an aspect of the book she refers to is here:

http://larvatusprodeo.redrag.net/2005/09/14/the-environment-beyond-left-and-right/

As a laborite frustrated with his own party a bit I'm hearing your call for more debate of these changing notions. Nice blog layout- good luck.

Thanks to all for these early comments. As a neo-phyte blogger I am still getting my head around it all. Thanks to Rafe for the link and material on tenderness,men and women.

An extract of a chapter of mine on the culture war is due to be published in tomorrow's 'Weekend Australian'. I'd love to know what observers think of it. I will be releasing more parts ofthe book in the next few days.

I don't want to avertise the opposition but a fascinating series of debates are happening at Catallaxy.

We dont talk in terms of opposition at Catallaxy, we talk of creative interaction:)

David

I disagree that the left has been totally dominated by the right. The ambivalence of John Howard toward future tax cuts and the opinion polls last year suggesting that citizens prefer better schools and a better health system to lower taxes suggests that people are rethinking things.

Like you I started off on the left but then (unlike you) swung strongly to the right. I now find that I am somewhere in the centre of politics hopefully without the self-congratulatory sentimentality of the left but with a sense of social justice.

Nice to hear from you again and good luck with the blog.

A modern economic market system has historical been the most successful in producing goods and service for our needs, even Karl Marx acknowledge that fact,but has come as a cost to us. The benifits should be obvious to us.

The question should be does the benifits out weigh the costs.In priciple the benifits out weigh the cost in the short run

The main critism is that labour has become a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Externalities generated do not appear on the balance sheet of production. This causes more to be produced than other wise.Time will tell if the later can be rectified in the long run.

J k Galbrath claimed that with high economic growth problems protrude beyond economics. He should have said politicians as well maximising there short run gain.Maslow claims once our bilogical needs have been served our wants seek phychological needs. For examle, status needs. Our blue collars turn cream, we become more conservative. In times of uncertaninty and change,like children overboard and terrorism. We become more authoritarian. And align with like groups
So with changes and uncerntaninty we see the bith of a new righr who has taken the initative and courted the new status groups that have been formed out of the old left.

In the short run the problems facing our society cannot be solved by the new right or left or the market alone.Itwill take lateral thinking, innovation and copreation of all concerned in the long run to solve thes problems. We must learn to let go those things that no longer serve us