Gilmae, you’ve chosen the wrong adjective. It might be a hard-working life, or even a difficult life at times, but it’s anything but empty. It fulfils a part of a man’s nature to work to support a family and to be a father to his children. In a marriage there are people who depend on you and your efforts in life both emotionally and materially; there is a masculine instinct to want to take on this responsibility and to succeed at it, whatever the difficulties.

Gilmae, most days I come home from work to be greeted by my beautiful and affectionate wife and by my very cute, robust, happy 3-year-old son. It’s not an empty moment, but a “settling” one that makes you think that you’re fulfilling the purpose in life that you were meant to.

This is why I find the Don Arthur/Andrew Norton conversation so interesting, and why I plan to join in when doing so won’t get me rusticated from Oxford.

But really, what an empty life Mark offers us; unfulfilling employment so we can attract a mate, with a twist of subordination to the state. Presumably with a lot of Ikea shopping as well.

If that’s the vision of existence Conservatism offers us, I can find no stronger encouragement for the pursuit of pure autonomy and for the twin triumphs of feminism and Fight Club…err…I mean masculinity.

A pure autonomy is likely to be a sterile and alienating condition; ultimately, the sense that we fulfil ourselves in an important way in becoming husbands and fathers will lead most men to make a commitment to family life.

I think I disagree with the first proposition but agree with the second.

So when you ask who men give up their autonomy to, the answer in a practical sense is to their employers, to their wives and to the state.

The more interesting question, though, is what they give up their autonomy for. Why do most men continue to marry if it involves an impediment to their autonomy? The answer, I think, is that autonomy is not always the overriding good as modernism claims it to be. A pure autonomy is likely to be a sterile and alienating condition; ultimately, the sense that we fulfil ourselves in an important way in becoming husbands and fathers will lead most men to make a commitment to family life.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/04/07/central-banker-in-love-triangle-with-chelsea-clinton-and-angelina-jolie/

Btw, if anyone’s interested in the substantive discussion rather than the stuff about how righties Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair and lefties Megan and Gandhi all take pot shots at me for being a lefty writing on a News Ltd site, I’ve replied to some of the points made at the HES thread.

I do realise snark is more popular in some quarters than substance!

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/markbahnisch/index.php/theaustralian/comments/partisan_nonsense_obscures_sensible_debate/

The special forces were rotated out for a break. They’re not actually machines. Labor took advantage of this in a rather crass attempt to boost their security credentials on Afghanistan – the left’s Good War. Rudd’s drug finance big-noting in Europe failed. His continuation of the previous government’s policy of pressing European contingents to patrol something other than their canteens was welcome but only moderately successful.

They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth.

(via the Economist’s obituary).