Amia Srinivasan: evaluation

Transcript context

…But to get you all the way there, someone might say, “Well, if the costs of single-parent families were much higher than I thought, I would be a social conservative.” I’m not saying that has to be your answer, but that would be a kind of answer to the question. Yes. It’s a really interesting question. I’m not sure I’m going to give a very good answer to it. I think there are interesting questions about the place of community, tradition, ritual continuity in human life, and their relationship to value. I think conservatives — in the true sense of conservatives — sometimes correctly criticize the left for not paying enough attention to some of those things that really do give human life value. There’s a question about how you make room for those things in a society that’s also radically democratic and plural. I think liberalism’s answer hasn’t been a hugely successful one, and so the left has to offer an alternative vision on which you can have real community affinity, certain forms of collective ritual tradition, but in ways that aren’t oppressive. I suppose that my closest path to conservatism would be if I were the kind of person — which I’m not — who just thinks that, actually, the only plausible model for those things is a nonsecular, broadly speaking religious, but also culturally and ethnically insular vision of community. I in no way endorse that, but I think that I have, and we on left, generally — I’m not including you — people who are on the left, generally, do have more time for that part of the conservative critique than just liberals who think that “Well, no, you can just have a basic pluralistic society in which everyone is, within certain constraints, able to live their vision of the good life so long as it doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s ability to do the same, and that’s totally workable. ” I think that vision has left us in a place of mass alienation, unhappiness, and a certain spiritual vacuity. You can have that starting point and go in very different ways, and you can go very right-wing from that starting point. That’s just not the way I go. It seems to me that, as we move closer to what you call a feminist utopia or, just in general, make improvements of the world, that men and women will become more different. There’s an empirical literature that suggests in more egalitarian societies, personalities of men and women are more different. The evidence on STEM — there’re more STEM majors per capita or proportionally in Iran than in Sweden. When things are very bad, men and women, in certain ways, are forced to become similar. As things get better, they seem to become more different. Are you comfortable with the probable reality that in a feminist utopia, men and women will be more different than they are today, overall, on average?…

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