Mark Koyama: belief

Transcript context

…And what’s the single best piece of evidence for that marginal claim? We’re contrasting the experience of what we think . . . Europe, or the West, even today, doesn’t conform to our liberal ideals. But there’s something we can agree upon about modern liberal societies which makes them very distinct from, say, other examples, where people — like historians — have argued there was a so-called religious toleration, such as the Roman Empire maybe, or Spain and the Islamic caliphate, which people claim to be a golden age of religious pluralism. But when you actually look at the details, it’s quite different to what we see in modern liberal societies. We’re making a claim that political philosophers, social scientists who are interested in liberalism or liberal societies, haven’t actually done a good job of engaging with the actual history of how these societies emerge. It’s sometimes argued that the West has less cousin marriage, and thus is less clan based and perhaps more free, more democratic, more liberal. Agree or disagree?…

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