Standing firm against identity politics | Mary Eberstadt | Peter Kurti

[Music] foreign [Music] a warm welcome to the Center for independent studies and to this evening's event which is within the culture prosperity and Civil Society program at the CIS it's very good to see you and you're warmly welcome well vainglorious posturing by identity Warriors is easy enough but as netball Australia has recently found with the withdrawal of major financial support from Hancock mining it comes with a price pursuit of the ideologically impure generates Rancor anger and division as slogans and agendas are shouted at those deems to have offended General Goodwill is in danger of being warped into a state of Perpetual outrage and people ask how did we get here well fear is abound but tonight's guest Mary abastad propounds one of the most interesting explanations the rise of identity politics she argues is a direct result of the Fallout of the sexual Revolution especially the collapse and shrinkage of the family and I'm delighted that she's here this evening in person to tell us more Mary is one of North America's most notable cultural critics her social commentary draws from Fields including anthropology intellectual history philosophy popular culture sociology and of course theology Central to her diverse interests are questions concerning the philosophy and culture of Western Civilization Mary holds the Panola chair in Christian culture at the Catholic information center in Washington DC and she's a senior research fellow at the faith and reason Institute she is an American writer whose contributions to the intellectual landscape traverses genres and Nations I'm delighted that Mary abastad is with us this evening will you please welcome her to the stage thank you Peter for that kind introduction and thrilled to be in Australia this is my first time here this trip has been four years in the making and uh my husband Nick who's also here with me and I could not be happier foreign our subject tonight is the red hot one of identity politics a lot has been said about identity politics during recent years from all political directions on any given day news stories abound with references to newly formed political groupings based not on traditional ideas of compromise and give and take but instead on absolutist insistence we are informed that characteristics like race and gender and ethnicity now countermand long-standing Norms of Justice that the Trump ordinary politics in the United States several such factions are constant Staples of the news black lives matter white nationalist groups the many satellites orbiting the universe of LGBT and innumerable other factions left and right to list these groups together is not to suggest moral equivalence it is instead to observe that diverse is their political goals may be all of these groups and more share two features one expressed non-stop wherever videos and microphones are found is rage against real or imagined Injustice the other is the notion that the ends they seek cannot be achieved through conventional means in our self-governing societies many people have asked what this new kind of politics is doing to us As Americans as Australians as westerners tonight I would like to focus on a different question which is what the non-stop obsession with identity is telling us about ourselves our society and the social changes beneath the news cycle that have led the West to this divisive place so in what follows we'll examine the rise of identity politics and in the second part I will propose a theory about how that rise came to be so begin with the widest aperture the search for self the need to know who we are is a universal question it animates many of the greatest works of art and literature in the human patrimony Shakespeare's Hamlet is famously centered on that very question and so is classical drama surviving from ancient Greece Etc the entire country of Australia like that of the United States is in one sense an enormous petri dish for studying how people identify themselves within a multi-ethnic diverse Society so the point at least on the surface is simple every culture and every individual from time immemorial tries to answer that question who am I and today Across the Western World many people are finding that question harder to answer than ever before that is what the clamor over identity is all about that's what we're here to try and understand now in an ordinary sense of course questions of political identity are Eternal fluctuation and political identity is a fact of life especially in free countries where citizens change their minds and their votes again these kinds of alterations of political identity are nothing unusual they are healthy signs of a free Society at work but identity politics is a radically different phenomenon from traditional approaches to self-governance and to see why I would like to offer a little bit of History that very phrase identity politics is relatively new it first appears in 1977 in the United States in a Manifesto published by a feminist group called The kombahi River Collective in that document these radical African-American feminists reject the idea of traditional forms of community they embraced the idea that political identity should be based instead on victimization the authors made several declarations that charted a radically new course for American politics they declared that they were giving up on making common cause with the men in their lives they ruled the conventional family and the conventional Community out of bounds they said in effect that the only people they could trust were people just like them victims who shared the same oppression there is a straight line from that Manifesto in 1977 to for example the black lives matter rhetoric of today that movement also stands against the conventional family it also declares peaceful coexistence with the wider Community to be somehow unwanted maybe even impossible and like all other identitarian groups left or right its rhetoric abounds with anger at the world's injustices while running short on practical remedies or policies the same is true of identity groups based on features other than race or ethnicity the political wing of what is called the lgbtq community for example is just as absolutist and just as hostile to traditional ideas of tolerance as other identitarian groups it is also just as insistent in dividing the known political Universe into two simple factions allies and enemies so this is the first point to note about identity politics I think it is born out of loss identity politics says in effect that the most important thing about an individual is not that person's heritage or family or Community it is instead that person's status as a victim this claim to victim status takes different forms some groups claim to be victims of the so-called patriarchy others say they are victims of racial or cultural bias and still others claim that the very categories of male and female amount to attempts to oppress them no these groups share a few other features as well one is the insistence that any given group cannot be properly understood except by the people inside it another is the claim that victim status is the new divining rod for truth not reason or knowledge or empathy or civics and third and perhaps most important these groups command and receive absolute loyalty from their members the kind of unthinking Primal loyalty formerly associated with the family this is a point to which we'll return so what does the proliferation of all these groups tell us my thesis developed in the book Primal screams is that today's people especially today's young people have been deprived by radical social changes of the usual ways of constructing identity for that reason they struggle as most of our ancestors did not for answers to that question who am I now sometimes the deprivation they suffer has been accidental the consequence of deep social trends primarily the sexual Revolution rocking all of our societies since the 1960s sometimes they've been deprived at least in part on purpose a host of radical thinkers throughout the last hundred years have thought that radical change would be beneficial the consequences to Ordinary People be damned feminist Betty Friedan declared the natural family to be akin to a concentration camp progressives across the West today compare churches and homeschooling to child abuse and there are many other examples one could name in this vein but the point is that many forces have gone into the atomization that we see today some of them defending this indiscriminate de-institutionalization in full so if we want to understand why our societies seem so Riven and split into factions understanding that many influential thinkers in the west have willed it so is a good start so let's zero in now on what I think are the two most important such changes of the past 60 years or so the years in which identity politics were born changes to the family and changes to the churches and by extension organized religion generally so first up the family up until the middle of the 20th century human expectations remained largely the same throughout the ages from what we can see of the record that one would grow up to have children and a family if one were fortunate that parents siblings and extended family would remain one's Primal community and that conversely it was a tragedy not to be part of a family for many westerners today these facts still hold but it has to be emphasized that for many Family Ties have nonetheless weakened as never before in history why in three words the sexual Revolution the mass adoption of contraception beginning with the technological shock of the birth control pill would go on to have massive and compounding social consequences and there is increasing agreement on this by thinkers across the political Spectrum as you probably know the sexual Revolution erased the giveness into which Generations are born it turned behaviors that had once been rare into ordinary facts of life for many millions to observe this is not to point fingers or engage in a blame game there's hardly a family in the world not affected by some of the things I'm about to list it's instead to make a point about human arithmetic abortion fatherlessness divorce single Parenthood childlessness the shrinking family the shrinking extended family every one of these post-pill developments that are now common have had the effect of reducing the number of people we can call our own every one of them is an act of human subtraction and again every one of these Trends once rare or unusual have increasingly become the norm across the West since the 1960s in fact in a very few decades there won't be anyone alive who does remember life before the sexual Revolution reconfigured the world in this way I certainly don't remember such a world I'm guessing most people here don't either which makes it all the more important arguably that we try to understand its transformative period power Here and Now now to say that these changes have radically affected Western lives is not to say that everyone is equally affected it's to say that we share a collective environment and just as a factory dumping toxins into a lake will affect some fish more than others for reasons that scientists don't understand the same is true here considered together these acts of human subtraction amount to a massive disturbance of the human ecosystem or to put the point another way family reality for many of today's Western people can be summarized in one word fewer fewer brothers sisters cousins children grandchildren fewer people to play ball with or talk to or learn from on the point about playing ball the rapper Tupac Shakur who's surely known to some here wrote possibly the saddest song of the last 50 years it's addressed to his father and it's about a boy trying to play catch by himself now these have been massive and mostly under attended transformations in the way ordinary human beings live and these acts of subtraction can also be found at every stage of human life fewer people to celebrate a given birth fewer people to visit one's Deathbed and of course fewer people with whom to Mark these great events including in the other foremost institution in which Humanity has participated from time immemorial religion this brings us to the second most transformative change since the 1960s the decline of organized religion especially Christianity in significant parts of the western world this too has been a great and parallel exercise in human subtraction around 10 years ago I wrote a book called How the West really lost God to try to understand what was behind that decline tonight let's just mention a few statistics in passing in 2021 just under 44 percent of Australians called themselves Christian in the census 50 years ago in 1971 fully 86 percent still call themselves Christians so from 86 percent in 1971 to just under 44 today in effect the percentage of the Australian population calling itself Christian has been cut in half in 50 years Australia is far from alone every society in the west exhibits the same growing indifference to organized religion uh in the United States as in Australia the category no religion is the fastest growing subset of all and much the same pattern can be found across Western Europe as for the United Kingdom although the number of people calling themselves Christian still hovered around 51 percent a couple years ago only 27 percent of Britain's report that they actually believe in a god and I had to read that twice when I first came across it but that's that's the quote now why does the decline of church going and religious belief matter to the idea of identity as it turns out it could matter quite a lot first religion hands Believers a profound way of answering that question who am I it is I am a child of God that's the Christian answer to the question of my identity it's not about my sex or my skin color or my erotic longings but about my relationship to my Creator and the cosmos now for Christians and people of other faiths of course this way of understanding one's primordial relationship to others remains but with the rise in unbelief across Western societies many people especially younger people cannot answer that question Who Am I by reference to a transcendental Realm many have no idea there even could be such an answer and so one more way of constructing identity has been taken off the table the simultaneous decline of faith in church matter to Identity for another reason this one prosaic not only does religion confer an abstract understanding of Supernatural identity it also delivers real life communities made of real life people who worship together mourn together celebrate together sing together work in soup kitchens and hospitals together and the rest of the program so the point here is twofold splitting splitting the human atom into Recreation and procreation has produced a people deficit simultaneously splitting the temporal World off from the Eternal world has produced Souls with nowhere to go and both collapses have left westerners with fewer trusted people from whom to learn this is a critical fact about Society in the west that is not well understood I think and needs to be we human beings like all other animals learn from our kind around us and like other animals when we are deprived of our fellow creatures we learn less in Primal screams I get into animal science that I think Bears directly on this question of social learning so it's no wonder that there are whole new forms of confusion in our time including over Elemental questions like male and female the sexual Revolution subtracted the number of role models who were immediately available and trusted who could help to form an answer to that and simultaneously the unchurched revolution removed the building blocks of community for many lives so in summary today's identity crisis has deep roots that I believe are treatable but they cannot be treated without first recognizing their source which is social and familial deprivation the dispossessed literal and figurative children who have become the foot soldiers of identity politics may not be large in number compared to the majorities in our societies but they will not go away or become productive participatory citizens until the crisis that has unhinged them and severed them from their own is somehow addressed and addressing it first requires understanding it which is what we're trying to do tonight thank you very much [Applause] thank you well Harry thank you very much indeed for that um for that thesis for that argument a number of questions occur to me I'll start with the family because you um you pin a lot really on the disintegration of the family or what you argue has been the disintegration of the family and I wonder how do you respond to critics who say that the patterns of family life are always evolving and that we must not keep looking to the past I mean there have been momentous changes in in human society over the years one thing to the black death and the implications of the fact the consequences of the Black Death the Protestant Reformation the the rise of commercial Society so patterns are always changing are you pinning rather a lot on some on an institution that is simply evolving rather than disintegrating I am pinning a lot on it because I'd observe that in Contra distinction to say the Black Death this is something we have brought upon ourselves that we are also told we should celebrate we are not told that say the Christian rule book and uh the shrinking family Etc we are not told that these things are socially neutral we are told that the sexual Revolution was a great Boon to humanity and one of the things this argument does is bring out the thought that actually it's had a lot of deleterious consequences this is what people don't want to face this is why we hear the objection isn't the family always evolving aren't children resilient can't people just reinvent themselves constantly in a small measure yes but what we have done to ourselves what we have inflicted on ourselves is hurting a lot of us and there's great resistance to seeing that so I pin a lot on the family for that reason not in order to point fingers but just to say let's look at the collective environment here and what's happened to it do you think that the the rise in uh concern about the mental health of young people is directly related to this absolutely I've been writing about that for 20 years because for at least 20 years psychiatrists and other researchers have agreed that there is a real uh rise that is not a statistical artifact of some kind in anxiety depression obsessive-compulsive disorders and things like that across uh at least American young people and less familiar with the figures in in Europe but uh this is obviously part of the picture what is wrong with these kids materially they're not badly off most of them generationally they suffer the same Growing Pains of adolescence that other adolescents have always suffered clearly there's something else going on here and I think it has to do with loneliness and atomization some of the latest studies on loneliness in the west are showing that yes old people are the loneliest of all except for people in their 20s who are lonely or still so we are seeing flashing signs out there that something is uh seriously wrong with significant number of our young people especially and I think it's past time for the West to pay attention to those things and what's going wrong is is a a loss of a sense of identity as you've said and this lies behind that that claim to have things that I can call mine you make it you make that you emphasize that very strongly in the book but I need to be able to say what is mine and if it's mine it can't be yours we're seeing that run through so many social conversations these days yes I think the language in which identity politics is couched tells us something important so in the fuhrer over say cultural appropriation the idea that if you're not Mexican-American you can't make a tamale to take it to a ridiculous extreme to which it's often taken uh what's going on there why are people so frantic to say what is theirs and I think it's it's a regression to a kind of toddler-like State in which that's mine that's mine and you can't have it and the Panic behind that kind of assertion I think can be seen elsewhere in identity politics look at the meltdowns over pronouns what does that tell you you know it's pretty common for people who are more traditional minded or conservative minded to make fun of this sort of thing because it's easy and there's a lot of it out there but I think that the deeper meaning uh is much more unsettling I don't think that the people who adopt this kind of politics are doing it because they're they're evil uh I think they're doing it because they're desperate and the language betrays that and that's sense of desperation it seems is also now engulfing women who this is one of the paradoxes of identity politics which you bring out very very concisely that for all the empowerment that women enjoy in society it seems that they aren't they've never been more vulnerable in other words vulnerable to sexual predation vulnerable to misogyny vulnerable to all kinds of discrimination how do you account for that Paradox that when just as we see we seem to be seeing women emerging in in the fullness of their identity they seem to be under assault or feel that they are under assault I think they are more vulnerable than they used to be for several reasons number one again the sexual revolution has taken out of their lives of protective trusted male figures whether it's through fatherlessness or through the fact that families are so much smaller many girls don't have brothers protective uncles Etc the kind of community on which uh women young women once relied to protect themselves that's one problem I was especially struck by that problem when I was reading through some of the accounts of the me too movement and these stories that young women were telling about what had happened to them because of predatory men without prejudging who was right and who was wrong in any particular case one thing was very clear these young women most of them in Elite uh circles like Hollywood uh journalism these young women the products of our finest schools in almost no cases did anybody report a male relative going to this accused man and saying knock it off that was stunning in almost no cases were there reports of men playing a protective role in the lives of these young women except for a couple of instances I can remember where a couple of boyfriends played that role uh so women are feeling more vulnerable because they are more vulnerable on that account and they are also more vulnerable because pornography is ubiquitous and they have no idea who's into it and they hear very little from secular sources about the idea that this might be bad for them this might be bad for romance this might be bad for human relationships so I think there are threats out there that didn't used to exist I think we see this also in the transgender uh movement if that's the right word in the United States some two-thirds of the young people who are presenting for um uh treatment to become like the other sex are girls these are almost all young women now what would ever give them the idea that this is a terrible World in which to be a young woman so terrible that the only solution is to become a young man again um I think it's a threat-rich environment in a way that it didn't used to be and that's what they are reacting to not that they're conscious of reacting to it that way but I think that's what's going on underneath you said at the towards the end of your remarks that this is a fixable problem but how is it fixable how do we let's take the relationships between men and women or young men and young women how do we re-socialize young men and young women to equip them for the sorts of relationships that might give them a greater sense of of uh of stability or stable identity well the first thing to do is to go after the things that are hurting them and one of the things hurting them is uh pornography as mentioned so for the policy minded out there Prosecuting obscenity wouldn't be a bad start for some of what ale's young men and young women these days um but also we need to push back against what I think is this pernicious story they've absorbed because it's been put out for 60 years now which is that men and women are the same and uh any differences are a matter of indifference there's just a lot of remedial learning that needs to happen in a world where so many people have fewer people to learn from in the first place you talk about Prosecuting obscenity do you think there is a place for restoring blasphemy as an offense or is that going too far that's the part of the questioning where I say I'm not a lawyer and so I leave it to the lawyers to answer that question but it depends on the statute okay as a as a theologian is there a place for blasphemy in a liberal Society I think before we even get to a question like that we so much groundwork to do that may even take that question off the table in other words what about pro-family policies what about policies that make it easier for young people to get married stay married have families have families of size uh of course there are experiments that do and don't work but we need to try as many as we can because we're coming from a very broken place where more and more what were said to be individual decisions about the sexual Revolution these are private matters right we've heard this for 60 years these are private matters only this is only about what private you know consenting adults do no we are seeing the consequences of this new way of living in politics and across society and in I believe phenomenal like the rise in mental health problems so we need first to understand what it is that's ailing so many people going really to the roots of it which is what I'm trying to do here and then we can talk more about how to restore things one of the things I really enjoyed about Primal screams is that you invited three critics to engage with the argument Liller and Peter Thiel and then you in turn responded to what they had to say and I thought that was actually a very creative and courageous thing to do to open oneself to to criticism between the covers of a book one of the critics Peter Thiel points to the problem of economic stagnation as a major factor in the social changes that you map he says identity politics functions as a cheap substitute for economic progress identity Politics as a substitute for economic dynamism do you buy that I thought that was a very smart point that he made because he was saying that if we're wondering about what we now call woke corporations and why they are woke it's because it's the cheapest thing for them to do to throw a bone toward identitarians and make them happy and be uh you know on on the right side of History uh and his point was this isn't fixing anything which is also true but two to his um objection that if we just straightened out the economics the rest of this would fall into place I don't think that's true because if there if family formation for example uh is harder than it was before if some young men who have been living in their basements have no idea even how to start on this thing then giving them the best Blue Collar jobs in the world isn't going to give them the blueprint for that which is why these are I think primarily social not economic issues do you think these things from your research and your observation and I know this is your first visit to Australia but do you think these changes are um are about to happen here that America the United States stands as a warning to other countries or do you think it's already happening in Australia I would defer to the Australians but from what I've heard so far on the visit I think uh something toxic has come across the Pacific uh I wouldn't blame America First for it um it's happening um I wouldn't blame America First for it because I think all the Western countries are participating to different degrees in this thing that has the same roots another critic Mark Liller um made a criticism that was we've we've all sort of covered already but I want to draw attention to what Lilla says because I thought he made a very interesting observation and he was the one who he was what the critic who argued that you were making one cultural fact uh or or event as it were bear a lot of the weight of explanation and he uh points that the great scattering as you refer it can better be explained by first of all the growth of wealth and its concomitant material prosperity and also by what he called the liquidity of contemporary life and The Supercharged capitalism of our age social institutions melt but they never re-solidify into new ones he says how do you respond to criticism such as Mark lilas in particular this point about the liquidity of contemporary life so in the book as you know I argue that this the sexual Revolution is not the only problem out there that's causing this kind of atomization and then I list contributing uh causes but at some point I get frustrated with this argument of well that's just modernity modernity is liquid you know and sort of throw up the hands because the fact is that some of this is ours to redirect if we have the the will and The Awakening it will take to redirect some of these changes um one example one analogy I like to use is um say tobacco smoking um and I say this not to stigmatize smokers but we all know that there's been an absolute sea change in the way that tobacco smoking is regarded in the Western World um I can even remember as a little girl when you not I but adults could smoke in hospital rooms as long as there wasn't oxygen in the room that's how I think that's how common it was that's how accepted it was and it looked as if this thing was never going to go away it was fun the adults liked it it was everywhere now 60 years after that we can see that there's been a great change in the social consensus surrounding tobacco across the world not only the Western World so what did it what did it was the insistence beginning with a very tiny minority of health professionals that this stuff taken in excess could really hurt people and we ought to do something to make it harder to get or less rewarding to use in public spaces Etc so there we have a very interesting example I think of how in the face of evidence concerning harm Society will sometimes renorm itself and I don't think that's impossible in the case of the sexual Revolution I think there's already revisionism underway to say maybe this wasn't the greatest thing for women and I'm talking about revisionism not coming from the churches uh but but from the left there's a very interesting series of second looks going on right now so I am hopeful that down the road we will not just shrug and say you know this is modernity baby get used to it uh I think we might say stop shrugging and let's think about how to curtail this thing when you talk about tobacco and the society's capacity to renew them I do wonder if we ever learn because currently in the United States also in this country and in the UK there's a great movement to to normalize the consumption of cannabis even though there is mounting evidence of the psychological harm that cannabis does but proponent Advocates say um you know it's overstated that so there's evidence which we my point is that once again it seems we're confronted with evidence that something is harmful and I wonder to what extent we really do have our capacity to to renorm um I wrote an essay for the spectator on that subject called more drugs just what America needs because the legalization of cannabis went through with shocking speed and a lot of it happened during the pandemic when I think no state government felt in a mood to say no to anything that would keep people from jumping off their roofs but I agree with you that this experiment is going to look very bad in the rear view mirror and I also think to Mark lilla's point which which is legitimate untrammeled capitalism does have something to do with this big pot is a big industry it this legalization of cannabis wasn't coming from uh farmers who are growing it in their fields it's coming from a big industry and industries can also make mistakes um which doesn't excuse government being complicit in that but I agree with you I think that's another that's a bad one just one more question before we open it up to uh to questions from the audience I'd like to ask you a bit more about loneliness because as you said loneliness is endemic uh in in our in Australia also in societies not just amongst the elderly but amongst the young as families um disintegrate and grandparents are separated from parents and parents from Grand grandparents are no longer grad sorry the Elder they are no longer grandparents that's precisely the problem how how long does it take a society to reverse that slide into into entrenched loneliness which has psychological material and and social consequences that's a great question Peter and I think the answer is we don't know because this Grand experiment that I'm trying to describe this this sexual Revolution thing and all of its Fallout is really relatively new in human history so how are we going to know how to fix the problem of loneliness in uh in the elderly which is largely a problem of family lessness among the elderly um I think all we can do is take note that this is a this is a tragic problem and that maybe we need to look at the other end of life's telescope to babies to see how this problem gets fixed thank you thank you Mary members of the audience some questions um hello Mary um my name is Cassandra how do to me one of the big problems in the west is or has been and is the demonization of men so when we we look at why young women who are very vulnerable don't have those protectors anymore is because I think men are very reluctant to step up and quite frankly I don't blame them because they're constantly under attack for whatever they do so how can we deal with that because I think we need to celebrate the mail I couldn't agree with you more I masculine virtues and even by the way in some contexts to use that word I used several times tonight protective that is even that is regarded as a loaded word but if you take away from men anything to protect and if you say that it is even wrong to have that feeling of wanting to protect then you're pretty much casting them adrift to be nothing but Predators if they're so inclined um what do you make of the incel phenomenon in some meaning um mainly men who are involuntarily celibate who um have been checking out of society they can't have they can't find a job they're not looking for any um any sexual partners they're not um they're basically um checking looking over um you know certain Hobbies like look um like pornography and playing video games so do you think it's an it's a real phenomenon and if so um how can we deal with that in so that you know these people could uh could be looking in a more optimistic path yes that's a great question yes I think the incel phenomenon is a real phenomenon and I think it fits very well with the idea that there has been a social breakdown here young men of uh mating age as you said uh haven't previously in history stayed in the basement playing video games I think that this generation has been deprived of very Elementary knowledge of how to approach the opposite sex they've been deprived of role models for knowing how to be young men and so confusion is rampant let me give you one example from animal science that I think is really telling here I mentioned it in the book so I don't know who has a cat I'm not allowed to have cats because my husband is allergic but I like cats and so if you don't live in the city and you have a cat you're familiar with the fact that some cats can go up trees and get down from them and some cats go up trees and you have to call the fire department because they haven't learned how to get out of the tree this has been studied because it's a mystery and the answer scientists think is social learning the cats that know how to get down from the tree have had the opportunity to study typically siblings and mother to learn how to get out of trees and cats that can't get out of trees haven't had that model before them typically they are house cats who are living you know in an isolated way so I don't think we need to worry too much about the cats but I do think we need to worry about what this says about us when we've taken we collectively inadvertently have removed from the lives of so many young people uh that subtracted Uncle who could have taught you how to play soccer or that imaginary sister who could have taught you something about what the opposite sex is like before you get launched into the Mating Game this is what I mean by social breakdown this is what we're seeing out there what would you say the proposition that as a society we've become a lot less resilient the old saying of sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me doesn't exist anymore that is part of this new intolerance that we're all living with for sure the fact that people are not acting like adults they're acting like toddlers or children who have been mortally offended by being called a name which goes again to this point that uh people are not acting like functioning adolescents and young adults in particular they are acting like they haven't gotten out of this those earlier stages um which again I attribute to a certain kind of social breakdown not a permanent or inevitable one but one that we are witnessing I can think of two books that have been published just in the last year or so in addition to your own that criticized the sexual Revolution one is the rise and Triumph of the modern self by Carl Truman who I understand is an Evangelical Theologian in the US and the other is the case against the sexual Revolution by Louise Perry who is a secular journalist in London my question is do you think that there is a growing backlash against the sexual Revolution growing in our society or am I being a bit optimistic yeah it's not surprising coming from Carl Truman whose work I greatly respect but when women on the secular side of things and women who identify say as feminist foremost start making some of the same points I think that's very interesting and it's also not surprising it's to say that ideas get around and the idea that we are witnessing something novel and uniquely deleterious that's going on in our species is an idea that I think has just been waiting to happen I I would predict we will see more of that Mary thanks for thanks thanks for that uh you've you've described uh appropriately some of the Dynamics impacting upon young people in this space but what to do about it you know so that everyone can agree that yes there is a there's a problem that we can observe the the issues impacting upon young people but there's a lot of calls to action I feel sorry for in particular for educators and other departments that have taken a lot of responsibility on to try to address issues of of of things like consent and understanding appropriate behavior among others that no one can really point me to interventions for instance that seem to be actually improving outcomes for people what do you have to say to that I mean I think the interventions have to come from uh changing minds and hearts one at a time in a way that gets translated into personal behavior and so for example uh I know plenty of not just say liberals but conservatives plenty of religious people who have counseled their daughters to go through college and get the degree and establish themselves in a career first these are parents who love their daughters who mean well I think given the kind of social evidence we are seeing to tell a young woman that she should wait until she's 30 or 35 to really think about having a family is the worst possible advice so one answer to your question is uh ring back earlier marriage tell the people who ask your opinion on this what you think of that not that everyone should willy-nilly get married but the current uh dominant approach to marriage and family formation I think is way off kilter uh so that's one one kind of response in other words I don't think it's for teachers to write the answers I don't I I think as a principle of subsidiarity this has to be fixed uh further down for starters but if I may just interject and say that that will be an example where we're being carried along on the on the tides of Technology because of IVF technology which is improving or changing developing all the time it's just making it easier and easier for people to defer those those decisions yes and um I'm not here to knock corporations but I I do wish young women would understand that when they're in a snazzy job and the corporation offers to freeze their eggs for example as happens so they can be mothers anytime they want to be is the implied promise first of all the promise is false and second they need to understand that um you know women are great in the workplace women are so great in the workplace that corporations will do a lot to hold on to them that a lot of things that are not necessarily in a young woman's interest if what she has in mind someday is marriage and a family Mary some 40 years ago I was involved in student politics and at University we were combating what I would call economic and political Marxism we congratulated ourselves 10 years later that that particular phenomenon soon to have been beaten with the fall of the Soviet Union I'd leave China aside but what had happened is something I think that we missed at the time and that was that Marxism in the universities had manifested into a cultural analysis in which class analysis was actually being applied to the family so in fact you were finding that male dominance became a feature fatherhood was now seen as a matter of Oppression with women being encouraged to oppose it and and children and what then was concurrently emerging was the fact that sexual identity was it was moved from the biological notion of sex xxxy to gender which is a sociological concept and that's taken hold and I just wonder how you now see that playing out and how we now try to manage that because culturally it was become embedded in our universities and it's cascading both through the public and the private sectors uh in a way that's now very difficult to manage great question I think there will be a backlash to all of that I have no idea how far off it is but it's very encouraging that in the United States right now that the parents of America who have kids in public schools seem to have been awakened by being exposed to some of what their kids are being taught in those schools and so there are local fights all over the place about this and it's not all gender ideology stuff there are also questions of are kids being taught to hate their country kids being taught that men are bad answers yes yes but that's to say again five years ago there was nothing like this kind of reaction on the horizon so I I think I hope what we'll see is a trickle up effect that will eventually affect the universities picking up on an earlier question I'm really interested to know in this new paradigm because it is a new paradigm so addressing sort of well we can't change it but where do we go to from now and I have in I've got two in within my family one my own daughter and a niece who are both within that lbgtqia community and one has transitioned and as a family we have to live with that and we have to accept that and we have to um you know pay a certain respect and and to towards that so it's a difficult world for us as parents to negotiate you know this new generation I also have a daughter in her 30s who is in a relationship and I've said to her just have children have them now but you know I'm it's like I can only say that once so so you know it's where do we go to in this new paradigm so how do we how do we address a lot of the issues that you've been talking about in a way that is going to bring them along with us rather than you know turning them further away from us so one interesting thing is that if you ask women across the political Spectrum what they want most in life even now most say marriage and family including all over the left which is to say we've got to count a little bit on human nature kicking in here just a bit my hope is that by putting this record out there that's so hard to talk about but so important that there will be a shock of recognition because I think that that shock of recognition is coming to say you know what um if you want to have children now's the time to think about it which people can cannot always hear from other adults right but I think uh given what we are seeing given that what we are seeing resonates with the innermost being of most women that is to say uh marriage is harder than it used to be children are like impossible to imagine is this what I want I think that internal conversation is happening already and I think we can push it along just by making this case in the Public Square That's My Hope that's a part of why I do it Mary um this is Under The Heading of re-norming the excellent online magazine unheard which Peter Curtis is familiar with I believe had an article recently which was very surprising it said that the hottest club in New York City was the Catholic church and it went on to say that the reason for that was that it offers structure and liturgy and uh you know an explanation of the beginning and ending of life and that was attractive to young people who were lost so I'm just wondering if you're seeing any sort of recognition or evidence of that sort of tendency yourself I see it all the time and for example my husband Nick and I teach in Poland in the in the Summers uh we participate in a graduate seminar on Catholic Social teaching that's Run by George Weigel and uniformly at the most on fire Catholics are are coming out of broken places I also see this in another place where I teach in Washington DC the Catholic information center which brings people in because they have been raised in this uh this sea that they no longer want to swim in and in many cases these are young people who were not exposed to any kind of organized religion but who got tired of seeing their friends and I'm quoting literally from someone I was talking to recently uh overdose or misclass in the morning or have a nervous breakdown about her boyfriend again Etc so the the Brokenness out there is throwing these people into other orbits potentially and I think there is a lot to work with about that a lot of the parents that I come across are not happy with what their children or grandchildren are being taught in private schools but they're they're seeing some of the teachers are activists and the so how much is this coming from an elite how you you mentioned the elite is now a bit out of touch with the reality you know I don't need to marry till I'm 40 and I've got IVF and uh how much is the elite um pushing this I'm not crazy about the word elite because I think in some sense anyone who's fortunate enough to succeed is part of that Elite even if they have different opinions but I do know what it is you're referring to um again it gets back to the problem of what people are taught in universities in fact uh looked at one way the whole dispute over pronouns is a class dispute because if you go to other parts of the country say rural Upstate New York where I happen to grow up you don't hear this kind of language because you have to go to college to learn it you you have to you you can't learn it just by uh even going to the internet doesn't really teach it effectively you have to spend a fair amount of time and be schooled uh with pretty strict rules about how these words are used you have to acquire a new language so in that sense yes there's definitely a class element here yes the elite from which this language issues yes is the the university Humanities Elite and yes they are very uh committed to what they're doing and yes this is a problem but as I was saying it's a problem I hope gets corrected at least in part as more and more parents realize that this is inimical to their own interests as parents [Applause] for decades CIS has been a fiercely independent voice working hard to promote sound 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Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 11,915

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, AusPol, Australian politics, On Liberty, Classical Liberalism, freedom of speech, Liberal Policy, Classical Liberalist, identity politics, sexual revolution, LGBTQ, Mary Eberstadt, Peter Kurti, Women's rights, family structures, family values, western values

Id: L5RYhwYA6R0

Length: 62min 55sec (3775 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022