What are times where more freedom and opportunity are not good things?
Well, to pick a very stark example.... I don't think many communities are improved by allowing people to freely sell and consume crack.
Aside from some biological drives, I don’t think you can prove that women in general and universally are made “happier” by being the sole child/household caretaker and not pursuing a career of their own outside the family.
To your satisfaction, perhaps not. Equally.... it seems pretty clear that nobody can show that the move away from the home has made the world a happier place. Also, having witnessed the biological drives close up, I'm not sure that they should be understated. Ultimately it is the biological drives that I'm talking about. I'm not married with kids out of an act of platonic rationalism.
A lot of women are perfectly happy doing that, but so are a lot of men. It should be fine and socially acceptable either way. It shouldn’t be “You woman. You make babies, make food. You man. You work, you make money.”
I have been over this already. Yes, perhaps it would be lovely if everybody could live what ever life they liked without impacting other people's ability to live theirs. They can't though. Once women start going to work en masse the community that once existed for the women who want to stay home is undermined. A society has to be built around a particular idea of "the good" that is facilitated and encouraged. If you facilitate one mode of life, you almost by definition impede another mode of life. There is nothing value free here.
Luckily, it’s not that way anymore. I would have been miserable trying to pursue a career and my wife would have been miserable being the homemaker. Modern society gives more opportunities to women and therefore men also have more opportunities.
Maybe. As I've said already, most of us have grown up in the time of society promoting these kinds of things. Society isn't just this field of neutral opportunities though. Depending on how society is organized, particular modes of life are facilitated, and particular modes of life are made more difficult. Children are encourage to consider some modes of life as aspirational, and some modes of life as selling themselves short. To me, the question is.... are the people living in one mode of life, with all it's self self justifying beliefs, happier than the people living in another mode of life, with all that mode of life's self justifying beliefs.
Incidentally, one of the explanations for men getting happier and women unhappier is that when men perform homemaker activities, they feel virtuous where as women don't.
No problem. Women should have maternity leave and full accommodation to breastfeed or pump at work for later. Men can change diapers, feed the baby, keep them entertained just fine.
They can.... but does the shift to that being common make people happy? All this amounts to enabling women to spend more time at work and less time with their babies. I'm not sure that that shift has actually made women happier on average.
I don’t know why you keep talking about “liberal.” I am a just looking at the world and society I live in and it is an observable fact that many many women want careers of their own.
You live in a liberal society and are observing liberal women.
I can also observe other societies where social expectations of the genders are more “traditional.” Women want freedom in Arab religion-run countries, for example.
Do they?
If you really look at things, it seems pretty obvious that women want the same options men have traditionally had AND some men want the options traditionally for women. THAT is human nature.
And yet the things that are supposed to make us happier can't be shown to make us happier. When you ask "would you like X" and "would you like Y", you get an incoherent mess. People want high public spending and low taxes. None of these things you will be asking arab women about are discrete things that can be had in isolation. It's like colonizers offering trinkets to the natives. Accepting the shiny trinkets that liberalism offers come with the radical journey of social change that we have been on. Ask those same women whether they want the other things that go with liberalism, that is the price of the shiny trinkets... maybe some of the things that Emily's Cat complains about.
I would hope not because that’s a pretty backwards view. I couldn’t disagree more. If it were nature and reality, then women would naturally not want more freedom and opportunity.
No. That is completely wrong. People are always presented with the immediately desirable side of things. Even then, feminism and liberalism has had far from universal support from women. Liberalism commits you to a long term process of social change. If you just selectively present it as the option of just having the shiny desirable things at no cost and without discussing the long term journey you are buying into, it isn't an informed choice.
The “ideology” arose in recognition of the plain fact that women actually do want the freedom, power and opportunity that men have always had.
No, the ideology arose long before feminism. You see it in heretical Christian sects that then fed into the thinking of the first liberal philosophers. You can trace it back to early Christianity.
We can look to the Arab countries in the grip of religious authority and see this just isn’t true. You have that completely backwards: there is a push to give women equality because that’s what they want.
Well, the exposure to stuff generally leads to the desire for more stuff. I don't deny there is a certain inevitability to it, just like if you give somebody a sample of crack you might find they come back wanting more. My claim though is that this doesn't actually make the world happier, not that if you direct the same advertising and incentives at arab women that were directed at western women you can't get them wanting the same things. Again, when they are wanting this stuff, are they wanting the whole package of liberalism.... or are they being offered an idea of freedom and equality and not discussing what that actually means?
You have already conceded it, you just don’t want to be saddled with the connotations of the words. You speak of a world where everyone had their place and it was some kind of natural order. If this were true, then it never would have changed.
That is not the case. It was a system that worked in the context of a land owning aristocracy. When rule passed to the merchants and the bankers, a different way of understanding the world was needed that was all about property rights and valued liberty and equality so that the old ways of life that inhibited trade, and the exploitation of labour by capital, and the turning of everybody into consumers could be undermined. Liberalism is the justifying principle of capitalism. It's like the Jesuits following on the heels of the conquistadors.
It changed because women naturally want the same power, opportunity and freedom that were only allowed to men.
There is nothing natural about it. In terms of widespread adoption, it's entirely modern and is a product of capitalism.
So your position is that women are being pushed to pursue careers and they would naturally be happier staying home raising kids and taking care of the home for their men? I am afraid that history has already proven you wrong.
No it hasn't. You keep viewing this from the perspective of the market. There is a degree to which the market makes all of this inevitable in the modern world, just as there is a degree to which the destruction of the commons is inevitable. That doesn't mean that either outcome is a source of increased happiness to the great mass of people. Plenty of disastrous outcomes can be the result of people freely pursuing their own self interested, short sighted goals.
Women have been oppressed for all of history. If anything, the long-run has shown us they don’t like that power structure. Women have only started having the freedom and opportunity for the last 100 years or so.
And as far back as data goes, they seem to be getting less happy as this great liberation has gone on.
We have yet to see the “long-run.”
We've had 50 years since the big social changes of 2nd wave feminism. This is like the followers of Jesus adapting to him not returning in his lifetime. When do you think we will get to the "long-run" where all of this starts bearing fruit?
My view is that if every person had the right and opportunity to pursue what made them happy, whether that be pursuing a career or homemaking and child rearing, then I think it’s obvious everyone would be much happier.
OK, but like I keep saying.... if you reconfigure society in that way, the choice to live in the old society goes away. You can't as an individual decide to live in a traditional community unless there is a traditional community around you and the more we move to this liberal utopia the less the non-liberal options are available. Which is where I return to my question, has making more traditional lifestyles less viable while encouraging people into this brave new liberal world made people happier. I don't think it has.
If there is anything that makes people unhappy, it’s the obstacles placed in the way of their pursuit of happiness by people who want everyone to fit into some non-existent natural order.
OK. Prove it. Not that some liberal is offended by having traditional expectations thrust upon them. Maybe show that liberal women are happier than conservative women, or something like that..... or that I am wrong and in the bad past women were less happy than today.
Fundamentally, I think my issue with liberalism is that it sets forces in motion that inevitably lead to ruin, but it's not unique in that. I'm open to being proved wrong on the happiness thing. All I'm basing that off is the claim about happiness upthread. Prove me wrong.
There are no divine truths. If you truly wanted people to be happy, you would let them do the things that make them happy, regardless of your own view about what “should” make them happy.
No, no, no..... I have no moral argument about what path "should" make people happy. There is no "should" about it. If we were talking "shoulds", then I'd probably go with liberalism. My claim is that it doesn't in fact achieve this.
