Despite the promise of the international community, Afghan women were put up on

podiums for almost 20 years, certainly in those early years and told, you are our partners, you know, stick your neck out,

come out on a limb. We will fund you, we will support you, we will finance you, we will train you,

we will back you, and in the end we'll abandon you and now the

good fight with yasha monk

over last week's For the last weeks I have been telling you about my book about the great experiment. In the first part of the book I talk about why it's so hard to build diverse

democracy what we can learn from the history of those societies. In the second

part of the book I talk about the vision of the kind of society we should be

aiming for, the kind of society we should create.

And this week we're coming to the end of that.

We've talked about the basic rules

which govern our cooperation, about the road of patriotism,

about the kind of metaphor that can help us think

through what sort of society we should want to create.

Well, today I talk about something a little less tangible, something more cultural.

How much of an aspiration can we have to build a meaningfully shared life?

What will the culture of that diverse society look like?

Now, I reject three different visions which I think are too pessimistic. The first is to turn back the clock to try and return these societies towards places that are more homogeneous, places that

don't accommodate the diversity which defines them today. I think that would be unjust because it wouldn't be

allowing some of the members of our society to be full and equal members of those

societies. It would also be incredibly cruel because the only realistic way to do that

would be through significant levels of violence.

...