Maybe this is old news to the rest of the world

[catsittingstill]

But I've been thinking about what I perceive as the two basic responses to new ideas.  Some people tend to embrace them.  Some people tend to resist them.  And this, it seems to me, is the basic liberal/conservative divide.

It's my perception that over the past couple of centuries the general consensus has been becoming less and less tolerant of violence.  It's my further perception that at any given time, people who tend to embrace new ideas seem to be less tolerant of violence than people who tend to resist new ideas. 

Hence liberals are more likely to be pacifists, less likely to trust violence employed by the military or the police, less likely to accept corporal punishment of children as good and normal (and likely to have a lower tolerance for higher-violence punishments).   Earlier liberals were more likely to fight slavery in part, I think, because they had less tolerance for the violence necessary to enslavement.  And liberals are more likely to oppose the use of torture.

The New York Times has a piece today, written by a retired gynecologist who began practicing while abortion was still a crime.  He saw the deadly aftermath of botched illegal abortions that desperate women risked their lives to get. 

The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous “coat hanger” — which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it.
                                                                                                    Waldo M. Fielding, M.D. New York Times 3 June 2008

And the self-violence these women suffered in a life-and-death attempt to terminate their unwanted pregnancies make me wonder--is part of my desire to avoid returning to those times rooted in my discomfort with violence?  And is part of the social conservative's general desire to return to those times not just a desire to roll back the massive social changes in the status of women, but also rooted in their greater comfort with violence?

Comments

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

If you're right, then we're all doomed. Our advanced, peaceful civilization is no match for their primitive weapons.

Put another way, it's heartbreakingly easier to destroy something violently than it is to create.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, but my hope is they will, however slowly and reluctantly, be dragged after those of us who embrace new ideas.

Even most conservatives are uncomfortable with slavery now.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

That's what they said to Gandhi.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Aigh. I need to go and bury myself in stuffed animals for a wile. Argh aigh aigggh.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry. My mimmoths are all crowded around the screen trying to make you feel better.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

dont feel bad vixy. if you use a credit card by axident you can always cansel a transakshun.

oh thag wants to say something

shemciwnto ddddd

well what he sed was 'thag[bang] thag thag thag.' but he sed it very emfaticly.

[mdlbear]

I just realized how terribly young you are.

I didn't notice any hill...

[billroper]

I don't think it's a violence thing, to be honest. I think that for most abortion opponents, the question revolves around "When does human life begin?"

If you believe Roman Catholic teachings, human life begins at the moment of conception (earlier even than implantation). I'm not Catholic myself, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that human life does not begin until the baby is out of the birth canal (which I understand is only a position that would be held by only some of the pro-choice folks). This is why I have a problem with intact dilation and extraction, a.k.a. partial-birth abortion -- it's simply a procedure which appears to me to be too darned close to infanticide for my taste. (And pretty violent, all things considered.)

And while I understand that there are people who say that I'm not qualified to have an opinion on the subject, because I'm male, I disagree. I'm allowed to have an opinion, because I'm human.

Someone once told Gretchen that she was not allowed to have an opinion on abortion because she wanted kids. Excuse me?

I'm in the muddy middle on abortion. I'd prefer that it wasn't a problem, but it is. And given that, I'd like the number of abortions to be small -- implying effective birth control -- and the timing to be early, because the earlier the abortion is during the pregnancy, the less likely that it is that we've terminated a human life, based on my understanding of what it means to be human.

(Note that I have no problem with abortion in horrible cases such as anencephaly, because I can't define the poor thing as being human since it lacks a functioning human brain.)

Does this make any sense? I'm not trying to change your mind; simply trying to help you understand what motivates your opponents.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I think there's a language thing involved here that, while some people might dismiss as splitting semantic hairs, I think is fundamental to really understanding the question. I argue that the question is not "when does human life begin", it's "when does personhood" begin". I can't disagree that a fertilized human egg is human -- it's certainly not of any other species. I can't disagree that it is alive. But I do not believe that it is a person.

I think that a large fraction of the population has an unquestioned assumption that "human" and "person" are one and the same, and I really wish that we could collectively question the assumption. I'm not demanding that the rest of the world accept my definition of personhood, but I wish they'd think about whether it's the same as 'biologically human'.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

The problem is, life starting at conception is stupid. Do identical twins share a soul? Do chimeras contain two souls? Not to mention the, what, 50% of conceived eggs that fail to implant properly and just wash away? Obviously all of medical science needs to be focused on ending THAT ongoing holocaust if life starts at conception, forget worrying about abortion. :P

[autopope.livejournal.com]

If you believe Roman Catholic teachings, human life begins at the moment of conception (earlier even than implantation).

Except, that's the modern, revisionist RC teaching.

Back before the 1850s? Abortion was a minor sin but perfectly acceptable up to, IIRC, 12 weeks. (Then a highly reactionary pope decided to change his mind on that, and a number of other issues, and his successors decided it was a useful drum to bang on: because nothing keeps the women in line like guilt and children, and you need to hang onto the women if you want their children to grow up with the right beliefs.)

And then you can always go for, say, Orthodox Jewish teachings: the soul enters the newborn with its first breath. Up to that point, it ain't a person.

The anti-abortion faction have propagandized us into debating on their terms, which are the most absolutist they can cherry-pick from the various religious doctrines on offer.

Reprehensible. Utterly reprehensible.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a violence thing, to be honest. I think that for most abortion opponents, the question revolves around "When does human life begin?"

I respectfully disagree. That is, I accept that some people are actually thinking about when human life begins, but I think for most of the leaders of this movement, this is only a smokescreen.

Here's my reasoning: when I picture a person who thinks that embryos and fetuses are human, I see a person in a terrible quandary. "Is it acceptable to enslave one human being--a particularly intimate and pervasive form of enslavement that may directly cause her death--to preserve the life of another?"

Yet when I read or hear arguments made by people who claim to think that embryos are human, I never see this quandary. I have never seen them say--"yes, I am advocating enslavement, with deep regret, with the understanding that the enslavement must remain as short-term as possible, and with the iron belief that every effort must be made to minimize the discomfort and danger of the slave, but in the unshakable conviction that the enslavement is for a higher purpose--the preservation of another human life."

Indeed, I rarely see them acknowledge that there is a second human being involved at all. If the woman gets mentioned, it is only to belittle and dismiss her pain and danger, and hold her up to scorn as being irresponsible and slutty. I never see any suggestion that her right not to be enslaved is deserves consideration next to the fetus's right to draw its nutrients from and deposit its wastes into her tissues to preserve its life.

This leads me to think that I am looking at either 1) people who are exploiting the arguable humanity of the fetus in order to make women suffer or 2) people to whom it has never occurred that women are human beings who have a right not to be enslaved.

Fetal development is a gradual process that, in my opinion, doesn't lend itself well to picking any defining moment as the time that a fetus becomes a human being. Even the sperm penetrating the egg is a process rather than an event. Is it a human when the sperm touches the egg? When the tip of the sperm is through the zona pellucida? When the whole head of the sperm is through the zona pellucida? When the sperm looses its tail?

But since we need to pick a time, I pick a time when the fetus ceases to be a parasite. This has the advantage of being a reasonably clear and obvious process with a defined end, and the secondary advantage that we no longer need to enslave a human being to preserve a fetus. I'm aware that other people may pick other times, and I'm okay with that. What I would like to see is some indication that the breathing, thinking, speaking human being involved enters their minds at all, and that they give a moment's thought to her right not to be enslaved.

I acknowledge your right to have an opinion on the subject. But at the same time, I think the people who could actually suffer and die over this decision have a right to have their opinions count more. I am confident that you would be no more eager to see the lives of women you love endangered than to see your own life endangered over this. I'm ...less confident...of this as regards a lot of the In Sorrow Shalt Thou Bring Forth Children crowd, based simply on the fact that the woman as a human being is largely absent from their rhetoric.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

(continued because I ran out of comment space)




And given that, I'd like the number of abortions to be small -- implying effective birth control -- and the timing to be early, because the earlier the abortion is during the pregnancy, the less likely that it is that we've terminated a human life, based on my understanding of what it means to be human.

I'm with you on this. Abortions only result from something bad happening--either an unwanted conception, or a wanted conception that turns badly wrong. If we can reduce abortions by having fewer bad things happen--great--that's totally what I would want. And I want abortions to happen early--it's less morally ambiguous, *and* it's safer for the woman, so I see it as a good thing all around.

This is why I have a problem with intact dilation and extraction, a.k.a. partial-birth abortion -- it's simply a procedure which appears to me to be too darned close to infanticide for my taste. (And pretty violent, all things considered.)

Well, I'm sorry to say it, but I think some people holding this point of view may have been suckered by the In Sorrow Shalt Thou Bring Forth Children crowd on this one. First, as I understand it, the vast majority of late term abortions are carried out when a) there is something seriously wrong with the fetus, like anencephaly or b) the woman's life is in danger. If I understand correctly, these are both situations in which you would see abortion as a sad necessity but the best remaining option. And second, outlawing that particular method of late term abortion doesn't prevent the abortion from taking place, it just means that a more difficult, dangerous method must be used. So the measure didn't even save any more fetal lives--it just increased the suffering of women.

I agree that surgery in general is a form of violence, and that violence is particularly graphic in the case of late term abortion. It's just that, well, violence carried out on an anaesthetized patient, with the patient's consent, for the good of the patient, bothers me a lot less than other kinds of violence.

I think you and I largely agree--and I concede that part of the reason I set my dividing line for human at "born and breathing" is that I'm concerned that anything less will be used as a lever to enslave women and force us back into old social patterns.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The ancients held that human life begins with the first breath, "inspiration", literally. The older rule in modern Western medicine was until "quickening"--when the fetus starts moving in the fifth or sixth month. All rules are arbitrary in this area--we don't actually know. The Christian opposition to abortion began as the defense of life in brutal and greedy Roman empire. It has turned into something else over the centuries. The Catholic church also continues to teach the Aquinian doctrine that contraception is evil because unnatural. It would seem to me that this argument, consistently applied, would make all medicine, and indeed all secular technology, evil. I have come to believe that the Catholic doctrine is in fact rooted in sexism.

You appear to be unaware that any delivery, even in modern hospitals, with modern medical technology, is a risk to the mother's life--IIRC around 1 in 1000. In the third world, death in childbirth is still frequent. IDE is largely used when the fetus is so severely deformed that it's the safest thing for the mother.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

That certainly has seemed--broadly--to be the way it stacks up from where I sit. Those who post from a standpoint that excuses or condones violence of any kind tend to be those who identify as conservative, and the converse is also true, for the most part.

But there's an interesting point or two here, so if I may I'll ramble for a bit. Feel free to stop reading when it stops making sense. Or before, if you like.

There is nothing intrinsically "new" about the ideas that make up liberalism--they may be new to us, right here and now, because to the best of my knowledge there has never been a time or a place where all the beliefs that are called "liberal" were honoured in the observance, but many of them have been around for some time, and they won't stay new for ever. If liberal ideals were to become old, then those who embraced new ideas would be (from our point of view) conservatives, if you see what I mean.

"There are two kinds of fool. One says, this is old and therefore good. The other says, this is new and therefore better."

It is a mind that thinks around ideas, that sees logical conclusions, empathises with others, and can predict conclusion D from premise A, a mind possessed of a full and active imagination, that is more likely to consider new ideas, judge them good or bad, and embrace or reject them accordingly. A mind that resists new ideas out of hand is not, I think, a mind that does that.

But there's an arrogance trap here that it's necessary to avoid. It would be incorrect to assume that conservatives as a class do not have the equipment or the will to consider new ideas in general. There will be people who do, and people who don't, but I don't think we can claim that most or all of the people who do are in our camp and most or all of the people who don't are in the other. I'd like to, but honesty forbids.

Possibly the key may lie in the newness or oldness of the idea to the particular person at the time it is presented. If you are a person who embraces new ideas, who has been brought up by parents of a profoundly liberal persuasion, you might find the ruthless clarity and simplicity of conservative ideas, when you encounter them, quite refreshing, not to mention easier to live by.

But...the same kind of mind I described above, the imaginative mind, is in my opinion the kind of mind most likely to reject violence. To be able to condone slavery, waterboarding or abortion by coat hanger, one must, I think, be unaware of how it will feel, one must be able not to put oneself into the other person's shoes and imagine their pain, and one must be able to be blind to what the consequences will be. So how do the minds of this kind that find themselves on the other side of the liberal/conservative divide manage it?

Perhaps because a reasoning and imaginative mind that can reject a new or a dubious idea without even considering it has to be a mind under superb control.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, so I'll leave it there: I hope some of it was at least coherent.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

You have a good point that the newness or oldness of an idea depends not just on the idea, but on the "ideational" background of the person coming across the idea.

I had not given enough consideration to the fact that many of the "new ideas" I favor are ideas that my parents shared. Perhaps in person I am just as conservative as most conservatives, but encountered ideas like "violence is generally a bad idea" at an earlier age. I need to think about this for a while.

I did not intend to suggest that people who tend to embrace new ideas are people who are more thoughtful and imaginitive and people who tend to reject new ideas are less so, though I can see how I might have given that impression. While people who are not thoughtful and imaginative are less likely to be able to accept new ideas because they are less likely to be able to understand them, that does not mean that only thoughtful people embrace new ideas and only people who are not thoughtful reject them. I think it is quite possible for someone to be able to think through the implications of a new idea while still being emotionally enclined to resist it because of its newness. And vice versa; someone who is inclined to accept new things might be unable to think them through.

Often we use our intelligence, ostensibly to reason, but in the end to rationalize.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

Except for some edge cases, I would expect that violence is not a goal and therefore not a root of the behavior. The greater comfort with violence does give access to a tool for control, which I see as the real goal.

In general, new ideas (and their implementation) tend to take control away from those who previously had it, causing them to fall back on their older tools. (The new idea adopters don't need to; they get their control fix by manipulating "the new thing" or using it to manipulate others.)

Whether this fits a liberal/conservative structure, I don't know. Are labour unions liberal? Ignoring for the moment where they might have learned it, they've often made violence one of their tools for gaining or keeping control.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I didn't intend to suggest that the violence was generally the goal--more that being comfortable with violence makes one more willing to contemplate, or advocate, customs that require violence. As you said, it makes violence as a tool more available.

It is true that labor unions have in the past been violent, though I will point out that they came into being and were shaped by a time when violence was being used extensively against them.

I see the violence thing as a trend rather than an absolute.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Hence liberals are more likely to be pacifists ...

Pacifism is "tolerance of violence," since it offers no path to preventing it on the part of others.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

sigh.

I'm really not sure where to go on this, except to ask "if the use of violence is tolerance of violence, and renouncing violence is tolerance of violence, is there *any* way to not tolerate violence?"

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Moral suasion, which can be effective. But usually someone has to die before to win the argument.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

One of my doctor friends told me that due to public controversy, many medical universities are choosing not to even offer the courses that train in abortion procedures unless a class's worth of med students specifically requests them. (That way it never shows up on paper to be criticized by anyone looking.)

Down the road, this will mean fewer qualified practioners for women who may need help like the emergencies cited in the article. It imposes a de facto ban if no one has the knowledge to do it.

[lola-mccrary.livejournal.com]

How ironic. When I was a sophomore at a Catholic high school in a conservative area they decided that the best way to discourage abortion was to show every student in the school a training film of a clinical abortion IN THEIR RELIGION CLASSES. Even at age 15 in 1972 as a good little Roman Catholic I KNEW that the students would have had the same reactions if they had shown a training film of a tonsillectomy. I felt totally manipulated and very angry. My attitudes about abortion have changed significantly since then (and I'm a good Independent Catholic instead of Roman Catholic now), but the irony is that many of our med students who should see the film I was forced to see aren't allowed to.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

"Conservatism" is correlated with authoritarianism, at least; "Social conservatives" are trying to return to an imagined past; the real past is very different from their ideal version. I generally call that "reactionary" politics, since it is not truly conservative. A few years ago, I wrote this note on conservatives and reactionaries; it sums up my view of this matter:

As far as I can tell conservatism is the attempt to conserve past practices. A thing I am sympathetic with, to be sure...but it turns into irrational stubbornness when all ground has shifted. And it often turns into...

Reactionary capitalism, which is the attempt to recreate the past. As with Reagan/Bush/Bush economic policies, which are apparently an attempt to recreate 19th century economic conditions. Now, just why
someone would want 19th century economic conditions back is open to question but then...

There's reactionary nationalism, where we all try to conquer the world. Fascism, in other words. 'nuff said.

And finally there's reactionary "religionism"--more commonly known as fundamentalism. And that is John Ashcroft. [This was before I found there were Things Worse Than Ashcroft.] Worse still...it is Wahabbi Islam.

What would you have? The changes the world has gone through in the 20th century are vast, the 21st promises to be as dramatic. How on earth is anyone expected to see a path forward if one starts by saying that what has been done in the past is still the best way?

[(Anonymous)]

I see your point. It is foolish to assume that the old ways are always the best ways. But isn't equally foolish to assume that the old ways are always the worst ways? When confronted with new conditions shouldn't we look at the situation and see how the old ways are coping and then decide if we need new ways or not. The basic concept is if it isn't broken, you do not have to fix it.

I do not mean to suggest that we can't improve things that are working so they work better. I do think we need to prioritise so that the fix the things that are really broken before we rush into fixing the things that are working.

To answer your last point, an intelligent conservative is not going to say that the past is always better. He/she is going to ask the innovator to show them that this proposed change is actually better than the status quo and that it is worth the opportunity costs as well as the direct costs of pursuing it.

Donald Clarke

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

Many years ago, I heard a rabbi comment that if the doctors and clergy can't agree on whether a fetus is a person, why should we trust Congress to make that decision?