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

[mdlbear]

Actually, what I meant by that was that I'm old enough to remember those days, and you clearly are not. I remember back-alley abortions. I remember when a couple had to drive across the state line to New York because abortion wasn't legal in Connecticut. I remember when birth-control pills were invented, and how far backward things have come since the sexually-liberated 1960s. I went to high school before sex education. I went to college before co-ed dorms.

There's very little that can shock me anymore, except perhaps realizing just how old I am.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I figured that's where you were going with that.

It's not that I hadn't *heard* of back-alley abortions and coat hangers, though I admit I had not heard of women going to the doctor with them still in. It's just ...well, actually that part was it. The reason I don't read horror books or watch horror movies is that I find it REALLY hard to clear images of horrible things happening to bodies from my mind. They just stay in my head on repeat for a really long time, and I have a hard time keeping them *quite* entirely separate from thoughts of my *own* body.

And, well... some images are more horrible than others.

[mdlbear]

I sympathize: I avoid horror, too. Also most comedy, since so much of it is based on putting people in embarrassing situations. The only movie I ever walked out of wasn't horror.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

I remember when birth-control pills were invented, and how far backward things have come since the sexually-liberated 1960s.

This, of course, is the part that scares me most. And is why the more horrible images should still be talked about. If we're moving backwards, then that's where we're headed...

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I don't remember them (I'm 44) but I have read about them.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

And I live with someone who grew up in Mexico, which has, in Mexico City only, recently legalized first-trimester abortions. In most of the world, it is still those days.