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

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

"if the use of violence is tolerance of violence, and renouncing violence is tolerance of violence, is there *any* way to not tolerate violence?"

Yes.

Peacefulness, which means being willing to use violence only in self-defense or in the defense of those who are the victims of aggression.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

?

I didn't suggest that all liberals are pacifists, only that liberals are more likely to be pacifists because liberals tend to be less comfortable with violence.

So are you trying to say I'm wrong about that?

Or are you trying to say that being uncomfortable with violence makes people less tolerant of violence until they actually try to give it up completely and then somehow they boomerang around to become more tolerant of violence because they're less comfortable with it?

That's kind of odd.

At any rate, they certainly carry the idea to a farther extreme than most people, or most liberals, or me, if that's what you're getting at.

But I've never seen a pacifist who tended to resist new ideas. Maybe a Quaker, I suppose.