Category: Religion

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Just To Be Clear…

Just to be clear…

I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November. Nothing radical or shocking in that, I intended to vote for anyone who had a chance of winning who is not Donald J. Trump. It helps this time that the candidate I’m voting for has some policy positions I can support unreservedly. 

We like to dismiss political ignorance in this country by attempting a blasé pose that “really, there’s not much difference between the two parties.” There may actually have been a time when that was largely true, but we have been watching a divergence of positions of tectonic proportions for the last 40 years. One could make an argument for the last 70, but I think it became alarming with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Disclaimer: I voted for Reagan the first time. Like too many people, I was swayed by the optics, by the substanceless bluster. And Reagan made the usual slew of claims that he would not do this or that, to mollify those who, conservative as they might have been, were content with a great deal of what was in place since FDR. 

But Reagan put our economy on the track to suffer recurrent bubbles, resulting in higher paydays for those who knew how to play the market, and increasing disparities in income, and a degradation of middle class security. He was the first Republican president whose policies left us with a huge debt and a deficit that became a political football for the next 9 election cycles, a problem no one in the GOP wanted to solve because it was too good to run on.

Reagan brought a religious element into national politics that has brought us to a point of division as bad as the one that caused the Civil War, all in order to leverage a particular kind of political opportunism that pumped ether and adrenaline into issues that had never been controversial before, issues which went on to become talking points no one wanted to actually solve because they were such excellent campaign issues.

Reagan started the whole denigration of a federal government that had till that point worked miracles in terms of public service since the 1940s. All in the name of dividing the states and permitting a partisan war that served the interests of Big Money.

After Reagan, the allowable agendas shifted to the right and even a centrist like Clinton found himself unable to veto the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which took down the last bulwark between commercial and private banking that led directly to the 2008 collapse. The weak legislation passed to make up for what had worked perfectly well since the 1930s received death blows in the form of Supreme Court decisions on the side of Money, primarily Citizens United, which in the 1960s and 70s would have looked like sheerest nonsense to D.C.

All of which brought us into the era of politics which saw unbelievable increases in campaign spending, an environment in which the primary job of an elected official is always the next campaign (perpetual running), and a deterioration of reliable information sources which has given us a toxic media ecology that has very little to do with substantive policy.

Hillary Clinton was buried under an unrelenting media avalanche which should have had no traction. They kept bringing her back for Benghazi. She never pleaded the Fifth (one of her aides did, but Clinton herself never did), and the last time she sat for 11 hours. The fact is, if the Republicans, who were in charge of these investigations, could have found something, why didn’t they? Because wrapping it up would have taken one of their campaign issues off the table.

We are living in an absurd period. 

It is perhaps a legitimate question to ask, how is the average citizen supposed to know what to believe?

In specific, it’s a huge task. But when it comes down to identifying legitimate issues from bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard.

We have politicians railing against tampon distribution in schools. Really? Are you that hard up for a campaign issue?

This is simple, at least for me. Those who continually attempt to deny voting rights to various groups are the enemy.

Those who seek to strip rights from otherwise legitimate groups are the enemy.

Those who continually tell you who to fear, especially with no evidence to support their positions, are the enemy.

Those who support book banning, under any circumstances, are the enemy.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the chief components of violence are the enemy.

Those who reject science are the enemy.

Those who back corporations instead of neighborhoods are the enemy.

We can go on. And, unfortunately, there are people who wholeheartedly support the enemy. In the absence of a larger perspective, their personal intolerances and knee-jerk fears supplant coherent thinking. All of these things are the trademark today of one party. For the first time in my life I am rejecting any Republican out of hand. The GOP is, in my opinion, on the wrong side of history—indeed, civic morality—on every issue.

And for the moment it appears they are finally beginning to implode from it.

The cherry atop the sundae is Trump. I have never been so dismayed by the categorical blindness of so many of my fellow citizens over something which should be obvious to a child. The man is a trash fire. He managed to accomplish two things during his presidency (three if you count packing the Supreme Court with ideological drones): another enormous tax cut for the top 1%; a tariff program that set the stage for all the distribution nightmares triggered by a pandemic he then refused to take seriously until the situation was dire (which set us up for the inflation we are still trying to contain); and, though this was unofficial, chaining the GOP to him in such a way that he is still telling them how to vote even though he is out of office…which led directly to one more failure in congress to deal with the immigration problems he exacerbated. Why? Because, like so much else, it is too good an issue to solve.

He has stated pretty much unequivocally his desire to be a dictator. For a day or life makes no difference to me, he treated it like a joke, but his actions around January 6th show clearly that he’s one of those politicos who believe he only has to win one election and he should be there for life.

It is part of the incoherence of his supporters that they will not understand reality. Biden has performed incredibly as president, and yet none of the MAGA camp can tell you what he has done much less why it should be seen as bad. The repeated canard that Biden has and is destroying the country is so blatantly untrue, yet people—many of whom have benefited from Biden’s programs—believe in their bones that we are about to collapse, when the opposite is true.

And then there are those who like to position themselves as somehow morally superior who refuse to consider voting for either because, a pox on both houses. This is little more than a refusal to accept how politics function and an excuse to not compromise, without which we have the gridlock we are all so justly tired. Third parties never do anything but sow chaos, at least when they come out of the gate going for the top prize without having done the decades long work of grassroots community building. People like that keep their gaze fixed on the presidency while their local school boards end up run by religious zealots who prefer a high teen pregnancy rate and rising STDs to actually dealing with the problems as things which can be solved and, oh, while they’re busy with Abstinence Only nonsense they’re trying to ban books and shove the Ten Commandments into the classroom. They don’t, by the way, do that because they think these things will help, they do it because they want the problems shoved back in various closets, the costs notwithstanding.

I want more people to vote and for it to be easier for them.

I want books of all kinds available to everyone.

I want women to be equal not just before the law but before the community.

I want wealth to remain in communities.

I want us to stop burning the planet down in the name of a few more points on the Dow.

I want people to be cared for without it bankrupting them.

And I want Being American to mean everyone, not just code for Being White.

I want the stupidity to end.

Now, that last one, I realize, may be hoping for too much. But we might start by actually educating kids rather than just trying to make them conform.

We might start by getting rid of those who traffic in intolerance just to hold office.

Big job. Maybe we should actually start by stop mistaking political expediency for being fair.

So, yeah, I’m voting for Kamala. Not because I expect her to magically solve all the problems. If she solves one it will be an achievement. But the other guy—the other Party—seems uninterested in solving anything. Rather, they’d like there to be a few more, so they have something to get their base stirred up and keep voting for them.

See you in November.

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Hope Projected

An idea occurred to me recently while reading a history of the early christian church (a very good one, I might add). I have little patience with the absolutes advocated by religious sentiment, the whole idea that one must, above all, believe. That to “have faith” is the most important thing. The materialist in me always come back to the same question: in what? That is the shoal upon which any ship of faith I might board runs aground. And without a clear What, the rest splinters and sinks.

But while I have a firm distrust of calls to faith—likewise demands for belief, for loyalty, for boundless commitment to causes for which I may be sympathetic even if unwilling to suspend all critical analysis of them—I cannot deny at least a set of habits that draw me to it. Historically, we see examples of faith empowering people to do amazing things.

I have not for many decades been able to “put my faith” into anything I cannot define. Further, just defining the thing is insufficient. There must be some basis in accepting its reality. I do not believe in gods.

But I do accept an idea of the numinous.

Recently, while listening to To The Best Of Our Knowledge, during an episode about hope, it occurred to me that we may have the whole idea of faith backwards. Humans have a habit of projecting concepts onto externalities. We attribute qualities to all sorts of things that cannot, in many instances, possess them of themselves. We do this across the spectrum. People, cars, boats, books, buildings, money. Luck is a prominent one. Public figures provide endless opportunity for us to project our desires, our preconceptions, our dislikes and prejudices, our sense of self worth.

I have always conceded, at least intellectually, that Faith (with a capital F) goes beyond concepts like trust, relying upon, dependence. All those are conditional.  Faith is supposed to be absolute, unconditional, ever reliable. Faith defies reason. Faith asserts infallibility.

And I realized that there is one thing we carry inside that fits all that, to varying degrees, which most often we take for granted, but occasionally elevate to supernatural status given the right circumstances. Hope.

Hope is a mercurial idea. Part optimism, part fantasy, part will, it is a view of the world that our place in it will be acknowledged and rewarded. To hope is to choose the positive outcome, no mater how unlikely, over the despair resulting from surrender. It is, in fact, one of the factors in getting out of bed in the morning feeling that the day will come out all right. It operates often without evidence. In short, it exhibits all the characteristics of Faith with one exception—it is entirely self-generated. In fact, there is one thing that faith supposedly provides that hope does not: comfort.

Or does it?

My conclusion is that faith is only hope projected. We put it on an external something then attribute that something as the source and then proceed to believe in it as if it actually existed. (Now, it may be that we do this to another person, in which case it is concerned with something—someone—that exists, but there is still that confusion as to the actual source.) The much-vaunted “faith in god/providence/the supernatural/etc is usually what is meant when we talk about Faith.  Also, because so many people have difficulty investing ideas with loyalty, at least in any sustained manner, we personify the idea and make into…

The question always comes back to, “do you have faith?” I have hope. I may be unable to do anything about that, it comes with the equipment. But I know the source, and curiously that gives me comfort.

It also makes me responsible for any misconceptions I might have about matters of…well…faith.

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I Do Not Believe

It was a toss-up what this post would be. Something about upcoming books or…this.

It is said that we are more polarized than we have ever been. I do not believe that. What I think is that in the last 40 years the band-aid has been ripped off and because of the emergence of social media we are now seeing just how polarized we have always been. Look at any period of our history and ask a simple question: were people more tolerant then or was it that anything that might challenge them in their complacency was simply kept buried and they didn’t have to deal with it?

There’s nowhere to get away from it today. Which I think is all to the good, because unaddressed problems, wounds, dysfunctions, and ruptures never just go away by themselves. The rising cry against so-called Wokism is nothing but people who never had to deal with their erroneous assumptions complaining that they don’t want to own their shortcomings. During the last few decades we have seen a resurgence of Lost Cause nonsense in the form of denials that the Civil War was all about slavery. In response, a flood of actual data was presented to show that, no, in fact, it was all about slavery. All of it, at every level, and by the Secessionist’s own admission. The objectors to this historical reality have been living with the solace of muffled history all their lives. It was unpleasant for them to be confronted with the fact that they had accepted misstatements, propaganda, and lies about something they wanted to feel no connection to. Even as they continued to support, implicitly or otherwise, a civic ecology of racism that exists out of all the unaddressed inequities of that soft-focus, romanticized Gone With The Wind* mythology.

The divisions of which we hear today have always been there and we were able to largely ignore them because of the weight of sheer numbers. The oppressed were too few, too weak, and therefore too voiceless to cause discomfort. Except for those times when it became intolerable even for the majority to bear. Eruptions of social justice movements burst forth, often violently, and Things Were Done to mollify the genie. After which things settled back into an uneasy stasis of hoped-for quiet.

There have been strides, changes we can collectively be proud of, but too often it was left unfinished. Too many people have been left out of the solutions and certain people would like to go back to believing everything is fine. The entire MAGA movement is nothing more than a demand for the cosmetics of a misremembered past when people didn’t complain and we could be pleased with our place as some kind of icon of decency…and power. The dissonance of the demand—Make America Great Again—begs the question, especially at a time when we have an unprecedented capacity to do genuine good in the world. And every time we are tasked to do that, the MAGA crowd howls in discontent that we ae somehow less and the country must be rescued and remade according to Hollywood history.

At the base of this is a habit of cognition which, in proper perspective, should not be a problem, but when pushed past the limits of its utility has become a serious problem.  “What do you believe in?” In normal usage, it’s merely a question of conditional acceptance, a placeholder, if you will, until better information can either modify or replace how one understands something. But when used as a litmus test of trustworthiness, it becomes toxic and inimical to the one thing that might save us from destruction, namely our ability to see clearly.

For years I’ve had a problem with the phrasing “Do you believe in science.” I know what it’s supposed to mean and what it often does mean, but I still chafe at it. The usage carries implications that are the exact opposite of what is intended. And it is those implications that those who intend something else know very well and use to subvert the legitimacy of any casual answer. I’ve gotten to where I will not say Yes. No, I do not believe in science. I accept science as a valid and useful tool, I accept the answers it provides, I privilege its product above mere statements of belief. I trust it, yes, but as a process. The question “Do you believe in science?” reduces science to an object, one with innate qualities on par with a deity. It renders ones acceptance of it as a volitional act of surrender to those qualities and its dictates. It redefines the proper relationship and turns it, by degrees, into a faith, a religion.

No, I do not believe in science.

Go down the list. That question, about anything, is generally a shorthand, a quick way to determine the basis for further discourse, but for some people it is a statement of fidelity and admission to an exclusive club.

Long ago, in my adolescence, I became entranced by the speculations of Erich von Daniken. Along with the whole UFO craze, I thought his ideas percolated with a coolness actual archaeology could never hope to achieve. But I was raised by a father who was determined that I never be taken in. By anything. Question. Never accept that we know everything, in particular that I know everything. It is impossible to go through life constantly off-balance by doubt, but always be aware that certainty is conditional. So I did finally go looking to genuine archaeology and found out that the nonsense Van Daniken espoused was little more than the stuff of a good story. I felt betrayed. I liked the notions he put forth, the part of me that preferred a great yarn wanted very much for his implications to be true. I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t, not after I found out the facts. The same thing happened to my affection for UFOs. And Atlantis. And so many other things that turned out to be mere stories woven from a few threads of reality by what I later understood as the practice of conspiracy theory.

How does this relate to our present divisions? When people are trying to ban books, ignoring history, asserting faith over fact, it should be obvious. Our divisions manifest in multiple ways, but are rooted in the desire by one faction to above all believe. It is, perhaps, easier than constantly reassessing. Reassessment always comes with the possibility of having to discard a favorite story as Not Fact.

In the constantly escalating heat of our divisions, one is forced, it seems, to take hard positions just to maintain equilibrium. So I will here state that I Do Not Believe In…anything. Not in the sense meant by those seeking to undermine everything I find of value.

Authority is never absolute and it seems to me that those most invested in proclamations of What Do You Believe want above all to end all questions. Aside from everything else, it is this assertion of absolute authority—in the guise of taking back our country—that I find I cannot support and which the Republican Party is now deeply invested in. Only they aren’t doing it by finding better information, clearer facts, a firmer grasp of reality, but by trying to silence the debate. I cannot accept that and heads the list of the things I do not believe in.

 

 

 

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*Which is itself a species of selective apprehension. There are two ways to watch Gone With The Wind, the most common apparently being as a love letter to a vanished utopia. But there is such a thing as subtext and below the surface throughout that film one can read all the hypocrisy and ugliness that valorized surface covers. In many ways it is a thorough condemnation of the South and the Peculiar Institution and the rose-tinted notion that there was anything beautiful about the antebellum world.

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Intellectual Parasitism

This will be brief. Sometime around 2010 a term entered common usage—Woke—which basically meant be alert and aware of racial prejudice in all its manifestations. It took hold and came to stand for general awareness of discriminatory conditions and practices across a wide range of social interactions. Being alert and aware and, a step further, choosing to speak out about a variety of all-too-commonly held beliefs that slowly, deeply poison our daily discourse, from anti-LGBTQ statements to all manner of anti-Progressive resistance from certain quarters. In the short decade since, it is being weaponized as a pejorative on behalf of the very attitudes and mouthpieces the term was intended to call out. The Right is very good at this sort of thing. Look what happened to the term Liberal. To some people it’s another word for devil-worship and pederasty.

And people who repeat the detractions and attack Wokeism (as they call it) seem blissfully unaware that what they are railing against is merely a call to vigilance. They throw the accusation of Woke as if they know what it means. Well, they know what it means to them, perhaps, but it always puzzled me that they themselves would have to be functionally Woke in order to even recognize the thing they’re opposing. I don’t believe they are. I don’t believe they understand what they’re denigrating at all.

I’m reminded of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  Someone, somewhere, has gifted them with the intellectual equivalent of that delightful fungus and they go forth issuing challenges and putting up barriers and challenging anything that runs afoul of their pet aphorisms and they do so at the behest of the parent organism that has infected them. The basic scenario is this: Person A makes a blanket statement about Those People. The statement is worse than useless, it parrots something they may have heard growing up, but they’re comfortable with it because most of their life it has gone unchallenged. Person B says “That’s not true. In fact________”  What follows is a string of actual data which shows the original statement to be a load of dingo berries. Person A responds “That’s a load of Woke B.S.” and triumphantly withdraws from any potential dialogue that might threaten the comfortable zone of thoughtless categorization they use in lieu of actual intellection.

I have witnessed this. Almost never is any substantive rebuttal offered and direct engagement is refused.

Someone like Ron DeSantis told them Woke is evil and, unquestioningly—because the hapless ant walks around with a host of substanceless heuristics that allows them to walk through life without doubting their own intelligence—they go forth and refuse to learn. Instead they have a new heuristic in their arsenal of defenses that prevents any possibility that they might reconsider a longheld prejudice and rethink their attitudes,

Zombies in service to ignorance. And rather than take any steps to find out if that is the case, they will simply turn it around and accuse those questioning them of being exactly what they are—zombies in service to ignorance.

Look: even if you end up reaffirming that thing you believe, doing a little work to find out if it’s true never hurt anyone. But refusing even to look in the evil telescope or open the forbidden book is the kind of behavior that leads to the collapse of civilization.

But it may not be your fault. Poor little ant, you’ve got a parasite.

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Imperial Theology

I made an off-hand reply last week on FaceBook to a question that has become so common as to almost be meaningless. How can so many people who claim to be christian follow an exemplar who is the exact antithesis of everything Jesus stood for? The usual response—well, they aren’t really christians—will not serve. Because it overlooks too much of what is going on and what has preceded it. My response was that they are Imperial Christians, adhering to what the religion became after 313 C.E. Prior to that date, it was pretty much just one of dozens of religions, having no better claim to relevance than any other. After that, it became the state religion of Rome, thanks to Emperor Constantine’s mandate.

That changed everything. What Jesus said (may have said, the other inconvenient fact being that we really do not know, even if he existed*) played less and less a part of what then unfolded, because it became then an arm of the government, and governments are never pacific. At best, governments are pragmatic. In this case—and it can be argued—Constantine was a pragmatist with an eye toward posterity. (Also there was this little thing called the Battle of  Milvian Bridge, which Constantine won and took the throne under the sign of the cross, which he then parlayed in his justification for being emperor; right there Christianity was inextricably tied to military victory and an imperial mandate) The constant tumult that had emerged with the advent of a faith that had the temerity to declare that it was the One True religion and had an obligation to convert (Judaism had a similar claim, but it was never an evangelical doctrine and kept pretty much out of politics, except in the question of a homeland, so they actually caused little trouble for Rome) had created a degree of civil unrest that made governing difficult. Time to settle things. Constantine’s mother may have had something to do with it. In either instance, Constantine decided it would be best for there to be a single state religion and decree that the others should get in line.

The details comprise several bookshelves of historical research. We can try to analyze the whys and wherefores, what was he thinking, and so forth, but the fact is christianity ceased being what it had been and became an imperial tool, which meant conversion with the backing of the Law. Not Yahweh’s law, but Roman law. That aspect—that character—of what has come down to us has pretty much corrupted the whole thing. When people refer to the New Testamant and the red letter sections to try to point out the hypocrisy of certain people, they unfortunately overlook the real world aspect of christianity, which is that is a colonial movement, an occupier, a set of principles designed to privilege a single worldview even to the destruction of all others. It is a Roman artifact. So when a Leader steps forth who holds up the sceptor of that movement and declares that it will triumph, whatever Jesus might have said is utterly irrelevant to those who follow. They adhere to a conquering religion. (That’s one reason right wing christians almost never refer to the Beatitudes. What a lot of weak-chinned, namby pamby pacifist nonsense! You have to force people to believe and all that tolerance and empathy will gain you nothing!)

All religions that become aspects of government end up evolving into something other than their presumed intents (or almost all, since some religions are designed from the start to be governments). What we’re seeing in the screeling irrationality of so-called fundamentalists (so-called because if they truly were “fundamentalists” they would adhere to what Jesus presumably said—indeed, they would first know what he said, instead of regurgiting updated takes on Old Testamant Angry God theology—but instead they are soldiers in the march to be religious imperialists always with an eye on the “reward”) is a revelation of what christianity has become for them. They are christians, but they are Constantine’s not Yeshua’s.

Personal aggrandisement, either of wealth or reputation, and a need to silence detractors are the hallmarks of this brand. Naturally they will follow a leader who promises both. We should stop trying to shame them into reason and get some explanation from them as to why they aren’t christians. They are. But they belong to an 1800-year-long tradition of an imperial theology that doesn’t really take Jesus very seriously.

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*No, we actually do not. Not concretely. This is the fly in the ointment in all this. We have no “original” documents, only copies of copies, and none of them agree with each other. It’s a morass of supposition. But. My own personal view is that Yeshua bar Joseph did exist. Someone said some things that have come down to us as his words and whoever that someone was, he was a serious philosopher. There are some radical things in those attributions, and if taken seriously would have posed a threat to the status quo at the time. Whether we call that man Jesus or Sam, it doesn’t matter. Ideas came down to us that still have resonance. The pity is that such a large number of people won’t really look at those words in any but metaphorical and ritual terms.

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And Another Thing

Sort of a follow-up on the previous post. Georgia has handed down over 10 indictments, not only to Trump but to his posse of enablers. Glee has erupted in many quarters, as well as continued bewilderment over how certain people can still support him. We keep assuming, we who are pleased to see the system finally working, that eventually the corruption inhering to these folks will become so obvious that supporters will fall away, will, in fact, “wake up” to the fact that this was grossly illegal, illegitimate, and inimical to our country. Some have. More perhaps than reports show. But a significant number of people are still encouraging him and applauding January 6th.

I frankly do not see why this is hard to understand. It doesn’t matter that what he did was probably illegal (I say “probably” because here we have this little thing about innocence till proved guilty, so I’ll adhere to the principle for now, despite my convictions) because that was the whole point anyway. They believe, if I’m reading them right, that the system that holds what he did to be wrong is itself corrupt and illegitimate, so finding him guilty per its standards will, for them, prove nothing. It will be another talking point for them to remonstrate against the system.

Those of us who do not see any benefit in abandoning a system which, despite its flaws, has managed to sustain most of us for over 250 years are scratching our heads at these armchair revolutionaries (which I believe many if not most of them to be) who are convinced that he was about to bring about the changes they so eagerly await and that now he is being pounded by the very system that he sought to overturn on their behalf.

They Believe, in other words, that Trump was the leader of a populist revolt that would, in the much overused and vacuous phrase, take their country back.

I’ve been wondering for decades—back from who? From what?

When they bring out their lists, if they do, it becomes fairly clear that what they seek is a return to some golden age of white supremacy, low or no taxation, and pure christian values. That this is a fantasy matters little because it is the fantasy they have come to embrace with the fervor of a reformed smoker lecturing others about the evils of tobacco and vaping. Most of the rest of us see this as psychotic because, despite the problems and the flaws (and there are many), the path we’ve been on seems a pretty good one. With hiccups along the way, we’ve been moving toward equity and justice and shedding the dross of past privilege. We’ve been participating in building a world that is fairer and better. It might even happen someday. It’s taking too damn long, sure, but the alternative being offered by the Right is largely what we’ve been trying to leave behind.

And that is what his supporters want, a return to…

Fill in your own blank. My point is, stop trying to parse their convictions according to standards you embrace. For the time being there’s no rapprochement. They do not want women to have autonomy or minorities to have equal power to them or even have a safety net if along with it comes support for people they hate. I don’t have to assume this, they’ve pretty much said it out loud, often and repeatedly. We—you and I who do not think that way—keep defaulting to a reasonable person model that suggests they will see through him at some point.

Well. It’s not Trump they need to see through. It’s themselves.

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Belief and Other Matters

By now it should be obvious to everyone that the so-called Pro-Life movement is not interested in confining itself to abortion. They have a definition of it so flexible that some designate birth control as a form of it. The line is not clear. Not to mention that in individual cases there is an evident record of hypocrisy. It’s all right for me, but no one else. It should not be legal.

It makes me uncomfortable.

I do not wish to get into the gears of the matter. I have a couple of observations about the framing issues.

Firstly, the division is largely (though not wholly) a consequence of Belief. At base, if you believe that the fetus is fully human, separate and distinct as a person from the woman carrying it, then you established a moral line difficult if not impossible to cross. There can be no compromise over that. Like other questions of assumed rights, it will not matter what counterarguments are made, the reality is you believe this and there can be no fact that will persuade you otherwise. For a change to occur, you would have to abandon your belief. That would not alter the substance of the belief, only your position in relation to it. Either it is a belief you embrace or it is not.

And no reasoned argument will alter that.

If, in other words, somehow it could be demonstrated that the fetus is not a person, it would change nothing. That would have no validity in the face of your belief.

(To move this out of the abortion arena for a moment, take for example the debate over the Second Amendment. For some, what the framers of the constitution actually meant would now make no difference—the belief in the right to personally own firearms is unassailable, regardless of what facts may be shown to the contrary.)

In any confrontation between deeply-held belief and fact-based alternatives, the latter has no purchase.

However, the chief flaw in the overall Pro-Life argument lies in its deployment as a feint. Again, this is connected to a species of belief, but since it was for so long buried in the rhetoric of “unborn rights” it only recently emerged. Given that a fairly substantial number of those who align themselves with that movement have proven to have feet of clay—namely, many who talk the talk end up availing themselves of the services they so loudly decry—it becomes clear that abortion is not the main issue. They are now going after contraception.

To my mind, going back to those with marrow-deep commitments to the Second Amendment, the reasons for such positions emerge only later. The why of such positions. We should all know now that a sizeable cadre of such gun rights advocates are not insisting on them for matters of self-defense or sports, but because they believe they have a right, even a duty, to overthrow the government. They are nascent revolutionaries. Along with this, there are those who seem to believe they are in an unacknowledged war for the supremacy of one tribe over others. The philosophic issues surrounding the constitution and its presumed properties are secondary to their assumed “right” to defend themselves against the boogeyman of potential oppression. Often in the guise of other ethnicities, immigrants of all stripes, and even political opposites. The insistence on personal firearm possession is part and parcel with an ingrained paranoia that holds that a presumed set of cultural privileges is sacrosanct and will have to be defended against abrogation. We do not have to go far to find historic examples—the entire history of the KKK is based on exactly this kind of thinking.

Such duplicitous thinking underlies many otherwise insurmountable divisions. Within a given group, the supposed “purity” of purpose can be seen to break down on closer examination. It is not a monolith.

Curiously, the one thing that seems to offend them all within their group is the idea that it should be left up to the individual.

So the two issues I’d like to address are conjoined in this instance—firstly, the presumed sanctity of Belief, and secondly the shell games that come about when belief runs into politics.

Let me clear up first the potential pitfall—belief vs Belief. In order to navigate the day, we all have to base certain actions on a level of belief. You have to believe certain things just to get by because there is simply no time to verify every single thing we take on some species of faith. We have to believe that the food we buy from the grocery store is safe. When something goes wrong and there’s an outbreak of e. coli, we have to believe the agencies responsible for our safety will do their jobs. We would go insane to act otherwise. And as a consequence of statistical reality we are right to do so.

(For me, one of the most important things to cultivate in life is a healthy skepticism and an appreciation of doubt. Doubt is essential. I was asked once by someone, quite sincerely, why they should doubt that which they know to be true. The only answer that serves is that while the thing being believed may well be innately true, it is our ability to understand and interpret what it is that we must always doubt. That we have it right is the necessary question. I have no doubt the universe is real and operates according to certain principles. What I must always doubt is my ability to know and understand what those principles are and how they operate. What the True Believer seeks is to eliminate doubt altogether. I do not know if it laziness or impatience or insecurity, but I find this the most baffling aspect of such a position.)

In the back of our minds, though, it is conditional. Under certain extraordinary circumstances, we are also right to suspend our belief in all this, at least temporarily.

I’m not talking about that kind of practical assumption of reliability.

I’m talking about the moment belief becomes Belief, which is a different order perspective. It is the conviction that in all instances under all conditions, Something Is Always True and Reliable, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. With Belief comes intransigence. With Belief comes a conviction that one is being lied to by those who do not share said Belief. With Belief comes a rejection of evidence arbitrarily, based on how it may or may not conform to the scaffolding of Belief.

With Belief comes a vein of conviction, often constrained but always there, that anyone living otherwise is a potential if not actual enemy. And because of the presumed lies and the nonconformity and the absence of like-mindedness, any level of duplicity is justified because this is a war. In other words, Crusade is an acceptable response to differences of opinion and an insistence that there is more than one way to live one’s life.

Most of the attributes of a personal view of life well lived have long since subsided into minor things that cause little friction between people. All that is required for social harmony is a modicum of attention and respect for differing choices. We do not see seismic convulsions over dietary differences (although it may be possible to imagine one over the omnivore vs vegan question). We simply recognize differences and do not impose a monolithic preference.

Underlying and permeating this level of Belief is a deep and often unexamined insistence that the world conform to our expectations. That contrary positions be extirpated. That differences over key issues be eradicated. That everyone should be the same. And underlying that is the assumption that the Believer has the right viewpoint and has not only the right but the obligation to impose it on everyone else.

Mostly, this rarely rises above an ongoing anxiety that things do not conform.

But the central tension resides in a refusal to acknowledge that those who do not share your Belief have a right to hold their own.

We come now to where it erupts into conflict, namely social policy.

We’re seeing another example in Oklahoma right now, where a debate over the opening of a new—religious—charter school is unfolding because public funding is involved. I understand the concerns of both sides of this argument, and have felt personally for years that this is a conundrum with an easy solution, at least in terms of policy. My solution, however, would have the added consequence of driving partisans into the open to declare their actual intent. People have a tendency to camouflage their true desires, probably because a bold statement will be met with bold resistance. We live in an era in which major policy demands are too often couched in euphemism or hidden inside secondary or tertiary issues in order to slip the real goal in like a trojan horse. To state baldly that you want a school where children are spoon-fed religious ideology is a non-starter. So all the other reasons for establishing a separate, non-public institution are given. (My solution? Include religion in public schools, as part of history or even separately as a class on World Religions. Teach them all, give them all equal time. I suspect the howl of protest would quick strip the veneer of First Amendment concerns touted by partisans of a given creed.)

This is where Belief comes into conflict with the World. Belief dictates a preferred state, a template of how things ought to be, and where possible informs a drive to make the world conform. Giving equal time and respect to competing Beliefs is simply nonsense against such deeply held desire.

In a democracy, it is the back-and-forth that we recognize as the Will of the People that undermines any and all such attempts at enforced conformity. This is a brute-force method, of course, and too often satisfies no one, but it allows for the one thing that does effectively alter Belief—experience.

Even a cursory look at history shows that once deeply-held Beliefs have changed significantly, that the unquestioned givens of one period are the subject of bewildered speculation now. The only thing common to all this is experience, which erodes the details and eventually forces what we know to be true to change to accommodate a world that apparently had never been what the Beliefs of the Day said it was. Time and experience work like tides to alter and sometimes obliterate Beliefs.

Which understanding serves only to underscore the impermanence of them. We are taunting fate to insist that we must hold fast to ideas in the face of a reality that cares nothing for our wishes.

But then we come to the most intransigent aspect of Belief and that is where it coincides, reifies, and validates Identity. Our Beliefs, we imagine, are who we are.

What we have done historically in this country could be described as a series of holding actions, one part of the community erecting barricades to another until something new emerged from the confrontation. This has happened repeatedly and rarely without pain. The one thing that makes it all seem different now is our ability to see it as it happened, even if we are not directly involved. And that seeing elicits an opinion, a stand. The buffer of long communication has eroded to almost nothing. In many ways, this is a good thing. We have no excuse being surprised by injustices happening somewhere else. But the erosive effect on Belief has also accelerated. We are trying to establish that which will not change, under the assumption that principles are eternal. Well, perhaps some may be, but their formulation and the conditions in which they are expressed are not. What they are is water. Water is always water but the way it flows, where it rests, its very manifestation is mutable.

What makes this all the more difficult is the fact that there are dispassionate forces willing and able to take advantage of these differences to exercise power. I say dispassionate, but only in very specific aspects—those who crave power could actually not care less for the specifics of a given Belief. If they could get what they want by fostering and manipulating completely different sets of Beliefs, they would. All they want is the chasm between partisan advocates into which they may step and benefit by the conflict.

And we let them, because we are blinded to that by the nature of the Beliefs they exploit to their advantage.

I’m examining all this in order to find a way to navigate the current landscape. It has always bothered me when reason, backed by fact, fails to persuade. It took a long time for me to realize that I was not facing a reasoned position, but an expression of Identity that cannot yield, not without fundamentally changing its own nature. That is a tremendously difficult ask. It may or may not help to understand that eventually, the separation itself will yield to the erosion of experience. When some one or some group thrusts their Belief into a question that bears on people with whom they disagree, such disagreement a consequence of those same Beliefs, it comes down to a matter of assertion alone. Commonalities go by the wayside until—finally—experience erodes the division enough that some kind of compromise or altered perspective has a chance to manifest. In the meantime, other factors enter into the argument that most of time alter the question sufficiently that it becomes a new issue.

This is not conclusive. I’m still working all this over. But my inclination is to reject the assertions of those who offer only the testimony of their Belief as sufficient argument to impose their views on everyone.

I’ll come back to this in future.

 

 

 

 

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Eyes Open, Mind Engaged

To me, that is the definition of Woke. I’ve been bemused by the backlash of people who, without too much interpretation, are obviously complaining about something else loudly hurling “Woke!” as if it is a pejorative. It’s not that they have a legitimate argument, it is that they are discomfited by the implications and wish to go back to pretending there is nothing to be woke to. It’s not even subtle.

Consider one of the consequences of the backlash—the attempt to ban books. Now, this is nothing new. Banning books that unsettle the comfortable is a long American tradition, quite often less political than the kindred forms of censorship practiced elsewhere. We don’t usually protest books here because of political ideology so much as out of a reflexive defensiveness of cherished myths. Some of these are family stories left unquestioned for generations, some of them are the kind of origin stories surrounding the establishment of this or that institution. In most cases, people have embraced these stories and incorporated them into their sense of self, their identity, and when the story is challenged, their apprehension of Who They Are is called into question.

Somewhere along the way the practice of review has either been abandoned or was never inculcated. It comes as a shock that perhaps they should never have accepted uncritically all the things they were fed as children.

But I suspect the most violent reactions are coming from those who perhaps sense the truth beneath the myth and simply do not want to accept it. They do not want to feel responsible. Maybe their concept of a Good Life depends on those myths. Whatever.

Once, in conversation with acquaintances who were very proudly Catholic, the question was raised (by them) “just what was the Reformation all about?” I took it at face value and said, “Many things, but the trigger was over Indulgences.” “What are those?” When I explained what a Plenary Indulgence was, they regarded me with the blank expressions of the never-before-informed. They didn’t believe me. I had to be misinformed. Why would the Church do that? Why would people believe these things would work?

The facts opened a shelf-full of cans of worms that required a profound revision in their understanding of the institution in which they had invested a great deal. Delving into all that threatened their sense of well-being in their self-identification as Catholics. The fact that, as members of that institution, they not only did not know about significant parts of Church history but strenuously did not want to know, dismayed and saddened me, but it served as a good example as the kind of mindset we encounter in those most stridently condemning Woke-ism.

But I have rarely seen a clearer example of “getting it wrong” than this. It is sharper, more clearly delineated, than its predecessor, the rejection of so-called Political Correctness, which was also misunderstood, mostly by those who simply did not want their assumptions about history and culture and politics and personal identity called into question. They did not want to be reminded, held to account, called on the carpet, or simply be required to do the work of realignment necessitated by an acceptance of realities not in evidence in their own lives.  Political Correctness devolved at times into a game of constantly revising what things were called. That, of course, should have been merely a consequence of revising our understanding of relationships, taking into account the realities of others, but that’s complicated and tedious and hard and for people who never internalized actual learning but skidded by on doing well on tests and knowing how to interview successfully and going along with those in power just to get along, it was a slog and often resulted in long periods of just feeling like eggshells were everywhere in their path.

Woke—and, more to the point, being Anti-Woke—is less ambiguous. Woke is a requirement to not privilege ignorance over reality and Anti-Woke is a demand to enshrine specific kinds of ignorance in order to maintain privileged conditions. Every time someone stands up and opposes being Woke, I hear someone insisting on being callous and stupid.

Except for those in leadership positions. They are not stupid. Callous, certainly, but not stupid. (Clever, but not very intelligent.) They know their audience. They’re just venal. In order to attain power, they’re playing their supporters for saps.

The more you know, the more you can know. The more you can know, the less power demagogues can wield over you. The less power they have, the freer you are. The freer you are, the less you have to fear.

So wake up.

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School Prayer

Over the years, I have modified my opinion on this many times. For a long time I believed it was a non-issue—how do you prevent it? If a student is intent on praying, what would prevent it?

Nothing. Which leads to the next realization that the people complaining about, demanding it, leading the charge against a prohibition that does not, in fact, exist are not interested in prayer in school: they’re interest in School Prayer, which requires public demonstration. What they want is openly-led prayer, as a group, with full participation.

This is not prayer, this is indoctrination. This is taking a position and directing the students to attend to what is being advocated. One major problem with this is that those students who decline to participate will be singled out and self-identified. What, one may ask, is wrong with that? Did you never go to school in the United States? Any deviation from a presumed “norm” is an excuse for bullying.

What is desired is an imposition of conformity.

Well, one might ask again, what is wrong with that? Isn’t that part of the point of attending school?

To which I must concede, yes, it is. We wish our people to have a common grasp of what it means to be a citizen and for that a certain degree of conformity is required.

Which is why this is such an intractable issue for many people.

How do I feel about it now?

Well. I believe the problem is not so much with a relative dispositions of a required set of conformist doctrines so much as that this is not supposed to be what school should be about in the first place. School—ideally—is where we should be sending children to learn how to apply skepticism. We should teach them how to think, how to examine the world, take things apart and put them together again. We should be allowing them to discover, in lightly directed ways, how the world works, what it means to develop understanding, and how to approach life critically. We should be teaching them, in short, how to avoid being duped.

While there may be schools where that level of actual learning takes place, for the most part it doesn’t happen other than by accident. I’ve always felt, at least after reaching an age and a level of understanding that allowed it, that public schools are not there to teach but to produce Citizens—consumers, workers, voters, patriots, parrots. Therefore, School Prayer is just another aspect of this and would be consistent with the programmatic inculcation of the conformity too many people prefer to the possibility of having a population of critical individuals questioning every damn thing and maybe challenging the status quo regularly.

So (again) how do I feel about it now?

Absolutely not. Religious instruction of any kind, unless done within the context of history classes, should be kept out of school, because it is by definition antithetical to skepticism. Which is of course why some people want it in there.

Somehow, some way, many students manage to acquire the tools of critical thinking even through the often mind-numbing “instruction” that passes for learning. They emerge as questioners, as independent thinkers. Apparently enough of them that the proselytes of conformity want to throw this in to the mix to see if something can be done to shut it down. So in the name of giving actual freedom of thought a chance, I must declare that I prefer religiosity of any kind kept out of public education. The fact is, religion depends on faith, which is incompatible in concept with skepticism. Mature believers certainly do find ways to balance them, but it seems unfair to expect kids to find that balance before they are even acquainted with the power of their intellects.

The day comes when we actually teach critical thinking as a matter of course, then by all means, admit prayer. Until then, I say leave it out. We do too much already to instill a stifling conformity.

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3000 Words About Bad Faith

We compartmentalize. All the time. We divide things up so they don’t inhibit our ability to act, to judge, to feel. We don’t even seem to have to learn how, it just develops as life unfolds. The walls, though, are porous, and occasionally they collapse altogether. But they re-establish given opportunity. 

But sometimes the divide between one part of ourselves and another can become toxically entangled. It can cause a lot of pain, confusion. When challenged, there’s a kind of panic that attends to our desperate attempt to put those walls back up, to find a way back to the comforting areas where one thing did not conflict—violently at times—with another. 

The old jokes about never discussing religion or politics at dinner or with strangers indicates an awareness of this phenomena that goes way back. Because established beliefs can run afoul of new evidence or personal feelings or even with other established beliefs. They exist in balance, precariously at times, and we have rules of engagement to prevent the explosion that may occur when one is shoved against the other. Why we don’t do something about the contradictions is one of the great conundrums of life, but most of us discard old ideas with difficulty. As I say, they are comfortable. We’ve been living with them a long time.

But sometimes resolving the conflict is vital. Life or death. 

“My body, my choice.”

On the surface, not a difficult concept, and likely for most people in most circumstances, an automatic “of course.”

Until it comes to sex. (I will stipulate here some muddle when it comes to drugs and such, but we do not so much dictate what can be done with someone’s body but only what may be legally possessed. Drugs are not, generally speaking, Of The Body; they are foreign substances. Even so, regulations regulate possession; we tend not to criminalize using drugs, but having them. Sex, by comparison, is Of The Body.) Then we encounter all the rooms into which people have shoved conflicts, embarrassments, unresolved questions, religion, desire, fantasy, ambition, guilt—a stew of unexamined reactions and complications that remain so because so many of us just don’t want to think about them. Because the vagaries of the act and the desire conflict with social issues and other beliefs which we may not have examined, at least not deeply enough to find the fulcrum of our dis-ease. 

And then there’s the fact that so much of what we feel about it changes over time. It is intrinsically part of our body—all the unmitigated hormonal things we seem mostly unable to control, that once we survive puberty we wish to be done with—and it is often in conflict with the dogmas of our upbringing. No wonder people want to put it in a cage and ignore it.

Until we can’t. 

Now, many people figure all this out well enough to avoid lifelong neuroses, therapy, or self-loathing and live lives wherein sex is an organic part of who they are. Most of them do this well enough that quite often the struggles and conflicts may be forgotten. So much so that when they pop up in others and lead to erratic or irrational behavior, we’re surprised and unsure how to deal with the results. And if these conflicts erupt into the public forum, we find ourselves in the awkward position of defending positions with which we are only tenuously familiar.

But suddenly we find our lives being intruded upon and our own sense of what we presume to be our rights challenged in ways that catch us off-balance. Because—compartmentalization being what it is—the challenges do not always come at us straightforward. They are often couched in terms designed to mask deeper issues.

“My body, my choice.” We have, at least in this country, and more generally in the religious traditions to which we are heir, treated sex like a thing apart, a separate something that is not to be admitted as part of who we are. In popular culture it is often portrayed as a sort of prize, to be won, a reward in certain circumstances, but in too many instances as property, a commodity, a thing that can be owned. It is a thing that happens to us, a thing that takes control of the aspect of ourselves we do consider as who we are. We make excuses for it, treat it like a lapse, a mistake, we hide it, we use it to extort, intimidate, smear, manipulate, like it’s a drug or a demon or anything other than an intrinsic part of our own identity. 

You can trace this all in the hypocrisies on exhibit. People who believe contraception is “wrong” and yet, after fifteen years of marriage have only one or two children; those who publicly decry infidelity, yet carry on affairs which they pretend don’t happen; women who picket clinics and then avail themselves of those very services when they are “caught.”

“Caught.” An archaic but telling euphemism describing an unwanted pregnancy. It encapsulates the issue nicely. Unpacking it reveals all the incommensurable elements, the contradictions, false assumptions, and judgements that permeate this matter. She did something she should not have and got “caught.” Meaning becoming pregnant. Which of course makes pregnancy a punishment. Combined with the attitude expressed by many who condemn abortion—or birth control of any kind—that such things are “letting them get away with it.” Get away with what? Having sex? Being sexual? Why should that be something about which anyone other than the consenting participants have any say?

A man I worked with when I was 20 took pains once to describe to me how at one time he suspected his wife of cheating on him. It was a fraught period in his marriage but he found out his suspicions were groundless. “I didn’t have to kill her,” he concluded. A few months later he had to go on a business trip with the company owner and he gleefully looked forward to it, that he would have the opportunity to “grab a piece of ass” while he was away. I looked at him in some dismay. I reminded him of what he had said about his wife’s fidelity. He dismissed it by claiming this was different. When I asked how, all I got was a puzzled stare, like I should just know.

“Grab a piece of ass” is another one those euphemisms that explains so much when you unpack it. Firstly, it reduces an essential element of another person to an object. It abstracts out the “thing” from the person who has it. It turns that thing into an object that the woman only seems to carry around. He wasn’t going to find a person to make love with, he was going to make use of her genitals, which are somehow Not Her, or perhaps simply not hers. There are many of these turns of phrase, which do the work of rendering the components of sex isolated from the person who has them. Some of this attaches to the male sexual apparatus (“my dick has a will of its own”), but not nearly as much and not to the degree that women’s sex organs are so rendered.

By so doing, though, possession is established as the essential element in what amounts to a kind of third party transaction. To underscore what I’m suggesting, the history of prostitution, especially in the modern era, reinforces the assertion that women have only provisional ownership of their genitalia. 

Which does make the whole thing a kind of property rights issue, based on an inability to see ourselves as whole beings that are, as part of that wholeness, sexual.

Why is this important in the current climate?

Because it also, by extension, sets pregnancy apart from the woman, defines it as a thing separate from her Self, that once that condition is established she no longer is meaningfully in possession of either her body or her pregnancy.

There is a pathology to this which seems pernicious. It is bound up with a resistance in our culture to not “own” our sexuality. Since the Sixties and the so-called Sexual Revolution, there has been a reaction to perceived obscenity, lewdness, promiscuity, and permissiveness that saturates the Culture Wars. This is where it manifests. It reduces sex to the social equivalent of taking drugs, making it a separate practice from what is “normal.” When the practical distribution of contraception for women became common, the discussion came closer to what was really at issue. The insistence by social conservatives that contraception be banned, returning sex to something fraught with the risk of “getting caught” tells us what is really going on. Sex must not be normalized as something innate to what it means to be human. 

(But marriage! Well, yes, but that’s an arrangement. Sex is implicitly offered as both reward and excuse for getting married.)

The fact that the anti-choice movements feel they have a moral right to impose their objections on everyone undercuts any legitimate moral rationale. This is not about morality but about ownership.

The fact that many anti-choice advocates are willing to make exceptions in the case of rape or incest underscores this even further. Sex, in this formulation, is something that “happens to” a woman. Therefore the unwanted product of it can be seen as a separate, utterly alien manifestation ruled by “special conditions.” The idea that sex is an organic expression of a woman’s sense of self is, in this formulation, incommensurable with the “happens to” concept. (In rape trials, the fact that a woman’s manner, history, apparel, so forth are used as defense of the rape underlines this attitude. In order to be found “innocent” she must be seen as without her own sexual identity.)

Bringing this to the whole abortion issue, wherein a fetus is argued to be fully human, we can see how it plays out. In this, the woman does not—cannot—be entirely self-possessed. If she is, then the pregnancy is inseparable from her. It is something of herself. It is her body, producing a condition. It is, in a way, Her. Which gives her agency over it.

It is not a separate thing which can be granted agency by social decree. Which is what the anti-choice crowd would assert, going directly back to the initial assumption that her sexuality is not intrinsic to her identity—it is this Other Thing which by custom, tradition, and even legal precedent is given special acknowledgement defining it as an object that can be owned.

And traditionally, owned by someone other than herself, either her father, her husband, or in the current assertion Society. Anyone but herself. This can only be asserted by denying that it is an inextricable part of her.

If pregnancy is an emergent condition, with a potential if carried through, but primarily an expression of a woman’s Self, then there is no moral or ethical basis for denying her the choice to either proceed or terminate. It is as much Her as her lungs, stomach, heart, bones, and we grant her agency over those by implication in the instances of organ donation or elective surgery or DNR mandates.

If pregnancy is a separate object, something other than and outside her, then she does not “own” it and can claim no agency over it.*

But we can only assert that if we strip away her right to Self entirely, effectively reducing her to slavery, indeed all way to machine-hood.

If we agree a Woman is an individual with rights to self-determination and agency, then it is impossible to morally assert the kind of authority over her that would deny her the right to her sexuality and all that attaches to it.

Which means that this issue is not wholly, possibly not even initially, about the so-called unborn.

Which of course is now being demonstrated in the raft of anti-choice laws being touted to constrain us on several fronts directly to do with personhood and matters of self-determination emergent from an acknowledgment that sexuality is an irreducible aspect of identity. Of Selfhood.

What this comes down to is a recognition that the separation of primary aspects of ourselves is a form of distancing that allows for the intrusion of third-party control, which cannot remain isolated to only that aspect but eventually expands to become control over the whole Self. That in this instance, the feelings, desires, thoughts, and apparatus of a woman’s sexuality must be seen to belong entirely and only to her, as essential elements of her sense of agency; that all of this cannot be possessed and therefore controlled by third-party forces. And if that is the case, the use and condition of those components cannot be selectively determined by anyone else because to do so necessarily leads to such intrusive determination of her entire Self. That such autonomy being necessary as both precondition and purpose of free will within any legal context seeking to hold as a necessary part of democracy, with personal liberty as its intent and justification, then it cannot be tolerated that such autonomy and agency be selectively restricted by common law, regardless of the condition or use to which the individual defines as personal prerogative.

We may not therefore seek to dictate personal choice in matters of sexuality or its concomitant aspects by selective legislation beyond the commonly understood social limits regarding assault if we wish to maintain the image of a free society with guarantees of individual liberty.

The current threat to outlaw abortion and the associated attempts at controlling and/or outlawing contraception and all other movements to bar a host of sexual/gender freedoms (trans rights, same sex marriage, etc) are fundamentally anti-democratic, authoritarian, and unsupportable by any legitimate theory of liberty.

Finally, to put this in an even larger context, we must look at the broad goal of the entirety of the Civil Rights movements of the last—well, for the sake of definitional efficiency, since the end of WWII. What all such movements share in common is an assumption of the freedom of association. The self-evident freedom to associate with whom and how we choose. That segregation, either by race, class, or sex, are anti-democratic and a denial of any concept of individual liberty. The upheavals of the last 70 years all come down to this fundamental freedom, and the current struggle over individual autonomy and the self-definition of the individual and the agency accorded to each of us, here exemplified by the anti-choice movement, is axiomatically autocratic and authoritarian and cannot be isolated in its effect to a narrow aspect of our individual Self.+

Lastly, it is evident from the wider context that all of these limiting attempts are being done in bad faith. Laws are being advocated on the basis of a single thing that have as their ultimate goal several other consequences having little to do with the primary justification. The “innocent” are not being protected by any of this. “Innocence” in this case refers only to a condition wherein all other aspects of individual autonomy and agency are absent. It is, rather, an idealized concept that is being imposed exclusively for the purposes of control. Clearly, based on the general lack of advocacy and support for most childcare proposals, “innocence” here refers to that which does not have a presence in the world. In other words, that which is not an individual. Bad faith. **

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*Of course, if that is the case, that we are defining the pregnancy as a separate thing, like an infection or a disease or a surgical implant, then bodily autonomy enters into the discussion from a different direction, namely that no one has the right to “implant” a foreign object into anyone without permission. And then we are right back to realizing that this is in no way about protecting the unborn but about denying women autonomy and agency—because we would have to make a special case for this particular “foreign object” to override her ability to say what can be done with and in her body.

+ In the attempt to define a fetus as a separate individual for the purpose of legislating restrictions on the autonomy of a woman, the argument fails on its face, firstly because it is not a separate individual but until born it is an expression of her body and her self, but secondly because in order to assert such restrictions you must first strip her of autonomy—her freedom—by limiting the definitional parameters of liberty for her and removing agency from her as an individual. It is functionally illogical to base presumed liberties on the constraint of liberty of someone else. And by liberty I refer to matters of self identity and freedom of association. There may well be attempts to example other forms of action which can be construed as expressions of autonomy—for instance, theft, assault, murder—and therefore be protected as such, but this fails by the simple metric that these actions and expressions also require the stripping of someone else’s liberties in order to occur and by definition cannot be confused with legitimate and moral expressions of individual agency within a free society.

**A clearer statement on this could not have been made than that by the Alabama state senator Clyde Chambliss who said at a hearing “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” His concern is not for “life”—in this case fertilized eggs in vitro—but for pregnant women. He expressed no concern here for the loss of “innocent life” but for the idea that a woman might do something about her pregnancy. Which is pretty much tacit admission that the fetus and the woman are not independent entities, but a holistic organic system. Which means that the only rights at issue are the woman’s and in this formulation they are being specifically targeted. Senator Chambliss exhibits no deep philosophical position in this statement but a naked rejection of individual—female—agency.