Monthly Archives: July 2019

The 2020 Election: Is It Love versus Fear?

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On night two of the first Democratic primary debate leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Marianne Williamson gave her closing statement:

I’m sorry we haven’t talked more tonight about how we’re going to beat Donald Trump. I have an idea about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not going to be beaten just by insider politics talk. He’s not going to be beaten just by somebody who has plans. He’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what this man has done. This man has reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes. So, Mr. President, if you’re listening, I want you to hear me, please. You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you’re doing. I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field. And, sir, love will win.

No one should take Williamson seriously in the Democratic primaries. And some say there are reasons not to take her very seriously as a public intellectual either. But I think that that specific statement of hers was not a reason not to take her seriously. Williamson opened up a few possibilities there of no little importance. Her statement packed some important assumptions. We should try to evaluate the possibilities that she opened up. But in order to do that, we first have to recast her statement, designed as it was to be a soundbite for easy consumption. We have to present her real contentions in such a way that those contentions are as defensible as possible, which means among other things as empirical and falsifiable as possible.

Let’s begin with love versus fear. According to A Course in Miracles, known to be a big source of Marianne Williamson’s philosophy, Perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, then there is not perfect love. And The opposite of love is fear. Enough further understanding of ACIM might give me a different understanding of what the author of it (or channeler of it), Helen Schucman, meant by those sentences, but I will assume that what she meant accords with a view of mine: there is a lot of psychological truth in saying “Love is the opposite of fear.” I think that all fears are mechanisms of clinging to our egos and are the causes of all our suffering. (“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” If one does not fear and resist pain, then it is only pain. This knowledge goes back at least to the Buddha.) Once we are free from our egos and free from suffering, what will remain is the love that is always under the surface, and as part of the process of getting free, that love that is under the surface impels us to overcome, or cast out, fear.

Love is often dichotomized with hate, but I feel that hate, and all negative emotions other than fear, would not occur if we did not fear for our egos. Whereas love is not contingent on anything in a similar way. It is fundamental – it is always there, and it is there to be experienced once we overcome fear. Real love is entirely altruistic, in contrast to what Abraham Maslow called “deficiency love,” and when real love is directed toward a person, the attitude is “Love says that ‘it is good that you exist,’ and insofar as I am able I will contribute to your happiness, your existence, your flourishing.”*

So I think there is a lot of truth, in the context of the psychological realities of any individual person, in saying that love is the opposite of fear. And whether or not it is possible for a person to be all love and no fear, I’m sure there are big differences between persons in terms of each person’s balance of love and fear. I feel quite sure that there were Democratic candidates on that stage those two nights who were more loving than poor Donald Trump, and that Marianne Williamson was one of them.

But Williamson is talking about an election, a form of social struggle. Can love cast out fear in a social struggle?

The psychological mechanism by which love casts out fear operates within a particular individual, working in the framework of the love and fear within that individual. There is no such mechanism by which the love within one voter can cast out the fear within another voter. So I don’t think she is really claiming that that will happen. She spoke of harnessing love and harnessing fear. She was saying that Trump’s voters will be motivated by fear, and hers by love. So what she seems to be claiming is that a side whose supporters are motivated primarily by love will prevail politically (or in the case of a war she might say prevail militarily) – will prevail in any social struggle – over a side whose supporters are motivated primarily by fear.

She does not quite claim explicitly, by the way, that her own internal love-fear balance is more loving than Trump’s, but my guess is that it is. And my guess is also that she would not disagree.

She did not say exactly that Trump had stoked any fears, only that he had harnessed them. But Trump has sometimes been accused of fearmongering, and probably Williamson would agree that, whatever fears Trump voters may already have harbored, Trump has also created new levels of fear that did not exist before.

But at this point we have to look at Williamson’s website. Her website says:

There is a growing consensus in America that climate change is an existential emergency. . . . Due to the nefarious influence of unlimited corporate money on our politicians, our government has become a system of legalized bribery. . . . The situation has reached emergency proportions. . . . Everything about American life today – including the economic pressure that leaves 40% of Americans living with chronic stress over whether they can make basic costs of health care, rent, transportation, and education – contributes to the higher trend of chronic disease. . . . eradicating or limiting abortion rights would not decrease their number; it would simply mean that rich women have safe abortions, while poor women go back to risking injury, or even death, in the modern equivalent of back-alley abortions.

These are all appeals to fear. So at this point let’s make a distinction. Some of Williamson’s appeals to fear may be to valid fears. And though Trump may have stoked fears of terrorism, for example, way beyond a rational level, Williamson would probably not deny that terrorism is a matter of concern. To a small extent at least, Trump’s appeals also may be to valid fears. Williamson’s objection is not to valid fears, but to false fears.

One more thing can be read between the lines. I mentioned above my own confidence that Marianne Williamson is a person of a more loving nature than poor Trump, and mentioned my guess that she would not disagree. My guess is also that within the framework she subscribes to, whenever there is any struggle in which society is divided into a love side and a fear side, the love side will almost always be led by someone who is personally more loving than the leader of the opposite side.

So I think that if Williamson were to state her contentions more precisely and rigorously than she did in the forty-five seconds she was allowed that night, they would be these (and I might be wrong, of course):

1. A social struggle, including an election, can at least sometimes be meaningfully framed as a contest in which the typical supporter on one side is motivated more by love than by false fears, while the typical supporter on the other side is motivated more by false fears than by love.

2. 2020 will be such an election.

3. The love side has the advantage. That is, in any social struggle where there is a love side and a fear side, if all other variables are equal, the love side will win.

4. The victory of the side whose supporters are motivated primarily by love will necessarily result in better outcomes than would the victory of the side whose supporters are motivated importantly by false fears.

5. Williamson is a more loving person by nature than is Trump.

I think that contentions 1, 3, 4, and 5 must be largely correct. But what about 2?

Contention 2 will be correct only if Williamson has correctly calculated that her supporters will be motivated primarily by love, and that Trump’s supporters will be motivated primarily or importantly by false fears. But let us look at this.

One of her web pages, as I have mentioned, says:

eradicating or limiting abortion rights would not decrease their number; it would simply mean that rich women have safe abortions, while poor women go back to risking injury, or even death, in the modern equivalent of back-alley abortions.

First of all, “would not decrease their number” is not true. And if she is predicting injuries and deaths in big numbers, based on the past – numbers big enough to justify raising an alarm such as this in her platform – then she is peddling the same misinformation that Planned Parenthood’s president recently tripped over, as revealed by no less than the pro-choice Washington Post. So she is harnessing a false fear, whether she understands that or not. False fears are being harnessed on both sides.

And will no voters on Trump’s side be motivated by love? Again let’s think about the abortion issue. There are tens of millions of Americans who perceive the unborn at any stage as full-fledged members of our human family, that is, who perceive them with love and with an instinct of protection. Yet hardly anyone who supports Williamson’s position on abortion knows anything about love for those young beings. Whatever Williamson’s supporters may know about love seems to enter a vacuum when their gaze falls on the most vulnerable and youthful end of the human spectrum.

If Williamson were indeed to face Trump in 2020, there might be only one issue, the abortion issue, on which false fears would motivate voters on Williamson’s side, and love would motivate voters on Trump’s side. But that one issue is a very big issue, huge in terms of human numbers and disproportionately large in terms of human consciousness.

Note that I have not called Williamson’s supporters on the abortion issue unloving persons. Their love bypasses one big human group because of a problem of perception.

Williamson said in her closing statement, “[Donald Trump]’s going to be beaten by somebody who has an idea what this man has done.” Her qualification to be the Democratic nominee, as she sees it, is a keener psychological and spiritual insight than that of her Democratic rivals. Yet those who support her and all her rivals’ absolutist position on abortion will some day be remembered as the side of history that was unable to see.

* Jason Lepojärvi.

© 2019

 

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How Noam Chomsky Misinterprets the Politics of Abortion

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On the morality and legality of abortion, Noam Chomsky seems to have bought into a couple of popular pro-choice arguments that can only be described as profoundly unthinking and anti-scientific (the bold is mine):

“There is a strong debate at the moment with regards to a woman’s right to control an organ of her own body – namely the foetus. There is legislation being enacted in several US states to define personhood as a fertilised egg.

“Pretty soon you can imagine legislation prohibiting the washing of hands because thousands of cells are flaked off that could be turned into a stem cell and you can grow a foetus – so you’re killing a person.”

But on politics, Chomsky is brilliant, and he is brilliant as well on the politics of abortion. In a recent Democracy Now! segment, his argument went like this: The politicians of both major parties primarily, at present, serve the interests of corporations and the very rich. However, the corporate stakeholders and the very rich do not themselves constitute a large number of voters, so the parties have to hoodwink numerous voters, their vote-bank “bases,” into believing that they (Republican or Democratic politicians) sincerely represent such voters on other issues. In the case of the Republican politicians, a key issue that they decided to pretend to care about in 1972 was the pro-life issue. Any Republican presidential candidate who might genuinely care about base issues has typically been crushed during the primaries by the Republican establishment as being too “outlandish.” Of the candidates “rising from the base” whom Chomsky mentions, I think Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum might have sincerely cared about the life issue. Chomsky views Trump as a candidate supported by the base whom the establishment failed to crush. I would add this observation: however opportunistic and insincere Trump may be in his heart about any of the base’s issues, the big pro-life organizations seem to give him credit for having tried harder, at least, on life issues, once in office, than Nixon, Reagan, or either of the Bushes (members of the Republican establishment).

I’m impressed by Chomsky’s argument, as far as it goes. Abortion was not a partisan issue prior to the late 1960’s, and I think it was more likely the Democratic Party and not the Republican that made the first positional move on the issue, whereafter there was an inevitable escalation towards extreme polarization (at least in terms of the parties’ stated policies). Chomsky does not outright deny that the Democrats started it, but seems to suggest that the Republicans moved first. Apart from that question, I’m open to accepting all of Chomsky’s analysis – as far as it goes.

Chomsky is among other things an eminent philosopher, and certainly there must be a rich range of values that he personally holds and that conspicuously underlie all the advocacy positions to be found throughout the whole body of his work. In some of his writings he has probably approached values on a meta level as well, evaluating different values. But in the huge collection of speeches on political topics for which he is best known, I am unaware of concerns about any values other than wealth and power. He is concerned about inequities of wealth and power, and the causes and cures of those inequities. At least, so it is in the Democracy Now! video. He is concerned about politicians’ favoritism toward corporations and the rich over the rest of us.

Within that framework of analysis, his only concern about the slaughter of unborn innocents is not about whether that slaughter could possibly have negative value, nor about whether the anguish many Americans feel toward that slaughter is morally justified or not, but only about how that anguish offers opportunities for political leverage, particularly leverage to the benefit of Republicans – leverage that will affect outcomes not in terms of lives or moral progress, but outcomes in terms of wealth and power balances among Americans. (Or rather, among born Americans.)

I think that Chomsky misinterprets abortion politics by implying that those politics are only important as a mechanism of progress or regress on a materialistic continuum of power and wealth equity. I would submit that the more important continuum we should focus on is a moral continuum of progress or regress in terms of another kind of equity, an equity of dignity. Let’s call that continuum a continuum of humanization. It is a continuum of inclusion or exclusion of all who are rightfully members of our human family. It is a continuum on which I think the greatest inclusivity will ultimately mean the greatest human happiness.

Nothing could be more obvious than that humanity has consistently evolved in the direction of increasing inclusiveness. And it is obvious to me, from changes I have seen in the people around me as that growing inclusiveness has unfolded, that its benefits have not been a one-way street. In the 1960s, it humanized us (those of us who were white) to come to see other races as fully human; it humanized us (those of us who were men) to come to see women as fully human; and it humanized some of us Americans to come to see the Vietnamese as fully human. A decade later, it humanized us (those of us who were heterosexual) to come to see homosexuals as fully human. And around the same time, it humanized those of us who were able-bodied to come to see the differently abled as fully human.

Chomsky clearly doesn’t see the unborn as full-fledged members of our human family, so there was nothing in his presentation that would prompt him to think about the continuum of humanization. I blame him for short-sightedness about the unborn, but don’t otherwise blame him for focusing only on his power-and-wealth continuum. But the omission of the other continuum badly throws off any evaluation of the overall impacts of the two parties.

A materialistic analysis of history is largely subscribed to both on the right and on the left, both by capitalists and by Marxists – and by Chomsky as well, as far as we can tell from the focus of his political presentations. And yet our material well-being, beyond a certain point, contributes notoriously little to that which we really seek in life – happiness.

What does contribute to our happiness is our moral evolution. I think that a society that has outgrown slavery is a happier society. I think that a society that has outgrown rape will be a happier society. And I think that a society that has outgrown abortion will be a happier society. Some historians on the right say that underlying Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, his real concerns were only about naked power and how the loyalty of blacks could contribute to his party’s power, and say that in his heart he remained as racist as he had ever been. And yet laws, out of whatever motives they may come to be enacted, have a tremendous pedagogical effect. Their pedagogical effect is at least as important as their deterrent effect. Laws influence culture as much as culture influences laws. That principle holds whatever the reality of Johnson’s attitudes may have been. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has contributed to a less racist, more moral society. And I would submit that that moral progress is a greater progress than the correction of wealth and power inequities. A more moral society is a happier society.

When we discuss progress on a continuum of humanization, and discuss the aim of eventual inclusiveness of the unborn, we have to notice that humanization of the unborn is related to, but not exactly the same thing as, saving unborn lives. Because of the constraints imposed by Roe v. Wade, a law aimed partly or entirely at saving unborn lives may be, for instance, an abortion clinic regulatory law that unavoidably masquerades as being aimed entirely at the protection of women. Such a law may save many unborn lives by causing the closure of abortion clinics, but such a law cannot pay recognition to the humanity of the unborn, hence will do little to humanize the unborn. And a law from the other side of the aisle may provide social support for pregnant women and mothers, and thus save unborn lives by lessening the pressure to abort. But that law, similarly, will not pay recognition to the humanity of the unborn and hence will do nothing to humanize the unborn. Such a law will make forbearance from abortion more convenient, but will not make it more morally incumbent. As soon as the funding for the program dries up, parents of unwanted children will go back to killing them as usual, because they will recognize their humanity no more than before.

When Chomsky looks at the anti-abortion stance of Republican politicians and applies his power-and-wealth analysis, he is only concerned to point out that the stance is opportunistic and that it wins votes. Whether Republican policy initiatives do in fact save some unborn lives – a fact admitted to recently even on Rewire.News – makes no difference to him. He does not stop to reflect on the fact that a young person who owes his life to the Hyde Amendment, or to some state-level parental-consent law or waiting period, supported by Republicans, might be happy to be alive – regardless of whether she is alive due to sincerity or due to opportunism!

That Republican-supported laws are saving some lives is unquestionable, regardless of the rivers of cynicism on which those laws have no doubt often floated. And when some of those laws save lives, they do so in a way that pays recognition to the humanity of the unborn.

Republican politicians have been duplicitous with pro-lifers, no doubt. And it’s doubtful that the small contribution they have made on the continuum of humanization, in relation to the unborn, has outweighed all the harm they have done on the continuum of wealth and power equity – not to mention the harm that they have probably done even on the continuum of humanization, in relation to groups other than the unborn. But the contribution that they have made, sincerely or not, in relation to the humanity of the unborn should be recognized, and above all it should be recognized that the continuum of humanization is the more important of the two continuums. Failing to perceive the humanity of the unborn, Chomsky seems not to think at all about the continuum of humanization or any continuum of moral progress, and ends up with a materialistic view of history.

© 2019

 

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McFall v. Shimp: More Analogous to Legal Abortion Than We Usually Think

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In 1971 Judith Jarvis Thomson analogized the legal prevention of abortion (i.e., anti-abortion laws), in the case of a rape pregnancy at least, to legal compulsion to endure the use of one’s kidney by a stranger for nine months. She expected readers to agree that such a compulsion would be “outrageous,” and even most pro-lifers agreed that indeed, our society should not institutionalize such compulsion. Almost all pro-lifers defend, legally if not morally, a passive right to refuse such that the needy person dies of their own disease – unless perhaps there are special circumstances * and the demand on one’s body is almost trivial, such as the donation of one pint of blood. Thomson’s paper pioneered a genre of similar arguments for abortion rights, known as “bodily-rights arguments” (or more specifically “right to refuse” bodily-rights arguments).

Soon enough after 1971, in a Pennsylvania court in 1978, Judge John Flaherty ruled that Robert McFall did not have a right to any of the bone marrow of David Shimp, even though McFall’s life might be saved by it and he might otherwise die. There was no known public disagreement with the ruling. This bore out the contention that a legal compulsion to endure the use of one’s internal organs, at least if the one being compelled was not responsible for the condition that had created another born person’s need to use them, would be unacceptable if not outrageous.

So the legal prevention of abortion, i.e., anti-abortion laws, compelling a woman to endure the use of her internal organs (at least if she was not responsible for the condition that had created another person’s need to use them, that is, a pregnancy), is clearly unacceptable – if such legal prevention of abortion is really analogous to the legal backing that McFall sought in trying to use some of the bone marrow of Shimp.

In fact, legal prevention of abortion is disanalogous in a number of ways to the legal backing that McFall sought in trying to use some of the bone marrow of Shimp; but the pro-life side has focused more than anything else on one disanalogy: the fact that McFall was left passively to die of his own disease, whereas in an abortion, the pregnant woman actively kills or hires someone to kill her unborn child.

I would like to argue here that that distinction, while worth making, is not sufficient in itself to justify the legal prevention of abortion, and that such legal prevention can only be justified by the cumulative import of a number of disanalogies.

The problem with simply pointing out that McFall was left passively to die of his own disease, whereas a pregnant woman actively kills or hires someone to kill her unborn child, is that, once Judge Flaherty ruled against him, McFall “took no for an answer.” He did not proceed to start taking Shimp’s bone marrow.

But an unborn child does not take no for an answer. An unborn child is tiny, it is innocent, it is unconscious, but nevertheless it is capable of refusing to take no for an answer and proceeding, without going through the courts, to start using its mother’s uterus and consuming its mother’s blood.

So in order to make the McFall v. Shimp situation more analogous with an unwanted pregnancy and a proposed abortion, let’s see how that case could hypothetically have played out instead of how it actually played out. This may get a little fanciful, but we already knew that any hypothetical that is really analogous to pregnancy will be fanciful.

Let’s say Judge Flaherty delivers his 1978 verdict, including his well-known comment “For a law to compel the defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded.”

At this point something understandably snaps in McFall, and he develops a psychotic delusion that Shimp is a bone-marrow-dispensing robot. (So that whatever he may do to Shimp, he will be innocent by reason of insanity, just as an unborn child is innocent.)

He follows Shimp home, and before Shimp knows what is happening, McFall has tied him to his own kitchen table and is proceeding to take some bone marrow.

There is no lethal threat to Shimp, and he knows it, but nevertheless he manages to get a concealed handgun out of his pocket. His only possible target is McFall’s head. He fires and kills McFall.

Now he has committed an active killing, as when a woman aborts. But how much less justified is he than if he had passively let Shimp die, which pro-lifers say should legally be okay? He has not killed gratuitously. As when a woman aborts, he has done it under circumstances where he had said no, but the person needing to use his body had refused to take no for answer.

So soon Shimp is back in Flaherty’s court. The prosecution has charged Shimp with criminal homicide, because he actively killed McFall. There is no dispute about the facts of the case.

Shall Judge Flaherty say to Shimp, “I said earlier that a law cannot compel a defendant to submit to an intrusion of his body. But I take that back. Under your circumstances with McFall, the law did require you to submit, because your only alternative was active killing and the law does not permit active killing. True, there is no law worded ‘if your only alternative is active killing, you must submit,’ but our homicide laws, since I interpret them as applying even in your situation, have the same effect” – ?

I don’t know how Flaherty or any judge might rule, but since we are using this scenario only as an analogy for abortion, the point is what the law should be rather than what it presently is. I once debated with an intelligent pro-choicer who thought that acquittal of someone in Shimp’s position would be “uncontroversial.” I responded with my moral intuition that, as long as any harm likely to be done to Shimp were no greater than is done to a woman in an average pregnancy in a developed country, Shimp should not be legally permitted to use lethal force. But I found the pro-choicer’s view extremely understandable. Hence I do not consider that making the distinction between actively killing, and passively letting someone die of their own disease, is, alone, a knockdown response to the right-to-refuse argument. In ethical debate, if an analogy is to have its desired effect, it works by analogizing the situation containing the debatable issue to a situation where the right and wrong are not in debate. But if the McFall-Shimp story had played out in the way I have suggested, a way really analogous to abortion, it would have been a situation where the right and wrong are in debate.

If it is a fact that no law or precedent can compel a person to do X (for instance, “submit to an intrusion of his body”), that does not mean that there is an automatic corollary “the law allows lethal force to save oneself from X.” In many situations of “cannot compel a person to do X,” there would be no such corollary. However, when Flaherty said that a law cannot compel a person to submit to an intrusion of his body, he went on to say that for a law to do so “would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded. To do so would defeat the sanctity of the individual and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn.”

To be consistent with those ponderous words he used on the first occasion, Judge Flaherty would either have to find active killing under the circumstances that Shimp faced to be permissible, or would have to be very sympathetic to such a finding. He would not find active killing to be as obviously impermissible as pro-lifers would like it to be in a situation analogous to abortion.

If Flaherty’s strong words are true without exception for any circumstance, and if our homicide laws would operate in the above hypothetical circumstance such that Shimp would have to submit, then those homicide laws “would change every concept and principle upon which our society is founded. . .,” so seemingly such laws could not stand – meaning that in that circumstance the law would allow lethal force. Flaherty’s words, with which no one seems much to disagree when we are talking about born persons, describe a non-negotiable right to refuse, meaning a right that can be defended by almost any means necessary.

Remember that in the hypothetical scenario, McFall is proposing not merely to injure Shimp’s body, but to use it. This distinction is at the heart of the concept of bodily rights, and the effect, I think, is to bolster Shimp’s right to defend himself.

When we point out that abortion is not just the withholding or withdrawing of help, but active killing, the right-to-refuse argument loses a lot of the sizzle it might otherwise have, so we should definitely point that out. It is a point worth making. But any motivation for a pregnant woman to actively kill stems from the absence of a passive option for freeing herself – unlike the passive options open to Shimp (the way his case actually played out) and to Thomson’s kidnap victim (that person could simply disconnect without actively killing) – and the absence of a passive option means by the same token that the woman is in a trap and that therefore the taboo on active killing also loses its sizzle. Active killing is the minimum level of force necessary for her to free herself. The more reason of a self-defense nature you have for killing someone, the less the moral difference between actively killing them and passively failing to help them becomes. Under some circumstances, actively killing someone for self-defense reasons might even be more moral than failing to help. So the point about active killing does not do the desired work of showing that a woman procuring an abortion is disanalogous to Shimp. Let’s make the point about active killing, but not expect it to completely defeat the right-to-refuse argument.

Fortunately, there are, as I said earlier, other disanalogies between the prevention of proposed abortions on the one hand, and compelled organ donations on the other. I don’t think any single one of the disanalogies can defeat the right-to-refuse argument in the case of rape, but I think a cocktail of disanalogies/arguments, taken together, can defeat it even in that case.

* Listen at 5:23.

© 2019

 

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