politics and empathy

ramblings on abortion, community, and building empathy in a world determined to move backwards

This is a strange time to be human. On the one hand, we’ve got a techno-capitalist class that’s promising that our society is on the brink of utopia amidst theoretically never-ending innovation, progress, and growth. On the other, it seems like all we’re doing is going backwards, with the destruction of the beautiful environment that the earth gifted us after eons of meticulous work as well as the rollback of rights that our forebears so earnestly fought for.

Most of the discussion that I’ve seen around Roe v. Wade has centered around anger towards the Supreme Court for bringing bias into a theoretically apolitical institution, frustration towards our representatives for abdicating their responsibility of crafting legislation to protect our most vulnerable citizens, and outrage towards anyone who fails to see the pain and fear that a ruling like this inflicts. I’m 100% with this.

The part that I kept getting stuck on is that I just do not understand people who are on the other side. I get that there’s a few arguments put forward for why abortion is bad, but all of them seem incredibly hypocritical.

There is the bible and morality argument, and I guess I can see the value in building a society upon a shared set of morals which in theory the bible provides. But it doesn’t seem like most people who put forth this argument have a very good understanding of the value system the bible puts forward, and a lot of people who put forth this argument seem a little too quick to defend our last president who doesn’t really seem like the best example of biblical values, to say the least.

There’s the defending life argument, and I guess that makes sense if you view human life as sacred and see it as a societal responsibility to care for everyone. But it doesn’t seem like most of the people who put forth this argument are interested in caring for the children once they come into this world, and they also seem a little too quick to embrace the death penalty which should violate the sanctity of life that they theoretically so dearly value.

There’s more, but it all falls in line with the same pattern; that abortion seems to be the unique case where a certain set of values applies, and that the people proposing these arguments don’t seem to feel any responsibility to defending those values in any other cases. It all seems awfully self-serving.

In the past, I definitely used to be content settling for these ‘gotcha!’ points, feeling like a real intellectual for pointing out the ideological inconsistency within everything abortion critics said. I stopped my line of thinking there, feeling a mix of outrage at the fact that people like this had the ability to influence legislation with such awful and dishonest arguments and views along with a hint of pity at the fact that evolution must’ve neglected this class of people because their brains clearly stopped evolving past the neanderthal stage.

I eventually realized that maybe this isn’t the healthiest mindset to adopt. The following quote from Ted Lasso seems particularly applicable: ‘Be curious, not judgemental’. So instead of joining the chorus of people hurling venom at others, I challenged myself to at least try to understand. Just because I couldn’t work my way through the perceived hypocrisy of all their arguments and views doesn’t mean there’s not a worldview in which all their views align.

I clearly recognize the issues of starting this entire piece by bracketing together an entire group of people and attacking their views as if they’re one, and I certainly know it’s ridiculous for me to postulate about the underlying worldview that their arguments represent when I’ve never really had any deep discussion with any abortion critic. Which means I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about. So please feel free to disregard everything I say. But here’s my attempt at explaining it anyways.

I think it comes down to punishing deviance.

I read something interesting the other day that postulated that their worldviews are driven by a sense of family and kinship. The family, the ‘in’ group, is driven by conformity, and any lack of conformity results in swift punishment. Empathy is only extended towards those in the ‘in’ group, and anyone outside of the ‘in’ group is essentially dehumanized which legitimizes any violence against them. At the end of the day, it’s about legacy and family and preserving a way of life and a set of values for generation after generation.

I guess this provides the missing link between something like being anti-abortion and pro-death penalty; it’s about punishment, about not seeing a place for these people within their community. The unborn baby hasn’t been ‘tarnished’ yet so they still believe the baby can become one of them, part of their family. But as soon as they enter foster care or get placed within the cycle of poverty, there’s no place for them anymore.

This brief (and uneducated) attempt at an explanation is clearly very unflattering. But unless I’ve completely missed the mark, there are probably some people out there that use this lens to form the foundation of their politics.

This exercise into trying to understand the basis of anti-abortion views was an interesting one and led me towards a couple overarching ideas about the way we engage with politics in general.

1. Issue-specific politics are a path to nowhere

I’ve come to believe that it’s more about competing worldviews than about specific policies on specific issues. For example, with gun control, I think the discussion about regulating the sale of guns is a less important one than the discussion about where the responsibility for protection lies in society; whether it lies with individuals or with institutions like the police. This then bleeds into the even more abstract discussion about whether we’re manufacturing danger through the pursuit of safety and security.

Regardless of the specific issues, I think we’re always going to be spinning in circles until we build the capacity to have deeper debates about competing worldviews. This will allow us to align on one and take steps towards it. Policies will naturally follow from that.

One of the beautiful things that I think will flow from a focus on worldviews is that it will naturally empower the voices of people who have personal experience with the nexus points of the discussion. It’s been so strange how politicians have become quasi-celebrities in the past decade; discussion of politics and issues has been so focused on random tweets and what so-and-so politician said and increasingly more and more divorced about the day-to-day harms and pain that people experience that said politicians should in theory be addressing. I hope we can move away from a focus on specific people and move towards a focus on stories and experiences.

I think focusing on worldviews also helps illuminate hidden hypocrisies within platforms. For example, one of the things I have a hard time understanding is how people balance the belief in prison abolition and rehabilitation with cancel culture; they seem like they stem from completely different worldviews. Maybe if there was deeper discussion on this inherent tension and the competing ideals these two worldviews represent we’d actually start to take steps forward.

Either way, I think I’m done aligning myself with specific policies or actions or talking points. I want to spend a lot of time reflecting on the kind of world I want to live in, the kinds of values it represents, and how to balance the responsibility for caring for one another between individuals and different levels of government. Arguing about the pros and cons of specific policies feels pointless now; I don’t see a path forward until we can start to build a shared vision.

2. We won’t build true community as long as love and care is conditional

I don’t think we move forward as a society until we build the capacity to look at people we disagree with, even people whose politics disgust us, and still be able to honestly and authentically say ‘I want you to feel loved. I want you to feel safe. I want you to feel cared for.’

To me, it feels like the biggest cause of polarization and the increasing amounts of hatred present in the world is that people seem to have lost the desire to live with one another; it seems like people are content looking at an entire group of people and telling them to go fuck themselves, that those people have no place in the kind of world and community they want to build.

To be honest though, this was me for a long time. Every time I came across someone I disagreed with, I would always think ‘The revolution is coming, and I’m going to make sure it displaces anyone like you. You better watch your back.’ I think I finally have the perspective to realize how dangerously aligned that perspective was with fascism.

We can’t build a society just for the people we agree with. If we wall ourselves from those we disagree with, that wall will recreate itself within our seemingly perfect community because at the end of the day the society won’t be built upon shared love; it’ll be built on shared hatred. And that hatred will manifest itself within the community. It always does.

If we want to move forward, we have to work together, even with people who have completely different sets of experiences from us. But I have absolutely no fucking idea what this looks like.

---

This was a really meandering series of thoughts. It was all over the place, likely because I feel all over the place right now. I feel lost, I feel confused, I feel scared, and I feel pretty hopeless. And I’m not even the one really impacted by this ruling.

It’s really hard to see where to go from here. Maybe this outrage cycle will be different than other outrage cycles and result in healing rather than apathy. Maybe one day we’ll learn to transform our anger into community building. Maybe one day we’ll get a little closer to learning how to live with each other in this weird, confusing world.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue listening to people’s experiences, continue learning from the stories I hear, and continue trying to figure out how to best support the women in my life in a world that seems determined to never let them feel safe or protected.