A Fetus.

So in my neverending quest to read about things that make me deeply disheartened with this world, I came across this article in the LA Times (unfortunately subscribers-only, but I'll sum it up for you):

A New Generation of Anti-Abortionists. Young people, women, in their teens and twenties, who would like to ban abortion entirely. My particular favorite is a now 20-year-old woman who has campaigned to emend the Colorado state constitution such that a fertilized egg is now defined as a person. A fertilized egg. (That couldn't work legally in America, because fetuses would either have to get visas or be declared illegal immigrants because, after all, they wouldn't have been born here).

Now, putting aside all the traditional pro-choice arguments I keep handy in my back pocket, I think that history has something very important to teach us on this subject.

First, 'abortion' (by which I mean an intended miscarriage of a fetus) has always been practiced by humans. Always. There is no point in history where one could say that no one on earth had an intended miscarriage. Abortion has as true and universal a history as religion, government, and war.

I was originally going to write a long explanation of the legal murder and enslavement of children in ancient Greece and Rome (about 1000 years' worth of Western civilization's 3000-year lifespan), but instead I would like to posit some of the legal ramifications of defining fetuses as persons today.

The Funny ones: being able to drive in the carpool lane while pregnant; filing tax reports for your fetus (and claiming them as a dependent?); ordering off the kids' menu at any restaurant; parking in handicapped spots (since the 'person' inside you is unable to walk); preboarding on airplanes (since the 'person' inside you requires assistance to get down the jetway).

The Scary ones: getting arrested and prosecuted for endangering the life/liberty/happiness of your fetus if you do any of the following while pregnant: drinking alcohol or caffeine, smoking, being near other people who are smoking, eating basil or pesto (or any number of other miscarriage-inducing herbs), taking antacids, being near paint fumes or mercury, dyeing your hair, running, jogging, jumping rope, other strenuous exercise (including sex?), petting or owning a cat, working overtime, getting stressed out, reaching upwards, lifting heavy things, etc.

My point is this: there's a lot of stuff out there that can kill a fetus, and many women miscarry for completely unexplainable reasons. Are we going to have to investigate every single miscarriage as a possible homicide? Are we going to police the movements and decisions of pregnant women? Will you be prosecuted if you fail to report witnessing a pregnant woman eat chocolate or walk past fresh paint? (After all, you may have witnessed an involuntary manslaughter or attempted assault!)

It's absurd.

A potential kick in the face for male politicians

Feminist strategies have taken many different forms over the years. In the 1960s, women fought for equal pay by saying that they were just as qualified/smart/ambitious as men, that they could perform the same roles. In the late 19th century, women convinced the American college system that they needed access to higher education. Their reasoning? - they needed to be smart so that they could provide a good at-home education for America's sons.

What does this have to do with the present day? Well, one of the reasons that Mrs. Clinton will probably not win a national election in 2008 is because much of our society still thinks (at least subconsciously) that women are fundamentally more emotional (read: less rational) than men. We get moody, we change our minds frequently, we cry, we break dishes, we are 'pussies'. Putting the rational/emotional debate aside, if it were the case that a candidate had less 'rational' ability, they probably would not be as desirable a political leader.

Now, this article about one of the side-effects of Viagra indicates that taking this drug might make you a more 'emotional' person. Viagra apparently increases the production of a "love hormone." [Cue satire] Now we all know that that feeling of love can mess with our decision-making skills. And we all know that some large percentage of those crusty white guys in Washington are popping the little blue pills. So how can we trust political leaders who take drugs that compromise their rational abilities and risk the safety of our nation? These men are turning themselves into women.

So I propose that we ban the use of Viagra by political leaders, police officers, men in the military, CEOs, market analysts, and anyone who clings to the myth of male rationality as a justification for not allowing women into their field. Let's keep male space pussy-free.

looking toward '08

So I've been following the Democratic presidential candidates this year a little more closely than in the past few elections. The main contenders present an interesting conundrum of issues: while Clinton, Obama, and Edwards all seem to be forward-thinkers and have decent platforms, I worry that Americans simply will not, when push comes to shove, elect a woman or a Black person.

Which makes me want to put my eggs in Edwards' basket. But for some reason, the media is giving him less coverage, he's doing worse in the polls, even though his 'poverty' campaign is one of the best platforms I've seen since Dennis Kucinich. And maybe that's why he has not been as successful. Anyway, Scholars and Rogues has a really good analysis of why the American public might not be willing to hear about poverty and privilege and wealth gaps. And it gets back to my earlier post about Rocky Balboa and the American sense of toilocracy.

I suppose the brain-popping-realization of classist practice in this country is much easier to take when you're 18 than when you're 50, lower-middle-class, working your ass off to make ends meet, and can't figure out why you haven't experienced the American dream.

Since I'm holding forth on movie heroes (Rocky B.)

I also saw (before I left for England) the lastest Rocky Balboa movie. I got to thinking about the type of hero/person Rocky is meant to represent, and it made me think of an episode of "So You Think You Can Dance."

I think this episode was from season two. Anyway, the story is: this kid (bad dancer) is auditioning for the second year in a row to be on the show. His mother is in tow at the audition. He does his piece and gets reamed by one of the judges (stern British guy), who tells him point blank that he will never be a dancer. At this point, the mother gets up and yells at the judge that her son can be anything he wants to be - if he works hard enough, he will be a good dancer. She seems to believe this to be true - passionately, hysterically. Her son, perhaps, believes it as well.

Now, this example is laughable, but it brings up an interesting philosophy of American culture. Do we really think that we can do anything we want to do? My parents certainly told me that when I was young, even though we were not wealthy or well-connected. The idea seemed to be that through work and committment one could acheive anything.

Now, I don't believe in a truly Aristotelian argument - that people are born with certain talents and should pursue careers that fit them (he also famously said that certain people are born to be slaves). I do think that humans have the ability to learn things and change the way their minds and bodies work. I also believe, however, that some things require a lifetime of shaping, a lifetime of particular opportunities and particular practice (supposedly, we acquire the ability to be tone hearing -as opposed to tone deaf- within the first year of our life). The 'good' dancers on that show, for example, had lessons and teachers and recitals and diets and expensive lycra bodysuits. They probably had these things for most of their lives, and the access to these things is what has conditioned them to have an aptitude for dancing. As the show proved, one cannot (barring extreme talent for a thing) simply self-teach for a year or two and become good.

Yet somehow this guy and his mother firmly believed in the philosophy of hard work and gain. This brings me back to Rocky, another person who, I think, embodies this philosophy. Rocky is not a smart guy. He is a bit naive about a lot of things. I think of the scene where he begs the council to let him have a boxing license - the council is acting on behalf of his bodily health, but he insists that his body is his own to govern, even if he destroys it in pursuit of his goals. He firmly believes that, with enough training, he can turn himself into the fighting machine he used to be. Though Rocky barely survives the fight, the movie ultimately, unfortunately, perpetuates this philosophy, that hard work will get you whatever you want, that hard work can transform you into someone else.

This philosophy is a flaw in American thinking. It is connected to the myth of self-reliance (that you can boot-strap your own way from poverty to wealth, invisibility to fame, fat to skinny, ugly to beautiful, etc.), and it may be why some Americans are so unhappy and overworked. How many movies do we see in which the above transformation is successful? How often do we blame ourselves for laziness or lack of committment when in actuality we are working ourselves to death in search of the unattainable?

I am also not advocating that we stop working, or become lackadaisical with ourselves. I still believe in our ability to change and grow. But I do think that a movie like Rocky Balboa and its promotion of this American 'just work harder' philosophy obfuscates the reality of disparate wealth and access in our country. It is a fact that people who are born into wealth have more opportunities than people who are born into poverty. It follows as well that the wealthy, because of their access from birth to these opportunities, will seem more 'talented' at their chosen profession/hobby, on average, than their less well-off peers. We do not all start off on an equal playing field. And the equal playing field is what we should all be working towards, lest our younger generations face our same feeling of dismay, exhaustion, and confusion that can only be felt after an unsuccessful fight between one's forehead and a brick wall.

an individual dealing with american culture

So I've been reading a lot about Seneca lately (you know, the old Roman philosopher dude) and the innovations he had made in the formulation of selfhood, behavioral modification, and happiness of Roman Stoic philosophy.

Prior to Seneca, a person who wanted to live a "virtuous" life would turn, inevitably, toward the opinion of the society. One would formulate their decisions, self-presentation, and attitude based on the reaction and expectations of the society. So a senator could know that he was living virtuously because he would gain the approval of the people around him. Even when alone, moreover, the guiding voice of virtue in his head would be the voice of public opinion - the expectations of the society were internalized as his model of behavior.

When Seneca began his theorizing, the Empire was in a sorry state: emperors with unlimited power (and often abusive of that power), aristocrats out for money or brown-nosing their way into power, afraid to criticize the emperor even for the most atrocious of deeds. In short, "public opinion" was fucked. Seneca therefore tweaked the guiding model of Stoic philosophy, encouraging people to turn inwards rather than outwards for their models of behavior. There were no living icons to follow - he had to create one and follow it, even when it encouraged his behavior to go against what had become the cultural norm.

Which brought me to think about American culture. I think American culture is very much screwed up, and (at least for those of us who are not blessed with kabillions of dollars in family wealth) moderating one's behavior by the cultural expectations of our day will likely result in depression, eating/exercise disorders (anorexia, bullimia, bingeing, or obesity), ill health, exhaustion, and happiness generated only by our children and our material goods. My initial thoughts focused on our obesity problem and restaurant portion sizes, but I suppose it applies to any one of our many cultural standards.

In simple terms, we have two levels of decision-making. The first level, a basic level, is our conditioned instinct. Freud called it an "id," it has been seen as our "bestial" or "appetitive" part, and it is our baseline for decision-making - what we want. There exists a second level of decision-making - as Bartsch terms it, "what we want ourselves to want." This level of thought is where we have a sense of right and wrong, what we ought to be doing, what we idealize for ourselves as the "correct" mode of behavior. Now, it is this second level of decision-making that often coincides with conditioned cultural norms - we know that a bright red dress will stand out at a cocktail party, so, however much we like the red dress, we choose the black one because it is more fitting to the social expectation.

So what can we do when our culture tells us that it is appropriate to gorge ourselves on unhealthy food, exploit others for the sake of personal gain, pimp out our giant rides (using up our savings), take up space, bomb other countries under false pretense, work overtime, rub antibacterial gel all over ourselves five times a day, etc.? The results of conforming to this, as I've said above, are not good for us individually or for the rest of our citizens. It could also be argued (but this is a topic for another time) that our conformity without questioning the norm only perpetuates these unhealthy and unethical cultural practices and beliefs.

We need, therefore, to divorce ourselves from public expectation. We need to reject the large restaurant portions, the giant cars, the antibacterial gel, popcorn at the movie theatre, guns in our houses, the pedestrian-bereft suburbs, and mom's apple pie. We need to sit and imagine actual ethical behavior and create our own interlocutor to guide us toward virtuous living. Wow, and maybe that's why evangelical Christianity has taken up so easily as of late - a set of guiding principles alternative to (and more ethical, in some senses, than) those capitalist and exploitative secularities that have gotten our country into its current state. I suppose Jesus is a better interlocutor than Colonel Sanders.

Of course, modern Christianity has its own problems (a huge topic, but for starters, the believers should think more about modelling their own decisions after Jesus; he seems to have been a pretty ethical individual), and for the non-believers, we need to do a little bit more legwork to come up with our own standards for ourselves, standards that will help us be happy and ethical people.

Which brings me back to Seneca. Aside from philosophy, he also wrote a bunch of tragic plays, in which (as Bartsch has argued in The Mirror of the Self) characters who have created their own set of guiding principles, against the expectations of their societies, commit horrible atrocities that make perfect logical sense in their own heads. By breaking ourselves from societal expectation, we also risk losing all sense of ethical behavior and guiding ourselves by a faulty set of beliefs (like those bloody misled Objectivists). Nevertheless, we must rethink our formation of self if we hope to save ourselves from the harm our culture currently inflicts on us.

addendum to previous

For a look at a scholar who has done some very interesting cultural things with her science background, check out Anne Fausto-Sterling's work.