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The Politics of Virtue
Is Abortion Debatable?
By Elizabeth Mensch, Alan Freeman Duke University Press
Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7795-5
CHAPTER 1
Evil, Good, and Beyond
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Once we knew the difference between evil and good. The period spanning the 1950s was framed by dramatic instances of each: Nazism as it began, and the civil rights movement as it closed. We have, at least in retrospect, unequivocally named those two cultural images as perfect examples of villainy, on the one hand, and virtue on the other. Their evocative power is with us still.
Each, in its extremity, worked a convergence of law, theology, and politics, creating a sense of moral appropriateness that challenged all inconsistent premises and practices. In law, nothing short of an unprecedented and retroactively applied accountability for "crimes against humanity" was sufficient as a response to Nazism, despite overwhelming victory at war. Similarly, the moral force of the civil rights movement altered the American federal judiciary and, arguably, the structure of American federalism. Theologians, meanwhile, were haunted by the fear that their church's doctrine and practice had not been sufficient to resist the Nazis and would not be able to counter the next cultural example of unambiguous evil. Civil rights then became the limiting case against inaction in the worldly sphere, challenging the doctrinal basis of all compelled otherworldliness.
The abortion debate emerged during a period when images of both Nazism and early civil rights activists still preoccupied moral and political thought. That context shaped the way in which the abortion debate unfolded, and it helps to explain why the debate has assumed such overriding importance in American life. A brief, evocative look at the significance of Nazism and the early civil rights movement may suggest their persistent power.
Nazis were the ultimate affront to the presumptuous complacency of Western culture, an affront that was political, moral, and ultimately theological. How could the highest and most refined of cultures endorse grotesque barbarism and participate with emotional fervor in apparently pre-modern ritualistic evil? Nazi symbols—giant swastikas, black uniforms, death's head insignias, book burnings, Adolf Hitler as revered supreme leader—all stand as terrifying reminders. The Nazis not only appealed to an irrational, fanatic, premodern sensibility, but they also, ironically, inverted legality, rationality, and science itself in pursuit of their agendas. Thus, legality became a finely tuned engine of bureaucratic oppression, while science supplied military might, gas chambers and ovens, and experiments on human beings so unspeakable that serious moral opposition still remains to studying the results for humane purposes. Even a long and respected tradition of Christian theology in Germany found itself yielding institutionally, almost without exception, to political idolatry in subservience to the German state.
Having met Nazi evil, we remain forever culturally (and personally) unsettled. When are we responsible? When must we take a stand? One might try to pretend that the Nazis were sui generis, a unique case of tribalism run rampant, produced by the intersection of peculiarly decadent German sensibilities and post-World War I frustrations. Whatever truth lies in that account, the appeal to utter specificity is never adequate. Genocide in Western history is not uniquely German. European Americans must reckon with their own history in relation to Native Americans; so too must the English in relation to their history with the Irish, the French in relation to the Algerians, etc. The point is not to induce self-loathing, but to remind us of our own cultural capacity for evil, not easily distinguished, categorically, from that of the Nazis. Meanwhile, Freudianism, at its most cautionary, had alerted Americans to dark impulses lurking within the human psyche. Lest we think it could never happen here, the Milgram experiments of the 1960s only confirmed the worst of earlier fears.
Despite those troubling but more ambiguous parallels, to students of evil the Nazis offer a kind of "naked singularity" not unlike that envisioned by cosmologists to describe occasions when otherwise applicable laws of nature do not apply. The civil rights movement does the same for students of good. We speak here not of the later discordant times of the Black Muslims and Malcolm X, black power, urban disorder, or affirmative action, but of the time of moral clarity, of Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, the young Martin Luther King, Jr., the Great March on Washington, D.C., of 1963, and the subsequent Birmingham bombing deaths.
Americans in the very process of defeating Nazism were reminded in 1944 by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal of their own national shame—the pervasive structure of legal and social apartheid directed at black Americans. In fact, most Soviet propaganda in the early cold war period was directed to exposing America's domestic racial oppression to the world. The civil rights movement, especially after 1954, offered an occasion for national redemption from that shame, as the Civil War, in Lincoln's biblical imagery, had offered redemption from the sin of slavery. Myrdal had taught us of a critical gap between the (fundamentally good) American creed and our (bad but alterable) racist behaviors. Thus, the nightly news, as it depicted the arduous struggles of the early civil rights movement in the South, offered an ongoing morality play. Bull Connor and Sheriff Jim Clark, with their dogs and fire hoses and cattle prods, were pitted against decent, peaceful, God-fearing Americans—including children—who were vindicating their basic constitutional rights, and thereby vindicating our own belief in human dignity.
Nazism and civil rights triggered historical responses, intellectual and institutional, that converged in the divisive contemporary issue of abortion. For the moment, however, our focus is on the peculiar political power of the two images. To name one's opponent a Nazi, with any credibility, is to suspend the usual rules of discursive engagement. The Nazi is denied respect, subjected to name-calling, vulnerable to extralegal tactics, and must be opposed by all persons of conscience and good will. Even the usual legal protections may be unavailable to those who take Nazi positions, as many argued in the famous case of the American Nazis' planned parade in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, and others continue to argue with respect to "hate" speech. Similarly, if inversely, to appropriate to one's cause the aura of the civil rights movement is to demand the unquestioning allegiance of people of goodwill and conscience, to call for a vigorous and singular activism. That activism may include civil disobedience or other extralegal activity, for even formally legitimate legal obstacles are rendered fundamentally illegal. The net effect is to elevate one's cause to a politics of virtue rather than just self-interest.
However powerful these images remain, the moral certainty that once permitted us to assign virtue or villainy to their respective realities has surely unraveled. Today, the characteristic form of public moral dialogue is the protest, with each side ready to display placards, deploy angry, close-out rhetoric, and luxuriate in complacent ownership of moral truth. In that divisive process, the imagery of Nazis and the civil rights movement often informs the content of debate, as if we long to recapture the moral certainty that allows us to name evil or good when it appears.
The abortion debate provides a dramatic illustration. Notably, by way of comparison, so does the issue of animal rights, which is true despite the usual opposition of pro-life activists and animal (and, often, environmental) activists. The abortion and animal issues are, in fact, strikingly similar, for each raises troubling questions about the reach of community and human responsibility.
Similarities of rhetoric and image abound. In fact, one discovers that proponents of both sides of both issues (abortion and animals) regularly resort to civil rights and Nazi images to affirm the virtue of their own side and reveal the villainy of the other. Thus, for pro-life activists, "[Today's medical abortionists are doing the same thing to the unwanted unborn as the Nazis did to their victims...." If the doctors are Nazi executioners, then unborn victims can be identified with Holocaust victims, especially children. Thus, in pro-life literature, photographs of discarded fetuses are shown next to photographs of bodies from concentration camps. This graphic portrayal of innocent sacrificial victims, of course, also plays on deeply imbedded Christian cultural themes, made more explicit when, as some demonstrators have done, infant dolls are carried on huge wooden crosses. The Nazi Holocaust inevitably represented for Christians a dramatic and troubling reversal of complacent Christian imagery. Accustomed to describing an innocent Christ handed over by Jews for crucifixion, Christians instead witnessed innocent Jews slaughtered in a supposedly Christian culture, with little Christian resistance. From within their own tradition, American Christians could not doubt that Christ's presence would have been with and among his fellow Jews in Germany, not with the indifferent or murderous Christians. That recognition creates an imperative to identify the true sacrificial victim and to respond with loving and even self-sacrificial, culture-defying concern rather than with the indifference of the "good German." For the pro-life side, fetuses are not just victims, but also persons awaiting legal recognition of their true personhood, like slaves before the Civil War: "[T]his is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of human lives. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was not overturned in a day, or a year, or even a decade." Pro-life extremists (e.g., Operation Rescue) explicitly analogize themselves to civil rights demonstrators of the 1950s and 60s, adopting the tactics of their predecessors (including the use of child demonstrators), and legitimizing their willingness to test the bounds of legality. Even some members of the U.S. Supreme Court analogize Roe v. Wade to the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (which upheld compulsory segregation) to justify the immediate overruling of Roe as illegitimate precedent.
In parallel fashion, the pro-choice side also employs Nazi imagery to characterize opponents. Thus, religious fundamentalists who are pro-life activists are considered instances of the "authoritarian" personality, a category developed by post-World War II psychologists to recast adherence to Nazism as a social (even medical) pathology. Pro-life protest tactics are then implicitly likened to those of Hitler's SA (Brown Shirts) and not to those of Martin Luther King, Jr. James Hunter describes the irony of an Orthodox rabbi being accused of standing with Nazis because he demonstrated with pro-life evangelicals and Catholics; and recently pro-life literature has been likened to that of neo-Nazis. The pro-choice civil rights claim is that Roe v. Wade is not analogous to Plessy v. Ferguson, but instead of equal stature to the most ethically legitimate of all Supreme Court cases, Brown v. Board of Education. To invoke Brown is to assert invulnerable moral truth; to discard it on account of faltering consensus or political expediency is implicitly obscene. Just as Brown relieved black Americans from oppression rooted in (racial) prejudice, so Roe relieved American women from oppression rooted in (sexist) religious prejudice (especially Catholic, but later Protestant fundamentalist as well). Roe thus represents the legal recognition of female personhood, as against a sexism that attempts women's systematic subordination. Those seeking entry to abortion clinics are recast by this imagery as the students seeking to vindicate their personhood rights by gaining attendance at previously all-white schools in the South in the 50s and 60s. A New York Times story on the Operation Rescue activities in Kansas is headlined, "Little Rock, 1957. Wichita, 1991," with the story devoted to the explicit analogy. Even a federal district judge analogized the use of cameras and videotaping equipment by pro-life protestors to the use of clubs and attack dogs by segregationists. While conceding the difference in degree of physical threat, he nevertheless deemed the "camera, like the attack dog," as a "tool used by defendants to intimidate women from exercising their constitutional rights."
Animal rights activists, as do their pro-life counterparts on abortion, liken their opponents to Nazis. Philosopher (and guru of the animal rights movement) Peter Singer explicitly analogizes animal experimentation to the grotesque practices in Nazi concentration camps. Singer finds "striking" the parallels between the attitude of the Nazi doctors experimenting on prisoners and that of "experimenters toward animals." The analogy goes beyond experiments. When we sponsored for our seminar a showing of the Frederick Wiseman documentary film Meat, a seemingly matter-of-fact account of procedures in a modern slaughterhouse, an animal rights activist who attended at our invitation left angrily, proclaiming the slaughterhouse workers to be "just like Nazis; they should be killed." Similarly, we have heard militant environmentalists ask derisively, when denouncing loggers for killing old-growth forests and their resident spotted owls: "Don't they have Nuremburg laws for that sort of thing?" Even Vice President Albert Gore repeatedly invokes the Nazi analogy to support his environmental agenda ("an environmental holocaust"—"an ecological Kristallnacht").
Paralleling the use of pro-life fetal imagery, animal rights groups graphically depict the plight of helpless, innocent creatures sacrificed solely for the sake of commercial gain and human self-indulgence. Pictures show baby seals being clubbed to death, struggling, penned veal calves, and rabbits blinded by the Draize test (a grotesque procedure once routinely used by cosmetics companies). The cover of the December 1990 issue of The Animal's Voice is a large color photograph of an apparently still-alive monkey staring helplessly at us with a metal hoop circling its skull through which, at frequent intervals, screws have been driven directly into the monkey's flesh. Inside, with appropriate warnings, are similarly gruesome pictures. The civil rights analogy is no less explicitly drawn in the case of animals. First, there was racism, then sexism, and now "speciesism," with the implicit call for an appropriately militant political response. One finds the famous proclamation by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, which appeared in the first issue of The Liberator, invoked as a demand for action on behalf of animal rights: "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard."
As with pro-life activists, animal activists are viewed by their opponents as "ignorant fanatics, fascist in their sweeping demands," and "driven by fundamentalist visions." They are described retreating to an absolutist fundamentalism as an antidote to moral ambiguity and relativism, thereby "reifying their own principles as ultimate Truth." University researchers, given their experience as representatives of reason and scientific inquiry as against sometimes terroristic fanatics, will quickly remind us that the actual Nazis were also animal rights proponents. We learn that Hitler was a vegetarian, Himmler believed in animal rights, and even that Hermann Göring in 1933 issued an order prohibiting vivisection of animals in Prussian territory, because, "To the Germans [as to animal rights activists] ... animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive faculties, who feel pain and experience joy...."
A common charge of opponents is that animal rightists are indifferent at best to questions of human rights and employ arguments that inevitably undercut the claim of universal human dignity that lies at the heart of the civil rights movement. Animal rights activists, for example, are easily caricatured as "one-issue" people: middle-class white women who deviate from class interest only for the sake of animals. That assumed combination of fervent concern for the suffering of helpless animals with an apparent indifference to the suffering of, for example, people with serious illnesses who might be helped by animal experimentation is captured by Gordon Gekko's quip in the movie Wall Street that "the thing about WASPS is that they love animals, but they hate people."
That both sides on both of these issues can invoke the Nazi and civil rights images is surely testament to our state of moral confusion. Both abortion and animals might be presented as case studies of MacIntyre's notion of "incommensurability." It is also the case, however, that each side, in presenting these powerful images, is grasping a partial truth in response to equally extreme opponents. Important moral issues are at stake that are not fully answered by the extreme positions on either side of either issue. Serious debate on those issues, unfortunately, is hampered by political rhetoric.
Philosopher Rosalind Hursthouse asks: "Would not one expect someone arguing against the way we slaughter animals to be rather 'pro-life' in general, and hence against abortion and infanticide?" The typical answer, with few exceptions, seems to be that it is politically implausible to be both pro-animals and pro-life on the abortion question. We are speaking here not of the great muddle of people who are confused and ambivalent, but of visible activists on behalf of one or the other issue. Thus, for feminist animal rights activists, abortion is an easy issue, for rights belong to individuals, and the only relevant individuals are women and animals. The fetus is just a physical appendage, defined as "a human being to be created and grown by a woman if she chooses to do so." Even cows and sows, who are individuals and have rights, should "not be forced to be pregnant against their will." The predictable response of the equally intransigent other side is that equating animals and people is nothing less than moral insanity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Politics of Virtue by Elizabeth Mensch, Alan Freeman. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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