Modernity, among many other things, has provided a rapid-fire assortment over time of quick, reductive social theories that provide explanations for why people do what they do, why the news happens at all. Most human societies have had access to at least two or three such propositions, some of them overlapping and compatible, some rivalrous, but in the last two and a half centuries, we’ve had a riotous, successive assembly of them.
People are maximizing their utility!
People are accumulating power and power corrupts them in proportion to its accumulation.
People are trapped in socioeconomic and political structures that precede the lives and desires of individuals, control them and serve the purposes of a few at the cost of the many.
People live in societies that are complex adaptive systems that formed from simple antecedents but have grown into structures and institutions that had (and have) no conscious intent or intended character but that now have a persistent role in shaping what people can and cannot do.
People are governed by cognitive modules that are the product of evolutionary pressures in the era before complex societies formed.
People have ideas that they’ve worked out consciously and want to follow, or are being influenced directly by charismatic individuals who have those ideas.
People are living within and reproducing a lifeway, worldview, culture or religion that they’ve grown up with and unconsciously adapted to. The culture has no underlying explanation or origin story, but its accumulation over time is the cause of whatever happens next, of what people in the culture do subsequently.
People are acting out of desperation and deprivation and doing what they must to stay alive.
People are acting out of resentment and avidity for what they don’t have.
People are acting out of greed and selfishness to protect what they do have from others.
People are acting out of resentment for what they once had that they feel has been taken away from them.
People want to be free as individuals to do what they wish.
People want to support one another in community and family but huge impersonal systems and forms of power interfere.
People want to be told what to do and to be constrained by law and impartial forms of political authority because they recognize that freedom leads to anarchy and violence.
I can go on. Most of us crib from at least five or six of these narratives on a regular basis, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Some of us try to work out the contradictions in order to arrive at a ‘grand unified theory’ of human life, some of us don’t. Sometimes we give up reductive explanations and seek something else: less “why?” and more “what did that mean? how did that feel?”, the questions that humanistic intellectuals sometimes like to claim are their province and which necessarily have no fixed or ultimately satisfying answers.
Some of us try to prove that one of these stories is fundamentally the right one. All of us trying to do that end up loudly announcing that our part of the blind person’s elephant is indeed the entirety of what the whole thing looks like, or at least that the rest of it really isn’t very important. Mostly we do that in order to make something into a tractable problem, something we can act upon with policy, with collective action, with individual practice, with institutional design, with therapeutic intervention.
Most of us are confident in our own back-of-the-envelope answers to “why”: they’re based on our experience, our intuition, our formal knowledge, our communities and affinities. The answers flow from our aspirations and our fears. And mostly we should be confident in all that.
The desire to make an event (or series of events) something we can act on, however, sometimes forecloses those other reflective questions about meaning. Moreover, it can make it hard for any of us to understand when our answer to “why is this happening?” is clearly inadequate and is tying us to a patterned response or course of action that is making the problem worse, is limiting the scope or magnitude of an actually-possible response, or is keeping us locked in a stagnant status quo because the possibility of real transformation threatens our established answers to “why?”
I’m thinking about this broad, abstract set of observations this morning in response partly to the mysteries that the front-page news presents me today and an awareness that my quickfire explanatory responses to each story are not very propositionally consistent with one another. No surprise: the news itself already encodes a queasy mix of contradictory or rivalrous social theories into the assembly of stories it lays out each day. Some news stories depend on the proposition that a given individual (or group of individuals) and their intent is what is driving events. Some stories are already sure they’re about an event concerned with institutions or histories or social structures. Why is Putin allegedly “on the brink” of military action in Ukraine? Why have the world’s global and national systems for responding to epidemics responded so poorly to covid-19 and why aren’t we going to be more prepared for the next pandemic? Why are American workers only now recognizing just how hostile the conditions of work in many businesses have become and why haven’t they been acting politically with this in mind before this moment? Why has a mental health crisis for younger Americans been brewing for a decade, to be aggravated by the pandemic? Why are there supply chain problems for the beverage industry?
I’m satisfied with simple surface explanations for some stories. Why is the GOP settling on opposing vaccine mandates as a political strategy? Because it’s popular with their base and maybe with some independent voters who are tired of an endless emergency. E.g., it’s just a tactical response. But every simple explanation has a complex chest-bursting alien restlessly moving inside of it. Why is it popular with their base? How deep does that popularity run? Why is the feeling seemingly so strong?
The continuing news story that is most on my mind right now, however, is reproductive rights, including the right to abortion. I’ve read so many commentaries over the past week, so many over the past decade, so many my entire adult life. It’s hard to say anything new, and it’s hard to say anything that deviates from the “whys” that I and many others are satisfied with.
Why is this such a deep and persistent controversy? Why didn’t we just settle on “this is a matter of individual choice and conscience, so if you have convictions that forbid you to do this, that’s fine; if you don’t that’s also fine?” a long time ago? The answer I and many others would quickly give is, “Because there are people, mostly men, who want to control women’s bodies, want power over women, want to use women’s bodies as a wedge issue to exert a much more comprehensive control over other people’s lives as a whole.” It’s a good and I think basically accurate answer, fulsomely supported by evidence of all kinds. (Representative Madison Cawthorn, in a Dec. 3 speech in the House describing women: “earthen vessels”.)
Something unsettled in me still asks, “why”. It asks because it’s plain that this isn’t going away no matter what happens next, no matter what the Supreme Court decides. That is the why of asking “why?”: to grapple with an event that recurs and recurs and recurs despite our ardent, despairing wish that it should stop. It’s in these cases that we have to keep digging on “why?” We might ask in the wake of a one-in-a-million event (winning Powerball, getting hit by a meteor, etc.) “Why me? Why now?” but mostly we know the answer is “dumb (good or bad) luck”. But “why does this keep happening?” is a different kind of question. Why does this keep happening, despite our well-justified feeling that we know how this ends, our sense that we’ve learned our lesson and we should know better. Why is a spectacularly incompetent and criminal man who tried to overturn this democracy plausibly threatening to do it again after so many millions went to the voting booth to say “No, we don’t want that?” Well, partly because almost as many millions went to the voting booth to say “We do want it.”
Which is the case for abortion, too. Many different kinds of polls have shown that for a long time a majority of Americans support the protection of reproductive rights that include the right to abortion, and very large majorities oppose the particular kind of anti-abortion policies recently adopted in Texas and other states. But equally plainly, anti-abortion is a strongly motivating idea for a substantial minority of both active voters and people who don’t often vote but do register their views in other situations. Why? Why is that such a persistent and constantly renewed conviction that figures so strongly in their agency as political actors?
Even if the answer is still robustly, “because they want to control women’s bodies and sexuality” and “because control of women’s bodies is a linchpin of a broader desire for control and power”, that answer has further “whys” embedded inside of it that we have to keep chasing, because only in the fullness of the answers do we have any hope of finding a way to be free of the recurrent threat to the freedom, autonomy and humanity of women.
It’s partly because that longer chain of explanations and causes is the only way to open up the persistence of the issue. Many Americans who want to restrict abortion or curtail reproductive rights will cite their Christian faith as the primary reason. But it’s nowhere in the Bible. The history of Christian (and pre-Christian Western) thought on ensoulment, pregnancy and the fetus is unsettled and complex until relatively modern times: contemporary American thought is certainly not a coherent product of millennia of consistent doctrinal instruction. Daniel K. Williams in his book Defenders of the Unborn argues that anti-abortion activism didn’t become a predominantly conservative and religious cause until after Roe v. Wade and that in its deeper political roots it was associated with liberal post-1945 social reformers at the outset.
That the history is much messier than our readings of the dangerous present can easily accommodate might give us hope of some contingent possibilities where we presently see none, some shifting of allegiances. On the other hand, it’s not as if women had access to safe abortions—or any reproductive rights at all—prior to abortion becoming a major political issue. The deep history of abortion at a global scale shows both that most societies have had knowledge of various plants and substances as well as physical procedures that might stimulate a miscarriage for an unwanted pregnancy and that in many societies this knowledge was a subject of contention and deeply constrained or subject to existing forms of male authority over women and family. To some extent the ideas and freedoms we defend now are relatively new and are the profoundly hard-won product of struggle by many women around the world.
Somewhere in all of that history, recent and deep, might be some answers to the question of whether anti-abortion political sentiment in the US today is conscious of its own motivations. Because here I cannot help but feel that people motivated significantly by anti-abortion both are and are not aware of their desire for power over women and their bodies, are and are not self-consciously seeing the prohibition of abortion as a first step towards some reconfiguration of family, work, masculine primacy, and social structure generally. That’s important. When the answer to “why” turns out to be relatively shallow or limited to that single issue, no matter how strong the feelings involved, they’re relatively easy to overcome and uproot. It’s incredibly striking going back to the early 1960s to read how intense the sentiment against long hair on men was across a wide spectrum of American society. But despite a few lingering flare-ups in the culture wars, this is a long-settled issue: it wasn’t connected to much (and it was also about regulating the behavior of men: powerful social groups generally find it easier to revise the standards for their discretionary behavior). But when a cause is a linchpin of a much deeper, pervasive vision of social life that some people have a yearning to construct and inhabit (and a determination to compel others to do so), there’s no hope of resolution without engaging that vision across its entirety.
Which I think feminism has substantially done—this is not work that has been avoided or missed. But maybe a deep revisit of “why” will help us understand what the continuing wellsprings of that vision of family, household, community and gender are and what replenishes them. Perhaps, for example, the desire to recapitulate or reinvent a half-fictional vision of family and gender through some form of social compulsion appeals in part to men and women in some American communities because of the dislocations of the last forty years of socioeconomic transformation, because lower middle-class white families are no longer protected from accelerating inequality by the fact of their race, because of the restless mobility and instability of globalization and “disruption”. Maybe it’s because progressives sometimes have confused some of their own local or particular cultural affinities and preferences with larger sociopolitical commitments that need to have universal force and have threatened the everyday lifeways of people who might otherwise be content to live and let live—e.g., not so much abortion rights as the triggering issue but instead a much more granular assembly of affective and expressive visions of gender and sexuality.
Or maybe it’s just power-seeking as the alpha and omega of explanations, that this is a real version of “they hate our freedoms”, and we can just full stop on that and be prepared to fight for as long as it takes. I am not selling a particular bill of goods here as much as trying to document my own dismay that what I take to be a basic right, founded on basic principles of self-ownership and freedom, is so deeply imperiled in my country and seemingly will remain so for generations to come—and to ask, in desperate confusion and humility, “why”?
Image credit: Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash
I wish I had time to respond to this today, Tim, but I simply do not. However, please, please, please do not set up—even as a straw man—the fashionability of western men’s hair with the desperation of women’s enforced reproduction around the globe. Abortion has never been out of the question. It has only been out of reach as a safe and legal medical procedure. Women will die because of what is happening in SCOTUS. Women are already dying in Poland, El Salvador, and many other countries because of similar laws. It’s not only abortion. It carries over to contraception, supposedly dubious miscarriages, rape and sexual assault laws, ad infinitum. This is the tip of the spear. The whole blade is coming.