The only remedy is moral outrage heated enough to get people to the polls. “Nothing great happens without anger.” (Thomas Aquinas)
This was Matthew Fox talking this morning about the impending American Supreme Court Decision if a leak is prescient. Abortion as a culture war imperative has lost any sense of nuance or humanity in much discourse.
It reminded me of something in the book that I continue to read - Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key. In his chapter, “The Ethic we need” he observes that science can provide us with what we must need to know about a subject - in the book’s context, it’s nature, but the same can apply to any moral issue. Unlike most of the culture wars which focus of what is good for an individual, he looks at the broader implications for a society as a whole. What is nearly always missing in the current brouhaha is the larger context of the reality of a pregnancy and all the players that surround it - or for that matter, that it takes more than one person to make it happen.
The Author, Larry Rasmussen, goes on to talk about change and quotes Vaclev Havel on its anatomy: “The distinguishing features of such times are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered”. Havel thought modernity was ending and saw the world as disconnected, confusing and chaotic with few common meanings or inner understandings of what we are experiencing. Rasmussen goes on to ask us what will make our species become the one that is capable of the right kind of change.
He suggests that the levels of change are threefold.
The first one that we think of and is the easiest to do. It’s based on what we know already and is most familiar.
The second comes when we realize that an unexpected crisis demands something more - certainly in the case of the climate crisis, but that one is now swamped in the news by the war crisis and the abortion crisis. One decision was made about the latter. It can’t be reversed without a chance of causing another crisis.
The shouting and distrust of institutions calls for something quite different and calls for a third - a change of consciousness - what Havel called “New meaning . . . gradually born from the encounter or the intersection of many different elements” - a different view, Rasmussen says, of what does and does not make sense.
The good thing about anger is that it can be motivating and energizing - but just yelling at one another doesn’t deal with an issue and dissuades others from exercising their own view through voting since all of the speakers eventually seem like idiots.
Suppose the placard carrying supporter and opponent of abortion - or even their counterparts in the Supreme Court - needed to hear not from lobbyists or lawyers, but from several pregnant woman as to what they were facing in terms of decision - perhaps a mother with several children to support already with less than adequate means to do so, or a young teenage girl after a chance encounter with a teenage boy where neither knew anything about unprotected sex, or a woman molested by a family member, or a woman raped at gunpoint. Putting on those shoes - what does the mind say? What about the heart? What about the gut? In turn each supporter and opponent might be asked to tell their stories of unexpected crisis in their own lives when they had to make a choice - and what the values were leading to that decision - and if the decision had to be made again, what the choice might be. Could there ever be a learning experience for any of them?
Keeping the two placarded sides separate may prevent violence brought on by anger. But is it the only possibility?