Re: Shaming Redux (was Re: [Fwd: Culture and Technology (was Re: Abortion, Killing etc)]

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie, I think this whole abortion thread shows what happens when
debates are imported from other lists. I thought you were talking about
something else entirely! You were talking about arguing with LEFTISTS
who are wimping out on abortion, or willing to trade it to make
alliances  (with the seamless garment  Catholics, for ex). I thought you
were talking about how to talk to ordinary people, students etc.( Where
I have to say I think "arrogance," recommended by Carroll, is not the
best strategy -- you embolden a few, maybe, but you turn off more. But
maybe whether or not to be arrogant is not an entirely free choice!)
  I agree with your recent posts completely--in fact I've said all those
things in print. Well, maybe not completely, because i think leftists
who are willing to surrender on abortion (mostly men in my experience)
often were not very pro-abortion in the first place. It was never a big
item on the agenda for them, but the product of, among other things, a
strategic professed sympathy for women's liberation that has now been
partially replaced by a perhaps equally strategic sympathy for
communitarianism. Or, in Christopher Hitchens' case, rightwing
Republicans. Or, in Alex Cockburn's case,rightwing Republican gun nuts.
  Another thing -- the Nation is not a leftist magazine, and hasn't been
for fifty years (if you count stalinism as leftism). It missed the
entire 60s, for instance.  It's a liberal, "progressive" (word I hate)
magazine, with sentimental feelings for the old CP. It has some leftist
writers, and some liberal writers, and some writers that actually are
pretty much Clintonites. It even publishes the occasional conservative.
But its editorial politics are firmly electoral and
social-welfare-state, oriented around assorted good causes, ACLU,
AFL-CIO, the ever more elusive "left wing of the Democratic Party" and
various third-party chimeras.
 Even so, though, The Nation's editorial policy has never waffled ONE
INCH on abortion. I am happy to say. It has never published an article
advising compromise.  Hitchens' infamous anti-choice column of l989 (I
think) was unavoidable -- columnists have carte blanche. On abortion, a
liberal is as likely to take a hard prochoice line as a leftist. After
all, liberals are FOR individualism!

One more thing.  Feeling free to criticize, in your own heart or in
gossip, the behavior of others is not the same as "shaming."  One can't
help making judgments about people. We all think and talk and speculate
and evaluate and compare and wonder and, yes, condemn, too sometimes--
how ever not? Human behavior is the book we are all reading.  But most
of the time it's not a good idea to share your  negative thoughts with
the object of your observations in the hope of 'reforming" them.

katha