So we’re in Convention Season this quadrennial election cycle; the GOP had theirs last week, and the Dems are having theirs now. The latter party has concocted a mythical GOP “War on Women,” a cynical ploy that shows significant signs of failure. After all, as Sandra Fluke is not Rosa Parks, she doesn’t make for a compelling figure around which to rally. It’s not like access to contraception is the burning moral issue of our time, and most Americans recognize that.
I’ve been thinking about identity and ideology this election season, as so much of our cultural and political discussions revolve around these related concepts. “Ideology” is basically an intellectual belief system imposed upon reality, while “Identity” today is not something given by nature or tradition but something chosen. As regards our current cultural and political situation it seems to me that what it means to be a male or female has nothing to do with nature and everything to do with ideology. The same claim would hold, I think, for issues of ethnicity and race.
Take the issue of “women’s issues.” In our current cultural encyclopedia, the phrase “women’s issues” basically refers to the euphemism of “reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” — that is, unhindered and free access to abortion and contraception. But many women I know are pro-life. And while the plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” the data show that more women identify as pro-life than pro-choice: In a Gallup poll taken in early May, the numbers for women were 46% to 44%, respectively. How is it that abortion is a “women’s issue” when American women are divided? Ideology, not the facts on the ground, is at work here.
Take also the lineup of speakers at the GOP convention. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley spoke, a woman of Indian descent who attends both Sikh and Methodist services. Artur Davis, an African-American who represented the 7th district of Alabama in Congress as a Democrat from 2003-2011 and who introduced Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention, recently switched his party affiliation to GOP and spoke at the GOP convention. Mia Love, the African-American GOP candidate for congress from Utah(!) and Ted Cruz, Hispanic GOP candidate for the US Senate from Texas spoke as well, as did other non-white-male speakers. The network and cable coverage was nearly non-existent, and the meme persists that the GOP is the party of rich white males while the Democratic Party is the party of women, minorities, and the poor.
If you dig into the data, there’s plenty to confound that narrative, or, at the very least, to reveal to complexity of the situation. What’s going on here?
Identity is defined not by anything natural, traditional, or physical, but rather by ideology. This is how we have the phenomenon of Bill Clinton being “the first black president,” while the first black president, Barack Obama, is now “the first gay president.” Nikki Haley is not a woman because she’s not pro-abortion. And so it goes. Apparently, identity is not defined by who you are by nature, or by culture, but rather by what you think, by what causes you’re committed to, by ideology.
This phenomenon is, I think, typically American. America is subtly Gnostic, meaning that we don’t take the body very seriously, and we reject any constraints of the physical world. (I’m not making this up; read Harold Bloom’s The American Religion.) Indeed, we use technology as secularized grace to destroy nature in choosing our identities, whether cosmetic surgery, liposuction, sex-change operations, extreme piercings, tattoos, or something as simple as an avatar online. And part of our national ethos (as Anglos, at last) is a full-fledged flight from the constraints of tradition; we wanted to leave those behind in Europe.
The issues of identity and ideology, their relationship and their bearing on the cultural and political issues of our day are indeed complex and worthy of deeper contemplation than a blog post can afford. At the very least, however, ideology and its effects on how we conceive of our identities is dangerous, especially with regard to our cultural and political debates, because it is estranged from nature, from reality, and sooner or later reality bites back.
(Cross-posted at leroyhuizenga.com)
September 4th, 2012 | 2:00 pm
In my opinion, the mere fact that, in this identity-laden age, the DNC *wants* to prominently display Sandra Fluke as a member of their team, tells you something worth knowing right there.
September 4th, 2012 | 2:48 pm
Apparently, white girls at prestigious law schools who can’t balance their checkbooks properly, delay personal gratification, compromise their progressive principles by buying their contraception cheap at “corporate” Target or Walmart pharmacies (or the local Planned Parenthood?), and ensure that their hookups/dates/boyfriends wear condoms (which, unlike oral contraceptives, are supposed to protect against STDs) probably won’t generate much public sympathy except from fellow ideologues in small bubble-encased circles.
What’s even more pathetic is that professional victim Sandra Fluke will probably get a book deal and Lifetime movie made out of being called the s-word by Rush Limbaugh.
September 4th, 2012 | 3:06 pm
I can’t help but wonder given the logical mismatches Huizenga notes, that some Democrats have begun to believe their own spin. That’s always a danger to those who focus on politics, regardless of their tilt.
September 4th, 2012 | 3:22 pm
“How is it that abortion is a “women’s issue” when American women are divided?”
Um, because it’s an issue of women’s bodies – you know, wombs and vaginas and so on.
September 4th, 2012 | 3:48 pm
Um, it is also an issue of male bodies, along with female bodies – you know, sucked out of the womb and so on.
September 4th, 2012 | 5:04 pm
As best I can tell (as a mathematician ignorant of the relevant philosophy), Western society has long sought to construe reality as a collection of ideal models. That is, we seek to reduce any facet of reality to a small collection of principles about which we can reason deductively, thus predicting the behavior of that facet successfully and, in most cases, manipulating it as we will. In effect we mimic Euclid’s development of geometry in which he begins with a small collection of postulates and proceeds to deduce the traditional geometric results.
Thus in considering the material creation we look for physical laws as the postulates from which we can reason about the physical creation. In politics we write constitutions making them the postulates from which all other laws must flow (or, at least, which other laws must not contradict). In Christianity we adopt Sola Scriptura, making the Holy Scriptures the postulates from which all authoritative doctrine must derive. In effect we build axiomatic models of the physical creation, of government, and of Christianity, treating them as so much geometry; and we then identify the realities with our models, treating the models, in effect, as ideals in Plato’s sense, as higher truths realized more or less imperfectly in the world around us.
Ideologies – whether traditional ones like communism, capitalism, democracy, and (C.S. Lewis’s favorite) “progress,” or the more modern ones you mention – are simply models of reality, models taken to be truer than reality itself, models to be imposed on a recalcitrant reality. The trouble is that, for reasons I do not understand, a model never preserves the nature of the reality it models. Thus conforming reality to a model inescapably involves subverting, warping, and ultimately denying the nature of the reality. This is particularly grievous when the reality is man, himself, whose nature is conformity to the image of Christ. Once that nature is denied, man is just so much raw material to be shaped according to his own will, or according to the will of those who have the power to do so, and the result becomes increasingly hell on earth, regardless of whether the intentions are good or bad.
September 4th, 2012 | 5:38 pm
“After all, as Sandra Fluke is not Rosa Parks, she doesn’t make for a compelling figure around which to rally. It’s not like access to contraception is the burning moral issue of our time, and most Americans recognize that.”
For the love of Pete, our great country MUST find a way to keep 30-year-old GU law student Sandra Fluke stocked with free contraception at all costs. She must not be made to carry this great burden alone. Our nation once carried off the Apollo space program—I am sure we can ensure, somehow, that Sandra Fluke gets the Pill (or little rubber things) for free.
When the DNC puts her front and center at their convention, I am sure we will all see the priority of her need, and understand the need to surrender some of our First Amendment rights. I hope they make a really cool poster—suitable for framing— to explain it all.
September 4th, 2012 | 5:59 pm
unhindered and free access to abortion and contraception. But many women I know are pro-life. And while the plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” the data show that more women identify as pro-life than pro-choice: In a Gallup poll taken in early May, the numbers for women were 46% to 44%, respectively. How is it that abortion is a “women’s issue” when American women are divided? Ideology, not the facts on the ground, is at work here.
First, contraception is a big issue in this election, and “pro-life” doesn’t mean “anti-contraception.” The vast majority of women of childbearing age use contraception. It is difficult to deny it belongs among “women’s issues.”
Second, the Republican Party Platform appears to be opposed to abortion in all circumstances. If you are a woman of childbearing age and you are “pro-life” but nevertheless believe a woman should be allowed to have an abortion in cases of rape, incest, or threat to her life, you may still very well be concerned about abortion rights.
Third, many pro-life women will no doubt be too far to the right to even consider voting for Obama. As the cliche goes, Obama needs to “energize his base” to get out and vote. If he ignores abortion as an issue, he is a lot more likely to lose pro-choice Democratic women than he is to gain pro-life Republican women.
September 4th, 2012 | 11:26 pm
“Identity is defined not by anything natural, traditional, or physical, but rather by ideology. This is how we have the phenomenon of Bill Clinton being “the first black president,” while the first black president, Barack Obama, is now “the first gay president.” Nikki Haley is not a woman because she’s not pro-abortion.”
That is a great observation and it is refreshing to see this in conjunction with the insight into the Gnostic parallel. Although I have not read Bloom’s book, I find the parallels between ancient Gnosticism and today’s contemporaries very compelling when observed by Hans Jonas, the author of The Gnostic Religion, Eric Voegelin in his analysis of “the gnostic mass movements of modernity,” and Christopher Lasch at the end of my edition of The Culture of Narcissism. Many others have made this observation by now including my friend Gil Costello on this site.
I am reminded by the term “war on women” of the epithet against early Christians as being “enemies of humanity” – in this case it is half of humanity, minus the girls aborted for ‘women’s rights.’
I am impressed by the way in which this ‘women’s rights’ rhetoric isolates a woman- it tends in the minds of many men to make the choice to conceive entirely hers, and so her responsibility; it also configures emotional isolation from the baby in her womb, the objective distancing from her bodies history and the life within her in order to make a choice; it also sets up a kind of antagonism toward her own body by making the urbane modern woman promoter of taking the type one carcinogenic pill the majority of her fertile life. There are lots of more nuanced observations that have been made about this than I can muster. I am struck by the individualistic, disembodied, non-communal nature of this rhetorical construct.
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