Landscapes, Binaries, and Scales, Part II
Tweens, abortion, and other failures of the political compass
“We can make [social and political issues] fit on a political compass by removing their complexity, denuding them of context, and slapping each side with partisan labels to create a kind of gloss of ideological content and fit that doesn’t exist,
but I’m not sure what the point is or how it helps.”
I wanted to follow up on my last post with two more in-depth examples, in part because readers keep asking whether my 4D landscape really helps anything at all. Doesn’t the binary - the very least - help us understand the world? Even in limited ways?
I’ll discuss two examples and both, I hope, show that the use of political binaries or compasses don’t really help us navigate human problems, small or large. And both, I hope, will show how we can use our shared landscape to navigate these problems in a meaningful way, without jettisoning the hope of something like an objective answer.
What Tweens and Makeup Tell Us About Political Truths
The first is a minor one that just came up this week. Our oldest daughter is 11 and recently asked to be allowed to wear makeup to school. Our first reaction was “when Hell freezes over!” But our more nuanced - radically moderate - reaction was to look around, talk with her, and assess a range of options. What we settled on was that she could wear tinted lip balm to school and we would consider minimal eye makeup for very special occasions, but that, in general, more extensive makeup including eye makeup would not happen at all before high school and she shouldn’t ask. (We’ll see how long that lasts…)
Andrew’s post argued against my rejection of binaries and compasses: “I don't know of any good reason to think we can't place different actions, policies, or political leaders on those scales in a way that can provide useful information.”
But the question of whether our 11 year old should wear makeup doesn’t clearly fit on any kind of political compass in any way that helps us solve the problem. Both progressives and religious conservatives might come down against tween makeup, but for very different reasons. And it’s not clear to me whether we can even use a simple argument for human freedom or any other particular political principle, since it’s not even clear whether makeup is liberatory or not.
In fact, people disagree on makeup’s moral and political status in a host of culturally embedded ways, such as when we accept 20 year old women wearing makeup but might (still) look a bit askance at a 20 year old male wearing makeup or even be mildly judgy of an 80 year old woman wearing a full face of makeup over leathery wrinkled skin. I’m not arguing that any of these reactions are justified, merely that our attitude toward the concept of “makeup” depends on who is wearing it and in what contexts and our own cultural, religious, and experiential dispositions.
But back to tweens... Since we couldn’t land on a clear libertarian or progressive or conservative or any other kind of solution to the culturally embedded problem of whether tweens should wear makeup, my husband and I ultimately had to do what all radical moderates have to do in the end: look around.
We had to assess our own 4D moral and social landscape and figure out where we all were located at this particular point in time. We started with our own values as a family (leaning against), the norms in our daughter’s school (more favorable), the activities she enjoys for which makeup might be relevant (like anchoring her school’s morning show), and our overall feeling about how makeup affects young girls’ attitudes toward themselves in both good and bad ways (mostly bad, but maybe sometimes good, and always context-dependent).
We landed on a kind of moderate position, but it’s a moderate position that would be quite different in a society that practiced, for example, ritual face decoration. And as we had allowed her to wear (zombie bride) makeup for Halloween without concern, the context of the decision - where we were located in our particular landscape on that particular day - clearly mattered. We weren’t hypocrites; we were just in a different part of the landscape that shifted the way our values
And ours is ultimately a position where binaries or even compasses just don’t make sense. Not only does “tween makeup wearing” not fit well into any of the standard value boxes, but it’s very context dependent; some people would say “of course not!” but allow it for Halloween while other people would say “of course!” but not mean it for wearing to bed or they might limit the kind of makeup and its volume.
Well, you might say, this isn’t a political problem at all, so of course the political compass doesn’t help us! But whether 11 year olds should wear makeup does, in fact, have moral, political, and social heft, though I of course wouldn’t want the government making this decision for me.
But if tween makeup wearing isn’t convincing, let’s take something much more politically relevant and one where the political compass *should* be able to help us: abortion.
Abortion, Compasses, and Political Truth
Oddly enough, the political compass helps us just as much with abortion as it does with tween makeup: that is to say, not at all. The problem, as with tween makeup wearing, is that the context, or the shared moral landscape in which these decisions are made, makes all the difference in the world. I could locate the pro-life position on the authoritarian part of the spectrum or I could locate it on the liberatory part of the spectrum, always assuming of course the fetus has personhood at some point. Here, as elsewhere, motive matters. I could argue that the pro-choice position is either progressive or libertarian, but neither really tells me much about human freedom or whether and in what circumstances abortion rights lead to human flourishing.
The problem with abortion - as with so many other human social, political, and moral problems - is that the devil is in the details. Most Americans recognize this, of course. Very few Americans use the binary or even the political compass to decide how to live their lives (which is good), though they are sometimes tricked into trying to force their opinions to fit that compass after the fact.
What Americans really want to say about abortion is something like “whether it’s acceptable or not depends on where a person is located on the landscape: the kinds of options they have, their reasons for choosing it, how far along the pregnancy is, and what the tradeoffs are of intervening.”
My particular position on abortion is that it’s almost always morally wrong (and gets much more wrong the longer a pregnancy goes on), but that there are few cases (if any) where government involvement is safe or justified. This position is in part a reaction to the lessons born by our collective centuries-long experience with government regulation of abortion as well as my own experiences with pregnancy. It’s both deontological and consequentialist and the entire position is predicated on a basic human tradeoff: sometimes we have to put up with some kinds of moral badness because trying to get rid of it would cause an excess of human suffering or other kinds of worse moral evil.
And even this position has a lot of nuance built in, depending on where people are located in social/political/moral space: a woman terminating a pregnancy with a profoundly disabled child who will likely die after birth is a different animal - morally - from a woman terminating a pregnancy to get back at her partner. You the reader, of course, don’t have to agree with my assessment, but it seems obvious to me that those two women are making fundamentally different moral decisions. So we can add virtue ethics and human motivation to the deontological and consequentialist variables at play.
From my perspective, all these things matter when we assess the morality of abortion: people’s motives and intentions, their economic and personal vulnerability, their ability to make other choices, the stage of pregnancy, the health of the fetus, and so on. These are all variables that we can only get at by understanding where they’re located on our shared moral landscape.
But crucially, none of these things are relevant when it comes to government intervention in abortion because we’ve seen - time and time again - that governments are not able to consistently, coherently, or safely - regulate what women do with their bodies.
So in one sense I fit into the “pro-life” bucket but when it comes to state involvement I’m “pro-choice.” And my anti-state involvement stance might look like it fits well with a libertarian or anti-authoritarian perspective, but I got there via a pretty circuitous route and not because I implicitly believe that the state has no role at all in defending the unborn.
I don’t think I’m unique in this respect. Most of the people I know have pretty nuanced positions on abortion, even if they claim a pro-life or pro-choice position. Ironically though, in my anecdotal observations at least, those who align themselves strongly to a specific position on the binary end up losing the nuance and complexity their positions originally had and not in a good way. It’s like once you’ve identified yourself as “pro-life” you’re not allowed to be nuanced or have complex opinions on when - however rarely - abortion might be justified. And once you've slapped that “pro-choice” pin on your shoulder, it’s easy to feel like you’re not allowed to even think there may be moral weight to abortion or that it could be morally condemned in some situations, however rare. I’ve had lots of conversations with friends and family and students where - when you really pin them down - they express strongly held beliefs that they admit they’re not “supposed” to think. And they’re not “supposed” to think those things because to do so would conflict with their polarized identity.
Does any of this matter? I think it does. Our justificatory and explanatory complexity gets masked when we assign people labels that stick them onto a binary or locate them on a part of the compass and expect them not to move once they’re there. And this masking has real and dangerous implications for how we think about our shared world, as I’ve argued here before.
How Often Do Binaries Really Fit?
And I think this is an overlooked and quite serious part of the problem with political binaries and political compasses: many of the things that *do* seem to fit on those binaries and compasses only do so because we’ve forced them on. We assign pro-life to the “right” and pro-choice to the “left” and it works only because we’ve completely hollowed out all the complexity of the problem itself.
Abortion continues to challenge political and social compasses because it’s a very common situation with very unusual moral, legal and political ramifications. It’s one of the only times in the human world where two people share the same body at the same time. This is not a situation our individualistic legal system is very well set up to deal with, despite it happening millions of times each year. And it’s a situation where the social, moral, political, medical and economic landscape can either align maternal and fetal interests or separate them.
But, really, the same thing goes for tween makeup, immigration, free speech, and a range of other human social, moral, and political issues. We can make them fit onto a political compass by removing their complexity, denuding them of context, and slapping each side with partisan labels to create a kind of gloss of ideological content and fit that doesn’t exist, but I’m not sure what the point is or how it helps us understand what the right thing to do is in any given situation.
What’s the Right Answer? It Depends.
I do think Andrew and some of the compass defenders have a point when it comes to something very basic, namely our attitude toward state power. J.C. Lester commented on Andrew’s post (and later on a previous post of mine) with a link to his piece from the Journal of Social Philosophy, which argues that a compass that looks at personal choice and property choice can help us understand different value systems in a more comprehensive way. And that’s probably true. But even in that article, the answers to the questions about personal choice and property choice answers could be “it depends.” For example, I’m a big fan of free speech, so the answer to 4) “Should all state censorship be abolished?” should seem obvious: yes!
But… Are we talking about eliminating any and all regulations of speech, including offensive speech? Does that mean pornography on public streets? Should black Americans or Jews have to walk down public streets plastered with neo-Nazi propaganda? Should my public school children be subjected to advertising on their school laptops or in the hallways of their school just because to do otherwise would constitute government censorship? I’d probably pause for a second and say “wait a minute… it depends.”
Maybe the response from defenders of the political compass would be that this just means I’m located in a different place on the compass between personal choice and property choice than an extreme libertarian would be. But even then, I guess I wonder how helpful locating me in this way is, given that my opinions on a lot of these questions are somewhat fluid, depending on context. I would have different feelings about offensive speech in the United States than I would in Kosovo, where certain types of ethnically loaded speech could easily spark a civil war. Same for access to pornography in elementary school versus high school. Same for almost anything else out there.
What do binaries and compasses help us *do*?
So I’m kicking the can back over to the defenders of binaries and compasses. What do these tools actually help us do in the social and political and moral world that we couldn’t do otherwise? Do we have any evidence they actually help us make better choices? Do we have any evidence that they lead to better, more thoughtful, and more clear decision making? On the flip side, is there evidence that talking about our values and how they fit into our current location on the landscape is somehow less helpful than hollowing out complexity in order to stick those values onto a static compass of some sort?
And most importantly: does whatever benefit they offer outweigh the harm they do by eliminating complexity and nuance from our political, moral, and social lives?
What do you think? Let me know in the comments. And as always, subscribe and share!