(Via Catallarchy 2005-03-29.)

Treasury Secretary Snow came to Portland a couple of weeks ago to hawk the Bush administration’s Social Security plan (i.e., inflicting another goddamn government-controlled account on you and calling it freedom); Captain Arbyte attended and stuck him with a tough question that puts the lie to the ownership society rhetoric.. Good show; but it turns out that before he even got the chance to ask, Snow had already let the mask of the State slip, for just a moment, before hurriedly putting it back in place (emphasis mine):

The fourth question asked about potential changes to existing retirement accounts. Snow said that Social Security was never intended to be a person’s only source of retirement income, and that FDR was clear about this when the program was enacted. Snow praised Health Savings Accounts in particular as a savings vehicle. He said that the young are notoriously poor savers, and that it’s an advantage of the President’s system that it forces people to save. Foot in mouth, he quickly rephrased it as an opportunity. (Thanks Steve; I missed the rephrasing.) He finished by saying that he’s in favor of savings — well, at least he’s clearly not a Keynesian.

But, of course, that’s what the Bush plan is, no matter how lovely the mask and no matter how polite the language: it is a plan for forcing people to save for their retirement against their will. And, while we’re at it, so is Social Security: whether you think you have a better use for your money or not, whether you think you can get a better rate of return from your local bank or not, whether you would feel more secure not being dependent on U.S. government entitlements for your retirement income or not, you will be forced to turn the money over to the government’s approved uses, and you will be forced to do so under any Yet Another Damn Account plan that Bush and his gang come up with. Don’t believe me? Try not paying your Social Security tax and see what happens to you.

In the world of State bureau-speak, the State offers opportunities, not threats, and opportunities do not exist until the State creates them. In Snow’s world there are apparently no brokers, no banks, and no mason jars, so young people do not have an opportunity to save unless the government issues an edict forcing them to do it. Just like No Child Left Behind gives schools an opportunity to hire more credentialed teachers and increase standardized testing. Just like jail gives potheads an opportunity to reconsider their dissolute life. Just like the draft gave our boys an opportunity to serve their country. Of course, this is all the polite way of saying that no matter what individual people who know about their own lives better than you do decided the best course of action to be, given their present circumstances and limited resources, you will need to comply with what the government tells you is best and if you do not comply some dude with a gun or a billy-club will come to your house and make you do it, or take you to jail for not doing it, or both. As Ludwig von Mises said:

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action…. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

–Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, ch. XXVII, p. 719

Now, let me be clear. The fact that an edict is backed by the threat of force is not a decisive argument against it. There is nothing wrong with using force to stop murder, or slavery, or robbery, or rape. But the point here is that if you are going to go around in favor of this or that government program you had better be clear about what that entails and it had better be something that it’s worth using force to achieve.

So, now, remind me. Why should I be forced to save for my own retirement?

One of the easiest things to do in this life is to be an anti-feminist blowhard. It’s easy because you don’t have to know anything at all to do it: when it comes time for some dude to spout off about Women’s Lib, he can count on being taken seriously without having spent 5 minutes on even a casual attempt to find out what his target’s views actually are, whether he has represented them rightly or wrongly, whether he is saying something true or false, or whether he is musing about something that has already been mooted and already answered definitively many, many times before. You don’t have to know anything about the history or theory of the feminist movement (a lot of which is, mind you, less than 40 years old and widely in print); you don’t need to know anything about what particular feminists did or didn’t say; you don’t even have to know anything in particular about current affairs. As long as you are spouting off about feminism or some particular feminist, no-one in the mainstream media or culture is likely to bother checking up on a damn thing you say.

Given the complete lack of any kind of intellectual accountability, or felt need to stop for a moment and read up on what you’re talking about, that big-mouthed men have enjoyed when it comes to feminism, it shouldn’t be surprising that a broad spectrum of ill-informed lectures, factless tirades, half-truths, distortions, and outright lies spring up and spread from year to year. At the furthest, most degenerate end of the spectrum, you can find a particularly loathsome specimen: the anti-feminist horror file quote list that are circulated among Fathers’ Rights bully-boys and anti-abortion websites. As a case in point, I offer Fathers for Life’s compilation of quotes, apparently collected by Bill Wood (with interspersed commentary by an unnamed author) claiming to show that feminism has roots in communism.

Now, as far as the conclusion goes, it seems to me that this is a bit like marshalling all your forces–complete with cavalry, banners, and a booming great military band–into a massive charge to take a cowpatch that was never contested. Anyone who has spent five minutes reading a survey history of second-wave feminism–like Feminist Revolution or In Our Time–or some of the actual works, such as The Dialectic of Sex or Toward a Feminist Theory of the State—already knows that many of the pioneering second-wave feminists came out of the radical wing of the New Left, and many of them were socialists, Marxists, or anarchists of various stripes. They are not particularly coy about the fact, and so what, anyway? Anyone who has taken the time to look up these basic facts before spouting off also knows that a lot of the New Left responded with hostility and contempt towards the emerging Women’s Liberation movement; they know that it eventually led to an acrimonious split and the abandonment or qualification of many classical Marxist doctrines as women came to shape an analysis grounded in their own experience of oppression and liberation. If you think that this is going to come as some kind of shock to people, then you are presuming a great deal of willing ignorance on the part of your audience about feminism. Depending on the audience, that may be a pretty safe assumption, but where it is, it’s pretty clear that the fault lies with the audience, not with the feminists.

No, the issue here is not that the conclusion of the horror file compilation is false (it may be false, if they mean to portray feminists as classical Marxists; it is true if they only make the more limited claim that feminist theory is deeply influenced by Marxism). It’s that the reasons given for this conclusion are deceptive. Nestled in between lengthy quotations from several anti-feminist polemics (among others, Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Professing Feminism), there are citations from a number of feminist authors and activists purporting to demonstrate connections between Marxism and feminism. The problem is that, even though the conclusion is true, the quotations used to bolster it are being used deceptively. They do not mean what Fathers for Life claims they mean. In some cases, they express a view that is the opposite of the one the author holds. In fact, it includes a quote which may be completely fabricated for all I can tell–more on that below. And these aren’t innocent mistakes, either. Fathers for Life has made it clear that they do not care whether the evidence they’re using to bolster their case is accurate or completely spurious. I know because I wrote them about it:

To: FathersForLife.org website contact form
From: Charles Johnson feedback@radgeek.com
Date: 25 February 2005

I was a bit puzzled to see some of the following quotes at http://www.fathersforlife.org/feminism/quotes1.htm#Femicommies, apparently intended to demonstrate that feminism is derived from Marxism:

Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism — Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, The unhappy marriage of Marxism and Feminism

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism…

— Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Catharine A. MacKinnon, 1989, First Harvard University Press. Page 3.

I wonder whether anyone involved with this page has actually read Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, or The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. In fact, one wonders if you have even read the title of The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, since that puts it in a nutshell before you have even made it to the essay. I ask these things because the two pieces are extended discussions of the problems inherent in trying to combine feminist and Marxist politics. The first 1/3 of MacKinnon’s book is devoted to a lengthy feminist critique of Marxism and of attempted Marxist-feminist syntheses.

There are plenty of places to find Marxist influences on feminism, or attempts to combine Marxist and feminist politics. But MacKinnon and Hartmann’s essays are not among them. Frankly it’s hard to regard the selective use of these quotations as anything other than (i) incredibly sloppy, or (ii) dishonest.

Here’s the reply that I got:

Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 21:26:13 -0700 From: Walter Schneider misc@fathersforlife.org Subject: Re: Data posted to form 1 of http://fathersforlife.org/contact.htm
To: feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Fathers for Life

Thanks for writing.

If you read all of the document, you must have read also who produced it and noticed that it contains many, many more quotes than just the couple that you found to be objectionable.

Your complaint is noted, but two objectionable quotes about the strong ties between communism and radical feminism isn’t all there is at Fathers for Life. I suggest that you make a search for “feminism communism” at fathersforlife.org.

Amongst the more than a hundred pages containing information that relates to the connection between radical feminism and communism, there must surely be a few more that will irk you. I suggest that you narrow your search down by adding the following search term to the string:

Pizzey OR Hubbard

Enjoy,

Walter

Of course, this was not a response to the point and I was not (and am not) particularly interested in changing subjects to a general debate on the validity or invalidity of feminism with someone who can’t even be bothered to care whether or not the claims presented on his advocacy website are true or false. So:

Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 11:42:22 -0500
To: “Walter Schneider” misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Data posted to form 1 of http://fathersforlife.org/contact.htm
From: “Rad Geek” feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Rad Geek People’s Daily

. . .

Mr. Schneider,

I’m not sure that you quite understood my purpose in writing. I don’t dispute that there are real historical and intellectual connections between radical feminism and Marxism. Anyone who has read the history of the feminist movement knows this; radical feminists make no secret of the fact that substantial parts of their thought come from contemporary Marxist movements and that they themselves were often involved in revolutionary socialist movements (they went on to angrily break with most of these movements, but rarely gave up those movements’ fundamental goals–see for example Robin Morgan’s Goodbye to All That).

What I am concerned with is the fact that you cite the following three quotes, among others, as evidence for this fact:

Marxism and Feminism are one, and that one is Marxism –Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (qtd. in MacKinnon 1989)

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism… –MacKinnon (1989) p. 3

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism. –MacKinnon (1989) p. 10

Hartmann’s and Bridge’s essay is a criticism of Marxism; the quote is a parody of Blackstone’s famous nutshell summary of the legal status of husband and wife in a marriage. Her argument is that, heretofore, Marxists have claimed to support feminist goals while actually ignoring them or distorting them in order to make them subordinate to the theoretical concerns and personal interests of Marxist men. This is obvious if you’ve read the essay; it should be clear that that’s where it’s going if you’ve so much as read and understood the title.

The use of the quotes from MacKinnon is even worse. Both quotes come from the first several pages of an extended critique of Marxism. The opening statement that sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism is used to set up a series of questions as to whether or not Marxism and feminism are, at the end of the day, compatible. (MacKinnon goes on to argue that they are not, and that feminist method must be, in some important sense, “post-Marxist”.) The second quote is not a statement of MacKinnon’s beliefs at all; it is a statement of a view with which she sharply disagrees; she thinks that the view is part of the anti-feminist strategy that some Marxists have tried to adopt in addressing feminist concerns. Again, these points are quite clear from a single reading of the opening chapter of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.

Are there historical connections between feminism and Marxism? Of course there are. But the quotes that you intend to introduce as evidence for that conclusion aren’t evidence for it, and they clearly do not mean what you seem to be indicating that they mean by grabbing them out of their context and arranging them as you have. The problem is that the use of all these quotes is selective, and in being selective it is deceptive. I do not know whether the deception is by intent or by ignorance; in either case it is clearly the result of sloppy or nonexistant reading of the text.

Will these quotes be removed from your discussion of Communism and feminism?

Sincerely,
Charles Johnson

Here’s the reply:

Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 19:03:58 -0700
From: Walter Schneider misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Bill Wood’s Testimony at the Ways and Means Committee
To: Rad Geek feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Fathers for Life

Dear Mr. Johnson,

No, not at all, I have a fairly good appreciation of what you are getting at, but let me be more direct about your misperceptions, as there are more than just one.

You picked on three examples of quotes that don’t quite meet your exacting standards, and you picked on the wrong fellow to direct your complaint to.

Obviously, those three examples are only a small fraction of all of the quotes used by Bill Wood, the author of that article containing the evidence he presented to the Ways and Means Committee. Surely you understand that I can’t willy-nilly edit the things that other people stated, just to suit your preferences.

However, just because those three quotes don’t meet your standards, does that prove the basic premise wrong? Of course it doesn’t.
So, what exactly is your beef?

If it is nothing more than a complaint about the academic quality of the article with respect to the standards used for the documenting of sources, then you should address your concerns to Bill Wood.

If you are not happy with the manner in which Bill Wood formated his quotes, so as to make it clear as to who said what and that it would be unmistakable that some of the quoted phrases do not present the opinions of the authors that quoted them, write to Bill Wood.

If you think that I have editorial responsibilities that I did not exercize with due diligence, consider that I merely quoted another source that is clearly identified in the version of the document that concerns you. In that case you should write to the people in charge of that source.

• From Marxism to Feminism: The planned destruction of the American family http://waysandmeans.house.gov/hearings.asp?formmode=view&id=954
• Statement of Bill Wood
  FC-8 Hearing on Waste, Fraud, and Abuse July 17, 2003
  TESTIMONY FOR THE [US] WAYS AND MEANS COMMITTEE

The sole reason why I posted Bill Wood’s testimony is that I installed a hyper-text-linked index to the various entries, so as to make it easier to find them in the rather lengthy document. If it would not have been for that, I would have pointed people directly to the original source at which the testimony had been delivered and published. A link is so much less troublesome than to quote and format a whole large article, right?

This whole debate has taken far more of our time than it deserves. I don’t know whether you can afford to spend that much time on relatively inconsequential and misdirected criticism, but I do know that I can’t.

Sincerely,
Walter Schneider

PS. Did you have a chance to look for the items I pointed you to? –WHS

Incidentally, the link he provides is not the source of the collection of quotes as it is presented on FathersForLife.org. It contains a few of the same deceptively out-of-context quotes that are repeated in the quotes page at FathersForLife.org, but wherever the latter came from, it was not from a copy of an address already given.

Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 21:55:42 -0500
To: “Walter Schneider” misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Bill Wood’s Testimony at the Ways and Means Committee From: “Rad Geek” feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Rad Geek People’s Daily

Mr. Schneider,

In your reply from several days ago, you seemed to be laboring under a couple of misunderstandings.

First, this is not a matter of “exacting standards”, “suiting my preferences”, or “academic quality”. And it’s certainly not an issue of “formatting”. This is a matter of factual accuracy.

The compilation of quotes and commentary on your site at http://www.fathersforlife.org/feminism/quotes1.htm#Femicommies lists three quotes, taken selectively from Catharine MacKinnon’s work, and insinuates that they represent her views (or the views of radical feminists broadly) on Marxism, when in fact they are (1) part of an argument that feminism and Marxism are in fact incompatible or (2) expositions of views that MacKinnon explicitly condemns. By stripping the quotes of their context, it attributes a view to MacKinnon that is the opposite of the one that she holds; that is to say, it presents demonstrable deceptions as fact.

I sent an e-mail through the fathersforlife.org contact page to whoever was responsible for the content on the website; since it was you who received that e-mail, and since you ask the following:

If you think that I have editorial responsibilities that I did not exercize with due diligence,

I gather that you are the person, or at least a person, responsible for deciding what content goes on your site. As such, you have a responsibility not to purvey false information to readers on the Internet in the name of your cause. You’re quite right that Bill Wood is identified as the compiler of the quotes in the article (although I might add it’s not at all clear from either the article or your remarks whether you have drawn these quotes from sources presented by Bill Wood, or whether he himself assembled the page as it currently appears on your site; nor is it clear whose commentary is represented by unquoted remarks such as Catherine A. MacKinnon is a University of Michigan FEMINIST LAW PROFESSOR!! Do you think her lawyers are learning Republican government OR are they learning Communism?)

You wonder why I did not contact Bill Wood about this. Well, I’d be glad to contact him in order to inform him of his (frankly either sloppy or dishonest) mistakes in describing MacKinnon’s views, but (1) I don’t have his contact information, and (2) you have responsibilities as an editor in this matter whatever Bill Wood has or hasn’t done. Given that whether or not the conclusion that this compilation puts forward is true, the grounds given for it are demonstrably false (by a simple reading of the plain text), your responsibility, as an editor, is to do one of the following, depending on the nature of the piece and the author’s wishes:

1. Remove the offending quotes (with an editor’s note or ellipsis if necessary)
2. Issue a correction
3. Remove the piece from your site.

All three of these things are things that responsible editors sometimes do when authors make mistakes of fact. Simply leaving a piece with known factual errors online, as-is, for public consumption, while making no attempt whatsoever to avoid deceiving your readers, is not.

Second, this is not a “debate”. There is nothing to argue about. Your page, as it currently stands, is deceptive. That may be the result of negligence–in which case it is a sloppy error–or it may be the result of intent–in which case it is spreading lies. Which conclusion an observer should draw depends, in part, on how you deal with the matter now that it has been brought to your attention.

Sincerely,
Charles Johnson

And here’s Walter Schneider’s final word on the matter, for the time being:

Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 05:35:55 -0700
From: Walter Schneider misc@fathersforlife.org
Subject: Re: Bill Wood’s Testimony at the Ways and Means Committee
To: Rad Geek feedback@radgeek.com
Organization: Fathers for Life

Mr. Johnson,

Rad Geek wrote:

….You wonder why I did not contact Bill Wood about this.

I didn’t at all wonder, I suggested that you do.

Well, I’d be glad to contact him in order to inform him of his (frankly either sloppy or dishonest) mistakes in describing MacKinnon’s views, but (1) I don’t have his contact information, and

I can help you out with that. Try http://waysandmeans.house.gov/contact.asp, the first organization that published the quotes that you perceive to be misleading. They may be able to provide you with contact details for Bill Wood, which shouldn’t be that hard for them. Unfortunately, on account of two recent PC crashes I no longer have Bill Wood’s e-mail address. This clue may help you in contacting him: Representative Bill Wood, Charlotte, North Carolina.

(2) you have responsibilities as an editor in this matter whatever Bill Wood has or hasn’t done. Given that whether or not the conclusion that this compilation puts forward is true, the
grounds given for it are demonstrably false (by a simple reading of the plain text), your responsibility, as an editor, is to do one of the following, depending on the nature of the piece and the author’s wishes:

My responsibility as an editor is not to alter text taken from a document authored and published by other people. If you misconstrue such quotes and become offended on account of your misperception, that is your problem, not mine.

The best of luck,

Walter Schneider

Of course, Schneider does not anywhere make clear where the document in its current form was published or why he, as an editor, cannot indicate through the use of elipsis or editor’s notes that parts of the text are incorrect. Responsible editors of advocacy sites either remove pages that contain false information, or issue corrections on false information where people reading the misleading page can see them. Schneider, for his part, seems uninterested in any of this; at least, as of press time, FathersForLife.org continues to print the same quotes from MacKinnon without redaction, correction, or apology.

For myself, I do have a bit of a correction to make: since I wrote the first couple notes while on vacation, and didn’t have my copy of Toward A Feminist Theory of the State with me, I assumed that this quote, attributed to page 10 of MacKinnon’s book, was an explanation of one of the anti-feminist Marxist approaches to the woman question that she was criticizing:

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism. –MacKinnon (1989) p. 10

I was wrong about that. The sentences I was remembering were similar sentences from Chapters I, II, and IV of the book in which she does set out and then demolish views that come out roughly to that (e.g.: the view that women’s subordination to men, when acknowledged, is seen as caused by class dominance, its cure as the overthrow of class relations [p. 62]). If MacKinnon did say what she is quoted as saying, then it was surely in the context of elaborating an opposing view in order to criticize it, and the quote is deceptively taken out of its context and passed off as a statement of belief in propia voce. But after going through the opening chapters of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State several times, I cannot for the life of me find where she did say Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism in the first place. It is not on page 10 of Toward A Feminist Theory of the State. Nor is it on page 9 or 11. Nor is it anywhere to be found anywhere in Chapters I or II. Nor is it on page x in the Introduction, nor on likely candidates for a typographical error–you won’t find it on page 19, or on page 20, or anywhere in pages 100-110. A Google search returns only anti-feminist websites with the same quote and the same claim that it appears on page 10. All three quotes are gravely misunderstood if they are accurate quotations, but this one may very well be a complete fabrication. (If you have a bibliographic reference to where the quote actually occurs, drop me a line–I’d appreciate being able to print the quote in its actual context!)

Fathers for Life is spreading deceptive information on their website in an attempt to further their cause. This may have originally been the result of carelessness and sloppiness. That’s bad enough in itself–there is far too much misleading through carelessness or sloppiness in public debates today. But whatever the original cause, they continue to spread deceptions knowingly, without correction.

That’s lying.

Nobody likes to have an abortion, and nobody would like to have one even under the best of conditions. Things are much better now than they were in the dark days of back-alley butchers; and they could be made much better yet if it weren’t for miles of punitive regulations and red tape made with the explicit purpose of making abortions harder for legally vulnerable women to obtain. But even without the cultural bullies and screaming protestors, even without the government-imposed cartel costs and the intense curtailment of options for procedures, your choices would still in the end be between invasive surgery of some form or another or drugs that make you nauseous and bleeding over the course of a few days. Of course abortion is not the horrendous experience that anti-choicers repeatedly make it out to be; it is far safer and quicker and easier on both patient and provider than nearly every other kind of surgery that there is. It’s safer and less psychologically taxing than giving birth. (Somehow these comparisons don’t seem to get made very often by either the anti-choice leadership or their foot soldiers. How strange.) But root canals are very safe and relatively simple too; that doesn’t mean that anyone is excited to have one.

But so what? Nobody goes around talking about the terrible tragedy of root canals either, or about the need to reach across the divide to unite with the anti-root-canal community (I take it that there are some Christian Scientist types who oppose dental surgery out of deeply felt religious conviction) in order to prevent unwanted tooth decay. Nobody feels the need to prefix every remark about their support for the right to get a root canal with a half-hour of qualifications and apologies. Yet the Party Hack wing of the Democratic leadership seems to have decided, yet again, that this is just what they need. Here, for example, is how Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest political triumphs for women’s liberation in recent history:

In a speech to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters near the New York State Capitol, Mrs. Clinton firmly restated her support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. But then she quickly shifted gears, offering warm words to opponents of legalized abortion and praising the influence of “religious and moral values” on delaying teenage girls from becoming sexually active.

There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate — we should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished and loved, Mrs. Clinton said.

Her speech came on the same day as the annual anti-abortion rally in Washington marking the Roe v. Wade anniversary.

…

Mrs. Clinton, widely seen as a possible candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, appeared to be reaching out beyond traditional core Democrats who support abortion rights. She did so not by changing her political stands, but by underscoring her views in preventing unplanned pregnancies, promoting adoption, recognizing the influence of religion in abstinence and championing what she has long called teenage celibacy.

She called on abortion rights advocates and anti-abortion campaigners to form a broad alliance to support sexual education — including abstinence counseling — family planning, and morning-after emergency contraception for victims of sexual assault as ways to reduce unintended pregnancies.

We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women, Mrs. Clinton told the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Most of this is true enough, as far as it goes. Nobody wants abortion instead of widesperad contraception and responsible sexual education. Nobody likes to get an abortion. And in the present political and cultural climate, all too many women are made to feel far worse about their decision to have an abortion than should be. Fine. But the latter isn’t an unchangeable given; it’s a political fact that is enforced by a constant and intentional climate of harassment and intimidation. And the fact that we’d rather women were able to avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place is no reason to spend hours hand-wringing over it and apologizing for it unless you already think that there’s something wrong with getting an abortion. But why should you think that?

Actually, there is one other reason that you might do all that hand-wringing. You might be cavilling in spite of your own beliefs because you think that kind of dissembling is politically useful. I hate to say it about Hillary — she gave such a great speech at the March and all — but it’s hard to know what else to conclude about this particular strategy:

Mrs. Clinton’s address came as the Democratic Party itself engages in its own re-examination of its handling of the issue in the wake of Senator John Kerry’s loss in the presidential race.

Democratic senators such as Harry Reid of Nevada and Dianne Feinstein of California have also pressed for a greater focus on reducing unintended pregnancies, and some Democratic consultants have urged that party leaders mint new language to reach voters who identified moral values as a top issue for them in last November’s election.

Jesus Christ people. Look. No. Just, no.

First, you’re not trying to mint new language. You’re repeating the same crap that you did for the past 12 years. Here, for example, is how Electable John Kerry answered questions on abortion during the second and third debates:

Mr. Schieffer Senator Kerry a new question for you. The New York Times reports that some Catholic archbishops are telling their church members that it would be a sin to vote for a candidate like you because you support a woman’s right to choose an abortion and unlimited stem call research. What is your reaction to that?

Mr. Kerry I respect their views. I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views, but I disagree with them, as do many. I believe that I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith. I believe that choice, a woman’s choice is between a woman, God and her doctor. And that’s why I support that. Now I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade. The president has never said whether or not he would do that. But we know from the people he’s tried to appoint to the court he wants to. I will not. I will defend the right of Roe v. Wade.

Now with respect to religion, you know, as I said I grew up a Catholic. I was an altar boy. I know that throughout my life this has made a difference to me. And as President Kennedy said when he ran for president, he said, I’m not running to be a Catholic president. I’m running to be a president who happens to be Catholic. Now my faith affects everything that I do and choose. There’s a great passage of the Bible that says What does it mean my brother to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead. And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people. That’s why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith. But I know this: that President Kennedy in his inaugural address told of us that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own. And that’s what we have to – I think that’s the test of public service.

And before that in the second debate:

DEGENHART: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person?

KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I’m a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can’t take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can’t do that.

But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society.

But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.

Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro-abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don’t deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can’t afford it otherwise.

That’s why I think it’s important. That’s why I think it’s important for the United States, for instance, not to have this rigid ideological restriction on helping families around the world to be able to make a smart decision about family planning.

You’ll help prevent AIDS.

You’ll help prevent unwanted children, unwanted pregnancies.

You’ll actually do a better job, I think, of passing on the moral responsibility that is expressed in your question. And I truly respect it.

Apparently the apparatchiks have decided that there isn’t enough hand-wringing and pandering to the sensibilities of the Religious Right there. I don’t know how you could add any more hand-wringing and searching for “common ground” with the Christian Right there without the references to a woman’s right to an abortion disappearing entirely, but there you have it.

Guess what? It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Why in the world do they think that it would? Are they trying to win votes from the Christian Right? Do they honestly think that moving the political debate over reproductive freedom back from abortion to the Sanger-era fights over birth control and sex education is going to improve the political climate in this country?

In other words: stop treating the right to abortion like you treat free speech rights for the Klan. If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with abortion then quit hemming and hawing forever about how much you respect the position of people who do and how much you’d like to work with them on birth control. You’re wasting your time: a lot if not most ofthem also hate birth control and sex education anyway. And in the process of wasting your time you are also dissembling about your real motives and spitting on women’s struggle for freedom.

Incidentally, Rox, among the reasons I like Howard Dean as much as I do is that in the heat of an election, this is how he answers a question about abortion:

Diane Rehm: We have seen reports that builders across the country are refusing to participate in the construction of Planned Parenthood buildings. What would you do about the threats to freedom for a woman to choose?

Howard Dean: Well, I think that’s a very dangerous game those builders are playing, especially in the city of Austin, which is where it’s going on. Were I down there I would immediately refuse to do business with any of the contractors who were boycotting that. So all groups can play that game; you have the right-wingers playing the game today, but other groups who may disagree with that can also play that game. And I think that’s a mistake for them to do that.

I am pro-choice. I’m a doctor; I frankly believe that it’s none of the government’s business to interfere in a woman’s making decisions about her own healthcare. And I tend not to be very supportive of efforts to enforce political points of view on individuals’ healthcare, and that’s what’s going on in Austin, Texas.

— On the Diane Rehms show, WAMU, 2004-12-01 10:00am (they don’t seem to have a transcript; the question is around 45’45” on the audio version)

Elsewhere he’s also directly, and without apology or cavil, taken on both parental consent restrictions and late-term abortion bans, and pointedly insisted that on the issue of abortion, We can change our vocabulary but I don’t think we ought to change our principles..

Second, even if this were a new tack, and even if there were any reason to believe that it would get anything worth accomplishing accomplished, why would you think that women’s control over their own bodies is an acceptable bargaining chip? Women are not pawns to be sacrificed for better board position. Lots of Democrats bolted the party in the late 1960s to become Republicans because the national leadership would no longer keep silent about Jim Crow and the efforts of efforts such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party finally broke the Eastland-Wallace white supremacist stranglehold on the Southern state parties. That lost the Democrats a lot of voters. The difference even lost them several elections. So what? Does anyone think that it would be a good idea to endlessly fret about how to reach out across the divide and find common ground to bring the Klan vote back into the party?

To hell with that. If you’re going to get hung up on winning political office, this is not how you should be trying to do it. Falling back on the apparatchiks and electable candidates using electably mealy-mouthed rhetoric doesn’t work and it wouldn’t have gained anything worth winning even if it did. Meanwhile, the other side won’t believe it, your side won’t pull out the stops for you, and the people in the middle won’t know where the hell you actually stand.

If Democrats are looking for new language with which to frame the abortion debate, I’d like to suggest a good old standard: ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY.

In the course of repeating a game the other day, I mentioned that I don’t like meme-talk, and pointed to an older post that, among other things, gives a short version of my reasons for saying that there are no such things as memes. Thing is, in that post I said I was giving the argument short shrift, and said I’d probably come back to it later–and then I never did. Since (1) I had cause to mention it lately, (2) a commentator recently prodded me on my abbreviated version of the argument, and (3) in memoriam of Rox’s last Random Ten–a fun weblog game unfortunately mislabeled a meme–I’d like to make good on that at last. Consider this the Friday Anti-Meme, if you will. Rox may not be continuing to spread a fun idea for talking about music anymore, but by God you will get a cranky philosophical disquisition that spends too much time talking about how we talk about silly web games. (It’s not that I have anything against people who use the word meme to describe the ideas for posts that they spread. At worst it’s a bit of an offense against my prose aesthetic. But I do have reasons for hoping that the word will meet a swift and ignominious demise; and if this contributes to it, well, so much the better.)

So what’s all the fuss about, anyway? Well, we’re not just talking about weblog posting games where you encourage others to join, of course. What is all is the notion of a meme supposed to encompass? Here’s how Susan Blackmore, quoting and explicating from Richard Dawkins’ original discussion in The Selfish Gene (1976), puts it:

At the very end of the book he asked an obvious, if provocative, question. Are there any other replicators [besides DNA-based genes] on our planet? The answer, he claimed, is Yes. Staring us in the face, though still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator — a unit of imitation.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

(I, for one, won’t forgive such a clunker of an attempt at cutesy neologism. But let’s move on.)

As examples he suggested tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. He mentioned scientific ideas that catch on and propagate themselves around the world by jumping from brain to brain. He wrote about religions as groups of memes with a high survival value, infecting whole societies with belief in a God or an afterlife. He talked about fashions in dress or diet, and about ceremonies, customs and technologies — all of which are spread by one person copying another. Memes are stored in human brains (or books or inventions) and passed on by imitation.

In a few pages he laid the foundations for understanding the evolution of memes. He discussed their propagation by jumping from brain to brain, likened them to parasites infecting a host, treated them as physically realised living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will gang together in groups just as genes do. Most important, he treated the meme as a replicator in its own right. He complained that many of his colleagues seemed unable to accept the idea that memes would spread for their own benefit, independently of any benefit to the genes. In the last analysis they wish always to go back to biological advantage to answer questions about human behaviour. Yes, he agreed, we got our brains for biological (genetic) reasons but now we have them a new replicator has been unleashed. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old (Dawkins, 1976, 193-4). In other words, memetic evolution can now take off without regard to its effects on the genes.

Well, Dawkins and Blackmore are certainly right to knock their colleagues’ heads together if they insist on trying to find some way to tie every widespread cultural phenomenon to some sort of adaptation for genetic fitness (except in the very broad sense that human intelligence, as such, allows for such phenomena through its extreme versatility, and human intelligence is itself adaptive). Good for them. Unfortunately, the alternative they offer is on no better grounds. What they are claiming to do is to introduce a new technical term and a new theoretical framework that will give us interesting, useful, and accurate accounts of a huge array of cultural phenomena. Let’s keep in mind just how various the facts they’re claiming to explain are; they explicitly include:

1. the popularity of tunes and catch-phrases
2. fashions in dress
3. cuisine
4. the inculcation (and adaptation) of customs and etiquette
5. styles of art and architecture
6. the spread of ideas and beliefs
7. religious belief, evangelism and conversion
8. the rise and fall of scientific theories
9. the adoption of technologies and useful inventions
10. the preservation of key elements of (1)-(9) in the form of literature, story-telling, articles, blueprints, recipes, etc.
11. the adaptation, modification, and sometimes disappearance of (1)-(10) over time

If you really could come up with a unified science to take all of these phenomena into account, then it truly would be a discovery of Newtonian (or Darwinian) proportions. Dawkins and Blackmore think they have got it: the concept of self-replicating information patterns, and a research programme based on investigating the selective pressures at work on the replicators. Just as research into the selective pressures on genes can do the heavy lifting to explain the vast biodiversity of our world, the idea goes, research into the selective pressures on bits of culture can offer the basis for a Grand Unified Theory of cultural development and human diversity.

If the parallel between selfish genes and bits of culture can be drawn, that is. But that’s easier said than done. For that parallel to hold, and for memetic accounts to do any explanatory work from it, we’ll need to say something about what it means for tunes, catch-phrases, superstitions, religious beliefs, scientific theories, poems, weblog games, customs, and more to be fit, and what the selective pressures on them in a given environment are. In order to draw a good parallel, we need to cash out fitness like we do in evolutionary biology–in terms of reproductive success, i.e., the replicator’s shot at making copies of itself. The whole research programme, then, depends on an account of what it means for tunes, catch-phrases, superstitions, religious beliefs, scientific theories, poems, weblog games, customs, and more to replicate themselves. So what is the account? Well, Dawkins says, it’s jumping from brain to brain; memes replicate when they spread to another person. Or, to be more precise, when one person spreads them to another.

And that’s the problem. To talk about how bits of culture replicate, you need to talk about the reasons people have for spreading, or for taking up, an idea, belief, device, etc.

Yet memetics can’t get us one step closer to understanding these reasons. The whole point of memetics, as a science of culture, is supposed to be that it can give us accurate and interesting explanations of cultural phenomena from the standpoint of selection of the fittest. But there’s an important disanalogy here between evolutionary biology and the study of culture: organisms can, and the astronomically large majority of organisms do, replicate their genes blindly. That is to say, they can replicate their genes without intending or desiring to do so; since of all the species in the known Universe only one understands how babies are made (let alone population genetics), most genes are replicated this way. There is usually a causal link between an organism’s interests or desires or choices and the replication of the genes that may determine or influence them, but there’s no conceptual link; you can spell out what makes for the replication of a gene, and what makes a gene fit, without any essential reference to the interests or desires or choices of its vehicle. Not so for memes; the link between the fitness of a idea, belief, device, game, etc. and the reasons a person does or doesn’t have for passing it on or taking it up is not just causal, but logical. Those reasons may be very simple: you hum a song you heard on the radio because the melody is nice; you tell your child not to bite you because it hurts. Or they may be very complex: scientists begin to adopt the Alvarez theory of the K-T extinction because several complex geological findings tend to support it over other plausible candidates; Dada Anti-Art flourishes in the world of visual art and art criticism because of an intricate knot of political, aesthetic, and philosophical influences including the devastation of the Great War, a perception that the possibilities for modern painting had been exhausted, and the modernist ethic of rebellion against stale convention. But whatever the reasons are, it is essential that there are some reasons; otherwise what we are discussing is not a part of culture, but rather some kind of acquired tic or reflex.

That leaves memetics in a nasty bind. Since there is no way to give an account of the replication or fitness of spreading bits of culture independent of facts about their hosts’ reasons for spreading them, memetic explanations of cultural diversity don’t have the explanatory ground to stand on that genetic explanations of biodiversity do, and must fall into one of two degenerate patterns:

1. They could fall back on some understanding of people and their reasons for accepting and spreading ideas–making the account accurate but completely vacuous. The explanation here depends on the selection of fit over unfit ideas, but the criteria for determining whether an idea is fit or not depends on entirely on understanding acts such as giving evidence, drawing conclusions or committing fallacies, weighing alternatives, informing or deceiving, manipulating, explicating, misdirecting, ignoring, revealing, confusing, and all the other things that people do when they talk with one another. But that just means that the memetic explanation is entirely parasitic on explanations drawn from other disciplines–logic, for example, or rhetoric, or psychology. If those other explanations are good ones, then you may really get an explanation of why an idea has spread so well; but in that explanation memetics will be contributing nothing more than argot. The notions of memes and selective fitness and the rest will just be along for the ride, as terminological placeholders for the non-memetic analytical categories that are doing the real explanatory work.

2. If, on the other hand, they try to offer an explanation that doesn’t refer, either overtly or covertly, to people’s reasons for accepting and spreading ideas, then the meme-terminology will indeed do some special explanatory work of its own; the problem is that it must issue in conclusions that are obviously false. In order to do real explanatory work a memetic account would have to spell out some factor that makes an idea, belief, etc. fit in terms that are independent of facts about hosts (that is, us) and the reasons that we have for adopting or rejecting it. But you can’t do it, and if you tried to, the degree to which your explanation invoked terms that have nothing to do with the person’s reasons would be the degree to which you were treating the object of your study as something other than a cultural product. (If your explanation for a person falling to her knees five times a day has nothing to do with her reasons for accepting and acting on the idea that she ought to, then you’re not explaining a ritual; you’re explaining a repeated fit.) Any non-vacuous memetic account has to be false, because it attempts to explain by irrelevancies.

A would-be memeticist might try to avoid the dilemma by claiming that my second horn depends on an overly rosy view of the average human being’s rationality. Is it really wrong to say that a lot of customs, slogans, etc. aren’t the products of reason? But that would just be a cheat: there’s a difference between explaining a cultural product by reference to bad reasons people have for adopting it, and explaining it without reference to any reasons people have for adopting it. Among the things I said you have to understand in order to understand how some beliefs and ideas spread are things like deceiving and confusing and misdirecting. It’s certainly true that there are some beliefs–superstitions, for example–that persist because people adopt them for bad reasons. But a memetic account that refers only to the bad reasons that a person might have for adopting a belief is no less vacuous than a memetic account that refers to all the reasons they might have had; it’s still entirely parasitic on our understanding of people’s reasons for spreading certain beliefs. The only difference is that it is also less charitable, and so more likely to be false. In fact, this precise confusion seems to be at the root of many if not most memetic accounts: since you can’t intelligibly give an account of cultural practices under option (2), but the memeticist wants to avoid explanations that are obviously entirely parasitic on an understanding of logic and psychology, they try to cheat their way into (2) by restricting the range of reasons that they’ll consider to the bad ones. I think this goes a long way toward explaining, for example, the common memetic explanation for widespread norms for altruism by appeal to the likelihood that people who get the meal will listen to the sermon, or that mutual back-scratching will benefit the scratchers. It’s certainly true that these may be part of the reason why people exhort others to be nice, and listen to others who so exhort them. But why not also explain the widespread norms by reference to, say, the notion that humans can see it’s true that they have a duty to be generous and not cruel? The past century of psychoanalysis and secularism notwithstanding, the fact that an explanation of human behavior is ennobling isn’t always a good reason to regard it as false.

This may also help to explain why memetics talk rarely progresses beyond some appeals to elementary folk psychology concealed under cutesy pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Smuggling in the folk psychology keeps the account from being false or simply unintelligible–as in (2)–and imposing the flashy argot in between the real (logical, rhetorical, psychological) explanations and the audience directs their attention away from the degree to which–as in (1)–the account is, where it gets something right, entirely parasitic on some non-memetic explanation of human behavior.

Omar K. Ravenhurst argued, in reply to my previous post, that the dependence of memetic accounts on other disciplines might not pose any problem for memetics as a science. Thus:

I don’t know if I follow you here. Physics can theoretically explain the whole of biology. Even if we could do this in practice, it wouldn’t destroy the usefulness of biology as shorthand.

Actually, I’m not at all sure that it’s true that biology is reducible to a complete physics. But if it is, that certainly doesn’t mean that biology is useless. Fair enough, but that doesn’t help memetics. If memetics is entirely reducible to the other human sciences, then it is failed at what it set out to do. It’s not at all clear to me that memetics could do what it is supposed to for the other human sciences (that is, provide an over-arching theoretical framework that will do what evolutionary biology has done for the study of paleontology and ecology) if it is merely a shorthand for them, but even if it could, why bother? If biology is merely shorthand for a complete chemistry and physics, it is still useful because the chemical and physical processes involved in a single organism are orders of magnitude more complex than anything a human being could comprehend in one survey. But are facts such as People often pick up catchy tunes they hear on the street or Scientists tend to pick up on scientific theories that elegantly explain recent findings and solve outstanding problems in the field or Sometimes human beings believe things without enough evidence if it makes them feel better about the future complex facts that need a shorthand? If not, then why bother making up a distracting shorthand–much less a shorthand based on a systematic attempt to turn attention away from the very facts about people and their reasons for doing what they do that you ultimately need to refer to to make sense of the account?

It seems, in all cases, that memetics is nothing more than pseudoscientific mummery; the notions of memes and memetic fitness, and any research based on these notions, depend on a conceptual misdirection. We are told that we’re going to find out something about how ideas or beliefs spread, but the memetic terminology is supposed to turn your intellectual attention away from the very facts about meme hosts (viz., us) that actually explain why we do or do not accept ideas, and why we do or do not pass them to other people. But that’s nothing more than a conjuring trick, and a pernicious one at that. The reasons that we have for picking up or putting down ideas, beliefs, theories, bits of culture, etc. are what make us who we are: rational animals who relate to one another in an intelligent community. Memetic explanations are so often uncharitable because they insist on trying to explain facts about human actions, human ideas, and human communities in a literally dehumanized way. The sooner we stop that, the better.

As far as the weblog games go: if the word meme deserves to die, then what should they be called? Well, what about the good old word idea? As in: Here’s an idea that I got from Rox Populi. I’m passing it on here because [I think it’s fun / I’m hard up for material / I want to start a discussion / I want to rant about memetics / etc. etc. etc.]

Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind! Écrasez la niaserie!

(Link thanks to Pandagon 2004/11/14. I appreciate the commentary, Jesse, but I could have done without the joke about sexual assault.)

John Ashcroft has never been one to shy away from pushing the envelope; for the latest example, consider his parting words for the judicial branch.

Ashcroft:

Without referring to specific adverse rulings on the treatment of detainees or enemy combatants, Ashcroft blasted activist judges for encroaching on the powers that he insists belong solely to the president in wartime.

The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war, Ashcroft said.

… he spent most of his 30-minute speech defending the administration policies against federal judges critical of the government’s terrorism policies.

Ideologically driven courts have disregarded and dismissed the president’s evaluations of foreign policy concerns, in favor of theories generated by academic elites, foreign bodies and judicial imagination, Ashcroft said.

Slimy judicial activist elites:

Article I

Section 9. … The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.

…

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; … nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; …

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Charges of judicial activism have a long history on the Right. It used to be that judges were denounced as judicial activists for upholding limits to government power that go beyond what is, strictly speaking, spelled out in the Constitution. Ashcroft has an even better idea: now you can denounce judges as judicial activists for refusing to go beyond what is, strictly speaking, spelled out in the Constitution in order to find exceptions to limits on the power of the Executive.

(You may note that there are accomodations for wartime exigencies in Article I §9 and Amendment V; true, but none of those exceptions apply to the current set of cases, and none limit the protection of Amendments IV, VI, or most of the clauses of Amendment V, either. Nowhere are the phrases the president’s evaluation of foreign policy concerns or except when the security of our nation in a time at war is at risk to be found.)

Here’s how the strict constructionists in the audience greeted this exciting new discovery:

As Ashcroft arrived Friday, he received a long and roaring standing ovation from a hotel ballroom filled largely with leading conservative lawyers. In his speech to the Federalist Society’s national convention, Ashcroft made no direct mention of his decision to step down as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Ashcroft’s stepped down, but no doubt the Right will continue in its campaign against the creeping menace of judicial activism, marching forward as they always have: that is, by denouncing defenders of individual rights and proudly championing the absolute power of the Monarch as ordained by Almighty God.

O it’s time to let mighty the Eagle soar…

Further reading:

• GT 2004/06/24: Pro-Choice on Everything, Part I
• GT 2004/05/30: Why We Marched
• GT 2003/12/20: Belated birthday presents for the Bill of Rights
• GT 2002/08/10: Judge Doumar has made his ruling; now let him enforce it
• GT 2002/06/11: An Important Update from the War Information Council