When dueling pains became our political discourse
Abortion wields emotional power, such that neither camp seems burdened with nailing down facts. Did this form the blueprint for all public thought?
In her podcast, “The Last Archive,” historian Jill Lepore puts on a little Rod Serling schtick* to ask: Who killed truth?
In the days since Dobbs v. Jackson, in which SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, my social media has boiled over with sentiments along the lines of “If you feel X about abortion, unfriend me right now because you’re not the kind of person I want in my life.”
And I keep recalling TLA’s eighth episode, “She Said, She Said.”
JILL LEPORE: In the 1960’s, radical feminists argued that the personal is political. That lived experience, the speaking of bitterness, counts as evidence. In the 1970’s, liberal white feminists embraced this idea too, and so did African-American feminists. And so too in the end did conservative women.
Lepore opens in 1969, at a Redstockings Rap in Greenwich Village. The Redstockings believed that legislators only considered a subset of people — and a subset of facts — when looking at the abortion question. So they spoke publicly about their personal experiences, the pain they had that pointed to facts previously excluded.
The episode moves on, to 1977. Phyllis Schlafly is in the Houston Astrodome, headlining the highly effective Pro-Life, Pro-Family Rally in direct opposition to the National Women’s Conference. Lepore uses this moment to illustrate that in just a few years, the anti-abortion movement had co-opted the playbook of radical feminism. Schlafly’s camp used emotion as evidence — and hoped emotion would drown out opposing views.
This is roughly where we are today. Not just on abortion. On everything. People pick sides, scream the emotions that drive them to support whatever side that is, and imagine that anyone who disagrees is evil incarnate for choosing to be unmoved by those emotions.
Go listen to the full episode. And the full series. In the meantime, I’ll let Lepore close us out here.
JILL LEPORE: “Speak your truth.” Sure it sounds good; it sounds great! Until you start to ask: “What if someone else’s truth is different from yours?”
… “Everything I say is true, everything you say is a lie. To question me is to do me harm. If we disagree, whichever of us has suffered more wins.”
[*]OK, so Ms. Lepore is probably more interested in comparisons to the anthology radio dramas that influenced Serling’s most famous work (“The Black Museum” comes to mind for its use of still-life launching pads), but most readers today will instantly think of “The Twilight Zone” on hearing Lepore’s intros.
