“Everybody Else in the World Was Dead”: Hiroshima’s Legacy
(compiled by John Whitehead)
The American atomic bombing of Hiroshima was 74 years ago today, August 6th. To mark the anniversary, we share stories from bombing survivors, in Japanese hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”).
Hibakusha Stories
Sadako Sasaki, the young girl who died of leukemia (probably caused by the atom bomb) after completing her 1,000 crane origamis, 1955
Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was at home that morning, which was “still, warm, and beautiful. Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden as I gazed absently through wide-flung doors opening to the south . . .
“Suddenly, a strong flash of light startled me—and then another. So well does one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern in the garden became brilliantly lit…
“Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy.” (Hiroshima Diary)
Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widowed seamstress with three children, was in her house when “everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen…[T]he reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.
“Timbers fell around her as she landed…everything became dark, for she was buried…She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, “Mother, help me!,” and saw her youngest—Myeko, the five-year-old—buried up to her breast and unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.”
Mrs. Nakamura “crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung tiles aside, in a hurried effort to free [Myeko]. Then, from what seemed to be caverns far below, she heard two small voices crying, “Taskukete! Tasukete! Help! Help!” (John Hersey, Hiroshima)
A first-grade girl tried to help her mother, who was trapped under their house’s burning wreckage:
“I was determined not to escape without my mother. But the flames were steadily spreading and my clothes were already on fire and I couldn’t stand it any longer. So screaming, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ I ran wildly into the middle of the flames. No matter how far I went it was a sea of fire all around and there was no way to escape.
“So beside myself I jumped into our [civil defense] water tank. The sparks were falling everywhere so I put a piece of tin over my head to keep out the fire. The water in the tank was hot like a bath. Beside me there were four or five other people who were all calling someone’s name.
“While I was in the water tank everything became like a dream and sometime or other I became unconscious…
“Five days after that [I learned that] Mother had finally died just as I had left her.” (Quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb)
Mikio Inoue remembers “We were walking along the streetcar line at the foot of Hijiyama. Wherever we went we saw dead horses and bodies lying here and there. The remaining fires were giving off a lot of smoke. Not a soul was in sight. It was when I crossed Miyuki Bridge that I saw Professor Takenaka standing at the foot of the bridge. He was almost naked, wearing nothing but shorts, and he had a rice ball in his right hand. Beyond the streetcar line, the northern area was covered by red fire burning against the sky. Far away from the line, Ote-machi was also a sea of fire.
“That day Professor Takenaka had not gone to Hiroshima University and the A-bomb exploded when he was at home. He tried to rescue his wife who was trapped under a roofbeam but all his efforts were in vain. The fire was threatening him also. His wife pleaded, ‘Run away, dear!’ He was forced to desert his wife and escape from the fire….
“His naked figure, standing there before the flames with that rice ball looked to me as a symbol of the modest hope of human beings.” (from Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors)
A five-year old girl recalled that
“The whole city…was burning. Black smoke was billowing up and we could hear the sound of big things exploding…Those dreadful streets. The fires were burning. There was a strange smell all over. Blue-green balls of fire were drifting around. I had a terrible lonely feeling that everybody else in the world was dead and only we were still alive.” (Quoted in Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb)
Yasuko Yamagata remembers “[The morning after the bombing] I started from school toward the ruins of my house in Nobori-cho. I passed by Hijiyama. There were few people to be seen in the scorched field. I saw for the first time a pile of burned bodies in a water tank by the entrance to the broadcasting station. Then I was suddenly frightened by a terrible sight on the street… There was a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms. Who on earth could she be?” (from Unforgettable Fire)
More hibakusha stories are available online.
Hiroshima’s Legacy
People have drawn notable lessons from the Hiroshima bombing and the additional nuclear bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th:
“Reference was made to my agreeing that abortion is taking a human life, which it is. However, let us remember that war is also legalized killing, that the pilot that dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed human life. He got medals for it. We bless our troops when they go into battle to kill human beings, so that the taking of human life…is not a strange behavior in a society.” (Dr. Frank Behrend, whose practice included abortions).
“Presidents, members of Congress, and other leaders have made life or death decisions that resulted in thousands of deaths. Some of these decisions – such as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – are justified by many Americans, even if many deaths occurred…Somehow we can tolerate our leaders making life or death decisions affecting many lives when they are faced with difficult situations such as international aggression. We find understanding and empathy for them if they make a mistake – even if their decision brings death to other human beings, yet we don’t want to let a woman make a decision affecting only her own life and the life within her.” (Beverly Wildung Harrison, Christian ethics professor, Union Theological Seminary)
“How do we know our own identity? By limits; by boundaries; by law; by order. And I think we lost all of these at 8:15 in the morning August the 6th 1945 when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. That bomb blotted out boundaries of life and death, civilian and the military; and trust among nations. And so abortion from that point on is defended on the ground that one may do whatever he pleases.” (Archbishop Fulton Sheen, “The Approach of Midnight”)
“[The atomic bombing’s] proponents even now justify it primarily . . . not by denying the intention of killing the innocent, but by reference to casualties prevented, a consequentialist justification. . . . [thus passing over] the subsequent history of our nation, a history that includes further acts of indiscriminate killing during the Vietnam War, a standing resolution to destroy the Soviet Union if it were first to attack us with nuclear weapons, and the eventual adoption by the nation in its domestic affairs of death as a solution to be embraced for its consequences—before birth, as in abortion or human embryo destructive research—or at the end of life, in [Physician-Assisted Suicide] and euthanasia. These are, sadly, natural choices for a country swayed by consequentialist justifications; the way to those choices was paved by the literally catastrophic choice to destroy Japanese cities (as before them, German cities) for the sake of military gain.” (Christopher O. Tollefson, “On the Dangers of Thanking God for the Atomic Bomb”)
“I was sitting in the wrong end of a police wagon the first time I questioned nuclear weapons . . .
“We had been protesting abortion. I was thinking about nuclear weapons because a couple of those in the bus were peace activists who had long rap sheets from years of anti-war protests. I, on the other hand, was a Republican-voting, independent Baptist church-attending, conservative-leaning, law-abiding (well, until now) kind of Christian. I was awed—and grateful—that these peaceniks would join the likes of me in common cause against another kind of violence. My new friends adhered to the ‘seamless garment’ philosophy, also called the consistent life ethic, one committed to the protection of all human life, whether from war, poverty, racism, capital punishment, euthanasia, or abortion.” (Karen Swallow Prior, “Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian”)
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For more from John Whitehead on similar topics, see:
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Wages of War: How Abortion Came to Japan
See Karen Swallow Prior’s article in our blog, with a link to the full article:
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons
Activists, Beware: Burnout is a Very Real Danger
by Rachel MacNair
Part 2 of 2 posts responding to Ward Ricker’s essay, “Prolife – Not.” Here’s Part 1.
Ward Ricker’s main point is: haven’t pro-lifers been ineffective because we’ve sent mixed messages? Mainly, we’re proclaiming an abortion to be the murder of an innocent child, and yet our behavior shows we’re not taking it that seriously. We’d drop everything to pull people we can see out of a burning building, after all. So why are we so cheerful and nice about it, when at the same time, we’re asserting this is mass slaughter?
Philosophy: Our Musings
I copy here comments responding to Ward’s point from other members of the Consistent Life Network board of directors and advisory board:
Carol Crossed:
I believe Ward’s words are insightful. I recall when a bunch of 40+ were arrested at the Pentagon with Daniel Berrigan in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima Nagasaki. We were on this bus being taken away to the detention center and we were chatting and laughing. This woman stood up and said something to the effect that can we not be reflective? Do we really treat this as a picnic outing? The bus fell silent. After a few minutes, Berrigan said in his deep slow way, well, she has a point. Are we doing this because we want to feel good, or are we doing this because we have just witnessed evil?
Richard Stith:
. . . If your social view is in general perceived to be that of the Establishment or at least be winning, you can be as angry and mean and hateful as you like and you won’t suffer for it. But if your social movement is perceived to be non-Establishment or even to be losing ground, you have to be extra-extra nice in order to be heard. That is why most anti-slavery people in the north were not fire-breathing abolitionists. They couldn’t show rightful outrage against slavery and still be respectable. . . .
The bottom line strategically and tactically for us is this: We should never neglect to state and show the full horror of abortion while at the same time being hopeful and friendly. That’s tough to do. So we should be tolerant of fellow pro-lifers who err in one direction or the other.
Lisa Stiller:
I’m having trouble with this whole discussion, as it’s like saying you have given up on opposing war because protestors aren’t angry enough. Or given up opposing the death penalty because opponents are too calm.
If you don’t oppose violence because you don’t like the way people are opposing it, you really don’t oppose violence. It’s about the concept and morality of opposing killing. Nothing else.
Philosophy: My Musings
My first reaction is that I would in fact drop everything and focus on a woman who was considering an abortion, if I saw it as possible I could prevent it. Sidewalk advocates, of course, put themselves deliberately in that situation all the time. Yet the last-ditch effort when an abortion process is already in motion isn’t as good as getting there long in advance, so the woman never considers abortion or so that she tells those people trying to pressure her into one to quit bugging her. So all the nonviolent and honest actions of the entire pro-life movement are needed. But those are all long-term, constant, steady – not an immediate emergency.
I would make a comparison to how the media extensively covers mass shootings, which only happen now and then. Yet currently many times as many people will have been killed in Yemen that same day. And every day. There’s a war there. Wars don’t get the day-to-day coverage that an isolated incident does. When something that would be an emergency if it happened only once becomes commonplace, then opposing it becomes part of your lifestyle.
And there’s never been a time in history when there weren’t massive numbers of killings. Feticide and infanticide have been common in most places throughout history, as have wars, executions, and lynchings, to name a few. Anyone in any historical period who cared about people not getting killed has always had to include that opposition as part of her or his lifestyle.
Which leads us to what happens when opposing killing must be a life-long commitment.
Psychology: Burnout
Burnout has three components:
Emotional exhaustion — feeling overwhelmed by emotional demands. Ward’s argument that we should treat the constant killing as a constant emergency is bound to provoke this.
Depersonalization — development of a detached, callous response. So, as an example, when a client complained about not having Christmas presents for her children, the social worker snapped at her to go shoplift something – a markedly unhelpful response, and a sign of burnout. And Ward similarly snaps at fellow pro-lifers. He makes valid points and illustrates them with pertinent experiences, but we’ve all had those frustrations. As I said in Part 1, all social movements have the problem of being less effective than they could be, because they’re run by human beings. When the response isn’t to try to improve that problem but to drop out of the movement, that’s a sign of burnout.
Feeling of reduced personal accomplishment —and reduced social movement accomplishment. Given the high stakes, the sense that we’re just not getting anywhere is a sign of burnout.
What I see is that Ward has offered a recipe for burnout, and then unsurprisingly shows that he’s suffering from it.
Ward, you haven’t asked my advice, but this I offer anyway: you need a good long break, which you should regard not as stopping work on the movement but replenishing yourself for the long haul.
Then, when ready to get back in, follow the advice for everyone below. I think you’d be especially well equipped to address your concern that the balance of atheists in the pro-life movement is insufficient. Atheists are obviously better suited to appeal to other atheists than non-atheists are.
For Everyone: Avoiding and Coping with Burnout
These are the basics, as those studying the problem (mainly, Christina Maslach) have figured out:
1. Work smarter, not harder. As when going uphill, it’s better to shift gears than to use more gas.
a. Set specific, realistic steps.
When a step is done, one can see that progress has been made. The final goal may be years, decades, or perhaps centuries away. Define accomplishments in concrete terms. Have daily, weekly, or monthly goals that can reasonably be done in that time frame.
b. Do the same thing differently.
Avoid ruts. Find what can be varied, and experiment with what’s effective. The change may improve effectiveness, and can be abandoned if not.
c. Take breaks and rest periods.
In addition to needed relaxation, this gives a chance to get some mental distance to get some perspective, to see things more coolly.
d. Take a “downshift.”
Not a full break, but doing other aspects of the work. Do paperwork or read; organize files; do some cleaning.
2. Caring for Oneself. The best way to help others is to be in good shape.
a. Accentuate the positive.
Finding the good makes the bad less overwhelming.
b. Small talk is important.
It may be irrelevant, but helps people manage.
c. Ask for positive feedback.
d. Know yourself.
Be in tune to inner feelings.
e. Use relaxation techniques.
The best to use is the one that fits you well.
f. Use humor.
It helps you keep perspective and lifts spirits.
Yet all this is exactly what goes against Ward’s point: how can we be humorous when babies are being killed? How can we relax and engage in small talk? What positive things don’t pale in comparison to the horror of it all? Doesn’t that communicate that we don’t really believe what we say when we say it’s massive slaughter?
But the results are in: those of us who use these techniques to keep ourselves sane are still working, and Ward has dropped out. The very fact that he feels the need to drop out shows the inadvisability of his approach.
Burnout is something all activists on every issue need to be aware of. We need to take care of ourselves – not for selfish reasons, but because it makes us more effective. We’re in it for the long haul.
“Why Haven’t We Ended Abortion?”
by Rachel MacNair
Part 1 of 2 posts responding to Ward Ricker’s essay, “Prolife – Not”
Ward Ricker has been active in opposing abortion, but has recently written an essay expressing alienation from the pro-life movement. In Part 2, I’ll address that feeling of alienation more directly, but first I was challenged by his complaint that when he googled the question – Why Haven’t We Ended Abortion? – his own previous essay on the topic was the only one that came up. He thought the question deserved more attention.
As seen with my outpouring of reasons below, I’ve certainly thought about it. But first, I want to make the question more specific and realistic: “Why haven’t we ended abortion being legal, socially approved, and practiced widely and openly?”
First, a reminder that the CLN blog welcomes diverse views, so the reasons I offer below are my opinion and not officially that of the organization.
Some Suggestions on Why
1) Courts in those countries with a court-imposed “right” to abortion are, for the most part, engaged in bizarre reasoning from which they either refuse to budge or they budge only slightly.
2) Mainstream media too often cover negative stereotypes of abortion opponents rather than giving an honest view of the debate. Most mass media tend to avoid covering those of us that don’t fit the stereotypes. As Ward has pointed out, they also only cover the debate – they rarely cover abortion itself, nor the gory details of how it’s practiced. And mainly they don’t even do much to cover the debate.
3) In the U.S., the Republicans have talked smoothly on the topic, but many politicians don’t have behavior showing they mean it. Pro-lifers spend so much of their time working for them, only to be betrayed. Over and over. A prime example is President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court.
4) In the U.S., Democrats have become bigoted on this topic. The intolerance of pro-life views is truly astonishing. Even simple efforts to have a “big tent” philosophy of allowing people to be pro-life Democrats has met with massive resistance and in most places isn’t the current policy.
5) Because of this Republican/Democrat divide in the U.S. and similar rifts in other countries, and because of the courts, and also the media, abortion has been presented as a right-wing/left-wing divide. So people move to the wing they agree with on other topics rather than thinking about it.
6) We have the same problem with societal apathy that absolutely every social movement that has ever existed has had.
7) Abortion promoters have way more money. They make money from abortions themselves. They also have more rich people and foundations donating, plus government grants.
8) The lead-up to Roe v. Wade arose during the cauldron of the American war in Vietnam and when Cold War anxiety over having a nuclear holocaust was high. The negative vortex of violent energy fed off the horrific violence of the era.
9) The Abortion Distortion Factor – when abortion is the topic at hand, many people dispense with the moral principles they normally abide by. I explain this as cognitive-dissonance-induced belligerency.
10) Human society has a long-standing habit of using killing as a problem-solver. We’re struggling against millennia of massive slaughter.
And Yet . . .
Abortion numbers in the U.S. are falling and have been for years, and there’s an even more dramatic downturn in first-time abortions. The repeat abortions are keeping the numbers up, but they’ll fall by attrition eventually as women hit menopause, so we’ve got a more dramatic downturn coming. I’ve written about how we can use psychology to our advantage with this observation.
But this also means that our work all these years has in fact been highly effective.
It’s of course heart-wrenching that it isn’t more effective – half of a huge number is still a huge number, and just one is one too many – but we are in fact making progress, and it’s absolutely crucial that we continue.
Final Question: Why this Question?
Ward was taken aback that he seemed to be the only one posing this question, and wondered why. My quick answer is that pro-lifers are very well acquainted with the many obstacles we face and are more likely to complain about those obstacles than to ask the question in this way. These are longstanding frustrations, after all.
But being inclined to connect issues of violence, I’ll also ask:
Why haven’t we ended war? Though we’ve made progress in that people generally only think it allowable for defense and not aggression, they’re nevertheless awfully easily convinced a given war is defensive when that’s highly questionable or just plain silly. Or they’re unconvinced but apathetic.
Why haven’t we ended the death penalty? It’s a mere shadow of what it used to be in numbers of executions and numbers of places it’s used, but why is it still happening at all?
Why haven’t we ended poverty? There’s a far smaller proportion of human society mired in it than used to be, but we have the resources to end it entirely, and stop the many deaths it causes. So why haven’t we?
Why haven’t we ended racism? Again, we’ve made more progress over the decades, but far too much of racism is still rearing its ugly head.
And why haven’t we ended nuclear weapons? Unlike all these others, we’re not dealing with centuries of human practice. While nukes were prevalent when I was born, my own parents were born into a world without them. There are far fewer than there used to be, and we now have an international treaty to ban them (signed by nations that don’t possess them). Given the demise of the Cold War and the clear danger of having so many and actually “modernizing” them, why is there so much apathy?
The answer to all these questions is: all social movements to stop violence have obstacles of the kinds I mentioned above.
Also, all of them aren’t working as effectively as they could, what with being run by human beings.
Additionally, these are some of the forms of socially-approved killing that we still have left, out of a once far greater number. We pretty much ended duels, gladiator games, witch-burnings, crucifixions lining the roads for public display, and various other forms of killings that used to be quite legal. We can learn lessons from those successes.
To my mind, the practical question isn’t why the killing of various kinds hasn’t ended. The practical question is: What are we going to do, or what will we keep doing, to end them?
All hands on deck.
Oppressors of Women Scapegoat Fetuses to Preserve Patriarchy
by Richard Stith
[Originally published in The New Human (Vol. VI, No. 5, June 1977), newsletter of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition,, under the title “Abortion Proponents Are Often Exploiters of Women.” Lightly edited.]
We’re all familiar with the argument that racism is fomented by those who exploit poor whites, in order to generate a convenient and often dehumanized scapegoat and thus prevent oppressed white workers from realizing who their real enemies are. The upper-class white in effect says to the lower-class white whom he is oppressing, “Hey, don’t blame me for your miserable existence. It’s those ‘n . . . .s’ who want your job and keep wages down by flooding the market with cheap labor. Get them. Lynch them. Kill them.”
Well, similarly, those in our society who oppress women are given a convenient scapegoat in the frequently dehumanized unborn child. The male says to the female he gets pregnant and abandons, “Hey, don’t blame me for your problems. It’s that ‘fetus’ inside you. Get it. Abort it. Kill it.”
Or, again, those who stigmatize unwed mothers instead of reacting with compassion can say, “Don’t blame us for your ostracism from the community. We’ll be glad to take you back, if you cover up what you did by getting an abortion. That ‘fetus’ is your enemy. Get it. Kill it.”
Or, again, the businesses that pay women less because they get pregnant, that don’t provide paid maternity leave and even fire pregnant women, that don’t in any way (that is, by part-time jobs) try to help men and women accommodate their family responsibilities—all these businesses can say with abortion available, “Hey, don’t blame us for your economic problems. It’s that damn ‘fetus.’ We’ll treat you just like always if you’ll get rid of it. Kill it.”
And, finally, abortion lets the government tell the poor and the black (at home and abroad): “Hey don’t blame us or U.S. capitalism for your troubles. It’s your own kids. They are your real enemy. You’ll see how happy you’ll be if you just get rid of them. Kill them. We’ll even pay for it!”
In none of these cases are the oppressed (poor whites, blacks, women) forced to turn to racism or to abortion. But the dehumanization and scapegoating of blacks and of the unborn nevertheless are used as tools of systematic oppression. The mere fact that women in theory have “freedom of choice” in regard to abortion doesn’t stop them from being exploited by abortion, because the parameters of that choice are strictly limited by the interests of sexism, racism, and capitalism, and because the consciousness of this limitation is ideologically suppressed by the use of the “fetus” as a scapegoat.
Blacks in Africa have long regarded abortion “as the white man’s new(est) form of genocide,” stated Dr. Margaret White of Croyden, England at the annual meeting of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians Guilds. The United States Agency for International Development has financed a spokesman who attacks the antiquated laws of the colonial masters and at the same time is calling for more contraception and abortion. “I find this . . . a nastier form of colonialism than ours,” she stated. The U.S. Center For Disease Control and Prevention lists the abortion rate for non-whites as twice that of whites in America. (Ob-Gyn News, 3-15-77).
The [National Youth Pro-life Coalition] NYPLC Board of Directors, in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, has condemned the U.S. government’s plan to sterilize one-fourth of the world’s fertile women, and has called for an end to the plan’s covert funding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation . . . . The NYPLC pointed out that such a massive program must necessarily involve heavy one-sided propaganda, if not coercion. The real motive behind federally-financed abortion and sterilization, keeping down the demands of the poor for social justice, is now out in the open and must be resisted, the NYPLC declared. . . .
Interestingly, the leftist press in the U.S. and abroad has for a number of years agreed with the pro-life movement about the often regressive nature of the government push for abortion and sterilization, even though the left has not generally been against abortion per se. For example, the cartoon below appeared on the cover of a journal called Science for the People in January, 1977. The remark by Che Guevara is a warning that abortion may be used to kill the unborn poor before they have a chance to grow up to be revolutionaries. The artist is Wen-Ti Tsen of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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For more of our posts from Richard Stith, see:
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
Misogyny vs. Patriarchy
by Rachel MacNair
Before I get into why I think it’s important to understand the difference between misogyny and patriarchy, I want to explain how they fit into the Consistent Life Network’s set of issues.
We identified six issues of violence involving socially-tolerated killing of human beings, as listed on this banner:
Each of the issues is overarching. Nuclear weapons and military spending are covered under war. Destructive embryonic stem cell research is covered under abortion. Infanticide is included under euthanasia. And so on.
I’ve always regarded racism as also covering misogyny and lethal discrimination against people with disabilities. In all cases, entire groups are being targeted for dehumanizing words and actions. There just isn’t really a good word to cover all of the groups. Bigotry is the closest, but it doesn’t quite capture the point we want to make.
But why is racism the one to cover all three?
It’s more clearly related to all issues: the racism of the death penalty is a major problem, whereas women are less subjected to executions and people with mental disabilities are in some places explicitly exempted. Women and the disabled are also explicitly excluded from being subjected to the military draft, which we would regard as a benefit for them.
Still, our focus on abortion should bring misogyny to the forefront, and our focus on euthanasia brings bigotry against people with disabilities to the forefront. Yet racism clearly has lethal impact in both those areas as well.
Misogyny vs. Patriarchy
There’s a further complication: many people confuse misogyny and patriarchy, but they’re not the same. Misogyny means being against women. Patriarchy means ruling over women. An example to illustrate the difference:
During the original run of the sitcom Roseanne, Jackie was Roseanne’s sister and Dan was Roseanne’s husband. Dan didn’t particularly like Jackie; when he came home and saw Jackie there, he wasn’t happy. But Jackie was family, and therefore entitled to be there. Jackie moved in with a man named Fisher. Fisher beat her. She wasn’t willing to go to law enforcement for fear of making things worse. Jackie’s father had died, she had no brother, and the husband-surrogate was the problem. In patriarchal terms, the next in line for male “protection” was her brother-in-law. So Dan went and beat Fisher.
Here’s the difference:
Fisher beats Jackie / motivated by hatred for women = misogyny.
Dan beats Fisher / motivated by protection of women = patriarchy.
Both led to violence. Both are, shall we way, poor at problem-solving. Both treat women as unequal. Yet the motivation is so opposite that a different analysis applies.
Applying this to abortion:
Misogynists can regard women as receptacles for the next generation for whom abortion is disallowed. Conversely, they can regard themselves as entitled to consequence-free sex and therefore launch unwanted pregnancies and push for aborting them.
Patriarchs – while they can, of course, also be misogynists – can instead have a sense of beneficent rule over women that would protect women and children from abortion. Conversely, they can also rule that abortions should happen. Discussing the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of the Christian era, sociologist Rodney Stark observes:
Once married, pagan girls had a substantially lower life expectancy, much of the difference being due to the great prevalence of abortion, which involved barbaric methods in an age without soap, let alone antibiotics. Given the very significant threat to life and the agony of the procedure, one might wonder why pagan women took such risks. They didn’t do so voluntarily. It was men – husbands, lovers, and fathers – who made the decision to abort. It isn’t surprising that a world that gave husbands the right to demand that infant girls be done away with would also give men the right to order their wives, mistresses, or daughters to abort.
Discovering God, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 321
Both misogynists and patriarchs can be on either side of the abortion issue.
Patriarchy and the Pro-Life Movement
It’s impossible to be a misogynist consistent-lifer; it would be like being a racist consistent-lifer. Both are a contradiction in terms. But is it possible to believe in patriarchy of a non-misogynist type and still be a consistent-lifer?
Technically, yes. You don’t need to beat the wife-beaters to protect women. If protecting women and children is your motivation, then the issue of whether society is better off if men rule women is a side-issue – perhaps a question of strategy.
But, I must say, I’ve never met a patriarchal consistent-lifer, and would be surprised if I ever did. Many of our member groups are pro-life feminists, and pro-life feminism is so enmeshed in our literature that we pretty much regard it as integral to the consistent life ethic. I’ve never known of an instance when anyone thought that bringing up pro-life feminism was off-topic. (I myself was president of Feminists for Life, 1984-1994). The point that greater equality and more genuine choices for women is one of the prominent solutions to abortion is a point we make frequently.
March for Life, 2019
What about the pro-life movement as a whole? This is a female-dominated movement, and always has been. While there might be a difference in multi-issue groups such as the Knights of Columbus, in activist right-to-life groups, any man who wants to participate has to be accustomed to working with women, taking our ideas seriously, and taking instruction from us.
Just this last time at the March for Life Expo, two men gave me literature showing a Roman centurion outfit and having clear patriarchal wording, of the men-are-supposed-to-protect kind. Nevertheless, they listened to me intently as I explained the finer points of boycott strategy. Their idea of male obligations on protection didn’t include discounting female expertise. It couldn’t. That’s just not the dynamic of how the pro-life movement works, or ever has.
This was one of the things that struck me when I joined the pro-life movement back in the 1980s. I was well-versed in peace and anti-nuclear activism at that point, and those movements weren’t nearly as good at including women as the pro-life movement was. There was much talk about how women had been expected to get coffee while the men did the decision-making, and this was no longer acceptable. Yet the effort to do otherwise in the groups I was involved in was very conscious and deliberate. I got pushed into a lot of leadership based on the need to address gender balance in leadership; fortunately, my predilections worked well with this.
When I joined mainstream pro-life groups, though, female participation in leadership was natural and never required attention to ensure.
Male politicians, of course, are another matter.
Book Review: “Resisting Throwaway Culture”
by Mary Lou Bennett
Resisting Throwaway Culture: How a Consistent Life Ethic Can United a Fractured People, by Charles C. Camosy.
Anyone living in the United States today is acutely aware of the pain and decay that permeate society as a result of contemporary moral issues. With such awareness, feelings of sadness, despair, and disbelief can become paramount. Hence, Charles C. Camosy’s book, Resisting Throwaway Culture, becomes a very important read.
Camosy not only writes with a profound understanding of what plagues society, but he also offers hope and a clear approach for setting the foundation for a better tomorrow. With knowledge and a straightforward approach that’s easy to read, Camosy explains that the American tendency has become to solve problems with violence. This, in turn, has resulted in what Pope Francis calls our “throwaway culture.”
Such a culture is enabled (if not fueled by) constant consumerism, and has resulted in humans becoming increasingly ignored, rejected, and disposed of. Camosy urges individuals to put aside political debates and reflect intently on their deepest values, while also embracing a Consistent Life Ethic (CLE). In doing so, people who have found themselves in a polarized culture war can finally begin to unite.
Camosy discusses the contemporary hook-up culture, reproductive technology, abortion, euthanasia, poverty, immigration, and mass incarceration. I was pleased to see he even goes a step further to also address the CLE’s concern that non-human beings are also being treated with cruelty and extensive violence. The CLE acknowledges that such brutal treatment of animals, like all violence, speaks to the fact that the world revolves around consumerism, diminishing the value of all life, human and otherwise, to “mere things” in order to generate a profit.
As I read Comosy’s theories and arguments, there were many eye-opening moments for me. For example, though I know of various state laws about the death penalty, I didn’t realize that more than 170 countries have abolished the death penalty, but the U.S., and a handful of other countries (including Iran and Saudi Arabia) continue to keep it.
I was also disturbed by some of Camosy’s information relating to reproductive biotechnology. He explained that, in the near future, embryos created through in vitro fertilization will have some chosen, while the “excess” will be thrown away. The embryos will then be edited to eliminate what those in power have decided are genetic diseases.
In each chapter, there’s a discussion on consumerism and autonomy, and how each, coupled with the use of language, serves to marginalize the sanctity of life, making it easy to discard the vulnerable. Indeed, each chapter is a reminder of how lost our country, the United States, has become.
At times I teared up, thinking about the countless loss of life, particularly that of the most innocent and helpless,the unborn. Other times, I became frustrated and enraged by what I learned. To discover that there’s a pervasiveness of abortion in many African American communities, and then read that abortion clinic owners often target communities with large percentages of racial minorities when deciding where to build their facilities, is truly infuriating.
Additionally, reading that abortion is promoted in some cities through billboard campaigns with slogans like, “Abortion is Necessary” is unnerving to say the least. Prior to reading Resisting Throwaway Culture, perhaps I could have said I found such information unfathomable, but now I understand that consumerism and autonomy apparently drive all aspects of existence, and some people have no shame. How utterly sad
This certainly all sounds bleak and disturbing. So, where is the hope that I spoke of earlier? According to Camosy, it can be found within the values of the Consistent Life Ethic itself. These values are: the inherent dignity of every person, nonviolence, hospitality, encounter, mercy, conservation of the ecological world, and offering priority to those in society who are the most vulnerable.
Beyond reminding us of these important values, Camosy reminds us that we must act–all of us. We cannot simply expect change, we must work to implement it, by first changing the way we live.
At the end of his book, Camosy’s appendix serves to highlight all the issues he discusses throughout. These issues are presented in a chart form, along with the various principles that serve to fuel them.
Though you may not agree with everything that Camosy has to say, you’ll certainly find that he has coherent arguments that get you thinking about the sanctity of life. He responds with compassion to the cultural fracturing that currently exists, while also providing a unifying framework, the Consistent Life Ethic, to protect the most vulnerable members of society.
Hopefully, Camosy’s book will be successful in its call to challenge each of us to create a culture of encounter capable of resisting what Pope Francis calls a “globalization of indifference.” If so, our society will undoubtedly become a better place for all to live.
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Mary Lou Bennett
For more of our posts from Mary Lou Bennett, see:
The Tragedy of Carrie Buck: A Review of Imbeciles / Mary Lou Bennett (book by Adam Cohen)
Mothers and Daughters / Mary Bennett (movie)
When Women Lead: The Pro-life Women’s Conference
by C.J. Williams
This year’s Pro-Life Women’s Conference had a theme: WHEN WOMEN LEAD. But what might just as well have been the unspoken theme was unity, and underlying all unity is consistency.
As the Consistent Life Network (CLN) set up to table in the enormous Pontchartrain Conference Center in New Orleans, we were surrounded by a sea of fellow advocates for life. Women poured in from as far away as California, as near as New Orleans itself, speaking more than one language and sporting more than one exterior style. Eight hundred plus registered this year, and we were excited to notice our fellow tablers focused on restoring resources and building a culture of peace consistently.
From Feminists Choosing Life of NY, whose executive director Michele Sterlace-Accorsi (who keynoted the event with verve and personal passion) to Sisters of Life, who spoke eloquently of developing our own interior silence and peace, the women spoke and heard consistency.
END WAR and STOP CALLING FEMINISM VIOLENCE FCLNY’s buttons stated boldly.
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL Rehumanize Intenational’s new stickers flashed in appropriate Spanish.
“[We are here] valuing life no matter what,” Sterlace-Accorsi rounded up her keynote, “We can cure diseases. . . but the only cure for despair, loneliness . . . and fear . . . is love.”
Within all this, Rachel MacNair and I mini-trained multiple conference goers on the peaceful but radically impactful Grassroots Defunding Planned Parenthood Campaign. Rerouting non-pregnancy healthcare needs away from PP and to the local federally qualified health clinics both aids men and women in local communities find the testing and treatment they need, and takes customers and funds away from clinics that kill, ultimately starving out PP centers across the nation.
“This is wonderful,” said one woman from Massachusetts, “I was at the huge public hearing on the abortion bill last week, but this is something I can do every day.”
Panels ran that unified and consistent gamut as well, pinpointing women’s power to lead in their communities. “Prolife? For the people at the border!” cried Fr. Craft, leading Sunday mass for the Catholics in attendance, “Are you leading with love?”
Cynthia J. Wood also addressed the #MeToo movement in her breakout, “Sexual Harrassment- A ProLife Issue Too.” A physicians’ panel, “Comprehensive Care” addressed healthcare needs and holistic nonviolent avenues for doctors also keyed in the consistent note.
A final highlight, the conference wrapped on Carrie Murray Nellis’s look at caring for and supporting birth mothers in the adoption process – and their lives going on.
“Nonviolence,” said Diane Lara from Texas, “I mean, caring about life and replacing violence. That’s why I sidewalk advocate. It’s also why I started a small organization here that works on, like, do no harm. Local agriculture and care for our environment and community. Vegan living – avoid harming animals. And never, never kill a preborn person.”
That’s unity. That’s consistency. And we were beyond pleased to participate this year – our table covered by two trailblazing women – in a conference lead by the feminine genius of unity and consistent compass
Note: This was the fourth annual conference; the 2020 conference will be June 26-28 in Indianapolis.
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For more of our posts on adventures at events, see:
My Day at the Democratic National Convention
Progressive Prolifers at the Progressive Magazine 100th Anniversary Celebration
The Mirror-Image Counterpart of the Selfish Society
by Richard Stith
This 1978 article was originally entitled “What it Means to be Pro-Life: Toward a Political Theory for Our Movement.” It appeared in The New Human, Vol. VII No. 2, March–April 1978, a publication of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition.
It’s been lightly edited.
Does being “pro-life” mean something more than being against abortion? Every pro-lifer would, of course, answer “yes.” But exactly what else it means is not quite clear. Does it mean one is against all killing, and thus that one must also work against euthanasia, capital punishment, and war? Does it mean that one is searching for “positive alternatives” to killing, especially in the case of the unborn? Or does it mean that one is an all-around “pro-people” good guy, working to help everyone in every way?
Probably, it means all of these things to some extent. But I think it also means something more exact. I think that there’s a quite specific role that the pro-life movement has undertaken to perform. . . .
I want to argue that the specific role of our movement is to be an exact mirror-image counterpart of the “selfish society.” That is, our job is to be a kind of counterbalance to the selfish tendencies in human nature and in politics—so that we ought not to try to do all the good things, but rather only those things which we think selfishness is least likely to take care of.
In order to make my point clear, let me first outline a model of a selfish society and of the rights which it recognizes. The role of the pro-life movement will then be simply to further those rights which self-interest leaves unprotected. I’m not saying that modern society is entirely selfish, but only that it is to a large extent selfish. Therefore, we can expect it won’t ignore matters affecting self-interest. However, it may ignore matters of human dignity which it thinks not relevant to self-interest, and so it’s in these matters that the pro-life movement is most needed.
A Model of the Selfish Society
Even a totally egotistical and selfish person will grant some rights to other human beings. For example, he or she will agree in general that people shouldn’t kill each other. Why would the person agree? Simply because the person doesn’t want to be killed, and realizes that other selfish people won’t promise not to kill him or her unless he or she also promises not to kill them. Similarly, the selfish person will grant other people rights to property, because he or she wants them to respect his or her property. So even in a society made up of wholly selfish egoists, certain rights will be recognized (or at least public lip-service will be paid to them).
But will a rational selfish person extend these rights to all people? No. For if his or her motives are wholly selfish, he or she has no reason to grant any rights to someone who’s too weak to do him or her harm. Such a person will be interested in “making a deal” only with those who have something to offer to that person. For example, if someone else is too young or too weak to kill him or her, why should he or she agree not to kill that person? The selfish person has no reason at all to make such an agreement. A selfish person will recognize the rights only of those who are strong enough to hurt him or her.
We should add two additional points:
First, strength may be measured by group rather than by individual. So, for example, a selfish person will acknowledge the rights of even a very weak person, if the latter is a member of a group (say, racial, ethnic, family) which is strong enough to retaliate effectively. Or conversely, a selfish person will not grant rights even to a very strong individual, if the former belongs to a group which is strong enough to suppress the latter. So, for example, an individual slave may be very clever and strong and yet have no rights, if the combined group of selfish slave-owners is strong enough to crush any rebellion. [Editor’s note: the same applies to condemned prisoners.]
Second, even selfish people have their likes and dislikes, and they may like some other people. The can’t love these people (because love, as self-giving, is necessarily unselfish), but they might like having certain others around, because they’re pleasant or useful. Thus even selfish people, for example, may want to protect their own children, because they find them cute, or helpful, or a status symbol, or because of some other self-interested reason. Thus, even though young children are too weak to be a danger to their parents, their parents may protect them insofar as they’re “wanted” (have no handicaps which make them not pleasant or useful). Similarly, their parents may insist other adults not kill them, and in return they may agree not to kill the wanted children of other adults.
So our conclusion must be that pure self-interest will do a good job of recognizing the rights of the strong or the wanted (individually or by group). But selfish persons won’t care at all about those individuals or groups who’re both weak and unwanted.
Caring without Selfishness
Just as selfish persons are concerned about others the more they are strong or wanted, so pro-lifers ought to care about others the more they are weak and unwanted. Now, there’s no other class of human beings weaker than the unborn, and so whenever these children are also unwanted, they are totally ignored by our selfish society. It’s for this reason, I think, that pro-lifers have rightly concentrated so much on protecting the unwanted unborn child. That child is the underest of underdogs, so to speak, and so is both the most defenseless and the most oppressed (no other person today being totally killable on demand).
Pro-lifers, in other words, don’t think the unborn are more valuable than other persons are. Unlike the pro-abortion people, who give no rights to the unborn, we believe that all persons’ lives are equally worthy of reverence and protection. However, self-interest will and does take care of the rights of the strong or wanted, and so the help of the pro-life movement is less needed.
Now, with this model as a guide, I think the special vocation of our movement can be truly discerned. We’re called upon to help those who would otherwise be without help—not those who already have plenty of help.
For example, I don’t think the pro-life movement should be involved in trying to stop recombinant DNA research, even though this research, in my opinion, is a clear danger to the survival of the human race—because of the simple fact that the rights of the strong are here as menaced as are those of the weak. The strong don’t want to be wiped out, and so we can assume they’ll do a good job of limiting such research for the sake of their own self-interest—without the help of the pro-life movement. Pro-lifers shouldn’t fight against all dangers to life. They should mainly oppose the killing of the weak and unwanted.
But we must go beyond protecting the right to life of the victims of selfishness and aim at protecting all their human rights. So, for example, pro-lifers should protect not only the right of Down Syndrome kids to survive, but also their right not to be purposely or accidentally neglected—insofar as selfish adults don’t give a dam.
Obviously, this is all a matter of degree rather than of absolutes. There’s a kind of social spectrum along which we all fit. At one end are those of us who are both very strong and very wanted. These are not the concern of the pro-life movement. At the other extreme are those both very weak and very unwanted. These are our chief concern. But we ought to be more concerned to fight for others as they near the point where they have no significant defenses against more powerful individuals and groups.
Popularity?
One last crucial point: If such is our vocation we can’t ever expect to be popular. For we shall always be found on the side of the unwanted—the “niggers” or “fetuses” of every age. Even if, for example, we succeed in getting selfish persons to “like” unborn kids (say, by showing pictures of them cutely sucking their thumbs) or in getting them to see their own self-interest at stake (because, say, of a declining population or of a growing disrespect for all human life) we won’t become “socially acceptable.” For to the extent that the unborn become wanted, they become no longer our chief concern; and we must struggle in defense of those individuals and groups who have now become the most oppressed victims of a selfish society. As soon as our work is approved, it’s finished, and we are called to struggle elsewhere.
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More of our posts from Richard Stith:
Equal Concern for Each Human Being, Not for Each Human Issue
Open Letter to Fellow Human Rights Activists
Dorothy Day and the Consistent Life Ethic: Rejecting Conventional Political Paradigms
by Rob Arner
As anyone who has embraced the consistent life ethic (CLE) will tell you, the sense of isolation, of not fitting in can be paralyzing. This is all the more true when it comes to the traditional American political spectrum, with its the left-right/conservative-progressive dichotomy. CLE political positions, linked as they are by the underlying conviction that all human beings possess inherent dignity and worth, are at odds with the standard narratives of left and right and lead to a sense of alienation from both.
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, knew this sense of isolation better than most.
Day and the Poor
As a radical left-wing journalist in her young adulthood, Day developed a social conscience that led her to side consistently with the workers, the poor, and other marginalized people:
[W]hat I read made me particularly class-conscious. I used to turn from the park with all its beauty and peacefulness and walk down to North Avenue and over West through slum districts, and watch the slatternly women and the unkempt children and ponder over the poverty of the homes as contrasted with the wealth along the shore drive. I wanted even then to play my part. I wanted to write such books that thousands upon thousands of readers would be convinced of the injustice of things as they were. I wanted to do something toward making a “new earth wherein justice dwelleth.”
Union Square to Rome, 37
Or as she would put it in a diary entry from 1945, Day “became converted to the poor, to a love for and desire to be always with the poor and suffering— the workers of the world.” This progressive social conscience led her for a time in her youth to identify with a variety of anarchist, socialist, and communist organizations who shared her social vision for a more just society.
Day and Abortion
But as an adult convert to Catholicism, she came to marry this progressivism with a deeply-rooted traditionalist Christian faith that reinforced in her the conviction that every human life is priceless and irreplaceable. Her conversion experience prompted her to reflect on some of the earlier tragedies and mistakes of her life, especially the painful experience of having an abortion in an ultimately futile attempt to maintain her relationship with the baby’s philandering father. In 1973, shortly after Roe v. Wade was decided, Day reflected on the pain abortion had caused for many women, as well as for herself:
Suddenly the thought came into my mind of abortion and even then though our entire [Protestant] pop has been taught that it was not “taking life”—“Life only began at 4 ½ months.” Legal restrictions alone made women guilt ridden. Does the changing of laws— the Supreme Court decision—do away with this instinctive feeling of guilt? My own longing for a child.
Diary entry dated April 13, 1973
Most deeply disturbing for Day was the way that many of her collaborators in the 1960s anti-war movement didn’t share her reverence for human life, lamenting how “those in this peace crowd do not hesitate to have abortions” (November 12, 1962 letter to Thomas Merton). She elaborated in another letter: “Here we are as pacifists seemingly on the side of life, and so many in the peace movement denying life” (March 3, 1967 letter to Jim Forest).
Rejecting Left and Right
Thus, Day and the Catholic Worker don’t fit neatly into the usual left/right dichotomy. Like socialist radicals, she made the cause of the poor and workers central to her vision of a just world. But like conservative traditionalists, she was deeply grieved by the prevalence of abortion in society. As this icon of Day communicates,
she combined traditionally “conservative” methods and emphases, such as charity, the works of mercy, and an emphasis on personal responsibility to address social needs, with traditionally “liberal/progressive” methods of social change, such as protest and nonviolent civil disobedience.
As a Catholic Worker from Philadelphia once explained to me, the Catholic Worker isn’t a “liberal” or “conservative” organization, but rather a radical one. While conservatives are generally happy with “the system” with only minor tweaks, and “liberals” would focus on making structural changes within the system in order to make it work, a radical organization such as the Catholic Worker is convinced that the system doesn’t work and is so fundamentally flawed and corrupted by sin that it can’t.
Personalism
For Dorothy Day, the philosophy that best expressed these seemingly divergent convictions in a coherent and intellectually satisfying manner was “personalism,” a philosophy imported from French Catholicism by her mentor and Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin. At its root, personalism stresses three things:
(1) The invaluable worth and dignity of the individual person;
(2) The fundamentally social nature of the person (that is, persons are always “persons-in-community”); and
(3) the moral imperative of personal responsibility, which stressed persons, rather than institutions or ideologies or rulers, as primary moral agents and the essential subjects of history.
Personalism means that persons, rather than ideas, agendas, or any other abstraction, are what ultimately matter. All other issues are subordinated to the needs of the person standing before you. Personalism for Day was also an authentic third way between the twin dangers of liberal capitalist individualism and person-negating communist collectivism. Both, she felt, in different ways, devalue the person or make the person’s importance subordinate to some greater cause or conflict.
This synthesis of the individual and the social was so novel in American society that it aroused great suspicion from both the right and the left. Robert Ellsberg observes that personalism was so outside the American experience that “readers from both the left and the right often found it difficult to locate the movement along the conventional political spectrum… To many seasoned observers, the very idiosyncrasy of these positions suggested a smokescreen, designed to obscure the true intentions of its proponents.” Indeed the FBI maintained a surveillance file on Day for her entire career as a Catholic Worker, and her resolute pacifism lost the Catholic Worker newspaper over a third of its subscriber base during World War II.
Day came to understand that adopting a personalist outlook on life meant losing a lot of friends who didn’t share her same core values. As she wrote in a 1943 letter to a fellow Catholic Worker, “Personalism isolates you in this mad world!” But it also offered her a radically open view toward others, which, for her as a Christian, meant seeing Jesus equally in all people.
Reflecting on an upcoming trip to Cuba, which was fresh off Fidel Castro’s communist revolutionary takeover, she wrote: “I go to see Christ in my brother the Cuban, and that means Christ in the revolution[ary], [and] Christ in the counter-revolutionary. But to both sides, being violently partisan, such an attitude will be considered reasonable by neither” (Diary entry, September 2, 1962). Nevertheless, she clung to the belief that personalism offered the best – indeed the only – just and humane way to create “a new social order wherein justice dwelleth, which is neither capitalist nor communist nor totalitarian in any way” (February 7, 1969 letter to Karl Meyer).
Personalism and the CLE
Because of her personalism, Day was an early adopter of what came to be the consistent life ethic. The infinite value of the person, Day believed, meant that something eternal and irreplaceable was lost when a person is killed through neglect or belligerence, and she took a solid stand for her entire life against all killing of human persons. As Daniel Berrigan put it in the foreword to Day’s memoir The Long Loneliness, “What held me in thrall was an absolutely stunning consistency. No to all killing. Invasions, incursions, excusing causes, call of the blood, summons to the bloody flag, casuistic body counts, just wars, necessary wars, religious wars, needful wars, holy wars— into the fury of the murderous crosswinds went her simple word: no.”
Day herself would connect the issues in a way that is now so familiar to those of us who embrace the CLE. “We are aghast at the continuing and spreading warfare in the world— the waste of human life, and at home too with abortion used to save the resulting consequences of our acts from suffering, from the cross we impose upon them” (1971 letter to Daniel and Philip Berrigan).
Dorothy Day’s long career as a Catholic Worker stands as a testament to the possibilities that can open up when we reject the boxes forced upon us by the prevailing society. The CLE is a personalist outlook, one which embraces the inestimable value of each and every human life and stands in ready defense against any threat that would destroy it or force it to exist in poverty and degradation. It combines the best of the progressive social vision of justice and equity for all people with what is good from the conservative esteem for and defense of every life, “from womb to tomb.” Only such visions that can bridge the divides and make common cause toward a better world can ever come close to achieving Day’s goal of creating “a new society from within the shell of the old.”
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For similar posts, see:
Women’s History Month: Jane Addams
Courageous Woman: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001)
Celebrating the Life of Daniel Berrigan
Abby Johnson Remembers Dan Berrigan
The Redemptive Personalism of Saint Oscar Romero
For more of our posts from Rob Arner, see:
The Consistent Life Consensus in Ancient Christianity
The Real Meaning of Mother’s Day
Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit Into the Consistent Life Ethic?
Jasmine, Aladdin, and the Power of Nonviolence
by Rachel MacNair
The recent live-action version of the movie Aladdin didn’t deal much with specific consistent life issues. The only one brought up was war, and that was only because the villain wanted it, though never got beyond planning. Yet the fleshing out of the characters, compared to the 1992 cartoon version, led to a theme about power. The movie uses the theory of power that nonviolence has always been based on. And of course nonviolence has always connected all of our issues.
Hungry for Magical Power
We can start with how startled the genie was to discover that his new “master” wasn’t a greedy power-hungry person, as the genie was accustomed to. His first words to Aladdin were, “Oh Great One who summons me,” a line that would be more expected by the kind of people who try to find the genie’s lamp. As part of the more realistic plot lines that go into live-action movies, as opposed to cartoons, people who seek out the lamp would be those kinds of characters.
It seems funny to refer to a story with a genie doing magic as “more realistic.” But it’s common in live action films based on previous animation that the implications of the story are better thought out.
Instead, the genie finds in Aladdin a young man who actually asks the genie what he, the genie, would wish for – a whole new idea. And what the genie wanted was his freedom. Naturally. And for the first time, he found a man who wasn’t quite so power-hungry, who said that for his third wish he would give the genie his freedom.
Yet the genie had seen what power of the magical kind does to people. He clearly had bitter experience. He was cynical enough to expect this would happen with Aladdin as well. When it came time for that third wish, the genie turned out to be correct: Aladdin had gotten a taste of power, and couldn’t let it go. In the original cartoon, the issue was that Aladdin was lying to everybody. In this version, the idea that power had gone to his head was more to the point.
Aladdin’s first wish was to be a prince. This wasn’t for the sake of being a prince, but for the sake of impressing a specific woman, Princess Jasmine. He’d fallen in love with her, but she was legally obligated to marry only a prince. Therefore, he needed to be a prince.
In the original cartoon version, Aladdin got “dolled up” and then, by golly, he was a prince. The live-action version paid a little more attention to what that means: where was his country? Ababwa was made up, of course, so the question of whether he was actually a prince, simply because he had such impressive riches, was asked.
This becomes all the more important when the villain, Jafar, steals the lamp he originally sent Aladdin to get, and uses it in the very way that the genie feared. And while in the cartoon version the genie was clearly unhappy about having to fulfill Jafar’s demands, in this version, there was more: you could see in the genie’s face how very much it pains him to have to do this yet again.
The Nonviolent Rebellion
Jafar wished to be sultan. And the genie took the royal clothes off the Sultan and put them on Jafar, put Jafar on the Sultan’s throne, and stood by ready for enforcement. So the guards concluded that their loyalties must now shift, because the magic had happened.
But here is where the nonviolence theory of power comes in: Princess Jasmine made a direct appeal to the guards. Where was their loyalty really? Was it not up to the people to determine a ruler, and not up to someone who managed to find a genie and make a wish?
The guards realized this was so. Who was wearing the clothes didn’t matter. Who was sitting on the throne didn’t matter. They had loyalty to the same man they had pledged loyalty to before.
Neither Aladdin nor Jafar were able to become a prince or a sultan by magic. Magic isn’t how power works.
Power works because people cooperate with those in power – primarily, because they understand the power to be legitimate. Tyrants can strike fear in people, but that’s a very difficult way to maintain people’s cooperation. Only an understanding of legitimacy keeps power without tremendous and unsustainable inputs of violence over time.
In this case, the withdrawal of power happened right away. But then, the illegitimacy of the power grab was quite blatant; in real life, clearly stolen elections are common triggers for nonviolent uprisings. In front of Jafar, Jasmine pointed this problem out to the guards. They could see it immediately, and responded accordingly.
Jasmine
The figure of Jasmine herself has become quite a bit more powerful in the recent version. The new song for this movie, Speechless, is a passionate song in which she declares that she will not be speechless. (See a clip or full lyrics)
But her power doesn’t come from a desire to lord it over others. It comes from a compassionate desire to help others. Her power, using compassion, would be seen as more legitimate, and therefore easier to sustain in a willing population.
Her father, the Sultan, sees this. Earlier when she had proposed that as his only child she should be the next sultan, and that she had the needed skills, he had responded that a woman wouldn’t be sultan. While not illegal, it was against tradition. Yet after she demonstrated how courageous and effective she was, in the face of a magical onslaught, he saw that she would in fact make a very good sultan. He told her she would be the next one.
The Third Wish
As for Aladdin, he realized the danger of leaving a genie with magical powers that the genie himself would rather not use. He also realized that he’d been slipping into a power-grabbing mindset, and Jafar had just given him a model of how horrific that road could be. So he did keep his promise and he used his third wish to free the genie.
This was the same plot point in both the cartoon and live-action movies. Yet in the recent version, the genie was stunned because he wasn’t expecting it. He thought Aladdin had become like the other “masters” he had had, since Aladdin had pretty much said so earlier. At least, the genie would have thought, what Aladdin wanted was relatively benign. And Aladdin’s desires were a huge relief after dealing with Jafar (a problem solved through a trick from Aladdin that took advantage of Jafar’s blind power hunger).
Aladdin sacrificed using his third wish for himself and instead used it to free the genie. This showed his compassion. He went back out on the street in his street clothes; a sacrifice for a friend is what he intended to do.
And of course it was that compassion that was a major appeal to Princess Jasmine.
That and his knowledge of what things were like on the street would be a tremendous help in her work as sultan. She was the one qualifid to do the work, and he recognized that (another major appeal for her), but he had a contribution to make as someone not in the upper class.
Conclusion: Hollywood
The feminist sensibilities in Disney movies are improving considerably over what they used to be. While Snow White in the 1930s sang “Some Day My Prince Will Come,” the cartoon Jasmine didn’t want to be pushed into marriage with a pompous man. With this latest movie, she developed into a Jasmine who wanted and deserved a leadership role.
Yet it’s still common in Hollywood that women gain equality by becoming as violent as men. Rather than catching on that violence is bad for the men committing it, along with everyone else, the penchant in many movies to use fantasy violence as a fantasy problem-solver is still strong, and shoving women into that same mold isn’t really feminist progress.
It was refreshing to see a strong woman leader who wasn’t merely nonviolent in the sense of not being violent, but who assertively used nonviolence principles to solve the violent problem in front of her.
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For more of our posts on movie and TV reviews, see:
Hollywood Movie Insights (The Giver, The Whistleblower, and The Ides of March)
Three Nonviolent Lessons from Dr. Who
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Movies with Racism Themes: “Gosnell” and “The Hate U Give”