The Beacon

Issue date: 2/4/10 Section: Opinions

A quick pre-emptive strike on issues of gender, rhetoric, class, etc.



In the event that I prove persuasive enough to keep your attention in lower-case text, the piece that follows will address certain issues regarding: Roe v. Wade, Miss Cowan's commentary in last week's issue of The Beacon, American identity, cultural ethics and a whole bunch of other stuff, maybe.

So I feel I should acknowledge upfront that I'm well aware of my personal status as a white American male from a certain socioeconomic stratum who is accordingly shackled to all the mindsets and biases that come along with it. I know, and I'm not proud of them, but what can you do? The rest of this particular commentary should be read with said biases in mind.

Actual commentary



In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace - anyone who knows me at all is laughing to themselves right now; cease and desist, I say - wrote an essay called "Authority and American Usage" in which he takes a look at the current war in English grammar studies. It's way more interesting than I just made it sound. True to Wallace's style, "Authority" is a super-digressive work, touching on topics as varied as the philosophy of language, sociological dynamics of children and, appropriately enough, abortion.

It's fair to take as an axiom that "the question of defining human life in utero is hopelessly vexed," Wallace writes, otherwise there wouldn't be such a vitriolic debate about it.

That is, it is currently impossible, both scientifically and philosophically, to pinpoint the moment when a fetus develops a soul, a fact from which two conflicting arguments emerge.

1) According to Wallace, "… the principle 'when in irresolvable doubt about whether something is a human being or not, it is better not to kill it,' appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Life."

2) At the same time, Wallace writes, "… the principle 'when in irresolvable doubt about something, I have neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to do about it …' appears to me to require any reasonable American to be pro-choice."

I do indeed agree with Wallace on both, but if you're anything like me, you are raising a serious objection at this point: It sounds like I'm basically endorsing a form of moral relativism. Worse still, it may seem like more liberal pussyfooting, the most useless kind of equivocating that currently exists on the left side of our political spectrum.

Continued...

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