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I've been meaning to post some more in-depth thoughts about some of the books I read in 2007 and just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Willa Cather, "My Antonia," and racial/ethnic/gender issues. (First, I want to note that I realize I am conflating the opinions/thoughts of the protagonist Jim Burden with what Cather thinks/feels, and this isn't always a reasonable thing to do, as authors often write characters to have very different ideas or feelings than they have. But it's pretty well known that much of "My Antonia" is disguised biography, so I think it's safe to assume that Cather's thoughts and feelings are at least similar to what Jim thinks, feels and believes.)
I think it's really odd how Cather has so much sympathy for European immigrants and sees how hard-working and just like regular old Americans they are, and yet she can't seem to get past some of her weird ideas and feelings about "negroes" in the book. She has obvious admiration for pioneer immigrants, especially the women who often worked as hard or harder than the men. She obviously thinks that her fellow 'mericans who find these people to be alien are mistaken. And yet, when she talks about a blind mulatto piano player, she pulls out a lot of racial stereotyping, from the shape of the head to her line about him enjoying the music in a primitive way, "The way only a Negro can." It's pretty bizarre to me, even considering the times, that she couldn't take that one more step and see the common humanity even with the skin color difference. She goes on and on about the mulatto's yellow skin color and can't go two sentences without mentioning racial features, very much different than the way she treats the European immigrants, after getting a few descriptors out of the way early on.
In contrast, I LOVED how she talked about the difference between hard-working farm girls and hired maids and the girls who grew up middle class and never had to do any work harder than walking half a mile to school. She talks about how when the boys danced with the girls, the sedentary girls didn't move under their clothes, and their muscles seemed to be asking not to be exerted while the working girls felt very different in their arms, muscles moving powerfully. Great descriptors. It's pretty obvious why Cather is something of a lesbian icon.
The abortion debate in shades of gray. I read two books last year that touched on the ethics and morality of abortion in places, and the authors both advocated a less black-and-white approach, while coming at it from pretty different places. The first was "The Science of Good and Evil" by Michael Shermer, and the second was "Crazy for God" by Frank Schaeffer.
First off, before I discuss these two author's opinions about the abortion debate, I just want to say that while I'm firmly pro-choice, I do think that the debate is really over-polarized and that both sides often make statements or arguments that are WAY too extreme. I also think their tactics are often ridiculous. For a satire of this, check out the movie "Citizen Ruth." It makes both the virulently pro-life and the virulently pro-choice activists look like twits, and it's hi-LAR-ious. I think it's equally ridiculous to call a two-cell organism a "baby" and call an aborting mother a "murderer" as it is to call a 7-month-old fetus a "clump of cells" and to pretend that there's no moral component to the decision to abort a baby that- with modern technology- could be a viable, living human being. But there's been precious little room for gray-area thinking in the abortion debate as it's been framed post Roe v. Wade.
Schaeffer comes to the abortion debate from a strongly pro-life viewpoint. He was one of the leaders that pushed abortion as a moral issues for evangelicals to take a stand on; before the 1970s, abortion was largely seen as a "Catholic" issue and many evangelical and fundamentalist churches had no strong stands for or against it, at least not publicly. He admits that much of his anti-abortion stance is based on emotion, that he was a teenage father who grew up with severely handicapped friends, and he finds the arguments about unwanted babies of unwed teen mothers and aborting disabled fetuses to be morally repugnant from a highly personal point of view. Later in life, he developed a more nuanced view of abortion, feeling that perhaps a 13-year-old who had been raped or molested should be allowed an abortion while two parents with plenty of income should not be able to abort a child with a minor disability just because they want a "designer baby" (although, I have to wonder how many of the latter kinds of people he's ever met or talked to- that's not even close to my experience of the reasoning behind why some of my friends have had abortions).
Shermer comes to the abortion debate from a libertarian viewpoint, and from the viewpoint that MOST moral decisions are not yes/no or black/white, and that morality is almost always along a continuum. One area where I've heard this argument before is in terms of animal rights. It seems weird and non-intuitive to give all animals 100 percent of the same rights as humans, but it also seems wrong to treat our closest relatives- monkeys and apes- and other somewhat intelligent animals, like dolphins, as though the are indistinguishable from, say, a mosquito. He proposes giving animals rights along a continuum, with humans having 1.0 human rights, with the great apes having, say, 0.9 human rights, and mosquitoes maybe 0.05 human rights (I'm making up these numbers, but you get the idea).
Similarly, he posits that many moral choices can been viewed along a continuum, with taking the morning after pill being perhaps 0.1 immoral, with killing an already-born child being 1.0 immoral, and all the variations in between falling somewhere along that continuum. Under this type of moral thinking, it makes sense to allow first-term abortions, discourage second-term abortions, and severely limit third-term abortions, for instance.
I don't necessarily agree with either in full, but I have to say it's refreshing to see people talking about abortion in shades of gray without getting bogged down in polarized dogma from either side.
Willa Cather, "My Antonia," and racial/ethnic/gender issues. (First, I want to note that I realize I am conflating the opinions/thoughts of the protagonist Jim Burden with what Cather thinks/feels, and this isn't always a reasonable thing to do, as authors often write characters to have very different ideas or feelings than they have. But it's pretty well known that much of "My Antonia" is disguised biography, so I think it's safe to assume that Cather's thoughts and feelings are at least similar to what Jim thinks, feels and believes.)
I think it's really odd how Cather has so much sympathy for European immigrants and sees how hard-working and just like regular old Americans they are, and yet she can't seem to get past some of her weird ideas and feelings about "negroes" in the book. She has obvious admiration for pioneer immigrants, especially the women who often worked as hard or harder than the men. She obviously thinks that her fellow 'mericans who find these people to be alien are mistaken. And yet, when she talks about a blind mulatto piano player, she pulls out a lot of racial stereotyping, from the shape of the head to her line about him enjoying the music in a primitive way, "The way only a Negro can." It's pretty bizarre to me, even considering the times, that she couldn't take that one more step and see the common humanity even with the skin color difference. She goes on and on about the mulatto's yellow skin color and can't go two sentences without mentioning racial features, very much different than the way she treats the European immigrants, after getting a few descriptors out of the way early on.
In contrast, I LOVED how she talked about the difference between hard-working farm girls and hired maids and the girls who grew up middle class and never had to do any work harder than walking half a mile to school. She talks about how when the boys danced with the girls, the sedentary girls didn't move under their clothes, and their muscles seemed to be asking not to be exerted while the working girls felt very different in their arms, muscles moving powerfully. Great descriptors. It's pretty obvious why Cather is something of a lesbian icon.
The abortion debate in shades of gray. I read two books last year that touched on the ethics and morality of abortion in places, and the authors both advocated a less black-and-white approach, while coming at it from pretty different places. The first was "The Science of Good and Evil" by Michael Shermer, and the second was "Crazy for God" by Frank Schaeffer.
First off, before I discuss these two author's opinions about the abortion debate, I just want to say that while I'm firmly pro-choice, I do think that the debate is really over-polarized and that both sides often make statements or arguments that are WAY too extreme. I also think their tactics are often ridiculous. For a satire of this, check out the movie "Citizen Ruth." It makes both the virulently pro-life and the virulently pro-choice activists look like twits, and it's hi-LAR-ious. I think it's equally ridiculous to call a two-cell organism a "baby" and call an aborting mother a "murderer" as it is to call a 7-month-old fetus a "clump of cells" and to pretend that there's no moral component to the decision to abort a baby that- with modern technology- could be a viable, living human being. But there's been precious little room for gray-area thinking in the abortion debate as it's been framed post Roe v. Wade.
Schaeffer comes to the abortion debate from a strongly pro-life viewpoint. He was one of the leaders that pushed abortion as a moral issues for evangelicals to take a stand on; before the 1970s, abortion was largely seen as a "Catholic" issue and many evangelical and fundamentalist churches had no strong stands for or against it, at least not publicly. He admits that much of his anti-abortion stance is based on emotion, that he was a teenage father who grew up with severely handicapped friends, and he finds the arguments about unwanted babies of unwed teen mothers and aborting disabled fetuses to be morally repugnant from a highly personal point of view. Later in life, he developed a more nuanced view of abortion, feeling that perhaps a 13-year-old who had been raped or molested should be allowed an abortion while two parents with plenty of income should not be able to abort a child with a minor disability just because they want a "designer baby" (although, I have to wonder how many of the latter kinds of people he's ever met or talked to- that's not even close to my experience of the reasoning behind why some of my friends have had abortions).
Shermer comes to the abortion debate from a libertarian viewpoint, and from the viewpoint that MOST moral decisions are not yes/no or black/white, and that morality is almost always along a continuum. One area where I've heard this argument before is in terms of animal rights. It seems weird and non-intuitive to give all animals 100 percent of the same rights as humans, but it also seems wrong to treat our closest relatives- monkeys and apes- and other somewhat intelligent animals, like dolphins, as though the are indistinguishable from, say, a mosquito. He proposes giving animals rights along a continuum, with humans having 1.0 human rights, with the great apes having, say, 0.9 human rights, and mosquitoes maybe 0.05 human rights (I'm making up these numbers, but you get the idea).
Similarly, he posits that many moral choices can been viewed along a continuum, with taking the morning after pill being perhaps 0.1 immoral, with killing an already-born child being 1.0 immoral, and all the variations in between falling somewhere along that continuum. Under this type of moral thinking, it makes sense to allow first-term abortions, discourage second-term abortions, and severely limit third-term abortions, for instance.
I don't necessarily agree with either in full, but I have to say it's refreshing to see people talking about abortion in shades of gray without getting bogged down in polarized dogma from either side.
