Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!laura From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.abortion Subject: re: old "society&abortion" article Message-ID: <4222@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Thu, 16-Aug-84 08:07:16 EDT Article-I.D.: utzoo.4222 Posted: Thu Aug 16 08:07:16 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 16-Aug-84 08:07:16 EDT References: <974@shark.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 83 Brian, you are right that ``we are not clones''. So when you speak of yourself as ``a member of X society'' then you are only identifying the elements of the society with which you would like to be identified. These elements may even be specious generalisations for all we know. The problem arises when a few people say the same words over and over so that people become aware of a label and begin to think that the label is the people. So everybody knows what ``the ME generation'' is supposed to be from media coverage. The problem is that there are a lot of people who do not fit the stereotype of ``the ME generation'' just as there are a lot of people who aren't stereotypical Blacks, White Southerners, Policemen, you name it. ``Society'' is just a catch-all stereotype. And when someone says things like ``Society demands X'' what they are actually saying is that ``Certain people, who claim to be representative of ``society'' demand X''. It will be interpreted as ``everybody wants X'' or ``everybody who is not a nut-case wants X'' to the extent that one believes that those certain people actually do represent ``society''. But this is more a matter of ideology and propeganda than anything else. If Joe Elected-Member-Of-Government stands up and says ``I am elected and therefore representative of society and societey wants me to vote yes on issue foo'' a whole lot of people will say yes, he does represent society. What they do not uinderstand is that Joe Elected may never have mentioned issue foo during his last campaign, or that he may have, and most constituents wanted him to vote no, but more than that they really didn't care about issue foo and voted for him because his opposition were unattractive in some way, or even that it is likely that more than half of the members of his constituent who were eligible to vote either did not vote or voted against him so that he was in by a plurality alone. So Joe may not be representing that much after all. The problem is that the more speeches Joe gives the more people will come to believe that Joe is actually representing society, simply because they hear it so often. This causes disgruntlement among the members of the society which Joe claims he is representing (if they do not think that their actual desires are being put forward) and causes outsiders to think that society is what Joe says that it is. So if Joe says ``Christian society demands that evolution be thrown out and creationism taught in schools'' he has done several bad things. In the first place, he has got the Christians who are not fundamentalists and think that creationism is wrong upset with him. In the second place he has got the Fundamentalists who are arguing for equal time with evolution upset with him. The Fundamentalists who agree with what Joe says may be estatic, but the rest of the non-Christian world gets another indication that Christian=that subset of Fundamentalist Christians. Not good at all. But it is the nature of democracy that the people interested in making the rules give as their justification for making the rules that they are ``doing the will of the people''. Mostly, of course, this is a big con and they are only ``doing the will of some of the people -- inparticular enough to keep me elected''. The number of issues on which all members of any ``society'' agree is so small that the usefulness of the word at all is very questionable. It suggests a unity where there is actually none. So why use the word? I know that politicians use it to intimidate people who disagree with their proposals (under the ``society says means if you do not agree you are a nutcase'' interpretation) and I see media people using this form of argument by intimidation all the time. Assuming that you do not want to intimidate another into backing away from his beliefs out of fear of humiliation, what other purpose is served by this word? besides being short enough for newspaper headlines? Laura Creighton utzoo!laura ps -- who says that ``being well liked'' or ``fitting in'' is something which should be guaranteed before a child is allowed to exist or grow up? There are a lot of people out there who, rightly or wrongly, believe that they are not well liked and do not fit in...but they are still happy to be alive.