Wading in Roe

Well, this is freaking next – the triumph of the ape!  We knew it was coming; (most but not all - there’s still Liz Cheney) Republicans have been courting the white male inner monkey for decades.  Not because Republicans have the slightest qualm about abortion or anything else – they can pay for as many abortions as their mistresses (and even their wives) need.  No, they’ve just wisely latched onto our ancient primate wiring and ridden it straight to the blossoming hell at our feet.

In grad school at Washington University in St. Louis I wrote way too many papers about the work of a German sociologist, Georg Simmel.  In retrospect I admit that my enthusiasm for Simmel probably reflects little more than the ease with which I could pronounce his name – “Gey-org Tsimmel.”  Fun!

But I’m haunted by one of his most grisly, depressing and incontrovertible social theories.  Essentially, it’s that nothing ever really changes.  Society in any culture is a grid, like a window screen, lots of little squares.  An individual square, for example “women,” may expand for a time, gaining recognition, rights, autonomy.  But inevitably  the walls of that square will shrink to its original configuration, annihilating the changes wrought by its expansion.

Our original configuration as primates is a social order based on obeisance to a large alpha male. (Currently a sociopath with an orange face and tiny hands.) Other males incessantly jockey for places in a descending hierarchy from the alpha down, and females do nothing but seek to mate up the same hierarchy. Unlike all other animals, however, we possess an ability to think and thus to override our ancient wiring. Like an embarrassing relative at whose anatics we chuckle, the wiring’s there but we ignore it to choose more interesting lives.

Except when we don’t.

Except when a cadre of shrewd white males with sufficient wealth to control the media that influences us chooses to use our inner monkey to gain power over us.  Those who think are appalled, but other millions feel vindicated.  Yeah, they cheer, we always knew the female exists only as a receptacle for literally everybody’s sperm and the squalling result, even if it kills her!

When I was in grad school, and after, I was part of an expanding square on the grid – feminism, the women’s movement, all that.  We worked and read and wrote, marched and met and thought the changes we caused would make a better world.  But I never forgot Simmel’s grid and feel it now, smashing my own history into oblivion.

This is only the beginning.  What will come next is a Gotterdammerung, the twilight of reason and all human autonomy except that of the power-mad white male.  And of course that leaked draft of a supreme court opinion only reifies a less socially significant but more traumatic personal loss. If anybody has a more upbeat perspective, let me know!

Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash