if men get war, then I get abortion
This line from Sarah Vap's Winter: Effulgences and Devotions has inhabited my thoughts since the afternoon when, quelling my innate prejudice--for I believe the Golden Rule extends to intellectual hospitality--I cautiously invited it in.
Vap makes a bid here for the right to gamble her future using abortion, as men do with war. I would like to take this appeal as a launching pad to explore the reasons people contend for such tarnished prerogatives. I would like to make my case against all but a few of them. But my appraisal of means and ends will always be as persuasive as the convictions that guide it. Such conversations yield at best a gallery of irreconcilable worldviews, at worst, confusion and bitterness.
Taking that approach also bypasses two concepts which, combined, equip us to make the seemingly impossible refusal to gamble our own destiny at all.
First: that our choices yield outcomes, but the outcomes are unpredictable. Selected in the mercurial darkness of the present, our choices exert a wayward catalyzing energy of their own upon the choices faced by others, even as the choices of others keep forming our own potentialities. If this is true, then choosing for our idea of an outcome--however innocently or even nobly intended--will always be a gamble. To choose using the currency of one or many unyielded human lives raises the stakes, often in ways we are incapable of fathoming. Arguing the prudence of such a wager is difficult, and ought to be. It does not take much imagination to see ourselves, our loved ones, on someone else's table.
Second: that whatever else our choices beget, we will be the byproduct. When I look back at the many decisions that I have made, I see the truth about my character coming into focus. What I choose will always reveal who I am. This is where the power of volition can be harnessed towards an achievable destiny. My choices cannot incarnate my desires, but they will always incarnate my true self.
Both these concepts offer freedom: from the futile striving to wrest outcomes out of a universe that doesn't submit to our edicts, and from the moral bewilderment that sets in as we grapple with how little our choices seem to matter.
Wars and abortions would be much reduced if we trained ourselves and our children to understand the limits of choice, to wield its vast power appropriately. Not only because fewer people would avail themselves of these extreme prerogatives, but because more people would have the wisdom to reject the millions of small but self-disclosing moral failures that beget such extreme situations.
At the very least, such training allows us to transcend the power dynamics with which Vap herself resigns to participate.
