Signifying heroes and villains, good intentions and bad

One of the bigger struggles I've had during the Trump Era has been with how to identify people -- the folks with whom I disagree, the ones who are doing things I sometimes even find harmful -- who are nonetheless acting in good faith.

There are personal reasons for this. No need to get into the details publicly, but there are persons I was once close to, despite our profound differences politically, because I thought we at least shared a commitment to speaking as truthfully as we could, to seeking the Truth -- even if we defined that somewhat differently.

Then Donald Trump came along and I found out I was mistaken.

I've lost a few friends in recent years. And yet: I refuse to believe that most people are cartoon villains. (Again, the Trump Years have tested this.) The vast majority of humans -- I really, firmly believe -- understand themselves to be acting for the right reasons and noble motivations. It would not resolve our differences to understand people as they see themselves, and we don't have to accept those self-judgments as definitive, but I still think it's important to try. Even now. At least for the sake being somewhat more realistic in our assessments, and not least because the people we now define as our enemies are also our fellow citizens, and the opposite of figuring out how to live with them is too terrible to think about. 

This brings us to abortion, naturally.

We are in Day Two of the post-Roe era, and the recriminations are filling my Twitter feed. One woman -- a writer who grew up among evangelicals, then rejected that upbringing -- wrote an essay in which she declared something to the effect of: They hate women. They may not think they do, but they so.

I understand why she writes this. If you're a person whose rights are being taken away, you're not inclined to see the taker's best intentions, their most self-flattering regard for their own high ideals. She's pissed. Understandably. She's on the receiving end of what the Supreme Court has done, and it certainly feels like being hated. 

But also I think she paints with too broad a brush. Hates women? Maybe some of them. But most evangelicals -- or maybe just many, who knows -- legitimately believe that unborn children are persons with rights and that those rights are not negated just because thatunborn person relies on another person's body to survive for a few months.

That's not my position. But understanding that does change my understanding of what pro-lifers are trying to achieve. What reads as oppression on the receiving end reads as liberation -- or at least, the saving of loves -- on the other side. If you're interested in knowing the truth of a situation, youll get closer by paying attention to what people think they're accomplishing rather than relying on your own feelings about it.

On the other hand: On Twitter today, a semi-prominent pro-lifer said that much of the backlash against the Dobbs ruling could be attributed to a total devotion to "sexual libertinism."

Oy.

Trying to read that comment from this person's point of view, I suppose it's true that many women want simply to make their own choices about sex and reproduction and that the ability to make such choices constitutes "sexual libertinism." But that doesn't account for allthe women who worry about the reproductive issues that may arise within a monogamous context: Ectopic pregnancies, septic pregnancies, miscarriages, the ability to afford to raise a kid, or even -- especially -- the heightened legal and state scrutiny that's a likely to accompany the new regime. Even for pro-life women who happily choose to become mothers and welcome a child into the world, the consequences of Dobbs might well be intrusive.

You don't have to be the Marquis de Sade to recognize those fears.

The flip side of trying to understand your rivals as they see themselves is that they should try to do the same for you. And the result of that attempt should be -- if they're really committed to seeking the truth of a situation -- that they will understand the limits of their own seemingly good intentions.

I'm thinking now of America's invasion of Iraq. Our leaders told us we'd be greeted as liberators, and then were bewildered and angry and drenched in blood when it turned out otherwise. Where was the gratitude? We failed in Iraq, failed disastrously, because we refused to consider how the effects of our good intentions would actually be received by the intended-upon. We thought we were trying to make things better. We brought horror. And we were shocked not to get credit for meaning well.

That's how you end up a villain.

And that points, ultimately, to the limitations of my own attempts to find good faith in my opponents. Sometimes there is none. And sometimes -- and the issue of abortion is definitely one of those times -- no amount of good faith can change the fact that different conceptions of the good are simply irreconcilable with each other. Good faith is not necessarily, irrelevant, but close enough. Somebody will be the villain in somebody else's story, no matter how much they wish otherwise.