On Recurring Debates

Abstract

Have you ever noticed how some and ideological debates seem to go on year after year, generation after generation, with same arguments being raised and often with same participants, each time seemingly as if issues were new? Some of these debates, such as one over existence of god, have gone on for millennia with nothing really new being said. An example of this is debate on pornography and politically correct sex, which is part of a larger discussion over general issue of the personal is political. The slogan the personal is political became popular among feminists around 1970. At its most elementary level, this doctrine simply means that one's behavior should not contradict one's ideology. As such, that is just a proscription against hypocrisy and not a prescription to engage in any specific acts or thoughts. This doctrine, while closely identified with modern feminism, had its origins prior to and outside rebirth of feminist movement. The cultural radicals of 1960s, especially Amsterdam Provos and Youth International Party (Yippies) had a slogan live as if Revolution had already happened, a direct precursor of the personal is political. Other antecedents include actions as simple as boycotting lettuce and grapes in support of striking farmworkers. In my own life, reading Henry David Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Albert Camus' Neither Victims Nor Executioners and various essays by A.J. Muste (usually in Liberation) opened me up to importance of closely tying individual actions with belief. I became a draft resister, a tax resister and a participant in many civil disobedience actions. Accepting feminist implications of this came easy, at least intellectually. 301