[Image by Tumisu from Pixabay]

I’ve given myself a harder job than usual today justifying my title (at the Minimise Project, unlike at most major newspapers, bloggers usually pick their own headlines). Surely abortion is one of the most culture-warry issues of the age? One of the huge dividing lines between conservatives and liberals, religious people and the secular, family values types and freedom-loving nonconformists?

Well, in practice things often play out that way, with abortion getting made a cause of standard partisan or tribal groups and playing its role in drafting people into the culture wars. But abortion isn’t like that in and of itself. That’s because the correct position on abortion follows from views that almost everyone in the culture wars holds.

Compare something like sexual ethics. A person’s views on sexual ethics tend to be tightly bound up with deep views they have about the meaning and purpose of sex (or lack thereof). And there are actually existing widespread worldviews that differ about these questions. You can get a lot of consensus on some sexual ethics questions without agreeing on these deeper ones (almost everyone thinks rape is evil). But on other questions (sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, contraception) people’s views are going to vary depending on their answer to the deep questions, and you wouldn’t expect people’s minds to change on the ethical questions without something about their deeper worldview also changing. 

I think that almost everyone in the contemporary western world already has the resources they need within their own worldview to reach the conclusion that abortion is wrong, because those resources are very widely spread across different worldviews. The ‘resources’ are just the belief that there are such things as fundamental human rights, the belief that those rights include the right not to be killed when you’re innocent, the belief that all born people have equal fundamental rights, and various general beliefs about the right way to weigh bodily rights against the right not to be killed.

These starting points are, at least in the economically developed world, common to most liberals, conservatives, communitarians, and libertarians. They are common to most adherents of the major world religions, as well as to most atheists and agnostics. It’s not that they are not deep or fundamental views: it’s that they are deep and fundamental views which most worldviews are agreed on. The purpose of things like the Equal Rights Argument and the Conjoined Twins argument are meant to help people get from premises that they already hold to pro-life conclusions.

This should be good news for pro-lifers. In an important sense, it is. If people don’t need to change their whole worldview in order to change their minds on abortion, then it should be easier to convince people of all stripes of the human rights of the unborn. Changing your whole worldview is hard! Changing your view on just one question is easier.

That’s all true, and deeply true. It’s one of the big reasons why I’m so optimistic about the abortion debate in the long run, and why I recommend optimism about individual conversations with pro-choice people. Changes of mind really are possible on this issue.

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However. If this is all right, it means that abortion, when rightly considered, is not an issue that lends itself to culture warring. If you don’t actually have to become a conservative to change your mind on abortion, then any connection between conservatism and being pro-life is accidental (which, if you look at the history, is correct). Just as this is good news in one way, it’s bad news in another. Why? Because things that aren’t culture war issues find it harder to get oxygen, especially in the age of the internet.

The definitive introduction to this topic is Scott Alexander’s blog post The Toxoplasma of Rage.

I don’t endorse everything in the post – some of his examples are better than others – but it’s a piece of writing that changed the way I think about so many issues, and it perfectly predicted the way in which online discourse would increasingly go in the twelve years since it’s been written. At the core of it is something Scott calls the PETA principle: “the more controversial something is, the more it gets talked about.”

PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, are the animal-welfare organisation famous for, shall we say, eye-catching stunts. Stunts like the following (via ABC News):

PETA has jumped into the Plan B conversation to offer its own contraceptive plan: Plan V.

For vegan.

As in go vegan to lose weight and Plan B will work better for you at preventing unwanted pregnancies.

In its letter to Population Connection, a nonprofit organization aimed at population stabilization, PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, president Ingrid Newkirk noted that vegans were 18 percent thinner than nonvegans.

“With access to family-planning tools being essential, we’re proposing ‘Plan V,’ a program that will encourage women to adopt a healthy vegan diet in order to lose weight and so take control of their reproductive rights,” Newkirk wrote.

This comes on the heels of news that the French manufacturer of a Plan B-like drug in Europe announced that it was seeking to change its label after a study of 1,700 women found that the emergency contraceptive pill didn’t work as well for women who weighed more than 176 pounds.

“If extra pounds are thwarting a woman’s ability to use Plan B, PETA’s ‘Plan V’ could be the prescription they need,” PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in a statement. “Going vegan is a great way to lose weight and get healthy, and it could help women regain control over their reproductive lives.”

This is fairly mild stuff for PETA. When the city of Detroit cut off water supplies to thousands of families due to unpaid water bills, PETA offered to pay their bills, but only if they went vegan for a month. Their advertising campaigns have included a billboard linking consumption of milk with autism and, well, Scott goes on:

Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-​American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography.

People mostly hate PETA. But people pay attention to them. Scott compares them with the far more reasonable group Vegan Outreach. Vegan Outreach are calm, reasonable, sober, and focus their attention on making progress on those areas where most people are already on-side (the cruelty involved in factory farming). But nobody knows who they are.

Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-​farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it.

And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized.

But at least they’re paying attention! 

The thing about PETA’s content is that it gets shared both by supporters and opponents. Opponents share to say ‘look how awful these horrible vegans are’ and supporters share it either because they approve of PETA’s tactics, or because sticking up for your ‘side’ in a culture war even when it’s costly to do so is a powerful way of signaling your strong allegiance to that side.

Scott goes on to give other examples of this. For example, controversial cases of campus rape where it’s not completely clear which side to believe get shared and discussed much more often than unambiguous, slam-dunk cases. Someone who thinks that people have gone too far in prosecuting allegations of rape and sexual assault in universities will be unlikely to share a news story about a case where it’s abundantly clear that sexual assault happened. That would only hurt their cause. But they will share a case where there’s real controversy, because it becomes possible to take the side of the person against whom the allegations were made, and dunk on the people arguing for the side of the alleged victim. But the people advocating for tougher treatment of rape accusations on college campuses will also be more likely to share the controversial case. In part this is because they want to show how strongly they are committed to their own views on the matter, and in part it’s because they want to defend the alleged victims from the attacks they’re getting from the other side.

A rape that obviously happened? Shove it in people’s face and they’ll admit it’s an outrage, just as they’ll admit factory farming is an outrage. But they’re not going to talk about it much. There are a zillion outrages every day, you’re going to need more than that to draw people out of their shells.

On the other hand, the controversy over dubious rape allegations is exactly that – a controversy. People start screaming at each other about how they’re misogynist or misandrist or whatever, and Facebook feeds get filled up with hundreds of comments in all capital letters about how my ingroup is being persecuted by your ingroup. At each step, more and more people get triggered and upset. Some of those triggered people do emergency ego defense by reblogging articles about how the group that triggered them are terrible, triggering further people in a snowball effect that spreads the issue further with every iteration. 

It’s like the toxoplasma fungus: certain controversial ideas seize control of the people who have them, enraging both supporters and opponents into sharing and further propagating them.

You really should read the whole thing. I especially love the way that Scott highlights the toxoplasma-enhancing role of the ability to repost something while adding your own comment, which first rose to prominence on Tumblr but has since come to characterise most of the social media landscape.


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You might notice that the way the toxoplasma of rage works is the opposite of the approach that the Minimise Project takes.

Instead of starting with cases on which people’s intuitions strongly differ, we recommend starting by emphasising common ground. Instead of dunking on people or hitting them with gotchas, we recommend asking questions and working through the finer points of arguments together. We’re all about lowering blood pressure rather than raising it. 

We’re also anti-toxoplasma when it comes to thinking about our opponents. We don’t think most pro-choice people are baby-hating libertines. We think they are people who care about human rights and justice as much as pro-lifers do, but who aren’t convinced that unconscious embryos and fetuses have rights, and / or believe that justice requires giving primacy to a woman’s right to control her own body. We believe that most pro-choice and pro-life people are far more similar than they are different. 

This is by far the most effective way of convincing people one-to-one, because it happens to be true. But because it’s such an anti-toxoplasmic message, it’s tougher to get it out there. For example, I flatter myself in thinking that someone determined to dunk on stupid pro-lifers wouldn’t be inclined to share our post explaining and defending the Equal Rights Argument. Because that post isn’t stupid: whether or not it’s right it’s clearly making reasonable arguments in a reasonable way. But that means that all else being equal it isn’t going to get as many pro-choice shares as might an angrier, less measured piece.

The same goes for the fact that we’re a single-issue organisation who aren’t trying to advance the cause of any particular social or political tribe. Rather we think people from all the tribes should become pro-life, and we’re always going on about the importance of seeing your opponents as reasonable people of good faith. That way of framing things doesn’t lend itself to bolstering tribal self-identification, to sharing a piece because it owned the pro-choicers. 

This problem doesn’t just apply to abortion. The world over we can see that controversial and polarising positions and modes of argument are taking up more and more oxygen, while conciliatory ones that reject culture-war framing struggle to be heard. The problem is that the stuff that does get attention very rarely leads to anyone changing their mind. The attention that PETA gets is mostly empty calories, or worse, it actually makes people less likely to care about animal welfare. The same goes, unfortunately, for a lot of pro-life content.

I don’t have an answer to this problem, except to say that if you do think our approach to the abortion issue is the right one, tell your friends! Share one of our posts or get in touch with us about one of our conversations workshops. It’s tough out there in toxoplasma world, but in the long run I would bet on conversation and persuasion over internet-fueled rage every time.

Ben