Where is the place for emotion?

I was reading an article on The Atlantic by Caitlin Flanagan from 2019 titled “The Dishonesty of The Abortion Debate”, folks say that it points out how abortion is an unwinnable debate, I still don’t quite get what that means, which is exactly what I’m writing this for — Is there such a thing as an unwinnable debate?

Dispassionate and empirical data tend to be the thing that we most frequently call “true”, and one might very well say it is the closest thing to truth. How many death occur due to a certain disease, the prominent perception of a certain phenomena, essentially epistemology is our attempt at honing in on the truth, and it hasn’t betrayed humanity much.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love the non-exact, and a couple of thinkers’ words regarding what counts as true still exists in my head. What counts as “true”? Is the story of The Batman true? Well Gotham City doesn’t exist that’s for sure, but can one really say that it wasn’t true? Is the desire to change a deeply broken city for the better untrue? Or, as Darren Mooney said, “The idea that fantasy figures can serve as a literal light in the darkness, embodiments of the best of our ideals in our darkest moments”? I don’t think so, there’s certainly truth to that (Jung would be proud, Matt Reeves).

I just spent like 10 minutes trying to craft that paragraph nicely, man JBP was spittin when he said if you wanna write just spray shit out first

So, the abortion debate, I still don’t understand how it’s unwinnable. One of my favorite twitter people, Sarah Haider, said that the most wise and compassionate slogan for abortion should be “Safe, legal, and rare.”, and I agree, it should be much like any other medical procedure that has heavy implications for the patient, whether those implications manifests itself in the present or future, physical, mental, or social.

But from what I just read by Caitlin, she tells of her experience of listening to her mother’s stories of abortions from the early to mid 20th century, and also her experience seeing a 3D sonography of a 12 week old fetus, to which she said

The argument for abortion, if made honestly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire consequences to women of making a very simple medical procedure illegal. The argument against it doesn’t take even a single word. The argument against it is a picture.

The picture, to me, didn’t evoke any particular emotions. It was certainly baby-shaped, you could see the head, the torso, limbs, “Yep, that’s a baby fetus” I went, and at that moment I understood that I could not understand the argument through that picture because I wasn’t experiencing the same emotions that the picture evoked for her. “What does that matter?” I say to myself, well what matters is that that emotion consequently ended up allowing her to write a very good article that very justly demanded that the best arguments on both side of any topic be heard, as JBP once said, “Anecdotes are not data but they can serve as a source of hypotheses”.

“Think about how she/he/a person would feel!” A person says as a counter-argument, obviously inviting emotion into the whole thing. In a personal or social argument, sure, emotions very well matter, but policies are meant to be evicted of emotions, meant to be materialistic (in the Hegelian-Marxist sense), to reliably produce and replicate its desired results amongst many happenings.

I started writing this partly because I felt a very vocal inner monologue inside of me go “God it’s so fuckin annoying with all these emotional anecdotes man” when I finished reading Caitlin’s article, why can’t people (the very vocal on the internet types mind you) just stop thinking about emotions and look at things from a material perspective? I’m not saying people should be robotic in everyday life, that’d be dystopian, but when you’re weighing in on a topic that implicates millions of lives, please don’t be all dramatic.

Emotions matter, that’s for sure, if I’ve learned anything from Chloe Valdary, it’s that a lot of the cultural & political mess happening in the States right now is due to a sense of unbelonging, that their communal values are being robbed or changed against their will. But where is the place for emotion in the larger debate? Obviously ethics come into play from there, but even ethics can be dispassionate to one side, and then when epistemological knowledge comes into play, what then of emotion? Should the losing side simply give up? Will they be satisfied by an empathic response? An “I’m sorry but we’ve indisputably proved you wrong”?

I hate that just now I once again come to the conclusion that the answer would be once again, as JBP would endlessly say, “the integrity of the individual”.

But does it really end at the individual? This is a group of people on both sides of the argument, both with its equally irrational subgroups, and they have their grip on the steering wheel of the narrative bus. Is a domino effect bythe inner God within Man all we can hope upon?