Are the culture wars a distraction?

One of the keynote debates at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival will ask if there are more important things than the relentless debates about race, gender and more.

Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, has attracted plenty of attention for her speech at the Conservative Party Conference on Monday. In particular, she attacked the ‘woke’ turn in public life in general and the Labour Party in particular. ‘The left accuses us of fighting a culture war. But we will not apologise for fighting for common sense’, she said. She added: ‘Let Labour bend the knee before this altar of intolerance. We’ll keep building a country that is, in every way, stronger and fairer for all.’

Her audience in the room lapped it up – and, no doubt, there will be plenty of people outside the conference hall who will have nodded in agreement, too. But others will have sighed at the Tories using the culture wars as a political football to distract from their wider failings. Regardless, it’s an argument we should have out in public, which is why it is a keynote debate at this year’s Battle of Ideas festival on 28 & 29 October. The starting point for the speakers will be the short provocation essay below. I hope you can join us.

Claire

---

While the culture wars rage on social media and in the press, many view them as peripheral compared with issues like the cost-of-living crisis, climate change or the war in Ukraine and the return of global conflict to Europe. Matthew Syed, writing in The Sunday Times earlier this year, argued: ‘The culture wars may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’

Do Syed and others have a point? Are we effectively fiddling while Rome burns? Whether it’s fights over vegan sausage rolls or galleries flying rainbow flags, culture-war debates certainly generate a lot of heat. But when economic realities mean, for example, that hospitals are under strain and many cannot access vital health treatment, not surprisingly identitarian wars over language codes can be viewed as an artificial attempt to distract us from the problems that really matter – at a time when few politicians seem capable of offering genuine solutions.

For others, the UK culture wars are an American import – an alt-right, Christian fundamentalist assault on stability and the body politic. Given that even the most strident culture warriors on the conservative side are at pains to insist they are not racist, sexist or transphobic, why get so agitated about different degrees of enthusiasm for a worldview we all basically share?

Or is there more to it than is admitted? While today’s cultural divides may not straightforwardly map onto historic left-right splits, some say that, in essence, they do reflect significant contemporary class and political divides. Given that how we see the world, and what we value and want out of life, is mediated through culture, today’s battles around historic figures’ links to slavery, or institutions ‘virtue signalling’ over toilets and pronouns can have the capacity to fundamentally influence how we understand ourselves and negotiate change.

If no one, from the National Trust to the British Library, will uphold the traditional values and the legacy of the past, will we lose our sense of who we are and where we’ve come from?

Are the culture wars simply a Twitter sideshow to the more serious concerns of everyday life? Or is the way we relate to each other, and to our shared values, fundamental to how we plan for a future together? Given that dissent from so-called ‘woke’ ideas – whether on race, gender or culture itself  – has become impossible without being demonised as stirring up toxic, divisive and dangerous trends, is there any choice but to engage in the culture wars? Will it have to be reckoned with if we are to have a serious discussion about anything else? And if, as some argue, today’s culture war is a continuation of the age-old conflict between liberty and authoritarianism, does the claim that the culture war is a ‘distraction’ not in itself become a distraction from the issues that matter?

This is a preview of the debate ‘Are the culture wars a distraction?’ at the Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 28 & Sunday 29 October at Church House in London. For full details of the programme and how to buy tickets, visit the Battle of Ideas festival website.

Free subscribers to this Substack get 10% off tickets with promo code SUBSTACK-BOIF23. Paid subscribers can use ‘Associate’ rates for even bigger discounts.