Are the culture wars a distraction?
We had a great debate on this issue at Buxton Battle of Ideas festival. Read the introductory speeches by Dr Cheryl Hudson and Bruno Waterfield. PLUS video of the same debate from our London festival.
The culture wars are a major preoccupation in UK politics today. But should they be? When we face war in Ukraine and Gaza, a cost of living crisis and a crumbling health service - among many other problems - do we really want to be talking about critical race theory, gender ideology and all the rest?
This was the focus of a fantastic discussion at Buxton Battle of Ideas festival on Saturday 25 November. The panel featured Dr Remi Adekoya, Simon Calvert, Dr Cheryl Hudson, Stephen Knight and Bruno Waterfield - and the audience were very much involved, too.
To give you a flavour of the discussion, we asked Cheryl and Bruno to write up their remarks. Their contributions are contrasting but equally fascinating and well worth reading.
We’ll have video of the Buxton debate soon (we’re collecting together video from our 2023 festivals on our YouTube playlist). But in the meantime, we had an equally fascinating discussion on the same topic at our London festival. You can watch the video for that debate below.
Dr Cheryl Hudson
Cheryl is a lecturer in US political history, University of Liverpool, and author of Citizenship in Chicago: race, culture and the remaking of American identity (forthcoming).
It is difficult to resist choosing sides in the culture wars, but I think we should try. It is too common a demand these days that you ‘have to pick a side’. I have never been shy about arguing for my political position – I am not a fence sitter – but I don’t think it wise to choose a side on the terms offered by the culture wars.
What are we talking about when we talk about culture war? We are not fighting over the quality of a Tolstoy over a Dickens, or the relative merits of Picasso versus Michelangelo. No one is getting dragged on Twitter for liking brutalist over gothic architecture. The culture wars relate not to high culture (although sometimes it does get pulled in) but to the cultures of meaning that we inhabit every day.
The culture wars are an expansive category, but they usually revolve around heated topics relating to questions of who we are rather than what we want (the traditional ground of politics). They are usually rooted in identity, based on shared characteristics – often immutable characteristics – of race, sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and so on, and they can be very tribal.
We all know what culture wars look like: they involve gesture politics or ‘virtue signalling’: not the left and right of politics but right and wrong in a moral, shaming sense. They involve a rigid friend/enemy binary that cares less about truth or complexity and more about shaping a narrative flattering to your particular identity group. They can provide a form of entertainment, a spectacle we can all watch and appreciate while we root for our team.
Sometimes they offer an emotional outlet for righteous outrage. Often a lot of flags are involved, and a lot of the alphabet – LGBTQ+, BLM, and so on. We wave the flag that best represents our identity group to perform for the world (our audience) the kind of people that we are. It is all highly performative. Culture wars also crucially involve a claim to victim status, in what has been called the ‘oppression Olympics’ – if you can show that your group has suffered the most at the hands of the most evil oppressor, then you win moral high-ground points.Â
They are usually transient and temporary, which is really at odds with how ‘culture’ used to be understood: something that prevailed and was handed down through the generations. The culture wars are always moving on to the next big current thing: more off-the-peg than soul deep. The speed at which people replaced their BLM flags with the Ukraine flag, and now the Israeli or Palestinian flag is indicative. This fickleness denotes a deep lack of seriousness and highlights the superficiality of each debate. There is no sustained attention to any problem, so nothing will ever be resolved. Â
Even situations like the Israeli – Gaza conflict, which should be the ground of serious politics, have become a culture war in the West. That is, there is little attempt at historical or geopolitical understanding; it is entirely about the identities of the two main ethnic groups involved, whose side you are on, which flag you wave, and how it is important that you demonstrate that your group is the biggest victim and is confronted with the greatest risk.
These cultural clashes are not usually about what they purport to be about; there is a lot of obfuscation. They exist in a hall of mirrors. This is because they are epiphenomenal, that is, they are a secondary feature of a deeper, underlying problem. The culture wars are a symptom of our problem, not a solution to it.
That problem is the absence of politics and the possibility of change. Our society is experiencing a loss of hope about the future, and our ability to shape or change it. We are stuck, and the culture wars keep us stuck. There is a kind of narcissism of small differences that propels debate: I think of it as like two warring groups – with more in common than they like to think – standing on either side of a train track, yelling at one another. The train keeps on going down the track and whatever that train represents - whether neoliberalism, globalisation, social inequality or anything else you might hope to change - it is not diverted in the slightest by all the outrage. It just keeps on going and our inability to change its direction only underlines our powerlessness further.
The liberalism that animates Western societies had within it, right from its inception, the seeds of its own destruction. There was a failure to deliver on the promises that it offered: of freedom, equality and of continual progress and advancement. At first, the chinks were small, and groups left out of these promises – women, blacks, gays, and others – were able to use its unfulfilled promises to demand equality. But over the course of the twentieth century, that tragic flaw in liberal society has become increasingly apparent to more and more people, so that from the 1960s and ‘70s, they’ve begun to turn away from the project entirely. Martin Luther King may have had a dream, but current racial thinking can only see nightmares. Second-wave feminists demanded equality, but no one knows what a woman is anymore.
And that train continues on down the track, along with a sharp decline in social cohesion and in social bonds of trust, as well as an ongoing atomisation and isolation of the individual. The corresponding rise in identity politics and the culture wars was, I think, an answer to our need for social connection, our need for bonding and belonging in a society that has no sense of purpose or collective means of bringing about positive change. Identity has ossified and become our anchor in a world that seems out of our control, but has itself now, with some irony, become a block to any purposive change.
So, for me, the problem is not that the culture wars distract us but that they are a dead end. The form that they take and the mode in which they operate – that is, as a divisive deadlock, means that the culture wars cause many more problems than they solve.
Is there a solution? A defence of enlightenment values - of reason, freedom (especially free speech), democracy and justice for all is essential. But even this can get dragged into the culture war if these values are used abstractly, waved as a flag, seen as an end in themselves, or worse, as the property of one group over another. Â There has to be an end in mind in any defence of these universal social goods.
All the great free-speech defenders in the past had something they wanted to achieve with their speech: the abolition of slavery, trade union rights, the woman’s vote, and so on. They represented a real threat to the status quo, which is why those people with more at stake sought to silence them; not simply because they offended sensibilities or belonged to the wrong demographic. We need to think seriously about what we want and find ways to build a better future; there is no solution to the culture wars simply by defending the gains of the past.
We are stuck and we need political imagination to find our way out. The late Mark Fisher famously stated that we are able to imagine the end of the world (in our environmental catastrophising) better than we can imagine an alternative to capitalism. We can conjure the absence of any future easier than we can see a different, better future.
The point I want to drive home is that in the culture wars, the other side is always the reference point of the debate, and it is too often driven by rage and disgust or even hatred of them, the bad guys, as opposed to being driven by a vision we have of the future. This means that you are not debating how you get to where you want to be, but you are fighting over being who you are and your right to be so. It is a closed circle and there is no way out.
To get beyond the culture wars, we must focus on what we have in common, not what drives us apart; we must focus on what we want, not who we are; and we must not be afraid to have difficult conversations.
Bruno Waterfield
Bruno is the Brussels correspondent for The Times and has been reporting on EU affairs for over 20 years.
I want to make the case for why we fight and what we are fighting for in this war, this political struggle - aims which also shape how we wage battle.Â
I agree how infuriating, even maddening the culture wars are. They are profoundly distasteful and really show us, more often than not, a decline in basic decency, tolerance and manners. But unfortunately, you might not be interested in the war, but it is interested in you. You are in the sights of the culture warriors, the senior police officers, much of the public sector, your employer, should someone inform on you, magistrates, universities, schools and a whole army of people trolling, scouring through social media to uncover you.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the culture wars is that denouncing and informing is de rigueur. It shows you are a good, morally superior, social activist if you can grass someone up and get them fired. This is a big deal. We are combatants, like it or not.
What is going on is a redefinition of how we live, our manners, how we interact, the tearing down of what makes us who we are and, often, what we hold dear. It is about meaning. Meaning is important. To determine ourselves what meaning is, the language we use to describe our lives, our communities is profoundly basic and important.
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Up here in the High Peaks and the Derbyshire Dales, which voted to leave the European Union, you must have heard the expression ‘left behind’? It is a very irritating motif that is often, wrongly, seen as an economic concept applied to those who benefited less from modern capitalism and globalisation.
It is not - it is a moral framing. Even in the economic sense, there is a patronising regard in the term for those who do not have degrees and who work in jobs that are seen as having little worth, or living in communities that are regarded almost as alien cultures. You must have read stories and features, in newspapers and magazines, where intrepid journalists come from down south, usually, to explore places like Boston in Lincolnshire, Doncaster in Yorkshire, almost anywhere in Teeside, or perhaps the Scousers. There is a real sense of them going into a dark realm, like Victorian explorers discovering tribes with horrible culture and habits, almost as bad as cannibalism.
The real mark and essence of the ‘left behind’ is one of inferiority. We ‘left behind’ are fated to be, as they always say, ‘on the wrong side of history’. Because in the way we live, with our commitments and attachments, we are resisting, conserving our way of life.Â
These wars over our culture are not a dumb distraction from real politics, at all. They are an assault on how we make sense of the world and principles, the lived traditions, feelings and essence of how we live our lives with others. Yes, they are predicated or based on the absence of politics, as once it was known, but they are the way in which structural differences are emerging between the finger wagging, morally superior and us, the moral inferiors, living our lives in these scary ‘left behind’ places.
Cultural debates can rage with arguments that can seem trivial or abstract, but each is important in its own right. They are often individually transient or episodic, nihilistic but have a cumulative effect. These battles have real consequences, not just in terms of individuals. They corrode, even to dissolve like acid, some of the key tenets, principles and foundations that sustain us, our communities, havens in a heartless world, our families, our freedom. The stakes are high.Â
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Like it or not, to be on the wrong side in culture wars is, for most of us, to be branded as a moral inferior, on the wrong side of history. History itself is being transformed into a new paradigm of ‘conservatives’, often portrayed as Trumpian bigots or fascistic nationalists, versus the ‘progressives’, modern, caring culture warriors, tearing down the oppressive pillars of the past and tradition so new vistas of understanding come into view.
This fallacy, an immense conceit, is wrong. History - since the English civil war, Burke versus Paine, the Chartists and the battle for universal suffrage - was always about the principles of political equality and democracy against an elite minority, defined by their moral superiority to the mass, the undifferentiated, faceless, majority of the swinish multitude. It is a struggle against the rule of oligarchies, the magistracy and officialdom, in the form of instructors or guardians. This aristocratic order and authority, in new form, is being restored by the culture warriors.
Democracy and the struggle for political equality (enshrined in the principle of one person, one vote) was often birthed from struggles to conserve and protect ways of life, freedoms and communities precious to us because that is where our roots are, the site of our autonomy.
Here in the dales, peaks and valleys from Buxton down to Nottingham or Derby and up to Manchester, the Chartist movement, one of Europe’s most radical, and the English working class were simultaneously born in battles over the poor laws, almost 200 years ago.Â
One struggle was to preserve the family, broken up when men, women and children were put in different workhouses by the ruling guardians and magistrates. Marriages were smashed; ‘whom God hath joined together let no man part asunder’ no longer applied. The Chartists and radicals wanted the vote, universal suffrage, free speech and rights of association, to reverse laws that were disrupting and destroying the basis of their lives.Â
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Each and every culture war reinforces the sway of the new elite - still in formation but most definitely in the driving seat - which is defined by markers of their superiority. A new establishment of finger-wagging experts ruling over the less-educated multitude. It is a move to a new elite or clerisy with the removal of contest, challenge and closing down of any clashes of alternatives from politics. Â
It begins with indifference to defending freedom, particularly free speech and lived lives. It becomes an order defined through a culture of intolerant conformism, often posing as radical, a new orthodoxy around the use of words and language. Culture wars are the militant expression of an ideology that devalues our moral worth, the majority that live outside the world of the new expertise and guardians who want to instruct us.
If there is a model or template for society, for the culture warriors, it is education, particularly universities. This is the destruction of education as it was valued by our parents or grandparents. Institutions that were once about knowledge, science or the quest for truth or beauty have been transformed, weaponised. The culture wars are not about capture of institutions, but their transformation into something else. Education is now an instrument of rule and rules. It is a training in moral superiority, it is about shutting down contests or exploration of ideas or philosophies. Over 40 per cent of our children go to these institutions where ideological precepts are handed down, such as the new dark age doctrine that a person can be born in the wrong body.
Higher education is a stick to beat the majority. Whenever an election goes the wrong way, it will be explained how so many voters are non-graduates, with too little education and poor cognitive development, smaller brains. Education, the enlightenment or emancipation of free minds in pursuit of knowledge and truth, has been torn down, chained and turned into a weapon against society and community.
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The more radical and transgressive the assault - it seems incredible that even the biological difference between a man and woman can be so contested - the more corrosive it is. How we live together as men, women, with attachments and commitments to our families and communities, living in territories with borders as peoples or nations is disrupted as never before. In fact, the very idea you should have boundaries and borders is anathema, a mark of the ‘left behind’. They are anathema because they are bulwarks and bastions to account for and protect our lives, what constitutes us as peoples and nations. There is an assault on the boundaries, the premises of how we run our lives and the self-determining communities and practices that make us the nation we were.
At stake here, at the very least, is political equality, the foundation of democratic politics and freedom as most of us are defined as moral inferiors. We just do not ‘get it’.
Much worse is the stigma, the ‘problematisation’ in the jargon, the stripping away of the common or conventional understandings of how we view the world and what we need to live in it. The new order, social institutions weaponised by the culture wars, has a different impulse to shape us, to abolish the past, to change the nature of the human soul by destroying the foundations of how we think and live. This is a deadly dissolution because it undermines what we need to do battle in a world that has become more dangerous and difficult.Â
The struggle for democracy, to ensure our lives and freedoms are conserved and protected, gave rise to the greatest gain of civilised society and history - the nation state. This is a foundation of public authority on representation and the constitution of politics through citizenship, political freedom, free speech, participation, and the vote. Let's save it.
Video
Watch another excellent debate on the same topic from our London festival, featuring Professor Aaqil Ahmed, Andrew Doyle, Professor Frank Furedi, Lord Ken Macdonald KC and Nina Power.
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