More on the Culture Wars

I enjoyed Steve’s post on the culture wars, although I’m sorry (and a little impressed — now there’s a conscientious and serious thinker!) he’s losing sleep over the issue.  I also found the comments incredibly interesting, although to my gentle mind somewhat disturbing.  (I must also add,  in response to Robert, that based on my time at USD, Steve’s questioner surely knows many more than one person on faculty who voted for a Republican president.  His observation might be truer at other law schools, although less so today, I think, than was once the case.)  I’d like to add a few thoughts.

Much depends on what we mean by a culture war, and particularly whether we emphasize the word “culture” or “war.”  It should not be especially disturbing, I think, that our culture is contested, nor that particular cultural issues are contested.  When, in the long course of modernity, was it ever not so?  In his book on public intellectuals, Richard Posner (who, admittedly, may be anathema to some on both sides of the culture divide, and perhaps especially the right) does a lovely job of examining the jeremiad genre.  He points out, quite rightly in my view, that this genre depends in large measure on idealizing the past and taking the dimmest possible view of the future.

This approach tends to both understate the serious social problems that once confronted us but have faded into the background — some of the seemingly decent citizens of a bygone time also denied service to blacks, treated domestic abuse as regrettable but rarely criminal, and accepted many other forms of bigotry, violence, and neglect as commonplace — and overstates the degree of degradation in our own society, by overemphasizing what it sees as its unparalleled vices and ignoring its significant virtues.  Tom Wolfe once quoted a visiting European writer, in the heyday of American campus radicalism, as marveling that the dark night of fascism always appears to be falling in America but only ever lands in Europe.  The same approach seems to fairly characterize those who lament the positive “collapse” of our culture.  That lament is not positively falsifiable, since it depends on what you mean by our “culture.”  But, foolish optimist that I am, I note that, just as the promises of global and not episodic starvation and resource scarcity that we have been warned about for 40 years seem not to have come true quite yet, so our society keeps being on the verge of collapsing and yet . . . not quite collapsing.  Neither Steve nor, I’ll warrant, any of the commenters had to make their way to work today past riot police and barricades, although it is certainly possible they had to squeeze past a few billboards advertising Lady GaGa.  If we cannot see the difference between the two, we have a problem with our perspectives.  If it is true, which I doubt, that “America is dissolving, rotting from within,” then it’s a hell of a slow rot.  It would be more accurate to say that our culture is constantly changing, in some ways for the worse and in some for the better, and that these changes can be unsettling, to people on both sides of the usual liberal-conservative divide.  But change is not the same as degradation.  It’s, well, change.

That is not to say that single issues cannot attract a good deal of heat.  For those who understandably believe that abortion is the great evil of our time, it may indeed be distressing that what can reasonably be called a lengthy period of conservative political ascendancy has not changed the fact that some abortions are legal.  (I’ve had this debate with Rick before, but I think that should incline us to think about who and why we are supporting politically, and whether supporting politicians only on the basis of their generally unrealized pledges on abortion actually makes sense.)  I am inclined to take the view that one battleground is neither the whole war nor the whole culture, but I understand those who view this or any other issue as the defining battle of our time.  I might add that there are doubtless liberals out there who might make almost the same observation from the other side, lamenting what they see as the long slow decline of reproductive freedom as it is eaten away from the edges.  I need not take sides here, except to note that the very fact that abortion is deeply contested is itself significant and should not be neglected.  One can view this issue as defining from either side of the divide, without ignoring the fact that 1) abortion laws in many parts of the country have become stricter, and actual access to abortion providers scarcer, 2) many prominent liberals have adopted a value-talk around abortion that emphasizes the need to reduce abortions altogether, rather than emphasizing only the “freedom” aspect of reproductive freedom, and 3) many people on both sides hold complicated views on abortion and yet have managed to converge around policies that seek to reduce the number of abortions while not removing the right to seek them altogether in at least some cases.  I understand those on either side who see such a middling state of affairs as a defeat, not a victory.  But it’s not the only way to view things, and this more nuanced description certainly seems to me to something other than a conventional “war.”  Street-by-street urban fighting, perhaps, but not a single-front “war” of all against all.

So I don’t think we should mistake cultural change for culture war.  But we could emphasize the word “war” itself in the phrase “culture war.”  Here, I think there is more reason for concern, although it should be measured concern.  Despite some of the comments, I think the absolute numbers of “utopians” on either side of our culture are relatively small when compared to the vast middle.  Whether the culture has become increasingly polarized in absolute terms or not, it is emphatically not completely polarized.  But that does not mean there is no war being fought.  On both sides — I see it more on the right than the left right now, but that may just be my perspective — there are minorities who insist on seeing things in all-or-nothing terms.  They treat politics not just as war by other means, but as war itself.  They do not think civil discourse is warranted, given what each side portrays as the high stakes involved and the possibility (the certainty, as they see it) that they are losing history’s last and most important battle.  For the sake of this war, they are willing to sacrifice many things, not least civility and, often enough, principle.  The idea that this war is encompassing our entire culture or our entire population is, I think, misguided.  Most people on both sides of the debate are probably more united on a daily basis by their dislike of vuvuzelas than they are bitterly divided by other issues.  But it is certainly a very — I won’t say increasingly, just very — prominent part of our culture right now.

I am admittedly more of a proceduralist than one who holds strong substantive views, but I think it is this aspect of the culture “wars” — the fact that many people treat our “culture” as a “war,” rather than as a debate or a dialogue — that ought to concern us.  I am not advocating that we sideline these issues, treat them as unimportant, or declare them out of order.  As Steve knows, I believe we ought to have more open debates about what divides us.  But we should not treat the fact that we are divided — and always have been — as some new and especially hazardous fact that justifies our taking up arms, rhetorically or otherwise.  Treating ourselves as combatants in a “war” degrades public and civil discourse, which should be open about our fundamental differences but not give way to utterly martial behavior and rhetoric.

That is especially true because the rhetoric is often just that — rhetoric.  It is not about bringing about actual change, but about feeding debate for its own sake — and for the sake of capturing market share in an increasingly fragmented media environment, in which profits come from gaining a minority of strong-minded viewers and readers rather than trying to appeal to the vast middle, which is harder to define and thus costlier to market to.  Or it is about fund-raising.  Again, I don’t wish to end this kind of self-serving rhetoric by fiat.  But neither do I think we should be pleased by it.

So, should Steve sleep like a baby, or remain wakeful at night?  My view, I suppose, is that if it’s the culture itself that concerns him, he ought to be able to rest a little easier than he does now.  But if it’s about the “war,” without being unduly alarmed by it, he ought to have a few sleepless nights.