Culture wars have two main functions. First, to split an existing, dominant social or political coalition apart by the clever use of wedge-issues. (Not all wedge-issues are a part of a culture war.) So, a culture war reveals a latent or induces real divergence in a pre-existing coalition. So, for example, how to think about trans-issues has split contemporary feminism apart (especially in the U.K, which is itself an interesting phenomenon). Second, and this mirrors the first function, to induce or solidify unity within a potentially heterogeneous coalition (think of the role of women’s ‘right to choose’ in America’s Democratic party). So, the issue must have salience to what we may call ‘tribe formation.’ (If you don’t like my examples offer your own!)
Now, the term ‘culture war’ is a literalist translation of the German ‘Kulturkampf.’ This nineteenth century conflict involved a major political conflict between Bismarck and the Catholic Church over control of educational institutions (and the content taught) as well as ecclesiastical appointments. In it national/ethnic stereotypes (about the Polish) were used to shift balance of allegiance. One reason I mention this origin of the term because in it we already see many of the later features of culture wars: the significance of education, especially the education of social elites, the role of non-materialist values, including ethnicity/race, religion, and nationalism.
I don’t mean to suggest cultural wars only have these tribal functions. Obviously there are two others worth mentioning. First, culture wars may be oriented toward policy or legislative changes. But as Samantha Hancox-Li stressed, in an important recent essay, “How Movements win,” (Liberal Currents, April 9, 2024), issues that function well in solidifying coalitions need not do well in producing lasting legislation. (Her example is police abolitionism in the wake of BLM.)
Second, culture wars tend to be in the interest of particular individual members of what was once known as the clerisy (or intelligentsia, or blogosphere) who make some issue or some particular strategy part of their signature or persona and hope to cash in on them in some way. Sometimes this can be extraordinarily successful: Boris Johnson went from Back-Bencher to Foreign-Secretary to Prime-Minister in record time on the back of his support for Leave/Brexit.
Now, anything can become a culture war topic. That’s because anything can become of symbolic importance and become instrumental in solidifying affective and instrumental ties among people. Don’t believe me? Go re-read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels!
However, there is a class of topics that are especially likely to be effective in perpetuating culture wars. These are topics that are at the (i) intersection of campus politics (recall elite education) and, also, (ii) involve considerable abstraction. Now, what’s important about campus politics (especially at highly selective schools) is it is far removed from ordinary people’s lives despite the high seeming stakes involved (getting in is perceived to generate enormous windfalls). There is little direct acquaintance with them, and even people that have gone to a selective institution in the past spend their adult lives away from them. In addition, on campus there is an extreme intellectual division of labor among (and even within) disciplines such that the vocabulary of one discipline can become highly unintelligible and esoteric to members of another. The jargon of one discipline can easily become gibberish to the next, and this jargon is utterly unsuitable for public debate, where it will quickly seem mystery or bullshit.
So, the specialized jargon of a discipline or a field can also put other academics on par with members of the wider public: in the position of being unsure what is insight and what is bullshit. Culture war entrepreneurs take advantage of this fact in combination with the social and lived distance of campus life. Fashion, sports, entertainment, and art also can become culture war topics for very analogous reasons.
The previous two paragraphs hint at topics related to the political and theoretical significance of hyperspecialization that animate Plato’s Republic and Bacon’s New Atlantis. They have been put on the map anew by Elijah Millgram in his (2015) The Great Endarkenment; and are also of interest to me in my work on synthetic philosophy (see here for my restatement).
So, much for set up.
But there is another important feature that I need to mention. Some readers may well find the above too dispassionate about what’s at stake. They may feel that I lack a certain warmth toward truth. They would be right, but not because I am a sociopath about truth. Rather, when it comes to truth in public life, I am (recall) a Platonic skeptic: in democratic public life opinion will predominate and truth will, by and large, not rule. (See also Cyril Hédoin’s response here.) This may be elitist and undesirable, but some of us can’t afford to trade in fantasies.
Now, one might think that because nothing as abstract as (say) the semantic theory of truth could become a source of dispute in political and social life. This misunderstands politics. In political and social life anything can become politicized. And if one looks over the history of European politics incredibly abstruse often highly metaphysical topics have become the source of political and social strife. I don’t just have now distant condemnations of 1277 in mind, or the theological conflicts that led to the actual wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In my own life-time the purported perjury of a philandering president was debated in terms of the semantics of ‘is.’ Rather, as I noted abstruse topics lend themselves quite well to culture wars because people’s stance on them is not shaped by informed deliberation even understanding, but by social cues, loyalty, and aspirational tribal affiliation.
Bright (a LSE philosopher) himself comes very close to arguing this himself in his error theory:
So far so good. But then he concludes his piece with the following thought:
People care about how they interact with others, they care about how their history is understood and appreciated. There are particular claims about conventions we should or should not adopt around race or gender that they find very controversial indeed. And I think by sheer coincidence (ultimately related to the prestige economy of academia rewarding high-level discussion of abstract concepts combined with the habit of humanities scholars to want to pose as radical) we often get discussions about such cultural hot topics appearing next to discussions of the nature of truth and objectivity. And by Lockean association of ideas people come to pair the vexation they feel at the former with the nuances of the latter.
But politics is about how we live together, who is to command and who is to obey and when these roles should be reversed or abandoned, what our shared resources should be spent upon and when they should be saved, what burdens are to be borne and by whom. Theory of truth and ideals of objectivity are not irrelevant to all this, but their role remains fairly indirect. Keep your eyes on the prize.+
There are two disagreements that I want to highlight because my own views are not far removed from Bright’s. First, his claim that it is ‘sheer coincidence’ that cultural hot topics appear so close to the ‘nature of truth and objectivity.’ My disagreement may be surprising given my Platonic skepticism about truth in public life; for one might expect that I tend to treat social and political life as intrinsically random and, therefore, not truth conducive. But that’s not how I see it. Rather, there are strategic agents that promote given associations for the kinds of reasons outlined above; they even promote the character of the epistemic environment (whether it is trustworthy or not, etc.). Some such actors expect to gain from a public life where there is mistrust in established authorities and media. I don’t mean to suggest any determined strategic agent will always succeed. (So I am not claiming that social life is without causal opacity.) But political agents are constantly trying to generate new associations and antipathies within and among us.
Second, while Bright is surely right that “politics is about how we live together, who is to command and who is to obey and when these roles should be reversed or abandoned, what our shared resources should be spent upon and when they should be saved, what burdens are to be borne and by who;” this does not exclude or keep at a distance (or indirectness), a “theory of truth and ideals of objectivity.” And that’s because of their role in generating any ‘we.’
Even the most nominalist metaphysician has to acknowledge that in political life, people’s beliefs about abstracta (including rejecting their existence) may be an affective glue in some social unity. In fact, for the nominalist this helps explain the mechanism of how the otherwise distinct come to understand themselves as constituting a possible ‘we.’’
Now, one may well think I have missed Bright’s point. After all, his low-key satire is designed to make us laugh at our tendency to fall for the hucksters who try to set us apart by appealing to our mistakes over how to apply a Tarski-bi-conditional or how to interpret a model theory; or those that try to convince us that accepting ‘2+2=4’ is key to civilizational survival. The hucksters prevent, say, “rendering material circumstances more akin to what one might expect given a racially egalitarian ideology.”
Fair enough.
The problem is that in culture wars ridicule and mockery don’t unmask the powerful and bring us back to our senses. Rather, they reinforce the affective ties of the tribe or coalition. And so earnestly (or mockingly) one, thereby, keeps the culture war going rather than (ahh) changing the topic.
- This post first appeared in a slightly modified form at digressionsnimpressions.
{ 112 comments… read them below or add one }
Peter Dorman 04.26.24 at 5:27 pm
Yes, almost any concept can become the basis for an affiliation and serve resulting political purposes. The question here is whether different understandings of “truth” do more than this, at least in the present circumstances.
First, much of the left (but not all of it — not me for one) has come to be identified with the view that claims of objective truth are disguised power grabs or camouflaged displays of cultural domination. Thus, what we really have are competing social and cultural positions, and by stripping away these false claims we expose the real politics at play. I saw the emergence of this attitude in real time when I was a grad student. This was during the breakup of Marxism as a systematic understanding of history centered on political economy, especially in its analysis of capitalism. Marxism was subjected to withering attacks on its core logic and empirical support. There were in general three responses. Some battened down the hatches and became more orthodox in their Marxism than ever, denying everything. Others drifted away. But still others said, “Yes, Marxism fails these truth tests, but so does everyone else. In the end, how you understand society comes down to your positionality and commitments, and we embrace an “untrue” Marxism as a weapon against all the other untrue ideologies out there.” This was in the 70s already, and of course it reflected a larger trend in academia internationally and across disciplines.
In a nutshell, denials of truth can be deployed to rescue logically and empirically impaired doctrines, which is what I saw happening. In that sense, debates over truth are in practice debates over the presumed knowledges many on the left are attached to. I find the whole business absurd, due to….
Second, there is something really jejune about the rejection of “objective truth” on the Left. If you’re a pragmatist (like I think I am), the issue is just the extent to which your beliefs are informed by reasoning and evidence, buttressed with a large enough capacity for cognitive dissonance. (Cue Feynman.) That addresses the bullshit problem. But it also has implications for culture war dynamics, since cognitive bubbles of all sorts are barriers to truth-seeking, and, to the extent that epistemically open, logically and empirically sophisticated investigation is still largely centered in academia (still probably the case), it has implications for the role of education, socioeconomic status, secularism, etc. It’s not coincidental that the Right has emblazoned “truth” on its banners (and social media platforms), even as it rejects more thoroughly than before the processes of truth-seeking and bullshit detection. Silly debates over the concept of “objective truth” just obscure what is really going on.
MisterMr 04.26.24 at 8:14 pm
My two cents:
Righties generally are traditionalists, whereas lefties, as a consequence, are antitraditionalists.
For this reason, righties find themselves defending traditional “moral truths”, and lefties attacking them.
This creates the IMPRESSION that righties believe in objective moral truths, and lefties are moral relativists. But in reality this is not true: try arguing with a feminist that equal rights, or the right to abortion, are just cultural constructions, and see how she responds. As a matter of fact, lefties arguments are also based on a concept of natural rights, just these natural rights are different from the ones the righties believe in.
But even if in reality both lefties and righties think in terms of (different) natural rights, the impression remains that the lefties are the moral relativists. So the righties believe they are the defenders of “truth” against the believers in “relativism”.
This is then stretched to include theories about “truth” and semantics that have nothing to do with politics, because they work at a too abstract levels (also because most people don’t understand those theories).
Grumpy Ol' Commie Bahstid 04.26.24 at 10:24 pm
Quite a tease, that first paragraph! I mean: the part where you touch on the touchy subject of gender-critical feminism. I get the impression that you have things to say on the topic, and I hope you’re planning to post your thoughts here.
If you do post on the topic, I hope you’ll give due consideration to the fact that the Keira Bell court case, the ensuing Cass Review, and the (unrelated) WPATH files exposé completely vindicate the GC viewpoint, at least wrt subjecting children to medical experimentation.
It seems to me that this particular culture war skirmish runs counter to your claim that truth plays no role in public life. As you surely know, there’s an extremely rigid party line/quasi-religious dogma (aka ‘wokeness’) to which every good liberal (or leftist) tribalist is required to pay tribute. The consequences for repudiating even a single article of the catechism can be severe: think of the barrage of rape and death threats, not to mention academic purges, to which GC feminists are routinely subjected (with the at least tacit approval of the bien pensant). Many, if not most, GC feminists started out as members of the liberal tribe or the leftist tribe (both of which embrace the woke party line in all its particulars). Tribalism (and a sense of self-preservation) would’ve dictated that they suppress their doubts and sign the loyalty oath. They didn’t; they chose truth over party dogma, often at no small personal cost. And it appears that truth has actually prevailed over tribalism – at least wrt to medical experimentation on children (in England and Scandinavia, anyway; the US medical industrial complex will probably, for the foreseeable future, remain too subordinated to political pressure and the profit motive to even consider rejoining the real world).
Sophie Jane 04.26.24 at 10:32 pm
And the great thing about meta, of course, is that it’s possible to construct entire edifices of lofty discussion without ever once having to contemplate actual harm being done to actual people or to stir yourselves to do anything about it. Speaking here as a trans person in the current round of culture wars.
engels 04.27.24 at 12:18 am
Idea for an excruciating philosophy niche: just culture war theory.
nastywoman 04.27.24 at 4:59 am
‘(If you don’t like my examples offer your own!)’
How about ‘gamergate’
‘The alt-right’s emergence was marked by Gamergate.[7][293][294][295] According to the journalist David Neiwert, Gamergate “heralded the rise of the alt-right and provided an early sketch of its primary features: an Internet presence beset by digital trolls, unbridled conspiracism, angry-white-male-identity victimization culture, and, ultimately, open racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and sexual and gender paranoia”.[44] Gamergate politicized many young people, especially males, in opposition to the perceived culture war being waged by leftists.[296] Through their shared opposition to political correctness, feminism, and multiculturalism, chan culture built a link to the alt-right.[297] By 2015, the alt-right had gained significant momentum as an online movement’.
A movement with no official leaders or clearly defined agenda and because of its anonymous membership, lack of organization and leaderless nature, defining it has been difficult.[24] Frank Lantz of NYU’s Game Center wrote that he could not find “a single explanation of a coherent Gamergate position”.[122] Christopher Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon, told the Columbia Journalism Review: “The closest thing we’ve been able to divine is that it’s noise. It’s chaos … all you can do is find patterns. And ultimately Gamergate will be defined—I think has been defined—by some of its basest elements.”[123][27]
and so some commentators have argued that Gamergate helped elect Donald Trump as US president in 2016 and assisted other right-wing to far-right movements;[43][114][288][289] Alyssa Rosenberg called Trump “the Gamergate of Republican politics” in an opinion article for The Washington Post in 2015.[290] Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon remarked that through Milo Yiannopoulos, who rose to fame during Gamergate as the technology journalist for Breitbart News (a news website Bannon co-founded), he had created a generation and an “army” that came in “through Gamergate … and then get turned onto politics and Trump”.[289][291][284] According to Axios, in the 2022 book Meme Wars, Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, argued that Gamergate served as “The key template that the far right and former President Trump’s MAGA movement have used to organize online”, noting that during Gamergate, “online mobs deployed techniques and tactics that were later taken up by the Trumpist right, including the use of memes, false allegations and coordinated harassment.”
TEH utmost successful (Right Wing) strategy of the Kulturkrampf of the 21 century.
Neville Morley 04.27.24 at 5:17 am
This may be merely pedantic, but the literal translation of Kulturkampf is ‘culture struggle’ – it’s not Kulturkrieg. I have no idea of there is actually a direct connection between C19 Germany and the present situation, but if so it shouldn’t obscure the differences; ‘struggle’ can take place between forces or institutions vying for superiority within a broader institution or polity, without necessarily endangering the whole or implying that the contending parties are irreconcilable, whereas ‘war’ suggests absolutely hostile camps seeking the total defeat of the other.
Alex SL 04.27.24 at 6:55 am
Extremely complex topic that is difficult to respond to appropriately, so I will largely restrict myself to banging a drum that I have banged before: While I understand the perspective the post is coming from and agree with observations such as culture war topics being (a) in a sense arbitrary but also (b) strategically selected by political actors, I think that the missing angle is the willingness of the voters/keyboard warriors/general public to then engage with the topic.
Every human has their own agency. Even if a given political actor has an interest in making face masks, vaccines, pronouns, the EU, or gendered toilets their culture war issue, the public could simply say, “meh, who cares”, and nothing would come of it. Why does uncle Fred get weirdly angry at university students making use of their free speech rights but is largely indifferent to a billionaire not paying any taxes? It is a choice what to get angry at, and uncle Fred would choose differently if he were more rational and/or a nicer person.
Conversely, from the perspective of the political actor, that means that not everything works. What seems to happen is not that populists are political geniuses who manipulate an otherwise kind and smart public into acting against their own interests, but instead that the populist says A, B, and C, and then doubles down on C when they realise that it gets them roars of approval from their audience.
MisterMr,
Another aspect to this is that it is often futile to try to understand the right’s ‘reasoning’ using commonsense understanding of words. For example, Christians will often argue that atheists or secular countries are morally worse than Christians or Christian countries. A counter-argument may muster statistics such as crime, teen pregnancy, or willingness to donate to charity and demonstrate that the opposite is true. But that is to entirely miss the point; what those Christians are saying is that not being Christian is morally abhorrent, end. of. So, even if Denmark has less violent crime and happier people than Louisiana, to them, Louisiana is still morally superior and will always be. Because outcomes don’t matter, only team membership does.
Similar redefinition of terms to suit the right’s ends applies to ‘republic'[1] and ‘free speech'[2] in the USA, to ‘sovereignty'[3] in the UK, to ‘religious liberty'[4] worldwide, etc.
Footnote 1: Generally accepted definition is ‘not a monarchy’. Right-wing definition is ‘a minority of people gets to win elections, and the majority has to suck it up, but only if the minority is the right wing.’ (If the left wing wins, that’s tyranny, of course, even if they are the majority of voters.)
Footnote 2: Generally accepted definition is the right to express political and religious opinions without threat of persecution or discrimination. Right-wing definition is the right for right wingers to incite violence and hatred, and for peaceful left-wing demonstrators to be beaten up by police or run over by angry car drivers.
Footnote 3: Generally accepted definition is the ability of a nation to govern itself, which includes the ability to freely enter into binding agreements that are then, well, binding on that nation. Right-wing definition is to be able to ignore the obligations arising from agreements that one has freely entered into.
Footnote 4: Generally accepted definition is the right to practice one’s religion without threat of persecution or discrimination. Right-wing definition is the right to discriminate against others for not practising the same religion.
Grumpy Ol’ Commie Bahstid,
I used to follow one GC feminist’s blog. The transgender issue has turned her from somebody writing interesting posts on a variety of issues including gender discrimination, state-church separation, creationism, and the rise of the alt-right into somebody who exclusively rants about the supposed evils of ‘transgender ideology’, in post after post after post. That is not “following truth instead of party dogma”; it is the feminist equivalent of uncle Fed spiralling into seething resentment of minorities because he is watching Fox News all day.
Eric Schliesser 04.27.24 at 8:36 am
Thank you, Neville. I tend to think of kampf as a ‘battle’ in a war. But you are right one should not ignore the potential lack of enmity.
SusanC 04.27.24 at 10:59 am
Print media (e.g. The Guardian in the UK) and online polemic sites seems to be a key part of the phenomenon/ Yes, of course, they’re selling advertising space.
a trs
Stepping aside from any specific issue, the whole tendency strikes me as being very alarming. Like, which group is going to be the victim next time?
Kind of sucks if you’re a trans person and got this sort of unwanted attention. But whos’ next?
Israel/Palestine seems to be the next instance. Maybe it’s going to be Jews who get it this time. (that, or muslims)
As I say, the whole repeating process strikes me as highly alarming, (There might be slight nod to Martin Niemoller in the foregoing.)
Sophie Jane 04.27.24 at 11:17 am
@Alex SL
the public could simply say, “meh, who cares”, and nothing would come of it
This is, unfortunately, not true. See in particular the situation in the UK, where the right is able to keep spreading hatred and chipping away at trans rights precisely because the general public doesn’t support their agenda but doesn’t care enough to oppose it either
engels 04.27.24 at 11:27 am
Christians will often argue that atheists or secular countries are morally worse than Christians or Christian countries. A counter-argument may muster statistics such as crime, teen pregnancy, or willingness to donate to charity
Iirc most studies show Christians give more to charity than atheists.
nastywoman 04.27.24 at 11:50 am
‘This may be merely pedantic, but the literal translation of Kulturkampf is far more ‘culture fight’ than ‘struggle’ even as google likes to re-translate
‘Kampf’ into ‘struggle’
but then
somehow google translates
‘Kulturkampf’ first as ‘clash’ and then as ‘battle’ –
while as in the utmost in-famously use of
‘Mein Kampf’
Hitler used it with the (one sided) martial implication of ‘My Fight’ (or ‘battle’) and some English translators who used to be not familiar with… shall we call it ‘Feinheiten’ of the German language – translated it originally into some (more two sided) ‘struggle’.
bekabot 04.27.24 at 2:50 pm
“try arguing with a feminist that equal rights, or the right to abortion, are just cultural constructions, and see how she responds”
A good many feminists will tell you that of course equal rights and the right to abortion (among others) are cultural constructions and not facts of nature, which is why:
They can be fragile
They’re worth defending
And they may need defending.
That’s the way I used to respond and the way I still do.
Alex SL 04.27.24 at 9:50 pm
Eric Schliesser @9,
To continue the pedantry, battle in a war would be ‘Schlacht’.
Sophie Jane @9,
I agree that a government can do what it wants regardless of public opinion for about 3-5 years after an election, depending on the country, and it can forever implement the preferences of a large minority if the electoral system is broken, as it is in the UK or the USA. But that is not what I meant – the issue here is ‘spread hate’.
How could you spread hate unless somebody is receptive to it? You couldn’t, because by definition it only spreads if it infects additional people. Why does uncle Fred get really angry at a student preferring they/them, while uncle Bob, when faced with the exact same Spectator article, says, okay then, let them, I just don’t care? Why can you spread hate of immigrants to Fred, but you cannot spread hatred of the royal family or of the armed forces to Fred? My point is that the public / voters / consumers are not best modelled as a write-only system that demagogues can manipulate at will. They actually have agency and thus moral culpability themselves, and conversely, the demagogues have to work within the constraints of the pre-existing beliefs and values of the public.
MisterMr 04.27.24 at 11:29 pm
@bekabot 14
Yes but you imply they are good, so you are not a moral relativist.
A common situation is that righties have some tradition, say traditional gender roles, and lefties use the idea that this tradition is just a cultural creation to undermine the perceived moral value of said tradition, so the righties perceive this as a form of moral relativism (which in reality isn’t).
In other words, when you say that these things are worth defending, you are assuming that these have an absolute moral value, and that while culture might not recognize it, in that case culture would be wrong, so it is still a reference to some sort of natural right.
Phil H 04.28.24 at 1:59 am
“And so earnestly (or mockingly) one, thereby, keeps the culture war going rather than (ahh) changing the topic.”
When I was at school, I was introduced to The Game. Everyone is always playing The Game, and The Game has only one rule: every time you become aware that you are playing The Game, you lose. So, everyone reading this comment has just lost The Game, as have I. You forget about it for a while, then out of nowhere some next to you sighs and says, “Oh damn, I just lost The Game.” Which of course causes you to lose as well.
Culture wars are just like The Game. You can only lose, and they lie wormlike inside your head even when you actively try to ignore them.
nastywoman 04.28.24 at 5:19 am
@’the issue here is ‘spread hate’.
and with the internet there finally was/is – ‘to spread the HATE like never before’
and/or would have the type of current ‘culture wars’ even be possible with people sending their harassing letters and comments to the good ole newspapers – rejecting them?
AND so going truly ‘Meta’ on Culture Wars let’s turn ‘Meta’ -(and all the other internet HATE MACHINES) OFF – and start a-new with an internet which has to follow the same rules and regulations as any other ‘publisher’ – as isn’t any internet-platform actually just like any other publisher?
EWI 04.28.24 at 9:00 am
Engels @ 12
Iirc most studies show Christians give more to charity than atheists.
As in religious-flavoured institutions, I’m guessing. Would hazard a guess that atheists are a lot more in favour of taxes and social democracy!
engels 04.28.24 at 11:47 am
Here are two:
‘Boomers’ and ‘millennials’ who go to church are more likely to trust their neighbors and donate to charity, according to a new study
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-religious-charitable-neighbors.html
Religious people give more often – but they also prioritise different causes
https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/35692-religious-people-give-more-often-different-causes
And on political alignment:
Are conservatives more charitable than liberals in the U.S.? A meta-analysis of political ideology and charitable giving [tl;dr: yes]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X21000752
steven t johnson 04.28.24 at 2:34 pm
Getting lost so quickly, it seemed at first I wouldn’t have any comments. But trying again to understand the OP, “First, to split an existing, dominant social or political coalition apart by the clever use of wedge-issues” stood out because it is I think backwards. Culture war is about preventing the majority class from exercising any dominance to begin with. This formulation reverses cause and effect. Culture is so variegated precisely because it is not engineered according to plan, but emerges from numerous agents devising ploys ad hoc.
And “… to induce or solidify unity within a potentially heterogeneous coalition…” seems to me to not precisely a mirror image, not least because culture war issues do not genuinely unify a majority coalition: Issues and interests of property (the definition of “class” used here) do not yield to moral suasion, not even on culture war issues. What happens instead I think is that ungovernability means irreformability, i.e., the continued de facto domination of the minority class despite the formal existence of the mean for majority rule. That’s why the political victories of culture warriors have not brought back the good old days the culture warriors claim to want. The power of a vociferous albeit cross class minority to win their way on single issues against the lesser commitment of the majority of the general population does seem to be a significant structural problem of all formal democracies?
The byplay about personal generosity of the religious versus the irreligious is I think questionable in two respects. First, the individualist assumption that only personal altruism counts is wrong. Giving money personally to poor people never works as well as full employment, for instance, so the people who defend the existence of poverty as the scourge compelling labor are I think immoral even if they donate a pittance more than atheists. Second, it is never legitimate to speak of the religious in general. You must always speak of which religion to address such issues.
It seems to me another instance of ideological individualism misleading thought is the notion that the “public/voters/consumers” are the ultimate drivers of demagogy. Aside from the purely normative but otherwise content free notion of demagogy, it assumes an autonomy in the reprehensible individuals that needs to be established. Individuality is ineradicable. Not even identical twins are truly identical in my personal experience. In some respects it’s like saying Thai people choose to be Thai or medieval west European peasants chose to be medieval.
steven t johnson 04.28.24 at 2:37 pm
My incompetent proofreader has failed again. The word “emerges” in the last sentence of the first paragraph was meant to be changed “emerged historically.” Sadly, that may not be any clearer.
bekabot 04.28.24 at 3:54 pm
“righties have some tradition, say traditional gender roles, and lefties use the idea that this tradition is just a cultural creation to undermine the perceived moral value of said tradition”
I will agree with you that this isn’t a good tactic, because it can be seen through at a glance. Whether or not a thing is just a cultural creation has little to do its value, and everybody knows it. The Marriage of Figaro is merely a cultural creation, right? But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth anything.
Here’s where the righties get hung up, though: the principle I just indicated is widely recognized by lefties, but not so much by righties, for too many of whom value has to be bestowed from elsewhere. The critic in the sky has to stamp it with his imprimatur; that’s the only way you can know it’s valid and legitimate. This is one of the reasons why, when you have an argument between a lefty and a righty, the lefty often will win it because he doesn’t go around expecting to be backed up by an amen corner from another dimension. But here two wrinkles arise: the first is that winning an argument isn’t the same thing as winning politically. The second is that right-wingers too have their saved remnant of genial cynics who aren’t waiting for the applause of the angels. Those people are hard to debate with and can pose a real problem.
“righties perceive this as a form of moral relativism”
I think we both recognize that when righties talk about ‘moral relativism’ they’re cursing in words of more than four letters. That’s all they’re doing. We don’t try to parse the statements of a drunk on a blue streak and the blather about moral relativism should be treated the same way. As you point out, it’s nearly impossible for any human being to be an honest-to-God moral relativist, with the result that almost nobody is one. That’s why accusations of moral relativism are nearly always specious.
“when you say that these things are worth defending, you are assuming that these have an absolute moral value”
That’s beyond my pay grade; their absolute moral value isn’t known to me. I’m not sure, for example, that Chileans weren’t better as people under Pinochet than under Allende. Under Pinochet they would have had the eternal things always in view, due to the ever-present nearness of death, and would thereby have been made aware that there’s an abstract aspect to existence; while on the secular side, they were living in a nation whose economic growth was going through the roof, which has to be worth something. I can’t say with utter certitude that administrations like Salvador Allende’s don’t just produce timid and passably diligent livestock. I don’t think they do, but I can’t prove to the contrary. All the same, I infer that Chileans probably were better off under the first administration than under the second because, if only circumstantially, under the first administration you didn’t see so many prowling packs of parents looking for lost children, and you didn’t hear so much about dissidents thrown out of helicopters into the sea.
Are these standards and preferences which were formed by my culture? You bet they are. It doesn’t follow from that they have to be derived from any deeper or more ultimate source. They might be, but they don’t have to be. And anyway, culture, which is what you’re referring to, is more internal than external, despite the fact that most people experience it as circumambient and as a thing outside themselves. There’s no culture outside of the people who are practicing that culture anymore than there can be a church without parishioners. Is there?
wacko 04.28.24 at 5:43 pm
@MisterMr 2 “Righties generally are traditionalists, whereas lefties, as a consequence, are antitraditionalists.”
I think that traditionalists are, generally, some sort of communitarians, while anti-traditionalists are often a sort of libertarians, individualists. Consequently, the right-left dichotomy is not so obvious, in my opinion.
John Q 04.28.24 at 6:51 pm
Peter Dorman @1 “much of the left (but not all of it — not me for one) has come to be identified with the view that claims of objective truth are disguised power grabs or camouflaged displays of cultural domination”
This claim seems to me to at least 20 years out of date, going back to 1990s arguments about (what was then) leftwing postmodernism. As I and others pointing out at least as far back as 2003, it’s the right who now make claims of this kind and the left who adopt descriptions like “the reality-based community”.
https://johnquiggin.com/2003/09/06/right-wing-postmodernism/
John Q 04.28.24 at 6:59 pm
anything can become politicised and at least in the US, everything has been.
Picking a topic at random, I searched for “best exercise regime for conservatives”. It turns out, as I could probably have worked out with a little thought, that weight training is rightwing and endurance training is left-wing. Here’s a pretty typical statement of the case
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/is-it-important-for-a-conservative-to-get-in-shape/
Doctor Science 04.28.24 at 9:02 pm
I am surprised that no-one has said what has long seemed obvious to me: from the time of its introduction into US discourse, “Culture Wars” has been a right-wing effort to rebrand its opposition to any broadening of civil rights. The right felt that it lost the Civil Rights War, and the Feminism War, so it rebranded. But it’s the same old attitude in a new set of sheets. It’s the desire, the demand to say, WE decide who’s really a 100% full human being with full human rights. Or to decide who is or should be a full citizen, ditto.
It’s no more about “culture” than the American Civil War was about “states’ rights”.
engels 04.28.24 at 9:17 pm
1990s left: “the American prohibition against human sacrifice is culturally constructed”
2020s left: “mansplaining is absolutely morally wrong, and was in the Middle Ages”
engels 04.28.24 at 10:43 pm
I think that traditionalists are, generally, some sort of communitarians, while anti-traditionalists are often a sort of libertarians, individualists. Consequently, the right-left dichotomy is not so obvious, in my opinion.
Plus a lot of recent leftism has been about conserving what remains of the welfare stare against the austerian neoliberal death cult, or trying to restore it.
TM 04.29.24 at 9:31 am
Agree that the parallel between Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (apparently untranslatable, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulturkampf) and US style culture war is highly problematic. It might still have been interesting to investigate possible parallels but that doesn’t seem to be the author’s interest. It would certainly have required to actually pay attention to the phenomena under consideration, which also doesn’t seem to be the author’s interest.
Are culture wars somehow about deep philosophical questions about the “nature of truth and objectivity”? The doctrine of Papal infallibility did play a role during the Kulturkampf. Nowadays, the right wing culture war position is “there is no difference between fact/truth and opinion. Our opinion that Trump won the election, or that Global Warming is a hoax, etc. etc., isn’t subject to empirical refutation.”
A kind of everyman’s infallbility. Every Trumpist Evangelical a Pope of his or her own. The logical end point of the protestant reformation. Or something.
KT2 04.29.24 at 9:32 am
ES: “The problem is that in culture wars ridicule and mockery don’t unmask the powerful and bring us back to our senses. Rather, they reinforce the affective ties of the tribe or coalition. And so earnestly (or mockingly) one, thereby, keeps the culture war going rather than (ahh) changing the topic.”
Changing the topic to bring us back to our senses is exactly what I do, in particular at dinner parties, when culture wars erupt.
Ahh. Nice wall hanging!
Or ask for a definition of left right progressive conservative. Definitional wars ensue. Which may or may not assist…
…until the tribal, powerful and opinionated regroup. Or not.
Usually after one too many quaffs.
Others are then left to engage in culture peaces.
Tm 04.29.24 at 9:56 am
To add. The relativist position denying the existence of objective truth is often attributed to strawman postmodernism. I’m not a philosopher but my understanding is that postmodernism is more about epistemic humility and the need to reflect the economic and power relations inherent in scientific activity rather than a denial of any difference between truth and non-truth.
The right-wing position needless to say is not tainted by any trace of epistemic humility.
Their stick is to simply proclaim something as truth and that’s it. I brought up the parallel to Papal infallibility (only now available to everybody on the “right” side) more tongue-in-cheek but now that I think of it, it doesn’t seem much of an exaggeration.
Sophie Jane 04.29.24 at 10:53 am
@Alex SL How could you spread hate unless somebody is receptive to it? You couldn’t, because by definition it only spreads if it infects additional people
You do it by encouraging the small minority of people who are receptive to be vocal and active, by making them feel their views are acceptable and they’re not alone. This is why hate speech so often invokes “common sense” or a fictitious “silent majority”. Leaving aside questions of long term culture change, in the short term this means more hate crimes and a sense of threat to whoever’s being targeted, which spreads fear and discourages people from speaking up or being visible and creates more room for the bigots to operate. If it helps, think of it as spreading the practice of hate rather than the idea.
And this, I think is the real source of my frustration with abstract discussion of “culture wars” by those not targeted. The right uses culture wars to rally supporters and demonstrate strength, which means inflicting harm on suitably weak victims. It’s true they function as a distraction, but ignoring them entirely means throwing the people targeted under the bus – which is another intended part of their effect in creating division.
nastywoman 04.29.24 at 11:02 am
AND as there is a real ‘cultural’ war going on – in the literal sense of ‘culture’ – as isn’t ‘music’ = ‘culture –
or couldn’t it actually be ‘politics’?-
or even ‘poetry’? (tortured) –
as Americas Racist Right Wingers fear noting more than the Worlds Current Music GOAT
will write this again:
After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November.
@realdonaldtrump
5:33 pm · 29 May 2020
OR this:
I spoke to @vmagazine
– about why I’ll be voting for Joe Biden for president. So apt that it’s come out on the night of the VP debate. Gonna be watching and supporting
@KamalaHarris
by yelling at the tv a lot. And I also have custom cookies ????????????
10:23 pm · 7 Oct 2020
And when on X some of Americas Craziest and Utmost Evil Cultural Warriors defamed
a young woman as ‘SATAN’ and here followers as a cult of evil satanists and to further harass and degrade them posted AI generated Fake Nudes of the young woman and Elon Musk published these Fakes and let them sit on his HATE MACHINE – for every sick old
-(or even young) man on this planet to download – the gamers had lost their game – and after Trump will have lost again – the World will agree:
Americas Swifties tipped the scale –
AGAIN!
MisterMr 04.29.24 at 12:05 pm
bekabot 23
I agree with you. I was just trying to point out that when righties make “relativism” into a culturte war object they are not choosing it totally at random, although they understanding of it is often vague.
Alex SL 8
(sorry I didn’t read it before)
“Another aspect to this is that it is often futile to try to understand the right’s ‘reasoning’ using commonsense understanding of words.”
True, but in this case I think they more or less understand what they are pissed off by.
wacko 24
I think that traditionalists are, generally, some sort of communitarians, while anti-traditionalists are often a sort of libertarians, individualists.
True but in reality since at least 1800 the lefties have been the individualists, the righties the communitarians, at tleast about cultural issues (on economics is the reverse). For example the left is more or less anticlerical since at least the French revolution.
TM 23
“Papal infallibility (only now available to everybody on the “right” side) more tongue-in-cheek but now that I think of it, it doesn’t seem much of an exaggeration.”
First of all Papal infallibility was an answer from the Pope to Napoleon while Napoleon was cannonballing him, so it was quite political and quite conservative to begin with.
I think that you are quite right, but are forgetting that righties (and also catholics) don’t think they are making stuff up arbitrarily, they generally use “tradition” as a source of authority.
Sarcastic link:
https://credomag.com/2021/10/ideas-have-consequences-why-the-rise-of-nominalism-is-such-a-big-deal/
novakant 04.29.24 at 1:23 pm
The relativist position denying the existence of objective truth is often attributed to strawman postmodernism.
The thing is, that questioning purported objective truths is inherent in philosophical enquiry, it’s what philosophers have been doing for more than 2000 years. And outside the rather hermetical world of formal logic and philosophy of language it’s rather hard to establish or even define something like objective truth.
But you’re of course right that it’s about epistemic humility and that ‘consevatives’ tend to just posit something and run with it in a very unphilosophical way.
MisterMr 04.29.24 at 3:30 pm
Correction to my previous comment: Papal infallibility came out in 1870 when the Pope was cannonballed by Vittorio Emanuele II during the capture of Rome (last part of italian unification wars), not by Napoleon.
I think the point still stands that the Pope came out with that idea because he was mightly pissed off but the political changes of his times.
engels 04.29.24 at 4:18 pm
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that postmodernism wasn’t just about “epistemic humility” and questioning power.
SusanC 04.29.24 at 4:29 pm
Possibly related: why is it that obviously-false conspiracy theories so often involve Jews?
As we’re talking about the obviously false ones, we can exclude the explanation that people believe them because they’re true. (California wildfires were not started by Space Lasers; I am very sure this conspiracy theory isn’t true)/
But if truth isn’t a requirement, the space of possibly conspiracy theories is very large. We can credit David Icke with the discovery that you can just blame things on lizards from outer space. But still, out of the conspiracy theories we can imagine, it is only some that get traction with conspiracy theorists…
Harry 04.29.24 at 4:30 pm
“But you’re of course right that it’s about epistemic humility and that ‘conservatives’ tend to just posit something and run with it in a very unphilosophical way.”
That’s probably right within philosophy. But philosophers, when they talk to scholars in the other humanities disciplines, often come away with the impression that they really do believe something much more extreme than that we should embody epistemic humility, and something much more like what conservatives attribute to them — in particular often a kind of moral relativism the incoherence of which with their actual commitments is pretty obvious. With the caveat that this experience is much less common now than it was 20 years ago, especially with younger scholars who often seem much more sophisticated.
PatinIowa 04.29.24 at 7:08 pm
I think TM at 32 is pretty correct:
“The relativist position denying the existence of objective truth is often attributed to strawman postmodernism. I’m not a philosopher but my understanding is that postmodernism is more about epistemic humility and the need to reflect the economic and power relations inherent in scientific activity rather than a denial of any difference between truth and non-truth.”
I imagine that if I had to land someplace definite w/r/t epistemology, it would be an anti-foundationalist pragmatism much like Rorty’s. (I haven’t read him in a while. Correct me if I’ve misdescribed him.)
It seems to me that what pisses the right (and some on the left) is not my statement, “I’m a relativist of a sort.”
What pisses them off is the pretty persuasive argument that they are relativists too and can neither avoid it, nor effectively deny it.
After all, even the sky god from the other dimension changes his mind from time to time. (Life didn’t begin at conception for Aquinas, for example.)
engels 04.29.24 at 8:43 pm
Nothing would be more tedious than a debate about postmodernism (especially with people claiming it was just some folksy liberal common sense) but can we please be clear that many on the left (as well as the right) always thought it was bollocks?
LFC 04.29.24 at 9:04 pm
From the OP:
Though I’m not completely sure what a nominalist metaphysician is (it’s been a while since I had to answer an exam question about nominalism, if I ever did), I take the point of this passage to be the suggestion that “theories of truth and objectivity” — or a position on them — can bind together political coalitions or help create a sense of political common-ness among particular groups.
I have some doubts about that. While a rhetoric about truth and objectivity figures in some right-wing circles, I’m not sure it’s doing much political work. As the OP itself hints at elsewhere, most people outside the academy really are not that concerned with these issues. They may make good rhetorical tools in certain hands, but the animating issues of the “culture wars” as pursued by, say, DeSantis in Fla. have more to do with somewhat more concrete issues. DeSantis doesn’t much care whether students are reading Rorty, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Gayatri Spivak; rather he cares whether they are reading critical histories esp of the U.S. (good historiography being critical almost by definition) or “critical race theory.” Hence his obsession with pruning from the curriculum a perceived stress on the “darker” side of the country’s history (slavery; genocide of Native Americans, etc.) and the (correct) view that racism was inherent in at least some of the country’s founding documents and institutions; and above all there must be no suggestion that anyone alive today is in any way guilty or responsible for sins of the past or (or a more plausible suggestion) has benefited from them.
Jonathan Goldberg 04.29.24 at 9:13 pm
To Grumpy Ol’ Commie Bahstid 3
Please spell out abbreviations the first time you use them, even if they’re obvious. You used “GC” four times. I had to look it up. I assume you meant “Gender Critical”
but that came up third, after “Group Chat” and “General Contractor.”
lathrop 04.29.24 at 10:21 pm
@11 Sophie Jane
“See in particular the situation in the UK, where the right is able to keep spreading hatred and chipping away at trans rights precisely because the general public doesn’t support their agenda but doesn’t care enough to oppose it either”
I think its myopic to only see the right, when feminists, liberals, and leftists are concerned about women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, and the early medicalization of children’s psychological issues, and (unlike the right) do care that trans people be safe from discrimination. If there were open discussion, we might find that the “general public” has reasonable attitudes.
Grumpy Ol' Commie Bahstid 04.29.24 at 11:05 pm
@Alex SL (comment 8)
Now you’ve got me wondering about the identity of the excessively feminist blogger that you’re trash-talking. And wondering, as well, whether I would agree with your characterization of her blog (I suspect I wouldn’t).
Most of all, I’m wondering whether you have any substantive disagreement with the point of my comment. The point I was trying to make was that it’s possible for truth to occasionally play a role in public discourse, even in a capitalist society. In Scandinavia and (parts of) the UK, thousands of children will be saved from being subjected to a ‘medical treatment’ that hasn’t been proven to be effective or safe, and that’s down to the dogged efforts of a group of truth-seekers who challenged the shibboleths of liberal tribalism. (More of that, please!) I’m not sure what part of that argument, if any, you would take issue with.
@Eric Schliesser (OP)
In general, I agree with your skepticism about the prevalence of truth in “democratic public life” – but with a caveat: the irrelevance of truth applies only to the extent that public discourse is restricted to the confines of capitalist ideology. It’s perfectly natural that truth is of no import to disputes between bourgeois liberals and bourgeois conservatives; both sides are concerned with manipulating the masses, and for that purpose lies and half-truths are usually far more useful than truth.
But for those of us who would like to retain some faint hope of a mass movement that challenges the capitalist system, the appeal to truth seems essential. What else would a serious Left have to offer? A left-wing movement that abandons the pursuit of truth is useless. A left-wing movement that abandons the pursuit of truth in order to embrace a trendy, faith-based, cult-like belief system is not only useless but, perhaps worse, foolish. The only thing such a Left could accomplish is to make Matt Walsh look like a sane, reasonable, and decent person – not what I’d call a win.
(BTW, this should go without saying, but, JIC, I want to clarify that when I use phrases like ‘pursuit of truth’ I mean something like “doing your utmost to ensure that your beliefs are rationally justifiable and based on the best available empirical evidence”. I certainly don’t mean to imply that anybody knows the truth about anything, since all human beliefs are false, tho some are less false than others. That’s not postmodernism, it’s just stating the obvious.)
Grumpy Ol' Commie Bahstid 04.29.24 at 11:42 pm
@John Q (comment 25)
I wish I believed that “left” postmodernism is a thing of the past, but I have my doubts. For example, has there really been any decrease in the quantity of pomobabble in left-leaning academic journals? Maybe things are different in Australia, but my impression is that pomo is as big as ever in the U.S. When Susan Neiman devotes much of the text of “Left Is Not Woke” to a defense of Enlightenment values, I don’t think she’s tilting at windmills.
Perhaps it’s not so much that pomo has disappeared as that it has appeared to disappear, by becoming the water in which the academic fish are swimming. That, I take it, is the argument of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories” (a book that was not as bad as I feared but not as good as I hoped).
someone who remembers every single gender critical feminist was fine with marching with and supporting actual hitler-saluting nazis 04.30.24 at 12:22 am
the issue with these kinds of meta-analyses is they don’t tend to hold up when you turn back to the object level. “ah yes, really it originates on campus if you think about it” “the state legislature is passing a series of 38 laws saying if your kid has a haircut that the government doesn’t like they’ll call them trans and take them away from you to be electrocuted by a youth pastor for six hours a day. dont worry though; you’ll never see them again since you’ll be going to prison for 20 years to life for ‘grooming’ for saying its all right with you if your kid has a girly haircut”
like, the actual “meta” here is the hatred of and attempt to eliminate civil rights for gender, sexual and racial minorities. that explains whats actually happening. other explanations dont, or dont encompass the full scope of it, or dont explain the in-practice alliances, or dont follow the money. i promise the oklahoma state legislature does not care in the slightest what harvards trans person bathroom policy is. they want a cop in every applebees checking birth certificates so people will “get over their queerness and turn to jesus.” this “meta” explains why gender critical feminists are a-ok with marching with nazis in australia and new zealand and getting big bucks from american right wing megachurch slush funds – they don’t share philosophies or even values but it’s a fruitful political alliance if their goal is the torture and elimination of trans people. it also explains why all the big brain free speech boys who were so exercised when people protested against jordan peterson speaking on campus were fine with the complete prohibition of anyone saying the words “critical race theory” within 500 yards of a school. they aren’t hypocrites, they just hate black people. hatred is the actual “meta” at work here and no other explanation covers it.
Alan White 04.30.24 at 5:32 am
No one could read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions carefully and conclude that is was compatible with any account of objective truth–and it was certainly the influential foundation to what came to be called “postmodernism”. Truth was a sociological construction, pure and simple.
It’s too simple to associate that movement with pragmatism via Rorty–Peirce was no fan of non-objective truth even if other pragmatists were. One can be an advocate of epistemic humility and objective truth all at once–it’s my own position. Pragmatic truth need not entail denouncing a realist stance on truth.
Culture wars are fundamentally about sociological/political power–nothing else. Truth is a sideline issue to be used as fodder in the dialectical cannons.
TM 04.30.24 at 8:29 am
I’m not aching for a debate about postmodernism but that is the framing of the OP (“theory of truth and objectivity”) made explicit in Peter Dorman’s comment (1), and JQs rebuttal (25).
Instead of discussing philosophical strawmen (and it’s a strawman debate because the absolutist-relativist position was always marginal), I want to stress that empirically, the dominating right wing culture war position right now in 2024 – which I think should be the topic of discussion – is “there is no difference between fact/truth and opinion – our arbitrary opinions are at least as good as your scientific consensus”.
engels 04.30.24 at 12:16 pm
I certainly don’t mean to imply that anybody knows the truth about anything, since all human beliefs are false, tho some are less false than others. That’s not postmodernism, it’s just stating the obvious.
I’m pretty sure that I have two hands.
c1ue 04.30.24 at 12:30 pm
Interesting in a very ivory tower way.
Uninteresting because of the failure to delve into the opposite of the iconoclast huckster: the Kent Brockmans of media and the J. Edgar Hoovers that employ them both directly and indirectly.
nastywoman 04.30.24 at 1:40 pm
and about:
‘Fashion, sports, entertainment, and art also can become culture war topics for very analogous reasons’.
That’s why we prefer NOT to fight our ‘culture wars’ via the class of topics that are especially likely to be effective in perpetuating culture wars. These topics that are at the (i) intersection of campus politics (recall elite education) and, also, (ii) involve considerable abstraction. Now, what’s so unimportant about campus politics (especially at highly selective schools) is it is far removed from ordinary people’s lives despite the high seeming stakes involved (getting in is perceived to generate enormous windfalls). There is little direct acquaintance with them, and even people that have gone to a selective institution in the past spend their adult lives away from them. In addition, on campus there is an extreme intellectual division of labor among (and even within) disciplines such that the vocabulary of one discipline can become highly unintelligible and esoteric to members of another. The jargon of one discipline can easily become gibberish to the next, and this jargon is utterly unsuitable for public debate, where it will quickly seem mystery or bullshit’.
AND so – and in the tradition of ‘the crooked timber’ it could be a lot more… ‘philosophical’?
or ‘poetic’
or
‘playful’
or especially ‘relatable’ for everybody out there –
to fight any Culture War just via ‘fashion, sports, entertainment, and art as especially in art
any Lovers of Dadaism will always be ON OUR SIDE –
The side of the ‘Good Guys’!
Right?
Tm 04.30.24 at 2:10 pm
engels 42: I’m not aching for a debate about postmodernism but that is the framing of the OP (“theory of truth and objectivity”) made explicit in Peter Dorman’s comment (1), and JQs rebuttal (25).
Instead of discussing philosophical strawmen (and it’s a strawman debate because the absolutist-relativist position was always marginal), I want to stress that empirically, the dominating right wing culture war position right now in 2024 – which I think should be the topic of discussion – is “there is no difference between fact/truth and opinion – our arbitrary opinions are at least as good as your scientific consensus”.
MisterMr 04.30.24 at 4:40 pm
@Alan White 49
“No one could read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions carefully and conclude that is was compatible with any account of objective truth”
I’ve read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and I don’t think Kuhn was a postmodernist. My understanding is that other postmodernist thinkers stretched Kuhn’s book to push their own theories.
Kuhn’s theory is just this, that since scientific theories evolve inside a certain scientific framework, that is also used to validate the scientific experiments, sometimes there are “scientific revolution” when the whole scientific framework changes, and in other periods there is a more gradual accretion of knowledge inside the same scientific framework.
This isn’t different from the idea that as science progresses previous scientific “truths” might be discarded, it is just a step forward in explaining whi this happens in jumps and not continuously.
It is true that Kuhn uses an ambiguous language saying that a certain theory (say, phlogiston) is “true” for a certain period and “false” after a paradigm change, but this is just a linguistic use meaning “true inside the limits of a certain paradigm”.
The problem is, Kuhn says that verious paradigms are “incommensurable”, in the sense that they can’t falsify each other, but he never says that our current understanding of, say, physics or medicine are at the same level of those of Aristotle: he still sees knowledge going forward, just more with jumps than with steps.
anEnt 04.30.24 at 6:00 pm
Point of information: sometimes culture war issues (or putative policies / politics) are trotted out intended to fail, as the “defund the police” aspect of BLM was. The objective wasn’t to defund the police but to fracture a nearly successful bipartisan attempt to end civil asset forfeiture in the US. Recasting that popular policy ask from “stop letting the police steal from us” to “defund the police” torpedoed any chance at the intended and popular reform.
https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-dont-want-defund-police-instead-they-agree-reform
Aubergine 05.01.24 at 12:51 am
someone who remembers every single gender critical feminist was fine with marching with and supporting actual hitler-saluting nazis:
One of the fascinating things about this particular debate is the way that the side claiming to be “progressive” has adopted the rightwing approach to reality – as Tm puts it (@54), “there is no difference between fact/truth and opinion – our arbitrary opinions are at least as good as your scientific consensus”.
For the true believer in genderism, it doesn’t matter whether gender critical feminists marched with Nazis in Australia (they didn’t), or whether puberty blockers are in fact reversible, or whether women are in fact just as safe in mixed-sex toilets, changerooms and prisons. What matters is whether you are willing to demonstrate your faith in the cause by saying what you are supposed to say.
If anything the more absurd the matter of faith, the more effective it is. I’m not convinced that anyone truly believes that a woman can have a penis – they don’t believe it deep down, where it matters – so one’s willingness to pretend that one does believe this, and share the lie with all of the other believers, becomes a test of faith and belonging.
The modest success that gender critical feminism has had in the UK (where GC feminists are generally leftwing or liberal, and there are numerous hardcore genderists among the Conservatives) has largely come from cutting through the abstractions and using various deliberative institutions to return to the concrete, to draw out the underlying conflicts of rights and interests. Often at great personal cost, up against other institutions that have been entirely captured by gender ideology. There’s rarely much point in engaging trans activists on their own turf and arguing over abstractions like whether biological sex is an illusion, or whatever, because they will just obfuscate and equivocate. But when they’re up on the witness stand in an employment court being cross-examined on how they bullied a feminist out of her job, and they can’t silence or intimidate the barrister – that’s when the abstractions fall away and the ideology is revealed as the regressive, ultra-misogynistic nonsense that it is. (Reading the transcripts of these cross-examinations is one of the rare joys of this fight!)
The Cass review seems to be turning into a bit of a The Emperor Has No Clothes moment as well, this time about the various abuses of child gender medicine – again, engaging with the concrete (biology and medical science, the human body) over the abstract (the metaphysics of gender identity). Will it stick? One can only hope!
John Q 05.01.24 at 1:00 am
GOCB @47 It seems odd to relate “the left” to the kind of academic journals where postmodernism might still be a big deal. I don’t read these journals and I also don’t see anyone on the left paying attention to them in the way that some seemed to in the 1990s. At least in what I read (and write) “alternative facts” are the subject of derision, not approval.
John Q 05.01.24 at 1:06 am
“Woke” is the exact opposite of relativism, since it implies awareness of a truth that has been suppressed, namely the existence of structural racism and its centrality in the US in particular. I haven’t read Neiman but the summaries sound dire.
bekabot 05.01.24 at 1:26 am
“I don’t read these journals and I also don’t see anyone on the left paying attention to them in the way that some seemed to in the 1990s.”
FWIW, I was reading those journals back in the 90s and it always seemed to me that the criticism was shanghaied from the left-wing politics rather than the other way around. If postmodernism was an attempt to brainwash grad students into becoming good Bolsheviks, one can only class it as a devastating failure.
LFC 05.01.24 at 3:22 am
Re Kuhn: I’ve also read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (albeit a long time ago) and am inclined to agree with MisterMr @55.
Alan White 05.01.24 at 5:14 am
Mr. Mr. @55
I appreciate much of what you say but within Kuhn’s own system of thought, how can science move “forward” in any sense that transcends his incommensurability thesis? Mere difference doesn’t imply progress–you need some assessment of the succession of paradigms that can be said to be progressive in some valuation sense. I don’t see at all how Kuhn supplies that. Should he try saying something about tech and improvement of life or the like it would involve some kind of meta-assessment of paradigms, which he seems to dispute.
Alex SL 05.01.24 at 7:14 am
Grumpy Ol’ Commie Bahstid,
The point I was trying to make was that it’s possible for truth to occasionally play a role in public discourse, even in a capitalist society.
No doubt there – occasionally, it matters if a bridge can actually carry the weight of the trains meant to run across it, and equivalent issues elsewhere. One cannot run a society entirely on make-believe.
In Scandinavia and (parts of) the UK, thousands of children will be saved from being subjected to a ‘medical treatment’ that hasn’t been proven to be effective or safe
You misspelled “thousands of children will be denied the treatment that they request and that the medical community that has actual expertise in this area considers to be most appropriate”.
This ties in nicely, in a way, with my main point above: how we pick and choose who has agency. The worldview expressed here is one of a shady conspiracy of trans activists who try to hurt innocent children because… they are just evil for unclear reasons, I guess?… and who have enormous power in the medical establishment… somehow, despite being widely marginalised and discriminated against. And the children are seen as what I called above, in the context of voters or the general public, ‘write-only’; they have no agency, no wishes, no opinion, no self-image except that which either the evil trans activists or the virtuous people who (checks notes) outlaw treatment pour into them.
It would be laughable if it wasn’t so harmful. And conspiracy theories always fall apart if we ask if their theory of mind is plausible – just think of the image global warming denialists have of climate researchers, or creationists of evolutionary biologists.
Speaking of evil, as a cis person I cannot speak for those actually directly affected, but I feel that one of the most upsetting aspects of transphobia is the catch-22 of denying gender-affirming treatment in youth when it would have the greatest effect and then, when it has been denied and somebody transitions only after going through puberty, ridiculing and humiliating them for not ‘passing’ (“look, despite the skirt that is clearly a man, how silly to pretend otherwise!”). As the saying goes: for some people, being cruel to others is the point.
Aubergine 05.01.24 at 12:14 pm
Alex SL @63:
Fortunately there has just been a massive, multi-year review of child and youth gender medicine, conducted by an experienced paediatrician – the UK’s Cass Review. Its findings include:
These are just some of them. It’s a massive report and essential reading for anyone who wants to stay informed in this area rather than fight the culture war. And its findings about the past and present practices of this industry, while dispassionate and clinical, are broadly consistent with what the critics of gender medicine have been saying for years and years. Of course, this means that it’s been subject to a barrage of smears and misinformation – but it’s easy to find the report and supporting documents online, so why not look for yourself?
MisterMr 05.01.24 at 4:05 pm
@Alan White 62
It’s because the later paradigm, after some times, is able to explain more things or with more details than the earlier.
After some times because there is a middle period during wich the latter paradigm can explain some new things but struggles to explain all the things the earlier paradigm already explains in detail.
Presumably if this doesn’t happen people would go back to the earlier paradigm?
Sashas 05.01.24 at 5:19 pm
Fuck it. I’ve been lurking this week due to this being the last week of classes and I’m busy, but I guess I’ll use my lived experience and weigh in on a couple things.
@lathrop (45) I just want you to know that I see the way you carefully dropped “trans rights” from your list of things reasonable people care about.
@Aubergine (57, 64) Hi! I believe. DEEP DOWN. That women can have penises. There you go. Also, I had doubts about the ability of the NHS to do a reasonable job w/r/t trans rights before I heard about the Cass review, and those doubts are in no way alleviated by what you have written. Nor has my limited investigation into how it was conducted suggested anything to change my mind. I care rather a lot about the health of the children involved–I used to be one of them after all–but if you want to convince someone in my shoes you will need something other than that an authority said so. Authorities have been saying I should die for one reason or another basically my entire life, so I’m kinda used to them being wrong and shitty about that.
@Alex SL (63) The actual reason I’m posting… :-) I want to chime in and support your statement. As a trans person myself, yes. I can confirm that one of the most frustrating things about current trends in transphobia is that they’re targeting teens who are the most able to transition with the least intervention and the least pain. I’m nonbinary. I’m basically fine with being able to belt C0 at high volume, and the fact that I’ve been in vocal therapy for a long while now and still can’t reliably “pass” is annoying but not devastating to me. But someone who is a trans woman benefits so much from dodging the voice drop in the first place. For example. We could easily keep going.
bekabot 05.01.24 at 8:00 pm
@ Aubergine
Okay, let’s play it your way a minute or two — let’s say that trans women are men. So let me ask — has six thousand-odd years of men telling women “you can’t have this and you can’t have that; you can’t be this and you can’t be that” — has that message worked? Has it had the desired effect?
To the extent that it has worked and has had the desired effect, has the enforcement of it proceeded without a wrinkle or a bump? Has the agenda and its imposition made men more popular than they are — or has it had the opposite result?
Why, then, do you think that a when bunch of women decides to tell men what they can and can’t have and what they can and can’t be — why do you think you’ll get a better outcome in that case than you did the first time around?
This has honestly got me baffled. I would love to know.
engels 05.01.24 at 8:29 pm
someone who is a trans woman benefits so much from dodging the voice drop in the first place.
I would assume the problem arises if they are not a trans woman (as it… er… transpires).
engels 05.01.24 at 9:48 pm
For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.
This sounds sensible but unfortunately the only way to get mental health attention in UK by now is to run around Hainault with a sword (psychosocial support is likely to be less forthcoming).
somebody who actually read the cass review 05.02.24 at 12:27 am
lmao the fuckin cass review, a complete failure of a document made in order to give deranged transphobes something to point to, crawling, whimpering that “actually if you think about it all of medical and psychological science is wrong and should be thrown out because of our fee fees”. it’s pathetic. they literally asked for confidential data prohibited by law from being handed over and then made a big deal that the data wasn’t there. listen heather, you don’t need the fuckin cass review. you have infinite power and infinite money on your side, racist trillionaires will give a cool six figgies to any substacker who can “just ask questions” until a state legislature passes another law prohibiting someone who doesn’t dress according to your wishes from being within 500 miles of a child. trans people, by contrast, have nothing and nobody but each other and they sure as hell have no fucking money. you can do anything you want to the trans. just open up the camps and start the electrocutions. dump them in mass graves. firebomb their homes. smash their bodies with claw hammers. whos going to stop you? the cops and 38 state legislatures will join in. you could wrap this culture war up in a weekend if you weren’t cowards and liars. lucky for the rest of us you are.
someone who actually googled the authors of the cass review 05.02.24 at 12:54 am
the cass review cited a deranged right wing youtube channel as a source, but threw out every scientific study that didnt reach the conclusion of that youtube channel. it has the credibility of a video thumbnail with impact font saying “SJWS TRIGGERED” with a stonetoss cartoon of a bud light can being exploded. why even bother pretending to take garbage like this seriously? i guess its not enough to scream a slur at a trans teen; you need the teen to also say ‘thanks, i appreciate it’ instead of disliking you
Alan White 05.02.24 at 3:04 am
Mr. Mr. @65
I see what you’re saying, but: even using the criterion of more explanations as comparing paradigms doesn’t entail anything like progress. Each explanation scheme is entrapped by its paradigm of what constitutes proper explanation. So Newtonian physics greatly eclipsed Copernican/Galilean physics by explanation, but Einsteinian relativity then explained more things as well but with different explanatory grounds. But now we are in the peculiar period of having two paradigms–relativity and quantum theory–that themselves explain much in terms of the number of phenomena they individually explain but are logically incompatible (at least by non-Bohmian/deterministic accounts of the latter). This situation–now a century old–certainly complicates a Kuhnian account, but also shows that determining what constitutes progress is philosophically up for grabs.
Tm 05.02.24 at 7:20 am
Aubergine: “For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.”
How does this translate to “ban all gender-affirming care”? Btw it has often been reported that the UK has banned gender-affirming care, which is not true.
Meanwhile: https://www.hrc.org/resources/attacks-on-gender-affirming-care-by-state-map
That’s what the culture war is about.
TM 05.02.24 at 7:28 am
Also: “Deep down we all know” is a problematic reasoning for shaping public policy and restricting other people’s freedom. “Deep down” people were thought to “know” that women belong in the kitchen, Whites have superior intellect, Jews are greedy, homosexuals are… I spare you the rest. Really, Aubergine, think about what you are saying.
TM 05.02.24 at 8:59 am
“Deep down everybody knows/believes …” or “Deep down nobody believes …”
This could be the headline over almost any culture war debate. What turns conservatives and even some liberals into raving lunatic culture warriors is always the insulting impertinence of somebody questioning some of the beliefs that they hold “deep down”.
engels 05.02.24 at 12:55 pm
Whatever “the culture war” is it has to mean more than the trans debate, whose sides don’t map neatly into anything else (and as with “woke” there are much larger numbers of people who are baffled by the whole thing). I see no evidence it exists in Britain despite the best efforts of the scumbag right and Very Online left to fight it. Brexit might have been the closest candidate but it’s faded. However much I dislike Starmer’s Labour they are not a culture war party and they are about to be elected.
MisterMr 05.02.24 at 1:27 pm
@Alan White 69
“determining what constitutes progress is philosophically up for grabs”
but we mostly expect that at some point a new paradigm will emerge and link the other two tough.
engels 05.02.24 at 1:30 pm
“Culture war” to me implies a situation like US where you have a quasi-ethnic confrontation rooted in geography between sections of the population with incompatible systems of values.
nastywoman 05.02.24 at 2:22 pm
@
‘Whatever “the culture war” is it has to mean more than the trans debate, whose sides don’t map neatly into anything else (and as with “woke” there are much larger numbers of people who are baffled by the whole thing). I see no evidence it exists in Britain despite the best efforts of the scumbag right and Very Online left to fight it. Brexit might have been the closest candidate but it’s faded’.
BUT:
Donald Trump just said that London Is ‘Unrecognisable’ -(and France too) Because ‘Europe Opened Its Doors To Jihad’ –
(or in other words: NOT to blond and blued eyed Nowegian) as in every European Country the Right Wing Racist fear most – that their courntry ses it’s National Cultural identity lost by NOT adopting Remigration.
And so ALL of the other ‘issues’ of cultural war -(if it was ‘Brexit’- or now in Germany the panic about an impending Kalifat) –
is
THE MAIN CULTURE WAR?
(and why wasn’t that mentioned in th FIRST place?)
MisterMr 05.02.24 at 4:21 pm
My understanding of “postmodernism” is this:
At some point there was in France a philosophical movement called “structuralism”.
Structuralism is based on some theories about linguistics, and uses a lot of jargon, and also is French so many english-speaking people will not be aquainted with it, that summed to the jargon means, IMHO, that a lot of academics speak about it without really knowing what they are speaking about.
At the core of structuralism, though, there is just this very simple idea that is usually known as “linguistic relativity” or “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis”:
“a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers’ worldview or cognition, and thus individuals’ languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.” [definition from Wikipedia]
Basically the idea is this: suppose that in English there are three words: “plain, hill, mountain”; but in a different language Shmenglish there are instead four: “plain, lowhill, highhill, mountain”; and in the third language Trynglish there are just two: “plain, mountain”.
People who speak these three languages will describe reality differently, and arguably will also think to reality differently. The “structure” in structuralism refers to linguistic/semantic structures.
This theory is neither very political, nor totally relativist (since the underlying reality is not changing, it is just the words and concepts that are changing).
However many structuralists were also lefties/marxists.
Marxism implies the existence of ideologies, but doesn’t itself have a theory of what an ideology exactly is. So some marxist used the concepts of structuralism to explain what an ideology is: since people, supposedly, think through these cultural “structures”, the fact that we live in a capitalist society and therefore our structures reflect capitalist relations means that people are trapped in thinking in a pro-capitalist way.
This by the way was the usual explanation to the leftish question “why a large part of the proleteriat is voting for the other guys”, that is a common question still today and is quite relevant.
However this idea, for good or bad, is not limited to the use of an anti-capitalist way, but rather depending from your point of view you might see that our culture reflects “patriarchy”, or “white supremacy”, or essentially whatever.
This gives rise to a serie of resonable and justifiable arguments against this or that aspect of our “cultural structures”. This also can show how, for example, marxism is based on a linear theory of historical evolution that is (arguably, though not in my opinion) just another of these cultural “structures” (hence the hate from many marxists towards postmodernism).
Worse, even if we change our cultural structures, we just will come out with different cultural structures, and there is no reason (in structuralism, which however is a thory about linguistics, not about reality as a whole) to say that one way of structuring reality is better than another way of structuring reality. Noooh! Cultural relativism!! perhaps even moral relativism!!1!
This is indeed a philosophically problematic theory, however it is evident that any description of reality (discourse) will be done from some cultural point of view (paradigm or structure), so at some point it is just one way to remember that our concepts are culturally determined, and anyway the underlying relity that is described doesn’t change, only the words/concepts used to describe it change, so relativism but up to a certain point.
If we take a pragmatist point of view, one could argue that while there are certainly many way to conceptualize stuff, generally we should prefer the one that lead to the best practical results (for example, using an utilitarian or similar approach to morality).
engels 05.02.24 at 8:55 pm
MrMr one problem with your explanation is that postmodernism is associated with poststructuralism, which was a critique of structuralism. Althusser (eg) was a structuralist Marxist, not a postmodernist.
SusanC 05.02.24 at 9:23 pm
@MrMister … but one of the key features of the postmodernists was “scepticism towards metanarratives” … e.g. scepticism of grand theories of history, i.e. they thought that the bits of Marxism that Marx lifted from Hegel were nonsense.
So there is a definite sense in which many of the postmodernists were arguing that Marxism was nonsense … though they may still have been leftists, in a more general sense,
SusanC 05.02.24 at 9:28 pm
E.g. some people argued that the Marxian revolution of the proletariat was just a Christian heresey (last judgement as a future historical event) in new guise, made little sense in its original Christian context – where it was a heresy – and even less sense when adopted by atheists who didn’t believe in Christ anyway.
See also Eric Vogelin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin
Alan White 05.02.24 at 10:22 pm
Mr. Mr. @80:
“If we take a pragmatist point of view, one could argue that while there are certainly many way to conceptualize stuff, generally we should prefer the one that lead to the best practical results (for example, using an utilitarian or similar approach to morality).”
On this we are in pretty complete agreement!
John Q 05.02.24 at 11:44 pm
The anti-trans part of the culture war has been a spectacular failure in Australia & NZ. They brought out Kellie-Jay Minshull from the UK for a speaking tour, but most of the people at her rallies were either Nazis (supporting her) or counter-protestors. By the time she got to NZ, the crowds were so hostile that she packed her bags and went home early.
Even leaving aside the Nazis (whose role is controversial) the anti-trans group is almost entirely made up of the anti-feminist Christian right. The handful who describe themselves as gender-critical feminists have tagged along behind the far-right, and discredited themselves in process.
We still have culture wars going on over climate, First Nations, refugees, Israel/Palestine etc but at nothing like the temperature in the US or UK. I don’t have a great explanation for this.
MisterMr 05.03.24 at 11:02 am
I should clarify that I’m not really all that inside the structuralist/post-structuralist/postmodernist thing myself.
When I was at uni, now some 25 years ago, I studied “scienze della comunicazione” (more or less Media studies).
We had Umberto Eco in the faculty, so a large part of our program was shifted towards semiotics, and though I never studied under Eco himself I ended up reading a lot of his theorical books (in particular, “Theory of Semiotics”, which is unbelieavably boring); but still I studied it as part of a degree in media studies, not a degree in philosophy.
So I did study some “structuralism” stuff, but I’m not really specialised in it.
Looking at wikipedia, I see that english Wiki has another definition of “structuralism”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism
Whereas the group of theories that I’m referring to is called “Structural linguistics”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_linguistics
although I always heard the term “Structuralism” referred to “Structural linguistics” and never knew that there was a sociological meaning to the term “Structuralism”; I assume this is because “Structural linguistics” was very big in Europe (or parts of it) but not so much in USA/UK.
@engels 81
Yes, but post-structuralists are to structuralists what post-keynesians are to keynesians: basically the same stuff with some twists.
The problem is that early structuralists had a very schematic idea about these semantic structures, so they implicitly tought that it was in theory possible to “map” these semantic structures e.g. through semantic trees of differences or similar (we are speaking of linguistics here, this might be less relevant to the general philosophical point). In reality words can have a lot of different meanings based on context etc., so “post structuralists” used more or less the same concepts of structuralists bat allowed for more cahotic “structures” and for more importance of contexts.
For example Eco, who was a structuralists but also a post-structuralists, relies a lot on Peirce and in inference, and on reader’s “interpretation” (still inferences) as a way to make these more fuzzy “structures” to work.
So on the whole I don’t think that the difference between structuralists and post-structuralists is that big; perhaps the “post-structuralists” were more in the direction of “relativism” than the original structuralists, but not by much.
@SusanC 82-83
Yes, skepticism about “metanarratives” is indeed the core of postmodernism, however it was a general tendency in the second part of 20th century to put these “big systems” into doubt (here in Italy this current is called “Pensiero Debole”, “weak thought”, and apparently is influenced by Nietszche, but there isn’t an english wikipedia page on this).
Vattimo, the main philosopher of “pensiero debole”, also likens Marxism to Christianity and says that these are similar metanarratives; I do not know this school very much.
But this is still quite close to the structuralist/post-structuralist current, I’m currently (trying to) read Eco’s “Kant and the Platypus” (I could read this stuff more easily 20 years ago, now I find it very hard) and he cites Nietzsche and Vattimo.
In general I don’t think there is really an opposition here, it is just that the “cultural relativism” that is implicit also in structuralism, but also in marxist ideological critique, can also be easily turned towards letish concepts.
PS: I sometimes read Brian Leiter, who is a Nietszche scholar, and it appears to me that he really hates this postmodernism stuff, so it is funny that the italian school of postmodernism says that its roots are in Nietszche, and that Eco uses N. in Kant and the Platypus as an example of philosopher of the “fuzzy meaning”, whereas Leiter seems to think that “fuzzy meaning” is a traitorous french invention.
I know jackshirt about N. so I can’t vouch for either interpretation.
@Alan White 84
Happy to be in agreement!
engels 05.03.24 at 12:51 pm
What’s the evidence that Britain having any kind of culture war? What are the British equivalents of Red vs Blue states? I think some people are using “culture war” to refer to any acrimonious political conflict that isn’t directly material. or even any attempt to start one by the right. I don’t think is at all helpful but referring to “the” culture war in the singular as other do clearly implies something more unified.
nastywoman 05.03.24 at 5:19 pm
‘What’s the evidence that Britain having any kind of culture war?’
Ruanda?
engels 05.03.24 at 6:16 pm
British media coverage of “the culture war”:
bekabot 05.03.24 at 6:51 pm
“What’s the evidence that Britain having any kind of culture war?”
Normans versus Saxons
and before that, Saxons versus Celts.
engels 05.03.24 at 7:26 pm
I would call Rwanda an example of an extreme and contentious right-wing policy that scapegoats a vulnerable minority (of which there are unfortunately many others in Britain and other countries going back long before “culture war” was discussed). As I said above culture war seems to me to connote something more pervasive and unified.
It’s not the American situation where half the country wants guns and gas guzzlers and the other half wants academic titles and abortions and there’s very little common ground between them anymore apart from a shared love of the mighty greenback.
SusanC 05.03.24 at 7:31 pm
@engels.
I think we had upthread a suggestion that a few very vocal people are objecting to trans rights (and puberty blockers for teens) but most voters just don’t care.
It’s easy to imagine a fairly principled argument for not caring, on the lines that it’s a tiny number of people getting puberty blockers (few hundred) and we appear to be in some sort of debate along the lines of, vast majority of people who actually had the treatment thought it worked for them, quite possibly it does work, but then there are questions as to how solid the experimental evidence is for safety and effectiveness. To which, the average voter may reasonably reply – this is really not what I want the government to prioritise its attention on.
Maybe it’s just a lot of noise from Guardian and Telegraph journalists, and the voters are just shrugging.
engels 05.04.24 at 12:50 am
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/21/uk-voters-frustrated-with-politicians-desperate-culture-war-tactics-survey-finds
KT2 05.04.24 at 5:39 am
Engles. nastywoman ‘What’s the evidence that Britain having any kind of culture war?’
Ruanda?”
I feel Britian / England / Scotland, Ireland x 2, Wales / United Kingdom haa a 7 (x exp7) set of ongoing culture wars. But in reading below, ignorance is bliss…, “Among all other voter segments only one in five people could actually explain what a culture war is.”. Which also imo puts left / right political designators into question. How does the 80% ignorance is bliss UK set translate to the US?
Quote from the Guardian, Mon 22 Apr 2024
“Voters have been left frustrated with “desperate” culture war tactics deployed by politicians and are prepared to punish those who use them at the ballot box, a survey has found.
…
“…and in a survey involving 2,000 voters overall.
[Graphic of MaxDiff results]
…
“The research noted that knowledge of the culture wars was highest among progressive activists who took part in online debates and were highly politically engaged. Among all other voter segments only one in five people could actually explain what a culture war is.”
(theguardian2024 apr 21
uk-voters-frustrated-with-politicians-desperate-culture-war-tactics-survey-finds)
Survey report
“Dousing the Flames…
“People told us in focus groups conversations that they are deeply concerned that the way politicians and campaigners are inflaming culture wars is undermining that British approach to change, playing into the hands of cultural arsonists on the right and left, and building resentment over, rather than acceptance of, change.
“In order to better meet the public’s expectations Britain’s leaders need to learn from the past. In Dousing the Flames, we highlight gay rights, gender equality and climate action as examples where leaders from politics and civil society have stewarded change in a way that has changed hearts and minds. ”
…
https://www.moreincommon.com/media/q43lim5p/dousing-the-flames-uk-mic-report-july-2021.pdf
“Culture wars in the UK”
“Is the UK headed for a US-style “culture war”? The Policy Institute is carrying out a major research programme to assess whether we are on that track, and to understand the particular drivers and features of cultural division in the UK.”
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/research-analysis/culture-wars-in-the-uk
The other 80% of Fox News become the 20%. Slowly.
ES: “But political agents are constantly trying to generate new associations and antipathies within and among us.”… after they struggle with the lyrics.
“Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked the candidates, “Why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now? What do you think it means?”
“Introducing the question, MacCallum said that Anthony’s “lyrics speak of alienation, of deep frustration with the state of government and of this country.” She helpfully added that “Washington, DC is about a hundred miles north of Richmond.”
“In their predictably vapid responses to MacCallum’s question last Wednesday, the GOP candidates followed her lead in focusing on “the state of government.” Neither she nor the candidates so much as mentioned the primary subject of the song’s opening verses:
[lyrics]
…
“That’s how the culture war works. Conservatives love what liberals hate, often in large part because liberals hate it, and that makes liberals hate it more, and everyone fights about it until they get bored and move onto whatever’s next.”
(jacobin 2023 09
oliver-anthony-billy-bragg-rich-men-north-of-richmond-union)
noone important 05.04.24 at 7:36 am
SusanC 83
“E.g. some people argued that the Marxian revolution of the proletariat was just a Christian heresey (last judgement as a future historical event) in new guise”
Funny, the other day I watched part of Tucker Carlson’s interview of Balázs Orbán, Hungarian intellectual. Orbán criticized liberalism, mentioning at one point Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History: to Fukuyama it’s the final struggle of “democracies” against “authoritarians”, and then — the end of history! Exact equivalent of the Marxist gospel!
John Q 05.04.24 at 7:50 am
Engels @87. It appears your question has been answered by Engels @93
nastywoman 05.04.24 at 11:57 am
@
‘It’s not the American situation where half the country wants guns and gas guzzlers and the other half wants academic titles and abortions and there’s very little common ground between them anymore apart from a shared love of the mighty greenback’.
So
It’s the British situation where half the country wanted their own ‘Britain FIRST Club (again) and the other half wanted to make vacations in Europe without having to pass some border checks and there’s very little common ground between them anymore apart from a shared love of the mighty British pound’?
nastywoman 05.04.24 at 12:51 pm
and if it’s true that @94 ‘only one in five people could actually explain what a culture war is
there was pretty good explanation from the Brish Kings College in 2021:
Where does the idea of a culture war come from?
The language of “culture wars” was first popularised by the sociologist James Davison Hunter in the early 1990s. Hunter used it to describe the deep-seated tension that had emerged in the US between “orthodox” and “progressive” worldviews. For him, the term not only captured a political struggle over cultural issues, but a conflict “over the meaning of America, who we have been in the past, who we are now, and perhaps more important, who we, as a nation, will aspire to become.
A “culture war” signals much more than disagreement. In Hunter’s conception, it describes a sense of conflict between two irreconcilable worldviews in what is “fundamentally right and wrong about the world we live in”, and a disconnect between “our most fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans” (Brits – Germans etc?) and “how and on what terms … [we] live together”.
Indeed, culture wars tend to be described as being fought on one or more “fault lines”. This is often measured by the extent to which attitudes are polarised on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and gun control, which tend to have either a strong moral or values basis, or rub against changing norms. But what differentiates a culture war from mere disagreement is the extent to which attitudes coalesce into utterly opposed worldviews with competing visions for the future, and the perceived threat to what either side considers the right or acceptable way to live one’s life.
engels 05.04.24 at 3:08 pm
No, because my whole point is that a culture war requires the participation of the wider population. Kemi Badenoch wanging on about woke mobs is not a culture war, as I understand it. Outside of Westminster/the internet, most of Britain is far more concerned about being able to afford a place to live or not having to extract their own teeth.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/24/one-woman-took-out-13-of-her-own-teeth-the-terrifying-truth-about-britains-dental-crisis
SusanC 05.04.24 at 3:28 pm
@no one important
Yeah, the Fukuyama style end of history stuff also gets dunked for being Christianity via Hegel.
engels 05.04.24 at 5:13 pm
I think most people are moderately pro-trans but don’t prioritise it above their material welfare. Which isn’t ideal if you’re trans, as Sophie-Jane said, but isn’t a culture war situation. I think the US “culture war” is rooted in the civil war so isn’t the destiny of other Anglo states.
engels 05.04.24 at 6:36 pm
Britons not bitterly polarised over trans equality, research finds
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/16/britons-not-bitterly-polarised-over-trans-equality-research-finds
Britain is much more liberal-minded than it was 40 years ago, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/21/britain-is-much-more-liberal-minded-than-is-was-40-years-ago-study-finds
LFC 05.04.24 at 6:57 pm
n. i. @95
Friedrich Engels (the person from whom the CT commenter has borrowed his moniker) suggested that the state eventually would wither away or atrophy after the revolution, whereas Fukuyama’s thesis in The End of History and the Last Man was that liberal democracy represented the final stage of political evolution and in that sense was “the end of history.” But the liberal democratic state doesn’t wither away in that vision; rather, it becomes the universal political form. Hence, contrary to your statement, Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis was not “the exact equivalent of the Marxist gospel.” It was if anything closer to the opposite.
anon/portly 05.04.24 at 10:04 pm
59 “Woke” is the exact opposite of relativism, since it implies awareness of a truth that has been suppressed, namely the existence of structural racism and its centrality in the US in particular.
One of the many things I’d associate with wokeness, from both direct and indirect experience, is an interest in structural racism, but in “truth” terms I think the Samantha Hancox-Li essay mentioned in the post is insightful. My impression is that the more woke left-wing people are promoting things like “police abolition is good” while the less woke left-wing people are promoting things like “exclusionary zoning is bad.”
Even more insightful is Liam Bright’s “White Psychodrama” essay, linked in the post (and below). I don’t agree with Bright’s economic and historical analysis in many places, but I think he comes up with a good (sympathetic) way to think about the larger culture war picture as it pertains to race:
Repenters and Repressers alike are responding to their failure to realize racially egalitarian group ideals, but one wants to adopt lines of behaviour that acknowledge this failure and alleviate guilt and the other wishes to suppress discussion of the failure. It is near enough psychologically impossible for the same person simultaneously do both, and it is thus difficult for Repressors and Repenters to share spaces and resources.
And…:
And, more generally, there has grown up a small but profitable industry of racial self-help gurus, who extract money from Repenters in exchange for helping them alleviate guilt without challenging the fundamental material inequalities underlying the situation.
Bright is wasted in philosophy, he should be in comedy (although this is in my view true in this instance, and a massively underappreciated point in general):
If their behaviour seems disappointing, then one ought to consider the circumstances which birthed them rather than engaging in moralistic personal critique.
John Q 05.05.24 at 12:53 am
@engels
Our disagreement is largely semantic. Even in the US, most people are disengaged from culture war politics (and politics in general) most of the time. And, as you say, that’s true in the UK as regards wars over trans rights. Still, the wars are being fought pretty hard within the political class, and the anti-trans side is doing much better in the UK than in Oz. Here, they have been consigned to the lunatic fringe with anti-vaxxers, sovereign citizens etc (overlapping groups).
@anon/portly you are using “woke” as a synonym for “radical” which confirms my point. There’s nothing relativist about “defund/abolish the police” (invariably the example produced to counter the obvious lunacy of the political right on everything). Bright is an example of the absurd psychobabble that characterises most “anti-woke” writing, whether it is openly rightwing (Jordan Peterson) or concern trolling (Jonathan Haidt).
engels 05.05.24 at 1:00 am
But what differentiates a culture war from mere disagreement is the extent to which attitudes coalesce into utterly opposed worldviews
Exacto.
noone important 05.05.24 at 10:00 am
103 “It was if anything closer to the opposite.”
It’s an exact parallel, if you prefer, or whatever word fits. Final fateful struggle leading to the eternal bliss. But I’m pretty sure you understood that. Feeling hurt for Fukuyama? I am sorry.
engels 05.05.24 at 10:55 am
the anti-trans side is doing much better in the UK than in Oz. Here, they have been consigned to the lunatic fringe
Like Germaine Greer?
David in Tokyo 05.05.24 at 12:38 pm
Someone wrote: “…My impression is that the more woke left-wing people…”
Point of order. There’s no such thing as a “woke person”. There is such a thing as a cruel and hurtful person who’s angry about being called cruel and hurtful and is pissed that they can’t be cruel and hurtful without being told to their face that they are cruel and hurtful.
If you hear someone complaining about “woke”, you’ve got yourself one of them cruel and hurtful types. It’s really quite simple.
bekabot 05.05.24 at 1:43 pm
“Repenters and Repressers alike are responding to their failure to realize racially egalitarian group ideals, but one wants to adopt lines of behaviour that acknowledge this failure and alleviate guilt and the other wishes to suppress discussion of the failure.”
Sorry, but this isn’t exactly true (apologies for the impolitesse). Repenters might be responding to their failure to realize racially egalitarian group ideals, but Repressers aren’t. Though it might be true that Repenters haven’t responded effectively or well, it’s still important to remember that what the Repressers traditionally have wanted to repress has never been grief or anguish over a failure to realize racially egalitarian ideals, because those ideals have never been characteristic of their group. (The opposite, if anything.) What the Repressers traditionally have wanted to repress has been the racially egalitarian ideals themselves. Any failure to put the ideals into practice is (to Repressers) not a defeat but a victory. I think it’s wrongheaded not to recognize it.
A willingness to listen to the other person’s point of view is all very well, but it can’t proceed indefinitely while coupled with a determination never to acknowledge what the other person’s point of view actually is. (“It is near enough psychologically impossible for the same person simultaneously do both”.) In the long term one of the two things is bound to injure the other. Eventually the innocence breaks down or the willingness stalls out. ‘White Psychodrama’ accurately describes the deadlock which results, but I think it’s unclear about the cause of the dilemma. The world described in ‘White Psychodrama’ is a world populated by well-intentioned white people and PoCs with murky motivations. Is that the real world, the world we live in? I suppose that’s a question every reader has to answer for him/herself. It certainly doesn’t get answered in that paper. (Sorry, again, to be brusque.)
anon/portly 05.05.24 at 6:40 pm
anon/portly you are using “woke” as a synonym for “radical” which confirms my point.
By “woke,” which I would prefer not to use – but what else is there – I mean someone who combines some sort of standard-issue liberal or left or progressive-left political views with a particular emphasis on what I (and many, I think) view as a quasi-religious (not radical) approach to “social justice.”
One thing I think Liam Bright gets very right is to use the term “self-help.” The term “social justice warrior” is kind of stupid, obviously, but if people said “social justice believer” would that be so inaccurate?
It’s somewhat personal to me; a random e-mail in my workplace inbox may contain all kinds of woke jargon, to no great purpose that I can fathom, but if it makes other people happy, and if people I greatly respect are fine with it, I am absolutely not complaining. Maybe it’s helping to achieve better things (seriously, I’m not being facetious).
John Q 05.06.24 at 5:15 am
Engels @108 “Like Germaine Greer?” Indeed, you couldn’t have offered a better illustration. Greer is treated as a serious intellectual in the UK, and with (mostly gentle) derision in her native Australia, which she left nearly 60 years ago. Glad we are in agreement on that one.
BTW, it’s truly bizarre that Britain apparently gives an “Australian of the Year” award.
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/this-is-why-germaine-greer-is-out-of-touch-20180122-h0m3p1.html