From the very outset, the term ‘culture wars’ was misleading. Not that it wasn’t apropos — for, indeed, as all could see, there were different cultures contending over not just authority but power in America, many cultures in one manner but, in another, at rock bottom, only two. The Counterculture, that was one, and whatever the counterculture was against — possibly ‘the Establishment’, but that was a pointy-headed, square domain that essentially only ran the Culture, just as, in intimately related fashion, it ran the economy and the regime. The problem with the Establishment, despite the Dionysian thrust of the Counterculture at its height, wound up being one of mere access; let in The Marginalized, the logic revealed itself to say, and the kinks and cramps in the Establishment lifestyle would work themselves out. Given the right political inputs — a steadily expanding and deepening regime of equal rights — the cultural outputs could be trusted to emerge at an adequate speed, in an adequate way.
Andrew Sullivan has been prominent in advancing this kind of narrative. His latest reaffirmation comes in the form of an extended rebuttal of sorts to that old culture warrior Pat Buchanan. Buchanan, as is his wont, has penned an op-ed lately which points out that the dominant or regnant or primary American Culture — take your pick of terms — is going away, and that a large number of people — a majority — are unhappy about it. For Buchanan, to put two and two together is to be frank about the racial aspect of cultural change in America. To be blunt, he concludes, what’s still recognizably and memorably white American culture is being dismantled and swept away; but lots of white Americans aren’t simply going to let it roll over and die. It’s not a particularly new or subtle story, but it does call us to deal in something other than euphemisms when talking about the culture wars. (Glenn Beck, by contrast, refused to explain what he meant by ‘white culture’, ostensibly because the media would trap him into saying something that could be sliced, diced, decontextualized, and used against conservatives everywhere. I think that may be a risk someone in Beck’s position must steel himself to run.)
But in a decisive respect, when it comes to the culture wars, race is just a red herring.
Andrew himself eloquently testifies to what I’ve said elsewhere (I think back at Culture11) before: culturally speaking, no group is more American than black Americans. (Of course, that’s not to say every other group is less American!) And it’s easy to agree nowadays that the majority white culture in America, ‘the’ American culture, failed woefully to bring black America into the promised land. (Of course, that’s not to say many black Americans didn’t struggle to bring themselves there — and succeed.) Recall, however, that the ‘civil rights era’ — don’t call it the ‘race wars’ — culminated, and collapsed, with a profound divide among black Americans. Some wanted to take their rightful place in ‘the’ American culture. Others wanted out. Some were fighting for the culture, for its full realization. Others were fighting against it.
But even those fighting against it, fighting to break away or secede from ‘the’ American culture, were not fighting against culture. Think of the Nation of Islam. Then think of Lou Reed’s post-ironic usage [vileness alert] of America’s blackness, and of blacks themselves: not to mount a counterculture but an anti-culture.
Here we see the problem. The culture wars are the playing out of a fateful, momentous, confusing, and difficult argument in America: an argument over what culture is. Not a culture, not the culture, but culture itself — the foundational, necessary elements and structures of social order. Go back to James Madison and you see a certainty that American social order, including our political order, requires a religious culture. Even then, that certainty wasn’t so certain that it hadn’t to be spoken. Things have only gotten more explict and less certain since then. But one thing is clear. The anti-culture which the counterculture spawned or gave the opportunity of a lifetime used race/power as simply a weapon against the real foe of those against culture — religion/authority. And the foolish white racists of yesterday failed to realize that choosing to fight over the former meant choosing to lose the fight over the latter.
This is all the more unfortunate because the only way to completely eradicate institutional racism in the United States happened to be extraconstitutionally. Of course, it could in theory have been accomplished constitutionally. But it wasn’t. In part, this is because too many people had run out of patience. But in part, it was because of happenstance. Swedish sociology was in vogue; Earl Warren was Chief Justice; so a desegregation ruling was handed down that offered little more than a Just So story. Conservatives are still rightly distraught about the way the civil rights era taught us that being morally right licensed the dictatorial rule of poetry and discredited the institutional rule of law. The tragedy is that defending the rule of law and moral authority required American citizens to act on civil rights in a way too many Americans simply didn’t want to — even religious Americans.
So conservative claims about what culture is — what it must be in order to maintain social order — had to be issued out of an awkward and self-defeating race/power milieu. Conservatives were helped, however, by the patent brutality and nihilism of the anti-culture. You don’t need to go to church to reflexively avoid, or condemn, the revelry in sex/violence at the public heart of the anti-culture. Indeed, neoconservatism got its start precisely by offering a brilliant explanation about why the not-so-religious person in America had to defend culture, and therefore the American culture, root and branch. That term I’ve been using, religion/authority, was pried apart by the first-wave neocons; the status and sticking power of that forward slash have been the bone of internecine contention on the right ever since.
This is not the place for the important but long detour into the roots and fate of the initial neoconservative severance of religion and authority. The crucial point is that the culture wars will not die because they are at last being revealed to be what they have been all along: a war over culture, with some in favor of culture and some against. For culture to be or for it not to be, that is the question; all else leads back to that question.
That fact is made all the more sobering by the rise of ‘cultural libertarianism’. Kerry Howley’s declaration that we’re all cultural libertarians now leads freedom-loving Americans down a primrose path: you think you’re headed for the ultimate in convenience, yes-saying to everything so long as it’s optional; but you wind up confronting the monstrously non-optional question of whether cultural libertarianism is itself a counterculture or an anti-culture, a merely different way of running a culture or a project dedicated to the assassination of culture. I have to close here by acknowledging that the all-too-clever and seemingly casual agnosticism of the good cultural libertarian on this question — who are you to tell me I ‘need’ to have an answer? — is in the interim much less monstrous than any fateful reckoning with the full implications, one way or the other, of the to-be-or-not-to-be question about culture. But, as Hamlet bade Horatio remind us, that the interim is ours is cold comfort, and nobody ever lived long or prospered mad but north-north-west. We promise ourselves we know hawk from handsaw in a southerly wind. But that’s a bourgeois, not a bohemian rhapsody — the ultimate in having your cake and eating it too, and a high-wire bit of theater with no more staying power than the Prince of Denmark.
October 23rd, 2009 | 9:43 pm
Truth, I think.
Where I’m at, I used to be more of a political libertarian, I realize in retrospect largely because of a whiggish assumption that was the best way to see my culture (cultural libertarianism/anti-culture/culture of death/culture of critique/whatever) triumph. I’m less confident about that now, in no small way thanks to writers like you (after all, you got all the right inputs yet came out on the wrong side), and now I’m leaning more towards a d’Annunzian charisma-powered libertine-oriented state.
And I’d think of that more as a counter-cultural than an anti-cultural aspiration – after all, d’Annunzio himself, in Fiume, was establishing a culture, with definite values (virginity bad, adventure good), with rituals and holidays and a literary canon supporting them, and in bohemian artists a sort of priesthood class. He opened jails and burned criminal records, but in pardoning violators he established himself as a ruler in the same way others did by prosecuting them. So that strikes me as a fully functional culture, capable of legitimating a political order. Perhaps you could call out its cultural credentials for making no pretense to be built on the eternal and true, but rather whim and charimsa, but wherever cultures claim to be built on the eternal and true it’s always just the ossified whim of dead charismatics anyway.
And that’s kinda why I have a hard time understanding how you could use a term – “anti-culture” to mean some sort of negation of all and any culture, and then go on to talk about “the revelry in sex/violence at the public heart of the anti-culture”. How does an absence of culture have cultural content at its public heart? How does it even have a public heart? And are you sure you’re not just falling into the classic habit of using “culture” for “civilization” for “Christendom”?
October 24th, 2009 | 8:41 am
[...] call “the melting pot.” See Sully here, here, here, here, here, and here. Also James Poulos. Ann Althouse disagrees [...]
October 24th, 2009 | 11:53 am
bullshytt, methinks.
racist and religious prejudice against hispanics, asians, buddhists and muslims and hindus and atheists and buddhists wholly invalidates your argument, Lieutenant.
it isn’t racism against blacks thats is driving the WECs into the cultural-dominance sunset……it is blind, pig-ignorant, educationless fear of the Other.
October 24th, 2009 | 12:08 pm
also, too.
It is not about racism…it is wholly about WEC religion….
Evolutionary theory of culture dictates that successful culture assimilates sub-cultures.
American culture is universalist.
The white protestants that founded this nation and once made up 99% of the electorate.
Now WEC culture is rejected by the body of contemporary American culture.
WECs are disenfranchised from popmusic, academe, science, hollywood, teh MSM….in short, all the cultural authorities of 21st century America.
October 24th, 2009 | 12:12 pm
It isn’t even a war at all…it is an evolutionary event, like the Ice Age or the extinction event at the K-T boundary.
The cultural and demographic landscape of America has changed.
October 24th, 2009 | 12:17 pm
Fascinating James!
The ‘culture wars’ reflect the effort on the part of man to recover a divinely ordered process long abandoned by modernity. Having destroyed the old myth, the one that spoke of the Logos, man seeks to describe a new one. The problem is that our consciousness is already noetically luminous and does not require a new myth, thus the ideological disorder.
The ‘culture wars’ represent the continuation of Hegel’s (presumed) efforts to transform the Platonic metaxy into the “dialectics of an imaginary consciousness.”
October 24th, 2009 | 12:27 pm
[...] UPDATE #2: James Poulos [...]
October 24th, 2009 | 1:15 pm
You leave out the tension within religious culture between the intellectual strain that Madison and the (largely Deist) other founding fathers represented, and the ignorant bible-thumping of Falwell and Dobson. Unless you can take religion back from the Young Earth Creationists, you’ll lose, and you’ll deserve to lose.
October 24th, 2009 | 1:47 pm
What on earth are you talking about? The “culture wars” is about two competing cultural paradigms that have always struggled in the Americas. What Buchanan is defending is the culture that brought us genocide against indigenous peoples, slavery of Africans, multinational corporations killing the planet and poisoning populations for profit, a military industrial and prison industrial complex that destroys souls as much as bodies. It is a system that never would have been emerged without the help of Christianity–at least a certain nasty brand of Christianity that one could trace back to Calvin or maybe even Constantine. The best that could be said about this culture is that it has produced a great deal of scientific knowledge and it does not sacrifice cross-eyed virgins.
The “counter-culture” is really about liberation from this monstrous order. It is not just against culture; rather, it is about liberation from an evil system. At root, this counter-culture is about a new social order, which is working to rise out of the ashes of this modern Babylon. This order is spiritual, as it sees the earth, sovereignty of indigenous peoples, female power over their own sexuality, etc., as sacred. The authority comes from below, from the people and the earth that sustains them, not from a sky god. The issue is that this emergent system must integrate Christianity within its social fabric while finding ways to deal with the excesses that arise during the interim from one social order to the next.
October 24th, 2009 | 3:55 pm
Ima say this again, Lieutenant.
You are not getting it.
There is no “Culture War”.
There is only cultural and demographic evolution.
No religio/demographic group can fight cultural evolution.
The WECs that once defined this country’s culture are dead as the dinosaurs after the extinction event at the K-T boundary.
It is just the tiny little brains in their hips haven’t gotten the message yet.
October 24th, 2009 | 7:21 pm
While I agree with the idea that the Civil Rights Movements have suffered certain major failings because of “impatience,” I also am careful with how much purchase I give this critique. Because, if you think about it for half a minute, it is incredibly condescending.
October 24th, 2009 | 11:04 pm
The problem is that when you start writing and speaking about religion in terms of “culture” the game already is up — you’ve instrumentalized religion, making it the ally of some political/social/etc order and only incidentally about anything else (such as, to take an example, the salvation of souls). This always has been my problem with Rieff, most sociologists, most neocons, and more — they always cared more about religion’s “function” than its truth (or rather, the truth of any particular religion). Mainly, it kept the masses in line. Appeals to the function of religion lose all their force when those making them don’t buy religion. Most people have pretty decent bullshit detectors. I’m not arguing for some kind of Christian (or Jewish, etc) political quietism, of course. Just observing that those who have the most social or political use for religion seem to have the least amount of personal use for it. Weird.
I also have to second Wiseguise’s comments. And I must note that its awfully peculiar to associate various Supreme Court decisions with the breakdown of the rule of law but not do so in connection with the whole regime of white supremacy, segregation, and most importantly racial terrorism in the South leading up to those SCOTUS decisions. Surely the latter did as much damage as the former to the rule of law, no? Have you ever read what the (deep) South was like in the 40s, 50s, and 60s? Pick up “I’ve Got the Light of Freedom” when you get the chance, and let me know your thoughts on “the rule of law” then. Its unbelievable that Earl Warren, rather than the roaming white vigilantes who lynched blacks, is emblematic of the breakdown of the rule of law in this post.
October 25th, 2009 | 12:07 am
Well written, if arguable, and, sure, a sound engagement with the question. But Lou Reed’s “I Wanna Be Black” as post-ironic and vile? The vileness I suppose will depend on the auditor, but it’s hard to see what’s “post” about the irony: the song is a both a satire of pop cultural, and largely racist, fantasies of blackness and a recognition of the attraction of these fantasies to their insecure, white projectors, hence their creation. “I don’t want to be a fucked up middle-class white college student anymore”: yeah, that’s not Lou speaking, but Lou speaking in character, right?! The aggressive sexually transgressive nature of the song is of course the reason for its success as a work of art, and it’s volatility in terms of political correcteness, but that I think speaks to Lou’s willingness to plunge without preamble into the cum-stuck knots of the psyche that drive racism.
October 25th, 2009 | 3:10 am
I honestly didn’t understand what you are saying. Please explain your thesis, what’s the point of this?
October 25th, 2009 | 10:18 am
Senescent: for starters, I follow Nietzsche in recognizing an antagonism between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. But obviously part of the viciousness of anti-culture is in its strategic pretensions to mere counterculture. It is very hard to enlist people into a nakedly anti-cultural project, at least until you get the ball rolling. Consider the ‘career arc’ of the Nazi party. One separate but related subject I didn’t treat above is the question of whether culture, and not just counter-culture, can lead the way to anti-culture. Answering this question leads us to consider how, say, 19th-century Europeans viewed ancient Asian despotic regimes, especially Egypt and China. Story for another day. Basic question is how you prevent D’Annunzio from being overthrown by De Sade. Perhaps Nietzsche’s greatest error was in failing to endorse the ban on orgiasm as the first noble law.
Matoko: I can’t credit your line of argument until you deal effectively with Nietzsche’s critique of ‘evolution’, namely, there is no correlate between ‘fitness’ and ’success’, and oftentimes precisely the strongest and smartest die soonest. Your beloved evo theory of culture sounds to me like Adam Smith in a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy. With despotic results! Respond to Nietzsche’s attack, then get back to me.
Mike: the tension you identify is an important one. I’m afraid I had to bundle it into that ‘long detour’ set aside above. But I do think my explicit mention of Madison hints at your concern. The Deist or Providentialist position of the FFs seems to me of a piece with their aristocratic stoicism — and, again, quite a comfortable stoicism at that. One story that needs to be told, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, concerns the character of nondogmatic Protestant faith in America — beyond the simplistic coverage of the ‘new Deists’ that we’re starting to get, beyond the ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’ we also hear about, and indeed beyond the fervent, well-organized evangelicalism we know so well.
Prajna: I think your detailed description of your counterculture fits pretty comfortably within my theoretical sketch of counterculture, which is against THE culture without being against CULTURE period. But I have to add that your characterization of Pat Buchanan as a devotee of corporatism and empire is absolutely off the mark!
Wiseguise: You’re right, which is why my line of criticism came down extra hard on our racists.
Gabe: The point is that we talk about the ‘culture wars’ a lot without really asking what we’re talking about. We don’t reflect enough on the difference between an attack on THE culture and an attack on CULTURE period. Although these two things are related, as I suggest above in reply to Senescent, they are clearly distinct. People who think the culture wars might be over or ending soon are wrong because they think the culture wars have ended or will end in the triumph of the counterculture. But the counterculture itself is a culture. Some libertarians confuse us by artfully but awkwardly staying agnostic about the question ‘Is cultural libertarianism against THE culture, or against culture itself?’ Our broader confusion stems from a lack of conversation about what culture itself is — probably because we are uncomfortable with the sobering line of thought we’re led down in exploring that question’s answers. The first-wave neocons opened this conversation with limited success. They annoyed some people, won some strategic allies who practiced religion in a way they didn’t, and ultimately lost the battles of the ’70s-’80s culture wars, and their later-wave heirs wound up disenchanting a lot of religious allies who expected a significant political payoff for their loyalty and labor. Does this help?
October 25th, 2009 | 11:56 am
There is no “Culture War”.
There is only cultural and demographic evolution.
No religio/demographic group can fight cultural evolution.
I’m with Matoko Chan. The anything-goes folks vs. the honor the ancestors-folks have been fighting a war that has little relevance to culture or to the future of culture. Culture happens. And cultures die or at least experience winter seasons, which perhaps will give way after a while to a springtime. The winter season of the 14th century gave way to the springtime of the fifteenth.
I’m with Barzun. The West is decadent. Decadence happens, and like winter it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It just doesn’t have much spiritual energy anymore–the spirit has gone underground, so to speak, into the soul’s interiority. And since the whole movement of salvation history has been a movement from outer to inner, from given to chosen, from the law given on Sinai to the law written in the heart, it’s understandable that the outer trappings of Christian Civilization should become emptied and less relevant for the living of the faith.
I’m with Nietzsche. He was just observing what had become inarguable. Not that God was dead, but that He wasn’t to be found in cultural/civilizational forms out there. Sure the forms exist, but with a few exceptions these forms have as much relevancy to the spirit that once animated them as the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade has to the spirit St. Patrick. They are dead forms animated by the undead energies of nostalgia, jingoism, and other vulgar passions. Conservatives simply don’t want to face up to this truth, and keep fighting this battle for a zombie culture, and in doing so are looking for love in all the wrong places–out there in the mainstream culture. They are fighting for the preservation of cultural forms that were shaped by spiritual cultural energies that simply no longer exist.
Look. I’m a trinitarian Christian. I go to mass and I believe in the real presence. I see the mass as the central event, the time when we reenact Christ’s living into our death so that we may in turn die into his Life. I look forward to the retrieval of a kind of sensibility that naturally understands the world sacramentally, numinously, and I believe that’s in our future, but it’s not how we commonly experience the world now. And that retrieval, if it happens, will not depend on the preservation of medieval forms or some dream of Christendom’s return. All that matters is that the mass be celebrated, that men and women of conscience respond to the ubiquity of grace that they, we all, swim in, and culture will take care of itself.
Focus your energies where they might actually bear fruit. This culture war business is futile nonsense. Let Christians live deeply their Christianity and let them find ways to renew the face of the earth, and if they do it, not through some head trip bent on preserving the unpreservable, but in radical trust that God has a future for us, all shall be well.
October 25th, 2009 | 3:57 pm
I can’t credit your line of argument until you deal effectively with Nietzsche’s critique of ‘evolution’,
Why?
Nietzsche was a First Culture Intellectual. All hat and no cattle.
I am a Third Culture intellectual.
Niettzsche is irrelevant.
October 25th, 2009 | 4:04 pm
Conservatives simply don’t want to face up to this truth, and keep fighting this battle for a zombie culture, and in doing so are looking for love in all the wrong places–out there in the mainstream culture. They are fighting for the preservation of cultural forms that were shaped by spiritual cultural energies that simply no longer exist.
IOW, conservatives are battling an enroaching glacier with pitchforks and torches.
Fail.
October 26th, 2009 | 12:23 am
Two people can have culture.
Culture makes language. Man makes culture. Language makes man.
Subculture is a product. It can haz barcode. And “New and Improved” sticker.
The culture wars are merely the busybodies doing something other than striking at the root. Probably because it’s too easy to latch onto one’s assumed antithesis; that’s how it went down in high school.
Left, right, left. Freedom, tyranny. Pluralism vs institutionalism. It’s not the Division vs Unity. There is no unity. Without pluralism (me, the rope, the weight, the non-frictionless ground), unity collapses into nothing, deception collapses into unity, relativism collapses into deception, reality collapses into relativism.
It is not a noble unity vs a reckless individualism. It’s the living vs the nihilism that hides behind unity.
Culture. You can make your own culture. Say hello to your neighbors. It’s that easy.
October 26th, 2009 | 11:43 pm
James said:
“namely, there is no correlate between ‘fitness’ and ’success’,”
YES, YES! I definitely tried to convince several people at Ephemerisle of this as my most fundamental concern with the seasteading project, but was largely met with blank stares.
Matoko: You’re going to have to unpack your most recent comment a little if you want me to be able to understand what you mean.
October 27th, 2009 | 2:16 am
You can’t see half my comments…..they are moderated….but basically, Nietzsche on evolution is as valueless as Freud on social brain hypothesis.
No science involved.
November 4th, 2009 | 7:14 am
“I can’t credit your line of argument until you deal effectively with Nietzsche’s critique of ‘evolution’, namely, there is no correlate between ‘fitness’ and ’success’, and oftentimes precisely the strongest and smartest die soonest”.
The ’strongest and smartest’ is an insufficient definition of darwinian fitness. The fittest variation is the one that leaves the most surviving descendants. So it is possible to be too smart or too strong, if that is at the expense of other vital considerations, like breeding rate or survival of your children.
In other words it is a matter of cost vs. benefits.
e.g. Having a large brain carries a large metabolic cost. What does it profit you to have the largest brain, if your children die in the next famine, because even with all your smartness, you can’t find enough food to feed your energy-hungry brains?
Likewise, for a given resource budget, you can have bigger muscles or more children. Natural selection favors the variation that best balances the constraints of your environment, and leaves the most surviving descendants. That variation is the fittest.
So when it comes to smartness, or strength, or any other single, instrumental consideration; there is always a point of diminishing returns.
Natural selection favors the variant that, in your particular environment, maximises the number of surviving descendants.
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