The Culture War Never Ends
Bari Weiss writes in the NYT today:
But what really takes my breath away is how out-of-touch the daily debates on the internet were — “the discourse,” as some of us were taught to call it in college. Among the things the pandemic has clarified for me is the decadence, as my colleague Ross Douthat has described it, of our old culture war. Many of the battles of the past decade now seem self-indulgent and stagnant; others a waste of time.
I would know. I spent a lot of time in the virtual arena where those fights took place. Could a white novelist imagine a black protagonist? How much can cultures legitimately borrow from one another without it being called stealing? Was a ban on plastic straws actually a critical step toward ending our reliance on the fossil fuel industry?
These now seem to me debates of a world of plenty, not one in which tens of millions of Americans are worried about how they’re going to afford groceries.
This pandemic demands something bigger of all of us. One of the things I hope it ushers in is a culture war worthy of this moment. Because there are fights worth having.
She lists some of them, and she’s right. It’s an excellent column.
But notice this story, from the same newspaper in the past week, (as pointed out by Patrick Deneen):
You can say that we need a feature celebrating butch and stud lesbians. But you can’t say that while at the same time saying that the culture war has been rendered pointless and obsolete by the pandemic. To be clear, and to be fair, the NYT is a big newspaper, and like any big newspaper, does not tell its writers to take a party line. Bari Weiss is not responsible for the editorial decisions of that part of the paper, nor are they responsible for Weiss’s opinions. Still, it’s interesting to note the contrast.
I too have been thinking about how small our culture war disputes have seemed in the face of the world-historical challenges facing us all. And yet, as James Lindsay reminds us in the interview he did with me, Covid will not kill social justice warriors. Excerpt:
RD: On my more hopeful days, I consider the possibility that this pandemic crisis (including economic collapse) will finally put the SJWs, critical theorists, and the rest, out to pasture. But when I realize how deeply embedded they are within institutions (governmental, corporate, media, academic, etc), I realize that they are going to find a way to use this crisis to their advantage when it is over. What do you think?
JL: The “Critical Social Justice” Theorists, as I have come to refer to them, are activists, first and foremost. You have to understand that. Their primary occupation isn’t being an academic, an administrator, a legislator, an HR director, an educator, or any other such profession you might find them in; it’s being an activist and making their professional role about doing their activism. Once you realize this, your question kind of answers itself, doesn’t it? Of course they’re going to find ways to use this crisis to their advantage. They go around inventing problems or dramatically exaggerating or misinterpreting small problems to push their agenda; why wouldn’t they do the same in a situation where there’s so much chaos and thus so much going wrong. My experience so far is that people are really underestimating how much of this there will be and how much of it will be institutionalized while we’re busy doing other things like tending to the sick and dying and trying not to lose our livelihoods and/or join them ourselves.
It’s very important to understand that “Critical Social Justice” isn’t just activism and some academic theories about things. It’s a way of thinking about the world, and that way is rooted in critical theory as it has been applied mostly to identity groups and identity politics. Thus, not only do they think about almost nothing except ways that “systemic power” and “dominant groups” are creating all the problems around us, they’ve more or less forgotten how to think about problems in any other way. The underlying assumption of their Theory–and that’s intentionally capitalized because it means a very specific thing–is that the very fabric of society is built out of unjust systemic power dynamics, and it is their job (as “critical theorists”) to find those, “make them visible,” and then to move on to doing it with the next thing, ideally while teaching other people to do it too. This crisis will be full of opportunities to do that, and they will do it relentlessly. So, it’s not so much a matter of them “finding a way” to use this crisis to their advantage as it is that they don’t really do anything else.
For the “social justice”- oriented editors and writers at The New York Times, and everywhere in journalism, the pandemic crisis is not an opportunity to step back and reconsider their priorities. It’s an opportunity to keep pushing the agenda while their opponents are busy fighting civilizational catastrophe. And if you object to this, or resist it in any way, they will accuse you of being obsessed with fighting the culture war in a time of crisis.
The diversity bureaucrats at collapsing colleges will be the last ones to go. The Grievance Studies departments will fight like Japanese soldiers making their apocalyptic last stand in the tunnels of Okinawa.
By the way, according to HBO, now is a great time for a reality series in which a trio of drag queens shows up in America’s small towns to liberate the oppressed locals from their tired old values:
We could all use a little love.
#WereHere, a real-life series starring @thatonequeen, @itsshangela, & @eurekaohara premieres April 23. pic.twitter.com/qNGEK8mUmV— HBO (@HBO) March 20, 2020
See what I mean? It never stops.
UPDATE: A reader sends this meme:
He also sends a link to a 2010 Paul Kingsnorth essay on Roman decadence. He’s talking about decadence in a Douthatian sense. Excerpt:
I wonder if there has ever been a generation, in any civilisation, which didn’t think, to a greater or a lesser degree, that its society was decadent, falling apart, betrayed by hopeless leaders, suffering from a failing system. Perhaps not. But the fact that this may be the case doesn’t disguise another fact: that it is sometimes true. Sometimes societies are noticeably in decline; sometimes a cultural decadence does set in. When it does, ferociously insisting otherwise may become a necessary survival mechanism, but it doesn’t arrest the slide.
This set me wondering about the society I live in. In some ways – ways which we have explored here before – it seems that an inevitable decline is clearly underway. This is the decline of the industrial world: the world that has held sway globally for two centuries. We’ve looked at this in economic and environmental and political terms: climate change, peak oil, ecocide, the collapse of political and economic narratives; the evidence is all there.
It is easy, in some ways, to point to things like climate change, peak oil or deforestation, or even the hardening of the democratic veins with corporate fat, as signs of an imminent collapse or decline, because at least to some extent these things are clearly measurable. But what about more malleable, fuzzy, cultural pointers? What about decadence? Because if decline is real, it should surely be obvious in the culture we make.
The cultural elites who make television hold drag queens up as guides to the moral life. They really do. I saw a clip from this HBO series the other day in which one of the drag queens talked about healing the lives of the small town people to whom they minister. This is also the point of Drag Queen Story Hour, you know: to teach children about diversity and all that.
In the end, there’s no getting away from the fact that we live in a society in which the elites believe that one way to cure the proles of their horrible values is to teach men to dress like caricatures of women, and teach everyone else, especially children, to cheer for that.
” We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful,” said C.S. Lewis, of the modern age. We will not ride out this catastrophe on the backs of these repugnant geldings.
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