Additional Notes on Culture War

"each of us present and accessible to every other person in the world"

Fernand Léger, Men in the City (1919)

I closed out the last session with a question.

Whether you’re an urban liberal who’d like to stop a school library in a county that went more than 80% for Trump from yanking LGBT-themed kids’ books from its shelves, or a rural rightoid who thinks child protective services should be sic’d on metropolitan parents who take their kids to Drag Queen Story Time, the fact is that you’d like to impose your will on people far away from you—people with whom you’re likely to never have any unmediated contact, people whose kids will never play with your kids, people to whom you don’t intend to be beholden in any way.

I can think of a word for that sort of attitude. Any guesses?

The word I had in mind was: imperialist.

Now hold on a second. Maybe imperialism gets a bad rap. Maybe it’s not as categorically odious as it’s often made out to be. If you’re of the mind that the freedom to choose and to love a same-sex partner without fear of being made into a pariah, going to prison, or getting murdered is a universal human right, local cultural norms be damned, then it’s probably a good thing when the United States wields its economic clout to influence African countries’ domestic affairs. If you’re an ardent believer in the equality of women with men, then you could probably see an upside when we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, overthrew its government, and tried to build it back up as a democratic client state.

Sometimes strangers far away from us are guided by bad ideas and adhere to backwards practices. Sometimes they need to be corrected. And since people tend to be attached to their own ways of doing things and don’t appreciate outsiders telling them they need to straighten up and fly right, sometimes they need a few screws put to them before they’ll agree to see the light—or at least get off to a constructive start in acting as though they do.

It’s fine to feel this way. As Aristotle says, you’re a Political Animal. But don’t pretend that you don’t wish to assert your own will and thrust your own values onto complete strangers whom you’re never going to work with, live nearby, or speak to—even though you’re aware of them.¹

It’s undeniably pleasant to imagine a time when the idea of them no longer leaves so bitter a taste in your mouth, and when the ephemeral flashes of news blurbs, images, and video clips relating to them are less obnoxious than they are currently. It would be really nice, we might admit, if they would just go away.

But we were talking about the culture wars in the United States—and that’s something altogether different, isn’t it? We’re not talking about strong-arming foreigners into changing their laws to suit our own moral sensibilities, but of an acrimonious debate about our own national character.

But when we compare apples to oranges, we’re still talking about fruit.

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In February 2006, the latest reprints of Muhammed caricatures originally published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten sparked violent protests across the world.² My friend Nickie—who had studied abroad in Senegal the year before and would convert to Islam and marry the man she dated in Dakar by the end of the decade—was livid.

“I hope they’re happy. This is their fault. Now people are dead because of them.”

She was referring to the cartoonists and the newspapers.

“Come on,” I said. “People in Afghanistan are killing each other over a cartoon published in a foreign country, and it’s somehow the fault of the artists and the publishers? Don’t you think it’s unreasonable to say that a Danish newspaper ought to censor itself lest people a thousand miles away whip themselves into a violent rage? A mob set fire to Norway’s embassies in Syria and Lebanon because a Norwegian newspaper printed something they didn’t like, and you’re trying to tell me the newspaper is in the wrong here?”

Honestly I can’t remember whether I said it or just thought it. If I did contest the issue with Nickie, I definitely phrased it more cautiously. When she got truly angry about something, provoking her just for the sake of argument was unwise.

In retrospect, Nickie was just being realistic. She’d spent several months immersed in a majority-Muslim third-world country. She had firsthand experience of a fairly traditional Islamic religious experience and lifestyle (or a regional variant thereof). And we were having this conversation during the so-called War on Terror, when Muslims around the world felt (not without good reason) that the Christo-secular West had it out for them. When the Jyllands-Posten cartoons depicting Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban or endowed with devillish horns kept getting reprinted in newspaper after newspaper, in country after country (as much for the sake of reporting on the controversy as to assert Western dominance and/or reaffirm liberal values of free expression, depending on who you asked), Nickie understood how it was all going to come across to people in the Islamic sphere: the United States and Europe were giving them two pairs of middle fingers from behind a sheet of bulletproof glass and saying deal with it.³

Nickie was talking about how people were behaving and could have been expected to behave in light of the circumstances. I, on the other hand, was more interested in talking about how they should behave. Naïve? Sure. Imperialistic? Oh, yes. Why do these backwater religious-freak bumpkins insist on acting as though their sacred beliefs actually are sacred? Hopefully it won’t be long before they join us here in the twenty-first century and figure out that this kind of nonsense isn’t acceptable for civilized people.

We should point out that it wasn’t only the invidious right-of-center populist tabloids propagating the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. In the first days of February 2006, just before the protests took a violent turn, several of Europe’s center-left papers of record were reprinting them too: France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Die Zeit, Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat, etc. On February 6, the progressive United States magazine The Nation published an article by Gary Younge (editor-at-large for The Guardian from 2015–20) titled “The Right to Be Offended.” While he excoriates the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric investing Western conversation about the cartoons and the violent reactions to them, and points out that European Muslims are among the “weakest sections” of their societies and have reason to feel under siege by Christo-secular majorities, it seems he felt obligated to stress his own commitment to free speech:⁴

There seems to be almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive. There should also be universal agreement that the paper has a right to publish them without fear of violent reprisal. When it comes to freedom of speech, the liberal/left should not sacrifice its values one inch to those who seek censorship on religious grounds.

In 2010, The Daily Show—the voice of a generation of American liberals—published its second book, titled: Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race. Laid out in an infographic format, the book’s chapter on religion included three two-page spreads about the Abrahamic religions. At the top of each was the name, a picture, and a short description of its founded. Judaism was founded by a Moses with a copious grey beard. Christianity was founded by Jesus, sporting a trim brown beard. And Islam was founded by Muhammed, who was represented by a black silhouette with a caption reading something like: nobody has any idea what Muhammed might have looked like. The central blurb about Islam consists of a lot of fulsome praise about how peaceful and beautiful and really peaceful a faith it is, appended with a parenthetical little psst! asking readers to “meet me in the image credits” in the back of the book, where the author can safely “speak” on the topic with more candor. The joke—and remember, this was coming from a clique of television comedians who excelled at reading the mood-barometer of center-left Americans and calibrating their humor and subject matter accordingly—was that spoofing Muhammed and Islam were out of bounds because some Muslims responded all out of proportion to a good-natured ribbing.

Suffice to say that over the next decade, the prevailing attitude among liberals shifted. I’d be curious to know if anyone has written a history of it—cataloged the books, the articles, the lectures, the conversations with Muslim activists and intellectuals, the social media chatter, the institutional pressures, the changes of the guard among the the professional and media classes, and so on—but now the prevailing attitude among largely nonreligious producers and consumers of popular media in the United States is that depictions of Muhammed, whatever the intent, are outré. Not because they’re blasphemous (the term has no meaning to the irreligious; it can only describe a reaction observed in other people) or because they might needlessly provoke extremists at home and abroad, but because they’re just plain in bad taste. Like blackface, they have come to be regarded as intrinsically never-good. This is a remarkable change, especially in a country whose Muslim population amounts to less than two percent of the total.⁵

Sometimes the province is capable of exerting more control over the metropole than we might expect.

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McLuhan’s global village can be a useful heuristic device for getting one’s head around the situation in which we’re placed by globalized trade, jet travel, and electronic media and appreciating the extent to which it differs from every prior epoch of human existence. But as a metaphor it is imperfect—as are all metaphors. In some respects it’s as though we’re experiencing an urbanization of the world in which different nations, cultures, cities, and hinterlands becoming the districts of a planetwide metropolis.

Louis Wirth’s old remarks on urbanism are instructive here:

Large [populations] involve...a greater range of individual variation. Furthermore, the greater number of individuals participating in a process of interaction, the greater is the potential differentiation between them. The personal traits, the occupations, the cultural life, and the ideas of the members of an urban community may, therefore, be expected to range between more widely separated poles than those of rural inhabitants…

Characteristically, urbanites meet one another in highly segmental roles. They are, to be sure, dependent upon more people for the satisfactions of their life-needs than are rural people and thus are associated with a greater number of organized groups, but they are less dependent upon particular persons, and their dependence upon others is confined to a highly fractionalized aspect of the other's round of activity...The contacts of the city may indeed be face to face, but they are nevertheless impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental...

Diverse population elements inhabiting a compact settlement thus tend to become segregated from one another in the degree in which their requirements and modes of life are incompatible with one another and in the measure in which they are antagonistic to one another. Similarly, person of homogenous status and needs unwittingly drift into, consciously select, or are forced by circumstances into, the same area...The city consequently tends to resemble a mosaic of social worlds in which the transition from one to another is abrupt. The juxtaposition of divergent personalities and modes of life tends to produce a relativistic perspective and a sense of toleration of differences which may be regarded as prerequisites for rationality and which leaf toward the secularization of life.

...When large numbers have to make common use of facilities and institutions, an arrangement must be made to adjust the facilities and institutions to the needs of the average person rather than to those of particular individuals. The services of the public utilities, of the recreational, educational, and cultural institutions must be adjusted to mass requirements...If the individual would participate at all in the social, political, and economic life of the city, he must subordinate some of his individuality to the demands of the larger community and in that measure immerse himself in mass movements.

In an age of instantaneous mass communication and media spectacle, peoples separated by great geographical distances are aware of each other, but aren’t close or especially chummy. We may see scores or hundreds of people (or their media artifacts) over the course of the day, but we seldom interact with with them—and when we do, we confront each other as “fractionalized” personalities. We’re economically interdependent, and global compliance with a “rules-based” neoliberal order streamlines the movement of goods and money across borders, and in theory, sets up a situation where the preservation of peace and the ease of doing business mutually reinforce each other. Different cultures and nationalities observe one another, absorb each other’s customs, and engender hybridized strains through immigration and expatriation, air travel, the use of goods and services purchased from inter-/transnational firms, the consumption of mass media products, and so on.

Every city we’d call multicultural, every society we might call pluralistic presupposes common sets of laws and informal norms by which everyone is expected to abide. As Wirth suggests, the norms the govern a city’s commons are set up such that the “average” person can go about his or her business around town, visit public places, and participate the local culture with a reasonable minimum of friction.

The success of any city (or society) as a “melting pot” results from the creation and maintenance of spaces and situations where people from different social groups and/or strata can overlap and interact without giving offense to each other. Often the etiquette observed in these space consists more or less of ignoring other people and maintaining “segmented” and transactional relationships with a majority of the persons whom one encounters in the course of his routine. Both are much more easily accomplished in a city of two million than a small town with a population of two hundred.

The commons are both permissive and restrictive. To some extent, every group inhibits ever other group, while simultaneously being made to grant them some leeway they’d often rather not. Ideally, everyone will have ample latitude to act as how makes sense and seems right to them, and room to do what makes them happy.

Illustrations and notes by way of bullet points:

• One must accept that obligations or restrictions on conduct observed by your household, church, ethnic enclave, or some other in-group to which you belong are not to be applied to other groups. Whatever rules of female dress and modesty your community may observe, you don’t get to browbeat a woman wearing hot pants and a crop top on the street. At the same time, you can hope to be assured that nobody will tell your group that it mustn’t or is legally disallowed from requiring its female members to wear traditionally prescribed garments.

• Above I said “sets of norms,” plural, because anyone who’s lived in a city for a long time understands that certain behaviors that might be appropriate in one neighborhood can get you chased out of another. For instance, Brooklyn’s Borough Park definitely isn’t the place to distribute “Free Palestine” leaflets, and you could probably pick a better sidewalk to set up your Seventh-Day Adventist literature table than a sidewalk in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood. Other parts of town, however, might be fair game. As Wirth says, like tends to sort itself with like—but unless a block or a neighborhood which is homogenous by a particular metric or category has somehow attained complete autarky (impossible), its inhabitants still have wander out into general agora and abide by its norms there.⁶

• Some behavior must be kept behind closed doors, or restricted to a particular group’s “territory” or certain public occasions. My mother-in-law from Guangdong disciplined her children the old-fashioned Chinese way at home, but knew better than to slap them in public in Queens. Attire and behavior appropriate to a Pride celebration on San Francisco’s Castro Street might not be well-received on the sidewalk in front of a Catholic elementary school at 1:00 PM on a Monday afternoon.

• The purpose of a standardized education curriculum across public schools is to help ensure that the next generation grows up with a knowledge of common cultural and intellectual touchstones, despite coming into the classroom from separate communities. Maybe little Walter is taught in Sunday school that Jesus rose from the dead in 33 CE, and maybe little Jeremiah learns more about the history of the African continent from his parents than is covered in school—but both of them will nevertheless be conversant in the same historical narratives of the United States, agree that the Earth is spherical and orbits the sun, and can say a word or two about photosynthesis without confusing the other. (Walter will also learn not to assume that everyone else he meets “knows” about Jesus, and Jeremiah’s parents may impress upon him that while it’s true that the civilization of ancient Egypt was ethnically black, he should expect some pushback if he casually mentions the fact to his teachers.)

These rules of conduct which govern the public commons are not neutral. There’s no such thing as “default” values or social mores. The problem with the commons, and one of the reasons they evolve over time, is that they invariably do privilege certain groups’ customs and viewpoints. Why is it acceptable for a man in an American city to sit shirtless on his front steps on a hot afternoon, while a woman risks getting yelled at by her neighbors or handed a summons by a passing cop for doing the same thing? Can you give an answer without using some form or synonym of the word “traditional?”

Sometimes the members of a group may feel that the rules of the commons encroach too far upon their customary modes of behavior (example: “The Sound of Gentrification is Silence”), overrepresent the interests of another group in ways that are offensive to or incompatible with their own values (example: “The Culture War Over ‘Pregnant People’”), or seems to entitle members of certain groups to behave in ways they find inconvenient or irritating (example: “’Manspreading’ on public transport – new name for an old issue”). This of course isn’t an exhaustive list, but the “truce” between different groups whose outlooks and customs are at variance with or even antagonistic to each other routinely has its terms contested and its boundaries pushed.

We could cautiously say that any “culture war” is a campaign waged by the members of one group (perhaps with the aid of likeminded allies) for the purpose of making the commons more palatable to itself, which almost always entails diminishing some of the permissions given to other groups and the restrictions imposed on their behalf. It’s the same whether we’re talking about cracking down on dirt bikes in Philadelphia, state legislators in North Dakota setting terms for transgender bathroom use, Republicans working to restrict abortion access or Democrats working to restrict firearms ownership across the country, China twisting Hollywood’s arm into burnishing the image of the People’s Republic, or the obscure process by which Muhammed was globally moved out of bounds as a possible object of satire.

Public debate over such cultural matters as these lately have their most visible manifestations in The Spectacle, and by now we’re all familiar with (and maybe tired of) witnessing the vicious but utterly useless arguments on social media and hearing about how the Thanksgiving dinner table has become an ideological battlefield. But the “war” is most productively waged not by clashing with an antagonistic outgroup, but by going around it: working to tilt the sympathies of the Great Undecided, drawing in your foes’ apostates, capturing existing institutions or erecting new ones, forming tenuous alliances with other groups around a shared interest, etc., while in the meantime preserving the integrity of one’s own “neighborhood” against exogenous influences. All of this is done for the purpose of altering the rules and norms of the commons (which include those of the general public Spectacle) such that they more frequently and more strongly reflect, endorse, and at a bare minimum respect the values of one’s “tribe.”

Again, politics is the art of controlling one’s environment. In a time of deep and labyrinthine interconnectedness and global awareness, this increasingly means controlling everyone’s environment. Those of us who imagined at the beginning of the century that the internet and globalism would bring humanity together didn’t quite understand what we were asking for.

1. McLuhan:

[W]e now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance. No matter what part of the world they are in, we can put them under surveillance. This has become one of the main occupations of mankind, just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings on.

2. It’s interesting to note that the cartoons were originally published in September of the previous year. Information travelled a lot more slowly before smartphones.

3. The statement of the Jylland-Postens editor in the linked Washington Post article is a fascinating artifact of secular liberal attitudes in the West around the time of its publication:

We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

4. I am reminded of certain intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were openly atheistic, but nonetheless took especial care to reassure readers that they admired Jesus as a moral exemplar whose teachings in that vein were beyond reproach. Some probably believed it; others were certainly just guarding their flanks.

5. I wonder what, if anything, the comments section of a recent Washington Post article (“A pride flag ban sparks accusations of betrayal in a tiny Michigan city”) forecasts about liberal Americans’ evolving attitudes towards Islam and Muslims.

6. See also: the “Big Sort” phenomenon.