A tiny thought on culture wars

This is in response to a friend's post on the same subject and a need to vent a few of my own thoughts on the subject.

And my main thought - at least the one that's popped right into my head - and that is a big part of it is due to a similarity in culture shared by many on both sides.

That is the culture of No Compromise. 

Think how many ads you've seen hyping their brand as aiding the consumer in their "No Compromise" life style. Think how many of the famous and influential we've seen lauded for their unwavering dedication to their aims. We are being told that if we want something, we should have it, and to hell with everyone who says otherwise. Nobody is preaching the other side of this - that our right to swing our fists stops where the other person's nose begins. Which is, of course, inimical to the idea of a multicultural society - or broad church, or big house, or whatever roughly related idea you wish to call it.

This - I half-shout, half-hesitantly proffer - is the root cause of the culture wars; the glorification of untrammeled conflict and no compromises. And this is the main thing that must be understand in offering a possible solution. This type of thinking must be disarmed, or more likely be allowed to exhaust itself, before the culture war can cease.

The main thing is, of course, not the only thing. There are so many strands of what is going on that even the main thing is little more than the tallest stalk of wheat in a very big field. The worst thing about the field? You can't get a combine in there. You can't really persuade people against what they think by video, or paper, not in this age. You can get them to express what they've buried. Maybe, maybe by showing something that happened, you can shock. But mass media cannot effect mass conversion. No combine. It must be done in the old fashioned way, with the care of the reaper man. Face to face, with respect and empathy. 

Which is difficult in a fragmenting society. I've lived most of my life in inner suburban London, generally a stronghold of left-wing values with high levels of diversity. I've also spent my fair share of time in places and institutions that are not. I can't really think of a time where I've been somewhere that represents the demographics of British society as I'm aware of it. The average is not representative. Which means few of us are in a place to hear both sides with full honesty regularly face to face. The combine can't get into the field and the reaper man doesn't know where it is.

If one leg of this is a No Compromise culture, and another is the extent to which Society is no longer Cohesive, then the third leg of the tripod is the number of legitimate grievances. I won't get into this as that's not main focus of the article, but it has to be noted. And indeed, in the friend's post, he talked about the need to rescue the culture of our fathers. A fine point, but unlikely to cut much ice with those who believe their fathers are unrepresented in our culture, and those who see a kill mission. It is in itself one of the flaws with calling it culture wars, and leaning into the label of social justice warrior - wars are where we kill. Wars are where we other. 

I must also note in passing that the legitimate grievances leg gets inflated with other topics regularly for all sorts of reasons - a good example here https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2020/09/01/not-in-our-name-ethnic-minorities-don-t-care-about-your-prom - and that this only exacerbated by the issues I have set out, and made harder to resolve too.

In a lot of ways, my friend's post was right (my instinctive naysaying aside). The two sides (insofar as there are two sides) really need to talk to each other. People are getting hurt and things of value lost. But that was obvious. The question is how to get them to talk to each other. The barriers are not impossible - in many ways, they're rather flimsy. It's just that people go nowhere near them. There are all sorts of reasons why but, at the core, people understand that there to go near the barriers is to compromise. And the culture telling them to never do so is louder than the people they admire who want them to do so - because some of us don't even have any of them.

The solution? Impossible to say. Total victory for one side. Exhaustion. Grand world problems that force people to pack it all away. But if I were to be optimistic, I'd say a social shift that encourages the urban clusters of liberality disperse into the small towns and countryside, and to see what happens when they are at the barriers. Say, a shift that allows all those city workers to spend most of their life working from home, and for much entertainment to be available where ever, making the cheaper standard of living in the small towns more desirable. So who knows? Maybe covid will be the best thing that happens to us.

But in the mean time, the culture wars will grind on. And calls for compromise will at best, be a building force that might eventually break the dam years from now, and at worst, a total waste of energy.