An alarming graph published in a new study from the Policy Institute at King’s College London traces the nearly exponential explosion of newspaper articles about the culture war in the past few years. After trundling benignly along the x-axis, the line leaps into the air about a decade ago. It has now been shooting up almost vertically for two years in a way that, after a year of Covid, prompts the instinctive reflection that somebody, somewhere, should be imposing a national lockdown.
As a phenomenon, the culture war is patently fascinating — a fair few of those articles are mine. But contemplating the chart I felt a certain exhaustion, even a creeping despair, at the prospect of more and more unproductive, bad-faith arguments about statues and trans rights and stately homes and the legacy of Empire with every passing year. When will the culture war end? To this I have two answers. The first: never. The second: sooner than you might think.
Let’s start with never. Culture wars — struggles over society’s values and moral principles — are part of being human. Those battles, as the cultural theorist James Davison Hunter wrote in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (which was credited with popularising the term), tend to be fought between two persistent tendencies: “the impulse toward orthodoxy and the impulse toward progressivism”.
Hunter was writing about America but those tendencies are present in all societies. Indeed, specific battles along those lines can persist for a very long time. For centuries Britain was divided by a culture war over Catholicism that started before the Reformation and which flares up again and again in our history, with conspiracy theories about popish plots and “no popery” riots. As late as 1829, the Duke of Wellington’s government narrowly avoided a constitutional crisis in its attempts to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act.
European countries are familiar with similarly ancient struggles between the power of the state and the church (the original German word Kulturkampf referred to Bismarck’s efforts to combat the influence of the Catholic church at the end of the 19th century).
Unsurprisingly, as secular, individualistic modern society came of age in the Sixties, battles over faith were replaced with battles over personal identity. It is significant that, like the Reformation, the moral revolution of the Sixties arrived at a time of huge change in communications technology. Just as the printing press pushed new religious ideas deeper into society than had ever been possible, so television, cinema and radio gave the moral struggles of the Sixties the unprecedented immediacy that has helped to turn it into myth: you could (and still can) hear the civil rights songs, listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, watch the march on Washington
The extraordinary influence of that revolution is demonstrated by the fact that all subsequent culture wars have been fought on the same template: our moral battles over race, gender and language. There is no reason why this struggle shouldn’t replace the old religious culture wars as the West’s new normal for decades, if not for much longer.
But the situation won’t be one of continuous all-out conflict. We are at present fighting one battle in a long war that ebbs and flows (and here we get into the reason why my second answer is: sooner than you might think). Very roughly, these battles seem to last about a decade. By the 1980s, elite young people had given up the “social-worker speak” moral earnestness of the late Sixties and early Seventies for what Peter York, a co-author of the Sloane Ranger Handbook, called “reactionary chic”: flaunting their wealth, watching Brideshead Revisited, and “using the most insensitive language”. This is not hard to understand: there is nothing less cool than going around talking like your elders.
That is the reason why about a decade later in the 1990s (right on cue, according to my theory), yet another battle erupted over sensitivities about the use of language in universities. This debate was framed as one over “political correctness gone mad”. Our useful modern term “culture war” was not then widely used, though this is clearly what it was. Reading some of the best cultural journalism of that era (David Foster Wallace’s essay on politically correct language, Authority and American Usage, for instance) you’d think it might have been written yesterday.
But, by the early 2000s when I was a teenager, young people were derided as apolitical duds and I arrived at university at the tail-end of a miniature eruption of a sort of latter-day reactionary chic: everyone wore gilets and boat shoes from Jack Wills and listened to the band Vampire Weekend singing about Ivy League campuses, Oxford commas and Louis Vuitton. By the time I left we were all deep into the politics of oppression and intersectionality. The wheels of history turn.
Our present culture war is almost a decade old. Its age is showing in subtle ways. Online debates about trans rights no longer rage with the ferocity they did a couple of years ago. Indeed, the King’s College study found that newspaper coverage of trans issues peaked in 2019. Surveyed last year, half of teenage boys agreed with the sentiment “feminism has gone too far” — a reminder, too, that we might not be as happy to see the back of the culture war as we think.
The culture wars may not end tomorrow, and not even next year. But my suspicion is that they have already peaked with the statue wars of last summer, perhaps. Eventually they will fade. Before they come back again, and again, and again.
