For the past week, we have seen the full fury of battle in the culture war, one that signals exactly where the conservatives wish to take things. In the immediate instance, it is a matter of women's rights and privacy rights. It is a fight about the future on very specific terms, but it does assume there is a future.
"Culture War" has an air of illegitimacy to it. In a world full of constant and literal warfare, it sounds like a cheap metaphor. In a country where "the economy" is all that matters, culture is taken as nothing more than something people manipulate for personal or corporate greed (and many, many do - one need look no further than our big nostalgia merchants, some presently embattled on the right, but which did much to create the corrupted, simplistic nostalgia culture we inhabit).
Time, I think to recast the "Culture Wars" in different terms. The key question is no longer about the kind of future but the very existence of a human future. We do have a significant percentage of the population who do not care. For some, the reason is derived from nineteenth-century Christian theology. For others, there is a nihilism that cares nothing for what comes after them, or who cannot imagine a world without them (that takes quite an ego). There are those who misunderstand what it means to construct a reality (a basic category mistake). Others may be forced by the struggle of daily existence (economic or emotional) to ignore the longer-term future. There are surely plenty, like myself, who are concerned, but who like their comforts, and understand those comforts are traps they may lack the will to escape, and likewise know those comforts are inimical to the future.
We could frame this as a war of conservatives and progressives, even as a war of two realities. Does that really get us very far? Neither is monolithic, they are collections of more-or-less related beliefs and movements. Both are ultimately grounded in world views, largely economic and religious, that exist along continua and which precede the discovery of our present omni-crisis. It would be too easy to say they are different sides of the same coin, but maybe they do share too much of the same worldview to find their way forward. Their realities are not that different. They represent only a small part of the many psychological and cultural realities humans have inhabited over the last few hundred thousand years, or even over the last few thousand.
A lot has been written about the economics of attention or the war for our attention, in various permutations. I do think this is about attention, just not in the limited ways it is often portrayed. A culture is about attention. It is about that which we are allowed to attend and against those things that are "dangerous" or prohibited to attend. The individual is also about attention, what is necessary, what is interesting, and how far to push the boundaries set by the culture.
The attention of the culture and of the individual changes over time. Now the question is whether individuals and cultures can accept a major change in the boundaries and the accompanying shattering of illusions. If we can, then we may forge a new culture, a new civilization, that can find a future. That future may not look anything like our present world or any world we can predict. We may need to think and believe in terms completely different from our present-day economics, religion, or even what we think of as science (which is already changing in intriguing ways). These may be evolutionary changes or revolutionary, or, more likely a combination of both. It may be totally alien to what we perceive now.
We may also forge one that is worse than we have now, one so mired in a false nostalgia that denies the needs of present-day people, killing, maiming, and stunting individual lives while leaving no room for a viable future. That may be where both our conservative and progressive visions are taking us. While I would prefer a progressive future to a conservative one, I do not think either vision can produce a viable human future.
We are not fighting a Culture War. We are not yet really fighting a War of Futures. We are trapped in ways of attending to the world that no longer work. It may be that the ways in which some of us have come to understand ourselves, attending to whom we truly are, not what culture, society, and economics says we have to be, will lead to a larger change in cultural attention. That is the promise of the progressive side (though perhaps not of the radicals who are locked into their own kind of ideological puritanism). It does open possibilities for profound cultural change that may provide a path forward.
I do not see the same on the conservative side. There may be individual conservatives who could find a new kind of attention, but the general trend, particularly of the more reactionary sort, is to further constrict attention along with human rights, to limit what we may consider real and proper. That might lead to a kind of revolution that completely repudiates the restrictions, but that might never occur or be completely suppressed.
It may be that neither side can really change. Locked as they are in constant combat, it seems likely that they will only intensify and focus their attention into ever narrower paths. Personally, I look elsewhere for the changes and the new kinds of attention that can permit us to find a human future. That may be a long shot, but it may also produce the most livable future.
