Roots & Wings Statement
Theses on the Culture Wars
“There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings”.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The spectre of a new ideology haunts the Western World. It is omnipresent, but its meaning is hard to capture since this is an ideology without a name.
The lack of a common public language through which to discuss our differences leaves politics lost for words. Public figures rarely try to explain their concerns in the language we associate with politics. Those in power are silent about ‘beliefs’, ‘principles’, or ‘doctrine’. Instead, they speak like work-place managers with ‘agendas’ or ‘projects’.
In place of a moral language of right and wrong, political leaders claim their policies and decisions are ‘evidence-based’ or that they ‘follow the science’. Their technocratic – supposedly political neutral – vocabulary is wrapped into an opaque language of euphemism. Actions or statements are denounced by terms such as ‘inappropriate’, ‘uncomfortable’, ‘unwelcome’ or ‘problematic’. These are vague terms which through their lack of precision allows those who deploy them to evade explicit responsibility for drawing moral boundaries. Usually, they are unaccompanied by information about the nature of the transgression. They construct no coherent system of right and wrong – indeed, to do so, would now be deemed offensive.
As in George Orwell's 1984, those with power prefer to prevent the voicing of critical ideas through semantic engineering. When commentators can seriously propose that the word ‘woman’ should be replaced by ‘menstruating person’, or mother by ‘parent who gives birth’, you know that we are heading for a high-tech Tower of Babel.
Often, disputes over words are shrugged off as merely an expression of the natural evolution of language. However, in truth, conflicts over language play a part in the constitution of the reality that the language describes and that we live
As both language and other new modes of linguistic communication change, they influence cultural politics by altering the way that reality is perceived. The advocacy of a vocabulary that seeks to abolish binary categories challenges not only the foundational categories like man and woman or adult and child but also moral distinctions between right and wrong and good and evil. The contemporary project of semantic engineering is thoroughly committed to transforming people’s view of the world.
It is through words, and the meanings they communicate, that cultural attitudes are crystallised. This is why conflicts over words – what can and cannot be said – are always at the forefront of the culture war. Debates about free speech and censorship are not simply about words but about which norms and values prevail within society. The semantic revolution insinuates itself into every sphere of life. It attempts to establish a linguistic quarantine around expressions of traditional values and has been relatively successful in realising this objective.
The constant calls to re-engineer language have a profound implication for public life. They cause people to distance themselves from their own, taken-for-granted vocabulary. Not surprisingly this leaves many people, who do not share the outlook of the semantic engineers, quite literally speechless as they struggle to find words to give voice to their views. This is a dangerous development; people who self-censor may soon forget the beliefs and sentiments that they held in the first place.
The ideology without a name presents itself in a politically neutral and silent form. Its most curious feature is the promotion of a political culture that is both intensely personalised but at the same time deeply impersonal. It flies the flag of identity politics, asserts that the personal is political and seeks to medicalise public issues. This phenomenon was clearly displayed throughout the Covid pandemic: an era that saw the politicisation of public health evolving in parallel with the medicalisation of politics.
The personal is closely allied to the impersonal politics of a technocratic governance that insists that Science as expounded by the Expert must have the final say. The principal choice it offers people is ‘to follow the science’.
Scientism, with its devotion to social engineering is far from new. But only recently through its marriage of convenience to identity politics has it succeeded in assuming a hegemonic cultural status. Both wings of this ideological synthesis are committed to the uprooting of taken for granted cultural norms. Its sudden arrival has coincided with the unravelling of the political mainstream and the completion of a transition of power from the political establishment of the Cold War to an anti-traditionalist cultural elite.
Matters are complicated by the fact that the term elite rarely serves as a label of self-designation. It is worth noting that there is no consensus about what to even call this group that makes the rules for the rest of us. The term cultural elite is often contested by groups and individuals who play a prominent role within its ranks. Not surprisingly confusion surrounds the question of what to call them. Some refer to ‘cultural legitimisers’, others to a ‘cognitive elite’. Terms like the ‘new class’, the ‘creative class’, the ‘correctorate’, the ‘clerisy’, the ‘elect’ or the ‘metropolitan elites’ have been invented to describe an elite that has not embraced a name.
Lack of clarity about what to call the elite is not a failure of conceptual thinking. The phenomenon of an elite without a name is the outward manifestation of its lack of self-consciousness and search for meaning. This group also lacks a language through which it can confidently affirm its place in the world.
In recent times numerous scholars and commentators have sought to understand the ideological landscape that prevails in the Western world and develop a political language capable of endowing it with coherence. However, this ideology, which has emerged unannounced, and which makes no claims to possessing a distinct normative status or even an identity, refuses to yield to their name.
Some of the terms used such as ‘Post-liberal’, ‘Progressive’ or ‘Cultural Marxism’, ‘Postmodernist’ are simply lazy categories that attempt to give life to concepts that have thoroughly exhausted themselves over the decades. Others have sought to give a provisional name to a phenomenon that has yet to acquire its own. The term ‘woke’ is frequently invoked but it works better as a term of abuse than a concept possessing a degree of precision.
Of all the attempts to name this elusive ideological construct, I prefer Wesley Yang’s modest attempt to engage with this problem. He talks of a ‘successor ideology’, which he claims is ‘in its bland but vaguely minatory non-specificity may be the correct term for the melange of academic radicalism now seeking hegemony throughout American institutions’. The term ‘successor ideology’ leaves open the question of the form that it will assume in the future. Since it is evidently an ideology that is constantly evolving it is far more useful to understand its dynamic and ambition than to prematurely give it a label. Already it is evident is that it is a counter-ideology, the principal aim of which is to de-legitimate existing forms of moral authority and the cultural norms that support it. Ultimately, the culture war is not simply about pronouns and the sacralisation of identity groups but about the constitution of moral authority.
Back in the 1960s, there was more clarity about the culture war. This was the era-of the counter-culture, and those whom it engaged were uninhibited about acknowledging their vehement opposition to their society’s culture. However, although supporters of the counter-culture knew what they were against, they were far less certain about the culture they wished to endorse. In the 1970s the term ‘counter-culture’ was sometimes referred to as ‘adversarial culture’. Words like counter-culture and adversarial culture, as well as terms used later, such as ‘political correctness’ lack clarity and precision. They all try to capture and render explicit a variety of implicit assumptions, which was underpinned by an ideology without a name.
The use of that very contrived term ‘cancel culture’ is but the latest attempt to name a political phenomenon that typically refuses to acknowledge its very existence. Most discussions of the ascendancy of cancel culture highlight its sudden emergence, irrational steadfast dogmatism and unexpected success. While there is little doubt that in recent years its rapid advance has been truly breath-taking, it is important to appreciate that it has been in the making for a very long time. As I point out in my 100 Years of Identity Crisis: The Culture War Over Socialisation the first shots in the culture war were fired many decades ago. An understanding of its history provides an essential context for understanding the current cultural conflicts and genealogy of the ideology without a name. The different dimensions of this subject will be explored in Roots & Wings in the months to come.
Ten Theses on the Culture War
1. Today’s culture wars has evolved slowly, sometimes hesitatingly, from the 1940s onwards. Its main focus was, and remains, the socialisation of the young and their re-education into a system of values that distances them from the outlook of their parents and their communities. The current culture war began in the nursery, aiming to re-engineer the personality of children. Today, this ambition has acquired the grotesque form of seeking to promote gender-neutral ideals amongst toddlers and children. For example, in the UK, the sexualisation of childhood is vigorously promoted by the LGBT+ advocacy organisation Stonewall. They now go so far as to insist that ‘research’ shows ‘that children as young as two recognise their trans identity’. Stonewall’s absurd proposition about gender fluid conscious toddlers aims to transform the way that nurseries shape young children’s sense of themselves.
2. The culture wars seek to erode the moral distinctions and boundaries as well as the borders that have evolved over the centuries. Animosity against cultural boundaries acquired a quasi-ideological quality in the 1940s. Opponents of Western culture and civilisation were particularly hostile to the nation, an institution they held responsible for two world wars. They looked to international institutions – ‘global governance’ - to solve the problems facing humanity. The most forceful and coherent doctrinal expression of this standpoint can be found in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper along with a significant section of Western cosmopolitans regarded closed societies – especially nations as a source of conflict and destruction.
3. The idea of open society was contrasted directly to closed ones. This perspective held that a closed society was one that possessed, what they perceived, as a ‘tribalist mentality’; one that excluded other people from a group. At issue was not simply nationality, but any form of private and non-political bonds between people – religion, family and community. These bonds were denounced too exclusive. From the standpoint of the ideology of openness, even citizenship, was portrayed as discriminatory. Citizenship violated the principle of openness on the grounds that it was not open to all and provided citizens with rights that were not available to all the people who inhabit the earth.
4. Disrupting the pre-political bonds between generations and members of a so-called closed community was seen as the pre-requisite for the rise of a modern person. Hostility to prevailing cultural ideals was partly motivated by the recognition that these views cemented a bond between generations and offered a sense of historical continuity. A programme devoted to de-valuing the past and its legacy has been vigorously pursued by advocates of counter-culture. In this way they have deprived people of their roots, and their sense of belonging.
5. One of the main accomplishments of the confusion about where one belongs is a permanent crisis of identity. People flourish through the cultivation of their roots and development of connections with others. If they are disconnected from their past and tradition, they are likely to become pre-occupied about who they are and become concerned about their identity. This is why today, there is an unprecedented demand for identity.
The explosion of new identities from the 1960s onwards has seamlessly led to its politicisation. Inventing new identities, or rendering previous politically relevant identities unimportant, has encouraged tension and conflict. The demand for identity has been further enhanced by dispossessing young people of their cultural legacy. In the absence of values that could give them confidence and direction, the young are left to fend for themselves and invent their own values.
Lack of clarity about where they come from and who they are complicates their journey towards adulthood. In such circumstances finding a resolution to the identity crisis that invariably confronts the young becomes difficult to accomplish. The current obsession with identity and its constant politicisation is one of the outcomes of the state of disorientation imposed on the young through the culture war against traditional forms of socialisation.
6. Since the 1940s, it has taken the socialisation of four to five generations into the new counter-cultural norms for the ideology without a name to become ascendant. During this time, the so-called 1960s counter-culture has become increasingly dominant. In recent years the terrain of the culture wars – which was for long confined to educational and cultural institutions – has expanded to the private sector. The ease with which companies and other private institutions have internalised formerly counter cultural norms shows that there are very few obstacles that stand in the way of the triumph of the ideology without a name. The speed with which the war against the legacy of Western culture has accelerated this year indicates its opponents struggle to match its cultural force.
7. It is only now that this ideology has finally acquired a recognisable form and a provisional name: cancel culture. We have had to wait around 80 years for this confusing term to emerge. However, unlike the previous terms (counter-culture, adversarial culture), it draws attention to both its corrosive influence and its hegemonic role. Those in charge of cancelling are not the contemporary equivalent of 1960s hippies and student radicals, they are the elites that run many of the key institutions of society.
The term, cancel culture, could finally emerge because the ideology that underpins it has, in recent times, become more explicit and clearer about its objectives. For example, the 1619 Project of The New York Times constitutes an ambitious programme of de-legitimating the so-called American Way of Life. It does not merely demand the change of a name or a pronoun but a change of how we think of a nation and its history. By waging a war against the legacy of the founding of America, and more widely of the legacy of human civilisation, opposition to Western culture has acquired am unprecedented systematic ideological form.
8. Even now there is a reluctance to take the culture war seriously. Opponents of humanity’s civilizational accomplishments insist that they are not fighting a culture war. Like the Germans who, while invading Poland in 1939, argued that it was the Polish who started the conflict, advocates of identity politics point the finger of blame at their opponents. They accuse their opponents of stoking up the fire of the culture war and presents themselves as the innocent victims of malicious right-wing culture warriors.
9. Despite their hegemonic status, proponents of the ideology without a name, are far from confident or secure. They do not understand why millions of people want to hold onto their cultural traditions and reject their globalist vision of an open world. The rise of populism in recent year has unnerved them causing them to step up efforts to cancel their opponents. They are determined to prevent a repetition of a setback like Brexit and as far as they are concerned the Culture War is only beginning.
Unfortunately, their determination to press on is not matched by those who oppose cancel culture. It is necessary not only to respond and fight back but also to take the initiative and go on the offensive. What is at stake in the intellectual and cultural legacy of human civilisation.
10. The corrosive impact of an ideology without a name is not confined to the domain of culture. Economic and political matters are invariably interpreted through the prism of culture. Since the ability to deal with cost of-living and other issues affecting people’s circumstances requires a self-confidence public, it should be evident that cultural disorientation undermines people’s ability to assert and defend their economic interest. One of the casualties of the culture war has been society’s belief in-itself. Deprived of the cultural resources that provide people with the confidence and clarity needed to face the challenges of our time, many of us become de-moralised. Providing moral clarity to society requires that we take the culture war seriously. Such clarity is the precondition for ensuring that people have the confidence to fight for their future.
One of the casualties of the culture war has been confidence in the capacity of human agency to influence the destiny of humankind. To repair this damage requires that we take the battlefield of culture very, very seriously and intelligently. We need to reclaim our legacy, sink deep intellectual and moral roots so that we can spread our wings and transcend the narcissistic culture of despair they are attempting to impose on us all.
During the year ahead I will be exploring the inner working of the ideology without name and providing regular analysis of what are the specific features of the ruling elites.
Our aim is to render explicit the inner workings of this ideology so that we can understand more clearly what we are up against and in this give strength to our voice.
[ii] https://www.amazon.co.uk/100-Years-Identity-Crisis-Socialisation/dp/3110705125/ref=sr_1_1?crid=OUCKRNXOJVXX&keywords=frank+Furedi&qid=1659958563&s=books&sprefix=frank+furedi%2Cstripbooks%2C56&sr=1-1
Dear Allen
Thanks for your thoughts- there is a quasi-religious element to all this but as I will explain in an essay to follow it is more an ideological rather than a religious narrative.
Dear Donna
Thanks for getting in touch - you raise some important points that I need to thinks about. best wishes
Frank