As I think more and more about the escalating tensions in the US, I sense that our battles are increasingly coming down to seemingly irresolvable philosophical differences between groups of people that posit very incompatible assumptions/attitudes about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the role of people towards each other, views on the environment, attitudes towards economic prosperity, beliefs about religion, etc.
While this was always obvious in areas like environmentalism and abortion rights, I find increasingly that these issues are seeping into almost everything, even seemingly innocuous issues. I’m talking about stuff like the right-to-dry movement (i.e. should people be allowed to hang their clothes outside to dry?), raw milk advocacy, bicycling, etc. Conflicts in these areas are getting very, very heated, and once you start understanding the cultural tensions and narratives being disseminated around these issues, you realize that they’re also rooted in the same essential conflicts that drive the culture wars.
As such “minor” issues become intensified, it seems to me that the culture wars themselves are becoming increasingly heated, to the point where I can’t see them stopping or even slowing down-- only getting more violent and more dangerous to social stability. What is the solution to this problem? Is there any way to solve an issue like this? Will we ultimately need to resort to a 2 (or more) state solution?
Well, some would argue that we have a 50-state solution. You can move to the part of the country that tolerates your weird insistence on a power dryer, that also scoffs at global warming, happens to mostly fit your attitude to the role of labor unions, and also will turn a blind eye to your particular bizarre beliefs about acceptable sexual behavior.
And then each state can rear young children in a hothouse of conformity, & perceive the other states as irredeemably corrupt & bizarre, AND OH GOD THAT’S HOW WE GOT IN THIS MESS.
Perhaps we should impose internal borders & forbid freedom of movement long enough for each state to develop its own dialect mutually incomprehensible with other states. Say, 600 years. Then each region would feel stuck with its own kind based on language, & realize that the “culture war” stuff is relatively minor?
The problem is that too many people have forgotten the original principle of the American settlement: letting people live their lives as they want without government interference.
Unfortunately, both political parties are in favor of increased government involvement in the lives of its citizens. (I think because they have become consumed by the desire for political power at the expense of representing the people.) Republicans want to stop us from marrying who we want, stop us from controlling our bodies, stop us from enjoying recreational activities. Democrats want to stop us from buying what we want, stop us from taking our own risks, stop us from from saying what we want.
We need the state to simply stop trying to stop us from doing what we want to. But the state is reflection of us. That means we the people must stop telling other people how to manage their lives. Let the gay couple get married and buy their automatic rifles. Let the woman get an abortion and eat sugar deep-fried in transfat. Let the college student smoke pot and spout hate speech in a secretly funded political ad.
The Culture Wars will be resolved by generational attrition. The Baby Boomers are the youngest generation that substantially has any problem with gay marriage, abortion, etc., and those are probably minority positions even among the Boomers. When their elders pass from the scene, the “Culture Wars” as we now understand them will fade.
Of course, then, who knows what kinda weird ideas these crazy kids these days are gonna come up with . . .
But this view overlooks the feeling many people have that other people’s personal liberties have a negative impact on their own personal freedoms. For example: giving everyone the unrestricted right to bear arms places my own security at risk; letting gay people marry might negatively impact the well-being of my children; letting companies pollute as much as they want impinges on my right to breathe clean air. With these thoughts, we go back to square one. Can we really stop people from wanting to regulate behavior while still maintaining a government?
What does your suggestion mean in terms of our society? Should we have social services like police forces and libraries? Are those intrusions in our right to be left alone, given that we are forced to pay for them? What about health care? Elected officials? The idea of not regulating others’ behavior in some way sounds like a post-government world-- almost a retreat to frontier times-- and I would think that regulation of behavior in that world would be enforced by threats of violence rather than laws and social norms. I guess I’m okay with this, but it seems to have much broader implications than you suggest.
Get over it, times three. If someone actually harms you, then they can be either prosecuted or sued.
Police can concentrate on catching people who are actually harming others, instead of enforcing morals. Libraries can provide access to information, like they’ve always done; I’m not sure why you bring them up.
The purpose of the government is to provide services we all need that may be difficult or inconvenient to acquire any other way. And the great thing about a democracy is we can collectively decide what services we want the state to provide. That has nothing to do with the state telling us how to live.
The culture wars will continue until all sides of public opinion are completely fed up, and then continue a little longer until all sides of the power elite are satisfied that no more advantage can be gained from them.
According to Tea Partiers, it is the government telling us how to live. What do you think this health care debate is about? Some people don’t want to be forced to pay for national health care because it is the government infringing on their right to spend money the way they want-- which is not for those services. Any time you use some “democratic” process to enforce anything you are in effect regulating someone’s behavior and telling them how to live. Do you not see how having to give away some large percent of your paycheck for social services that you don’t like (or may even feel philosophically against) is a suppression of your own liberty? If you, as a staunch pacifist see 15% of your income going for wars that you don’t support, are you not feeling somewhat violated or angry?
Your view seems very simple in a big picture sense, but it seems to get a lot more complicated in the context of maintaining a government, especially since the role of government is specifically to regulate behavior.
The “culture war” will never end because there will always be different factions with different agendas who want to control the nation’s cultural and educational institutions. The conflict may heat up or cool down at various times, but it will never go away completely.
They are wrong. Using taxes to pay for public services is not telling people how to live.
Taxes are for public services. Public services that have been chosen by the people. “Liberty” does not give you the right to exempt yourself from society.
If you don’t like how the state is spending money, then use the democratic process to stop it.
I reject that the role of government is to regulate behavior. It is exactly that paradigm that leads to the culture wars. The state should restrict itself to providing services.
When we finally get around to eradicating every possible difference between people, and when everyone believes the same way about the same things in the same degree, the people with hair will end up fighting a war with the bald people.
You have bought into a false myth of the birth of America. The vast majority of settlers came for financial reasons. The celebrated few who came for moral reasons (the Puritans) came more to be free to dictate their moral code as law than to escape persecution. The biggest threat to their personal liberty in England was being forced to support a church other than their own, which scarred them so much they did the same thing as soon as they had the ability. The Mayflower compact was only signed because there were too many non-Puritans on the boat. With a few exceptions, the European colonies reduced liberty as they spread and nothing much changed after Independence.
The overall trend of personal liberty has been going up since the Civil War at least. It has not always been quick or sure, but it the trend is up, not down.
ETA: The culture wars are getting better as time goes by. Nowadays it is more a product of the fringe being more interesting in the media than any real threat of social splintering.
My statement “letting people live their lives as they want without government interference” is not restricted to religious refugees. Settlers who came for financial reasons were avoiding state control as much as the religious settlers.
That some simply replaced the old state regulation with a new one shows how far back the culture wars go.
But in any case, my position is not based on things used to be, but how things should be.
Any similarity between my position and the Libertarian one is purely coincidental. I believe the state has a strong role to play, but that role is not telling people how to live.
Once we allow the state to tell us how to live, we should not be surprised when (in our democratic society) people argue about how it’s telling us to live. If we want to end the culture wars, we must end the state’s role in controlling how we live.
You really think a nation of hundreds of millions isn’t going to have factions with competing interests? A relatively small nation with a fairly homogenous popuation can perhaps escape culture wars, but not one as large as ours. Even under Stalinesque repression, there would still be competing factions divided along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, social class, ideology, and blatantlly corrupt self-interest. And even under Stalin people still managed to get hold of jazz recordings and Western magazines.
We don’t need the culture wars to end, just like we don’t need class warfare to end. We just need to left to start fighting, rather than bending over and saying “Thank you Sir, may I have another.”
The central matters in the culture wars - gay rights, anti-racism, freedom from religous oppression, abortion, women’s rights in general - are worth fighting for. The reactionaries aren’t just going to start playing nice on them. If we want these things, we have to fight for them.
