The Culture War Is a Long War

Tanner Greer has written a very interesting essay at a site called Scholar's Stage titled Culture Wars Are Long Wars.

Although he doesn't mention philosopher Thomas Kuhn and his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his essay could be seen as an application of Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts in science to the sphere of culture and politics.

Greer begins with this lede:

We are told that conservatives “lost the culture war.” I dissent from this view: American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that.

They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture.

Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation.

No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

Greer believes that politics is downstream from culture, to use the late Andrew Breitbart's phrase, and as such the political fight that Republicans have waged is really the wrong fight. Unless the culture is changed political remediation will only be effective around the margins.

I have to register a minor disagreement at this point. It seems to me that what's needed in the present day is actually a two-pronged attempt to change both the culture and the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics because culture and politics are both influenced and changed by the other.

The law is a teacher, and when laws are changed the people are instructed and the culture is changed. The Civil Rights acts of the fifties and sixties were imposed on a majority population that was largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the plight of black people in America, but the law roused the majority from their slumbers.

Aristotle lends his considerable authority to this view when he writes that,

The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions....Lawgivers make the citizens good by inculcating (good) habits in them...if he does not succeed in doing that his legislation is a failure.

Anyway, Greer continues:

Cultures can be changed; movements can be built. But as these examples all suggest, this is not a quick task. Culture wars are long wars. Instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time—usually two to three generations of time. It is a 35-50 year process....

This is all true although I wish Greer would've explained how a culture - and politics - can be changed apart from a religious awakening.

With regard to religion he offers this insight which is also on the mark:

America’s future is godless not because the God-fearing were convinced of the errors of their faith, but because their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren never adopted their faith to start out with.

Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.

This is Kuhn's paradigm shift. Kuhn writes that scientific theories are rarely overthrown by the generations which initially championed them. What happens instead is that too many discoveries accumulate that the theory can't explain. The younger generation of scientists that doesn't have the professional and emotional investment in the theory that their elders have, become skeptical.

As the older generation retires and dies away their younger successors are freed up to promote a new theoretical paradigm which accounts for most of the anomalies and which ultimately supplants the old theory.

I think this is happening today with intelligent design which will, I think, eventually supplant a clunky, arthritic Neo-Darwinism as the old line Neo-Darwinists shuffle off the stage.

Greer elaborates on the cultural paradigm shift in the following:

....almost all “social” or “value laden” attitudes are established early in life and are then maintained throughout it. The “formative events” of one’s youth truly are formative.

The ideas, attitudes, and social pressures of one’s youth have a similar impact on one’s worldview, even after the conditions that created these pressures have long disappeared.

Cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort. They can, however, build up a system of ideas and institutions which will preserve and refine the ideals they hope their community will adopt in the future.

The real target of these ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren. Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn.

Future generations will be open to values, religious, political and cultural, that the current generation rejects outright.

This will not be apparent at first. Beneath the official comings and goings of the cohorts above, a new consensus forms in the cohorts below. Ideas will fester among the young, but their impact will be hidden by the inability and inexperience of youth.

But the youth do not stay young. Eventually a transition point arrives.

Sometimes, this transition will be marked by a great event the old orthodoxy cannot explain. At other times it is simply a matter of numbers. In either case, the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.

Greer cautions against hoping for a quick change. He's right to do so. Our present cultural circumstances did not develop overnight. They've been some sixty years or more in the making and have still not run their complete course.

Most of us, like the generation of ancient Israelites that fled Egypt, will not live to see the promised land:

.... as culture wars are long wars, there are no quick victories. If you reject the quickly crystalizing orthodoxy of America’s millennials, your short-term options are limited. The millennials are a lost generation; they will persist in their errors to the end of their days.

Theirs is a doomed cohort—and for most of the next two decades, this doomed cohort will be in charge.

But like all orthodoxies, theirs will eventually stumble. Today’s orthodoxy will meet events it cannot explain. Today’s hopes will be the source of tomorrow’s sorrows. When those sorrows arrive, a rising generation will be looking for alternatives.

The job of today’s insurgents is to build a coherent critique of this orthodoxy, a compelling vision of a better way, and a set of networks that can guard the flame until the arrival of that happy day.

This sounds very much like Rod Dreher's prescription in both The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies.

Greer is optimistic that the day will come when the current soft totalitarianism (Dreher's term) collapses. My concern, though, is that it'll only come if there's a revitalization of the Judeo-Christian faith that underpins the values to which he'd like to see us return.

Until we see signs of that revitalization I'm afraid the paradigm shift toward which Greer looks will be postponed indefinitely into the future. Anyway, read his essay. It's very good and there's much more to it than I can write about here.