Goodbye to Politics and Culture Wars
It’s been twenty-five years or so since I first heard someone explicitly take politics into account in his views of another person. A friend was asking me about a mutual acquaintance, saying “I’m not sure about him. He seems like a nice guy and his politics are okay, but…”
I don’t really remember what followed, partly because I was so shocked. I certainly had (and have) my own strong political and cultural views, but have never thought of such views as elements of character. Since then, of course, I’ve learned that the impulse to view them in exactly that way is quite strong in a lot of people, and that the intensity with which they are not simply held but insisted upon often makes any extensive social contact with people holding them difficult or impossible for one of differing views.
A week or two ago I ran across the blog of someone I know. In his most recent post he lamented the fact that he doesn’t believe in hell, because he wants very much to believe that President Bush will go there. He was probably not 100% serious but neither was he 100% in jest. I know this person fairly well and like him, though I haven’t seen him for a while. But if I were in the room with him and he began to talk this way I would only want to get out of the situation: I wouldn’t want to get into what would only be an unpleasant and fruitless argument, but even a silent failure to assent would soon become obvious and awkward, and a gulf would open between us.
My first thought was that here was an example of just how vicious things have gotten, but then I remembered the way the left felt about Nixon and Reagan, and the way the right felt about Clinton; this sort of thing is not entirely new. But I doubt more than a handful of cranks would have wished, say, Eisenhower or FDR or JFK in hell. I remember the horror and dismay with which JFK’s assassination was greeted in the South, where he was not at all popular; those who felt otherwise would have hesitated to express it publicly. But I have no doubt that if Bush were assassinated there would be open and unashamed celebration by many.
These bitter divisions took hold of this country in the 1960s and have never healed. I don’t think they ever will heal, actually; I think they will get worse, barring some sort of near-miracle. There are, very broadly speaking, two hostile parties in the nation and each regards the other as an enemy—not just a group of people who have the wrong ideas but an entity which must either conquer or be conquered. I think only the fact that the division is not geographical and that there is no physical property at stake keeps our metaphorical culture war from breaking out into actual violence. It’s a religious conflict in the sense that it’s a conflict over first principles; “liberal” and “conservative” are often not just intellectual or ideological terms but expressions of allegiance to a set of assumptions that go all the way to the root of what one believes about what it means to be human.
But it’s not my purpose at the moment to talk about the nature of the division, only about how I plan to treat it on this blog—which from here on will be rarely if at all.
I’ve leaned this way for a long time. I never intended my original web site or, later, this blog to be a vehicle for political discussion, partly because I don’t think I have anything particularly distinctive or useful to contribute to it. Scattered through my Sunday Night Journal entries you’ll find statements to that effect. But now it’s a firm and explicit conviction and intention which follows from my reasons for writing in the first place.
What are those reasons? Well, mainly I write because it’s a sort of compulsion which I’ve felt for as long as I can remember. But secondly, and more relevantly for this discussion: I see something beautiful and I want to tell people about it. As things stand today, politics and the broader struggle that we call the culture wars can only get in the way of that effort.
This realization crystallized for me over the past year or so. In the almost four years since I started the Sunday Night Journal, I have renewed my acquaintance with half a dozen or so people with whom I’d had little or no contact for many years, as long ago as high school (which is now quite long ago). In a couple of cases this was because the person happened across my name somewhere on the web. In a couple it was an actual meeting in which the question “Have you been doing any writing?” was asked. And I said, “Well, yeah, a little—I have this web site where I post things…” and gave them the URL.
Some of these people are not of my mind on politics and culture, and I think at least one or two were pretty well put off by some of my views, and that I became in their eyes an ideological opponent, someone to be argued with or ignored. It’s bad enough that this distancing occurs in everyday interactions, but I don’t want it to get in the way of my being heard on matters that are more important than the sloganeering and divisions of American politics.
I have to suppose that from time to time people who don’t know me happen across this blog. I don’t want those who might disagree with me on social and political questions to take flight because they detect unpalatable views. Nor do I want people whose minds are not dominated by politics to think that mine is, and that my writing is just more of the same rhetorical warfare that can be found in a million other places. Whether a reader finds my writing to be attractive or repellent, I want that reaction to come from a more fundamental level, where ideological divisions fade in the presence of the common things that matter to every human being—or, less grandly, everyday things whose enjoyment carries no ideological charge.
I know, too, that even the culture wars are not going to be settled by argument, but by the action of deeper currents in human affairs. And most of all I find that a declaration of non-combatancy serves an even more important purpose, one I mentioned in my journal some months ago (here).
Postscript: Greg Wolfe of Image magazine came to a similar conclusion some years ago and published a statement called “Why I Am A Conscientious Objector in the Culture Wars”. Re-reading that statement now, I find myself very much in agreement with him, though my concerns as an individual are a little different from his as a publisher and editor
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