Are the culture wars real? Some assume that they’re an imaginary affair, or, at best, a distraction from the real, pressing bread-and-butter concerns of today. As Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times yesterday:
‘The culture wars…may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’
We are familiar with this line of thinking, both from left and right. The culture wars about race and gender are irrelevant and ‘piffling’, so some say. It’s all fuss and nonsense.
Many on the left decry with airy disdain that complaints of ‘cancellation’ and ‘wokery’ are just antediluvian grunts of conservatives who don’t like, or don’t understand, the modern world – with its new, strange manners concerning matters race and gender. Then there are the shopkeeper-type conservatives, who think the culture wars are all a silly hoo-ha about pronouns, toilet usage, dramas about Cleopatra and the Royal Family as seen on TV. They scold that we should be properly concerned with material materials: the cost of living, inflation, mortgage payments, industrial disputes, the future of the Conservative party.
Both conclusions, from the complacent left and bean-counting right, are based on misapprehensions. They derive from a double falsehood. The culture wars are really taking place, whether the left likes or not. And the culture wars are a bread-and-butter issue, whether the right likes or not.
The rest of us live in material and financial fear of what might happen if we make public what we think
The consequences of wokery are having a tangible effect in the USA – which always heralds what is to come – where withdrawal for support and funding of the police has grown at a time of rising crime in Los Angeles, San Francisco and even now New York (the Big Apple a few years ago being the beacon of how to solve crime).
Calls to defund the police are the most obvious consequence of this pernicious ideology taking hold. Its advance in the UK has been obvious, and as insidious as it has been invidious. For years now we have seen people lose their jobs, been silenced, or been investigated by the police for saying something ‘inappropriate’ online. We live now in a culture of not only censorship, but self-censorship, in which people are terrified to speak their minds on a day-to-day basis.
This is the culture wars in very real action, in which the powerless and poor are penalised. It’s not just academics or writers who have been put at jeopardy. It’s all of us who are petrified to speak our minds on an every-day basis, for fear of the repercussions that may way come via our employer. We are now our own self-censors. The unsent tweet is the signifier of our age.
Some of us can deal with the social stigma that comes with voicing unfashionable out-of-season opinions on race and gender and immigration, but very few of us can afford to declare these unfashionable opinions. And ‘afford’ is the key word here. The likes of J.K. Rowling, Irvine Welsh and Tom Hanks have the privilege to speak as they like, because they can literally afford to do so. It matters nothing to them any threat of cancellation or of being fired.
The rest of us live in material and financial fear of what might happen if we make public what we think. We live in acquiescence and silence. The likes of me just go along with the fact that to be white, male and straight can now cast you at a disadvantage. We are damned and assumed to be privileged and guilty. Even TV adverts seek to make us invisible.
Wokery is an unspoken force – as are the most dangerous and coercive ideologies. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault observed in ‘Discipline and Punish’ (1975), the most pernicious and malevolent forces in an oppressive society are not the obvious ones – manifest Orwell-style in Big Brother statism – but the unspoken truisms and mores we unthinkingly imbibe, assume and propagate silently. People even assume that what the social media giants digest as news is neutral. It isn’t. They all have their agendas, and it is these day invariably liberal-left.
Wokery is an invisible force of the nature Foucault wrote about: an invisible, silent mind-virus. That’s why people sit back and conclude that it doesn’t exist, or it is a hard-right fantasy. It’s also why some conservatives conclude that it’s all side-show from that which really matters.
It isn’t. The culture wars are real and they happening. They have a very, real tangible effect on how we live from day to day.
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