The Culture Wars
March 13, 2021
THE CULTURE WARS are probably permanent. The new generation always become the arbiters of the output of the previous generation, and their instinct is to turn against it, just as they turned against their parents. The narrative is one of moral progress, and as we become adults, we all find it useful to make it clear that we are more tolerant, more far-sighted, more egalitarian than the people who came before us.
But still, there is something a bit authoritarian about the current round of campaigning to “problematise” or even censor things like The Muppet Show or Dr. Seuss. And there is something worryingly intolerant about Amazon’s latest decision not to stock any book that refers to transgender identity as “gender dysphoria”. There is at the moment a tendency to enforce a stultifying consensus on every issue, whether it is Meghan Markle’s sense of victimhood, Woody Allen’s guilt or bloody Eddie Izzard’s right to call himself a woman.
But I also recognise that I am now closing in on 50 years old, and when we reach a certain age, the moral curve of the universe tends to bend without us, and we end up saying things like, “ethnic minorities/gays/women have more rights than we do these days.” After challenging many of the attitudes we grew up with, the attitudes we formed are challenged in their turn. This happens. This should happen. Ethics define the sort of society we choose to live in, and they ought to be subject to constant scrutiny and revision.
Fox News was all over the deplatforming of Dr. Seuss and the degendering of Mr. Potato Head, using it to prove the madness of “woke” extremism. And I am being driven to agree more and more with those strange people at Spiked Online, who seem to offer a ready-made guide for old-fashioned leftists like myself to discover their inner Poujadist and rail against the absurdities of “wokist” ideology:
The pattern keeps repeating itself. Wokists do something mad and when you point this out to them they accuse you of being mad. The people who think that the mascots on Uncle Ben’s rice or Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix are essentially propping up white supremacy are perfectly sensible. Anyone who says ‘hang on a minute’ is crazy.
Meanwhile, the preposterously self-important Izzard has told the Guardian that he has been “promoted” to a woman, but his claim that he has had “boob envy” since he was a teenager sounds like classic autogynephilia. Critics wonder if he is now going to claim to be eligible for elderly women roles, and fear that in this topsy-turvy world, he will probably get them. They also castigate the Guardian for plugging an interview with Izzard so prominently on their front page, alongside a report about the disgusting murder of Sarah Everard and a collage of photographs showing women killed by men. They say the juxtaposition is not merely insensitive, but deliberately provocative and “misogynistic”. This goes to show how polarised the issue has now become.
Ah yes, polarisation. It seems we actually get a dopamine rush from exaggerating our differences and demonising our opponents. The Coddling of the American Mind refers to studies showing that even artificial, arbitrary group labels assigned just minutes ago will trigger exaggerated responses.
“The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism,” the authors say. Furthermore, “morality binds and blinds”.
