The Problem with Your Kierkegaardian View of the Culture War: Not Enough Irish Fatalism

The blogger Bad Catholic is sick and tired of the culture wars :

The dominant feeling associated with fighting the Culture Wars—whether over abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, or any of those super-fantastic conversation starters—is not one of righteousness, zeal, passion, hope, or holiness. It’s one of  bleaugh . It’s a desperate attempt to feel anything but nausea over the prospect of defending “God’s plan for marriage!” or whatever slogan seems popular. There may be joy in the fight—for fights are fun—but beyond that we don’t care. To be perfectly clear, I don’t care. Traditional family values can go rot, as can traditional morality, good government, and all the rest.

Now stay with me for a while. If you, Christian, don’t believe you’re at least partially  feigning your disgust with the age, I hold you’re either holy or lying. If the former is true, leave the Internet and pray for us.

I agree with everything here, though the Irish fatalist in me would put a more positive spin on it. Think of it this way: For someone who believes in Providence, participating in the culture wars is like tightrope-walking over a net. You should try not to fall off—not falling is the whole point—but with that safety net in place, there’s a limit to how bad things can get. It’s also a fun hobby for those who enjoy it but not exactly one of the seven corporal works of mercy.

Bad Catholic then turns his guns on movement politics specifically and abstraction in the, uh, abstract:

You may have a man against abortion. You may have several men against abortion. But the moment you draw a circle around those men, group them into a class, point to the circle and say, “Here is the pro-life movement!” you’ve created a deadly logical error. You may use the term to speak of the men as a movement, but there exists no movement. The circle is your own construction. There exists only the men.

Now when an idea becomes a movement, a generation, or a lobby, that idea is emptied of its significance. It becomes an abstraction. We who oppose abortion become a demographic, and can be ignored as such. We have pro-life arguments, we develop pro-life slogans, we try to convince people to join the pro-life cause. One can only feel true joy in fighting such a fight for so long, for it attempts to operate on the level of abstraction, attempting to convince people to join a non-existent thing . . . .

Everything  has been cunningly emptied of its significance. The Christian today defends ghosts and attacks with shadows. He may look like St. George, but he has been given a sword of cloud to fight a dragon of steam. He may kill the dragon in the end, but he will never be happy, fighting such a whispery battle.

This is certainly superior to the version of this argument you’ll get from the average Cliff’s Notes Burkean—and far more well-written—but it’s still vulnerable to the stock reply: If like-minded people don’t band together in  some kind of movement, they’ll never get anything done and, in their impotence, quite a lot will be done to them. And just as you need a lobby to fight a political battle, you need abstractions to fight a battle of ideas.

Nevertheless, I agree with everything Bad Catholic says in that quote. I came to this opinion by way of abstraction’s opposite, empirical evidence, which in this case meant looking at the individuals fighting the culture wars, the professionals who do this stuff for a living. Do they really lose sight of the ball once they start acting as representatives of a movement? In general, yes: They really do act as if they were slaying dragons of smoke with swords of vapor—they’re sincere about the issues they fight for, but when it comes to the  battle , they are perfectly cynical.

You can hardly blame them. The gruntwork of social-issue politics—the getting-stuff-done concrete-accomplishment part—involves talking to politicians, who act on the assumption that people are morons; putting out advertising, where  you  have to assume that people are morons; doing polling, where people demonstrate that they really are morons; and occasionally fighting a pertinent lawsuit, where you have to pretend that your client isn’t a moron. That famous saying about politics is an insult to sausage-making.

I’m still grateful to these folks and hope they get personal satisfaction out of being good at what they do, the super-cynical ones especially. Too many people hate their jobs for me to bedgrudge anyone the enjoyment they derive from theirs—assuming their work isn’t outright wicked, and it’s hardly wicked to be a professional culture warrior. It’s very valuable work.

“It’s very valuable work.” That sounded disingenuous. Let me put it this way: I feel about the culture wars the same way I feel about the press: appreciative yet repulsed. They say all it takes to make a man never trust a newspaper article again is for him to be the subject of one, at which point he’ll realize the sad truth about just how wrong reporters usually get it. I would add to that my personal opinion that journalists are callous cynics with a low regard for their audience and each other. (Which can be a good thing! Especially if manifested in the style of a fast-talking newspaperman from a B&W movie, or  Overheard in the Newsroom .) I don’t read much journalism myself, partly for those reasons and partly because life is too short for bad prose.

In spite of all that, I would be extremely worried if I lived in a country where newspapers didn’t exist or weren’t free to print what they wanted. That’s how I feel about the culture wars: It’s pointless noise that I try to avoid as far as possible, and its practitioners seem to have a disproportionate sense of their own importance considering how little impact they could ever conceivably have—but still, for some strange reason, I’m glad it’s there.