Culture Wars Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Culture war refers to a situation of radical conflict between opposite values or worldviews. The term derives originally from the German Kulturkampf, which denotes the policies enacted between 1871 and 1878 by Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German Empire, to fight the influence of Catholicism. By extension, the term came to mean not just the opposition between secular and religious worldviews, but more generally all situations of confrontation of radically conflicting values. In the United States, the term has been used in this sense by sociologist James Davison Hunter, who argues that a culture war on divisive issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and guns is currently taking place in America.

Metaphor Or Reality

The objects of a culture war are potentially unlimited. All cultural values can become the object of a radical opposition among social actors, including both individuals and communities. A few possible objects of culture wars include diverging religious faiths; secularism as opposed to religious worldviews; contrasting political ideologies; arguments in favor of or against gender discrimination; same-sex marriages; and other controversial issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research.

Different forms of culture wars can be grouped according to the intensity of the conflict. The intensity of conflict ranges within a spectrum whose extremes are war as a metaphor for a cultural opposition between conflicting values, and war as a reality, that is, as an armed conflict. Discussion of either end of the spectrum relies on the concept of conflict.

In a broad sense, a conflict denotes a situation in which two or more social actors try to impose their will on objectives perceived as incompatible. The objectives of conflict can be material resources or ideals. The first case involves a conflict of interests, while the second entails a conflict of ideologies (or, more recently, of identities). These are ideal types that never appear in their pure form in social life. Most of the time, the different components of conflict are so intermingled with one another they can hardly be distinguished. All the same, it is helpful to distinguish them at the analytical level.

Conflicts differ, among other things, in the different means employed in them. In particular, nonviolent conflicts differ from conflicts based on violence, which can be understood as physical coercion. In nonviolent conflicts, the term war is a hyperbole—a rhetorical figure to denote the harshness of cultural conflict. Violent conflicts entail a real war, meaning an act of violence to compel the enemy to do act on the other’s will. Examples of nonviolent conflicts abound in all multicultural societies characterized by a pluralism of values and where, therefore, a radical confrontation between conflicting values and worldviews is a common experience. The innumerable wars in history are all examples of violent conflict. Intermediate kinds of conflict are also possible, such as so-called “symbolic violence.” The term refers to situations such as gender and racial discrimination, which do not necessarily imply the recourse to physical coercion, but nevertheless display high degrees of violence.

The Question Of A Global Culture War

Another possible criterion to characterize culture wars is their scale. Culture wars can take place within bigger or smaller political communities as well as among them. An example of culture war within community borders is the Kulturkampf, which took place within the German Empire at the end of the nineteenth century.

An example of culture wars on a larger scale is the alleged clash between civilizations—a confrontation between world civilizations that, according to some interpreters, now occurs. Since its publication in the early 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order has ignited a lively debate. According to Huntington, in the post–cold war world, the critical distinctions between people are not primarily ideological or economic, but cultural. In particular, it would be the Islamic and Asian challenges to the supposedly universal Western ideals that would reconfigure the fault lines of world politics.

Although many saw in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States a confirmation of Huntington’s concept, scholars continue to strongly criticize his thesis. Some question the scale of conflict Huntington described; others reject the thesis altogether. Among the former, some do not necessarily reject the idea of culture wars but view it on a different level than Huntington. According to Benjamin R. Barber, for instance, the struggle between the jihad and the “McWorld” is not a struggle between civilizations, but rather between two different worldviews. More radically, in The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future, an analysis of contemporary India, Martha C. Nussbaum argues that the greatest threat does not come from the clash between civilizations, but from the clash “within” them and even within each of us as we oscillate between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in a world with others.

Among those who reject the thesis of a clash between civilizations, Charles A. Kupchan observes in The End of the American Era (2002) that Huntington tends to ignore politics while overemphasizing cultural factors. Kupchan contends that the ongoing struggle between the United States and Islamic radicals is not the result of a clash between civilizations, but rather of the behavior of extremist groups preying upon discontent within Muslim majority states. Others, such as Fawaz A. Gerges in America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests?, criticize the very idea of a culture war by arguing that it is a clash of interests and not of cultures that is shaping contemporary world politics. In this view, the idea of a culture war is not only a mistaken metaphor, but an ideological cover for conflicts that find their true sources elsewhere.

Bibliography:

Barber, Benjamin R. Jihad Vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
Bottici, Chiara, and Benoit Challand. “Rethinking Political Myth: The Clash of Civilisations as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 4 (2006): 315–336.
Clark, Christopher, and Kaiser Wolfram. Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Gerges, Fawaz A. America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Kupchan, Charles A. The End of the American Era. New York: Knopf, 2002.
Nussbaum, Martha C. The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.
Ross, Ronald J. The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.
Webb, Adam K. Beyond the Global Culture War. London: Routledge, 2006.