Comments on: Do the culture wars exist?

By: Peter Kirk

Peter Kirk — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:21:59 +0000

Yes, John, military metaphors are out of bounds here in the UK, certainly in the religious sphere and to a large extent in the political one. We have suffered from two major wars in the last century, and resent being dragged into new ones, real or metaphorical, by our American “friends”. Our parents and grandparents saw and told us what war could do to a country and to the lives of ordinary people, something yours only saw from a distance. We don’t want to repeat it, in our country or anyone else’s.

By: clayboy

clayboy — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:17:22 +0000

I’m going to raise an additional question on this topic later in a separate post, but I hope all of you will comment there, since I think we’ve got an interesting question on the appropriateness of “culture war” language outside the US.

By: Scott F

Scott F — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:09:15 +0000

The majority of the US population also agreed with what the South did during Jim Crow, too. 16 states still had miscegenation laws when they were declared unconstitutional in 1967.

By: CD-Host

CD-Host — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:01:01 +0000

In the US the culture wars were trigged by Supreme Court decisions. You had a profoundly democratic country confronted with a very activist court. The majority of people support the majority of what the 50-70s court did, but almost all feel the court overstepped. Also the great depression was comparatively worse in the US than the UK, while the boom after the war much larger. So the Baby boomer surge was proportionately greater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uspop.svg)

There is no reason why they should exist in the UK. This is a debate among Americans essentially about how best to govern America.

By: John Hobbins

John Hobbins — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:19:40 +0000

Ah, to be aware of our default positions.

By: clayboy

clayboy — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:27:27 +0000

“Culture” is of course what other people do. In England (I do not speak for the rest of the UK) what we do is clearly and self-evidently natural. England is, after all, God’s own country.

Read what irony you will into the previous paragraph, but consider also the extent many of us from diverse countries and cultures assume an equivalent to this as our default position!

By: John Hobbins

John Hobbins — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:28:09 +0000

Is it really true that military metaphors are suspect in Great Britain? Perhaps they are now out of bounds in the religious sphere, but that might be an expression of how little people in GB care one way or the other about the religious sphere.

Are military metaphors out of bounds in the political sphere, the Ersatz religion of European elites? Maybe so, but if so, in a particular way. That is, if I google “culture war” and BBC, to judge from the top hits, it turns out that the term is widely employed for cultural-political conflict elsewhere – in the US, Canada, the Muslim world – but not in good ol’ England. That’s a little bit revealing. I sense an undercurrent of condescension.