Culture wars have two main functions. First, to split an existing, dominant social or political coalition apart by the clever use of wedge-issues. (Not all wedge-issues are a part of a culture war.) So, a culture war reveals a latent or induces real divergence in a pre-existing coalition. So, for example, how to think about trans-issues has split contemporary feminism apart (especially in the U.K, which is itself an interesting phenomenon). Second, and this mirrors the first function, to induce or solidify unity within a potentially heterogeneous coalition (think of the role of women’s ‘right to choose’ in America’s Democratic party). So, the issue must have salience to what we may call ‘tribe formation.’ (If you don’t like my examples offer your own!)

Now, the term ‘culture war’ is a literalist translation of the German ‘Kulturkampf.’ This nineteenth century conflict involved a major political conflict between Bismarck and the Catholic Church over control of educational institutions (and the content taught) as well as ecclesiastical appointments. In it national/ethnic stereotypes (about the Polish) were used to shift balance of allegiance. One reason I mention this origin of the term because in it we already see many of the later features of culture wars: the significance of education, especially the education of social elites, the role of non-materialist values, including ethnicity/race, religion, and nationalism.

I don’t mean to suggest cultural wars only have these tribal functions. Obviously there are two others worth mentioning. First, culture wars may be oriented toward policy or legislative changes. But as Samantha Hancox-Li stressed, in an important recent essay, “How Movements win,” (Liberal Currents, April 9, 2024), issues that function well in solidifying coalitions need not do well in producing lasting legislation. (Her example is police abolitionism in the wake of BLM.)

Second, culture wars tend to be in the interest of particular individual members of what was once known as the clerisy (or intelligentsia, or blogosphere) who make some issue or some particular strategy part of their signature or persona and hope to cash in on them in some way. Sometimes this can be extraordinarily successful: Boris Johnson went from Back-Bencher to Foreign-Secretary to Prime-Minister in record time on the back of his support for Leave/Brexit.

Now, anything can become a culture war topic. That’s because anything can become of symbolic importance and become instrumental in solidifying affective and instrumental ties among people. Don’t believe me? Go re-read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels!

However, there is a class of topics that are especially likely to be effective in perpetuating culture wars. These are topics that are at the (i) intersection of campus politics (recall elite education) and, also, (ii) involve considerable abstraction. Now, what’s important about campus politics (especially at highly selective schools) is it is far removed from ordinary people’s lives despite the high seeming stakes involved (getting in is perceived to generate enormous windfalls). There is little direct acquaintance with them, and even people that have gone to a selective institution in the past spend their adult lives away from them. In addition, on campus there is an extreme intellectual division of labor among (and even within) disciplines such that the vocabulary of one discipline can become highly unintelligible and esoteric to members of another. The jargon of one discipline can easily become gibberish to the next, and this jargon is utterly unsuitable for public debate, where it will quickly seem mystery or bullshit.

So, the specialized jargon of a discipline or a field can also put other academics on par with members of the wider public: in the position of being unsure what is insight and what is bullshit. Culture war entrepreneurs take advantage of this fact in combination with the social and lived distance of campus life. Fashion, sports, entertainment, and art also can become culture war topics for very analogous reasons.

The previous two paragraphs hint at topics related to the political and theoretical significance of hyperspecialization that animate Plato’s Republic and Bacon’s New Atlantis. They have been put on the map anew by Elijah Millgram in his (2015) The Great Endarkenment; and are also of interest to me in my work on synthetic philosophy (see here for my restatement).

So, much for set up.

But there is another important feature that I need to mention. Some readers may well find the above too dispassionate about what’s at stake. They may feel that I lack a certain warmth toward truth. They would be right, but not because I am a sociopath about truth. Rather, when it comes to truth in public life, I am (recall) a Platonic skeptic: in democratic public life opinion will predominate and truth will, by and large, not rule. (See also Cyril Hédoin’s response here.) This may be elitist and undesirable, but some of us can’t afford to trade in fantasies.

Now, in a recent entertaining piece, Liam Kofi Bright (writing as Sootyempiric) engages with the culture war about “truth and objectivity” (in which one’s stance on the status of mathematical truth has been elevated to a sign of membership in either western civilization or cultural marxism) and treats it as “a distraction,” and goes on to claim “that in fact none of our disputes in political and social life are actually about the nature of truth.”

Now, one might think that because nothing as abstract as (say) the semantic theory of truth could become a source of dispute in political and social life. This misunderstands politics. In political and social life anything can become politicized. And if one looks over the history of European politics incredibly abstruse often highly metaphysical topics have become the source of political and social strife. I don’t just have now distant condemnations of 1277 in mind, or the theological conflicts that led to the actual wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In my own life-time the purported perjury of a philandering president was debated in terms of the semantics of ‘is.’ Rather, as I noted abstruse topics lend themselves quite well to culture wars because people’s stance on them is not shaped by informed deliberation even understanding, but by social cues, loyalty, and aspirational tribal affiliation.

Bright (a LSE philosopher) himself comes very close to arguing this himself in his error theory:

Here, at least, is my little error theory of the situation. People do not really object to doubts about truth’s objectivity or fictionalist metaphysics of mathematics or what have you. What they object to is something like… the flavour, the tone, the spicing… of the ideas. Their presentation and the affect it produces.

So far so good. But then he concludes his piece with the following thought:

People care about how they interact with others, they care about how their history is understood and appreciated. There are particular claims about conventions we should or should not adopt around race or gender that they find very controversial indeed. And I think by sheer coincidence (ultimately related to the prestige economy of academia rewarding high-level discussion of abstract concepts combined with the habit of humanities scholars to want to pose as radical) we often get discussions about such cultural hot topics appearing next to discussions of the nature of truth and objectivity. And by Lockean association of ideas people come to pair the vexation they feel at the former with the nuances of the latter.

But politics is about how we live together, who is to command and who is to obey and when these roles should be reversed or abandoned, what our shared resources should be spent upon and when they should be saved, what burdens are to be borne and by whom. Theory of truth and ideals of objectivity are not irrelevant to all this, but their role remains fairly indirect. Keep your eyes on the prize.+

There are two disagreements that I want to highlight because my own views are not far removed from Bright’s. First, his claim that it is ‘sheer coincidence’ that cultural hot topics appear so close to the ‘nature of truth and objectivity.’ My disagreement may be surprising given my Platonic skepticism about truth in public life; for one might expect that I tend to treat social and political life as intrinsically random and, therefore, not truth conducive. But that’s not how I see it. Rather, there are strategic agents that promote given associations for the kinds of reasons outlined above; they even promote the character of the epistemic environment (whether it is trustworthy or not, etc.). Some such actors expect to gain from a public life where there is mistrust in established authorities and media. I don’t mean to suggest any determined strategic agent will always succeed. (So I am not claiming that social life is without causal opacity.) But political agents are constantly trying to generate new associations and antipathies within and among us.

Second, while Bright is surely right that “politics is about how we live together, who is to command and who is to obey and when these roles should be reversed or abandoned, what our shared resources should be spent upon and when they should be saved, what burdens are to be borne and by who;” this does not exclude or keep at a distance (or indirectness), a “theory of truth and ideals of objectivity.” And that’s because of their role in generating any ‘we.’

Even the most nominalist metaphysician has to acknowledge that in political life, people’s beliefs about abstracta (including rejecting their existence) may be an affective glue in some social unity. In fact, for the nominalist this helps explain the mechanism of how the otherwise distinct come to understand themselves as constituting a possible ‘we.’’

Now, one may well think I have missed Bright’s point. After all, his low-key satire is designed to make us laugh at our tendency to fall for the hucksters who try to set us apart by appealing to our mistakes over how to apply a Tarski-bi-conditional or how to interpret a model theory; or those that try to convince us that accepting ‘2+2=4’ is key to civilizational survival. The hucksters prevent, say, “rendering material circumstances more akin to what one might expect given a racially egalitarian ideology.”

Fair enough.

The problem is that in culture wars ridicule and mockery don’t unmask the powerful and bring us back to our senses. Rather, they reinforce the affective ties of the tribe or coalition. And so earnestly (or mockingly) one, thereby, keeps the culture war going rather than (ahh) changing the topic.

• This post first appeared in a slightly modified form at digressionsnimpressions.