Wars and Rumors of Wars (Time of Monsters #6)
Culture wars have always been dumb. Consider, the people who want you to think that they’re fighting tyranny are passing laws that legislate your bodily functions.
The culture wars have felt different, recently. Perhaps it’s simply the political realignment as the democrats take power in the government and the Republicans move into being the party in opposition, but this still doesn’t feel quite the same. It feels more hollow.
Let’s recap. The latest culture war bullshit deals with the estate of Doctor Seuss deciding not to reprint six books – And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer – that they decided portrayed some groups in an insensitive and hurtful fashion. In addition, Hasbro has announced that it was dropping the “Mister” from the overall brand of “Mister Potato Head”, while retaining the honorific for individual toys – so it’s no longer a “Mr. Potato Head brand Mr. Potato Head” and “Mr. Potato Head brand Mrs. Potato Head”, simply “Potato Head brand Mr. Potato Head” and “Potato Head brand Mrs. Potato Head.” Also, Warner Brothers decided it didn’t want to put Pepé Le Pew in the new Space Jam movie, which also featured a redesign of a cartoon rabbit to be less sexualized.
All of these are united by several facts: the owners of the cultural artifacts made a decision on how to handle them based on changes in the broader culture, and then the right-wing self-talk started, where these changes were blamed on the actions of “cancel culture” as employed by “the left”. It hinges on people of a conservative outlook being unable to understand that no one on the other side of the equation cares about the thing in question – the last take I heard on Pepé Le Pew was from Dave Chapelle in the comedy special Killin’ them Softly back in 2000, and the last I heard on Doctor Seuss was some mid-new teens take on the right being upset about the radical politics at play in his books.
None of this matters. People get worked up about these things that frankly do not matter and then it gets plastered all over social media as people look for the newest thing to be outraged by. They are outraged, because their outrage is profitable to the people who work to influence their emotions.
Let’s trace this back. According to Vox, the discourse about Doctor Seuss can be traced back to a February 26 post on The Daily Wire (FreezePage used because I don’t want to give them ad revenue,) the publication of Ben “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings” Shapiro, which lied and said:
Learning for Justice — a left-wing educators group — is demanding that Dr. Seuss be canceled. A prominent Virginia school district has taken marching orders and ordered its schools to avoid ‘connecting Read Across America Day with Dr. Seuss.’
I was going to include the caricature with a content warning — however, given the spate of recent hate-crimes against people of east Asian descent, I am not comfortable doing so. If you wish to see it — and read a good write-up of the controversy, I would recommend looking at this piece from Resonate, a European journal of east Asian culture with a largely east Asian staff.
However, it is notable that the books have not been banned, nor has access to them been curtailed in any way. Nor does the group “Learning for Justice” have any kind of official pull to have these demands listened to — they’re simply being used as a bogeyman, because the right wing hates anything with the term “justice” in it. The reasoning for this, given by the Daily Wire is that the books, one of which features the line “a chinaman who eats with sticks”, among other gems, “allegedly have ‘racial undertones.’” (scare quotes original.)
The piece in question also has the awkward title “Oh The Places The Woke Will Go: Dr. Seuss Canceled For ‘Racial Undertones’”, which was written by Chrissy Clark. However, the piece itself, as you can see from the frozen page, features no actual examination of Seuss’s work: to dismiss the criticisms in question, it would be necessary to actually look at the material in question, instead of simply resorting to argumentum ad lapidem and just calling it (in not so many words) bullshit.
Of course, while this is transparent chicanery, the discussion gender identity of a plastic potato that stores its detachable facial features in its anal cavity is simply idiocy. We actually had people at CPAC standing on a massive Odal rune – albeit, apparently, unintentionally so – and decrying what was said in a press release that they had incorrectly summarized to them. That is something that future History graduate students will build a career out of.
The comparison. Flip the rune upside down in your head, if you need a prompt there. Image taken from the Orlando Sentinel, who got it originally from the Daily Beans podcast.
I think it is time to admit that all of this outrage is hollow.
I’m not about to say that no one cares about this – one of my cousins was posting very passionately about Doctor Seuss a while back – but all of this outrage is manufactured and is based on nothing real. There is no sensible reason for adults to actually focus on this, but the only thing that the Right Wing Outrage Industry can make money off of is cultural artifacts that date from before the Beatles were notable.
The really amazing thing is simply how mask-off it is and how little anyone seems to care about that. We live and work in an attention economy, and the easiest attention to drum up is outrage. The emotions of the audience are a horizon of extraction, a place from which they can pull the resource that they have monetized: they take the outrage, and they spin it into ad revenue.
Another benefit of this isn’t simply that outrage can become ad revenue, but that it prevents attention from alighting on something else. Paradoxically, keeping a large portion of the populace in a state of frothing outrage actually makes the system more stable, instead of less. Provided, of course, they hit the sweet spot on things – something that private interests are famously bad at doing.
Of course there is another explanation.
The Hygienic Roots of Censorship
In graduate school, I wrote a paper about the connection between periods of high censorship and public health crises. In short, I drew a link between epidemics and high-profile censorship cases (one of my main examples was about the banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the years after the Spanish Flu.) The basis for this is some of the better work in evolutionary psychology about the link between hygiene and morality. My argument was, essentially, that periods of high censorship followed periods of disease outbreaks, because of a misplaced urge to socially protect ourselves from potential contagions – and we draw a metaphorical link between hygienic and moral hazards.
Of course, there’s a weird difference here: nothing is actually being banned. It’s not actually a ban or a censorship case. This is not controversy, but the empty image of controversy. When you hear that something is cancelled, it’s important to check and see if it’s actually any harder to find, because you’re going to find out something quite easy to see: cancellation is not actually thing.
Given the misplaced, basically-an-attempt-at-sympathetic-magic way that moral and physical hygiene are equated, maybe this will have the same effect. Of course, the right wing can’t stop denouncing Colin Kaepernick or, indeed, the “woke mob” who are going around “cancelling” everything. Because, to them, deciding that things could possibly be better – and communicating as much – are the filthiest thing that a person can do. They certainly care about it more than marital infidelity, or sexual assault, or pedophilia.
Provided, of course, they can’t find a way to blame the other side of the political spectrum (I’m going to take the brave stance that perhaps it should never be tolerated and if so-called liberals and leftists end up going to jail for these things, then good. We’re better off without them.)
Culture War and Moral Panic
I’m fascinated by Moral Panics. This is a concept from sociology, articulated by Stanley Cohen. It’s a repeating pattern you see throughout history. Cohen laid out five stages:
Someone, something or a group are defined as a threat to social norms or community interests.
The threat is then depicted in a simple and recognizable symbol/form by the media.
The portrayal of this symbol rouses public concern.
There is a response from authorities and policy makers.
The moral panic over the issue results in social changes within the community.
These ideas were first put forward in Cohen’s book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Cover pictured above.
And you can see this over and over again. It happens at every point in history, in every culture. One of the strangest things about it is how, almost every time, these events are ignored after they have passed. Like they’re waking up from troubled sleep, people simply forget that they were convinced of it.
Once a year, I have an event in my classes I call “Satan Day”, which is about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s. I use it as an object lesson in why students should care about developing their critical thinking skills, because the people who got wrapped up in it are ridiculous and dragging these mistakes into the light to be looked at is a valuable lesson in why it’s important not to accept everything at face value.
I explain the general outline of what a moral panic is, I say we’re going to be talking about one, and give the broad strokes: for a time, all of America became convinced that there were satanists living among us, abusing children. Without any evidence of this, they tore one another apart. For fifteen years or so, America was even more insane than it currently is.
Of course, by the time I start talking – in vague terms, and with college students – about the McMartin Preschool trial or similar, one of my students will forget this, and ask “how could people do these things?” and I have to explain: they didn’t. People were convinced that these things had been done, but it was a misapprehension about how the world works.
And it caused incalculable damage. Lives were destroyed.
Now, of course, we barely have moral panics. We have culture wars. A culture war is what happens when there’s a failure around stage 3 of Cohen’s model, or in the second of Benjamin Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s characteristics, which is “consensus.”
In short, there is disagreement over what a symbol represents and the group it refers to, and so two or more blocs in society end up fighting one another instead of having a cathartic (and ultimately destructive) torches and pitchforks moment.
It smolders, instead of sparking, and we all have to choke on the smoke for decades.
Culture War and Class War
I know, it must come as a shock that something that concerns the appropriate honorific to use with a root vegetable doesn’t matter, but it simply doesn’t.
The culture war is a stalking horse. None of this matters and, indeed, none of this has mattered, ever. The culture war is simply there to exhaust you and sap you of your ability to feel outrage over things that actually matter. If you’re worried about the hypothetical genitals of a plastic root vegetable, and if you’ve spent a thousand hours posting online about it, then you’re not thinking about the fact that very different things happen when your boss shorts you by $100 and when you walk away with $100 from the till. You’re not thinking about the fact that the police killed more people last year than have died in every mass shooting since Columbine, and that this violence was unevenly distributed by race. You’re not thinking about the fact that we have to reshape the world completely in 9 years (less. As of this writing, we have 3,214 days to change the world.)
None of this matters. It is not simply useless, it is – to quote Thomas Ligotti – malignantly useless.
The more of our energy we sink into these pointless battles, the less able we are to build a just society. The more we simply sink into this quagmire.
You can see this quite easily – in many ways, the American system of “generations” is a massive oversimplification, and the lines of battle in this conflict are drawn largely on generational grounds. While it isn’t solely used as a proxy for class, I’m going to guess that the people who care about the “cancellation” of these children’s media figures (which, I stress, isn’t actually a thing,) are largely people who are financially comfortable enough to not have to worry about anything of actual import.
This whole issue of generation-as-class-proxy is part of why the conservative news media has called up Generation X as their chosen foot soldiers in this conflict, and I think that the insufficiency of the idea of generation-as-class-proxy is why so many Gen Xers laugh at the idea: they’re supposed to be the generational “middle class” in this model, but while a large number of them are more comfortable than their younger siblings and children, they were the first cohort to be hid by precaratization: they’ve largely been left out of the explosive wealth growth that older cohorts benefited from.
Of course, as we’ve discussed in the past, generations are bullshit, and don’t actually mean anything – but they are perceived to exist, perceived to mean something.
What Is To Be Done?
This one’s easy. The first step is the simplest thing you’ve ever had to do: quit caring about culture wars. They can’t have an argument if you refuse to participate. Of course, you might say, this will just result in the emergence of moral panics instead of culture wars: after all, if the two sides don’t line up against one another, one side will just have the aforementioned torches-and-pitchforks moment, won’t they?
Well...maybe? But I think it can be interrupted before it hits that point. You can’t have a culture war if no one comes. If you identify why something is bullshit and can pull out a credible source explaining why it’s bullshit, you can just move on with your life and focus on things that actually matter.
I honestly can’t think of any response to these current culture war moments that aren’t simply mocking the person bringing it up — and I’m going to do my best not to do that, because it isn’t as helpful as I wish it was.
I think that’s what most of us actually want. If we live in an attention economy, then we should have the right to expend our attention on what we wish. The Outrage Industry seeks to strip-mine your attention, the best thing that can be done here is resist it.