Let’s stop pretending the culture wars aren’t real

Are the culture wars real? Some assume that they’re an imaginary affair, or, at best, a distraction from the real, pressing bread-and-butter concerns of today. As Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times yesterday:

‘The culture wars…may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’

We are familiar with this line of thinking, both from left and right. The culture wars about race and gender are irrelevant and ‘piffling’, so some say. It’s all fuss and nonsense.

Many on the left decry with airy disdain that complaints of ‘cancellation’ and ‘wokery’ are just antediluvian grunts of conservatives who don’t like, or don’t understand, the modern world – with its new, strange manners concerning matters race and gender. Then there are the shopkeeper-type conservatives, who think the culture wars are all a silly hoo-ha about pronouns, toilet usage, dramas about Cleopatra and the Royal Family as seen on TV.