It may come as a surprise to some, that I read closely blogs and articles of scholars, who I believe, miss key or main points in their argument, whether from Left or Right.
Open scholarship goes to the work I do as a philosopher and historian, and as a sociologist. These are the roles of Frank Furedi. Furedi was first known for Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone? (Continuum 2004). It was moderate liberal-conservative argument, and, even as an intellectual historian might quip a few errors in language or minor context, it was the important, necessary, accurate critique. Furedi’s books descended from that point, following the popular trend in the reactionary thinking to something branded ‘Leftism’:
Furedi, Frank (2009). Wasted: Why education isn’t educating, Continuum.
Furedi, Frank (2018). How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century, Bloomsbury Continuum
Furedi, Frank (2021). 100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War over Socialization, De Guyter.
Yet Furedi’s work is still important and, to some degrees, useful. Recently Furedi set up a blog on Substack called, “Roots & Wings”. His blog, dated 23 December 2023, caught my attention, as it directly address the topic of my international-attracting article: Finding Peace from the Culture-History War: A Historiographical Message for the Times (2021).
Furedi’s begins well, picking up the common complaint, from the critics, that the “literature published in the 1980s and 1990s that dealt with the Culture Wars tended pooh-pooh its significance.” One reason, why, my 1995 doctoral work was ignored. As Furedi pointed out, the critics of the critics were wrong to assume that “…political correctness and later, cancel culture were fads…”. The logic of the culture wars was not exhausted, and has only magnified.
Where the argument goes wrong, if we take a detailed look at the wider scoping, is the way the culture war is defined or described in Furedi’s outlook. There are no clear definitions but, as argued in my article, definitional arguments only have the trend of re-debating the argument. It would miss the point by trying to criticise what Furedi might be trying to define as a culture war from the inferences of his article (you have to pay a subscription to the whole blog). However, the descriptions do infer confusion, and a tendency to be one-sided. For Furedi, parks the culture war as the “latest manifestation such as trans genderist ideology or Black-Lives Matter”. Furedi is annoyed that culture wars are, not merely proclaimed as a distraction, but “a political agenda”, which suggests more leftist problems than “the invention of malicious right-wing idealogues and used by them to reassert their failing authority.” At the outset, Furedi’s political sociology is not so much wrong. It is that far too-misguided as a simplified version of a more complex historiography. To quote Furedi:
In the inter-war era ideologically motivated conflicts created the conviction that the West was living through an Age of Ideologies. Struggles regarding which ideology would prevail distracted attention from domain of cultural values. It was not until the Age of Ideology ended that culture could gradually emerge as a source of political polarisation. The so-called Cultural Turn of the late 1970s marks the moment when support for ideological conflict declined and when values related issues began to dominate public life. The current Culture War began when culture – a way of being- a system of meaning began to get politicised.
There are a few important historiographical errors in Furedi’s statement. The first sentence is generally correct. The sentence reflects the insights of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991; only there is a longer story back from the inter-war period and forward to the 1990s. The second sentence can be taken as generally correct, but it does ignore the fact that “cultural values” does very much speak of ideology. The discourses between belief systems and values education is confused, from the perspective of a detail-respecting ethicist or of other philosophers analysing proclaimed beliefs as systems thought. Most of the population, even academics, still work on the basis that thought, emotions, insight, ideology, are separate boxes. The foolish academics know how to analyse, that is, break apart complex ideas, but fail in any interesting synthesis.
The third sentence is where errors begin: “It was not until the Age of Ideology ended that culture could gradually emerge as a source of political polarisation.” How is it possible that ideology existed in the 1930s and 1940s but political polarisation was yet to emerge as culture? Or is Furedi reversing the ideology-politics relations? In which case, of the latter, Furedi’s discloses his politics as instrumentalist, in that, if it is politics of the immediate-at-hand, then that is what drives the ideology (disingenuous belief system); it is not about belief at all, but of instrumental command, and habit (disposition). This is the position of the political cynic. If, however, the politics is questioned or doubted (measured skepticism), it is a matter of belief, and not reduced to instrumentalist outlook. I prefer, as critical thought, in the relations of ideology-politics, and not its reversal in the culture war.
Why? Because Furedi as a critic of the “culture war” has become something of the warrior himself, and yet that is the very point that he correctly makes of the problem:
Patrick Buchanan’s famous Culture War Speech at the 1992 Republican Party Conference indicated that Bell’s view was shared by even those who were sympathetic to the speaker’s view. This right wing conservative political figure faced a tirade of hostile criticism for what was described as his extreme rhetoric at the conference. Buchanan’s rhetorical call to arms was reminiscent of the language of religious wars in the past. Buchanan insisted that differences over values were far more significant than arguments over economic resources regarding ‘who gets what’.
.
On this account, Furedi makes an excellent point, but he missed the key point in the error of the original cited statement, at fourth sentence: “The so-called Cultural Turn of the late 1970s marks the moment when support for ideological conflict declined and when values related issues began to dominate public life.” The mistake here, is as stated above, to assume that value education and ideology sit in different boxes. The 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s, are just as ideological and shaped by values.
Much of what Furedi states is correct, particularly in citing the historian Gabriel Kolko, on the cultural realignment. The cultural realignment did happen in the late 1970s, but discourses on values were no more than what it had been. It was only the trend in values education which caught the cultural attention. Furedi’s mistake was to take the Bell thesis uncritically:
The American sociologist, Daniel Bell, for one was convinced that divisive moral questions had to be depoliticised because these ‘cultural and symbolic issues’ are ‘by their nature, non-negotiable and can only invite public conflict.
It is one of those paradoxes in sociology, created by the silly wars between schools: functional, and symbolic, in particular; as if what works has nothing to do with abstract thought (stupidity!). Semantics, critical thinking, and empathetic positioning are not separate existences, in the way confused academics talk (and who should know better).
However, it is in the warriors’ favour to break down things and not put matters back into peaceful relations. Yes, conflict is perennial, but its measure does not have to be warfare, whether literal or metaphorical.
******
Featured Image: dreamstime_l_60795224
Neville Buch
Latest posts by Neville Buch (see all)
- Presentism and Parallelism: Why Political Decisions-Makers Need to fund, contract, or employ professional historians - April 27, 2024
- What is “Stupidity” and Why it is Not a Dismissal in My Philosophic-Sociological History Work - April 26, 2024
- No! Not Yes: Optus Thinking is Machine Thinking - April 25, 2024