The Culture Wars...Again

Several roots of the war in Iraq can be traced to cataclysmic events that occurred in the first half of the early twentieth century. After two European wars had depopulated the West, the bursting-at-the-seams '50s post-war generation came of age shaped by a radical new technology called television. Alfred North Whitehead remarked, "The major advances in civilization all but wreck the societies in which they occur." Marshall McLuhan, the '60s media theorist, captured the discombobulating effect of television on culture when he coined the phrase "The medium is the message." The moving image quickly began to supersede the authority of the written word. The impact of a new way to transfer information on a youthful demographic bulge transformed the world.

The 1960s marked a sharp break from the past. Drugs, flamboyant clothes, exotic new dances, and rock 'n' roll accompanied a rebellious attitude. 'Anything goes' and 'don't trust anyone over thirty' became the watch-words of the decade. Accelerated by the Pill, the defining trait of the '60s was sexual liberation. Both religion and ideology slipped their grip on societal mores. The West lurched sharply to the left of the political, religious, and cultural spectrum.

Georg W. Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher, identified a recurrent historical process. First, some new event in culture causes a sharp break with the past. He called the break a 'thesis.' Then, the thesis produces an abrupt counter-reaction he called an 'antithesis.' The two clash in thunderous discord resulting in a culture war until both sides are exhausted. The sharp rise in right-wing religious fundamentalism that burst forth in the 1990s is the counter reaction to the dramatic leftward tilt of the culture of the '60s.

But wait. Isn't this déjà vu? Didn't this all happen before? Can we learn anything from history by identifying a similar pattern? Half a millennium ago, Europe had just emerged from two horrendous events: the Hundred Years War and three successive waves of Bubonic plague that had decimated its population. Then, a radical new means to transfer information transformed European society. Gutenberg's printing press (1453) caused an explosive rise in literacy rates. An oral society became a text-based one with unprecedented speed. The Renaissance resulted from the convergence of a bulge of young people coming in contact with a new means to disseminate information. Everything was transformed. Questioning authority, an antireligious philosophy called "Humanism" proposed that an ordinary person could make a difference. And most unexpectedly, a shocking attitude toward open sexuality became the rage. Elders clucked at the young's outrageous fashions, radical new dances and innovative forms of music. Society shifted dramatically to the left.

Heralding the rise of the counter-reaction, Savanorola, the dour Florentine fundamentalist, presided over the 'Bonfire of the Vanities.' Martin Luther and the Reformation he began ended the Renaissance. The prim, grim, right reasserted itself by declaring that laughing, dancing, bright clothes, and open sexuality threatened the fabric of society. Thus began the 'mother of all culture wars.'

For the two following centuries, people enthusiastically engaged in murder in the name of religion very nearly destroying European civilization. In France, Huguenots killed Catholics and Catholics killed Huguenots. In England, Puritans killed Anglicans and Anglicans killed Puritans. Germany's Thirty Years War began with Calvinists and Lutherans killing each other before the Protestants and the Catholics squared off for the main event, a cataclysm so destructive that Germany did not recover from its effects for another hundred years. In Spain, Catholics who had lived peaceably with Jews and Moors for centuries concluded that they would no longer tolerate their presence and they either killed them or expelled them. This period in the history books, by the way, can be found under the heading "The Age of Reason."

Drearily, the polarized events playing out today, with each side's clarion calls to a stricter fundamentalist intolerance, are a speeded-up replay of what transpired five hundred years ago. There are lessons to be learned if only we would learn them. History never exactly repeats itself but human nature unfailingly does. As George Santayana observed, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Or, as Rodney King put it, "Can't we all just get along?"