Culture wars: the age of the armchair warrior

Ben Wildsmith

‘Daddy, what did you do in the Culture War?’

‘I posted a meme of the Duchess of Sussex with Prince Harry on a lead but those were dark times, son. Never speak of them again.’

In the olden days you used to know when you were in a war because Tony Blair would start acting even more like a double-glazing salesman than usual.

With a flash of the demonic grin that seduced a nation in 1997, Middle Eastern cities would be reduced to rubble and The Sun would rush out an ‘Our Boys in the Gulf’ commemorative edition featuring Linda Lusardi in a khaki bikini.

The actual fighting of the war tended to be left to professional servicemen and the unfortunate residents of wherever we were liberating.

Our job, as armchair liberators, was to watch guided missiles blow up flat-roofed buildings on the news and then purchase computer games based on the conflict.

Your modern vicarious warrior, on the other hand, is a far more sophisticated consumer of warfare.

Nuance

Nowadays, we demand to be part of the action ourselves and lay our enemies to waste on social media as we fight for noble causes that permit neither nuance nor negotiation.

It’s do or die on Twitter for cultural warriors and, make no mistake, they must be taken seriously, or you’ll be unfriended at the very least.

At any given moment, battalions of our fellow citizens are valiantly calling each other names in the service of concepts that define the very soul of humanity.

Uncle Keith is fighting for freedom of speech during the ad break; Mum is defending biological womanhood for a couple of hours because her Pilates class has been cancelled; your daughter has put off her GCSE revision to decolonise the Llantwit Major community Facebook page and your window cleaner hosts a YouTube channel devoted to unmasking the machinations of the World Economic Forum.

The common factor in all the arguments that comprise the culture war is that they are insoluble.

At no point are Trans people going to agree to stop being quite so Trans, nor are their opponents about to suggest they be allowed to self-identify but only on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Such an argument must be distressing and exhausting for those whose lives are intrinsically affected by the issue.

These people, however, comprise a tiny minority of those engaged with the debate, and this is the defining feature of all culture war activity: it is a risk-free sport for those with no skin in the game, whilst being potentially devastating for those who do.

When our leisure time was spent meeting each other in person, it was considered impolite to discuss politics and religion unless they were the reason everyone was there. Nobody wanted the hassle.

Now, as public spaces are diminishing by the day and social media fills the gap, ideological strife has become an unavoidable part of daily life for many of us.

Debate

In a functioning democracy, the facility for everyone to debate issues of the day would be a great development. From it, new ideas could emerge, and meaningful political movements could be forged.

Far from democratising society, however, the internet seems to have hived off debate into a meaningless free-for-all and provided an illusion of solidarity for participants who, in reality, are growing ever more isolated and vulnerable to manipulation.

The terms of the debate are directed with ruthless efficiency by those with control over the flow of information.

So, this week people are lined up behind either Lady Sarah Hussey or Ngozi Fulani, neither of whom anybody had heard of until last week, in a dispute over a conversation nobody heard at an unremarkable palace reception.

Once engaged with the debate, people are cornered by algorithms that show them the opinions they want to see.

We are persuaded that the trivial is noteworthy and then set upon each other to fight for opinions which have been fed to us by our handlers.

Freedom of expression has replaced religion as the opium of the masses. As our standard of living declines, we are wasting ourselves in parlour games that serve no function but to perpetuate themselves and exhaust our capacity to protest.

The culture war is Eastenders for the self-important.