immanence

I think it’s fair to say that the United States is in a state of cultural civil war.

It is cultural war in the sense that it is a war fought with signs and symbols rather than with guns — signs and symbols intended to elicit affiliation, allegiance, and identification with one or another party to the war.

It is civil war not only because it concerns a rift within the civic order of the society, but also in the sense of its relative civility, in contrast to the incivility of physical or military conflict. The relationship of this kind of cultural civil conflict to real civil conflict is similar to the relationship between “civil religion” — or the assumed quasi-religion of a civil society, the glue that holds it together — to “real” religion: it is conducted in the same ways, but without the overt manifestations that make it “war” (or “religion”).

Cultural civil conflicts work on the affective and emotional registers much more than they work on the cognitive and rational registers. For that reason, appeals to facts, evidence, scientific truths, and other loaded claims masquerading as unloaded descriptions of reality, do not work very well at all. To the extent that any such claims support the emotional fabric of the conflict, to that extent they simply become part of the conflict. And to the extent that they become part of the conflict, the capacity of such claims (and others like them) to alter the conflict gets reduced.

The good thing about being in a state of cultural civil war is that it is relatively civil, and certainly better than its non-cultural alternative.

The bad thing is that, being cultural, it is very difficult to see one’s way out of it, or to think one’s way out of it. Those who are party to it are immersed in it; or, you might say, it is immersed in them. But that’s not really bad, since humans are inherently that way — inherently cultural, bound up within matrices of affective resonance, emotional affiliation, complex codification, and semiotic overdetermination. It’s the way we are. Cultural wars are inherently hybrid wars.

(And among the casualties of such hybrid warfare are those who get completely lost, literally “evacuated,” sucked into the vortex of HTD, the hate-technological amplification-distress machine that mass murderers like Stephen Paddock apparently get drawn into. Or so it seems to me.)

The only problem with its being cultural, then, is that we are still learning exactly what that means. And we are learning it at the same time as the cultural institutions and configurations we rely on transmogrify under the pressure of global currents and tensions that are getting more powerful than ever. Our cultural civil war is only one little front in a much wider set of conflicts that are, and will, be fought globally, with cross-cutting fronts intersecting in myriad ways across multiple scales.

Hopefully, they will remain cultural civil wars. And hopefully we will get through them.