Centerfield

It's the culture, stupid! So what to do about it?

There's an interesting and provocative little piece on parents and the culture wars by Mark Schmitt over at TPM Cafe, some of it based on his personal experience working for Bill Bradley in the mid-'90s. Schmitt's four main points:

"First, this is one of those issues about which the only reasonable reaction is an ambivalent one, and it's fair to assume that many of those who say they're concerned about culture in this way have a similarly ambivalent or complex reaction."

"Second, be careful about assuming that this is an area where there's a lot of opportunity for left-right alliances... [Y]ou can quickly find yourself in bed with people who seem to be talking about the same thing, but whose real gripe is with the positive portrayal of gay people, single parents and sexually active single people in the media."

"Third, avoid 'policy literalism.' Just because people in polls say, "I'm concerned about sex and violence in the media," that doesn't mean that the only plausible response is to propose a law that would somehow limit sex and violence in the media."

"Fourth, there may be an opportunity here for a broader shift in the debate about the market and government."

Where do I stand on this?

Back in the early-'90s, when I was at Tufts, I found myself submerged in the culture wars, largely as an op-ed columnist for The Tufts Daily. Then, my target was the academic left, which was very much in the ascendancy on college campuses across America. Tufts may not have been the most radical college in America, but it seemed to me that it had largely given in to political correctness, deconstruction, relativism, the dismantling of the traditional curriculum in favour of superficial interdisciplinary pursuits, and a rejection of the Great Books as educational tools. No, I didn't call for the return of Greek and Latin, but I objected to what I saw as a hijacking of higher education by an academic left more concerned about social engineering and its radical political agenda than with liberal education. Absolutism is the enemy of liberal education, and, back then, absolutism was very much a phenomenon of the left.

(As a Straussian (although, a liberal-moderate one -- believe it or not), I realize that this is very much what drove Allan Bloom to write The Closing of the American Mind: although he has been accused of being some right-wing blowhard, he was motivated precisely by the illiberalism that he found on college campuses, and his main effort was directed at reviving a healthy sense of what liberal education means.)

I still stand by what I wrote back then, but, clearly, the absolutism has shifted to the right. And now that I'm away from the cultural hotbed of an American college campus, I find myself defending a more liberal culture -- liberty supported by an education to virtue -- against the absolutism of the right. This makes me something of a cultural libertarian, I suppose, and in this respect I'm very much in agreement with Schmitt.

However, I do worry immensely about the so-called coarsening of the culture, and, though not yet a parent, I do worry about the exposure of children to what is at times an awfully vulgar culture. In short, I worry about the vulgarization of the American mind. But this, to me, requires responsible parenting, education that prepares young people for an increasingly complex cultural environment, and a recognition that, in many cases, the world of adulthood should be closed to children.

The great cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote about the disappearance of childhood, that is, the breakdown of the necessary divide between childhood and adulthood -- and he was, as usual, right on the mark. But what we don't need is censorship. There need to be barriers to prevent children from accessing what is specifically "adult" culture, such as pornography or even certain mainstream movies, but adults, in my view, should be able to access such adult content freely and without fear of recrimination.

But, let's face it, even my cultural libertarianism has its limits. This is the problem that plagues anyone who cares about liberty, no matter where they happen to reside on the political spectrum. We want liberty, not licence, but where is the line between the two? Liberty at its limits, after all, resembles licence, and the two ultimately become one and the same. For example, I support the legality of pornography for adults, but clearly I don't support all pornography: some crosses the line, the (personal, ever-shifting) moral line that I set somewhere out on the fringes, but my line might not be your line and I may find myself in disagreement even with accepted communal standards, which are themselves constantly in flux. So what to do? Perhaps the answer is not the draw some firm legal line between acceptable and unacceptable "culture," but rather simply to acknowledge that the issue is complex and that absolutism will get us nowhere.

And herein lies the dilemma: We stand for individual liberty, but we recognize that liberty means nothing without responsibility and that liberty unchecked degenerates into license. We oppose censorship and governmental efforts to regulate access (at least by adults) to what may be considered obscene or otherwise immoral material, but we recognize that there is a price to pay when such vulgarity threatens to consume the culture altogether.

Ultimately, the rule of law must prevail, and that means the usual interplay between different branches of government, with different interests balanced against one another and transient public opinion set against constitutional safeguards. And this means that different communities will have somewhat different standards of what constitutes appropriate (and legal) culture. As long as individual liberty is protected, and as long as public policy does not descend into the quagmire of censorship, I'm not sure that's such a bad thing.

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)