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I see that neither side of the culture war right now focuses on the positive, on something beautiful. Both sides see themselves as righteous oppressed victims fighting against the evil empire of the other side, but for both it is less a Star Wars vision than a Terminator vision. War machines running over skulls at night-time, death and lasers. The culture war is bleak and stark, it has no poetry, no romance. It is a grim attrition war, trenches and minor offensives but few large breakthroughs if by breakthroughs one means reaching one's opponent and convincing him of something. Where are the creative songbirds of thought and word who would transcend this opposition and maybe get both sides to become aware that both are equally stuck in the human condition? Has rhetoric truly reached the limits of its potential power? I have so rarely seen anyone change his mind about anything more than minor details.
It is all so tiresome. Maybe it is possible to move in some orthogonal direction and flank this whole conflict from a side that has the breath of fresh air behind it?
This seems like a strange perspective to me. Or maybe I'm missing your point. The Culture War isn't about the positive and beautiful because, and maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here, war isn't positive and beautiful.
Plenty of people are making beautiful arts and crafts of various kinds to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. That's just not Culture War material.
That's entirely fair, but for most of human history, the rhetoric around it was. So was the vision. War was painted as glorious.
Obviously war and the culture war are different, If we're going to compare them, why are they different in this particular manner?
For most of human history, most visions of war were written down by the warrior aristocracy that got the best training, the best weapons, and the best treatment when made prisoners. I'm sure the young baron who grew up with tales of chivalry was having a blast when he rode into battle on a 800 kg warhorse, clad head to toe in glimmering steel; the dozen peasant conscripts armed with a rusty sickle that he trampled on his way there might have had a different perspective (or for that matter their families, who could look forward to starvation when their crops and tools had been burned, their livestock slaughtered, and half their workforce murdered).
Outside of that warrior aristocracy, it's not that difficult to find moral opposition to war, even in antiquity:
– Mozi (墨子), ca. 400 BCE (source)
Sure, but that's not... exactly my point.
Why is the current aristocracy behaving differently than past ones?
Pillaging and looting the other guy doesn't get you fertile farmland, loot, and slaves anymore. Now, it gets you a smoking wasteland. Most of the human and economic capital has been blown to pieces or left or been killed.
So the argument is that, as the aristocracy moves to extracting wealth from human capital, the propaganda naturally moves towards methods designed to protect that human capital (and the related heavy infrastructure)?
That seems plausible on the face of it. I guess, does anyone know if we see more glorification of war in official propaganda from resource-extraction based economies (e.g. petro-states, countries that make most of their money on diamonds, etc)?
Even if so, that seems to conflict with the recent rise in pro-war messaging we've seen over the Ukraine issue, though. The left has been pretty gung-ho on it, as well as being the political side that generally benefits from higher quality human capital.
More or less. Wealth (for the peasants like you and I, and the lords and aristocrats at the top) isn't generated the same way it was in, say, 1500 AD. Then (oversimplifying here) you generated wealth by having a bunch of land on which you had a bunch of peasants growing crops, and you generally had a shortage of land. So killing the other guys and stealing their land was a good move; even a terrible war didn't usually make the land unusable. Now, the wealth is in factories and skilled workers. Even a resource-extraction economy has more sensitive infrastructure than preindustrial farmland.
As for Ukraine...this is basically the West trying to discourage Russia from going for ye olde pillage and loot strategy. The Russians now own an awful lot of smoking rubble and figuring out how to make money off that will be a pretty tough thing to do...
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War was painted as glorious and honorable so that men would actually be willing to pay with their lives. The moment the cameras and journalists get onto the battlefield, the less glamorous and noble it all seems.
One problem with the culture war is that the “soldiers” look back from the battlefield and, instead of seeing the opera houses of Vienna or the palaces of Versailles, they instead see the hovels and ghettos and wonder why exactly they are fighting in the first place.
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