People take the idea of a culture war as granted—a thing that exists, is irrefutable, and consistently (read: permanently) with us.
The fact that this is mostly a myth is rarely considered. Much like the very idea of its loudest proponents literally declaring war on their neighbors.
The concept of the culture war as normal, present, and universal only serves those who want to control it.
At the heart of this desire to control is the desire to control what is common.
Two ideas of “common”.
We have two aspects to what we mean by common. We need to start there.
- The first idea is as normal. We see common as “the usual,” popular, what everyone gets. When you open a pack of trading cards, commons are filler. When I shop at a big box store, I’m going where everyone goes.
- The second is shared environment. We often refer to this as the commons or speak to the things “we hold in common.” This is about shared identity.
Notice that common speaks to individuals and to community. It speaks to what we think is normal and what we expect from one another.
When people refer to what should be common, they are speaking to how we ought to change the environment or what we all experience, but not necessarily what we each experience. This is why the popular response to the vocal opposition to equal marriage in the 2010s was “then don’t get gay married.”
People mix these two ideas up.
And they do so on purpose.
We see this most prominently in the religious liberty discourse, where individual rights and cultural expectations clash, not to increase liberty, but to increase protection for particular religious groups.
That’s how it plays out directly. But under the hood is a confusion of what counts as “the usual”. And further, how we as a people adjust to evolutions in “the usual.”
Consider the common suit.
I discussed this idea of common, the two kinds of common, and what that has to do with men’s fashion recently. You should check that out if you haven’t already. But I wanted to expand on the idea by putting it into this context.
The classic men’s suit was common. In both senses of the word.
It was common because most men wore them. Not just to church or to the office, but everywhere. It was the expected attire in public for the time.
In the era before fast fashion, it was also durable and comparatively inexpensive.
It is anything but common today. Common is jeans and a T- or collard shirt with sneakers.
But it isn’t merely that suits, once common, are now uncommon. It is that they represent a specific place in our culture. They represent esteem. We wear them to impress or in places where the suit represents a uniform and barrier to entry. [There is a reason defense lawyers try to put their clients into suits.]
Suits aren’t simply Sunday’s best. They represent status, privilege, and specialness.
If the suit was like drawing a common in a trading card pack, today it is like drawing a rare.
The cultural impact of this shift is massive.
But particularly when we seek to control cultural priorities, protect cultural supremacy, and confuse the two ideas of common in our rhetoric.
In the era of the common suit, it represented both visions of common. But today, the suit represents neither. And yet, drawing on nostalgia for when it was the first idea (normal) and mandating we use it as if it were the second idea (our shared environment) without accounting for cost or impact is unreasonable.
It also represents a “front” in a mythical war on our neighbors. Because we can slide into common talking points about popular ideas like
work ethic
grit
responsibility
while also bemoaning changing expectations around
schools
community
churches
and passing legislation that makes work and school more difficult, common priorities harder to develop, and underfunding any of the institutions that help us build our common character.
In other words, the person who wants to encourage people to “dress up” is actually ensuring the suit cannot be a common garment.
This makes it a perfect metaphor for the culture war. In attempting to control the character of the culture, culture warriors undermine their stated values. The ones that are actually common.