We are currently in the middle of a culture war.
This could be seen through a short term lens, a conservative right wing waging war against a progressive left wing on the political battlefield.
However, I think it’s more interesting, and informative, to look at this culture war through a longer term lens.
Taking Clare Graves’ work on Spiral Dynamics and lumping the early beige, purple, red and blue stages together as pre-modern, calling orange modern and green post-modern, we can develop a useful framework through which to view the current dynamic on the world stage, particularly in the US.
For some quick numbers (that are useful for background), roughly 60% of the Earth’s population are estimated to be living in pre-modernity. That is, they function according to the maxims of what of the four most primal stages. 30% are living in modernity and 10% in post-modernity or beyond.
This numbers are on a global basis and they are different country to country, but they’ll serve as a place to ground ourselves for looking at this.
The culture war is being fought on multiple fronts, on tech platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (recently acquired by Elon Musk who has endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2024), in news and TV media like Sky News and The Project in Australia, and through specific think tank organisations like The Australia Institute or the IPA.
The attempt is to ideologically capture as much of the population as they can and shift public policy in their direction. Those are the short term stakes in any case. When we zoom out and take a longer term view, that’s when things get much more interesting.
To me it seems that the culture wars playing out at the moment are the growing pains on a global civilisation moving from modernity into post-modernity and running into all kinds of bumps and hitches along the way.
We seem to jolt forward and then lurch backward as we have this reactionary, lowest part of the brain stem, sound bite 24/7 media cycle and things seem to move so quickly. On the macro level, we are not really moving forward at all. We’re basically at a stand still or a slow crawl.
I remember in 2008, which is 16 years ago now, Barack Obama running for US president on a hope and change platform with a slogan of “Yes we can.” I remember feeling that there was so much promise of things moving in a positive direction and shifting in dramatic fashion. Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay in his first year in office for example. That prison that exposed so much illegal CIA torture around the globe, not just in Cuba, is still open today and the masterminds behind 9/11 are still in those cells awaiting trial after multiple delays due to legal issues. It’s an example of the deadlock of the system.
Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign was another example of a hopeful moment which fizzled out into nothing.
Even Donald Trump promised something different when he got elected in 2016 because he wasn’t part of the establishment, but apart from January 6, 2021, things were largely business as usual.
If we look at the last 20 or so years from a Spiral Dynamics view point, it seems to me that we are moving more and more into post-modern world, but that we’re going through severe shocks of how to effectively move forward and what that looks like.
The Woke movement started from a good place and has had pockets of effective change. The Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to move the needle in terms of awareness in the general population about income inequality and the Me Too movement did the same for awareness of sexual harassment of women by powerful men.
However, it has resulted in overreach in a lot of places. In around 2016, Canada legislated for the mandatory use of the pronoun of choice of any citizen punishable by law. Jordan Peterson rose to fame in 2016 and 2017 largely on the back of a common sense pushback against this overreach.
The Woke movement is still making waves in society today, predominantly of late around transgender issues, and Elon Musk is waging a war against it in particular, labelling it the “Woke Mind Virus.” It’s personal for Elon, given he has a transgender child, but it’s another example of the lightning rod for this culture war and how its propagating over time.
At the core of woke is an idea of immense value. That all of humanity is existentially equal and should be treated as such. That having compassion and treating your fellow human being with respect is a worthwhile North Star to live by. However, because we’ve been so entrenched in our modern values of material success, achievement, bigger, better, stronger, science is king, objective truth, pragmatism over principle, business growth at all costs, we are struggling as a society to fit these ideas into our current worldview.
So, we continue to fight this war on multiple fronts and lurch in one direction and then back in the other. The 2024 Presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will play out as another example of this culture war. Regardless of the result, we will continue our slow march towards post-modernity, the data continues to bear it out over and over again. How we get there and how long this evolutionary leap takes, though, is yet to be seen…