Do They Know It’s Kwanzaa Time Again?

Scott: So, ’tis the season where we annually get into the inimitable argument over whether people should be saying, “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”, whether there ought to be school plays involving the birth of the baby Jesus or not, and where everyone gets a little twitchy from hearing the same old songs mind numbingly lilting out of every speaker in ear shot. It’s time for the War on Christmas/Pluralism — depending on your point of view.

As a long defunct Christian, I’ve never really understood why the arguably most dominant religious pocket on the entire continent gets so bent out of shape over the idea that some folks would like to not feel pressured or forced into participating in a holiday that their religion just doesn’t recognize. I mean, as one friend once said to me, “We swim in a sea of Christianity here in North America.” So why the big brouhaha over some folks pushing back and saying, “You know, that’s not my bag. Decorate your home however you like, but don’t make me sit through your religious rituals. I don’t make you sit through mine!”

Am I missing something here?

Erik: If you haven’t read Julian Sanchez on the “politics of ressentiment” then you should. I think the idea of a “war on Christmas” is largely grown out of this sense of ressentiment (which also animates much of what drives the conservative base in the larger cultural/political wars. According to wikipedia:

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, an assignation of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

Sanchez goes on to talk about how this sense of cultural impotence is what really drives the conservative base and the tea parties, and that that cultural frustration is then transformed into political posturing:

Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag. Sure, there’s an element of “schadenfreude” in the sense of “we like what annoys our enemies.” But the pathology of the current conservative movement is more specific and convoluted. Palin irritates the left, but so would lots of vocal conservatives if they were equally prominent—and some of them are probably even competent to hold office. Palin gets to play sand in the clam precisely because she so obviously isn’t. She doesn’t just irritate liberals in some generic way: she evokes their contempt. Forget “Christian conservative”; she’s a Christ conservative, strung up on the media cross on behalf of all God’s right-wing children [....]

What we saw in ‘04 was fury at the realization that ascendancy to political power had not (post-9/11 Lee Greenwood renaissance notwithstanding) brought parallel cultural power. The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.

The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance—but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary. Check out the RNC’s new ad on health reform, taking up the Tea Party slogan “Listen to Me!” There’s almost nothing on the substantive objections to the bill; it’s fundamentally about people’s sense of powerlessness in a debate that seems driven by wonks. To the extent that Obama enjoyed some initial cross-partisan appeal, I think it owed a lot to his recognition that most people care less about actual policy outcomes than they do about feeling that they’re being heard and respected.

Of course, this plays out in full fury during Christmas. And naturally, because there are some bad apples on the secular side, it becomes very easy for culture warriors on the right to demonstrate and justify this cultural victimization. Bill O’Reilly can say “Why do they hate baby Jesus?” without batting an eye and people eat it up because there is this sense that this one definition of America is being subverted and marginalized whether or not that is actually the case. The important thing is that people perceive this to be this way, and it fits in with the wider political/cultural narrative that conservatives have adopted.

Scott: Right, and then there was the Tennessee Mayor who Will pointed out the other week who really took teh crazy to new heights. I mean, I get how a certain segment of America feels like “their country” is being slowly but steadily eroded. Many of the beliefs held by such Americans are, to put it bluntly, on the wrong side of history and they are going to forced with either taking a second look at those beliefs or becoming utterly irrelevant. But this whole posturing about being helpless just doesn’t ring true. For all their pleas, I think it remains fair to say that the tea parties wield a good deal more power than they’d like to let on. One need only look at the mountain of concessions to which Democrats have had to yield throughout the course of the health care debate.

And so in a post 9-11 world of clashing civilizations between the W(hite)est and the Great Islamic Satan, when such fears are so lacking in grounding, I fear that legitimate requests for cultural parity are seen as “attacks of the other” and could very well result in (may well already be resulting in) the kind of populist xenophobia that Freddie mentioned on a couple of different occasions when talking about the future of the country. That is, at base, some pretty nasty stuff, and I fear that the Limbaugh’s and the O’Rielly’s either honestly don’t or choose to willfully ignore how they’re sensationalism really does feed into such a dynamic. For them it might be about ratings, but the fall out isn’t a game and has some really dangerous potential consequences for the country.

Erik: It’s interesting also how this populism runs under the banner of limited government when in actuality, limited government could never bring about a return to the sort of cultural norm that these groups want to usher back in. It would take a big, right-wing government to return us to that place, and it would take some serious infringements of civil liberties as well. So right now you see resistance to trends like gay marriage or to safe cultural battlegrounds like Christmas or abortion, but to really ever satisfy this segment of the population you’d have to go much, much further. And even then, I wonder if this feeling of being marginalized or oppressed would ever leave, or if the movement would continue to manufacture outrage in order to fuel the continuation of whatever right-wing big government cultural revolution they’d like to perpetuate.

Scott: Well, the surest way to justify one’s actions under any circumstances is to point to the existential threat that necessitates them. I mean, not to get all strident, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that precisely that axiom underwrites much of American foreign policy over the past fifty plus years.But it is a strange inversion that a cultural segment that has been in a place of dominance for time out of mind and is now having that dominance challenged has decided that the best course of action is to suddenly shift gears and present itself as the underdog, fighting for its scrappy little life. Now that its traditional other has gained even a relatively minor toe hold, the 900 pound gorilla decides that it’d best coop the very tactics that have be used against it. There is a real lack of integrity there that I just find fundamentally distasteful.

All of which is standard cultural criticism trope, but I also worry that this, frankly, juvenile reactionary component of WASP culture winds up overshadowing some of the really positive and forward looking reactions you see from a not insubstantial pockets of, for lack of better phrasing, alternative Christian communities. It is precisely this kind of dynamic that fuels so much of the vitriol of the New Atheists. And, you know, rightly so when you look at the circumstances from this vantage. But that just isn’t the whole story, nor is it necessarily the whole story. And so often times, I find myself in this sort of confusing position of agreeing entirely with the narrative I just laid out and coming to the end of it and yelling, “But wait, let’s not throw the baby (Jesus?) out with the bathwater!”

Erik: Well I think it’s a tricky balance – as cultural shifts tend to incorporate good and bad changes and it’s always difficult to understand what is driving the change and which causes are having which effects. For instance, for Christian conservatives who embrace Christmas but are disturbed by the materialism of Christmas, but who also embrace the capitalist system, I think that things start to get somewhat confusing. Who do you blame for all this materialism if you’re a part of it? You know it feels wrong to some degree, but you also believe that capitalism is responsible for staggering growth in human prosperity – and besides, it’s nice to give gifts at Christmas. So there are all these inchoate pieces and fragmented ideas that are pretty easily transformed into a general animosity toward the Other – in this case the secular left and its apparent war on Christmas.

And of course this also manifests in this idea that people are less moral now than before, or that society is crumbling, or “kids these days” and so on and so forth – and if we could only go back to the good ol’ days it would all be okay. These days the good ol’ days are apparently post-revolutionary America, but really any good ol’ days will do.

Naturally, there’s some truth to all of this. Materialism and atomization of society are real problems and they’re problems born largely out of technological and cultural changes that people are ill-equipped to deal with in the short-term. Of course the reaction to these is often overblown and poorly understood by those reacting.

Scott: This plays nicely into a thought I had the other night about tradition, which was: is tradition bleached of most of its value if it ceases to be a “living” entity? If one engages in tradition in a mindless fashion because it is what one has grown up with and has become one’s life by rote, is it even tradition anymore, so much as it is dogma, pure and simple? Can we separate dogma and tradition (some would suggest we cannot) and, if so, what are the differentiating factors? Doesn’t it seem like a disturbing number of people interact with tradition in precisely this fashion and how might we look to embody tradition within the context of a contemporary life in such a fashion as to make it a force for contemplative and positive contribution (as well as stability) rather than an escape from necessary change and a rallying point for reactionism?

Erik: A lot of people also interact with tradition as something to be overcome. I think that’s at least one progressive impulse. And I think both the reactionary or revanchist forces who want to scale back or reverse progress in order to protect the past and the forces which want to undo the past and usher in radical change are both wrong.

For one, I think that behind both of these impulses is a larger impulse to maintain balance or stability. Sometimes I think people see change as a way to attain stability, whether that is progressive or regressive change, while in fact the natural evolution of society itself is probably the best way to maintain social balance. I suppose this is sort of like accepting free markets over protectionism. You accept that society will change of its own accord and that interfering with it, or implementing cultural protectionism will only benefit certain slices of the population to the detriment of the rest.

That’s another reason why I don’t accept the culture wars – I think they’re cultural protectionism.

I also think that secularism has had or at least could have a hugely beneficial effect on Christianity. I think cultural domination of any particular religious tradition inevitably leads to the perversion and corruption of that belief system. I think Christianity stands a better chance of resisting this in a secular society rather than in a “Christian society.” In that sense, I view the whole culture war as an elaborate farce however right each side may be on this issue or that.

Scott: Sadly, both sides have a lot invested in the battle. Just taking the “War on Christmas” as an example, there are big ratings there and, as we’ve circled around before, people are much more inclined towards a social/political narrative that whips them into a frenzy rather than one that gives them ample cause for reflection. How does one go about getting each side to acknowledge that there is some value to tradition and the stability it enables and that to remain relevant and positive there are elements of tradition that do sincerely need to be thrown under the bus?

Erik: By doing this I suppose. The process of politics, however bloody it can be, and the process of spreading cultural change, is just that – a process. There’s no one formula, I suspect, which will have the desired effect. Obviously certain policies may have very specific long-term effects on cultural or political realities, but even those – or perhaps especially those – are hard to anticipate.

So we just keep doing what we’re doing. The irony now is that we have much more technology and especially communication technology (blogging for instance) which hyperventilates the whole process into something that seems much worse or much more loud or more constant than it used to, and it probably is, for better or worse. And thus you see how even the debate itself is subsumed by the inexorable march of change (or time) that both sides think they can harness but which in the end turns out to be beyond our control. We are the variables. Change is the constant.

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