Thoughts On The War On Culture

8 February, 2006. 343 words.

I’ve been thinking about this War on Culture. It seems to exist on many different parallel hierarchies. (In software, it could be represented with a TreeView control.)

In one war, at the topmost level, we have the ongoing global religious war between Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, and Buddhism. (There are undoubtedly others that I don’t know about, but you get the idea.) And within each major religious division, there are undoubtedly dozens of smaller divisions. I can only speak for Christianity, which has Catholicism, Orthodox, Protestantism, etc.

Now if we go down another level in the religious war, we find civil wars between the social values of Conservatism and Liberalism. And I think there’s a Fundamentalism in there somewhere, which I suppose is even more conservative than Conservatism. And there’s a Moderate side that should theoretically encompass the majority of people, assuming a bell curve distribution, yet we never seem to hear about them. (This social civil war could also be seen to exist outside of the religious theatre, in, say, a legal theatre.)

Further, I think we could break those civil wars down to another level. That would be the war between Militants (people who will fight to spread their view), Activists (people who tell other people about their view), and Pacifists (people who don’t care about other people). This level can be seen battling in, for example, the denouncement by some Islamic leaders of the violent protests of other Muslims.

At the same time we’re fighting the multi-level religious war, we’re also fighting a parallel war between the economic philosophies of Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. And there is another parallel war between the political systems of Democracy, Theocracy, and Dictatorship. I won’t even pretend to understand that stuff. I bet those could be broken down into many different civil wars, too. (For example, Representative Democracy vs. Direct Democracy.)

And all of that doesn’t even factor in race or gender.

The point I’m trying to make is… this War on Culture is complicated. It’s sort of like contemplating the size of the universe.

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