How (Not) to Think About Culture
A second look at James Davison Hunter’s "Democracy and Solidarity"
In late-20th and 21st-century American politics, “culture” has been loaded with inordinate weight. Many politicians, pundits, and even ordinary citizens talk as though it is not enough to change policy, pass laws, or knock down legal precedents—the country’s culture itself must be changed. Cultural institutions which used to be sideshows—universities, the arts, entertainment, sports—have moved to the center of national politics, both as participants in and targets of the Culture Wars.
I have long thought the Culture Wars are only 10% about serious moral conflicts. There are indeed real moral issues at issue in the Culture Wars, but those moral issues are not fortifying the battle lines. Rather, it is activist organizations, politicians, and opportunistic businesses, especially in the media, that use moral conflict, the rivalry inherent in democracy, and the tensions of American pluralism to generate power for themsleves by fueling the Culture Wars. Mammon—not just money, but the power that comes with money—does far more to account for cultural conflict than do moral differences.
This is a view that is not that far off from what James Davison Hunter argued in his 1991 Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. There, he presented the Culture Wars as centered on a battle among elites for prestige, power, and domination. Ordinary Americans, he suggested, were not driving America’s moral conflicts as much as being driven by structures of power. The culture of the Culture Wars, in this view, emerges at the convergence of cultivation (that is, collective habit and character formation), cult (that is, attitudes toward, ideas about, and practices of the sacred and profane), commodities (that is, the production of objects of distaste or desire), and control (that is, the exercise of economic, political, and physical power).
As I suggested last week, Hunter’s new book, Democracy and Solidarity, seems to take a quite different view of things. I want to address this book at Civic Fields for three reasons.
First, thinking about civic life means thinking about culture, and Hunter’s book is explicitly about the role of culture in civic life. It is relatively hard to find such books. Most books on civic life are about policy, civic practices, civil discourse, or civility. Hunter is among a relatively small number of thinkers focused explicitly on the role and importance of culture in national life.
Second, Hunter has had considerable influence among center-right public intellectuals and academically oriented evangelicals, and this particular constituency, I believe (for reasons I will leave for later), has the most potential among the American citizenry to turn the tide in American political culture for better or worse. Hunter’s voice matters and matters a great deal.
Third, I wanted to write about Hunter because he has a very different perspective on our current crises than Robert Putnam, the subject of my first “crash course.” Unlike Putnam, who stresses the importance of everyday social practices in the civic fabric, Hunter writes of the “deep structures of culture” to explain, among other things, the rise of nihilism and authoritarianism in American politics today.
So, Hunter deserves attention. Democracy and Solidarity can be read productively as an eloquent and learned look at the challenges of keeping the American project going.
This all said, I felt like I was stumbling my way through Hunter’s argument last week. My goal at Civic Fields is to try to be both fair and generous; at times, the latter, being generous, means holding my tongue so that I can give the arguments of the thinker I am writing about some room to breathe. Sometimes this is easy for me, other times not so much. While I did learn a lot from Hunter’s new book, while I think it is well-researched and smart, and while I appreciate very much his calling out the nihilism behind so much of our current dominant political culture, I also did a lot of tongue-biting while reading it. This week’s post, my second and last on Hunter, is basically about what made my tongue sore.
I think I need to share my concerns because unlike his book Culture Wars, which I read as an exposé of how powerful institutions can capture and capitalize on moral conflict, Democracy and Solidarity seems to be using the categories and concepts of the Left—above all, “solidarity” and “democracy”—to make the case that the Right side of the Culture Wars has been making all along: namely, the country depends for its existence on cultural cohesion; this cohesion is essentially philosophical and spiritual in nature, and maybe even theological; and this cohesion is now in grave, even catastrophic, danger.
Democracy and Solidarity makes this case in the strangest of ways. The book is a requiem for both the Culture Wars and for America. It echoes what Hunter argued in his 2010 book To Change the World: Culture Warriors ought to give up the fight. But whereas in 2010 Hunter made the case based on a theory of cultural change, this book makes the case based on a theory of the “deep structures of culture” that America is just too far gone to be saved. The authoritarians have won because nihilism has taken root in the depths of America. Yes, Hunter says there is yet hope. There always is. But that hope will not be realized on the broad battlefield of the Culture Wars or, it seems, in America at all.
Democracy and Solidarity thus can be read also as an autopsy for the American project as we have known it.
How does someone get to such a definitive conclusion? And is the explanation convincing?
Not to me. The strength of Democracy and Solidarity is in its story telling, told through a variety of representative American figures, ranging from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey to Adrian Vermeule. Its great weakness is Hunter’s under-explained but exceptionally strongly stated theory of culture.
On a scale of 1 to 10, most scholars are somewhere in the middle when discussing the power of culture to define reality, existence, and horizons of possibility. Hunter is closer to an 8 or 9. At times, when writing about what he calls the “deep structures of culture,” he sounds like a 10. It is as if culture follows the laws of physics. (In fact, the academic discipline of sociology, Hunter’s own, has its 18th-century roots in exactly this claim.)
Culture, Hunter argues, sets the terms for our existence as a society. It defines and bounds our horizon of meaning and significance. It is, therefore, he argues, “the most elemental form of power” we know in society: it constructs for us our sense of reality, humanity, nationality, and possibility. Yet, he continues, for all its immense power we are mostly unaware of its effects on us.
Why are we so unaware? Hunter’s explanation is confusing. On the one hand, he suggests that it is because culture is everywhere. “Like the air we breathe, culture permeates all things human,” he writes in the Introduction to the book. We are then, it seems, typically no more aware of culture than a fish is of water. For this reason, it can act on us with relative impunity. Yet, on the other hand, he argues culture’s power resides in its depths. He writes of the “deep structures of culture” and compares culture to “collective unconscious.”
These kinds of argument are recognizable to me as a cultural critic. I am not unfamiliar with the argument that culture is everywhere or that it has hidden depths. Nevertheless, I have not encountered in an academic book—Democracy and Solidarity is published by Yale University Press—such claims devoid of any substantial theoretical articulation, at least not until I read this book. Hunter seems to want us to take his word on the matter. He holds up his sociological training as a mode of charismatic authority rather than as a mode of persuasion and argument before a questioning or critical audience.
But something can be everywhere without being the unifying or fundamental cause of all things. Take the example of air. I have spring allergies. Certainly, they are caused by my body’s reaction to pollen-carrying air. But I also have an ache in my lower back. I doubt very much air is the cause. The human body is an enormously complex organism. It depends on air for its life, but the quality of its life is not reducible to the quality of the air it breathes. So too with the civic body, which, to allude to Aristotle, is nothing but the composite of a large group of human animals gathered for common purposes. I can say with Hunter that culture is everywhere in the civic body without going so far as to suggest the culture determines in a strong sense the course and contours of our civic life.
The “deep structures of culture” theory outlined in the book comes in the profoundest of words but only in the loosest of terms. At the base of culture, he says, are structures composed of a realm of ideas and values that give cultures answers to the fundamental questions of human life and civilization, namely: What does it mean to be human? Who is a member of the human community? What is reality? Who gets to decide what is real? What is the point of life? How should we live? These are, in Hunter’s own words, the questions of “metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, and teleology latent in public life” (304). Their answers, he states, constitute the “collective unconscious” of a culture, articulated on the surface through story and public argument, but rooted in depths largely hidden from everyday folk.
Again, the idea of the “collective unconscious” or even of “deep structures” is not new. But Hunter’s notion that the collective unconscious or deep structures are composed of essentially fuzzy answers to philosophical questions is not typical, to say the least. Most times, when the idea of the “collective unconscious” is used, it refers to fantasies, imaginary visions, or archetypal dualisms that possess a society in the way that dreams or fantasies can possess a psychiatric patient. Hunter, however, has repurposed the concept to essentially stand in for a culture’s shared philosophical worldview.
It sounds intriguing, even profound, but it all seems to me quite close to a version of what Hunter’s own mentor, Peter Berger, calls “intellectualist misapprehension.” In The Social Construction of Reality (co-written with Thomas Luckmann), Berger states,
To exaggerate the importance of theoretical thought in society and history is a natural failing of theorizers. It is then all the more necessary to correct this intellectualist misapprehension. The theoretical formulations of reality, whether they be scientific or philosophical or even mythological, do not exhaust what is “real” for the members of a society. Since this is so, the sociology of knowledge must first of all concern itself with what people “know” as “reality” in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives. In other words, commonsense “knowledge” rather than “ideas” must be the central focus for the sociology of knowledge. It is precisely this “knowledge” that constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist. (25, 1967 edition)
Social reality, in other words, is for Berger not constituted by deep thoughts about the Big Questions of Life, but by commonsense knowledge and forms of practical wisdom. To be sure, the commonsense can sometimes bleed into Big Questions and even be made to depend upon them, in a contingent manner, for their authority in the form of a “sacred canopy,” but the point Berger makes here and elsewhere is that we should not mistake culture for philosophy or theology.
Democracy and Solidarity does exactly this. True, Hunter argues that people apprehend these deep cultural answers to the Big Questions often only tacitly or indirectly, but they nevertheless explain for him the course of American history.
Hunter, by contrast, pays almost no attention to other factors that could quite reasonably be said to have profoundly shaped American political culture: wars, assassinations, economic crises, natural disasters, migrations, genocides, slavery, constitutions, new technologies, or the election of nincompoops to electoral office. In fact, Hunter is borderline dismissive of those who would look this direction. They don’t “get it,” he implies. They are not “serious.” Before the power of the deep structures of culture, all these things are but secondary phenomena. In his effort to save culture from the “epiphenomenal” he ends up simply reversing the order.
Why would I say culture not essentially about ideas or values? Because ideas and values belong to embodied creatures who articulate their ideas and values continuously and precariously in material artifacts—books, building, tools, towns, infrastructures, communication devices, substack posts, and, above all, their own bodies. It is bizarre to argue that at its depths culture boils down to collective but largely unconscious answers to the questions of metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, and teleology. Hunter’s book reads at times as an exercise in gnosticism, or perhaps a strained version of Neo-Calvinist “worldview” philosophy. At a minimum, it is much more Platonic than it is Aristotelian.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the book also suggests that political efforts, economic reforms, or civic acts of repair, however admirable, are not “serious” enough, for they will not do anything to fundamentally correct the situation we are in. America he argues is faced with a tragic cultural predicament it will not overcome because its cultural elites have all become, at least tacitly, Nietzscheans. The good Philosopher Kings are dead. Hunter even takes a little swipe at Robert Putnam. Buckle up, Bob, the ship is going down. Hunter’s book thus makes a strong case for civic and political quietism and resignation in the United States.
Civic Fields is not content with quietism or resignation. There is work to be done, and not just by serious luminaries like the ones Hunter seems to think determine the course of American history. Everyday ordinary folk can have great and positive power over the course of the country, if they are allowed to exercise it.
Hunter thinks that our current crises are due to the depletion of Enlightenment ideals and ideas. I think a much more convincing explanation for the authoritarianism and nihilism in our midst has to do with the depletion of popular political power. The single scarcest resource in American political culture today is the political power of ordinary everyday citizens. Just these last few months, $90 million was spent on the election of a single state supreme court judge in Wisconsin. $90 million. What could you do in your community with $90 million? This is just one of a myriad of examples of how ordinary Americans have been systematically locked out of effective political power.
The depletion of political power is part of deeper structural problems that are political and economic in character, as well as cultural. Yes, the culture of nihilism is real, but what is the explanation for its presence? Hunter thinks it is because of the failures of intellectuals to keep on working out the premises and positions of the Enlightenment, to the point where our collective cultural reservoir of meaning has been exhausted. I would suggest that our nihilism derives more from the peculiar sovereignty that people in positions of inordinate political and economic power in the last fifty years have given to money. Mammon has the supreme “value” in our society. But Mammon has no values.
This is not a trite observation. It speaks to the way in which culture—in this case, the culture of contemporary nihilism—emerges not out of universities and think tanks but at the convergence of cultivation, cult, commodity, and control. We live in a society where character formation is broadly oriented toward economic ends, where capitalism has taken on a religious quality, where even the most serious matters (for example, the presidency) are organized around consumer-oriented objects of distaste and desire, and where economic, political, and even certain forms of physical power are concentrated in the hands of the 1%. Thus, the “common sense” of our culture, to allude to Berger, is being exhausted by Mammon. We fight over “culture” because we lack actual political power. It has not always been this way in this country, and it need not stay this way.