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4 min read28 July

In dousing the flames of the culture wars, our leaders would do well to look to the push for gay equality and to learn from it how to better live up to the publics expectations about navigating cultural change in Britain today.

A staunch conservative who enjoys Ru Pauls Drag Race. A 70 year old Brexiteer who admires Englands footballers for taking the knee. A liberal NHS worker who worries that everyone is becoming afraid of losing their job for saying the wrong thing.

This is the real face of modern Britain. As a new report from More in Common yesterday shows, far from being divided into two starkly opposed sides on culture war issues, most Britons look for balance. They have their views, but they blame politicians, campaigners, and cultural arsonists for turning disagreements into flaming rows, instead of showing leadership and building on the lessons of widely accepted cultural changes such as the countrys embrace of gay rights.

People think our ability to talk freely is under threat, creating resentment and resistance towards cultural change

More in Commons research has identified seven different segments of the population based on their values and beliefs. In conversations with all of them in the last month, we kept hearing how the tone of current debates is exhausting and leaves the public increasingly worried about saying the wrong thing. That feeling is leading people to think our ability to talk freely is under threat, creating resentment and resistance towards cultural change.

But despite this frustration, what came through strongly from our conversations was that Britons accept, and are proud, that Britains culture evolves and changes over time. And the public has a strong sense of how this evolution should be managed: in a way that builds on our traditions, rather than tears them down.

That helps to explain why time and time again when we asked people to name an example of how Britains culture has changed for the better, the answer that came back was how we now treat gay people and their families.

That acceptance of same-sex relationships might seem normal to us now - but at a time when the Pet Shop Boys topped the charts in 1987 with Its A Sin, three-quarters of Britons believed that same sex relations were almost always wrong. Now only 17% do. Same-sex marriage has gone from deeply contentious to widely accepted in 20 years. Attitudes have been transformed, and with that the experiences of gay people across Britain.

What lessons can our leaders take from the way attitudes on gay rights have changed to diffuse todays culture wars?

A key lesson is that campaigners for equality didnt talk about tearing things down. Recognising that Britons overwhelmingly say they are proud of our history, the case for gay equality was made in terms of fairness and equal marriage was presented as chance to strengthen the institution, not overhaul it.

A second lesson is that politicians advocating gay equality avoided an all or nothing approach. Instead, they took an incremental tack, that allowed them to bring people along and to show that changes didnt see the sky falling in.

Third, advocates of gay equality sought to build a big tent on the right and left. Rather than polarising the debate into us-versus-them or prosecuting debates along party lines, they engaged with the Conservative Party, with faith groups, with centre-right think tanks that had previously been hostile to gay marriage. And so, it was a Conservative PM who finally oversaw that introduction of equal marriage.

Fourth, campaigners also took time to make sure they communicated in everyday language and real stories that people understood. When Britons reflect on what has changed their attitudes, they often referencedcharactersin popular culture such as Eastenders in helping them to better understand the experiences of gay people.

Of course, there were moments of flashpoints and some polarising activists on both sides of the debate, but what is striking about the steady march towards gay equality is that it was done in a very British way - through dialogue and creating the space for people to ask questions.

In dousing the flames of the culture wars, our leaders would do well to look to the push for gay equality and to learn from it how to better live up to the publics expectations about navigating cultural change in Britain today.

Luke Tryl is the UK Director of More in Common.

More in Commons report Dousing the Flames: How Leaders can Better Navigate Cultural Change in 2020s Britain is being released today.

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To stop the culture wars, learn from gay rights - PoliticsHome - PoliticsHome

If you listen to certain British newspapers or Westminster politicians, you might have got the idea that universities are a major battleground in the culture wars: threatening free speech, left-wing madrasas,divisive forces that suck graduates into their metropolitan liberal orbit while leaving non-graduates to drift in a void.

However, an extensive survey on perceptions of culture wars in the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote suggests that theres not a great deal of awareness or particular focus among the UK public about universities being in the front line of this, according to Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, and a former managing director of public affairs for pollsters Ipsos MORI.

There are plentiful implications for universities in the major research series on culture wars concluded last month by researchers at the Policy Institute and Ipsos MORI, carried out in the light of increased British media focus on a concept originating in the US, and involving a survey ofabout 2,800 UK adults, international surveys and media analysis, plus reviews of academic literature.

Although real social and political issues divide opinion, the example of the US where the Republicans and Fox News have promoted culture wars, including via an intense focus on campus politics shows that you can help push yourselves down this road towards implacable conflict between mega identities where it becomes really difficult to compromise, said Professor Duffy.

The research found that while there has been a surge in media discussion of culture wars in the UK, its less clear that the public are as interested or engaged in the debate.

For example, when asked which issues they think of when the phrase culture wars is used, just 0.1 per cent of UK survey respondents cited noplatforming in universities, one of a range of findings suggesting that only tiny minorities associate culture wars with many of the sorts of issues that have been prominent in UK media coverage of this area.

And there was little sign that the public see university professors as left wing, the research suggested; among survey respondents who didnot go to university,about one in five (18per cent) thinks professors mostly have left-wing views, compared withabout two in five (42per cent) who think they tend to have a mix of different political opinions.

Meanwhile, the survey found just 5 per cent of respondents thought there was a great deal of tension between people with a university degree and those without, putting that divide 12th out of 13 social divides the survey asked about (Leave-Remain and rich-poor were rated as the greatest sources of tension).

Having re-analysed British Social Attitudes survey data on public attitudes to higher education for his forthcoming book on generational divides, Generations, Professor Duffy thought that could stem from the fact that there is still very strong support among the public for increasing or maintaining higher education access for young people.

He added that many people who did not attend university see it as a good thing and a sign of progress when their children or grandchildren do rather than something thats creating division.

The divide between those with and those without degrees is thus not the same as some other socio-demographic divides; actually, youre aspiring to that for your own family in many ways, he continued.

Overall, the Policy Institute and Ipsos MORI study concluded that there is (as yet) no comparable political identity in the UK to the Republican/Democratic identity driving culture wars in the US, but that those who identify with the Conservatives or Labour, or one side on Brexit, do show very large differences on some cultural perspectives, which could be a possible basis to build intractable political divisions based on broad cultural identities, particularly if there is top-down encouragement of cultural division, from any side.

Asked what advice he would offer to universities on their responses to the culture wars, Professor Duffy said that it was the same as the report overallthat we shouldnt be panicking or talking this up too much because actually when you look at the data, people are not nearly as divided or as agitated as the extreme examplesthat travel further fastest on social media and media would suggest.

However, that doesnt mean we should dismiss it as an important thing to engage with because it is these kinds of cultural change and tension [that] are really important, he said.

The main thing from universities point of view is to engage openly in that and be the place where you can have open debates on complex subjects, added Professor Duffy. That is very in line with where the public are on this.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com

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UK public 'don't see universities as a front line in culture wars' - Times Higher Education (THE)

A joke making the rounds since January describes social media dialogue thusly: Twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it.

I dont know who wrote this tweet or the individuals qualifications. But for me the message captures something about the ills of drawing caricatures of our political opponents.

Democrats these days are critical race theory loving, woke Marxists determined to scramble all gender distinctions, transform the country by making election fraud easy, drive faith out of the public sphere and silence any voices that challenge their radical agenda through censorship by their allies in big tech and the media.

Republicans are obedient fascists who remain in the thrall of former President Donald Trump and are all too willing to trash democracy to institute minority rule and maintain white supremacy while picking on immigrants and transgender people along the way.

Portions of these characterizations probably feel true to you. But they are inherently dehumanizing, turning an opposing faction into irredeemable cartoon villains. Its easy to make up a guy we hate, project him on someone else and live comfortably in our moral superiority.

Most of us know people who, at the very least, complicate these narratives. Yet the culture war carries on with the assumption that opposing factions represent existential threats to our side. Its a sure-fire formula for commentators and politicians to command attention amid myriad distractions. But it also walls us off from the kind of give-and-take between factions that is often necessary to make progress.

The conflict over critical race theory, which unfolded in Manhattan-Ogden USD 383 earlier this summer, is one of the latest topics to heat up in the culture wars. (Photo by Luke Townsend)

If theres hope to be found, it could be in the shared value that many Republicans and Democrats still place in the idea of civics. Last year, Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that a majority of Americans in both parties rank civics in K-12 education as their top choice for how to strengthen the American identity.

Of course, as The Atlantics George Packer recently explained, thats pretty much where the agreement ends. The right opposes anything in K-12 public education that smacks of anti-American activism, while the left demands the elevation of historical interpretations different from Americas heroic founding narratives.

If I get the option, I choose a civics approach that deeply educates Americans of all ages about their rights and duties as citizens, along with cultivating respect for the structures and processes of democracy. Civics should also teach people to hold and test different interpretations and inculcate a mindset that Americans must be doers, because civics has never been a spectator sport.

If we take that approach, the culture war could be the place where civics begins anew, rather than ends. But it requires us to set aside the imaginary archenemy mindset in favor of one that elevates curiosity over certainty. It requires us to ask questions first, be willing to fight our own instincts by considering the most noble interpretations of views we detest, and to look for any threads of connection that might be able to sustain us through even the most wrenching of disagreements.

What makes civics as an ideal different from the culture war is the opportunity it creates for understanding to move those with whom we disagree closer to us while ideally being moved to new understandings ourselves.

The process of engaging in civics can be messy.

As great as this country is, American civics can also produce unsatisfying outcomes. Even unjust or sacrilegious ones. But winning over enough factions to move forward is also the only feasible way weve ever had as a nation to re-form a more perfect union where the common good and individual Americans might thrive in concert.

We cant abandon that hard road even now, because any path that allows us to give up on half the country leads to nowhere but a dead end.

A version of this article appears in the Summer 2021 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.

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Opinion: Curiosity key to tamping down the culture wars and renewing civics - The Journal at the Kansas Leadership Center

There is happy news, if you can hear it above the babble of social media and the self-interest of some politicians, who would make us hostages to madness. The culture war does not exist in Britain not yet. Some just seek to will it into being for their own ends or emotional imperative.

But Twitter is not life not yet and if we are lucky, it wont ever be. I spend too much time on the platform whatever else it does, it is first with news and sometimes it feels like my head will blow off and roll across the floor. That would be uncomfortable in life.

Yesterday a report was issued by the charity More in Common UK. It is called Dousing the Flames: How leaders can better navigate cultural change in 2020s Britain.

It has done what Twitter cannot. It has dug deep into the data and interviewed more than 10,000 British people in polling or in focus groups over 18 months. It paints a far more benevolent, and hopeful, portrait of this country than we are used to imagining when we read of statues and paintings torn down, or not torn down, and when we doom scroll through social media.

We do not, despite the pleadings of this false mirror, hate each other and we are not at poles. We are not America, which really does have a culture war, with its two opposing sides aligned on almost every issue, facing each other across an abyss, and with guns.

In Britain, we have only a perception of division for now; in 2020, after the Brexit chaos, half of those polled said they had never felt more divided.

But it is a perception because our fault line, rather, is between the highly engaged activists on the Right and Left who are immersed in culture wars and everyone else. Broadly, we divide into seven categories, not two, and there is agreement on a surprising number of issues between these seven. We are not an abyss, but something more interesting. We are a kaleidoscope.

I know that facts are not as fashionable as daydreams, but here they are. More in Common finds that there is broad agreement on many issues in British life. On history and heritage, we are not divided into people who would tear down offending statues (and I believe the Edward Colston statue was offensive: it was opposite the war memorial, it bathed in its goodness) and those who would keep them. That is a delusion, and it should be expunged, because it is frightening.

The majority would prefer offending statues in museums to be given proper context, which should satisfy all reasonable people. The lesson there is that the Colston statue should have been removed from the centre of Bristol long ago: political paralysis is dangerous, and opportunists will always fill the vacuum. The initials of Colstons company were branded on enslaved children. Does anyone, honestly, want to keep his image on a plinth opposite a war memorial?

This knowledge that we are mostly reasonable will amaze both sides in the would-be culture war, and so it makes me smile.

Britons are proud of how far we have already come in creating a more just society and are more progressive than you might think. Some 46 per cent support the broad aims of the Black Lives Matter movements, and in a country where Conservatives have an 80+ majority (35 per cent think it is a bad thing).

And 57 per cent think Gay Pride is a good thing, with 12 per cent against. (In 1987 the country was roundly homophobic, with 75 per cent of people believing same-sex relationships were wrong. In 2019, it was 17 per cent). For MeToo female emancipation it is 41 per cent good to 15 per cent bad.

The lesson from this data is that the country veers towards moderation. It doesnt, on the whole, seek racism, misogyny and homophobia. Those who say it always does, or it always doesnt, are equally dishonest, and equally to be shunned.

There is a problem though, which could animate culture wars from social media and into life: opportunists. Conflict sells. It isnt dull. I also know that speaking to a base even an invented base is comforting for a politician because who doesnt love applause? A culture war is a distraction from more serious problems. Have a problem you cant solve? Start a war. It neednt be a real war or, at least, not yet.

The biggest problem is not the divide, which does not functionally exist, but the way in which people feel shut out of the debate, for their inability their lack of desire to scream at each other on social media.

And most people are worried about the tone of the debate. Fearful of making mistakes (bigotry) or prompting an overreaction (cancelled) they opt out of politics and leave it to the nutters (not a technical term, I give you), and this is dangerous. The wise (responsible) politician will dig in with truth and those unbearable and unfashionable things: nuance and compassion. Its where the country is. So where are they?

But there is happy news at least. The culture wars are, for now at least, a hopeful myth; an understudy hoping to make it on the stage. Think of her as a screaming Tinkerbell. If you dont believe in her, she dies.

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Dont mention the culture wars they arent big here... yet - Telegraph.co.uk

Two weeks ago, I visited the fabled Alhambra palace in Granada. The complex is an architectural poem, literally. Arabic verses are carved on the walls of its profusion of rooms and corridors. Wandering amongst them evokes a burst of geometric ecstasy.

The Alhambra is also the embodiment of the extraordinary aesthetic and intellectual flowering that took place in Islamic Spain over a period of 700 years.

Between the 8th and 15th centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Iberian Peninsula often clashing, but also cooperating.

Muslim armies from North Africa first crossed into Spain in 711. The Moors, as these North African Muslims were called, quickly overwhelmed the Christian Visigoths, who had ruled the region since the fifth century.

Over time, the Moors established a series of powerful polities collectively known as al-Andalus. Of these, Granada the city where the Alhambra was constructed in the period between 1238 and 1358 was among the best known.

The Christians fought hard to reconquer the territories of al-Andalus. Much blood was spilled in the process. Yet, the centuries of Muslim rule were also marked by interfaith cultural melding.

Across the great cities of Spain, from Toledo to Cordoba, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together, their heads bent over the Greek classics that they translated into Arabic, Latin and Hebrew.

In the 12th century, for example, an Italian-origin scholar and translator, Gerard of Cremona, worked with a Muslim colleague, Ghalib the Mozarab.

The collaborated on translating more than 80 works of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and logic, into Latin. It was one of the great revivals of scholarship in Europe, referred to sometimes, as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.

In many ways, the Muslims and Christians of medieval Iberia were open to appropriating certain elements of each others culture, even as they faced off in battles for territorial control.

The parallels with India, where Hindus and Muslims lived in a similar state of simultaneous tension and embrace over the centuries, are evident.

In its minglings and marvels, the Alhambra is like the Taj Mahal, or the tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun, in New Delhi.

It put me in mind also of Indonesia, an archipelagic cauldron of the Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and animist.

A few years ago, for example, I watched the Ramayana, a Hindu epic, being performed by Muslims to the backdrop of Hindu-Buddhist temples in Yogyakarta, Indonesias cultural capital.

In fact, every country I have lived in has had a history of culture wars, but at the same time a history also, of cultural cross-fertilization.

Japans aesthetics come from China. The Chinese folding fan is originally Japanese. Both nations imported Buddhism from India, adding their own magic and lore to the philosophy in the centuries-long process.

Japans national sport is arguably the very American, baseball. And the latest Yokozuna (grand master) in the very Japanese world of sumo wrestling is the Mongolian, Terunofuji.

Some time ago, my husband and I met a Jewish itinerant on the streets of Istanbul in Turkey. He might have been a tad inebriated when he embraced Julio upon learning his nationality.

I am Spanish too, he told Julio in broken, archaic Spanish (a Judeo-Spanish argot called Ladino). He claimed his ancestors had been Spanish Jews.

I was embraced with similar tenderness a few months later in a smoky tavern in Madrid, when the Gypsy flamenco singer wed been listening too, learned that I was Indian. I am from India too, hed said, tapping his chest with an open palm.

Culture isnt static. It is like shot silk, changing colors in different light. It can slip through cracks, heedless of walls and borders.

The high priests of cultural warfare the inquisition/ the ayatollahs/the prophets have always been tempted by neatness. But as humans we are unruly. We strain to escape our straightjackets, to bend and entwine.

Great science, literature, food indeed great love exists on the intersections of, and in the crossings of policed boundaries.

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Contemplating Culture Wars: From the Alhambra to India - The Globalist