Zack Stanton interviews sociologist James Davison Hunter, the author of Culture Wars (1991):

[T]here can be a tendency, especially on the political left, to talk about “culture war” issues as being “distractions” that are raised in order to divide people who might otherwise find common cause around, say, shared economic interests. What do you make of that view?

We are constituted as human beings by the stories we tell about ourselves. The very nature of meaning and purpose in life are constituted by our individual and collective self-understandings. How that is a “distraction” is beyond me.

You know, people will fight to the death for an idea, for an ideal. I was criticized in the early ’90s for using the word “war” [in the term “culture war”]. But I was trained in phenomenology, in which you are taught to pay attention to the words that people themselves use. And in interviews I did [with those on the front lines of “culture war” fights], people would say, “you know, it feels like a war”—even on the left.

I talk about this sense of a struggle for one’s very existence, for a way of life; this is exactly the language that is also used on the left, but in a much more therapeutic way. When you hear people say that, for instance, conservatives’ very existence on this college campus is “a threat to my existence” as a trans person or gay person, the stakes — for them — seem ultimate.

The question is: What is it that animates our passions? I don’t know how one can imagine individual and collective identity—and the things that make life meaningful and purposeful—as somehow peripheral or as “distractions.” [Continue reading…]