Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War

National Review, May 2, 1994 by Richard Neuhaus

THIS extraordinarily important book, following up on the author's Culture Wars of 1991, reflects an understandable reluctance to say straight out what some Americans are beginning to suspect is the case: cultural warfare may be on the edge of turning into civil war. That's the meaning of the book's title. The author's ambivalence about that ominous prospect is reflected in the uncertainty about the subtitle. In the advance proofs first provided to this reviewer, the subtitle on the cover was Searching for Democracy as the Culture Wars Rage. Inside the cover was a different subtitle: The Rise of Irreconcilable Differences in American Public Life. The first subtitle was considerably more hopeful than the second. The book itself replaces "culture wars," plural, with "culture war," singular. That is in keeping with the evidence examined. The lines of warfare are clearly drawn, and there is one war going on, not several. Meanwhile, the second subtitle's accent on the irreconcilable is in keeping with the book's concluding call for a renewal of "substantive democracy," a call issued in tones ever more wan and wistfull as the author realizes that the likelihood of its being answered continues to diminish.

James Hunter, professor of sociology and religion at the University of Virginia, wants it understood that, as a scholar, he is "neutral" in the culture war. He stands in the sociological tradition of Max Weber, espousing the virtues of reason, objectivity, and self-restraint. He is appalled by the current academic trashings of that tradition, by the deconstructionisms that reject objectivity and reason and turn all scholarship into no more than an exercise of the "will to power." As much as possible, Mr. Hunter wants to stand above the fray, helping the belligerents to understand the nature of the conflict in which they are embroiled, and urging them toward a discovery of "common ground" by which civil war might be avoided. There is a hint of desperation in Mr. Hunter's urgings. "Before the Shooting Begins" does, after all, suggest that the shooting is about to begin.

"It's the economy, stupid," should perhaps take the prize as the dumbest political slogan in recent American history. Although he's too much of a gentleman to call anyone stupid, the truth to be derived from Mr. Hunter's work is: "It's the culture, stupid." He does not put it quite this way, but politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion. The complicated linkages between politics, culture, morality, and religion are as evident on one side of the culture war as they are on the other. The conflict is often described in terms of the religious versus the secularist, but the secularist is as inescapably religious as his opponent. That is, he too, and however unreflectively, subscribes to a belief system by which he determines what is fair, what is right, what is just.

Mr. Hunter describes culture this way: "Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which we comprehend ourselves, others, and the larger world, and through which we order our experience." Everybody lives in a culture, which provides the terms for deciding what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is good and what is evil. Every counter-culture is itself but a rival culture. Our present circumstance in America is one of cultures at war. Some years ago Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in After Virtue that, in a society where people cannot engage in reasonable moral reflections, "politics becomes civil war carried on by other means." Mr. Hunter's study raises the question of whether that civil war will now be carried on by means more conventional to civil wars.

There are many issues being contested--abortion, euthanasia, multiculturalism, homosexuality, sex education in the schools, arts funding, crime and punishment, immigration policy, population control, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, quota systems, and on and on. All are unavoidably moral questions in that they invoke the "oughts" of life--how we ought to live and what kind of people we ought to be. The argument supported by Mr. Hunter's careful analysis of massive survey data is that these issues are but different fronts in the culture war, singular. And the issue around which the opposing forces are arrayed is abortion. Both conceptually and by virtue of the sociological dynamics, the other issues of the culture war are inextricably entangled with the question of abortion. Most politicians wish this were not the case. But Mr. Hunter dispels any illusion that there is some way around the conflict over abortion policy.

For any political strategist with the wit and the nerve for it, Mr. Hunter's fourth chapter (written with Carl Bowman) is a mother lode of fact and analysis for constructing new and more effective approaches to the abortion question. Building on work previously published in First Things, this chapter, titled "The Anatomy of Ambivalence," is a model of sociological sophistication. Examining "the structure of American ambivalence toward abortion," the authors employ six categories: consistently pro-life, privately pro-life, conveniently pro-life, reticent pro-choice, personally opposed pro-choice, and consistently pro-choice. The polls show 33 per cent of Americans are consistently pro-life, believing abortion is morally wrong and the unborn child should be protected throughout pregnancy, while 16 per cent are consistently pro-choice, believing abortion is permissible throughout pregnancy. The 19 per cent who are privately pro-life do not want to be identified with the pro-life position and often identify themselves as neutral; the 14 per cent who are conveniently pro-life believe abortion is wrong but would consider it in their own case or that of someone close to them. The personally opposed pro-choice 8 per cent are pro-choice in politics but pro-life in personal practice, while the reticent pro-choice 7 per cent approve of abortion (at least up to viability) but think too many people are having abortions.