I have to agree with @brazenautomaton here. I actually don’t think I mind Culture War Medics much. At worst, they’re not my cup of tea, but as much as eg. Mitford books aren’t my thing, I cannot begrudge them for existing or hate the comfort they give others. I honestly would like to see some more comforting, cup-of-tea, “chicken soup for the X heart” art by and for a lot more Xes. If only because I think everybody is easier to treat with when they aren’t raw with emotional pain, and I’d rather my opponents be in a mindset to negotiate out of pure self interest.I think… the difference is that, whereas older generations of the left wanted to conscript artists as Culture War Front Line Infantry, this generation of the left wants to conscript them as Culture War Field Medics.
It’s not their job to charge directly at the enemy, to recon unexplored territory, or to fight the major battles. Rather, it’s their job to find the people who are suffering under the weight of Culture War Injuries and jab them full of Culture War Narcotics until they’re ready to fight again.
no, I think it is the opposite
Modern Culture Warriors don’t want artists to create things that soothe or comfort, they want complete rote obedience and deployment of Culture War Weapons.
Medics do things everyone recognizes as good. Special accommodations are made for medics, and their work is considered to be important enough that it is not beholden to military strategy. They are allowed to help the enemy, even, because what they do is a moral good that transcends the goals of war.
Infantry are there to win the war and that is all. Nobody cares what the fuck they think, they have no purpose to their existence beyond being tools through which the goals of war are achieved. They are not allowed to deviate from their orders, nor to think about them or their enemies. If an action they perform might possibly aid an Enemy, it is grounds for punishment.
Modern Culture Warriors view all artists as conscripts into their Culture War, who only exist to advance the goals of their Culture War, whose art in and of itself has no meaning beyond its ability to advance the goals of Culture War. They do not want art that relieves suffering. They want art that magnifies suffering for everyone who is not marching in lockstep with their orders.
I dunno. I think that @raggedjackscarlet is pointing out a real dynamic here, and that it’s getting lost in some true-but-tangential thoughts.
The claim – I think – is that contemporary darlings of the culture-warrior set basically are Mitford books, that the flavor-of-the-month media is popular precisely because it is capable of serving as Chicken Soup for the SJW Soul.
So OK. What kinds of texts are we talking about here? To pick a few more-or-less at random…I dunno, Steven Universe, Frozen, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Mad Max: Fury Road. These are all things for which it’s really easy to find “culture warriors” squeeing over them, and in fact squeeing over how culturally-appropriate and Woke they are.
None of these texts is designed to achieve engagement with The Enemy. None of these texts is remotely capable of convincing anyone of anything, or even making anyone uncomfortable. None of them is capable of serving as a blow against the patriarchy.
Which sounds like an empty mega-obvious point, these days, but back in the ‘60s and the ‘70s…and even the ‘80s and ‘90s to some extent…it wasn’t like that. The cultural darlings of the hip set used to be pointed, at least a little bit. That was why the hip set liked them. Even lowbrow fare like Animal House pretty much came right out and said “being a Republican stooge is lame, being a liberated rebel is awesome.”
There used to be a sense that you would smack the bad guys in the face with your awesome art, and they’d fold, and that was how the good guys won. On the face of it that seems like a really stupid theory. In fact I’m not so sure; cultural change underlies political change and all the rest of it, and cultural change is in fact achieved by exposing people to mind-altering media. I’d be hard-pressed to say that texts like Rent and even Star Trek didn’t in fact have substantial political impact. But anyway. I digress.
Insofar as I’m saying anything useful here, it’s this:
The culture-warriors genuinely used to think of themselves as underdogs, socially speaking, and so they were inclined to use the weapons of underdogs. That tended to involve a lot of art. Art is relatively cheap; you don’t need concrete power to deploy it; and it’s good at worming its way past social defenses.
Nowadays, it’s clear that most of the culture warriors no longer think of themselves as underdogs, even if on occasion they find it politically useful to pretend that they do. (Whether in fact they are underdogs in any meaningful sense is a question for another time.) They believe, instinctively, that they will usually have the upper hand in conflicts. Thus they tend to reach for overdog weapons like “shaming” and “the law” and “connections to powerful people” and “naked appeals to widespread social consensus.”
In that context, art becomes an internal-use thing. Art becomes a way to feel good about the world, a source of security and reassurance. Jimmy Stewart movies back the the old days, or cop shows for the senior set now.
And, indeed, this is precisely what we see with the texts I mention above. Culture warriors don’t like them because they are tools that can defeat the Problematic, or even because they depict the Defeat of the Problematic; culture warriors like them because there is (allegedly) nothing Problematic in them. They are little pockets of a happier reality in which you can watch Badass Women Being Badass, and see likeable diverse characters having likeable huggy feels, and know that none of the shit that annoys you all the time in the actual world is there to bother you.
[It is notable how much straight romance there conspicuously isn’t in those particular texts.]
[To be fair, Fury Road is a little bit of an outlier in terms of the dynamic I describe, in that the bad guy is an obvious avatar of Patriarchy. But this is never actually used to make a point – the movie clearly never feels the need to make that point – we just get to watch Furiosa &co. punching him in the face over and over.]
*****
It’s true that (many of) the culture warriors demand a lot of ideological conformity from their artists, and aren’t especially tolerant of Enemy Artist Action, and this strains the “medic” metaphor a bit. But I think the actual relevant idea is that, to modern culture warriors, the point of art isn’t to shock or provoke or persuade or reveal. It is, in fact, to soothe-and-comfort.
Which means, inter alia, that the cool kids are a lot more interested in Establishment pablum and a lot less interested in aggressive edginess than they used to be.