But now the shoe is on the other foot.  Now the problem is that creative artists sneer at the bourgeoisie, and fear them.  They rail at the Religious Right and try to chase middle-class, Christian culture out of the public square because they fear the “chilling effect” of traditional rules and roles on their creative process.  Now the problem is that green communitarians fear the power of multinational corporations and the creative egos that founded and grew them, and want to curb their global reach because the corporate culture of global creativity seems to threaten their own dreams of global community.  The problem is the same as the old Social Question of the nineteenth century.  The “advanced” communities are impatient and fearful of the backward, and resent having to accommodate the “superstitions” and primitive culture of the ordinary middle class.  And they have preached a creative crusade, a Culture War to defeat the superstitions of the stolid Christian middle class.

This new problem, the Culture War, needs to be solved in a way similar to the old Social Question.  A movement of elitists is needed to champion the rights of the Mary Johnstons, the blue purposives in flyover country, from the scorn and the intolerance of the orange and green elitists just as, in the nineteenth century, a movement of elitists championed the rights of the working class against middle-class intolerance.  As you might expect, this has already happened.  The U.S. conservative movement in the 1970s transformed itself from an elite coterie of writers and activists into a broad-based movement that came to feature as its core supporters the meat-and-potatoes middle class of flyover country and the striver suburb.  The battles of this war are the social issues like abortion, school prayer, and gun rights over which elite opinion in the media and the university sharply differs from the common-sense opinion of ordinary Americans. 

The settlement of this culture war is still some way away, as the orange creatives and green communitarians still fail to understand that they have a problem or that there any reason to compromise with people they consider to be bigots.  They have defined themselves as the culmination of civilization, rather as the bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century experienced itself, in the words of Max Weber as “this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”  The modern elites will likely need to be rocked onto their heels by a severe shock before they will be willing to discuss compromise.  At the turn of the twenty-first century, they expect to define the future.  The idea that they ought to share the future with dull routinists who go to Bible study meetings on Wednesday evening has not yet penetrated their consciousness.

In its noble defense of religious, married, child-raising America, the conservative movement has developed a set of policy initiatives that defend the right of the ordinary middle class to live a life of purpose and direction, but to opt out of the orange disturbance of creativity and rule changing, and the green dream of universal brotherhood and global community beyond the limits of kin, of race, and of nation.  But it has not developed a cultural vision that transcends the vision of the orange creatives and the green communitarians, and that illustrates the poverty of the left-wing world view with its own broader and more compelling world view, one that combines the agenda of red/blue base with a vision of creativity and community that could attract the support of the creative classes.  In consequence, the conservative movement has lacked a cultural strategy and has found itself perpetually on the cultural defensive.  Without such a vision it is trying to defeat something with nothing.

The great failure of the left has been its failure to admit the immense difficulty of all creative work, and the specific difficulty of changing society for the better.  The moment of creative insight is the beginning of work, not its end.  The brilliant idea must be made to work—in a painting, a book, or in society, and all the mistakes and omissions in the original flash of insight painstakingly identified and corrected.  The reality is that, out of the thousands of creative artists in any generation, only a handful is fated to produce anything of lasting merit.  The work of the rest will be deservedly forgotten.  And social change is notoriously difficult, as the twentieth century proved.  The bold vision of Marx and Engels, when implemented in the bold strokes of Lenin and Mao, led to unimaginable sufferings for the Russian and the Chinese people and for millions of others as well.  The Greeks knew the danger of hubris, and warned how it led to disaster.  Would-be world saviors should not practice on society at large but in carefully controlled experiments far from the public square.

There is, of course, already a path for world saviors to follow, if they want to avoid the pitfalls of hubris.  It was studied by Joseph Campbell in his huge study of world mythology in which he attempted to catalog all the varied myths about redemptive heroes, the uncounted attempts of humans to imagine how to build a better world without succumbing to all its temptations and distractions, resolving the interplay of power and law, of creativity and destruction, of community and diversity, of the human yearning for greatness into a single narrative.  Campbell called his path the Hero’s Journey.

The hero’s journey starts when the hero responds to the call to adventure and sets forth from ordinary society to the threshold of adventure.  He goes into the kingdom of the dark, undergoing severe tests and yet receiving magical aid from fortuitous helpers.  At the nadir of the underworld he undergoes the supreme ordeal and gains his reward.  Then the hero returns from the underworld and re-emerges into the everyday world.  “The boon he brings restores the world.” (Campbell 1968 p246)

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill