Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 110

In the 1960s, the hippies, student radicals, and Vietnam War activists vocally, visibly, and sometimes violently rejected traditional American norms and values. Among other things, they rejected unthinking patriotism and taboos against recreational drugs and sexual freedom. The term culture war was used to describe the social upheaval that ensued. More generally, a culture war is a conflict pitting a subculture or counterculture against the dominant culture (e.g., antievolutionists versus evolutionists; Silva 2014), or a conflict between dominant groups within a society. Culture wars sometimes lead to the disruption of the social, economic, and political status quo (Hunter 1992; Luker 1984).

In the United States today, the major culture war being fought is between those who place themselves on the conservative end of the sociopolitical spectrum and those who place themselves on the liberal end. It is largely viewed as a political battle over such things as government spending, taxes, social services, national defense, and environmental measures. Conservatives generally favor less government spending, lower taxes for the wealthy, fewer entitlements for the poor, aggressive national defense, and minimal environmental regulations. Liberals usually support higher government spending on education, health care, and services for the poor; less spending on national defense; and stricter environmental regulations. Today, this battle is epitomized by struggles between Donald Trump and his conservative allies in the Republican Party and liberal Democrats in the Congress.

There are important differences in fundamental values between these groups. Consider, for example, the long-running battle over abortion. The political battle is over legal limits to abortion and contraception. However, the underlying values have to do with differing definitions of life and attitudes toward women’s role in society. Similarly, much heat is generated over “family values,” with conservatives worrying about the decline in the traditional nuclear family, the increasing prevalence of cohabitation and single parenthood, homosexual marriage, and the adoption of children by same-sex couples. They place more emphasis on strict moral codes and self-discipline, whereas liberals, in contrast, place more significance on empathy, openness, and fairness. Liberals tend to see the developments in the family as signs of greater acceptance of people’s differences and circumstances (Lakoff 2016; Wuthnow 2018). Within the field of sociology, in fact, there is intense debate between family scholars who argue that the family is in decline and those who feel that the concept of the family needs to be broadened to embrace the many ways in which people experience kin connections (Popenoe 1993; see Chapter 12).

The conservative–liberal culture war is debated endlessly in the popular media. The media themselves tend to be increasingly divided along conservative (Fox News) and liberal (MSNBC) lines. News reports on these stations are often wildly different, taking contrasting or conflicting positions and even featuring completely different stories or takes on the same stories. The leading media pundits (e.g., Fox News’s conservative Sean Hannity and MSNBC’s liberal Rachel Maddow) are often at war with one another.

Examples of culture wars are also to be found in the digital world. For example, open-source advocates believe that the internet, or at least large portions of it, should be protected from control by governments or corporations. They support free open-source software (e.g., Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, GNU Image Manipulation Program) as well as free access to information. One of their models is nonprofit Wikipedia, where anyone can create entries and modify them. They oppose the dominant profit-oriented players on the internet, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and internet service providers. These large corporations are seen as carving up the digital world and controlling access to generate huge profits. There is a constant low-level conflict going on between members of these two cultures and the groups that support them. More recently, a culture war broke out between those who want to give some corporations (such as Comcast and Verizon) control over the internet and those who favor “net neutrality,” in which the internet is free and open to all. The issue seemed settled when in mid-2016 a federal court ruled in favor of net neutrality, but it is far from dead. In late 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to eliminate at least some of the rules that made net neutrality possible. As a result, it is likely that large corporations will gain an even greater presence in, and control over, the internet.