Alec Ward | Parody shift

Talking Backward | Who really won the culture wars?

By Alec Ward 11/03/15 11:12pm

A few weeks ago, I watched a film called “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead,” which chronicled the rise and fall of National Lampoon, a controversial humor magazine which was immensely popular from the 1970s through ’90s. The magazine became known for its unapologetic transgression of traditional social mores, especially in its early years, when the conservative cultural taboos of the ’50s remained strong.

The magazine was a perennial flashpoint in the so-called “culture wars” of the late ’70s and ’80s — its flippant treatments of sex and violence, its joking takes on race relations and its routine ridicule of institutions and public figures put it squarely in the sights of right-wing “culture warriors.” High-profile conservatives including far-right Senator Jesse Helms and televangelist Pat Robertson sought, among other things, to quash publications like National Lampoon, which were associated with the countercultural movement which arose and thrived in the late ’60s and ’70s among liberal young adults.

As the hippie generation moved into middle-age, their attitudes and values began moving into the cultural mainstream, along with the arts and media they patronized. This shift enraged cultural conservatives, especially the religious right, who led an all-out attack on the new sensibilities, aided by many of the legislators whose constituencies they dominated. Serious government-led efforts were made to defund artists and shut down publications whose output was deemed “obscene.” Rock musicians and avant-garde visual artists were targeted with particular zeal. “Think of the children!” was the culture warriors’ battle-cry; they insisted that media had to be censored to protect the young from obscene content which, they argued, would hinder their development and inflict emotional trauma which would haunt them through their lives. Free-speech concerns, they argued, did not apply to obscene materials, because they caused real harm to the most vulnerable members of society. In the case of National Lampoon magazine, at least, the culture warriors were successful — pressure from conservatives ultimately led the magazine’s publisher to abandon it.

The conventional wisdom, nevertheless, is that the right lost the culture wars, at least among the highly educated. Helms and his like’s views on sex, obscenity and humor seem outdated to many, if not most Americans. Today, “Think of the children!” is more often a laugh line than an earnest appeal.

However, it seems to me that, lately, the right’s old arguments about obscenity and its harmfulness have regained popularity among a somewhat unlikely crowd: the far left. The notion that flippant treatment of topics like violence, race relations and sex is harmful to vulnerable members of society and therefore outside the bounds of acceptable discourse — and as such, worthy of sanction — is professed most enthusiastically not by demagogue Republican politicians, but by left-wing adherents to a certain strain of identity politics especially popular on college campuses. The preferred terminology for such disfavored content is now “offensive” rather than “obscene,” but it boils down to a remarkably similar set of taboos — especially where humor is concerned. I can’t help but think that today, National Lampoon would have been taken down from the left instead of the right, but over essentially all the same complaints.

A number of comedians have picked up on this: Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher, among others, have decried what they call PC hyper-sensitivity to edgy humor after recieving demands from college audiences that they scrub their routines of jokes that might offend. Such demands come not from the campus Republicans, as they might have in the ‘80s, but from professed liberals who insist that hearing jokes about race and sex would be harmful to racial and sexual minorities.

I wish I could say definitively how this particular form of dated right-wing cultural intolerance found a home in 21st century leftism, but I can’t. Perhaps before dying out, the culture warriors affected some kind of persuasion upon their opponents. Perhaps it’s simply a manifestation of the old truism that at its extremes, the political spectrum bends back towards itself. It should, however, give those who would claim to be liberals pause that, upon close examination, the content of their rhetoric and the objects of their anger are really not so different from those of yesterday’s arch-conservatives. And in light of a new poll released from Yale University last week indicating that a majority of college students favor punishment of “offensive” speech, we might as a society stop to wonder: Did liberalism win the culture wars after all?

ALEC WARD is a College junior from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu. Follow him on Twitter @TalkBackWard. “Talking Backward” usually appears every other Wednesday.

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