It seems like the term “culture war” is everywhere in our everyday speech: from cable news pundits to newspaper op-eds to people on the street, it seems as if everyone imagines our culture as a state of conflict. But what really is a “culture war” after all? What even is a “culture”? How can we have any idea about the meaning of a culture war if we don’t have a good definition of culture in the first place?

Defining culture is a hard task. Ask a random person on the street and each person will have a unique but unsure answer. Maybe a problem with this “culture war” is that while there’s certainly a feeling that there’s a war, people don’t really have a coherent definition of “culture.” Everyone is blind on the battlefield. But the definition of culture varies so much that we must also approach this conflict from different sides. Any deconstructing or redefining that we do is simply part of the process – the main goal here is to reframe. If we know what culture is, we can better understand what it means that our culture is apparently at war. 

In this essay, we will examine two definitions of culture to try and gain some insight on the meaning of our “culture wars”: Sigmund Freud’s ideas about culture in Civilization and its Discontents and Clifford Geertz’s ideas about culture in The Interpretation of Cultures. Sigmund Freud saw culture itself as a war that we have waged for centuries on our own minds. Clifford Geertz, on the other hand, saw it as so comprehensive as to be almost boundless. Each writer hints at how they would interpret our modern culture wars and the tension that seems to surround us, but they mostly just lay out maps of what culture is, and leave us to apply their ideas how we please. So in this essay we will first contrast their definitions, and second, see how they would address our modern day situation.

Before we begin, a quick note on the word “culture.” Freud and Geertz present us with two possible definitions in their books Civilization and Its Discontents and The Interpretation of Cultures, but Freud refers to “civilization” while Geertz refers to “culture”. We can treat these as synonyms; they are the same idea. Part of this is a translation issue–Freud’s German “Kultur” combines both, so in English we need to fuse the two. Nonetheless both writers define culture in interesting and different ways that help to show us its actual tendencies in the modern day.

At first, Freud’s definition of culture seems very expansive, and maybe not very different from the kind of answer you might get from the guy on the street: “the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors” (Freud 42). But this doesn’t actually summarize Freud’s thinking that well. Freud isn’t so interested in the distinction between humans and animals, and not even that interested in the “sum of the achievements” that make civilization what it is. Freud does list some of these achievements of civilization, but his attitude towards them isn’t one of praise. Rather, he is ambivalent at best, and more interested in the fact that civilization regulates us. Freud is actually contrary to the guy on the street – he sees civilization not as a threshold to cross, but a set of boundaries restricting us. Our achievements are effects of regulated lives, not causes of them.

Freud thinks this works using a hierarchy of control. Civilization is at the top, and gives rise to technology, ideology, and so on by regulating our decisions. It’s a sweeping mechanism that doles out judgment for certain choices. Through a long evolution, we’ve tweaked it to incentivize or disincentivize every little thing. You can point to our accomplishments to prove it works, but its actual influence is through the comments of our consciences. Our egos are overlorded by our super-egos, which use conscience to guilt, spook, and worry us into submission.

So we have consciences to bully our choices. But why? Freud claims that “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction…of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings” (Freud 51-52). The regulations and demands of culture put humans at odds with their own instincts and drives, and when those instincts are unsatisfied, we feel the titular “discontent.” We consent to this by joining society, but suppress our instincts so well that we confuse them and even forget they’re there. We convince ourselves we are fulfilled, and have built a world that supports this.

According to Freud, this puts the mind at war with itself, making us unhappy. In response, we search for ways to feel happier. These range from mental shifts like imagination, delusion, and love, to lifestyle changes like isolation, religion, and appreciation of beauty. Some are reliable, others are fleeting, and many are addictive. But all are palliative and all are flawed. Beauty fades, love dilutes, and religion veils. None loosen civilization’s grip.

Can anything loosen that grip? Freud seems unsure, and he implies that prehistoric peoples likely had gentler consciences, that because of our rapid advancement over the last millennia or so, “[The superego] does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings” (Freud 108). He also likens the process by which the “cultural super-ego” might loosen its grip on humans to the work of psychoanalysts who are “very often obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we endeavor to lower its demands” (Freud 108). But Freud himself seems skeptical of this possibility and doesn’t elaborate on it much more–rather, he holds out vague hope that “one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities” (Freud 110).

Might Clifford Geertz be this therapeutic messiah? Perhaps not. Geertz is not a psychoanalyst interested in diagnosing cultural pathologies, but an anthropologist. He isn’t trying to soothe people’s consciences–he wants to reform the discipline of anthropology. Geertz thinks that cultures are meant to be understood rather than fixed; heard, rather than healed. Indeed, for Geertz, culture isn’t a problem for human nature, so much as it’s an essential part of it. He defines culture as an involuntary byproduct of living. The two can not be divorced. We can hardly define culture, let alone escape, alter, or create it. In fact, his big shocker is that there is no underlying “human nature,” no contextless core. Culture is everything we could ever think, feel, do, want, or understand: “Men unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist, have never existed, and most important, could not in the very nature of the case exist. There is, there can be, no backstage” (Geertz 40).

This idea seems very radical, even threatening, like our identities themselves are in jeopardy. How can we work, live, and communicate if we are so dependent on culture? Are we our cultures? What if we don’t like our cultures?

These questions are especially existential for anthropology. Suddenly, sociology, philosophy, and really any science dealing in human thought get lumped into it. How can a discipline include so much? Geertz’s solution is a sort of moderate anthropology which he calls semiotic. It hinges on the belief that to study a culture is to study a community’s symbols. This relies on categorizing a subject’s behavior by looking at how fellow subjects understand it, because “as interworked systems of construable signs, culture is not a power, something to which social events, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described” (Geertz 15). Semiotic anthropologists “thickly describe” by accepting their own norms as an inherent lens their work must shine through.

Geertz’s idea of culture is too big to go to war. It is so comprehensive that there is no enemy to fight, no territory to contend, and nothing to win. It’s beyond inert; it can’t do anything. It has no poles to be ripped apart from. Because “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” Geertz would just see conflict as two quadrants of that web scraping together (Geertz 5). Geertz thinks dissatisfied individuals adopt ideologies as a way out, creating “an autonomous politics” and “the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped” (Geertz 237). When people join schools of thought, tradition is rejected, and culture has growing pains. We see these pains as conflict, but they are really just evolution as the culture web twists shape.

Freud would agree with this idea of rebellion, but would see it as more personal. If coping fails, if culture gets to us, wouldn’t we grow angry and revolt? When God and yoga and your love interest can’t drown out your conscience enough, you rebel against the machine. Of course, you need somewhere to go, so you join a splinter group, something counterculture. If this fork gets traction it grows from “radical” to “normal.” Sometimes the offshoot eclipses the base culture, turning from “an expression of the will of a small community” into one where “a rule of law to which all… have contributed by a sacrifice of their instincts” (Freud 49). This is how Freud would see a culture war, as a clash between two different interpretations of justice, two different ideas of what civilization wants from us.

But how might an individual rebel in Geertz’s system? On a day-to-day level, we can’t understand culture or people separately, only how the two interact. We are each a unique cultural blend, and belong to different areas of the web. The more distance between us, the greater the differences between our symbols. Far enough away, and my symbols might tell me your symbols are “wrong,” appealing to my pathos using ethics. But I am only ever angry at how you carry culture and what your symbols mean. After all, an emotion like anger is just another symbol that I have been taught to use a certain way. “Enemy” and “war” are more symbols. Culture is never fighting; instead, it is like a huge traffic light, blinking commands in ways that sometimes cause accidents.

So it’s all a big miscommunication? It’s comforting to think that being unused to each other is the source of all our troubles. Maybe this is a genuine way to heal our divisions–insisting that distance between how people are raised is why we fight. We can’t control how we’re raised, so we quarrel by coincidence. This is exactly why semiotic anthropology can be a lay anthropology that anyone can do. All it takes is empathy to locate a person in the cultural web. Understanding that we all sit at a different intersection in that web means you can’t polarize groups. Maybe, by repurposing anthropology like this, we can cure our “discontent” after all.

Both authors disarm the idea of a “culture war.” Culture is more a feeling than an event, so there is no “war” around us. Do you gravitate toward one definition or the other? Which camp you’re in might depend on how well you take stress, and how willing you are to forgive others. Personally, I’d rather use culture to build bridges, instead of offering it as an excuse for why they burned. I’d rather live in Geertz’s web with everyone else than feel like I’m bullying my own brain all the time. 

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Norton, 1961. First published 1930.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 2000. First published 1973.