Before
the Shooting Begins
Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War
At the very center of cultural conflict today are a host of public issues--abortion, sexual harassment, homosexuality--issues so contentious they have recently provoked violence. Finding chilling parallels between today's culture war and the period just before America's civil war, James Davison Hunter in Before the Shooting Begins poses the central political question of our time--how might we find a working agreement on the common good in a culture as fractured and contentious as ours? Hunter persuasively demonstrates that the only way beyond the contemporary culture war is through the hard, often tedious task of arguing substantively over our deepest differences: however, enormous obstacles stand in the face of such a path.
Focusing primarily on the abortion dispute, Hunter explores the world of civil institutions, of special interests, and ordinary citizens, and finds that power politics, not substantive democracy, has come to dominate the manner in which the cultural struggles of our day are addressed. Institutions that could or should mediate the debate such as the university and media operate themselves now as special interest groups. Also, in his large scale national study of American's views on abortion, the author finds a disturbing inability of ordinary citizens to argue a consistent, well-reasoned position. Transitory sentiment now dominates discussion, and as Hunter warns, ephemeral feelings can hardly serve as a basis for meaningful debate on divisive issues. He also persuasively argues that the multicultural movement must bear some responsibility for the intractability of these conflicts, for instead of acknowledging the very deed divisions in our society, the movement emphasizes a comforting but fictional belief in the fundamental sameness of people. In the end, Hunter finds an unnerving tendency in American public culture toward what he calls "shallow democracy" --where the dynamics of power politics prevail over substantive reflection and debate.
More books by James Davison Hunter
Evangelicalism:
The Coming Generation
Culture Wars:
The Struggle to Define America
The
Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil
Articles
of Faith, Articles of Peace: The Religious Liberty Clauses and the American
Public Philosophy
American
Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity
Cultural
Analysis: The Work of Peter Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, &
Jürgen Habermas
Making
Sense of Modern Times: Peter L. Berger & the Vision of Interpretive
Sociology