JUST SAY NO.

One Nation, Two Cultures
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Alfred A. Knopf, $23, 179 pp.

Recent events-such as last fall's furor over the publicly funded exhibit of a portrait of a dung-daubed Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum; the defeat of state gambling in Alabama; the support for teaching creationism by the Kansas School Board; the popular outrage over Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura's attack on religion-focus fresh attention on America's culture wars.

Yet some question the very existence of the culture wars. In One Nation, after All (Viking, 1998), sociologist Alan Wolfe argued that such highly publicized controversies over cultural issues do not reflect the concerns of the middle-class suburbanites he interviewed. Quiet faith, and tolerance for almost everything, characterize their cultural outlook and, he implied, the outlook of most ordinary Americans.

In One Nation, Two Cultures, an elegant and beautifully economical essay, one of the nation's most distinguished cultural historians challenges this argument. Gertrude Himmelfarb says that the culture wars do exist, that they are deeply rooted in American political and religious tradition, and that they have had a largely salutary, if modest, impact on the society.

The title of her book, and some of its pointed criticism, are a rebuttal of Wolfe's thesis. Himmelfarb says that though we are one nation, politically indivisible, we are two cultures, divided over a set of fundamental beliefs on family, codes of sexual conduct, and the role of religion in the public square.

Himmelfarb traces the origins of this cultural divide to the l960s and the countercultural revolution which challenged and eventually overturned traditional moral norms. This revolution was "magnified by other concurrent ones"-racial, sexual, technological, demographic, and psychological-and together these revolutions "fostered a growing disaffection with established institutions and authorities." Liberation brought benefits, especially for women and African-Americans, writes Himmelfarb, but its rewards were tempered by costs and casualties: "The counterculture intended to liberate everyone from the stultifying influence of 'bourgeois values,' also liberated a good many people from the values...that had a stabilizing, socializing, and moralizing effect on the society."

What Himmelfarb calls "the cultural contradictions of liberation," gave rise to two cultures, interacting and coexisting, but not entirely reconcilable. The dominant culture is dedicated to protecting and expanding the legacy of the culturally liberationist agenda. Its cultural outlook is secular, morally relativistic, and nonjudgmental. Think Terry Gross on NPR. Its leadership is concentrated in the cultural strongholds of the media and academy, but its followers represent the majority of Americans.

A smaller and weaker dissident culture, arising more recently, stands in fitful opposition to the dominant culture. Its leadership is concentrated among conservative religious activists, but its membership cuts across religious denominations and includes secularists who find their moral convictions at odds with the dominant culture. Its cultural outlook is rooted in religious faith and moral conviction as well as the concern that the traditional family, civility, childhood innocence, and respect for adult as well as institutional authority are eroding. Think Dr. Laura Schlessinger across the am dial.

If Himmelfarb makes a persuasive case for the existence of culture wars, she nonetheless rejects the media portrait of cultural dissenters as members of a dangerous, authoritarian, monolithic, Religious Right. These dissidents are far more democratic, religiously pluralistic, well-educated, and diffusely organized than their stereotype suggests. And members of the dissident culture include more traditional Democrats than people commonly think. African-Americans, who are left of center in their politics, are often in sympathy with cultural dissidents on matters like religious expression in the public square, premarital sexual abstinence, the breakdown of the family, and school vouchers. For example, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of the nation's laboratories for school choice, 74 percent of African-Americans favor vouchers, according to a recent survey by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Himmelfarb concludes that the conflict between a dominant and a dissident culture has been mainly a good thing. Cultural dissent has tempered the socially utopian and culturally extremist views of the Left. She points out that no one today celebrates the glories of mind- expanding drugs or exploitative sex and violence in the media, as many did in the l970s.

Moreover, out of this clash of cultures, she states, we have begun to forge a consensus on such difficult and contested issues as the breakdown of the nuclear family. "It is not only conservatives (religious and secular) who now deplore the breakdown of the family; liberals do as well...." Finally, she sees little chance that the culture wars will escalate into religious wars. Indeed, in the future, the dissident culture is likely to become more ecumenical and less sectarian, more moral and less religious, more diffuse and less focused. Yet even as it blurs and softens, cultural dissent will continue to influence the mainstream in myriad ways: "If there will be no mass conversion," she observes, "there will be individual conversions on important cultural issues."

Perhaps because she surveys the cultural battlefield from Olympian heights, Himmelfarb sometimes makes cultural conflict seem rather more bloodless and dispassionate than it may be. And she fails to note at least one of the more obvious exceptions to her argument: For many conservatives, it is a matter of faith that the market responds to consumer pressures. Yet there is little evidence that organized protest or broad cultural consensus has had much impact, for example, on the television industry. Both elite and popular opinion on the right and left agree that television is too violent, too sexually exploitative, too harmful to children. Congressional critics on both sides of the aisle have used the bully pulpit to scold and shame media executives, advertisers, screenwriters; new grass-roots organizations have formed to boycott advertisers and lobby local television stations; parents have picketed and pled for more wholesome shows. Media moguls hang their heads in what has become a ritual of penitence, promise to do better, but then return to the business of pushing the edge of the cultural envelope and generating more vulgarity, profanity, and raunchy sex with each new television season.

And I wonder whether Himmelfarb might not underestimate the dominant culture's capacity to have it both ways: to submit to cultural challenge the way a big brother tolerates a tussle with a little brother, but then to reassert power and prevail in the fight. If today's cultural dissent tends to lose its sharp and adversarial edge and to tilt away from sectarian religious belief toward softer moral complaint, it is fair to ask whether it rises to the level of a Fourth Great Awakening, as some suggest, or whether it will turn out to be nothing more than a modest midcourse correction. It is probably up to the younger generation to decide this question. In the meantime, this dazzling book gives us profound appreciation for our long tradition of moral self-scrutiny and offers us a way to measure and, yes, judge today's culture wars against the record of the past.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the author of The Divorce Culture (Alfred A. Knopf).