For more than 20 years, writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson has been exploring the darker and odder corners of contemporary society. His latest podcast series, Things Fell Apart, goes back three or four decades to find the origin stories for our current vicious culture wars in the words of some of the key protagonists: a film-maker who kick-started the modern anti-abortion movement; the radio host who ignited a moral panic about satanic child abuse; a transgender women thrown out of a feminist music festival. We spoke ahead of his trip to Dublin to present a live version of the podcast.
What is a culture war?
“The best definition I read was ‘the battle for dominance over conflicting values’. It tends to stay away from economic matters. The first two great culture wars of the modern era were about diversity of thought in school textbooks and about abortion . . . What’s so interesting about the latter is how the Christian right were manipulated into being anti-abortion. After Roe v Wade, it was only the Roman Catholics who were protesting – quite quietly and peacefully – outside clinics. The Christian right were ambivalent, pro-choice even. And this weird father and son, through a very odd set of circumstances, manipulated Christian evangelists into being anti-abortion. It’s such a fascinating and unexpected story.”
Podcast: Jon Ronson on the origins of the culture wars
Arguments over abortion are something we’re familiar with in Ireland. You can draw a direct political line from the original Roe v Wade decision to what happened with our own Eighth Amendment. But the stories you describe are all American. Are the culture wars essentially American?
“There were a few British stories I could have done. But it struck me that, when Christian evangelists were prodded into becoming warriors in the early 1970s in America, and from that came the rise of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, the escalation of conflict on both sides that followed on from that all took place in America. Those were the pebbles thrown into the pond and that’s what I was looking for. The ripples were what then happened in Europe and everywhere else, but the pebbles did seem to be American stories.”
“The way America inhabits our consciousness now is of a different order from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. I was always drawn to America. I’ve always been drawn to mystery. I went to Broadmoor for [his book] The Psychopath Test, to what used to be called the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane – this is in England, of course – and I turned to a nurse and I said, ‘God, I feel so lucky to be in Broadmoor.’ The nurse looked at me like I was nuts and said, ‘Well, we’ve got some spare beds if you like.’ That’s how I feel when I go to America. But also, of course, we do live in their world. We live in the world that Trump created, we live in the world that the tech utopians created, the libertarians, the culture warriors.”
And there’s a sense that their present is our future.
“Well, they often say it starts in California, moves to the east coast and then moves to Europe.”
One of the most moving and positive of the stories that you tell involves Tammy Faye Bakker. It has a happy ending, which many of the others don’t, and it comes across as a cri de cœur for empathy.
“Tammy Faye Bakker was a televangelist who was kind of troubled. She had anxiety issues. She had a drug dependency. The other televangelists would mock and ridicule her and so she’d put a load of make-up on as a suit of armour and then they’d tell her she looked like a French whore. So she’d put on even more make-up. She was spiralling. Her peer group were very homophobic. Jerry Falwell convinced Ronald Reagan to not say the word ‘Aids’ in public for four years. But because they were bullying and mocking Tammy and she felt so alone, she found herself identifying more with the objects of their scorn. And so, one day in 1985, on her little TV show, Tammy’s House Party, which was an afternoon chat show for Christian housewives, she invited a gay pastor with full-blown Aids onto the show. What happened next was . . . I called the episode A Miracle, because it was nothing short of a miracle.”
I did find my eyes were getting a little moist by the end.
“Me too. I would get emails from people saying, ‘I was driving up the M6 and I had to pull over because I was crying so hard’.”
That story centres on a TV evangelist. Another one is about a a film-maker. There’s one about an actor, another that starts off with a talk radio host. One happens at a music festival and there’s another one about an online comedian. So, when we talk about the ‘culture’ wars, is that because everything that’s fought out now in the public sphere has blurred into or is indistinguishable from entertainment?
“I never noticed that connection between the different protagonists of the show until you just said it and you’re absolutely right. Yeah, there’s a dysfunctional relationship between these different power bodies. When it comes to social media and the mainstream media, it was so interesting, when Twitter started, your namesake, Graham Linehan, was the person who got me into Twitter. He said – this was 2008 – ‘You’ve got to join Twitter, it’s the place where no one fights’.”
That’s Graham ‘banned by Twitter’ Linehan.
“Yes. But back in 2008, we couldn’t have imagined what would happen. I think the mainstream media first thought, ‘Oh, we’ll just ignore it and it will go away’. And then it didn’t go away, so then the mainstream thought, ‘We’ll control it. We’ll do these articles on who are the 10 best tweeters in the media.’ That was the snake coming into the Garden of Eden, because suddenly it became performative. And then, when when social media completely outsmarted and beat the mainstream media, the mainstream became like the nerdy kid in the school playground, sucking up to the school bully. As journalists we’re supposed to be fearless, but when we saw people getting torn apart on social media, we shut up. We didn’t say anything, because we were scared. Which is the opposite of the bravery journalists are supposed to display.”
Although a lot of your stories begin before the internet.
“Yes.”
I have a theory, which is that the digital age actually began in the 1970s and the 1980s with the invention of cable and satellite TV, and that’s the point where you get this collision between the 60s social revolution and a counter-revolutionary backlash, with this media revolution also happening.
“And that thing I was just talking about before, about how the mainstream media was sucking up to the new media, that was also happening in the 70s and the 80s with the satanic panic. Christian radio stations were doing these stories about how people were getting kidnapped and made to take part in satanic ceremonies and how satanists had taken over day-care centres. All this nonsense. But it didn’t stay on Christian radio. CNN started doing shows about it. So once again the mainstream media saw something brewing that was full of conflict and dizziness and destabilisation and lunacy and thought, ‘Oh, we can use that’.”
The satanic panic episode is fascinating, because it doesn’t map easily to the binary of the culture wars that we have now. You talk to a teacher who was falsely accused and wrongly convicted of the most terrible abuse of children, none of which had happened.
“The thing that I found most interesting about that is the people who piled in on this woman in the early 80s, Kelly Michaels, they weren’t rural right-wing Christians from a southern state who you might imagine would believe in these crazy satanic ideas. These were progressives. This was an upmarket part of New Jersey, a nice part of town. They’re the ones who believed it, just like quite often on social media when somebody gets piled in on for something they didn’t do, the instigators are progressives. They could be well-educated, they can be wealthy. It just shows that no one is immune to irrational thoughts that lead us into ruining people’s lives.”
I do wonder who’s winning the culture wars.
“Well, I’d say the ultimate winners are the tech billionaires, these libertarian utopians. Whoever wins or loses the actual war itself, they win whatever happens.”
And who are the losers?
“To be honest, right now I’d say that the left are doing worse than the right. The left had an excellent run with #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and the new diversity in the culture. I’m very glad, by the way, to have lived through that period. I love the fact that movies now aren’t just white people . . . But you see with the backlash of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, people have sort of been manipulated and propagandised. They now all see the left as these awful people who just want to ruin your life if you say something slightly wrong. And everybody has to be gender-fluid and all these sorts of clichés. But I think they’ve been manipulated into being more fearful and more angry than they should be. I would say that the Rogans and the Musks are now winning.”
There can sometimes be a lazy equivalence drawn between both sides, but the anti-rationalism and anti-enlightenment position of the far right is also visible on the extremes of the progressive left.
“Obviously you always have to be careful about both-sidesing things because of the possibility of false equivalence, but also, both-sidesing something has become so unfashionable – because people do it for bad reasons – that those of us who actually think it’s kind of an interesting thing to do, we have to tread carefully. But yeah, I agree with what you just said. The other thing is that the average age of a QAnon devotee is like 40 to 60, so they’re the ones who are going to start the civil war, then at least they’re all pretty old.”
Most western societies are getting old. Old people banging angrily on their computers is essentially what’s driving our politics.
“Yeah, exactly. Luckily at least they’re not going to take to the streets quite as much if they’re 60, so that’s one bit of good news.”
You’re unlikely to have 70-year-old brownshirts.
“Right, exactly. So, I personally think that all this talk about impending civil war is overblown, but I do think there’s a danger of making it happen. My next story, in fact, I’m working on now is about this topic.”
Racism is obviously a hotter topic in America than it is here but it’s a hot topic everywhere.
“Yes.”
You talked to Robin di Angelo, an extremely controversial figure in the US. She’s at the centre of this argument over what the right call critical race theory (CRT), although the left says CRT is something else entirely. Essentially it’s addressing concepts such as implicit bias, inherent structural racism and white privilege. You interviewed her and I thought it was interesting you seemed sympathetic to some of what she had to say and less so to other parts.
“It was no mean feat to make a big series about the culture wars and not elicit much controversy, but the one thing I got criticised for was that people thought I was a little bit too soft on Robin di Angelo. And I think the reason why is because all the things you just said – implicit bias, systemic racism – those things really do exist. To say that they don’t is blinding yourself to the possibility of learning more about how the world works and also of making things a little bit better. That’s why I agree with her about that stuff. What I disagree with is. . . well, two things, actually. Firstly I think she would want people to be ashamed and to learn from that shame. I’m not sure I agree with wanting people to have such negative emotions. The other thing, going back to the civil war question, is that when she talks about implicit bias, unconscious racism, I think those are really good points. [But] when people talk about how the radical right in America are driven by racism and racism is their main agenda, I think history and evidence shows that’s not true, actually.”
Is this all a superimposition of ideas which are rooted in very specific parts of American history and an attempt to universalise them in an almost quasi-religious way? This sense of guilt, that everyone – or every white person – has original sin. That does have a quasi-religious element to it.
“I agree. If you’re born with white privilege, that’s it, there’s nothing you can do because you just have to try and make amends. That feels pretty religious to me.”
And the other part, which you mention in your interview, is that if you define everybody by their race and by the guilt which they bear, you’re inviting an intensified sense of identity and opposition based on racial identity from the very people you’re trying to convert.
“I think that’s true. I mean ultimately identity politics just turns people away from each other. It’s not a place where I want to be. I want to be in a place where everybody treats each other with curiosity and empathy and humanity and compassion. Identity politics is all about tribalism, withdrawing from each other, grievance. Saying all of that, I feel I’ve learned a lot from the left these past four or five years. #Metoo and Black Lives Matter, all of those things, have taught me a lot. You can see the positives but also identify the fact that there’s some real negatives.”
There’s a line in the introduction to the podcast: ‘During these last few years, Jon has watched friends get caught up in the online culture wars to such a degree that they’ve lost everything, their careers, their wellbeing.’
“I’ve sat here and just watched it unfold on social media. People losing everything. Successful writers get too involved in a particular culture war and the next thing they know they’ve lost their family, they’ve lost their reputation, they’ve lost their livelihood. I don’t know, are they the canaries in the coalmine? Are we all going to go that way? Is there something inherent about the way that we live on the internet that is doing something to our brains that’s very new and destructive? That was the question and then I thought: how will I tell that story? The answer I came up with is I’m going to go back to the beginning and tell origin stories to see how we got this way, how we ended up here.”
Jon Ronson brings Things Fell Apart to Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin on June 10th. singularartists.ie
He will be at the Festival of Writing & Ideas, Borris House, Carlow, on June 11th and 12th. festivalofwritingandideas.com
This is an edited transcript of an episode of the Irish Times Inside Politics podcast. Listen to the full conversation at irishtimes.com/podcasts
