D_01 Culture Wars and Criticism of Moralism: Struggles over Values and Identities

This work package (WP) examines meaning structures and historical developments of conflicts over values, identities, and knowledge regimes in Germany and the transatlantic context, focusing on culture wars surrounding morality and the struggle against discrimination and oppression. It concentrates on the history of the contemporary political catchwords gender, wokeness, and moralism.

Affectively charged culture wars today revolve around issues such as economic injustice, racist or sexist discrimination, and measures to address the climate crisis. In this context, critiques of moralism can be observed that frequently question the legitimacy of ethics as such, thereby calling into question one of the foundations of so – cial cohesion. Ethics provides a framework for evaluating action, structures shared values, and grounds solidarity. Right-wing conservative as well as left-wing critics decry what they perceive as a totalitarian “tyranny of values” and alleged speech prohibitions imposed by political correctness. Moralism is also critically debated within academia. Political science studies, for example, diagnose morally induced losses of legitimacy and polarization and see democratic institutions threatened by the “self-righteous elevation of one’s own moral position.” In moral philosophy, scholars discuss an “erosion of morality through moralizing,” arguing that moralism instrumentalizes ethics, reduces complexity, and arrogates authority. Hirschman even attributed a traditional aversion to morality to the social sciences.

Critiques of moralism also play a central role in transatlantic culture wars surrounding concepts such as gender and wokeness. These concepts are frequently described as “imports” from the United States that, due to their alleged focus on particular interests and identity politics, threaten social cohesion, democracy, and “the West” more broadly. At the same time, a semantic shift has taken place. In the United States since the nineteenth century, wokeness referred to knowledge and vigilance regarding discrimination; over the past decade, however, it has increasingly been associated with cancel culture and framed as a form of moralism. A similar inversion can be observed with the concept of gender, which originally aimed to generate knowledge about gender-based inequalities but has since been recast as “gender ideology” and become, for certain social groups, a symbol of a perceived threat to heteronormative social order and to democratic societies more generally.

In order to understand how the various positions in debates on moralism and culture wars relate to questions of social cohesion, this WP aims to close two research gaps. First, which motivations and argumentative patterns characterize the concrete actors involved in moralism and culture war debates? Second, what historical dependencies shape these debates? Neither moral argumentation nor critiques of moralism and culture wars are novel phenomena.

These two research gaps are addressed in two interrelated modules.

Module 1(Lüthi/Möhring) 

focuses on debates surrounding wokeness and gender ideology within culture wars on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly since the 1960s. For decades, “epistemologies of liberation” have shaped discussions of gender, societal self-understandings, identity politics, and notions of political and cultural participation. This module analyzes the argumentative repertoires and rhetorical strategies of these debates—including affective dynamics and moral repertoires—and their differing adaptations in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. A preliminary hypothesis is that debates around the now-contested terms “woke” and “gender,” radicalized by dynamics of resentment and social media, are transforming discursive culture in ways that endanger social cohesion.

Module 2(Berek) 

starts from the observation that the problematization of moralism is also used to delegitimize criticism of objectionable conditions by seeking to exempt certain areas of society from the applicability of moral judgment. An analysis of German debate contributions from the past five years aims to provide an overview of which real or constructed positions are interpreted as moralistic, where the boundaries between legitimate moral criticism and “reprehensible denunciation” are drawn, and from which political or philosophical positions critiques of moralism are articulated. A second step examines the historical path dependencies of contemporary debates. While the roots of “moralophobia” can be traced back to the Renaissance, the strands most influential for the present can be found in forms of cultural pessimism since the nineteenth century. On the basis of this historical and discourse-analytical work, the WP seeks to update theoretical discussions of social cohesion and ethics by engaging seriously with well-founded concerns raised in critiques of moralism.