Architectural Tupperware

Containers

Architecture is one of the ultimate cultural containers; it both represents and holds firm our society.  It is an absolute expression of who we are, our value system, our ideals, our aspirations.  It is also the thing that circumscribes our daily lives.  In this, I do want to state, I am not being an environmental determinist claiming that architecture makes us who we are.  Instead, I am making the opposite claim, that who we are determines our architecture, and that then architecture we create imposes boundaries on us.

Some might argue that art is the true container of culture: it challenges us, it embodies our ideals, it represents, and possibly abstracts, our culture; it stimulates thought and discourse.  All of these are true, but the one thing that art lacks is the connection to the practical.  By it's very nature, art is an object of ornament, not of function.  This is not to say that art is superfluous, it is very necessary, it is just that art exists for it's own sake. 

Architecture does not.  Architecture straddles the line between the practical necessities of life and the ornament of existence.  As Adolph Loos would say, "art should challenge, architecture should be comfortable."

Some might argue the opposite side, that technology is the actual container of culture: it demonstrates our knowledge; it shows our application of that knowledge; it celebrates our achievements; and in some cases, it fundamentally makes life possible.  All of these things are true also, but technology lacks the poetic.  It is missing an essential element of grace and beauty.  Technology is an object of function, not ornament.

Architecture also does not do this.  Again, it straddles the line.  It embodies the practical knowledge necessary to create buildings, but it also contains the beauty that pure engineering lacks.

Then there are those who would argue that writing, poetry and literature, are the true embodiment of culture, and in that I must agree, they are.  However, literature is just another form of architecture, in the sense that both are directly derived from the ancient art of storytelling.  (I would like to credit my friend Patrick with the concept that all art has it's root in the telling of stories.)  I am not claiming that architecture is constructed poetry or frozen music, merely that the two derive from the same source.

Writing is the architecture of the mind, buildings are the architecture of the physical.  They both employ structure, rules, form in the purpose of creating beauty.  A poorly crafted poem will collapse under its own weight just as quickly as poorly crafted building.

It is no coincidence that buildings and writings are the primary tools to dissect and understand a past culture.  They are the two fundamental sources used in archaeology to reconstruct the past.

To examine the first mode of architecture as a cultural container, I will address how architecture manifests essential aspects of society.

First I would like to discuss how architecture embodies our value systems.  As an example, I will look at the development of the kitchen over the last one hundred years and chart how it displays changes in societal roles.  I am going to use this time frame, because this is the period after the kitchen developed as a room separate from the main living space, as it had been in colonial times for all but the wealthy.  It is also after the kitchen stopped being hidden as the realm of servants for the middle classes, as it was in Victorian times.  This period is the time when the gas stove, refrigerator and indoor plumbing transformed the kitchen. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the kitchen was typically a very small room that could only hold a small number of people comfortably.  This was true even in houses of the wealthy, as shown in Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock house.  Further, the kitchen was relatively isolated from the rest of the house, segregated from the main living spaces by at least doors, if not actually by a butler's pantry.

This design showed the minimal value placed on the kitchen and more importantly, the minimal value of the women doing the cooking.  A common observation was "exiling the women to the kitchen."  This reflected societal norms of the men retiring to the parlor to discuss important matters, while the women went into the kitchen to work at cleaning up. 

In fact, the design of the house showed the sexual segregation typical of society at the time, where the men and the women typically shared space only during the meal, but were separated by the architecture both before and after.  And sometimes they were not together even then.  In my father's family, if there was not enough space at the table, the women ate in the kitchen.  The architecture limited all interaction.

As we moved into the second half of the 20th century, the kitchen began to change.  First, the kitchen transformed to celebrate both technological achievement and plenty.  While still strictly separated from the rest of the living spaces, it nonetheless began to become more of a focal point for the display of technology; electric stoves, wall ovens, dishwashers, trash compactors, a host of small appliances, supposedly labor saving devices, actually became status symbols to display in a new kitchen.  Even though socialization would not occur there, everyone had to see the new stuff in the kitchen and admire the achievement of the family who could afford it.

Additionally, stoves, ovens and refrigerators increased in size to accommodate the more plentiful food that needed to be stored and prepared.  To understand this change, I have a bread dish that belonged to my grandmother that she used in the 30's.  This dish  is small, it can only hold six or eight slices of bread, and those slices would have been cut in half.  It was a way to elegantly display a small amount of food.  Today, a bread plate would be able to accommodate an entire loaf of French bread, possibly even two.

But the most dramatic shift was the change that began in the 80's and 90's, when cooking moved into the social realm.  No longer were women exiled to the kitchen, and segregated from the men, now both sexes mingled and the kitchen became a prime social space.  In the shift to the great room concept of the new millennium, the kitchen is now often the main entertaining space in the home.

This shift shows the massive transformation of attitudes.  The kitchen has returned to it's Colonial American roots, where the activities of the home revolve around the hearth, now transformed into the island.  The change in kitchens shows the change in the values of society, where it is now important for an entire family or a group of friends to share space, even when work is occurring.   

My grandmother would never have had her entire family in the kitchen, it wouldn't have been proper because it was a working room.  I would never not have my friends in my kitchen, for the same basic reason, it would not be proper, but now because it is the social room.  The transformation of the kitchen in the house shows the shift in cultural ideals.

The change in the kitchen also shows a shift in our aspirations.  In the days of strictly defined gender roles, rooms had gender determinatives.  Certain rooms were for men, most of the house actually, and certain rooms were for women, chiefly the kitchen, sewing room and the kids rooms.  At that time, societal aspirations and norms were built around the concept of a man's home is his castle.  Our architecture reflected this.

Today, our aspirations are for a non-gender segregated society.  We are  tearing down the walls of sexism, and in doing so, have torn down the walls around the kitchen.  We are reflecting the hope for an equal society through an architectural expression that creates equality in the space.  Now the whole family can be together, and work together, in the modern kitchen.

But container has another meaning, it can also mean to hold back; to contain an idea in a limiting sense.  To demonstrate this, I will stay with the kitchen.   The shift in kitchen design lagged years behind the shift in societal roles, and in fact, it is not fully penetrated even yet because there are still millions of old style kitchens across the country.  In a very real sense, the delay in the shift of the physical puts a brake on the shift of the cultural.

In homes where the kitchen still is of the design and has the separation of the old

kitchens, the patterns of life in those houses still reflects the old system of segregation.  It may be the man doing the cooking, but regardless, the genders are still separated before and after the meal.  Socialization is still fragmented by the spaces.

Even in old houses that have large kitchens, like mine, there is still an odd disjointing, where everyone crowds into the kitchen, so a choice must be made between comfort or standing around the island in the kitchen.  There is no ability for everyone to be together, but engaged in different activities as they would be in an open concept house.

In this sense, our architecture also contains culture, by slowing down its transformation.  I am not going to claim that this is a good thing or a bad thing, just that the built environment can slow the societal changes, if for no other reason than we cannot afford to rebuild our entire world every time the culture shifts.

I could use countless other architectural examples of this embodiment of culture.  You can see it in the change from the corner store to the big box store, the parish church to the large mega-church, the grand civic buildings to the modest office structures that now serve as centers of government.  Each of these changes represents a serious shift or evolution of cultural values.

The architecture becomes a lens, magnifying our society.  Though our architecture, we can analyze our entire value system and the patterns of our lives.  But architecture can also become a prison, locking us into patterns that are no longer valid, but that we are unable to change, because the architecture confines us to the old forms.

We build buildings that fit our lives at the moment, then those buildings shape the patterns of the next generation.  It is a cycle that is at once elevating and limiting, and it is a cycle that we must understand.

The Spectre at the Feast

Chaos

Let the acrimony and recriminations begin; let us point fingers and begin the most important task in these sorrowful times - assigning blame.  We need to figure out who is responsible for this horrible deed, because obviously there are accomplices who need to be rooted out and punished.

Every time there is a national tragedy, we engage in this blame game  We seek out or create villains in order to be able to dump the nightmare at their feet.  Tragedy becomes a political football, perfect for scoring points against all opponents. 

"This is proof of the war against Judeo-Christianity," said Congressman Gohmert.  "It is the sign of a broken mental health system," according to a HuffPo columnist.  "It happened because we have too much gun control," cries the NRA.  "No, it is because we don't have enough," claims Senator Lautenberg. "It is because we have lost the Christian rudder that steers the country," as countless letter writers to the Denver Post feel.

We search frantically, desperately to find some reason to explain this mass murder, and all such events.  There has to be a reason, some hook to explain the evil that men do.  There have to be collaborators and facilitators, who create an environment to allow them to do it in.  There have to be some motivational factors that spurred the actions.

All of this is wrong.

Sometimes people are evil just because they are evil.  To quote Barbara Hambly, "The question is always the answer if you need one badly enough."  Sometimes there are just evil people in the world who do evil things.

This is a very hard concept to stomach.  It implies that things can be senseless, unpreventable and unpredictable.   It means that we can't always keep bad things from happening, and it means that when they do happen, sometimes we will never understand why.

These thoughts throw our well ordered world into chaos, which is what Christopher Nolan's rendering of the Joker represents.  He is the agent of Chaos.

And by adopting that persona, James Holmes also became the agent of chaos.

I am not saying that he didn't have his reasons for his violent attack on innocent movie patrons, maybe he is insane, maybe he was on drugs, maybe he was acting out some sort of sick fantasy, maybe he was just trying to get revenge for some imagined slight.  However, just like we never learn why the fictional Joker rampaged through Gotham City, we may never learn why the man who claimed to be the Joker went on a real rampage in an Aurora movie theatre.  Maybe there is no rational explanation for why James Holmes viciously shot 71 people in cold blood. 

And this reality makes it that much more terrifying. 

A few years ago, I watched an episode of the BBC series "Torchwood," which normally revolved around finding and stopping alien attacks on humans, sort of a dark and twisted "X-Files" meets "Men in Black."  In the episode "Countrycide," the team investigates a series of disappearances, murders and cannibalistic acts that are so gruesome and evil that they assume that only an alien could be responsible; they were just too inhuman.  In the end though, the monster was a human family, and the instigator was the father.  He was the most vicious monster in any episode of the entire series.  When he was asked why he did it, his chilling response was, "It made me happy."

That was it, no further explanation or examination, no deeper message.  He did it simply because it gave him pleasure.  His simple statement still gives me chills, because it is at once both absolutely inhuman and utterly human.  The cold, calculating evil revealed resides in the human race, and we see it over and over again, and yet we cannot bear to look at it, because we see ourselves reflected in the face of evil.

So we have to explain it away, because otherwise it becomes a mirror of our own souls.  We all have the capacity for unlimited grace and absolute evil, but this is not something we can admit to ourselves and so we have to come up with other rationalizations.  This process leads us into completely unhelpful dialogs that distract us from the evil men do.

In order to show how these are distractions, I'll quickly poke holes in the top arguments that I laid down earlier.  To do that, I'll run though some counter arguments. 

"This is proof of the war against Judeo-Christianity."  I'm not actually going to even dignify this one, simply because it is a straw man.  As such, it is not worthy of comment.

"It is the sign of a broken mental health system."  How do we know he was insane?  One of his former professors said he was the "top of the top."  Yes, he was antisocial and a loner, but unless social disconnection becomes a mental illness in it's own right, this does not prove he was unhinged.  The incredible exactness of his plan and execution of it does not indicate a disordered mind.  We do need better mental health care in this country, but this massacre is not a foundation for why we need to make the system better.

"It happened because we have too much gun control."  No, not at all.  My father was an army major, and a strong advocate of gun control.  His reasoning, which I have not heard enough from the politicians, was very simple.  Soldiers and police officers go through intense training to know how to use their weapon in a high pressure situation, which is very different than hunting or being on the gun range.  Even with all of their training, you still get a lot of friendly fire accidents and collateral damage.  Imagine several armed people shooting in a fear situation in a darkened theatre.  There would be a lot more than twelve casualties.  Adding more guns into the mix would have resulted in more, not fewer, deaths.

"It is because we don't have enough gun control."  Also, a true concept in some ways, but utterly inapplicable in this situation for two reasons.  First, James Holmes never did anything in his life that would put him on the radar as someone who shouldn't be able to buy a gun: he didn't have a criminal record; he had never been treated for mental health issues; and he had never indicated that he was a threat to anyone.  Second, even with the best gun control in the world, a truly determined person will be able to get his hands on some sort of weapon.  If he hadn't been able to get a semi-automatic, he probably would have used more bombs, and made them deadly.  He obviously had the skills to do so.  The means might have differed, but the end would have been the same.

"It is because we have lost the Christian rudder that steers the country."  Christianity is not the only moral compass, all religious systems try to impart a rigid system of ethics and morality.  Also all religions have their murderous nutcases, just look at David Koresh or Osama Bin Laden.  Both of them were extremely fundamentalist and devout in their religious beliefs, and yet they caused more deaths that James Holmes.  Besides, this country was never founded in Christianity.  Remember, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights was a Deist, not a Christian.

So all of these frames that we try to construct to explain the crime are probably not accurate, they are only a means to advance a political agenda, and as such not worthy of further discussion.  We can justifiably look at a culture of violence or the motivations of the killer, but even these don't necessarily explain anything.  

Until or unless we get a statement from the criminal himself, we will never know his motivation.  Also remember, if he is setting himself as the Joker, anything that comes out of his mouth cannot be assumed to be true or valid.  Similarly, any explanation we give it is our own projections on his psyche, which also has no authenticity.

Therefore, we are left with the spectre at the feast, he did it because he wanted to, and because he was evil, amoral and twisted.  It is not a demonic evil, it is a human evil.  It is an evil that we can all understand, although most of us will never dance with it.  And no matter what we do, that evil will still exist in some of us, you will never stop it.

And because of that, we have to face an even more unpleasant truth than the fact that people are capable of real evil, and we will never know why.  We have to accept, no matter what we do, bad things will happen, people will be killed and villains will walk the earth.

All we can hope for is that most of the times the monsters will be stopped before people die.  All we can if they are not is band together and support each other.  Pointing fingers and laying blame does not heal us.  Bad things will happen, no matter where the blame lies. There is nothing we can do about it except stop blaming and start supporting those who are hurting.  Our accusations don't make their recovery any easier.

The Immediacy of Tragedy

Mindset

As you are probably aware of by now, there was a horrific mass shooting in Colorado last night, possibly one of the worst mass murders in American history.  I am not going to explore the rationale behind this senseless act nor am I going to explore societal dysfunctions that led to this nightmare.

I cannot even begin to explain it, nor can I even begin to comprehend it.  Perhaps later I will be able to look at it, examine it and process it, but for now, I cannot.  The horror is too fresh.

What I am going to explore is my reaction to the shootings, and try to understand why I reacted this way, and using my reaction as a vehicle, try to understand why we, as Coloradoans react to tragedy in the way we do.

My first thought, when I heard about the shootings, was to wonder if my friend Johnny was OK.  Why was that my first thought?  The Century 16 is the closest movie theatre to his house, he is the sort of person who goes to midnight showings of movies, and the Dark Night Rises is the sort of movie he likes.  Hence my concern that he might have been there.  He wasn't, nor was anyone else I know, but I had to call to find out.

But still, why did I even begin to mentally place a friend of mine in the heart of the unfolding tragedy?

Was is pessimism?  A bleak world view?  Some deep seated fear mechanism?

Not really, but I didn't begin to figure out what was going on until I told my roommate that Johnny was OK and he wasn't at the theatre.  (My roommate had met him last New Year's eve, although that was his only interaction with him.)  He responded that he wouldn't have even assumed that he was there, or worried about it, unless he had known positively that someone he knew was actually going to be there.

So what was going on here?  This isn't the first time this has happened to me; calling someone in a disaster or tragedy to make sure that they were alright.  Why do I make that assumption?

And as I began to examine it, I began to understand, I have a small town mentality.  Whenever anything bad happens, and someone I care about is near that place, I worry that they might be involved.  In a small town, where you literally know everyone in the town, whenever anything bad happens, you know someone involved in it.  The tornado ripping though town destroys the houses of people you know, the woman who dies from cancer babysat you as a child, the car accident on the edge of town will have injured a friend.

In a small town, everything is personal, because all tragedy is immediate.

But then I asked myself, "Why do I have this mindset?"  It's not like Denver is a small town; with 3 million people, it is the 17th largest metropolitan area in the country, and between East Texas and the Pacific Coast, only Phoenix is larger.

Examining this deeper, I realized that my mindset comes from how the West developed, and how it still is structured today.  The Intermountain West is one of the most empty areas of the country.  There are only five major cities in the entire region, Denver, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Las Vegas.  Beyond that, there are only two other places that qualify as metro areas, Tucson and Colorado Springs.  The rest of the land, which is roughly half of the landmass of the continental United States, is made up of small, widely spaced towns.  Even Grand Junction, which is a center of activity has less than 50,000 residents, most places have less than ten thousand.

The West is a land of small, tightly knit communities.  Out here, with all of the hardships of living in a place where you have to have community to survive, people are irreplaceable.  It's not that we value life more than in other places, in fact, perhaps more than most, we recognize how fleeting it is.  Instead, it is the fact that without others, life is impossible.  The idea of the rugged, individualist mountain man is something of a myth.  Of course they existed, but they were the exception, not the rule.

The reality of it is, to survive out here, you need people.  We do have a wide streak of independence, so the proper etiquette in this part of the world is to offer help, not to ask for it.  And because we have to work together this has led to a distinctly different character than is found in other parts of the country.  In the West, a person is respected for their deeds not for their position; we are far more casual and egalitarian in all of our relationships; we are somewhat more nosy in order to be able offer help when needed, since we do not ask for it; and ultimately because of these things, we generally don't put a lot of stock in what the rest of the country thinks of us, because they rarely do.

This mindset means that people are extremely important.  We worry about hurting someone's feelings, because hurt feelings can cause problems in the tight knit community fabric.  We are concerned about the welfare of those around us, because we want them to be concerned about ours.  In short, the traditional Western character lives and dies by the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you should wish they do unto you."  And because of this, the bonds that tie us together become extremely strong.

So when tragedy strikes, the community is diminished, we are diminished, damaged in a way that people who did not grow up in this culture cannot understand.

For comparison, I would like to look at two national tragedies, and how the communities dealt with them.

I was amazed and awed by the strength and resilience of the people of New York City in the months after 9/11.  The ground was literally still smoking when I began working there in January 2002 on the rebuilding process.  Life was returning to the city and people were trying to move past the horror.  In fact, they were doing better on the whole, than anyone else in the country at that point.  They still thought about what had happened, and they still grieved intensely, but they also got on with their lives.

I contrast this with Columbine here in Denver.  At roughly the same point in the aftermath, people in Denver still put their collective grief before normalcy.  There were many people in this city who needed therapy after Columbine, even though they did not know anyone involved, nor did the event directly impact them in any way.

Even though this seems like self flagellation, and the height of being a city of drama queens, it had nothing to do with it.  Columbine hit us so hard because "We are all Columbine."  The bumper sticker, rather than being an inane catchphrase, really summed up the collective experience of the shootings.  The tragedy was immediate to our beings.

We are not martyrs to events that don't have anything to do with us, because in the Western mindset, what happens to the community, happens to all of it's members.  I should note here, one of my closest friends was a Columbine student, he was in the computer lab.  His brother, who was in the cafeteria, saw several people die.  For me, the tragedy is even more immediate than it is for some, although I did not know anyone who died or was injured.

But to return to the point, we grieve even for people we didn't know because we cannot escape the rural, community focused, backdrop that frames our lives.  Even though the reality is that we will never likely know anyone directly impacted  by this morning's shooting, we are all still affected.  The horror of the victims becomes the horror of the community and ultimately it becomes our own horror, because it is something we share intensely.

We were all Columbine, and we will all be Century 16.

Culture Wars

Lifestyles

In the past few decades there has been a conflation of the terms culture and lifestyle.  More specifically, we have frequently been replacing culture with lifestyle.  This shift has both positive and negative consequences; and we are also conflicted about both.

First, I want to define the differences between culture and lifestyle.  Culture is imposed, or perhaps inherited.  Typically, we get our culture from our families, our community, or our heritage.  Sometimes, in the case of "going native," (technically called acculturation) we adopt another culture as our own, but for the most part, we do not choose our culture, it is something we are given.  This process of giving is called enculturation, and it typically enframes our worldview.  No matter how hard you try, you cannot completely escape the snowglobe.

Lifestyle is how we conduct our lives.  It may be a product of our culture, but most of the time, it is something we choose for ourselves.  Most people, at some point in their lives, decide to be liberal or conservative, devout or secular, engages or passive.  The list goes on and on.  Our worldview typically evolves over our lives, but it is always the product of our experiences and decisions. 

Ad agencies claim that they are not selling a product, they are selling a lifestyle, and this is to a large extent true.  Purchasing a Lexus is not typically done in a vacuum, it is part of a larger lifestyle, that often includes a McMansion, a media room, granite counters in the kitchen, and frequently, voting a straight Republican ticket.  I'm not knocking this, I'm just pointing out typical associations.  Purchasing a Prius, often goes hand in hand with a Democratic voting record, environmentalism, and a backyard compost heap.

We assemble our lifestyle from a kit of parts, and more and more, that kit is mad up of the things we buy.  The ad agencies have done an excellent job of making sure your lifestyle is properly branded.  Being a Mac User tells someone vast amounts of information about who you are.  So does the brand of clothing you wear, where you shop, what you drive.  We build our identity from our possessions.

We are a profoundly material culture, dependant on positional goods.  These are the items that indicate your status in society. At the upper end of this spectrum are Veblen Goods, which are things you want more, just because they are more expensive.  Prada shoes and Viking Stoves are classic examples of Veblen Goods.

Further, in less materialistic societies, positional goods are not branded, they just are.  For example in India, social rank can be determined by whether you have indoor plumbing, electricity, and many other things that we in America take for granted, and consequently no longer consider status symbols.

As a result of this, less materialistic societies and communities tend not to have lifestyles, they retain culture as their main guide to life.  This is not to be construed as the same as countries.  In most countries, there are still segments of the population that still function from a Cultural Worldview, for example, the Amish, the Navajos, the Gypsies.   These people live in every country, just as, in most countries, there is at least a small segment of the population that operates from the Lifestyle Worldview.

Now to the conflicts that are arising from all of this.

We want culture to continue, but only if it meets certain specifications.  In America, we want W.A.S.P. culture to persist, and at least on Saint Patrick's day, we all want to assume a (bastardized) Irish culture.  On the other hand, we have no desire to see Mexican immigrants to live their culture, and we actively are attempting to stamp out Muslim cultures.  (Although on this score, the Europeans are going much further than we are, by banning the veil and other outward cultural tokens.)

But at the same time, we condemn lifestyles, again, especially if we disagree with them.  A perfect example of this is the "Gay Lifestyle."  (There are some who call it the "Gay Culture," but given that it is a part of the larger American Culture, at best it could be considered a sub-culture.  Give it a few decades, and there may be a distinct Gay Culture.)

Both sides of the political spectrum condemn the lifestyles of the opposite end.  Most atheists look down on a lifestyle that includes church two times a week, homeschooling, and large numbers of children.  The right is equally condemnatory of people whose lifestyle includes no church, open attitudes towards sex, or having children outside of marriage.

But at the end of the day, most Americans have abandoned culture for lifestyle.  Very few of us maintain all aspects of our cultural heritage.  This is probably an outgrowth of the melting pot that is the United States.  It is very hard for people to maintain their culture, unless they are insulated from others.  It starts slowly, losing fluency in the native tongue, eating foods outside of the ethnicity, abandoning the native dress.  It progresses into moving out of the ethnic neighborhood, going to a new church that is not the faith of your forbearers, and ultimately, building a patchwork of customs and beliefs that bear little, if any, resemblance to your original culture.

This is a slow process, and occurs over generations, typically at least three.  But by the end of the process, culture is subsumed by lifestyle, and you no longer identify by a cultural definition.  You identify by lifestyle markers, like profession, social status, colleges attended, and other things that are part of the common American experience.

On the whole, this is probably a good thing, because if we were still tied to our cultural heritage, our polycultural nation probably couldn't function.  Imagine, for example, if people during World War Two, rather than identifying themselves as American, still thought of themselves as French or German.  There would have likely been open war between neighborhoods.  (Since, in that scenario, people would have continued to live in ethnic enclaves.)

But still, many, especially on the right, decry this move.  Part of this, I'm sure, is because young people often adopt lifestyles that go against the older peoples value structures.  And without the cultural container, they feel freer to abandon the beliefs of their parents.  They don't understand, and therefore are unwilling to accept, things like arranged marriages, attitudes towards homosexuality, or strict orthodox faith.

These lifestyle choices then further undermine culture, and the process becomes a vicious cycle that pulls people even further away from their cultural roots.  And that, in turn inspires the retaliation to try to force people back into their cultural container.

An example of this is the feminist movement.  For most of Western history, we have been profoundly Patriarchal, up to the point of even asking if women were even human.  For the most part, throughout most of American history, women were property.  (You can see this from the fact that, technically, Statutory Rape is a property crime, not a sexual offense.)  This view of women was embedded deeply into most European cultures, and later into American meta-culture. (The overarching national identity, made up of all the subsidiary cultures.)

Then came suffrage, women's lib, double income households, and women dominating the professions in colleges, which will lead to women dominating the professional workforce.  This obliterated the cultural enframement of the role of women, as women chose lifestyles that put them in direct competition with the roles of men.  At this point, gender based roles have more or less ceased to exist, with women being primary bread winners and men being home-makers.  There are still a few gender barriers, for example, women in direct combat, but for the most part, both sexes can do anything they want with their lives.  The cultural containers that proscribed roles evaporated. 

This has upended traditional culture, and the men, at least the conservative ones, didn't like it.

So suddenly, this year, you have a de facto war against women, to try to stuff them back into their culturally defined roles.  You can't do that with a direct assault; you will never get any legislature to pass laws banning women in the workplace, or revoking the rights to vote and go to college.  Pandora's box cannot be closed.

So what do the culture warriors do to circumscribe the roles of women; attempt to ban contraception.  Without reliable and safe birth control, women will have no control over their reproduction, except with abstention.  It will force women to chose between having a career, or having a man in their lives.  (And as I said before, an unintended consequence of this will likely be a dramatic rise in lesbianism, but that's another story.)

With this action, they re-confine women to a classic cultural role of mother, without directly confronting the issue.  Women's careers become collateral damage, at least on the surface.  Suddenly, lifestyle is subsumed by culture.

This is not the only example of this.  You see it in the drive to keep people from attending college, which is a lifestyle factory.  You see it in the push to make this a Christian nation.  You see it in regressive taxation, that profoundly limits economic opportunities for the poor, while expanding them for the rich.  In fact, you see it in most of the far right doctrines.

They are attempting to return us to a culturally based society.  Through the straight-jacket of rigid, conservative culture, they are attempting to circumscribe lifestyle choices.

But the irony of it all is, being a Culture Warrior, is another Lifestyle Choice.