Earlier this year, The Lancet, a 200-year-old medical journal, carried an editorial entitled, “We must engage in a war of position”. This unashamedly military term derives from the young leader of Italian Communism Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).
The editorial notes that Gramsci’s “great insight…was to recognise the way in which the dominant group uses culture to exert its controlling influence. If the ruling power can persuade people to share its social, cultural and moral values, the motivation for radical political change will wither”. Those who wish to “advance a more hopeful, compassionate, and liberal vision of the future…must recognise that the culture wars are not peripheral matters.”
