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A COUPLE of weeks ago, I had an experience that was new to me, and which proved both infuriating and enlightening: I was harangued on Twitter for not being green enough. Last month, I wrote about driving my sick cat to and from the vet, and how the gridlocked traffic looked like a depressing taste of our post-pandemic future. “Shocked by yr column blaming traffic,” my chastiser tweeted at me. “You ARE the traffic; have you tried cycling?”

Deeply unfair. But it gave me a glimpse of what many people must feel when their behaviour falls short of the standards set by self-appointed eco police. I was merely doing what I thought was the right thing. But it involved a car, and I was judged for it. (For the record, I am not about to cycle up a main road with an elderly, sick and semi-incontinent cat.)

A few days earlier, I had watched the launch of some surprising . For readers who don’t live in the UK or haven’t noticed (of which more later), the national conversation is currently dominated by arguments over statues, taking the knee, free speech and more.

Judging from the media narrative, the country has already fractured into two warring and mutually irreconcilable factions, characterised as progressives vs traditionalists, remain vs leave, young vs old, woke vs anti-woke and, of course, green vs anti-green. This polarisation is the very definition of a culture war, as set out in the 1991 book Culture Wars by sociologist James Davison Hunter: “a sense of conflict between two irreconcilable views of what is fundamentally right or wrong about the world we live in.”

Another defining feature of a culture war is that it expands to swallow up ever more issues, converting political opinions into non-negotiable identities. The starting point is usually whether granting rights to marginalised groups has, or hasn’t, gone too far. But the rest – including environmentalism – snowballs. Or snowflakes. The long-running culture war in the US, for example, features entrenched partisan positions on climate action.

At that point, the two sides harden into mutual hatred and rational debate becomes impossible. There are signs that the UK is going this way. In 2015, national newspapers published just 21 articles about the UK’s culture wars; .

“The worst thing we can do is wag fingers. It will push people who could be our allies into the opposite camp”

But if you venture beyond the Fleet Street bubble – as a team at and the pollster Ipsos MORI recently did – the situation is quite different. There are, in fact, four tribes. Two are the classic culture war factions, each constituting a quarter of the UK population. The other two, the disengaged and the moderates, haven’t taken sides yet. This latter group makes up about a third of the population. A similar-sized group say they have never heard the term “woke”, and those who have are split on whether it is an insult or a compliment.

This, I think, is encouraging. I fell into the trap of seeing culture wars everywhere. That filled me with dread about the prospects for progressive change in our relationship with nature. It turns out I am wrong about this, and that it isn’t too late to stop the slide. Commenting on the research, Sunder Katwala at the think tank says: “there are reasons for reassurance… we are not in a civil war.”

What we are in is a state of mutual incomprehension. As Katwala explains it, people on the liberal left think the culture battles are a cynical strategy cooked up by the right to block environmental and social justice. But people on the right feel exactly the same way, concerned that the left started it by attacking traditional institutions and common sense, and it is their wearisome duty to defend them.

I’m not sure I entirely buy this; some of the recent rows in the UK – over patriotic songs and the removal of portraits of the queen from student common rooms – appear to have been confected or at least exaggerated by the government to rile up its base and distract from wider failings. But if Katwala’s analysis saves us from sliding into the abyss, I will accept that we need to stop blaming each other and seek common ground.

Which brings me back to my Twitter spat. The research also tells us that the worst thing we can do is preach and wag fingers. It will backfire, and push people who could be our allies into the opposite camp. that the biggest obstacle to the US Democratic party holding on to its majorities in Congress – and hence to the green new deal – is woke activists pushing too hard and alienating mainstream Americans.

Right now, the best thing we can do is wake up to the fact that the culture war is being fought by two noisy fringes, and that the middle ground is still up for grabs. Nobody has to abandon their principles, but being woker or anti-woker-than-thou is asking for trouble.