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For the most part, the protesters are from the upwardly mobile classes most strikingly illustrated by the young Ivy League-educated lawyers who threw Molotov cocktails in the New York protests at the end of May.

This global cohort and the global movement they have attached themselves to under that ultimate corporate asset, a global brand, has now turned its rage on statues. Ironically, the statues that they are defacing and tearing down commemorate the Anywheres of their times: these are the men who explored the world, sought to evangelise or to enslave indigenous populations, did global business, and brought the world closer together by connecting continents with one another.

Now the culture wars are back as a battle over whether to preserve the pomp of history or to erase it.

These are the men whose ideas of social justice, for better and for worse, formed the ideas of the populations they reported their adventures to on returning home. Davos Man before there was Davos. And many of them were wrong, cruel, bigoted, misguided or simply imperfect, but they thought they were doing the world a favour, much as do theirdescendants, who are now ripping down their likenesses in the name of modern social justice.

So now the culture wars are back as a battle over whether to preserve the pomp of history or to erase it. In the intervening years, the statues have become the property of the Somewheres, part of the fabric of the culture they identify with and which they seek to retain in the face of the homogenising force of internationalisation.

They are right to resist historical revisionism, which wilfully twists history into unrecognisable narratives suitable to the progressive aesthetic. But we must re-examine history to learn from it. Whatever we are getting wrong now, the clues to understanding it lie in the mistakes we have made before.

Whatever we have built of value, by way of institution or morality, is also distilled by revisiting the past armed with the improved perception of hindsight. Those who would preserve culture kill it when they put a stake in the ground and say: history can go this far but no further. History ends here.

In the same way, the Anywheres are trying to draw a line under the past once the past is cleansed or erased, the old nuances can be forgotten. The shadow of a new wrong in todays revolutions is denied. History can start here.

Both these attitudes are fundamentally nihilistic. For the Somewheres, Gurri points out, utopia is in the past, and for the Anywheres utopia is in the future the present sucks, no matter what.

Which is why fighting the culture wars is so reassuring in unstable times. The present sucks, observably. The culture wars allow us to slip into identities that make sense of the world, in which it is enough to oppose and shift the onus of proposing onto delegates: corporations and our elected officials. Never mind that we have collectively lost faith in their integrity and in the efficacy of the institutions they represent.

It is easier to grumble about corporate cowards and demand politicians abide by the moral codes we are too lazy to uphold; to outsource speech to the media and action to the activists.

And this is why the culture wars are both dangerous and futile: they are the howls of frustration of deeply nihilistic counterparties. Nothing positive emerges from them.

Culture is important, but culture is what we build, the lives we lead, our contribution to society, and the improvement of humanity when it understands itself. Culture isnt a war, its an edifice we each contribute to. The personal, in our fractured digital world, is deeply political.

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Nihilists fighting the past and the future - The Australian Financial Review