Can we survive deculturation?– Olivier Roy’s *The Crisis of Culture*

 [[{“value”:”I have been reading Olivier Roy’s new book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms.  It is the best book on culture in years, and if you enjoy Martin Gurri and Bruno Macaes you should try this one too.  This book actually got me excited at the theoretical level. Early on
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I have been reading Olivier Roy’s new book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms.  It is the best book on culture in years, and if you enjoy Martin Gurri and Bruno Macaes you should try this one too.  This book actually got me excited at the theoretical level.

Early on in the book you will read the key question:

Are we living in a new culture or, conversely, is this expansion of normativity the sign of a profound crisis in the notion of culture itself?

Perhaps it is the latter.  To some extent the internet drives the process, by chopping things up into bits and enabling and indeed sometimes requiring greater literality.  But it is also a cultural trend that predated the primacy of internet life.  There has been an ongoing erasure of shared implicit understandings, and that is a key variable driving many global trends.

Roy applies those insights to current problems with immigration and assimilation (which is now tougher), how to understand algorithmic social media, self-sufficiency in Japanese culture (a precursor of broader trends), the prevalence of memes (deculturation personified), by  the elevation of folklore by UNESCO and others, autistics doing better in the contemporary world, arguments over reparations (more of a whining than an actual politicized struggle), the EU (extreme deculturation), and our current obsession with food (and also food writing) as a form of compensating for a decultured world.

Here is one interesting passage of many:

Therefore, it is not that English is becoming dominant, along with its cultural underpinning, but that the use of English is becoming decultured.  This is why the linguistic phenomenon definitely does not reflect an Americanisation of world culture.  The aim is to avoid any misunderstanding and any need to refer to implicit understandings that might not necessarily be shared.  Jokes are banned and emotions have to be expressed explicitly using an emoji with a pre-defined meaning.  Emotion is allowed, of course, but it must be immediately understood by addressees, wherever they may come from, so it is “sourced” from a list that, while remaining open, is pre-prepared.

The conclusion of the book serves this up for a start: “The trilogy of declaration, coding and normativity seems now to structure all debates and strategies on every side…”

French thinkers remain underrated in the Anglosphere.  It is also notable how little coverage Olivier Roy receives in the “on-line world,” which is all the more reason to read this one and absorb its alpha.

You may recall that Roy wrote the earlier The Failure of Political Islam, which I also found very interesting.  So he is one of today’s top intellectuals, and still going strong at 74 years of age.  I still am not sure how many of his propositions I agree with, but I feel he is making real progress on the issues under question.

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