As common culture dissolves, life thins to rules, emptied of meaning. The Left is yet to recognise this crisis as such
Olivier Roy, The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms. Trans. Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, London: Hurst, 2024. (First published as L’Aplatissement du monde: La crise de la culture et l’empire des normes. Paris: Seuil, 2022)
‘How do we rediscover being part of a community?’, Olivier Roy asks in this short book, which became a sensation on its original publication in 2022. It is a question sages from Matthew Arnold to T.S. Eliot, Allan Bloom, and Alasdair MacIntyre, to name only a few, have posed. For many, the problem will be uninteresting. Why not shelve it altogether, as Richard Rorty urged: accept that any shared culture will be confined to one’s particular club; society at large will be merely a place for bargain-making, a bazaar of mutual incomprehension. How true collective projects, either those imposed by an emergency, such as the planetary environmental crisis, or ones making for universal flourishing, are to occur under such conditions of atomisation is, for this account, a non-issue. As such, the book might be written off as just one more iteration of an established, even tired, genre, the anti-modern manifesto.
Instead it is a humane, civilised elegy for precious things the author feels are being lost. What is going is that beautiful sense of implicitness characterising a community based on shared values, priorities, rankings. ‘Nothing is culturally self-evident anymore, we can no longer take anything for granted.’ In the absence of a ‘common culture’, we are down to thin inorganic rules. But if nothing is obvious, ‘what about right and wrong, good and evil?’. When togetherness as such disappears, ethical-political consensus becomes impossible. The miserable result is that all conversations now seem to take place in a language that no longer has any native speakers. The notion of an horizon (We embody this, not that), one permitting and protecting a specific lifeway, has evaporated; everything must be stated distinctly and baldly, in a stupidly denotative language, as if from a manual (Roy has a special dislike for the emoticon); nothing—in tastes, feelings, morals—can be merely assumed. It is as if we live in the world of Swift’s mad linguistic literalists at the Academy of Lagado (in Gulliver’s Travels), for whom, if you wanted to communicate the notion ‘chair’, for example, you should have one about you, to which you might point.
The perspective Roy presents is thus not to be dismissed. A waning sensus communis in contemporary Western societies is not a right-wing bogeyman. (Certainly the book is informed by anxieties about the changes that have taken place in recent times in the composition of European countries—the human side of ‘factor mobility’, which Perry Anderson has recently identified as a crucial challenge for socialist parties and which, indeed, the editors of this journal have lately called attention to as a major electoral problem for the Left.) The weakening of the sense of at-homeness that Roy points to surely drives much of our increasingly unstable politics. He locates this ‘crisis of the very notion of culture’—of communal life—in four developments since the Sixties: ‘1) the transformation of values with the individualist and hedonist revolution of the 1960s; 2) the internet revolution; 3) neoliberal financial globalisation; 4) the globalisation of space and the movement of human beings, in other words deterritorialisation’. These developments have brought about a general forgetting of everything embedded, enclosing, orienting: a genuine ‘crisis of humanism’. ‘All cultures are undergoing … deculturation’; everything once self-explanatory gives way to explicit ‘coding’. Global deculturation undermines high (canonical) culture as well as the special givenness of any lifeworld, dubbed here ‘anthropological’. ‘What we are…witnessing is the “deculturation of cultures”: a dissolution of the content of the cultural canon, an obliteration of anthropological cultures.’
There is, says Roy, no one prime cause of this collapse into amnesiac barbarism—invoking one would smack of the sin of reductionism, even conspiracism. Hence, the four-fold aetiology above. But this aversion to supposedly vulgar explanations is taken to the point of intellectual coyness. Suppose that one phenomenon drives all four transformations. In that case, it would surely be the world-eating totality of capitalism, accelerated by changes since the Second World War, certainly, but the essential logic of which is fundamentally antithetical to the stability, order, good sense, and continuity Roy defends. (This economic system is also, of course, hostile to the limits of Nature herself.) This is not to let a certain kind of soi-disant ‘leftism’ (the ‘identity politics’ in the subtitle of the book’s English edition) off the hook. Precisely because a ‘shared political culture no longer exists’, an ‘identity-based atomisation of struggles’ emerges. There is no end to coarse philistine moralising that is forever wrongfooting socialist humanism and universalism, and so poses absolutely zero threat to the suicidal anarchy of the contemporary economic set-up, with its forever-wars, ecological vandalism, and dog-eat-dog immorality. The sixties, asserts Roy, introduced an unprecedented ‘focus[…] on the desiring individual’, for whom ‘pleasure [became] legitimate in itself’; the outlook of this ‘desiring individual [became] dominant’. There is certainly an argument to be made that the consecration of ‘desire’ in 1960s thought and its aftermath was not only fundamentally anti-Communist but inimical to the very idea of a literary and artistic canon: the egoism of desiring individuals is unlikely to foster the solicitude for tradition indispensable to the survival of high culture. All that said, one must guard against looking to socialism as some kind of panacea. As has been argued in the pages of Arena, a technologically advanced global socialist order would inaugurate no settled End of History, and would undoubtedly confront many of the challenges of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘deculturation’ Roy diagnoses (though one would hope with a greater chance of rational co-operation in addressing them). Nevertheless, it surely remains true that capitalism, that system of organised chaos, is profoundly hostile to Roy’s ‘culture’.