The Crisis of Culture by Olivier Roy — a remarkable achievement
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In Ferenc Karinthy’s 1970 dystopian novel Metropole, a Hungarian linguist arrives at Budapest airport, whereupon everything goes awry. He goes through the wrong gate, gets on the wrong plane, and lands in an unknown city where, despite his professional skills, he cannot crack the code of the local language. He sees no way back.
Reading The Crisis of Culture, Olivier Roy’s illuminating and highly original interpretation of today’s world, I was reminded of the despairing experience of the Hungarian linguist. If home is a place that you understand and where you feel understood, we are today living in a homeless world. The cosmopolitan’s utopia in which one feels at home everywhere has been supplanted by a fear that nobody is actually at home or native to their own land.
Roy’s core argument is that what we are now witnessing is not the replacement of one dominant culture with another — as, say, during the expansion of Christianity or Islam, or during the Renaissance or Enlightenment — but a progressive erosion of culture both as an anthropological reality and as a national canon.
In Roy’s telling, this new reality is the result of a complex cocktail of events and factors. These include the “individualist and hedonist” 1968 revolution; neoliberal financial globalisation; the internet; and the melting away of physical borders after the cold war that has spurred the movement of peoples and “deterritorialisation”.
For him, national culture is like native language: you speak it before you learn the grammar. It is those “self-evident” truths which we share without knowing it. This shared culture is vanishing while artistic “high culture” is “either a waste of time or one hobby among many”. Not so long ago, to be French meant that you have read Hugo. Not any more. “At stake are the very codes and ties that comprise social ties, and which are encapsulated in discussions about identity,” writes Roy, a French-born sociologist who now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence.
The current conflict over values — the “culture wars” — is not really a battle between cultures, he argues, “but an attempt to conceptualise values above and beyond culture”. The result has been an “aggressive normativity”: everybody should explicitly know what is the proper behaviour in any given situation. Deviation is not tolerated.
While globalisation is often interpreted as “westernisation”, Roy sees it as “de-westernisation of the world”. The west has rented its culture for global use, and it cannot live in it any more. The spread of English, for example, has resulted in the rise of “Globish”, a language that is at times incomprehensible to people in Britain.
Roy is a man of the left. Yet unlike leftist critics of the “cancel culture” like Susan Neiman, author of Left Is Not Woke, or Yascha Mounk, who wrote The Identity Trap, he does not criticise identity politics for betraying universalism, but for trading complexity for fluidity, for replacing existing and very complex cultural identities with “box identities” and a world where freedom is the right to change the boxes.
An intellectual nonconformist, Roy has achieved something remarkable: he has written a book on identity politics that neither condemns nor embraces it, but is instead a nuanced cultural dissection of its origins and its contradictions. His tone, conveyed into English by translators Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, is melancholic, but never angry. He offers explanations, not polemics.
The resulting book is in a sense a 21st-century remake of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Roy agrees that history had “ended”, but not with the triumph of democratic capitalism. History’s “end” means that the past is no longer interpreted in its historical context. We are no longer interested in making sense of Thomas Jefferson or Robespierre in the context of their own times. We do not believe that the past is historically a different time. The dead have been liberated from their historical moment. You can no longer be progressive in the context of your time; you are now either progressive or reactionary for all times. Everyone is conceived as a contemporary, and is treated by the standards of today. Mozart’s Don Giovanni is as appalling in his sexual adventures as Harvey Weinstein. “The register of emotions is thus reduced to a collection of tokens,” writes Roy. The young act like the last generation, judges on the secularised version of The Judgment Day.
The Crisis of Culture is proof that truly singular books do not scream their originality; they hide it because originality no longer shocks. It brings order to a world that is not at ease with itself. Culture was once our traditional weapon against human mortality and we have every reason to fear that, as Roy asserts, “deculturation thus ends with dehumanisation”.
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms by Olivier Roy, translated Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous, Hurst £20, 232 pages
Ivan Krastev is an FT contributing editor, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, and fellow at IWM Vienna
The article has been amended to correct the title of Susan Neiman’s book
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