The Crisis of Culture

I have recently read two reviews of French intellectual Olivier Roy’s  book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms: Tyler Cowen, Ian Leslie. Roy argues that culture in the traditional sense of understandings shared at a barely conscious level is dying out, replaced by defined “norms” that we constantly fight over. Cowen: “There has been an ongoing erasure of shared implicit understandings.” Leslie:

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another - say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.

Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.

I agree that something like this is happening. Local accents are declining, as are regional variations in dress and idiom.

But I think we commonly exaggerate the degree to which cultural understandings were widely shared; "I didn't get the memo" and similar phrases go back to the nineteenth century. The world has, after all, been changing rapidly for about 300 years now, we have seen multiple major shifts in our expectations of public behavior. The rowdy eighteenth century gave way to the swooning Romantics and then the prim Victorians; the Twenties roared; the Fifties bopped, the hippies turned on and tuned out; etc. We may feel a bit more adrift than some of our ancestors, but it's a difference of degree.

I think it is true that many modern people feel adrift and unsure how to act, but to the extent that our ancestors were more secure that was because they interacted only with a limited set of people and put a lot of time and energy into fitting in.

We should also remember the extent to which "culture" was used to exclude people from charmed circles where only people with the right understandings were welcome, and the extent to which the powerful used it to manipulate others. For example women's equality in the workplace has come with a major assault on Mad Men-style office sexuality. Much of American southern culture was straight racism. Elite culture all over the world required the mastery of elaborate lore – dueling etiquette, foreign or dead languages, proficiency in rowing or tennis. A great deal of our most wonderful art was created to put distance between the rich and everyone else, since only they had the time to learn its intricacies.

So I would expect a more democratic and open society to be, in some ways, less diverse and more boring. I understand that this has costs, but I think we can find ways to keep various kinds of culture alive. For one thing, in a world as rich and populous as ours, you only need 1/100 of 1% of the population to sustain a pretty good movement, which can be as arcane as you like. (Furries) 

To the extent that we have replaced implicit understandings with stated norms, we have made the world much more open to everyone not raised in the right sort of family.