New Norms and the Death of Culture

There are no writers left in America: no impressive novelist, no essayist who commands prestige and popularity. This is true of Britain, too. Now as never before, the great modern empires of liberalism and democracy seem to have nothing to say for themselves. Twenty-first-century thought might as well not exist. Essayist Olivier Roy surveys this phenomenon in his latest publication, The Crisis Of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms. He claims Progress has desiccated what we used to call culture. Our success has overwhelmed all the limits and forms that made ways of life and ways of thinking possible.

Roy reminds us that the interesting thinking is in France, the only other modern country with a democratic tradition. Moreover, it’s on the right, not the left. The classically educated read Pierre Manent, the educated read Chantal Delsol, and everyone reads Michel Houellebecq. There is in addition a plethora of insightful essayists on everything sociological or cultural who write confidently, as though immune to civilizational decline, including Roy. Even this group, featuring figures like Renaud Camus and Christophe Guilluy, is increasingly considered right wing. This is false, but what is true is that sociological concern with popular rather than elite problems threatens to restore nationalism to political discourse. Yet all these writers show their faces in public, on national TV, and the state honors them. In comparison, elite left-liberal celebrities seem to lack insight and influence, evidence of Roy’s claim that we live lives beyond or after culture.

A man of the left, Roy is nevertheless in search of a nonideological standpoint and seems especially suited for our times, which have reduced ideology to a kind of snobbery. In his latest essay, he insists on two aspects of our crisis of liberty: the collapse of culture and the rise of endless lawfare. As to our increasingly moralistic litigiousness:

How is it that Western societies that claim to be liberal—the remarkable extension of the domain of political, sexual, economic and artistic freedom over a half-century—have brought about an equally remarkable extension of the realm of norms? Thus, we have witnessed the judicialisation of everyday life as well as the normative scrutiny of different domains and an increased appeal to pedagogical authority to impose new norms, whether pertaining to secularism, sexuality or religious practices.

It’s worth noticing, too, how little we talk about it. Roy argues that this new dispute about every aspect of human behavior follows the collapse, in the ’60s, of our previous moral agreements. But this in turn follows a much more powerful modern transformation of the implicit into the explicit, of experience into argument, which amounts to a rationalization of being human that issued in the various ideologies whose failure we cannot help noticing.

The problem, as Roy puts it, with reducing language to codes, shared things turning into individual access, is not that the old culture is replaced by new cultures. Instead, Roy argues, it’s that “the transformation of ‘cultures’ into explicitly coded systems destroys the notion of culture itself.”

Sociologically, this means that our technological and economic powers, together with our bodily desires, have evacuated politics and everything else that lies between the private and the universal, everything we used to call America, for example, which made it possible among other things to fight over what it means to be American and how he should go about being American. For Roy, the collapse is comprehensive:

Roughly, four levels of radical transformation have changed the world since the 1960s: 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.

Somehow it is easier to prove the cultural collapse thesis than to say what culture is, perhaps because that would involve us in endless controversies. Roy thinks about culture in two senses: one is at least apparently scientific, taken from anthropology, meaning more or less way of life and leaving aside the “value judgments,” without which we cannot live. This is where the attack on the implicit through ideological articulation and lawfare hurts us most—with nothing left to take for granted, it’s harder than ever to live together. Roy says, accordingly, that we’re merely strangers. But if so, how can we experience that condition—strangers as opposed to what?

Roy doesn’t attempt to prove that our rationalism has failed; it’s too obvious. He takes it for granted that being human requires a shared way of life and that individualism taken too far is our postmodern curse. Perhaps the problem becomes more obvious when we consider the second sense in which he uses culture—a canon. Whatever the process of canonization, it involves hierarchies, it demands transmission, that is memory and affection, and it elevates mere individuals to a pantheon that comprehends the best rather than the typical of our way of life, those experiences of the higher possibilities of man that make us more than mere strangers, more than philistines.

Ultimately, Roy claims we have lost the basis for justice and wisdom, the two virtues concealed in talk of culture, the one bringing us all together in comity, the other making us all aware of the best among us, who far surpass what we can ever accomplish, yet remind us that such achievements are somehow borne of our society. These have been replaced by an excellence that consists in popularizing bits and pieces of cultures from around the world, an endless fusion of fragments of culture that inevitably degrade as they become globalized. The claim to know everything and have access to the rarest human experiences is somehow coeval with the debasement of taste; uniformity and endless complexity go together.

Roy’s criticism of this society is an attempt at liberation from the uniformity of a new taste in food, tourism, and the sacred. Postmodern man is even shallower than modern man was because he can afford to pursue his mania for hierarchies of pleasure or authenticity and he has accordingly fewer memories of a way of life holding him back from making experiments. The postmodern reconstruction of taste as democratic but expensive is a new philistinism.

But Roy’s liberation from the left is limited and leads to humorous consequences. One of the few American thinkers he quotes repeatedly is Allan Bloom, whom he mischaracterizes as a conservative devotee of authoritarian pedagogy enamored of the German research university, somehow unaware of its connection to the Nazis. Obviously, it’s always the Nazis. The intellectual impotence of the left is an effect of this tired moralism. But leave that aside, what’s more important is how telling the misunderstanding is. Bloom was a better culture critic than Roy and understood the remarkable right-wing tilt of high culture, including modernism. The urgent question for us is: What understanding of culture makes it possible to overcome these mental handicaps and at least see clearly the thinkers and societies of our time? Roy offers many useful forays in the direction of liberation, but they are all merely tentative, early steps, as often stumbling as advancing, as confused as the civilization he describes.

Roy’s criticisms of neoliberalism as promoting deculturation and “normativity” spread through authoritarian pedagogy are unwise. He wishes for both the Progress the left offers and the Culture that the right offers, without showing how they might go together. His conclusion of this structural criticism that is ultimately unstructured is an exhortation that on his own terms is bound to fail to stand up to power:

We must leave our protected spaces behind and rediscover heterogeneity, difference, and debate. There is a clear demand for sociability. Things change when individuals seek to regain social connection in their real lives, in whatever remains of the social fabric.

One concurs in the sentiments while realizing this exhortation is futile. A reasonable man would focus on the core problem of the book’s last word—a “true crisis of humanism”—and support the opposition, whereas Roy is careful to always condemn both sides while reminding the reader that he is a Progressive, too. This is evidence that the left has collapsed, but not yet that the alternative is rising.

By Titus Techera , executive director of the American Cinema Foundation