The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
by Olivier Roy | Hurst Publishers, 2024, 217 pages

Olivier Roy’s new book, The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, was published in March.

In it, the French political scientist continues to examine cultural changes in Europe and beyond, just as he did in his provocative and profound 2020 book, Is Europe Christian?

Here, the question is not whether Europe’s culture is Christian, but whether or not the West has a culture at all in a world where social norms have been rapidly cast aside, and a world where identity politics centred around issues like race and gender have risen to the fore.

With so much of modern politics relating to questions of value and identity, this is a timely and engaging book addressing often overlooked questions.

Laying out his case, Roy describes the distinct aspects of culture as a concept: what it is and how it functions.

In an anthropological sense, Roy writes, culture “creates habitus, implicit rules of the games, a sort of self-evidence, a ‘normal’ state.”

When understood in terms of a canon, culture “is a set of products and practices (oral narratives, writings, works — which are then described as artistic — music, even certain forms of ritualised practices) that are selected and taught, in other words, handed down according to rules and procedures, with axiological intent, providing a moral ideal for all…”

The existence of a shared culture is important for creating a sense of stability and normality within any society, yet Roy suggests that a process of deculturation is underway across the world, and he believes that this is impacting dominant cultures as well as more derivative ones.

Pointing to his previous work, Roy emphasises the significance of the “radical departure from Christian culture” which has occurred, most obviously in the hedonistic 1960s when “desire replaced reason as the basis of autonomy and freedom.”

Atomisation

Today’s morally and socially individualistic environment is “narcissistic”, and technological changes have enabled an acceleration of this process.

“Social life is no longer tied to the place where one lives or even the physical reality surrounding the user; the internet knows nothing of strong social bonds, for it offers a disembodied bond that never approaches individuals holistically but considers only that part of them that they choose to engage… People choose only what they want to be, with no social determinism,” he writes.

He goes on to add that the crisis of culture is linked closely to the crisis of ‘desocialisation’, in which social bonds within societies have been weakening, as “individuals are no longer involved in a web of real social relations that structure their various activities: work, leisure, sexuality, meals and so on.”

The rise of what the author (rather lazily) labels as ‘neoliberalism’ has also had an impact in this respect. Roy makes the astute observation that economic changes, such as the decline in industrial employment, have had a particularly significant impact on lower-income segments of society by depriving them of a “social and territorial base” in which working-class cultures could flourish.

Aside from secularisation, mass immigration and the obvious shift in moral values that has occurred, the individualistic focus on identity politics is playing a massive role in this overarching crisis.

Instead of seeking to build a shared community, much of today’s discourse relates to very niche interests where many are “engaged in a race to find small differences”, and where the loudest practitioners of identitarian politics are increasingly championing “censorship and limits on the freedom of expression to better guarantee one’s own freedom to be.”