My mother, who is Chinese, grew up in Malaysia and came to America for college in the 1970s. She and my American father divorced when I was young, and this allowed her to make her suburban household as Malaysian as possible. She and my grandmother, who often visited us, spoke a dialect of Hokkien, their regional language, which was not spoken by anyone else we knew. On the weekends we would go to Asian grocery stores in search of niche ingredients for Malaysian food that we would spend days preparing. My grandmother practiced Tai Chi in the mornings, and for my birthday she gave me a set of Baoding balls—small metal spheres with dragons on them—so I could learn to spin them in my palm, exercising my hand muscles. She stuffed sticky rice into triangular packets made of lotus leaves and hung them in our kitchen until they were ready to cook.
It never occurred to me during my early childhood that any of this could mean anything to anyone. That’s just how we lived. My non-Asian friends were into non-Asian things—guitar playing, pro wrestling, RV trips—that meant nothing to me; the mutual opacity of our cultures seemed normal. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to see how cultural facts could have communicative significance. In middle school, my friends began to view my Asianness through the lenses of “The Karate Kid” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”; in high school they noticed looming associations with math and computers. The meaning of being American also dawned on me: somehow, the connection between TGI Fridays, Bruce Springsteen, and my weekend football games had an aura of wholesome, heroic normality—an ordinariness to be admired.
Strangely, the culture around me seems to have become more communicative as I get older. One day in 2019, I walked into a trendy Malaysian restaurant—Kopitiam, in lower Manhattan—and found the food of my childhood presented as cool, even chic. Enjoying it clearly meant something beyond pleasure; beautifully photographed on Instagram, it signals both the rising wealth of Southeast Asia and the possibilities of one’s own individuality. (“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” novelist John Lanchester wrote in a 2014 essay. “Now, for many of us, it’s about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to we live.”) Americanness was also changing its meaning: for some people, in some places, waving a flag or eating a corn dog could be a form of resistance. Increasingly, everything became Googled and shared, and social media reduced cultural differences to a matter of style; as writer William Gibson notes, the virtual world is colonizing the real. Every cultural act seemed to become a message to be read, a statement to be placed in quotation marks.
We all get a little cranky in middle age; maybe disenchantment with culture is just a natural part of being an “average person,” as my six-year-old puts it. But in The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms, Olivier Roy, a French political scientist, argues that culture as a whole is indeed deteriorating; in fact, the whole world is undergoing a process of “deculturation”. Roy believes that a set of abstract and apparently unstoppable forces—globalization, neoliberalism, postmodernism, individualism, secularism, the Internet, etc. – subvert culture by making it “transparent”, turning our cultural practices into a “collection of symbols” to be traded and displayed. Culture was something we did for its own sake; now we do it to position ourselves in relation to other people. For Roy, that means he’s dying.
Nowadays it is common to speak of “culture wars”. The idea is that we are deeply divided about the people we want to be, and that we express these divisions in everyday, sometimes small, ways. But in Roy’s view, this framing is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that there is a war on culture; what we call culture wars are just skirmishes among the ruins. Remember this idea and you may find yourself seeing the ruins everywhere. Many houses in my neighborhood, for example, carry variations of the American flag – rainbow flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, thin red line flags, etc. Flags are part of the culture wars. But in Roy’s account, they also reflect how much the “sociological basis” of the common culture has eroded. Less and less of our culture is evident – the phrase “our culture” may even seem suspect – and so the American flag, which must have some inherent, unchanging, self-evident meaning (isn’t that what a flag is all about ?) , has become a more interchangeable, outward-facing sign, perhaps not too different from the campaign posters we put up in our yards. Flags are just a dictionary. Why not let them breed?
It is hard to imagine what it might take to prove such a point; “Culture Crisis” doesn’t really try. This is a short book that can be charitably described as wide-ranging or more skeptically characterized as full of unsupported generalizations. Roy, a prominent intellectual in France who is best known for his work on Islam, radicalization and the West, writes with broad confidence on everything from Al Qaeda and #MeToo to Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs. There’s something to disagree with on every page. But that makes the book more enjoyable and interesting, not less; offers a valuable provocation.
Roy finds deculturation everywhere: in viral arguments about whether emotional support animals belong on airplanes; in the recent heated debate over whether Israelis or Lebanese invented hummus; in Disney’s “remixing” of traditional fairy tales into profitable mega-franchises; in the struggles of universities to attract humanities majors. What unites these phenomena, he believes, is that they unfold in a cultural vacuum. In the past, a society could rely on a “shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioral codes, etc.” to manage any situation. Today, in the absence of this shared origin, we must constantly negotiate what is normal, acceptable and part of “us”. Two things are true at the same time: we can’t agree on these things, but we need traffic rules. The result, Roy writes, is that we are “trapped in expanding systems of explicit normativity.” There are many rules, many of which conflict, and you break them at your own risk.
Deculturation is what happens when a culture that is bigger than you is replaced by a system of revised cultural codes. Roy writes that it is a product of “desocialization, individualization, and deterritorialization.” On a practical level, he means that more of us are bowling alone and working from home, perhaps for huge multinational corporations that don’t exist in a particular location. Yet Roy also sees more abstract changes in our “imaginary thoughts.” In the past, he argues, people found meaning in “great ideologies”—Christianity, Marxism, the American way—or based their existence on the unquestioned habits of traditional society. But “neither high culture nor anthropological culture provides the stuff of dreams today,” he wrote. “’Beliefs’ now fall into the domain of subcultures; they are associated with cults, fandoms, conspiracy theories, and the like. We still have society, of course, but we understand it as a project aimed at maximizing our freedom and happiness. Roy identifies this view as “neoliberal” because it is fundamentally individualistic and suggests that it is actually paradoxical in that we cannot agree on what counts as freedom and happiness. (Do we want to be free to say anything or free from hate speech?) “Here we are in a terrain where culture has no positive aspect because the old culture is delegitimized and the new one does not meet the necessary condition of any culture, which is the presence of implicit, shared understandings,” he argues. What remains is power: whoever is in charge at any given time seeks to impose their norms on everyone else.
In a review of the “Crisis of Culture”, published in the journal Philosophy nowTheo Blanc asks: “There is no culture always was in crisis?” Blanc notes that Roy “posits a ‘cultural state’ (echoing the classical ‘state of nature’) in which everyone shares the same implicit code of conduct, identities are clear to all, and there are no significant cultural differences or conflicts. But has it really been?” Roy himself admits that in many ways deculturation is nothing new: cultures change – due to immigration, colonization, war and technological transformation – and people change with them, ‘adapting’ to new traditions. But the situation today is different, because cultures are not being replaced by other cultures, he suggests, because despite the global popularity of pizza and inheritance’, what is actually ascending are the ‘weak identities’ constructed through this ‘collection of symbols’. It’s a bit like moving from a place where your family has lived for generations to an impersonal suburb. You could adopt your neighbors’ traditions if they had any, but they don’t – they’re just a random collection of people living close together. “You do it,” they say. This is not the same as doing everything together.
Is Roy right? Who knows. Some people will feel that he is simply out of touch – that “culture”, in the broadest sense, is still thriving and that he just doesn’t see it. It can be nostalgic, reactionary or romantic. Perhaps he is both right and wrong: one could say that culture is dying, and yet a society that hosts a range of cultures, rather than a single culture, is actually more humane, inspiring, and interesting.
When I test Roy’s ideas against my own life, I find that they fit together somewhat well. My family history involves deculturation: my mother, after moving to America from Malaysia, never really found a version of the rich, pervasive culture she left behind (or, perhaps, escaped). I was born in the United States, but I’m not sure I’ve found anything equivalent either. My cultural life is satisfying but idiosyncratic; like many people I find pleasure in “rabbit holes”. The cultural elements that seem to unite Americans – football? Taylor Swift? – they don’t really add much meaning to my life; I’m one of those people who is “spiritual but not religious” and so religious holidays like Christmas often feel more hollow than they should. As for Roy’s “shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioral codes, etc.,” I have a lot in common with the people around me. But Americans increasingly live in bubbles, and I imagine I’m no different.
Because Roy sees no way to create a “real” culture ever again, The Crisis of Culture is tragic in tone. I do not find tragic certainty a plausible attitude for subjects of this nature and magnitude. Still, his book made me take a closer look at how I live, looking for the culture that he says is dying. I find I can actually pinpoint islands of widely shared value. On my father’s side, I come from a family of doctors and scientists, and I feel an enduring connection to the culture of science—a belief in it as a large-scale enterprise that builds value and meaning. I’ve also studied literature in college and graduate school, and I see the arts as a kind of church.
On a more local level, I live in a small town where many families, including my wife’s, have lived for generations. Culturally, my city is probably less cohesive than it was in the past. More types of people live here than before. But should this be cause for despair? We live, for better or for worse, in a global era where the problems of the entire planet affect us all. Let’s assume that your neighborhood is actually just a collection of people who live in the same place. That’s probably a good thing. Maybe they’ll find a way to care less about where they came from and more about where they live. If culture becomes less powerful, that is a loss, but there are other ways of experiencing community that, while not equivalent to culture, may have their advantages. Mourning the loss of what is gone is healthy as long as you embrace the possibilities in what remains. ♦
