Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
In a famously misinterpreted conversation in 1971 as China opened to the West, Henry Kissinger asked Premier Zhou En Lai what he thought of the French Revolution. “It is too early to tell,” Zhou replied, a quip referenced endlessly as evidence of the long-term perspective of Chinese wisdom. It turned out, as later revealed by Zhou’s interpreter, the premier was actually referring to the student revolt in Paris in May 1968, just a few years earlier!
Nearly half a century on, it still may be too early to tell, but the French scholar Olivier Roy takes up where Zhou left off in his deeply insightful new book, “The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics And The Empire of Norms.”
As Roy writes, that youth rebellion, which epitomized the 1960s ethos of the “desiring individual” liberated from the staid shackles of historically inherited and dominant traditions, coursed through all aspects of society over its long march through established norms. Appropriated by global consumer capitalism and commodified, it spread everywhere in a de-territorializing sweep that chipped away at the confines of grounded cultural context, linking elective affinities beyond old boundaries as never before. Ultimately, the deconstructive ethos found a comfortable home in the distributed power of peer-to-peer tribes, or self-defined subcultures, that populate today’s social mediascape.
More than transforming what could once still be called “mainstream culture,” argues Roy, what we have witnessed instead is wholesale “deculturation.”
Generalized norms considered “self-evident” and implicitly understood have virtually vanished with the erosion of social authority deemed to be oppressive. In that decontextualized vacuum, the behavioral codes of diverse, “self-chosen” identities are explicitly and aggressively asserted in a bid for recognition. In short, norms without normality.
The connected isolation of this archipelago of subcultures doesn’t add up to the cohesion of society, but rather to a collage of juxtaposed normative claims that exist side-by-side in a perennially unsettled configuration. Classical canons, whether in music, literature or fine arts, like once prevailing ethnicities, religions or the social strictures of tradition, are now just another subculture no more privileged than the rest.
Struggles for “justice” among the politically correct crowd, Roy notes, are no longer so much about human rights and inclusion in the mainstream as about special dispensations for the self and the subculture.
As he points out, “Common imaginaries have disappeared. Utopia has been replaced by moral judgement and support for categorical causes.” Instead of trying to change society as a whole, we see “the demand from an atomized set of subjective positions for safe spaces for themselves” — not a politics of engagement or integration, but a practice of social protectionism. “Intersectionality” has become a demand for recognition of individuals suffering from multiple oppressions instead of a cry for revolution to overcome their circumstance by assembling a united front with others.
What Constitutes “The Culture” Anymore?
The emergence of this condition sets the stage for today’s pitched battles over what constitutes “the culture.”
Roy recounts the stumbling effort to define European culture when a new constitution for the European Union was considered in 2000. Was Europe a “secularized Christian culture” rooted in “natural law, family and gender complementarity?” Or were its principle cultural pillars “the liberal values that have become dominant since the 1960s: sexual freedom, feminism, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, etc.?” Which set of norms were Muslim immigrants supposed to adopt or respect?
In the end, the Christian reference was rejected, in Roy’s surmise, since “part and parcel of the liberal project is deculturation” that rejects identity embedded in any holistic or organicist context bequeathed by the historical past. The default substitute was “the European way of life” vaguely defined in lowest common denominator terms such as “freedom and democracy.”
That settled nothing fundamental. A quarter of a century later, movements led by the likes of Victor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy have found wide enough resonance in their call for the return to a more traditional and less liberal culture to take center stage. The Alternative for Germany party is now more popular than Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally garnered its largest share of votes ever in recent elections and is wrangling over a new government with the waning center and broad left that banded together to blunt its chances. The hung parliament duly reflects a hung society.
“Family, faith and nation,” as in earlier times, has become the rallying cry of these constituencies against the far left and liberal elites whom they see opening up borders to foreign hordes that poison homeland purity and transgress the norms of natural law by wholly embracing the LGBTQ+ agenda. The most emotional normative combat is over questions of same-sex marriage, gender identity, parental control and, still after all these years, abortion. American politics these days roughly corresponds with these divisions. All politics, it appears, are no longer even local, but increasingly personal and even bodily.
In this standoff where there is no arbiter, both the once dominant and newly insurgent cast themselves as victims under assault by those who would threaten restoration or further encroach on their diminishing domain. As with the original French Revolution of 1789, the cultural revolt of 1968 to which Zhou referred is eating its own children. The starkest reverberation pits a return to the ancien regime against the guillotine of cancel culture.
Thrown out with the dirty bathwater of the culture wars is the universal dimension of all identities. While, as Roy posits, liberal universalism by definition implies deculturation, humanism connects both what is common and distinct in the human condition. Tragically, that integral quality is what is being lost. “What we are living through now,” he concludes in the book’s last line, “is a true crisis of humanism.”
