My mother, who is Chinese, grew up in Malaysia and came to America for college, in the nineteen-seventies. She and my American dad divorced when I was small, and this allowed her to make her suburban household as Malaysian as possible. She and my grandmother, who often visited, spoke a dialect of Hokkien, their regional language, that was used by no one else we knew. On weekends, we went to Asian grocery stores in search of niche ingredients for Malaysian food, which we spent whole days preparing. My grandma practiced Tai Chi in the mornings and, for my birthday, gave me a set of Baoding balls—small metal spheres with dragons on them—so that I could learn to swirl them around in my palm, exercising the muscles in my hands. She stuffed sticky rice into triangular packets made from lotus leaves, and hung them in our kitchen until they were ready to cook.
During my early childhood, it never occurred to me that any of this could mean anything to anyone. It was just the way we lived. My non-Asian friends were interested in non-Asian things—playing guitar, professional wrestling, R.V. trips—that meant nothing to me; the mutual opacity of our cultures seemed normal. It was only as I got older that I began to see how cultural facts could have communicative significance. In middle school, my friends started viewing my Asianness through the lenses of “The Karate Kid” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”; in high school, they discerned looming associations with math and computers. The meaning of being American also dawned on me: somehow, at the nexus of TGI Fridays, Bruce Springsteen, and my weekend soccer games, there was an aura of wholesome, heroic normalcy—an ordinariness meant to be admired.
Oddly, the culture around me seemed to get more communicative as I aged. 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 apparently meant something beyond enjoyment; beautifully photographed on Instagram, it signalled both the rising fortunes of Southeast Asia and the possibilities of one’s own personality. (“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from,” the novelist John Lanchester wrote, in a 2014 essay. “Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live.”) Americanness was shifting in its significance, too: for some people, in some places, flying a flag or eating a corn dog could be a form of resistance. Increasingly, everything was Googleable and shareable, and social media was reducing cultural difference to a matter of style; as the novelist William Gibson observed, the virtual world was colonizing the real one. Every cultural act seemed to be becoming a message to be read, a statement to be placed in quotes.
We all get a little cranky in middle age; maybe growing disillusioned with culture is just a natural part of being a “mid guy,” 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, in general, really is getting worse; in fact, the whole world is undergoing a process of “deculturation.” Roy believes that a range of abstract and apparently unstoppable forces—globalization, neoliberalism, postmodernism, individualism, secularism, the Internet, and so on—are undermining culture by rendering it “transparent,” turning our cultural practices into “a collection of tokens” to be traded and displayed. Culture used to be something we did for its own sake; now we do it to position ourselves vis-à-vis other people. For Roy, this means that it’s dying.
It’s common nowadays to talk about the “culture wars.” The notion is that we’re profoundly divided about the kinds of people we want to be, and that we express these divisions in everyday, sometimes petty ways. But, in Roy’s view, this framing is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that there’s a war on culture; what we call the culture wars are just skirmishes among the ruins. Hold this idea in mind, and you may find yourself seeing the ruins everywhere. Many houses in my neighborhood, for instance, fly variations of the American flag—rainbow flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, Thin Red Line flags, and so on. The flags are part of the culture wars. But, going by Roy’s account, they also reflect how much the “sociological grounding” of common culture has eroded. Less and less in our culture is self-evident—the phrase “our culture” might even seem suspect—and so the American flag, which should have some intrinsic, unchanging, obvious meaning (isn’t that the point of a flag?), has become a more fungible outward-facing sign, perhaps not too different from the campaign placards that we put in our yards. Flags are just vocabulary. Why not let them multiply?
It’s hard to imagine what it might take to prove a thesis like this; “The Crisis of Culture” doesn’t really try. It’s a short book that could be charitably described as wide-ranging, or more skeptically characterized as being full of unsupported generalizations. Roy, a celebrated intellectual in France who’s most famous for his work on Islam, radicalization, and the West, writes with sweeping assurance about everything from Al Qaeda and #MeToo to Roland Barthes’s “Empire of Signs.” There’s something to disagree with on every page. But this makes the book more enjoyable and interesting, not less; it offers valuable provocation.
Roy finds deculturation everywhere: in viral controversies over whether emotional-support animals belong on airplanes; in the recent, charged debate over whether Israeli or Lebanese people invented hummus; in Disney’s “remixing” of traditional fairy tales into profitable mega-franchises; in the struggles of universities to attract humanities majors. What unifies these phenomena, he thinks, 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, behavioural codes, and so on” to govern all sorts of situations. Today, in the absence of that shared background, we must constantly renegotiate what’s normal, acceptable, and part of “us.” Two things are true simultaneously: we can’t agree on those things, yet we need rules of the road. The result, Roy writes, is that we’re “caught in expanding systems of explicit normativity.” There are lots of rules, many of them conflict, and you break them at your peril.
Deculturation is what happens when Culture, which is bigger than you, is replaced with a system of revisable cultural codes. Roy writes that it’s the product of “desocialisation, individualisation, and deterritorialisation.” On a practical level, he means that more of us are bowling alone and working from home, perhaps for vast multinational corporations that exist in no particular place. Yet Roy also sees more abstract changes in our “imaginaries.” In the past, he argues, people found meaning in “grand ideologies”—Christianity, Marxism, the American way—or based their existences on the unquestioned habits of a traditional society. But “neither high culture nor anthropological culture provide the stuff of dreams today,” he writes. “ ‘Ways of believing’ now come within the realm of subcultures; they are associated with sects, fandoms, conspiracy theories and the like.” We still have a society, of course, but we understand it as a project aimed at maximizing our liberty and happiness. Roy identifies this view as “neoliberal,” because it is fundamentally individualistic, and suggests that it is actually paradoxical, since we can’t agree on what counts as liberty and happiness. (Do we want to be free to say anything, or free from hate speech?) “Here we are on a terrain in which culture has no positive aspect, since the old culture has been 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’s left is power: whoever happens to be 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 magazine Philosophy Now, Théo Blanc asks, “Hasn’t culture always been in crisis?” Blanc notes that Roy “presupposes a ‘state of culture’ (echoing the classical ‘state of nature’) where everyone shares the same implicit code of conduct, identities are clear to everyone, and there are no significant cultural differences or conflicts. But was that ever really the case?” Roy himself acknowledges that, in many ways, deculturation is nothing new: cultures change—for reasons of immigration, colonization, war, and technological transformation—and people change with them, getting “acculturated” to new traditions. But Roy believes that the situation today is different, because there is nothing for us to get acculturated to. Around the world, cultures aren’t being replaced by other cultures; the idea of “Westernization” is a red herring, he suggests, because, despite the worldwide popularity of pizza and “Succession,” what’s actually ascendant are “weak identities” constructed through that “collection of tokens.” It’s a bit like moving from a place where your family has lived for generations to a faceless suburb. You could adopt your neighbors’ traditions, if they have any, but they don’t—they’re just a random collection of people who happen to live near one another. “You do you,” they say. That’s not the same as doing everything together.
Is Roy right? Who knows. Some people will feel that he’s simply out of touch—that “culture,” in the broadest sense, is still thriving, and that he just doesn’t see it. He could be nostalgic, or reactionary, or romantic. Maybe he’s both right and wrong: arguably, 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 somewhat well. My family story involves deculturation: my mom, after moving to America from Malaysia, never really found a version of the rich, all-encompassing culture she left behind (or, perhaps, fled). I was born in the United States, but I’m not sure that I’ve found anything equivalent, either. My cultural life is satisfying but idiosyncratic; like many people, I find enjoyment in “rabbit holes.” The cultural touchstones that seem to unite Americans—football? Taylor Swift?—don’t actually 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. When it comes to Roy’s “shared system of language, signs, symbols, representations of the world, body language, behavioural codes, and so on,” I have a lot in common with the people around me. But Americans increasingly live in bubbles, and I imagine that I’m no different.
Because Roy sees no way to create “real” culture ever again, “The Crisis of Culture” is tragic in tone. I don’t find tragic certainty to be a plausible attitude for subjects of this nature and scale. Still, his book has caused me to look more carefully at how I live, searching for the kind of culture that he says is dying. I find that I can, in fact, point to islands of widely shared value. On my father’s side, I come from a family of doctors and scientists, and I experience a durable connection to the culture of science—a belief in it as a large-scale enterprise that constructs value and meaning. I also studied literature in college and graduate school, and look to 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 resided for generations. Culturally, my town is probably less coherent than it was in the past. There are more kinds of people living here than there used to be. But should that be a cause for despair? We live, for better and worse, in a global era, in which planet-wide problems affect us all. Suppose your neighborhood is, in fact, just a collection of people who live in the same place. Possibly, that’s good. Maybe they’ll find a way to care less about where they came from, and more about where they live. If culture is becoming less powerful, that’s a loss—but there are other ways of experiencing commonality which, while not equivalent to culture, may have their own advantages. Mourning the loss of what’s gone is healthy, as long as you embrace the possibilities in what remains. ♦
