I have been reading Olivier Roy’s new book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms. It’s the best book of the tradition in years, and if you enjoy Martin Gurri and Bruno Macaes you should try this one too. This book actually made me happy on a theoretical level.
At the beginning of the book you will read an important question:
Are we living in a new culture or, on the contrary, is this expansion of normativity a sign of a deeper problem in the concept of culture itself?
Probably the latter. To some extent the Internet drives this process, by cutting things into pieces and allowing and indeed sometimes requiring greater realism. But it is also a cultural practice that predates the importance of Internet life. There has been an ongoing erasure of clear shared understandings, and that is a key dynamic driving many global trends.
Roy applies those insights to the current problems of immigration and assimilation (currently intense), the algorithmic approach to understanding social media, the gratification of Japanese culture (precursor to broader trends), the spread of memes (personified deculturation), the – the rise of fiction by UNESCO and others, autistics doing better in the modern world, arguments about restoration (more of a cry than a real political struggle), the EU (extreme separation), and our current obsession with food (and food writing) as a way to compensate for a cultureless world.
Here is one interesting episode among many:
Therefore, it is not that English is becoming stronger, and its cultural support, but that the use of English is decreasing. That is why the development of the language does not necessarily indicate the Americanization of world culture. The aim is to avoid any misunderstanding and any need to refer to an implicit understanding that may not be shared. Jokes are prohibited and emotions must be clearly expressed using emoji with a predefined meaning. Emotion is allowed, of course, but it must be understood immediately by the speakers, no matter where they come from, so it is “found” in a list that, while always open, is prepared in advance.
The end of the book serves this as a beginning: “The trilogy of declaration, codification and normativity now seems to organize all arguments and strategies on all sides…”
French scholars remain under the Anglosphere. It’s also worth noting how little Olivier Roy finds in the “internet world,” which is a big reason to read this one and grab its alpha.
You may recall that Roy wrote an earlier book called The Failure of Political Islam, which I also found very interesting. So he is one of today’s top geniuses, and he’s still going strong at 74 years old. I’m still not sure how many of his suggestions I agree with, but I feel he’s making real progress on the issues at hand.
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