Roy argues that culture as we have come to understand it is being irrevocably eroded. It is not, as some of his people believe, that one culture is replaced by another – they say, Christianity by Islam. That’s it everything culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalization, bureaucracy, and personal consumer choice. Local cultures, in the sense of beautiful patterns, shared feelings, spontaneously absorbed and deeply felt, are not like this ‘degenerate’ force.
We still need shared moral norms to function as communities, however. So instead of a culture of transparency, he says, we have introduced implicit “norms”: rules of behavior and speech that are not heard or directed but are expressed, encoded, and endlessly contested. Apart from the inherent standards of behavior we have to rule out everything, from the correct use of pronouns to the manners in public transport or work dress. “Culture war” implies some kind of great divide between people, but in reality, Roy suggests, our differences are shallow and narrow and worse for it. Banish culture and what remains is negotiation. Everything is politics.
Complex, distorted, layered social identities are replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom that includes the right to choose your box at any time (think of how gender identity is coded into an endlessly repeating string of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture has been reduced to a series of “tokens” that we buy and display to position ourselves vis-à-vis others. National cuisines, music genres, clothing styles: all these are tokens that we must collect and creatively combine into a personal brand.
Here is the full story. Here is my previous post on Roy’s book.
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