An Era of Radical Transformations

"The Crisis of Culture

By Olivier Roy

Oxford, 232 pages, $29.95

Olivier Roy is a French political scientist, a man of the old-fashioned, realist, moderate European left.

He doesn't chase after progressive fads and doesn't applaud the secularism that has driven religion out of public spaces.

He has a healthy disregard for the wokeness that besets Western societies.

His disregard extends to the globalized economy, which he thinks has contributed to the "deterritorialisation" of anchorless human beings.

Most of all, he feels that something is badly amiss in the values of a Western world that appears to have lost its cultural swagger.

Mr. Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, addresses these (and other) subjects in "The Crisis of Culture," a book whose aim is to help us understand why the postwar West has ceased to be a place of cultural confidence, no longer secure in its values and sense of self. Mr. Roy writes in elegant but quasi-academic French (with a fondness for words like "axiological"), and his book has been translated -- admirably, one must say -- by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous.

While there are many factors that differentiate the U.S. from Europe -- and, within Europe, the Catholic countries from the Protestant -- all of the Judeo-Christian West suffers from what Mr. Roy calls "the erasure of shared implicit understandings." In other words, we've become "archipelago societies"; all cultures are subcultures jostling for influence and attention.

Four kinds of "radical transformation" have propelled this widespread deculturation, as Mr. Roy sees it: the metamorphosis in values brought about by the "individualist and hedonist revolution" of the 1960s; the tribalism and facile certitudes of the internet revolution; unchecked economic globalization, which has crashed through local cultures like a wrecking ball; and mass migration across national borders. This migration has put pressure on Western values and fueled apocalyptic fears of a "great replacement," a hypernationalist theory positing that native whites will be swamped by unassimilable foreigners.

In case we weren't already aware, Mr. Roy tells us that today's political conflicts center more on values and identity than on the economy and social questions. Particularly intense is the drive to extend the "domain of normativity" -- the imposition of rules on people, whether they like them or not -- to sexual intimacy. He cites a law from 2014, passed in California, that imposes an "affirmative consent standard" for all sexual activity. "We have gone from 'peace and love' to #MeToo," Mr. Roy writes, "from the harmony of desires to the denunciation of patriarchal domination."

The sexual freedom unleashed by the feminist revolution, he notes, has had unintended effects. It has enabled "a new type of male domination that is more brutal because it is no longer culturally contained (by gallantry, for example)." Some of the liberal Mr. Roy's thoughts are in sync with the writings of conservatives such as Harvey Mansfield, who makes similar points on the social eclipse of "manliness."

Readers will be amused that Mr. Roy kicks off his book by using Maureen Dowd -- who has written breathlessly for the New York Times for over 40 years -- as an exemplar of how American values have changed. He compares a column Ms. Dowd wrote in 1999, in which she likened the White House intern Monica Lewinsky to a "leech," with one she wrote in 2018, when America was in full #MeToo mode. In the latter column, she excoriates Bill Clinton for "an inexcusable abuse of power" in his sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky. "How do you go," Mr. Roy asks, "from 'leech' to victim in twenty years, when no new element has emerged?" The paradigm shift, he says, lies in the radical remaking of our culture, from an assumption of permissiveness to an ironclad woke moralism.

The abandonment of high culture -- particularly the failure of universities to transmit it to the next generation -- has given rise to a free-for-all, Mr. Roy believes. We've gone from a common body of knowledge to "a catalogue of courses for all tastes. Latin, guitar, film studies and Chinese are all interchangeable options." An entire "architecture of knowledge" is teetering on the brink of collapse. The fault lies not just with our universities. Mr. Roy points out that the European Union is built on institutional and political procedures, not on a shared culture. In 2000 a fractious debate erupted over the inclusion of the phrase "Christian roots" in a draft European constitution. The phrase was dropped.

Although Mr. Roy has unkind things to say about conservative evangelicals in the U.S., he is critical, also, of militant French laicite (or state-mandated secularism). Whereas secularism in the 19th century was, he says, as much a spiritual as a rational alternative to religion, it is today (in France at least) a set of oppressive shibboleths that do nothing "other than to exclude religion." Faith is thus relegated to the margins of society, and jihadists and other radicals have seized the reins of religion.

Mr. Roy has made versions of this argument in a previous book, "Holy Ignorance" (2010).

For all its robust diagnoses, Mr. Roy's solutions to our crisis of culture are wan. He says, for instance, that the people of the West "must leave our protected spaces behind and rediscover heterogeneity, difference and debate." But it would be unfair to scold him for the apparent feebleness of his remedies. For this is a pessimistic book, and it is clear that there are no cures in sight. We have to live through this crisis and see where it takes us, reacting as best we can to social and political turbulence whenever it arises.

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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute." [1]

1. An Era of Radical Transformations. Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 July 2024: A.13.