In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey spoke with Olivier Roy, professor of social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and author of The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms.  Roy argues that neoliberal globalization is dissolving not just subordinate cultures but also dominant ones by undermining the tacit understanding that undergird cultures and demanding that those norms be made explicit.  Moreover, Roy discusses how identity politics has come to supplant the norms once implicit in a broader culture, undermining the possibility that people know how to live in society at all.  These development reflect the decline of utopian dreams – for better or worse – and the difficulties involved in maintaining social bonds.

Transcript

John Torpey 

The notions of “culture wars,” “identity politics,” and other challenges to the traditional left-right axes of politics since the French Revolution have become widespread understandings of contemporary politics. The focus on culture, identity, and subjectivity are widely seen as at odds with the historical emphasis on class and such familiar nostrums as “it’s the economy, stupid.” But where does this political development come from? How does it work? Who’s involved?  Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We’re fortunate to have with us today Olivier Roy, who is professor of social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He’s written numerous books, especially on Islam and secularism, including Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, Secularism Confronts Islam, and Globalized Islam. His most recent book in English is The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms. And it’s on that book that we want to focus today. Thanks so much for being with us today, Olivier Roy.

Olivier Roy 

Thank you.

John Torpey 

So let’s just launch into some questions that I have. As I indicated in the introduction, contemporary politics is often seen as being roiled by the so called culture wars, as James Davison Hunter labeled them some years ago, and identity politics, which at least goes back to Todd Gitlin’s book The Twilight of Common Dreams in 1996, I think. But that these political stances are shaped by subjective aspects of people’s lives. But you see these developments as a crisis of culture, something much broader, a crisis of culture rooted in a sort of insecurity of the dominant classes about their culture. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Olivier Roy 

I think that the most important event or trend is globalization, meaning the internationalization of some sort of Western or American culture, especially the language, for instance. And this is linked to the extension of neoliberalism in economy where the financial capitalism is more important than industries, etc., the collapse of social classes in terms of the connection to the economy, the immigration, which means that people leave Christian cultures to enter into new cultures. But it doesn’t, it’s not followed by acculturation, I mean by the imposition of the dominant culture. And another factor which is important is the crisis of religions, the deculturation of religion, and especially strong in the Western world, where secularization has turned the societies into not just secular societies, but from the point of view of religion, pagan societies, which means that the dominant values of secularized societies are no more secularized version of traditional religious values and gender, marriage, etc., etc. So, most the religions are turning into some sort of fundamentalist forms of religiosity based mainly on normative issues – do, don’t do, banning of abortion, etc., etc. So, we have no more connection, a strong connection, between religion and culture. It’s particularly visible in Western Christian culture, but the same phenomena, for me, is happening in Muslim, Buddhist, and other religions. So, we have a general crisis of culture, while everybody’s speaking about culture, that’s a big paradox, you know. We speak of multiculturalism, for instance, at a time where it’s difficult to define what are the cultures which are involved in this so called multiculturalism? Do we have real cultures? And so that’s the starting point of my book.

John Torpey 

So you’ve raised the question of globalization as a kind of fundamental background of all this, but you also mentioned the United States as a key actor in this. And obviously any understanding of globalization must involve, you know, the spread of American culture, at least, and American economics, military, military activity and that sort of thing. But I guess, I’m curious, you know, I think many of the French see this as an American phenomenon. Some Americans see it as a fundamentally French phenomenon, you know, but you see it really as a global phenomenon. So I’m wondering, you know, in what sense is it one thing or the other?

Olivier Roy 

Let’s take an example, the language, the globalization of English language, usually when you have a dominant culture, it, of course, this culture, of course, imposes its language on the world. So, during the Roman Empire, Latin became the global language of the Mediterranean world. In the in the 18th century, it was French in Europe, the Tsar of Russia, the King of Prussia, the Pope, they used to speak French, you know, and to write in French also. But they also knew the French culture. In these aristocratic families you had, you know, French teachers, which were in charge of educating the children since a very young age – they knew La Fontaine, they knew Racine, etc., etc. What we have now, with the extension of the English language, is not the extension of the English culture. People don’t read Shakespeare. They don’t read Dickens, etc. They don’t care about that. What is spreading now is a deculturated language, what I call “Globish.” It means that you don’t need to know a culture, a literature beyond this language, and you should not. Because if you use a too culturated language, then you fear not to be understood by the others. It doesn’t mean that people do not speak good English – we have many people who speak good English – but we have some sort of auto limitation of our use of English, about 1500 words. For instance, when we speak with somebody who is not from our culture using English, we will hesitate to use a word like “sibling,” because we don’t know if the other guys know the word “sibling” or not. So we say “sister and brother” because we are sure he or she knows the term “sister and brothers,” etc., etc. So we, communication here is destroying culture. In order to communicate, we should exclude, you know, British or English culture from our use of the English language. So we have here a form of globalization which is deculturating, not only, you know, the dominated culture, but also the dominant culture, which is totally new.

John Torpey 

Well, yes, this, to me, was the most striking, I think, claim in the book, which is that the idea that the dominant class, or dominant classes, dominant groups, have sort of lost faith in their own self understanding, in their own culture. And therefore it’s not being passed down, it’s not being transmitted to other groups. I wonder if you could talk more about what you mean by that and how that works.

Olivier Roy 

The paradox is that, you know, according to the post-colonial studies, the former colonial West is still in charge, is still the dominant power, or at least they master the tools of domination. It’s clear in terms of military intervention, it’s clear in terms of financial intervention, and it sometimes seems also clear in terms of cultural domination, like the use of Facebook, internet, etc., etc. But in the same time, we see that the dominant classes, or more exactly, the dominant White society, is totally unsure about its own cultural identity. We have this feeling of being a minority, which is very clear among white supremacists, for instance, you know. But the idea which is shared, you know, in the USA, in France, in Great Britain, in Italy, in Germany, etc., is that we have a replacement of population, and that the dominant national culture is undermined by immigration. This discourse of demotion of the dominant culture is accompanied, is going on with very classical complaints from the elites since, I would say, almost one century. It’s a crisis of the high culture, the crisis of the humanities, the crisis of universities, the crisis of transmission of knowledge, etc., etc. So, we have a conjunction between both, the sense that the high culture is now collapsing, but also that the anthropological culture, our way of life, in a sense, is also collapsing, at the very same time that technical domination is still here, you know, military domination, economic domination. So, we have this discrepancy between the continuity of a certain form of domination, Western domination, and the feeling of collapse, sometimes almost of an apocalyptic, you know, vision of the collapse of the Western society.

John Torpey 

So, this reminds me a little bit of the old joke, and I can’t remember whether that’s Democrats or Liberals, but in the United States, that Liberals are people who won’t take their own side in an argument. And it strikes me as though this is part of a sort of ongoing, sort of dynamic of modern society, you know, identified to some extent, by Tocqueville and others, as a kind of, you know, democratization of the world that increasingly is unstoppable in a certain sense. I mean, do you see it that way?

Olivier Roy 

It’s clear that, you know, the the traditional connection between a territory, a society and a culture, and our national state is collapsing. Globalization is weakening the concept of the nation-state. We have more circulation of people, and we have this crisis of culture. Which is, which consequence is not, you know, the creation of a new dominant culture, but of a general deculturation, the general crisis of the very concept of culture. Which is, for me express through what I call the rejection of the implicit. We do not share something implicit between us – body language, the values, desires, what you want, you know. Or we distrust, you know, this implicit. So, we have, now growing a call or necessity for rules, for explicit rules of behaviors, which is new. It’s something which is new, I would say, since the 20th century. It’s a phenomeonon of the 21st century. The systematic call for expliciting everything we think and everything we do in social relations, in of course, about sexuality, and this is the indication of what I call precisely the disappearance of implicit, or the rejection of implicit. Any culture is based on the shared implicit. When, if we fight this very concept of implicit, we contribute to accelerate the crisis of culture.

John Torpey 

So, you’ve mentioned sexuality now, and I know this was kind of important to your understanding of this disappearance of the implicit, but you argue in the book that the attitudes towards sexuality that were raised and attacked basically in the 1960s is kind of the epicenter of this larger process of the deculturation and the sort of rejection of inherited culture. So I wonder if you could explain more, you know, why that’s the case, and how that worked, and what’s going on with it now.

Olivier Roy 

In the liberal societies, modern liberal societies, starting from the 18th century, the starting point of the political link to build a society was the reasoning individual, you know, the idea that citizens are individuals who use reason to make a social contract. And what changes in, what’s changed in the 60s, is that the individual is still at the core of the social bind, that’s clear, but it’s no more reasoning individual, it’s a desiring individual. The idea that the desire is at the core of social relations came at the center of reflection in the 60s, clearly. At the beginning, you know, it was some sort of a hippie view of an utopic communities, and let’s just you know, sexuality organize our lives, and harmony will reign on our community. But slowly, this concept of the desiring individual expanded from the left to the right and was enshrined into laws. The fact, for instance, that you can define your own gender, etc., etc. In this 60s, this use of the 60s, culture was assimilated to repression, you know, the idea was that culture is an alienation, and that we should find something stable and permanent and, in a sense, organic, you know, the desire beyond cultures. The first culture, which was, of course, under attack, was the traditional humanist culture. But then, the idea was every kind of existing social bind is part of an alienation, and that we have to restart from the beginning, restart from scratch, you know, to organize social harmony. In this sense, the 60s was the start of the deconstruction, not of a given society, but of the very concept of society, the very concept of social bind. And for me, it’s, of course, it’s central in this process of deculturation.

John Torpey 

Right. So, aside from religion, it seems as though you know, one of the major institutions that would be implicated in the processes that you’re describing would be the university, which, after all, is the institution that has been developed in the western society over the last several 100 years to transmit knowledge, transmit culture, transmit values, even. And I wonder, you know, how do you understand, I mean, basically, you describe the kind of reduction of learning to kind of smorgasbord of unconnected, you know, ideas, facts, with no real coherence, which is presumably what this culture is that that is disappearing. So, so what’s the sort of fate, what’s the status, what’s the role of the university in this context that you’re describing?

Olivier Roy 

The universities, and the modern universities, were created, or not created but, you know, organized in the 19th century on the idea of being centered on humanities. Even for people who used to work on mathematics, on physics, the idea was that there was a paramount knowledge or system of values linked to the humanity. So, you had a paramount discipline. Everybody used to, at that time, learn Latin, either if you were a philosopher or a mathematician, and people used to share a common curriculum of books, literature, etc., etc. What we have seen in the second part of the 20th century is, I would say, the fragmentation of knowledge, the rise of social sciences, the complexification, of course, of sciences, into a growing number of different disciplines, and each discipline used to establish, first, its own boundaries, its own test of competence. You should be approved by your future colleagues. You should prove that you belong to the discipline. And the disciplines are more and more narrow. We have more and more different disciplines, and of course, each discipline has a more and more narrow field. So it’s not just social science, it’s not just sociology, anthropology, etc. It’s the sociology of political institutions, the sociology of labor, the sociology of elections, the sociology of what you want, you know. And the expansion of quantitative studies have accelerated this fragmentation of knowledge and the growing abstraction of the knowledge, which is a paradox in a sense. The more we want to study society, the more we work on abstraction. And now, for instance, sociologists are working by using, you know, the model of laboratory, by making experiences with witnesses, outside any real social link. So, this fragmentation of knowledge has destroyed the concept of humanities, and also it is reinforced, accelerated by the offer of knowledge. Now, you can have, pass an exam in Japan, in medieval Christianity, analytical philosophy. In the same year, you can have three studies, three different fields without anything which connects them, without any paramount knowledge, or vision, or wisdom. And this is a problem. The more we speak now about values, the more these values are disconnected from real knowledge. So, we have abstract debate on societies, on what we should do, on political action, totally disconnected with the disciplines which are taught. Well, that’s a big paradox, the disconnect between real life and what is taught. And so, the real life is not more done inside the classrooms, it’s done in the town hall, you know, it’s done in the campuses. That’s the paradox. The universities are now a place of a debate, that’s very clear, you know, debate, demonstration, etc., which is inside more and more disconnected with the real teaching, the concrete teachings, which are themselves more and more abstract.

John Torpey 

Well, I think this is in the United States, at least sort of paradoxical. On the one hand, there’s this very direct application, for example, in the protests about Gaza, the very direct application of ideas like settler colonialism. And on the other hand, in the meantime, you know, much of the broader public is, you know, I would say, disenchanted with what’s going on at the universities precisely because, as you say, it seems abstracted and disconnected from reality. So, I guess I wonder, in a way, you know, how are both of those things going on at the same time?

Olivier Roy 

Something which is reinforcing this insulation of universities is that the students are paradoxically looking for safe spaces. The more they speak about what is going in the world, the less they go to this world. In the 60s, the students who were fighting for civil rights in the USA, they used to go to Alabama, to Georgia, etc. They used to go outside the university. My generation, I’m not making the apology of my generation, we did a lot of bad things, but my generation used to go, to go outside the universities. The motto was “let’s go outside,” “let’s meet the working classes,” “let’s go to support guerillas, to Bolivia, Vietnam, Dhofar, we used to travel. We did a lot of stupid things in the same time. But at least you know, we went out of the universities. And now the students, they want to stay. They want to be protected. They want that university would protect the way they play, if I can say that, they replay this stage, you know, the crisis in the war. So, it’s a total paradox. They are very visible, of course, because they are demonstrating in prestigious universities like Columbia, Sciences Po, etc., etc. But in fact, the impact on what is going on is zero, zero, you know. And so, this accentuated this disconnect between what is debated and what is happening.

John Torpey 

Interesting. I mean, indeed, you know, in your book, it’s sort of suggested that this is, these developments, this crisis of culture, are all really that rather anti-utopia. And not, you know, they don’t sort of articulate a vision of a better society, particularly. And so I wonder if you could talk about, you know, why is that the case, and how much is it perhaps connected with the disconnect from social reality outside the universities.

Olivier Roy 

It’s clear that we have a crisis of utopias. And in a sense, it’s good, because the utopias, like communism and so led to a catastrophic situation. But for the first time, we have a youth, a young generation, which sees the future as problematic. For instance, global warming, climate change. So, they fight against climate change in order to prevent a certain future to come, and not to have a better future, but at least to have a future which would not be worse than what we have now. So, it’s a complete change of perspective. These movements are quite pessimistic, in a sense, and probably it’s connected, they are moralistic. They, the students, for instance, who demonstrate about Gaza, they put forward moral claims. Israel should be condemned by the International Court of Justice, for instance. They don’t promote any kind of political solution or political utopia. They are not revolutionary. They are not fighting their own government. They want their own government to repent and to adopt a more moral, a more a more ethical foreign policy, for instance, but they don’t fight for a revolution. So, we have this connection of moral statements, which can be very rigid, on one hand, a pessimistic view of the future, and a call for a safe space, for being protected, themselves, from a dangerous world.

John Torpey 

So, since you’ve written so much about religion and have paid so much attention to it in your work, I mean, this is an intriguing aspect of sort of more identity politics, I guess, strictly speaking, from my perspective. You know, I think people like Ian Buruma have pointed out the importance of identity politics and the moralization of politics, particularly in, you know, Protestant and I suppose particularly Calvinist societies, such as his own culture of origin in the Netherlands and, of course, in the United States. And so, I guess in a way, this brings me back to the earlier question about, you know, where is this really coming from? I understand it’s a global phenomenon in certain respects, but it’s presumably not really taking place in, you know, Africa. And so, I wonder, you know, how you would characterize the sort of religio-political roots of this phenomenon.

Olivier Roy 

It’s interesting, this phenomenon of religious renewal, revivalism. And what strikes me, it’s based first on nostalgia, nostalgia of supposed good Christian society, which was supposed to have existed for 200 years in the USA, for instance, you know. So, we have this beautification of the past, which, of course, is never true. The second point is the way they want to reconstruct society around Christianity is uniquely through norms. It’s the imposition of norms, banning abortion, banning same sex marriage, etc, etc. There is no real endeavor to convert the other guys. The other guys are seen as strangers that are threatening your community. There is no love. They speak about the love for God, but not about the love for the other human people are they? They want to reconstruct an artificial Christian society by putting physical boundaries, of course, closing the borders, but also by imposing norms on people who don’t believe like, as they do. So, this normative version of culture is something which is very, very common now. On the left we have the consul culture, which is also a way to conceive a society through a normative system of reparation, of punishment, of banning, you know, of attitude, words, etc., etc. So, in this sense, there is a crisis of spirituality. These new forms of this, the dominant form of Christian identity are not based on the spirituality. They are based on the norms, markers, for example, for the Catholic, the mass in Latin, and they, when they defend the mass in Latin, the conservative Catholic, they defend their own identity. They don’t say that God wants to be, to have people speak Latin. What they say is, “I enjoy the mass in Latin,” “that’s my way to express my faith, I am happy with that.” So, they use also this vision of the desiring individual. “I want, I decide, I enjoy mass in Latin. It’s good for me,” but nothing about reconstructing faith, community, which extends beyond your own vision of the of the world.

John Torpey 

Right. I mean, I should, I guess, add something I haven’t said before, which is that, you know, your argument is based to a considerable extent on the role of, shall we say, neoliberal, globalization, and individualism, and the ways in which they have come to shape people’s outlooks on the world. But maybe one last question, you know, sort of maybe ending on a more optimistic note. I mean, do you see shoots, sort of possibilities, beginnings of more optimistic kind of responses to the situation we’re in that may not be, you know, utopian in the bad sense that, you, you know, pointed to earlier.

Olivier Roy 

Then for me, the main issue is to reconstruct a social bind from the local basis. From below. I don’t think that politics are able now to reconstruct the society on the political social contract. I think it’s not, it doesn’t work anymore. And I see many endeavors in many countries in different ways, from different horizons, people trying to reconstruct a social bind through social action. The movement in France, which was called the Yellow Vests, Gilets Jaunes, it was a protest against globalization. It was called by their opponents, fascist, rightist. That’s not true. That was simply people who feel, who feel that the society, the social link, is networking, and they were trying to reconstruct, at the local level, the village, the neighborhoods, etc., some sort of social bind. I see that also through some religious communities. In Italy, for instance, Sant’Egidio or Comunione e Liberazione, they are trying also to reestablish at the local level, a social bind, not by putting boundaries to their identity communities – they reject the concept of identity communities now. So, we have to give up this concept of identity, because in an identity community, you are confronted only with people like you. So, it’s not a social bind. You have to recreate a social bind with people who are not like you. And under different forms, on the left, on the right, on the secular side, on the religious side, I see that there is a demand for that, and there are people who try to do their best to work at the local level to reconstruct some sort of social bind between people.

John Torpey 

Interesting. Big job. Important task, but not an easy one. So, it’s been a fascinating conversation, but that’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Olivier Roy of the European University Institute for sharing his insights about contemporary identity politics and culture. Remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on SoundCloud, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I want to thank Claire Centofanti for her technical assistance, as well as to acknowledge Duncan MacKay for sharing his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying thanks for joining us, and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.