Oliver Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, says “ Our world is flattened as linguistic diversity is replaced by Basic English, expression by emoticons, culture  by identity-markers”. Roy draws on his long experience in both academia and public life, but with provocativeness  and tackles the issue of the culture wars explaining today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values, illuminating, if home is a place that you understand and where you feel understood, we are today living inn a homeless world. The cosmopolitan’s utopia in which one feels at home everywhere has been supplanted by a fear that nobody is actually at home or native to their own land. Our only option is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level. According to Roy during the expansion of Christianity or Islam, or during the Renaissance or Enlightenment – a progressive erosion of culture both as an anthropological reality as well as a national canon.

The individualist and Hedonist 1968 revolution ; neoliberal financial globalisation, the internet, and the melting away of physical borders after the cold war that has spurred the movement of peoples and deterritorialisation.

For Roy national culture is like native language which you speak it before you learn the grammar. It is those self-evident truths which we share without knowing it. Now, this shared culture is vanishing, while artistic high culture is either a waste of time or one hobby among many.

Roy argues the attempt to conceptualise values above and beyond culture resulting in aggressive normatively, everybody should explicitly know what is the proper behaviour in any given situation, as deviation is not tolerated.

Roy sees the globalisation as dewesternisation of the world. The West has rented its culture for global use, and it cannot live in it any more. 

Roy has managed to write a book on identity politics that neither condemns nor embraces, but is instead a nuanced cultural dissection of origins and its contradictions. You can no longer be progressive in the context of your time; you are now either progressive or reactionary for all times. Everyone is conceived as a contemporary. Roys writes “ The register of emotions is thus reduced to a collection of tokens. The young act like the last generation, judges on the secularised version of Judgement Day. Culture was once our traditional weapon against human morality and we have every reason to fear and Roy has the last word “ deculturation ends with dehumanisation”.

The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms by Oliver Roy, Translated by Cynthia Schoch  and Trista Selous, Hurst £20, 232 pages.