In my second semester of law school, just after the upheavals of 2020, I studied criminal law under a visiting professor whose progressive bona fides were stellar. She was a full-on prison abolitionist who had imbibed and presented for discussion every critical feminist and race theory imaginable. But she was a good teacher and maintained some degree of subtlety that passed for ideological neutrality in an institution where 90 percent of students and faculty agreed with her.
That subtlety transformed from virtue to vice, at least in my classmates’ eyes, when we turned to the subject of the law of rape. Many law schools have stopped teaching the subject altogether because, to borrow a phrase popular among administrators, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It’s uncomfortable at best and does not teach students any doctrines they couldn’t deduce from the study of other felonies. But seeking to give her class an appreciation for the historical development of the law—which the law of rape does indeed illustrate particularly well—my professor taught us that once upon a time forcible sex was only considered rape if the woman fought back. Even then, it was far from a sure thing that rape would be treated as a serious crime.
One classmate raised her Zoom hand and accused our professor of failing to condemn legal doctrines of the past. “Did… did you think I thought it was OK to let men get away with rape?” asked the professor. “No,” responded my classmate, “but we need to clearly name the violence”—this is the phrase that has stuck with me ever since—”in what you’re describing. You didn’t name the violence.” A silent chorus of clapping and praising emojis popped up on screen in support.
It’s tempting to chalk up this bit of insolence to immaturity. Children need principles stated clearly and repeatedly to know they still apply. Or perhaps this is a vulgar example of the overarching progressive philosophy that words construct reality; if people ever mention rape without condemning it, it might become socially acceptable once again.
Philosopher Olivier Roy offers another possibility in his thought-provoking The Crisis of Culture, a short but wide-ranging examination of what happens when old systems of norms disappear. Without a culture to provide the context and expectations for our interactions and judgments, everything needs to be stated explicitly, over and over again, to remain operative. “Because nothing is culturally self-evident anymore,” Roy writes, “we can no longer take anything for granted.”
That’s a bit vague, which may give you a sense of what reading this work of French philosophy is like. But examples like my anecdote from 1L illustrate it well. When we no longer share widespread cultural understandings, especially normative judgments (“rape is wrong”) and guidance (“sexual encounters should proceed within relationships to guard against exploitation”), nothing can be left to chance or the unsaid. Nothing is implicit, which is why universities make students undergo training about how to have one-night stands, and those trainings include the instruction, echoed in “affirmative consent” laws, to receive an unambiguous “yes” before each stage of the encounter. Our interactions, sexual or platonic, become rote and mechanized. As Roy points out, romance actually begins to imitate pornography by sticking to a script and treating each element of sex as a distinct act within the performance.
I have put the analytical cart ahead of the horse here, of course. What happened to culture? More accurately, what happened to our culture, the one that provided the structure for managing expectations and interactions? Which culture is Roy, a Frenchman serving as a professor in Italy whose work is informed deeply by American current events, referring to?
Roy’s theory goes something like this: In the age of the internet, and the global-liberal marketplace of goods, ideas, and cultural touchstones it ushered in, local cultures are subsumed into a global culture with its own lingo, assumptions, and norms. That culture may be dominated by American exports—more precisely the contributions of American tastemakers—but we are not hegemons. Young people who grow up on the Web inherit an admixture of cultural inputs with no authority capable or qualified to tell them how to make sense of it all. Culture—implicit understandings of what is and what ought to be, shared by members of a community—has globalized, commingled, and diluted to the point of disappearance. All culture, in the traditional sense, is gone.
One mundane way this manifests is in the difficulty of discerning tone and intention from contemporary communications. Enter emoji, the surefire way to take all guesswork out of interpersonal interactions. Roy describes how European bureaucrats attempt to deal with the problem of language decoupled from culture: “Emotion is allowed, of course, but it must be immediately understood by addressees, wherever they may come from, so it is ‘sourced’ from a list that, while remaining open, is pre-prepared.” Joking is “banned,” therefore, and “emotions have to be expressed explicitly using an emoji with a pre-defined meaning.” The parallels to sex—and the ominously dehumanized world both manifestations of a post-culture world portend—are clear.
Another manifestation, and the one with which Roy is primarily concerned, is the ascendancy of identity politics. “Political life requires a shared vision of the issues facing the polis, the life of the city or nation, even if it means people kill each other to gain power there,” he writes. “But a shared political culture no longer exists because the political space is no longer invested with the desire of citizens.” More accurately, the political sphere is devoid of citizens altogether. The individuals and interest groups that would have once channeled their energy into persuading their fellow citizens now see themselves not as participants in the political sphere but combatants in the global intersectional struggle.
Credit to Roy for interrogating intersectionality’s original meaning: “not the conjunction of struggles of oppressed groups,” as so often described, “but the presence in a single person of many different predicates taken from different categories (race, class, gender).” Freed (or distracted) from local or national ways of channeling our interests, we tend to reduce ourselves to “explicit and elusive” facts about ourselves, like our race or gender, and advocate for the interests of imaginary shared groups comprising others claiming the same identity. Identity politics, on Roy’s understanding, is not politics at all because “identity … is never negotiable. And you cannot do politics when some elements are non-negotiable.” Identitarians rant and rave with symbolic fervor, but fail to attend to traditional territorial politics, the realm of shared culture and thus the possibility of progress. Returning to those traditional forms of cooperation, called citizenship, is the antidote.
In both these case studies it is possible that Roy has overlooked the importance of our global culture’s substance. Learning norms from the internet not only acculturates young people to a global culture that pulls them away from the world of time and space, but exposes them disproportionately to people who spend the most time on it. “Keyboard warriors” use the power of repetition to turn concepts into memes and conspiracy theories into accepted wisdom.
One set of ideas that has benefited from being memed into popularity is the one that preys on empathy to produce an unworkable social philosophy: When society treats a minority behavior or characteristic as abnormal, it is incumbent upon society to change and cater to that minority. That is the principle behind the “impact over intent” standard now widely employed to justify, for instance, punishing a professor who said a word in Chinese that sounds like a racial slur in English. Whether the man meant any harm is immaterial if students felt harmed. So too must the cultural context for emotion in expression take a backseat to concerns about how it may be received, leaving us with sterile emoji-speak. And so too must society’s “normies” cater to each new identity category, with no need for the members of those identity-based groups to bargain through political engagement.
Frankly, it is hard to get a firm grasp on whether this critique would change Roy’s conclusion—I suspect it would not—because his writing can be opaque to the point of impenetrability. Perhaps the translation does not quite work, or perhaps Roy’s ideas cannot be understood fully outside the cultural context of Europe and the French language. (Well-played, Roy. Well-played.) For now I will say only that Roy clearly belongs to the school of philosophers whose ideas are provocative and insightful, but whose grand theories do not clearly hang together, in part because they are not written accessibly.
Nevertheless, for those seeking a challenging appraisal of the simultaneous rise of identity politics, globalism, and ideological polarization, The Crisis of Culture has much to offer. At the very least Roy provides a useful defense of maintaining a political culture and its attendant, if unspoken, norms. Something surely has gone wrong when we need to “name the violence” each time we encounter it.
The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
by Olivier Roy
Oxford University Press, 232 pp., $29.95
Tal Fortgang is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
