How Our Culture Is Being Eroded

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This week I was in Munich to run a workshop on productive disagreement for a multinational company. My favourite part of overseas engagements is often the dinner with clients the night before. On this trip we ate at a restaurant serving Bavarian specialities brought to us by men in lederhosen. At my table was a group that included Germans, Swiss and Indians. Inevitably, the talk was of cultural difference.

I like these conversations. I relish, in particular, hearing Indians talk about India – the delight they take in their country’s awesome variety and extremity, and in the rich comedy of its social life. One of our companions, who lives in a Bangalore apartment block, was reflecting on the fluid boundary between public and private lives in India. He recalled that a neighbour to whom he and his wife had said hello a few times, knocked on their door one day. “I have to make a trip to the doctor,” she said “Can you take my baby?” She handed them a bawling one-year-old and made off.

On another occasion, a neighbour – again, one they barely knew – came round to talk about her marriage problems. Within a minute, she was on the sofa being served tea by our companion’s wife and mother, who offered sympathetic ears and told stories about their own family. Our Swiss companions were appalled. They strenuously avoided any remotely intimate contact with their neighbours while carrying out exhaustive research into their backgrounds on the internet.

‘Culture’ is an unavoidably imprecise and slippery word, sometimes used to mean creative work of some kind – art, film, music – and sometimes something (even) broader. Here I’m using it mostly in the sense of the habits of behaviour and thought that we unconsciously acquire from our society or community. Culture is everything you don’t have to think about (until you do).

Learning about other cultures, preferably directly and anecdotally rather than theoretically and dutifully, is revelatory. It’s a way of understanding your place in the world, and indeed yourself. It would be sad, then, if culture and therefore cultural difference is slowly disappearing from the face of the earth. But that’s the proposition of a new book by the French political scientist Olivier Roy, called The Crisis of Culture. Roy’s short book makes a grand and sweeping argument only tenuously supported by evidence (in that sense, it is, ironically, very French) but is stimulating nonetheless.

Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another – say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.

We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.

Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.

Professor Roy’s book isn’t an angry polemic, and while his tone is somewhat melancholic, The Crisis of Culture is not a tragic narrative. Rather than saying “This is bad!” he just says, “This is happening”. On that basis, I find it hard to disagree with him. Notwithstanding that there obviously are deep cultural differences in the world, as my opening anecdotes remind us, and that different countries are at different stages in this process, the overall direction of travel does seem to be as Roy says. A few related observations come to mind.

The return of Oasis is a reminder that they were probably the last truly national pop group. No album since has dominated Britain in the way that Morning Glory did, and none is likely to again. But it’s not just that. They were one of the last local bands too, in the sense that their music and personality were very particular to where they were from. Although they drew on a few different influences, they were unmistakably shaped by Mancunian culture, just as the Arctic Monkey couldn’t have come from anywhere but Sheffield. We don’t really have these local-national groups, or local scenes anymore – beat groups from Liverpool, trip-hop artists from Bristol. Social media uproots all artists, turning them into online content machines who could be from anywhere.

Increasingly, artists could come from any moment in history, too – or at least, any time in the last fifty years. I’m hardly the first to note that while we’re living through an era of technological change, it’s been a long time since we’ve had cultural sea-changes like the ones that swept through the 1920s, 1960s, or 1980s. If a time traveller walked down a busy London street in 1955, then walked down the same street in 1975, she’d be flabbergasted by the difference. Perform the same exercise in 2004 versus today and while you might be curious as to why everyone is staring at a device in their hand, it would feel like the same street.

Or, as Chuck Klosterman says, take a clip from a film from 1965 and one in 1980 and you’d immediately notice the difference, not just in technological quality but in aesthetics; do the same for clips from 2005 and 2020 and you’d have a harder time distinguishing the two. (In fact I recently watched the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice and it might easily have been made today.) Barring differences in linguistic usage and certain social norms, the same is true of other forms; it is hard to say what is distinctive about the Booker shortlist of 2024 compared to 2004.

Artists of all kinds, able to access everything anyone has ever made, have become curators, mixing and matching styles of the past rather than inventing the future. The late cultural critic Mark Fisher argued that we’ve lost the ability to articulate the present because there is no ‘present’, in a thick sense, anymore, just the afterglow of cultural history.

Why is this? I’d say the cultural earthquakes of the past were driven by the tectonic forces Roy identifies, and by the accompanying clash and blending of distinct, organically evolved sub-cultures – perhaps the greatest example being the twentieth century infusion of African-American culture into, first white American culture, and then white European culture. In the twenty-first century our societies are more diverse, mixed, ‘multi-cultural’, and, in most ways, egalitarian than ever before. But as a consequence there are fewer remaining distinct cultural genotypes available for new combination.

This leaves the question of whether the decline of culture, in the sense we’ve been discussing, is to be mourned. Instinctively, I feel it is. My most ‘conservative’ beliefs stem from this feeling. At the margin, I tend to favour traditions, although it’s not necessarily the content of a tradition that matters to me but the fact it exists at all. For instance, when I wrote a defence of constitutional monarchy a few years back I argued for it on rational grounds: countries with constitutional monarchies tend to be more stable, equal and prosperous. But in truth, what I like about having a Royal Family and all that surrounds it is that, as Nick Cave says, it’s fantastically weird and strange, and unique to our country.

You’d never design such a system. It’s not rational or efficient, but too much of modernity is designed – successfully or otherwise – to be rational and efficient; the result is often bland homogeneity. My rule of thumb is that unless I’m convinced an evolved cultural tradition is doing harm, I want to keep it, because it makes the world more interesting and more various. When people describe the monarchy, or all the pomp and rigmarole around parliament, as anachronistic, I think well, yes, that’s the point.

More generally, culture provides a depth and richness of meaning to people’s lives which can’t be replicated by technology or by our new norms and labels. So yes, I am sad about this. On the other hand, some cultural traditions deserve to be abolished. And while cultural differences are sources of insight, pleasure and creativity, they can also form barriers between people and hindrances to aspiration. Strong, distinct cultures often evolve out of exclusion and oppression; if there are fewer of them, that might be because there is less injustice.

On a podcast some years ago – I wish I could remember which one – I heard a middle-aged African-American father wax nostalgically about the working-class black barbershop he used to visit as a kid in the 1960s. He remembered the jokes, the discussions of politics, the smells and the music and the rhythms of talk, and above all the feeling that this was his place, for his people. He reflected on the fact that his son, now at university and on the way to a professional career, didn’t have that experience, and wasn’t particularly interested in it. The father felt deeply ambivalent about this. On the one hand, his son wouldn’t have that precious sense of belonging to a very particular culture; on the other, his son’s horizons were much wider than his had been; he was more free.

Culture creates, protects, and constrains. If Professor Roy is right and it is passing away, perhaps we should mourn the loss while celebrating the progress we’ve made.

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