Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
* Book: The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics And The Empire of Norms,” Olivier Roy
Discussion
Nathan Gardels:
"Olivier Roy traces the origins of today’s pushback in the West to the ethos of the “desiring individual” that arose with the youth rebellion of the 1960s. That ethos, which sought liberation from the staid shackles of historically inherited and dominant traditions, coursed through all aspects of society over its long march through established norms.
More than transforming what could once still be called “mainstream culture,” argues Roy, what we have witnessed instead is wholesale “deculturation.”
Generalized norms considered “self-evident” and implicitly understood, he posits, have virtually vanished with the erosion of social authority deemed to be oppressive. In that decontextualized vacuum, the behavioral codes of diverse, often “self-chosen,” identities are explicitly and aggressively asserted in a bid for recognition. In short, norms without normality.
The cultural wars we are experiencing today, as Alexandre Lefebvre observed recently in Noema, are precisely a battle over who gets to normalize the norms for the whole of society."