Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hey, Robin.

Robin:

Today, we're gonna talk about the book, The Crisis of Culture by Olivier Roy.

Agnes:

I would like to begin by stating that I feel emotional about this book

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

My listeners. This book is so annoying, and I kind of hated it. And at first, I was like, I'll just read five pages, you know? And then I was like, I'll just read another three pages. And then I was kinda going page by page for a while. It doesn't really argue. It's kind of a rant. There's a lot of, like, half warmed over French theorists lurking in the background. It kinda feels like he had to get all of them in there somewhere. You know, there's Bordeaux. There's Lacan. There's Foucault. Sometimes named, sometimes not named. It's just spewing references to everything, but a lot of references to, like, French cultural events nobody cares about. It's just such an annoying book, and the problem is the thing that's most annoying of all is I think it might have, like, a really important thesis that's true. So that's like and I don't want the thesis to be true. So there Okay. So I'm just, like, putting my cards on the table that I feel emotional about this book. Okay.

Robin:

I I agree with you that it was frustrating to read, but I've taken this as one example of many that I've been pondering, why is culture talk so weird?

Agnes:

Not that culture talk sounds like this book.

Robin:

Right. But it's a lot of it is still weird from the point of view of a STEM person.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

So this is weird in in the way that a STEM work person might find it weird, in the sense that it's not sort of being really clear and precise and logical.

Agnes:

Okay. But before we go so meta, maybe we should say what Yes. Claiming?

Robin:

I I I That's

Agnes:

where I wanna spend most of my time. Okay. Got it. So my understanding is that the the thesis of the book is that culture itself is undergoing a process of deculturation, which is to say we're like he doesn't put it this way, but you could think, okay. Culture was humanity's superpower. Like, look around you. Did any other animal ever achieve anything? Basically, no. No cities built by mice. No technology made by lions. Right? All the other animals are just abysmal failures. We've achieved all this amazing stuff, not, you know, only or exclusively because we have big brains. Yes. We do, so do some other animals. It's because we figured out how to work together in particular ways, and culture is a kind of general word for how we work together, for how groups of us get together and are able kind of cooperate in pretty, like, deep ways. And then we might he doesn't frame it in that historical terms, but I'm putting it that way to make it more dramatic. We won't be losing that. That might be ending. And then we will be entering a new post cultural human era era. So I'm Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you. I I also don't wanna say what are the what are his, like, arguments for that, but I just wanted to get the thesis of him before. But you can supplement the thesis, and then we'll talk about what the arguments are.

Robin:

I agree he's trying to say something in that direction. I think it's overblown, but real. So we previously talked about peasants and the Frenchman, And I actually think that's a similar process to what he's talking about here. So first, we took peasant cultures and merged them into a nation, and then we are taking national cultures and merging them into more of a world culture. And in each case, there's a similar fact that in the merging, initially, people are gonna be more aware of their differences from the so say within French, they're gonna be more aware of the other regions and how each region is different, And they're gonna be merging in sort of fundamental values and fundamental approaches to things, becoming Frenchmen, but still they're gonna be aware of their differences. They're gonna highlight and focus on those differences, but they're gonna become more shallow. Different pieces play, you know, people from different parts of France might have a little different accent, or they might have different clothes, or food, and, you know, toward the end, they will each look, feel identified with the part of France they came from, but they will no longer actually be that different. And I feel like Roy is talking about that same process now happening on larger scales, wherein we are merging into more shared cultures, and say even within France, immigrants, etcetera, are coming in and merging. And again, what we're seeing is that we're loot you know, each person is losing this rich integrated culture they had that was pretty intuitive and and pretty subconscious even, and they didn't have to think about it very explicitly, and they didn't have to invoke it very formally. It was just what everybody shared and did together. And then, as groups are merging, you have to be more explicit about the new norms because people don't know them, and they have to be simpler because, you know, people are trying to adjust to them brand new, but people are eager to hold on to their old identities. In some way, they want to have identities, and in fact, the concept of identity becomes more important, but it becomes more shallow. It's more a set of surface features that marks some sort of origin, but it less connotes deeper fundamental differences in norms and values. And he then sees that as the loss of culture, and it is the loss of deep integrated culture that was intuitive, and that you just grew up with, and you just understood by being in a place. What they call thick description in anthropology, what the anthropologists are trying to learn from each other, learn by going to somewhere, is this thick, integrated culture, and that's very hard to intuit and and communicate. And Roy is saying the same thing is happening, so he's lamenting the loss of that just intuitive thick culture and replacing it with these, on the one hand, surface markers of the place you came from and and that your identity, and also the more explicit, less deep, less, you know, integrated shared thing. And simultaneously, he's also losing the losing sorry, lamenting the loss of high culture, which is, I think, that something that didn't exist in the peasant world. And it was part of so there's a number of features that were created by national cultures that didn't really exist in the peasant cultures. High culture is one. Patriotism is another. And now we're losing those things as the new integrated world culture doesn't care as much for them and isn't so eager to push them. Anyway, that would be my summary of the parallel between peasants and Frenchmen and the change Roy is saying. So I I I do think there's there's a process that's real that's happening that he's describing there, and if he's the the first best person who has pointed to that, then it's good that we can talk about it with him. I agree that he's not always the best spokesperson or person to read about something, but he, of course, it seems that he doesn't like this, although he's kind of We

Agnes:

we we disagree in our reading. That is I think you can try to read between the lines and insert that attitude on his part, but I don't think he says it. I think what he's doing in the book is describing something, and you can posit an attitude on his behalf if you want. And I I think that's a fair guess about his attitude. That is I would agree with you that that's probably what he thinks, but it's certainly not that the book is an attempt to push a lamenting mode, in my opinion. It's a descript I I read it as descriptive. I guess I think let I wanna try to, you know first of all, I think you're right. Your set of claims are maybe the, I don't know, unimpeachable set of claims that he could have argued for, but what he actually claims is the thing I said, that is I think he thinks not only that I think he thinks culture is ending, not that it's being replaced by a thinner culture. He thinks that you thin it out to a certain point and it's not culturing. So you can maybe go from the peasant village culture to a more global culture, and you might even think that actually there's a kind of ideal size, maybe he thinks it's the nation state or something, such that certain kinds of collapsings of local culture is moved towards more culture because you can get high culture. But then at a certain point, if you keep going in that process, you get less culture. So it may be the the the the move towards sort of, like, increasing the size of the group, basically, first increases culture and then decreases it. He I he doesn't say that because he doesn't talk about the first part. But I think what he thinks is that what this globalization process does is that it erases implicit shared understandings, and it replaces them with codes and rules and subgroups that are superficial in the ways you described, that is subgroups that might have some we're the Harry Potter fans or whatever. Right? So they have some badge of distinction as being in the group. But importantly, unlike the thing where in, you know, the South Of France, they could still say, well, we're in this part of France, the subgroups are not geographic anymore. So the Harry Potter lovers might live in Japan or France or The United States, and they identify themselves with this subculture that is thin and that has no geographic manifestation. And I think he thinks of that as one of the last gasps of culture. It's like a very, you know, it's moving towards the not being culture at all. And it is produced by having sort of cultural artifacts that are he doesn't use this word, but they're sort of memeable in the sense that they are easily separated from their place of origins, and he highlights Japan as a country that is able to produce that, that is that is unusually able, perhaps because it has a very thick culture. It's known to have this is that the word for it? It's not very literal. It's the opposite of literal. That it produces for export these very separable cultural entities like manga or emojis. I didn't actually know those were Japanese, but I guess so. And and so we're producing these sort of almost not cultural cultural artifacts, and this is, from his point of view, the decay of culture. It'll just get, like, more and more like that. And I and I wanna flag the so codification, memeification, and literalness. So he thinks, like, we're living in we're living in autistic times. We're living in times when autistic people are gonna flourish because autistic people can't do culture, not real culture. They are not able to grasp implicit shared understandings, and and they want this literal code language. And so they're gonna you know, it's their their time has come.

Robin:

I agree that he is pointing these trends and and not thinking they're wonderful, clearly, very maybe somewhat lamenting them, but trying to be neutral. And I agree that he might be suggesting that this will just continue until this kind of implicit culture disappears, the thick implicit culture. But I would again point to the parallel of peasants into Frenchmen and say, at the beginning, surely, the idea of France was a very weak thing Mhmm. That couldn't have very much depth to it and had to have a lot of explicitness to it, because initially, there were just these peasant cultures, and French didn't exist at all. And then, as French became thicker, it had more parts to it, people became more familiar to it. Con- in contrast, each region would become thinner, and they would less have a thick set of associations, and more just have these surface appearances. And but eventually, when sort of the regions disappeared and there was just France, it was a thick thing.

Agnes:

Right. So there's a there's a thing he says over and over again. Again, he might I'm only trying to represent what he's saying. I'm not trying to say if it's right or wrong. So you're trying to give him the better view that's more reasonable, and I'm just saying I wanna get clear on what he's actually saying. I think he's actually saying it's just going away. And I think one way to see that he doesn't think that there is anything that could get thickened is that he constantly uses this phrase that I find pretty opaque. The Internet refers only to itself. The DSM statistical manual refers only to itself. Emojis refer only to themselves. It's a it's a confusing phrase, but I think and I and I don't think I fully understand what he means by it, but it's it's occurs throughout the book, and I think I I think it means something like this, that there's like there's like a code that takes on a life of its own and just doesn't have and doesn't have room for these thick meanings. So it's not like and his view. The emoji can never refer to anything but that emoji. So like, you know, angry emoji doesn't mean anger. It means angry emoji. And it doesn't have the ability to take on more meaning than that. And so unlike France, it it can't become thickened. I think that's his view, whether it's right or wrong.

Robin:

It might be, but that just can't be right. That is emojis can take on just as much associations as words, and used in combination words can be can connote thick elements of culture, but initially, when you're learning a language. So he talks about Globish, for example, the simplified version of English.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And that at, say, European Parliament, and in bureaucracy, they use this Globish, and in, you know, diplomatic context, Globish is used in order for people from around the world to speak to each other. And Globus has fewer associations, fewer metaphors, fewer, you know, idioms, etcetera, because it's able it needs to be something that many people can use to communicate with each other.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

But it seems like Globus could become just as complicated eventually in the future as English is. It just isn't initially. So there's nothing in Globus per se that means it couldn't become a much thicker, richer language.

Agnes:

So I think he thinks there is something in it per se, which is that people are actively avoiding they're actively simplifying in some way. So so that even if, say, you and I were both speaking Globish, but we, you know, we each of us might have a command of words beyond the 1,500 words that constitute Globish according to Roy, but we are consciously trying only to use those 1,500 words because we don't know how many words the other person knows, then that does seem like there's gonna be a kind of stabilizing force. I mean, here's a line. Okay? A line from towards the end of the book. He says, in a society that is fluid while also subject to meticulous normativity, how can culture develop? Okay. So the it's a rhetorical question. I think the answer is supposed to be it can't. But I bet it's just a question. Right? But his thought is somehow that the the so a thing we haven't mentioned that he brings in towards the end is like norms and that we are we live in this very bureaucratized, regulated world. He talks a lot about sort of regulation of sexuality and that this I think he thinks that these of regulations are constantly proliferating in order to manage a sort of constantly changing world. But the presence of change and heavy regulation is going to prevent the sort of slow growth of culture as you you would sort of need you would need like people to be hanging out for a long time under similar circumstances and you would need there to be not constant pruning of any kind of innovation or change. Right? But in a very normativized environment where if you said if you do something differently, you're gonna get sanctioned, where also things are changing really fast, I think his thought is you can't get that taken.

Robin:

I'm happy to accept that as a description of his claim, but I just wanna say it's wrong.

Agnes:

Okay. Well well, part of it is I do wanna just, like, get clear on what he's saying, and then I think there's something right about what he's saying and and then I'm not so clear about how far he's right. And, like, I guess I think one thing we might think is we are currently experiencing deculturation. That is a move away from culture itself, which perhaps was also happening when the French peasant groups got unified. But that perhaps culture will be reborn or something, will will will stabilize again in some new shape. That's one possibility. And I think that I think he thinks that there are forces that push against it. That is that if we assume that things are gonna keep changing pretty fast and that we're gonna keep being very bureaucratic and regulatory, then that's going to inhibit the growth of culture.

Robin:

I I would bet that from the point of view of peasants in early France, they saw the new concept of France as relatively explicit in terms of rules and descriptions that were not implicit, and they saw this as a transition from implicit things they understood intuitively and locally to a world of explicit things because that's how and in fact, school has the big mechanism by which France culture was taught, school being very notably explicit, of course. And with law, law became more important. Explicit law became more important rather than ordinary peasant culture's, you know, norms and customs. And so you could have, at that time, seen that as the loss of culture, but, you know, eventually, the rest so it's basically one part of culture is emptying out, but another is filling in. So let let me describe elements of world culture that are in the background that I think he's just not noticing that are accumulating. Okay. So I've, you know, noticed that world regulation has become much more convergent, not because of explicit rules, but because of shared norms and values that the world is coming to share by having lots of world contact. So if you look at regulation of energy or nuclear power or airlines or banking or medical experiments or COVID recently or organ sales, you'll just see enormous worldwide convergence.

Agnes:

All of that is explicit.

Robin:

No. It's each place has explicit rules, but there is no explicit world rule about them. The the world is

Agnes:

Rules that exist are explicit. So he thinks it's essential to culture that it's implicit. The new you never say it.

Robin:

I'm saying there is something behind these rules are the same because of something else that isn't the rules. So say the value of democracy, the value of gender equality. I mean, many people talk about those explicitly, but it's not because of explicit rules that the world world is, you know, much less militaristic, much more, you know, into peace and trade, and again, gender, and even ethnic inequality, and rule of law. All of those things have become part of world culture, but it's not because of imposed explicit rules that those things are shared. It's that because of increasing contact around the world, the world is converging. And also, there is a lot of world literal culture in terms of songs and movies and things like that. Those are part of the mechanism by which the world is converging, and those aren't explicit rules. And so people around the world do know more, say, common songs, common stories, even common, you know, styles of dress, food, architecture, cars. You know, many cities around the world look a lot more similar now than they did century or two ago. It's because of this shared implicit culture. The culture of what your city looks like.

Agnes:

So one of the things that he constantly says in this book is that there currently is no dominant culture. There are only subcultures. And that if you look at what used to be thought of as the dominant culture, let's say it's gonna be like, you know, heterosexual, cisgender white men or something in The United States, that group feels agreed, then it feels like, no, we're a special interest. We're not the dominant culture. And that basically everyone feels they belong to some subculture and that's their that subculture or the set of subcultures they belong to is their identity and there is no dominant culture anymore. And maybe your thought here is, no, there is a dominant culture, but it's kind of world culture. It's not it's just not there at the level of the nation. And

Robin:

Right. So

Agnes:

that's why he doesn't

Robin:

I mean, even this habit of complaining about your subgroup being mistreated is a new world culture. That is, we all expect the world to take those sort of complaints seriously, and that's why we're framing our complaints in those terms, and that's why we're comparing our complaint to other groups like that complaints. That's a shared rural culture. There were many nations in the past that did not have a local culture like that, where most people thought of complaining about their region being mistreated, and how their region deserved more respect. That, you know, happened in some places, but not others. But now, the whole world has that shared view of how you should frame yourself. And so, like, one element of a shared culture is when there are subgroups, how exactly do you define a subgroup? What are the key features of their body? What should be their attitude toward a subgroup? How do subgroups project themselves to the larger world? How do they present themselves? That's actually elements of a culture. So I was thinking about how, if we think about this parallel between, you know, peasants into nations and then nations into this world, and he's focused on the last part of the transition, there are similarities, but I can also see differences. And then those can be places where, you know, Roy has more room to be talking about some new unique thing that didn't happen before because it isn't entirely parallel. So so, for example, you know, nations push high culture. That is, high culture didn't so much exist for peasants, and they just had their local culture, but they didn't focus on some high exemplars of it. But nations, in order to create national cultures, they made up a lot of traditions that didn't exist. So they actually just kind of made up a bunch of stuff, And they also made up or or took things and made them these high icons of culture of their nations, and had museums about them, and had them taught in schools, so as to emphasize and create a national culture, and to make people proud of it. And now the world is less though people are merging in a world culture, the world is less eager to announce and be proud of a world culture and declare that people should want their allegiance to be to this world culture as opposed to some alien world culture. We're less, you know, framing our world culture in terms of its contrast with others, and so we are less pushing it and asking people to celebrate the world culture. We are less, you know, teaching it more explicitly, and so we have less of a high culture of world culture. So that he's lamenting the loss of high culture, because he says explicitly, which I think is true. High culture was typically high national culture. Different nations had different high cultures, and they were taught in school in order to help people celebrate their nation.

Agnes:

I mean, he does address this issue of world culture. He discusses it. And and the when when he's talking about UNESCO. Right? So he's like, look. UNESCO has this, like, intangible cultural heritages, like how a network for on the job transmission of knowledge and identity in France, or building and use of expanded dugout boats in the Sumo region, camel rising, etcetera. Right? And he calls these folklorimes, like folklore memes. He says they're designed to circulate in a global space and which are therefore homogenized, calibrated, and sanitized because they're stripped of anything connoting class conflict, gender, or identity. And later on, he said he talks about, like, democracy, feminism, and the third thing that I can't remember as being these supposedly global ideals that are not actually shared. So that there's I I think he thinks of the global the world culture as a kind of fake culture, as, you know, so thinned out and ETLated and self referential that it can't count as a culture. And a way to think about that in terms of so when you you you you, you know, made this point about thick descriptions, it may be worth to say what that is for our readers who haven't read Ryle or Clifford Geertz. So Geertz makes this point, which he's taking from Ryle, that if you if you were to, you know, describe somebody winking just in terms of the eye muscles of their eye, you could as well be talking about their an eye twitch. That is the wink and the twitch are the same from the point of view of describing the eye muscles. And in fact, if there were so there's one guy whose eye is twitching. There's a second guy who's who's winking. There's a third guy, let's say, who's making fun of the second guy who's winking as a parody. Right? It would still be the same eye muscles. If you imagine the third guy early in the morning rehearsing the parody wink that he's gonna do of the second guy, that's still the same eye muscles. But what culture is is being able to draw these distinctions between have all these layers on the use of your eye muscles, and the more you move it down to just well, what we can say is there's a certain movement of eye muscles, I think that's the thinning out, and then at that point, he'll say, we can still have things in common, but they'll be so thin that they won't be culturing. And if you think about this progression of the twitch to the wink to the imitation of the wink to the practice of the imitation of the wink, you can sort of see the kind of, like, layers of implicit understanding that need to be in place in order to understand what's going on. For instance, to understand the rehearsal, you have to understand what's the rehearsal for, and then to understand that, you have to understand. Right? And the point is that as we shave away those things, we're shaving away culture, and what we're getting is people having stuff in common that isn't cultural.

Robin:

And I think, in fact, say, with democracy, we are making it thicker. So if you think about a century ago, say, the Soviet Union made a surface version of democracy where they just had everybody vote, and everybody voted for the party, and they said, see, we have democracy. And, you know, in a thin war concept of democracy, that counted as democracy. But over time, as we've thickened our concept of democracy shared worldwide, that's become laughably not democracy, and inadequately so. And so, as over time, this shared thing which starts out thin and, you know, has very little to it because that's how you have to start, same with how you started France, eventually it becomes thicker, and the same way even for rule of law. Initially, rule of law, the world said, oh, there must be a court that makes a decision, so for everything we do, there'll be a court that makes a decision. See, we've got rule of law. And over time, we said, no. There's other things you need in rule of law, and we've made thicker concepts of the rule of law. Now we will not just say it's rule of law if a judge makes a ruling. Maybe the evidence had to be presented, maybe some contrary evidence had to be allowed, maybe some stated rule had to be in the background that was applied. And over time, we are making the shared world culture thicker. I would say, in medical ethics, you know, we do this all where in the world, and you might think a shared concept of medical ethics would be allow a lot of variation as long as it sets some basic rule of a doctor approved or something. And maybe in the Nazi experiments, you'd say, oh, that was fine because the doctor approved. And now we say, no. No. No. We have a lot more thick concepts of what counts for appropriate medical experiments, and the world is accumulating thicker culture of these things.

Agnes:

But do you think it's plausible so let let's let's imagine, okay. Maybe we can rehabilitate culture at the global level, and we can thicken that at least somewhat.

Robin:

I'm saying it is being thickened. It and it's it's been happening for a century.

Agnes:

Right. But do you think let's let's say so he has he uses the word culture in two ways in this book. One is the normal way to use culture, which is for applies to all of these forms of implicit meaning. And the other is high culture, so, like, great works of literature or art, which he associates with nationalism or with nations, anyway. And do you think that it's plausible if we just take the claim about high culture, that it's getting deculturated or destroyed, do you think that's plausible?

Robin:

Well, it's more plausible because a key element of the peasants and the Frenchman thing was that not only did the various peasant communities merge into a shared concept of a Frenchman, then the Frenchman had a presentation to the world. And that was important. Each Frenchman was to be proud of being French, and to see what France had different from the world, and to assert that. And part of asserting that was to assert the high culture of France. To be proud of France was to be proud of the high culture of France, so that was a key function of the high culture, was for each Frenchman to identify with France via being proud of the Frenchman's high culture, and that was important, that that was different than other high culture. And now the world is less eager to present, to not only get you to merge and become a world citizen, but to be proud of being a world citizen in contrast to something else. And so we don't have the need for the world high culture as the thing you should be proud of to be proud of being a world citizen.

Agnes:

And

Robin:

I think that's why peasants into Frenchmen actually took less than a century, it seems like, in the book, peasants into Frenchmen, really.

Agnes:

Yes. Much less. Like

Robin:

And so the war merging the world's been taking longer than the merging of peasants into nations, and that seems to be because the world is just less eager to push it. There isn't a central world organization that is pushing the world identity. Peasants and Frenchmen happen because a lot of explicit policies from the center nation of France explicitly crushing local cultures, forcing them to merge, and forcing them to celebrate they they funded museums. They funded representations of French high culture in order to push the nation of France, and the world hasn't been doing that.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess we do have some you hint the UNESCO.

Robin:

Right. And that is kind of pathetic. Right?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

None of us look at UNESCO world heritage sites as the peak of world culture. That's just not something any of us do very much. There's not a classroom in college about UNESCO world culture. There are many classes in college that teach high culture, but those don't show up in them.

Agnes:

Right. Right. So, I mean, that is interesting. It's a very kind of reductive angle on high culture to associate it entirely with nations. And but it but but when I think about it, I have to admit that, you know, even the biggest fans of really any form of high culture think of it as being very significant information to know what country that author came from. Right? So it's like if you didn't know that Emile Zola was French and you thought he might be German or Greek or something. I think he was by origin Greek.

Robin:

Gives us a different view into Zwag's book that we talked about last time, where he's focused on all these people who have high culture, but are identified with these different nations, even using the national language, and he wants them to merge into more of a European Right. Concept.

Agnes:

He he wants he wants I mean, yes. I think it sort of it sort of suggests that, like, Zweig is himself part of the beginning of the end of high culture. But what he wants, and we talked about this last time, is for somehow to have this, you know, pan European brotherhood of distinct nations where like, would have been horrified by Globish. He just thinks that all the French people should learn German and all the German people should learn French and they should all also learn Italian and just like him. And, like, there was a time when people were doing this, and people just learned tons of languages and spoke to each other, you know, when you were wherever you were, you spoke in their native language. That was a thing. And that does seem substantively different from people speaking to each other in globish. And so

Robin:

And the first supports the prestige of each nation via its high culture, and the second does not.

Agnes:

Right. Right. But it would sort of you know, people are often observing that although more and more novels are being written, they don't seem to be very good anymore. No one seems to be very as into them. Like, the age of the era of the novel feels like it's over now. If you say that, people are gonna always say, well, but people don't appreciate what's good in their own time. But I'm somewhat convinced by this argument, having read a fair amount of stuff that's written recently and having there's a few things that are very good, but they're very few very, very few considering how many are being produced.

Robin:

And it might be because there's less demand for high culture, and partly because there's less demand for high national culture as a way of asserting national pride.

Agnes:

So if you think about, like, someone like so Law was a popular writer. That is he was not high culture. He was not

Robin:

He has become high culture, and that's a thing we can do with old people is raise them high culture, whether they were seen at the time or not.

Agnes:

Right. So maybe there's stuff that is being written now that will become high culture later, I guess. So that's the question is, like, will there be high culture? Will we raise some stuff from the dregs of our culture? Will we decide that maybe Harry Potter will be high culture or

Robin:

something? I think we will, but that will require that the world require acquire this thick culture, and then it will have a status ranking, and then, you know, the high status stuff will be the high culture. But that'll take a while.

Agnes:

I think that there is, you know, like, the the the battles over the canon that it felt to me like they started in, like, the nineteen eighties or something. The literary canon, like, we reading books, you know, outside of, like, Europe and The UK or something America? Or are we reading books by women or that that that sort of dispute about, like, what are the great books? Maybe that was sort of part of the beginning of the global culture where if the canon now has to represent the whole world, then it is a problem that we don't have any books on it from Africa or something, because that's part of the world. And Right. But in effect, we want the canon to be global so that it can plausibly be a global canon, so that we can plausibly start to have a global

Robin:

Although, I doubt the French canon or German clanon needed equal representation for all the French or German cities. So they crushed the local peasant culture so thoroughly that nobody thought to complain that most of the French artists came from Paris, or most of the German artists came from Berlin, etcetera. That that was acceptable. But they just see inequality there. Whereas at the moment, you see it's unacceptable because we're still so folk we're still indulged with these local identities that were eventually just crushed in the case of nations. But, plausibly, we won't crush them nearly as fast because there's much less of a need to have a global identity in order to oppose the aliens. So I think that's just a key difference here. The rise of the nation state was fast and strong and enforced because nations saw this need to have a national identity in opposition to other nations to support for war in part, and the world just does not see that need or or have an actor willing and able to impose it. So we are converging, but without that extra strong energy for.

Agnes:

But on the other hand, it I think you're right that there's a bit less by way of enforcement, but there's a lot more by way of tools. That is, like Yeah.

Robin:

Right. So just world communication, travel, trade are just causing, but that's what put presence in the Frenchman too, of course. He talks about the trade and travel within France being a strong force that made

Agnes:

necessary conditions. Sure. But but, like, but there's just way, way more of that now. That is that's, you know, that's why so much of this book is about the Internet and the Internet as putting all these various cultures into contact and thereby starting to make it be the case that no culture is truly local anymore.

Robin:

And as much as if one was to lament this trend, once you see a big part of the force of it as this increased ease of trade, travel, and talk, it seems pretty impossible to reverse. Like, this is just gonna happen. We we could less celebrate it and think about it different ways, but come on. We are just not going to stop trading, traveling, and talking across the world, and those things aren't gonna get harder.

Agnes:

And, you know, this book was written before ChatGPT or before the author became aware of ChatGPT. And

Robin:

That's creating more convergence. Is

Agnes:

more. It would have been a great example for him in particular because I was discussing the thesis of this book with some people who, like last night, the night before last, and they were incredulous because they were like, but look at all these, like, complex subcultures that we have with their own lingo and their own symbolism of what an emoji means in that culture, that in that subculture, and that outsiders can't understand, like, some of this, you know, what was written on the bullets of the Charlie Kirk killer and all of that, like, how we can't understand it because we're outsiders of that culture. But, I took some of this stuff and put it in chat I'm like, chat GPT, explain, you know,

Robin:

cultural Right.

Agnes:

Orgies are. It just explains it all to me. Right? So that is if you're an outsider and you don't understand the symbolism, you just go to chat GPT and ask you to explain the symbolism. And because ChatGPT is getting access to the Internet periodically, that is is, you know, periodically Right. Retrained on new data, it is able to, in sentence, break into these supposedly walled gardens. And so that's that's one more kind of force that makes it impossible for a truly local culture to grow.

Robin:

So think of novels or music or movies as a world where there is variety, but then there's also some behind the scenes commonality. So you were talking about how maybe novels getting boring or something. And so we might ask, well, you know, in the past, novels could have variety of movies because they came from different actual nations, different cultures, and different attitudes, and that could give them a sharper distinctions. And now, as world culture converge, even say novel culture converges, we might say, well, there really aren't novels that represent the view against sexual equality, or the view against democracy, or the view for war. Pretty much all novel genres share those values now, Even a a western or a, you know, a romance or a science fiction story, they all share a lot of our culture's shared values, and so they don't actually feel that sharply different.

Agnes:

I think it's a little deeper than that. So I think, like, all high class novels nowadays seem to be autofiction, so they seem to be just like autobiography, basically, like the the the the the writer writing about themselves. And the they they they always the main characters always seem like they're people that the author endorses as good people. And that's just not true. You you read older literature, you even read something by Philip Roth or something, it's very clear that the author could, like, hate the main character, that that didn't stop him. In fact, that people I think novelists were particularly intrigued by Contemptible. I I'm reading this I just finished reading this novel called Boredom, Italian novel from 1960 by Moravia is that guy's last name. And I was just really struck even though it clearly had a bit of the autofictional element to it. Struck by the fact that the novelist was not trying to represent himself as the good guy at all, really. That that was not a task that he took himself to be tasked with. This so this is partly why novels are boring. Like, something like Sally Rooney, you know, all the main characters are always, beautiful and thin and misunderstood and secretly talented and poor, but, like, you know, eventually they're recognized for being it's such a cliche, but it's like they're all like that. Right. They're they're they're they're Right. So They're never, like, a bit despicable.

Robin:

So one of the most interesting points Roy makes, I thought, was that thick thick cultures didn't have to be as moralistic. That is, they could agree on many things, and then there could be moral questions of which they hadn't agreed on, and they wasn't as important that they agree on them. And that he says that with the loss of that and our shared culture becoming moralistic, there's just less tolerance for moral deviation. And I think that's what you're describing here.

Agnes:

So what? Could you explain? I didn't understand this. That is, I didn't understand the mechanism. Why were thick cultures able to be less moralistic?

Robin:

I don't know that he gave a mechanism.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And I don't know that I have a mechanism. Although I just had the simple idea that so think of well, think of just the idea of tolerance, the idea of multiculturalism, just the the liberal ideal. Right? In in the liberal ideal, people have written about it and said, well, we want to be able to disagree on a lot of different things, but we need to have a few core things that we agree on in order to enable liberalism. And those few core things tend to be values and norms. They aren't, you know, food and clothing and accents. They are values and norms. And so, the idea would then be that when you're starting out having a shared thing, the thing that you will most prioritize sharing is values and norms, and then you'll allow, maybe for a long time, differences in clothes and food and other things. And now, even today, we celebrate that we want to save those differences for longer because they're charming and say, they make us feel like we each have an identity and that we have a place. But we don't want differences in our fundamental values. That threatens our sense of being able to work with each other and being able to share a society.

Agnes:

Right. And so we might imagine like, here's a story that was long I don't know. I had in the back of my head, I don't know where I got it, but probably Jewish school. Which is that like, what makes you Jewish is that your mom is Jewish. If your mom is Jewish, you're Jewish. And so what you believe doesn't make you Jewish, and that's like, even quite religious people that I knew, they sort of saw what they believed is incidental. They saw that it was their sort of heritage and then their practices. Like, you know, do you light the candles on Shabbat? That sort of thing. Do you go to synagogue at least on the high holy days? And once you do all those things, you're kind of free to believe whatever you want. And so you actually have a lot of, like, cognitive freedom. Whereas if you're a Christian, you know, you can become a Christian kind of easily. You just have to adopt certain beliefs. But, like, one of them has gotta be you're not an atheist. Like, you can't be an atheist and be a Christian. And so Christians have less they they they might have only a few things you have to believe, like a small step, but you really gotta believe those things. You don't have freedom with respect to those things. And and you might think of liberalism as similarly, if you compare it to, you know, some peasant culture in France where you ask, okay. What is it that all of you believe or something like that? They might be like, well, you know, we they might disagree about all sorts of stuff. They don't have a sense of, like, here's the stuff. Here's a minimum little bit of stuff that we're all committed to. They feel bonded together because they came from the same place, they practice the same things, and there might be and this is clear in Zola, you know, there's often just some people in the village that are super weird and have all kinds of crazy weird beliefs, but they still belong for other reasons. And so once you are bonding on the grounds of ideas, you suddenly have ideas that you're not allowed to question. And that that shows up for the first time with liberalism, that there are ideas you're not allowed to question.

Robin:

So I think this transition Roy is pointing to is revealed in people who migrate or travel a lot. I because I think a thing that just happens generically with such people is, first, they start to notice that they are different. So if you're in a peasant village, if somebody asks you, what do you all have in common? It's just like, the sky is above us. I mean, it's like, they don't know how they differ from other people because they don't interact much with other people. They're just in their world. If they start to travel a lot, now they start to have a concept of how their group is different from outsiders. But the more they travel, the more they will assimilate into a larger cosmopolitan culture and world. But what they will retain longest is the markers that of clothes and accent or dress, food, you know, holidays, the things that are markers of their world that other people would see and notice. Those are the things they last longest with, but they are losing their distinctive values and norms, which were always kind of invisible to them anyway. And that's partly what's happening in our world. It's happened during peasants to Frenchmen, and it's happening in our world too. That is, we have these, you know, identity groups that don't actually mean much. You know? You have us

Agnes:

retaining those things. That's the thing. I I I I I like, if I just think about my own experience, it doesn't seem true. If I think about just clothing or something. I so I was two nights ago in Canada, I was having dinner with, you know, a group of people who all live in Canada, and the one guy's a lawyer, and the other person's academic, the other person's a kind of, like, event facilitator, people with different jobs. And I was like and I was telling them this thesis, and they were somewhat skeptical. And I was like, well, notice that, like, I showed up here in Canada, and, like, the four of us are pretty similar. And and you know what? I've met you. I've met you in Barcelona. I've met you in London. Like, this group of people, I feel like I've sat across from these people in many different countries, and they didn't dress differently.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

They didn't talk very differently. Even the superficial differences were not really there. They were just really not very different. It was it's like there's a kind of global elite, and it's just pretty similar in all of these different countries.

Robin:

Right. But I believe they're a bit embarrassed by that. And I think if you if you emphasize the point that we'll try to find some differences to highlight, but they aren't their heart isn't in it. So I've said the following for the last few years. When I meet global elites, they tell me the following two things, explicitly or implicitly. Right? So say somebody from Brazil or Nigeria, wherever it is. Right? If the subject of their place where they come from comes up, they will say that the place they come from is different somehow from the rest of the world, and that the world should value its differences. And they will defend the place they come from in terms of why the world should value it, and it being different. But if you look at them personally, they will basically implicitly say, look, I could fit into any global organization or event just fine. None of my differences will be a problem. They are themselves pretty interchangeable global elites, but I think it's important to each one of them that they officially identify with and celebrate the place they come from. And I think if we were to embarrass them too much, they might have some little bit of clothing or something that they would bring along to an event just to emphasize that they came from an origin. Even just a story at the table, maybe at one of these at these stories, people tell a story of the place they came from, and that gives them at least some sense of belonging.

Agnes:

Right. Yeah. Okay. So I I guess maybe there's some of that, but it's pretty weak.

Robin:

I agree that it's weak, but in the news it shows up as whenever any group of people decides to assert their Palestinian or Israeli or whatever identity, we are eager to hear about it, what are they doing, and how and then debate whether we're supporting or not them. We are very eager, and that's a way to get attention. The way to get attention for whatever issues you have is to connect it to an identity and assert that your identity is being mistreated. That's one of the most, you know, easy formulas for getting attention in the world, because we're hyper sensitive to the idea that we aren't celebrating and, you know, including enough different identities. But in fact, most elites don't lean into them and kinda merge into a global culture.

Agnes:

I wonder if so here's a funny thing that's happened to me in sort of promoting my book and doing events in my book is that I there's a question I get from at every event. And the weird thing about this question is it articulates a point of view, but the person who articulates it always alienates themselves from a point of view. So it's always like, what if someone were to say, and but never even though I get that every time, never do I get the person who thinks that it's true. And this and the what if someone were to say is something like, what if someone were to say that it's not really that important to do philosophy or be an intellectual, and like, I'm fine with my life, my unreflective, unphilosophical life going day by day, and I have enough wisdom, and I don't need to contemplate, and I don't need to talk to people or be refuted or refute other people, none of this is important to me, and I'm fine just the way I am. What would you say to that person? And then I sometimes I clarify, are you that like, do you think that? Is that how you feel about your life? To my end, I go, no. No. They don't feel that way. And no one in the audience has ever said that they felt that way. So I somehow there's this person who never shows up to my events, but who's always relevant at the event that we have to say something to them that they're not there.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

The person who's not an intellectual. So there's a kind of non intellectual who's never in the room, but who we always have to address. And I feel it's similar to this point about the the cult the othering, the culture that we're othering that is like, oh, you know, I'm from Spain or I'm from Brazil. Now nothing about me is very Spanish or Brazilian. I could be anywhere as a but but I still need to speak for the people who are not in the room, who are the regular people of this group, and we need to somehow feel like they're represented even though no one wants to identify as being one of those people because that would somehow be low class.

Robin:

Right. I think every culture has a set of iconic voices that we're supposed to think of who could speak and that we should be able to address even if they don't aren't very represented in the world. Like, you know, among medieval Christians, you could say, well, what would a saint say? Or what would Jesus say? Or something. And you would need an answer for that even if you never saw any real saints or Jesus around you.

Agnes:

Well, Jesus is a special case. Okay. That's you're not gonna get but, like, saints, I mean, you could ask a saint. I mean, you at least in principle, you could ask a saint. At least if they're sanctified before they die.

Robin:

But people might say, like, sure. You, you know, wanna be rich and comfortable, but a saint wouldn't need to be rich and cultural. Shouldn't we think of, you know, how a saint might feel about this issue or something?

Agnes:

I mean, I will just say that that's not an objection that I have gotten.

Robin:

That is No. But I'm just saying in the medieval world, whatever you're proposing, they might wanna, like, ask what a certain kind of view would see of it.

Agnes:

Right. But my but the person that's being brought that's, like, being brought into the room is supposedly a very common person. Almost everybody is supposed to be like this person. There's a very small, rarefied group of people that's like me and the person I'm talking to, or me and the crowd I'm talking to, but there's almost everybody else in the world who never shows up to any event, but we have to somehow get their point of view in, and their point of view is one that nobody wants to identify with, which is one doesn't really need to be very intellectual. And so, yeah, I guess you could say, what would a saint say? Or someone could say, what would a Russian person say to this book or something? This you mentioned Tolstoy. You know, I don't know. Maybe there have not been Russian people at my events. And but, like, no one feels the need to bring that in, but they feel the need to bring in this everyday man.

Robin:

Well, so he also talks about how more we have more explicit rules say around sex, And there's a sense in which more explicit rules are invoking these various hypothetical people who could have an objection to something. Even if intuitively, it doesn't seem like they're very common, it's very important to make sure all the possibilities are considered in consent, say.

Agnes:

Yes. Right. So one of his I think he thinks of consent as one of the areas where you can really bring out the the problem of the lack of shared understandings and the trying attempt to replace that with a contract. I was very struck by a regulation that was made by Lake Tahoe Community College where of yes means yes, where it says, together, we can make sure that when sex happens, it is a positive experience for everyone involved. What an incredible sentence, Blake. Like, is sex always a is anything that you always a positive experience? Is eating always a positive experience? Is going to be experience? But somehow, we're gonna be able to make sure that sex is always a positive experience, and that positive experience is based on consent. Look. If you consented, you better have a positive experience.

Robin:

Well, yeah.

Agnes:

So And so there's this thought. So I think that speaks to he doesn't make this point, but that speaks to the part of what he thinks is happening is the elimination of the subjective or the space of subjective experience. The kind of pub the the private is going away. Hannah Arendt said something like this, that the social is replacing both the public and the private, where it's like the question, like, but how did you personally feel about it might not be that important. It's like the question is did were all the rules followed? And if all the rules were followed, it's a positive experience.

Robin:

By definition, almost.

Agnes:

Right. And so here's a quote. Young people are taught not only what they must do, which is legitimate for a school, but crucially what sorry. Not only what they must not do, but crucially what they must do as though instinct had suddenly disappeared or rather as though two people no longer shared a culture, in other words, implicit and unspoken understandings. The code is there to manage nature when there is no longer a culture. So you can imagine if we took the attitude towards friendship that we take towards sex where it's like, when you're trying to become friends with someone, first, get consent about the prospect of be making being their friend. Be explicit about it. Say, I'm thinking about having you as my friend. Do you consent to my initiating this process? And then we can have a set rules of, like, stages of friendship, and you agree to each one, and right? And that's what we would do if we felt like each of these two people were aliens from different planets who had no clue about how to become friends with each other. But Roy's point is that is how we're treating sex. That's interesting, I think.

Robin:

Right. So when multiple cultures start to come together, there's a sense in which each other culture is pretty foreign to you, and in some sense, there's a vast space of possible creatures they could be, and then these general rules are ways to handle all the possibilities of what could happen if you interact with them. But it's not very well tuned to the actual distribution of the other creatures you can interact with. It's trying to be very general and robust, and that's a high cost to pay in a sense when you actually know a lot more about who they are and what they are because then you could take into account all the specifics. And so over time, I think as the world actually does converge, we will find these to be intolerably expensive generalities and, you know, have a thicker culture where we do, in fact, allow us to react to more details of what we know. And I think, in fact, we among cultural elites, we do mostly know, and these general rules are more of a vestige of an earlier time when there just was more uncertainty because you just didn't know as much about the other people you're enacting with in a culture of you know, in a world of different cultures merging together.

Agnes:

We should probably stop, but do you have any final thoughts?

Robin:

No. But I guess the book was frustrating to both of us, but it seems like we did find insight in the book, and we have to grudgingly admit that it was a book worth writing and reading.

Agnes:

I concur.

Robin:

Alright. Stop for now.