Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think.
Ranging from our grounded space shuttles to our Silicon Valley villains, from our blandly recycled film and television—a new Star Wars saga, another Star Trek series, the fifth Terminator sequel—to the escapism we’re furiously chasing through drug use and virtual reality, Ross Douthat argues that many of today’s discontents and derangements reflect a sense of futility and disappointment—a feeling that the future was not what was promised, that the frontiers have all been closed, and that the paths forward lead only to the grave.
In this environment we fear catastrophe, but in a certain way we also pine for it—because the alternative is to accept that we are permanently decadent: aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer confident in the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we wait for some saving innovation or revelations, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens.
In an interview about the book, Douthat gives his definition:
Basically, a decadent society manifests forms of economic stagnation, institutional sclerosis, and cultural repetition at a high stage of wealth and technological proficiency and civilizational development. So it’s a society that, by definition, has succeeded in a lot of ways and may actually give the appearance of great energy.
Today’s Hollywood keeps making the same movies over and over and over. The same can be said of our artists and our thinkers, repeating the same ideas without getting anywhere. We landed on the moon, but then lost interest in space travel. Our politics, both from the right and the left, gets people excited, but it is mainly “performative,” a matter of identity and virtue-signaling, while getting hardly anything done. Unlike the countercultural 1960s or the Reaganite 1980s, or pretty much any decade in our history, there is no sense that we are going somewhere. To be sure, we live in a time of transformative technology, but it has not transformed us as much as we expected and it has channeled our interests into virtual reality, as opposed to actual reality.
Douthat has chapters on stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition. He makes clear that he is not using “decadence” in its dictionary definition of self-indulgence, luxury, and excessive pursuit of pleasure, with connotations of sexual depravity. He has much to say about economics, politics, and the “closing of the frontier,” applying Frederick Turner’s thesis about what happened to America when the continent was settled to the dashed hopes upon the realization that space travel is not really feasible.
But other treatments of decadent societies–such as that of the Roman Empire and the Weimar Republic–did bring up the Roman orgies and the blossoming of homosexuality in the Weimar Republic.
“Sterility” is a hallmark of decadence in Douthat’s book, but it is used here as a metaphor for lifelessness. But the word carries the sexual association. “Sterility” literally refers to the inability to have children. In decadent societies, sex is made sterile. People are mad for sex, but they want sex without any connection to conceiving children. Douthat doesn’t say much about homosexuality or transgenderism, but he does discuss the decline of the birthrate in the West, pornography, and abortion.
Douthat says that decadent societies can last a long time, as the Roman Empire did. But, I would add, the Weimar Republic, with its cynicism about democracy, its uncontrolled inflation, and its transvestite cabarets proved to be a petri dish for Nazism, which was both a symptom of decadence and a reaction against it. Decadence is dangerous.
What can deliver us from the hopelessness and the cultural deadend of decadence? Douthat closes his book with three chapters on catastrophe, renaissance, and providence. A catastrophe–I am thinking of what might happen if Putin nukes America–can lead to a cultural reset. So can a renaissance, a rebirth, of cultural ideals. But, to his credit, Douthat, a Catholic Christian, puts most of his hope on God.
In his last chapter, he notes that “no civilization–not ours, not any–has thrived without a confidence that there was more to the human story than just the material world as we understand it” [his italics]. Citing G. K. Chesterton, Douthat observes that Rome’s decadence demonstrated the need for a Messiah–that God in His providence allowed human human civilization to hit a peak of wealth and political efficiency and culture, and then to experience a fallen world’s limitations at precisely the moment when He sent His son to save that world from itself.”
He concludes, “if this were the age when some divine intervention happened, whether long prophesied or completely unforeseen, there would be, in hindsight, a case that we should have seen it coming.”
Image by Monsterkoi from Pixabay
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