Toward a Hopeful Decadence

Read amid the current coronavirus crisis, The Decadent Society seems like a prophecy coming to pass. Fifty-plus days into the quarantine life, Americans—citizens of the richest, most developed democracy in the world—are witnessing the fabric of their social support structures unravel, trust in national leadership collapse, the economy crash, and the coronavirus fatality rate in the U.S. climb towards 90 thousand dead. Given its February 2020 publication as rumors of a national pandemic-induced crisis were beginning to materialize, Douthat’s central thesis seems both timely and prescient: that the prosperous “city on a hill” of the United States has become stagnant, sterile, sclerotic, and repetitive—and entered into a period of “civilizational languor” that is already failing in the present era.

What does that mean for us, the “decadent society” of his analysis? Douthat spends much of his opening matter describing why he uses that particular word. For him, decadence “is used promiscuously, but rarely precisely”—a word that sums up multiplicities of lowbrow and highbrow meanings: simplified and popularly conceived images of cocaine-fueled orgies and “decadent” chocolate cake, as well as the more academically inclined social theories of “overripe aestheticism” and moral despondency. 

This isn’t a new idea. It seems to reappear every few years online when partisan politics reach a fever pitch and deadlock into counterproductivity, and the comparison of the United States to the flagging Roman Empire has come to be such a hackneyed part of it that each new iteration of it seems overdone and repetitive. The last book-length attempt to draw this comparison was Gore Vidal’s 2002 Decline and Fall of the American Empire, which ham-fistedly decried the latter-day failure of Republican economic, foreign, and domestic policies over six essays. The problem with such a metaphor is that, while it’s an interesting enough comparison, it doesn’t really offer solutions, only cynicism. Decadence calls to mind what W. H. Auden called “the endless autumn” of Rome that “managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope”—a problem that The Decadent Society maintains is the inheritance of our age and the central crisis of our generation.

Were it to stop there, Douthat’s book would be yet another uninspired (though at least colorful) screed joining the ranks of other attempts to recalibrate the same tired comparison. But what makes The Decadent Society so different from the previous, less-successful iterations of this trope is that it does not presuppose collapse as an invariable outcome. Douthat stakes out firm middle ground, borrowing heavily from the work of the venerable French-American cultural historian Jacques Barzun, who uses decadent as a “technical label” signifying a successful society that, despite its energy, talent, or prosperity, cannot advance. To Barzun (and Douthat), decadent societies do not lack these things. Instead, the “falling off” is more like a plateauing of a society’s progress. Societies periodically experience eras of decadence that they can emerge from, and it is only the passage of time that reveals that declines in progress need not necessitate catastrophic implosion. Reassessing decadence in these terms allows us to understand how long the period might last and whether, truly, “a decadent era could give way instead to a recovery of growth and creativity and purpose,” and not the apocalypse of earlier tellings. It is the possibility of this optimism that makes Douthat’s take on an old framework truly compelling and worthwhile reading.

In many ways, the premise of the book is a classic Douthat argument, since it fits into the pattern of his other works: an elevator-pitch paradox of a thesis that is simple enough to toss around at a party, but explodes into fractal-like complexities when placed under the microscope. Writers keep returning to the America-as-Rome metaphor because it keeps producing new material; generation after generation, we are evermore exhibiting symptoms of our own imminent implosion, and commentators love to play prophet. In this, Douthat is an exceptional organizer—his “Four Horsemen” of decadence: Stagnation, Sterility, Sclerosis, and Repetition. This organization allows him to examine seemingly disparate events as exemplars of larger social trends. Once illustrated, they seem difficult to ignore as manifestations of his central argument. 

Douthat’s comparison is strongest in the chapters where he uses statistics. “Sterility” is alarming precisely because the demographic trends are so new; we live in an epoch without precedent—one in which the populations are larger, longer-lived, more dominant, and more destructive than any other species in our planet’s history. Taken alongside our own sociological mores—widespread birth control, climate change, and growing violence—it is difficult to predict how the mixture will bear out. 

A number of these are subjective examples, but they are compelling when taken together. Douthat claims that his “diagnosis of our condition is a journalist’s,” which is to say, one of impressions and interpretation. In “Stagnation,” he claims that technology has not “substantially” advanced since the Space Race, noting that a time-traveler who visited a person’s living room in 2000 versus one who visited in 2020 would note no real exceptional differences beyond changes in design. Medical advancement, he says, has also seemed to stall, with “the miracles […] happening for extreme and marginal cases more often than the masses.” Pharmaceutical research in new areas has dropped substantially in favor of more reliably profitable areas, creating “feedback loops where there is less money for research and there are fewer breakthroughs to boost productivity and wealth.” The result is the stagnation of American innovation across all fields: 

We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies. We used to go to the moon; now we make movies about space—amazing movies with completely convincing special effects—in which small fortunes are spent to make it seem like we’ve left earth behind. 

Instead of innovation, we have refinement; instead of progress, we’ve settled for comfortable capitalism. In that respect, whether or not the “refinement” of existing ideas doesn’t count as innovation is purely subjective; the author and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery observed that “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.” This is a pretty broad brush to paint with (especially considering how people now walk around with a computer in their pocket that outdoes anything on the space shuttles of yesteryear), but if taken with other trends, it makes for a convincing case. 

But compelling as Douthat’s interpretation of the malady may be, the diagnosis is old hat. Where he gets creative is in reinterpreting decadence as a semi-desirable state of affairs. Our present state, he says, is “as wealthy and healthy and long-lived as any society in human history, with many cruelties removed, various inequalities substantially reduced, the hand of tyranny lighter on most people than in many prior epochs, and the chances of horrifying tragedy diminished.” Given the range of alternatives, a “sustainable decadence” of the status quo, with a whole host of caveats, is more desirable than any of the upsets that might be caused by factors entirely out of our control.” The most likely candidate to end the current epoch, he notes, “isn’t fiscal or political but climatological.” Rising global temperatures, agricultural failures, demographic shifts, and surging migration face us. All will arrive in the context of power structures centered on stagnant political forms frozen by polarization. Each could shift the balance of global power in unforeseen ways and each makes survival an open question. In his typical tongue-in-cheek way, Douthat notes we probably have no real control over those trends either: we might mitigate the political, social, and economic factors by some great cooperative global miracle, only to find the paradigm shift out of our hands. He quips: “Were the dinosaurs decadent? Alas, their books have not survived.” 

But rather than leave us with a meteor strike or the sacking of the District of Columbia, Douthat’s projections are open to reframing the end of decadence in an almost historiographical way. If the great temptation of a decadent society is to “regard oneself as the last in a series,” and so lose momentum, then the solution is to contextualize the present within the future continuity of history—and look to beyond the present age to the inheritors of our “civilization.” In many ways, this is a spiritual return to the tired metaphor of the Roman Empire. Long after the “fall” of Rome in 476, the “Eastern” Empire preserved the elements, if not the spirit of that civilization—with its Greek-speaking citizens still regarding themselves as Romans. The inheritors of modernity may look likewise on us, and yet might look unfamiliar to us as “ancients.”

But all that is speculation. At its core, The Decadent Society seems less a diagnosis of the failures of modernity and more a rallying cry to the future—a criticism of our lack of imagination. Douthat begins with the moon landing and “ends with the stars”—hoping for (“predicting” seems too prescriptive here) for a renaissance that will inspire a positive feedback loop of visionary revival and scientific inquiry, of cooperative effort and genuine political progress. Why haven’t we stopped to look around and ask ourselves why the “implausibly utopian” future has not arrived? Why aren’t we working the 15-hour workweek predicted by John Maynard Keynes once technology has relieved us of the burden of working? Why haven’t we made real progress in space travel? He seems to beg us to consider the possibilities—and seemingly impossible achievements—we reached for in the past. We should do this less out of nostalgia and more as inspiration: a cry of “Why not?” that can lift us beyond screens and comfort and deadlock toward a common goal. The moon once seemed impossible. Why not the stars?

Michael Nevadomski is a Philadelphia-based ghostwriter and journalist who writes for CatholicPhilly.

There is Always Hope by Bansky