The West needs to shake off its decadence
It’s impossible not to see Canada in Douthat’s definition. — Sean Speer
The COVID- 19 crisis has produced a steady stream of commentaries by writers, scholars and public intellectuals about what this extraordinary experience tells us about our society and what it means for the future. One of the best such commentaries predates the crisis by just a few weeks. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, is an invaluable framework for understanding the economic, political and cultural malaise that permeated our societies in the lead up to the pandemic.
The book, which began as a set of talks at Regent College in Vancouver in 2014, contends that modern society’s wealth and prosperity has contributed to widespread feelings of dissatisfaction, exhaustion and aimlessness. It’s as if having achieved unprecedented peace and prosperity, our collective ambition and purpose has been sapped. Douthat’s decadent society is, by his definition, “a victim of its own significant success.”
His use of decadence to describe the age isn’t a moral judgment. Instead it’s a technical description of the general lull that he argues pervades modern society.
Douthat sees decadence in various aspects of our economy, politics and culture. It manifests itself in our economic life in the form of weak productivity growth and disappointing technological advances ( as investor Peter Thiel famously put it: “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”). It shapes our demography through declining birth rates and slowing family formation. It’s reflected in our public and private institutions as sclerosis and stalemate breed distrust and declining confidence. And it finds expression in our culture in the form of perpetual Marvel movies and other artistic and creative rehashes.
Douthat ’ s version of decadence thus amounts to a self- reinforcing combination of stagnation, sterility and drift. But, as fundamental as these particular manifestations are, decadence seems to exhibit itself most profoundly in a lack of seriousness. Material prosperity and general security have permitted us to focus our attention on frivolity. There are, regrettably, too many examples to point too in this regard.
What about Canada? Although Douthat mostly excludes Canada in his book, in a recent podcast with economist Tyler Cowen they speculated whether our successful immigration policy and the relative stability of Canadian politics may be evidence that we’re an outlier — that we haven’t succumbed to decadence.
It’s a nice thought but it belies the Canadian experience. It’s i mpossible not to see Canada in Douthat’s definition. Our politics have come to mostly take economic growth for granted and instead have become dominated by a series of third, fourth and fifth order questions. And hard- headed thinking about our national interests have been replaced with dangerous platitudes about the “post- national state.” We’re, in other words, for all intents and purposes, the poster child for decadence.
Douthat isn’t confident that this drift towards decadence is going to reverse itself. He’s not predicting i mmediate civilizational collapse, but he does presage “sustainable decadence” whereby we’re stuck in an indefinite state of languish. His closing advice is to “( get) down on your knees — and start working on that warp drive.”
But — and it’s admittedly a big but — there’s reason to think that the COVID-19 crisis may jolt us out of decadence just yet. There are signs that the magnitude of the threat has triggered an innate survival instinct among us.
Companies have swiftly shifted their production to contribute to our collective needs. Governments have cut through the cumulative labyrinth of superfluous i nternal approvals and red tape to provide timely support to businesses and households. People have come together in selfless acts of social solidarity. And all of us have been reminded of the enduring importance of nation states, borders and domestic productive capacities.
This anti- decadent response to the immediate crisis must come to represent a long- term reawakening in our societies. It should refocus our collective attention on fundamental questions about peace and prosperity.
It’s about time. While Western societies have indulged themselves in a slow yet steady descent into decadence, China and Russia have maintained an unyielding eye on their long- term national interests based on a zero- sum, highly- competitive view of the world. It’s working. This past year, for instance, China became the largest source of global patent applications after more than 40 years of U. S. dominance. That many of these new technologies have both commercial and national security applications reinforces the imperative here.
The first step, of course, is to deal with our immediate public health and economic crisis. But the next is to begin to bring expression to this newfound collective urgency in the realms of economics, politics and culture. This is far from an easy undertaking. But Canadians will be well served if they read Douthat’s book and in so doing challenge themselves to resist the claim of decadence.