The end is nigh for the sad, sclerotic rich world
• Ross Douthat’s critique suggests leading nations have stalled politically, culturally, economically and intellectually
Decadence is often taken to mean a propensity for overindulgence in some pleasure such as food, fashion or sex. But as the French-American academic Jacques Barzun wrote in his history of Western culture From Dawn to Decadence, what it really means is that “the forms of art as of life seem exhausted; the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.”
This, according to New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat, is where we find ourselves in the developed world today. His ambitious and entertaining book The Decadent Society is centred on the US and its likeness to a modern-day Rome: a falling, though not yet fallen, superpower.
But much of what Douthat lays out — from the failures of neoliberalism and the rise of secular stagnation, to cultural nostalgia in lieu of transformative ideas, from a technology “boom” that has sedated rather than empowered us, to a political crisis of the old order and a vacuum where the new should be — holds true for Europe and Japan as well.
Rich, powerful societies have, in his view, stopped moving forward: economically, politically, culturally and intellectually. This is responsible for concrete problems such as left-wing and right-wing populism, the Trump presidency, surveillance capitalism, the opioid crisis and the ever more finely parsed culture wars. It is also to blame for the sense of free-floating pessimism and angst about the future that many of us felt even before Covid-19 hit.
This is a large bundle of things to tie together. Still, Douthat makes a strong case for decadence as a kind of unified field theory for our societal malaise. He argues that somewhere between 1969 and 1980 — between the death of Kennedy-era techno-optimism and the birth of Reaganomics — the US entered an era in which it stopped looking to a higher goal (in terms of the space race, quite literally) and started focusing too much on the bottom line. Wealth creation and preservation took precedence over exploration and discovery.
The world became older and richer, but also less equal. Education, upward mobility, productivity and environmental sustainability were constrained. A ruling class of technocrats has kept things on life support. But political sclerosis is endemic in most of the rich world. The old order hasn’t yet collapsed. But neither has a new one been born, in either politics or economics. We are distrustful of both sides of the political aisle and sceptical of institutions.
On economics, Douthat is a fan of the academic Robert
Gordon, who argues that the big innovations that transformed modern economies are behind us and that there is no techdriven productivity boom on the horizon.
And so we languish in a weird slow-moving Titanic that never quite hits the iceberg, a place in which ineffectual governments and badly handled pandemics coexist with market highs and a lack of revolutionary fervour. For now.
Many will understand the economic and political side of this story. But Douthat is a cultural critic, and his analysis of cultural decadence is the most persuasive part of the book. He wisely homes in on a remarkable but underreferenced 2011 Kurt Andersen essay for Vanity Fair, in which the journalist observes that cultural evolution seemed to stall in the early 1990s. While it’s easy to tell the difference in a work of art or a dress or a song or a building from the 1930s, 1950s or 1970s, “try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992”, writes Anderson.
“Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey — both distinctions without a real difference — and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco.”
Essayist and novelist Joan Didion, who found fame in the 1960s, is as likely as a young novellist to write the next big book. Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) or Tom Wolfe’s essays on the “Me” decade of the 1970s are as relevant as anything pundits churn out today.
Andersen argued that part of the stagnation was a result of the speed of technological evolution itself — with the advent of the consumer internet and the smartphone, we simply couldn’t “do” more change in any other area of life.
But Douthat is with Gordon — the New New thing just isn’t all that new. We are made “comfortably numb” by technology that algorithmically sustains mediocrity.
Douthat, a card-carrying Catholic, is one of a small crop of conservative intellectuals in the US whom I admire not because I agree with everything they say, but because they are trying to stake out new ground. This sits somewhere between the scorched earth of the right’s failed trickle-down economics and the self-defeating identity politics of the left.
As Douthat concludes, even the end of history will end, though he’s wisely not betting on a new Chinese-led world order or some larger clash of cultures between Islam and the West. That the cultural visions he posits might spring up in response to decadence — from a new Eurafrica to a renewal of our aspirations for space exploration — may seem implausible. But at least they are fresh. /©