THE DECADENT SOCIETY
HOW WE BECAME THE VICTIMS OF OUR OWN SUCCESS
ROSS DOUTHAT
Simon & Schuster, 258pp, £20, ebook £11.99
Columnist Ross Douthat is the last conservative voice left at the New York Times. The newspaper headlined its review by Mark Lilla, ‘Ross Douthat has a vision of America. It’s grim.’ Douthat argues in this book that, as Daniel Oppenheimer put it in the Washington Post, we are living through a period of ‘profound exhaustion in the cultural, political and economic life of the modern West… Douthat calls this state of civilisational low energy “decadence”.’
Douthat dates the beginning of decadence to the 1969 Apollo moon landing, a moment he thinks the ‘pinnacle of hubris’. Since then it’s been downhill all the way: plummeting birthrates, stagnant innovation, institutional sclerosis, online porn and a culture that can only recycle rather than create. Martin Ivens in the Times called him ‘a soft-hearted Catholic’ so it is not perhaps surprising that Douthat sees hope for renewal in a revival of the importance of the transcendent. He sees signs, for example, of a Eurafrican religious renaissance in the impressive figure of Cardinal Robert Sarah.
Oppenheimer hailed Douthat as ‘the best opinion columnist in America’, the tension between his religious faith and his American patriotism making him excitingly ‘unpredictable’, but wondered whether his skills at synthesis were ‘limiting flaws’ in a long-form argument. Ben Sixsmith in Quillette had some issues with some of his examples but he applauded Douthat’s ‘moral seriousness, argumentative rigour and avoidance of cheap, attractive yet simplistic solutions’. But in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Joseph Hogan sniffed that his ‘middlebrow assessments’ of popular culture were, ultimately, ‘immaterial’.