It’s true that a lot of us are bored and exhausted. Last week, I asked my students, undergrads in a top-10 business school, why money is good to have. I thought they would say something about the inexhaustible choice, the power, the frictionless movement that it represents and enables. Instead, most of them said that money provides stability. These are the lions and tigers of our economy, perfectly poised to take over and rule. And none of them, with the notable exception of a few Chinese students, wanted to build an empire, become a mogul, see their competitors driven before them and hear the lamentations of their spouses and dogs. Old-fashioned acquisitive barbarism isn’t especially good or ennobling, but its absence was jarring.
This listlessness, this knee-jerk timidity even among the elite of the elites, squares well with the thesis of Ross Douthat’s instructive new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Douthat, the Harvard-educated, diabolically fair-minded right wing of the New York Times opinion page, has written a rather heavy, sad, and at times head-scratching book to explain our culture’s sadness and slowness, and to offer some smart speculations about where it all might lead. The news is mostly dim and dispiriting. If Douthat is right, then we could be in for many more years of the muddy, tepid late winter of Western civilization.
Decadence, in Douthat’s reading, is a combination of “economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” His thesis that the industrialized West exists in such a state is immediately resonant. We all know about the deaths of despair, the growing mistrust of our institutions, the alienation, the decline of the American dream, and the very, very odd political candidates winning lots of votes. Douthat’s book is most useful as a careful catalog of these and other, less readily visible forms of decadence.
One surprising aspect of Douthat’s book is its heavy emphasis on space travel and space-related TV shows and movies. The first line of The Decadent Society describes the 1969 Apollo moon landing as “the peak of human accomplishment and daring, the greatest single triumph of modern science and government and industry, the most extraordinary endeavor of the American age in modern history.” I find myself genuinely puzzled here. I’m a bit younger than Douthat, but neither of us was alive for the moon landing. I can make myself feel something about it if I concentrate, but it’s certainly not front of mind when I think about human greatness. When Douthat announces a few pages later that “since Apollo, we have entered into decadence,” I have to meet him more than halfway.
Douthat’s sadness about our recent earth-boundedness is of a piece with his sense that technological innovation has slowed to a pitiable crawl. He quotes Peter Thiel: “We were promised flying cars. We got 140 characters.” Douthat makes a strong case that much of the Silicon Valley innovation behemoth runs on what he calls “let’s pretendism” — the endless pumping of investment dollars into “technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without ever achieving liftoff.” Worse, this fluffed-up impotence is actually one of the bright spots in an economy that is, for most Americans, frustratingly stalled. Douthat explains that this economic-technological stagnation is allied with a sclerotic political establishment, plummeting birth rates, and a pop culture addicted to rote repetition: the “four horsemen” of our decadence.
Much of Douthat’s picture is just simply true, even if the links between the different horsemen are somewhat obscure. Why, exactly, are we decadent? The death of God? Selfish elites? Boring bourgeois hedonism? Each of these makes an appearance or two. But it is unclear whether Douthat believes there is a common etiology for our various social illnesses, and it’s hard to treat a disease if you don’t know what caused it.
The question of cultural decadence is a big one, and here, The Decadent Society is at its weakest. Douthat is not at all wrong that Hollywood studios are garbage-recycling operations, but are we also stalled in our art galleries, our literary fiction, our magazines of ideas? Here, Douthat is silent. Yet culture higher than the local movie theater is also culture, and in fact, matters a great deal. It is precisely in these less popular precincts that movements are stirring that could potentially put our tired, old epoch to bed — more on this below.
In possibly the strongest, most original part of the book, Douthat argues that our decadence might be uniquely well-designed to last a long time. Pornography, opioids, internet addiction, and other distractions keep us indoors, not stabbing, raping, or impregnating each other. We’re unhappy, to be sure, but at least we’re docile. As Douthat explains, “Teenagers in the internet age are more stressed out, more anxiety ridden, more prone to depression than teenagers in the more dangerous past. But their unhappiness is a form of anomie, not a spur to acting out.” Things could on like this, more or less, for a long time.
Yet this prediction of stasis returns us to the question of culture. The disruptions of the Trump era have unleashed a flurry of excitement and creativity among idealistic, hypereducated young people. My peers in academia, the arts, and journalism are more galvanized than I’ve ever seen them. New think tanks and magazines and institutes are being planned and launched. The Right and Left are thinking more broadly and ambitiously than they have since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The internet is electric with ridiculous new ideologies, supplements, mysticisms, and rules for life. Maybe it will all come to nothing, but such wild energy is a necessary condition for the birth of anything good and new. Occupants of massive platforms such as Douthat’s should be combing over these seedbeds, looking for the greenest shoots, and watering them with encouragement, advice, and exposure.
When Douthat looks around for sources of renaissance, however, he looks chiefly to Africa, with its young, religious, and rapidly growing population. He imagines a world where European cathedrals are packed with African worshipers come to carry on a Western Christian civilization that has fallen victim to its own success and comfort. He sees in Wakanda, the fictional African utopia of the Marvel flick Black Panther, a “yearning for an out-of-Africa renaissance, for an African-shaped future that’s dynamic rather than dystopian: Make Africa Great, and the Make the World Great Again As Well.”
The book ends with one last fanciful fling: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone if decadence ends with people looking heavenward: toward God, toward the stars, or both. So down on your knees — and start working on that warp drive.” Douthat is a serious man, a careful reader, and for years, the most interesting columnist at our paper of record; our public discourse profits from his continued interventions. But there is something distinctly odd about him tossing his hope for our society toward the distant salvation of divine intervention, space adventure, and bespoke African Christians. In its pessimism, its assumption of powerlessness, it smacks of something specific: decadence.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a writer, academic, and entrepreneur in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
