By scleroris, Douthat means the increasing inability of governments across the Western world to get things done, whether legislatively or administratively. By his calculation, the US government is just not as competent as it was 30 or 40 years ago, with systemic failures more common. He extends this critique to the EU, noting its inherently bureaucratic and glacial processes, and its struggle to resolve or even adequately manage the growing problem of Right-wing populism that is fundamentally opposed to the liberal universalism espoused by EU leaders.
Then we come to repetition. Here Douthat focuses particularly on culture, noting that popular music is becoming observably less sophisticated, both technically and thematically, than it was even 20 or 30 years ago, to say nothing of 50 or 60 years ago. He notes the increasing reliance of Hollywood on sequels and franchises.
The idea of decadence as cultural exhaustion, as constant repetition of what we already know because of uncertainty about where we go next and because we are not sure there is anything new to add, is an extremely fruitful one. To Douthat’s elaboration of it I would add that the great cultural and social rupture of the 1960s has left artists and intellectuals cut off from many of the great wellsprings of their culture, with the result that their work and their art has become stunted and boring and shallow.
The theory also helps to explain the insistence of elites on attacking an opponent that has long since ceased to exist. When Guardian columnists demand a school history curriculum that shows pupils the full horrors of Empire, what forces do they imagine are ranged against them? The professions of educationalist and teacher are not exactly renowned as bastions of conservative patriotism these days.
And who exactly do modern artists believe they are shocking with their confrontational conceptualism? The proportion of the gallery-going classes who are the reactionary squares of the avant garde imagination must be tiny. Duchamps’ urinal was daring and provocative in 1917, but that was 103 years ago. What is there now to conceptualism except a wearisome revisiting of the same tired clichés, the same boring gestures against an imagined traditionalist enemy whose power vanished decades ago?
Deconstructionism and anti-traditionalism, in their various forms, have become intellectual cargo cults, continued because their practitioners do not know how to do anything else except bomb the rubble of the dead past. There may be no decent new ideas, but the one thing we do know is that The Olden Days Were Bad.
Douthat’s account of civilisational exhaustion reminded me strongly of another book I read recently, Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death Of Europe, a reflection on — inter alia — the European crisis of self-confidence, which has been rumbling on since the First World War and only intensified after the diabolical horrors of the Second.
One of the shared concerns of the two books is the great, looming, unavoidable question: what happens next? Douthat sketches several possible futures, starting with “sustainable decadence” where in the medium-term Western governments simply continue to muddle along in the absence of any meaningful solutions to the problems of sluggish economies, low fertility rates, cultural boredom and inefficient government.
Alongside this, he envisions various ends to decadence, focusing particularly on Europe, which is the part of the Western world most affected by decadence as he defines it, and — crucially — most vulnerable to huge demographic pressures from the continent most resistant to decadence: Africa. One possibility is that Europe is simply overwhelmed by economic migrants and climate refugees from the south and more or less collapses.
Alternatively, we might see the emergence of a stable, well-integrated and non-decadent “Eurafrican” civilisation, with the risks and losses of demographic transformation mitigated and balanced by Christian revival as envisaged by putative Eurafricans like Cardinal Robert Sarah. Douthat sketches other scenarios too, some more likely than others but all rather speculative; as he stresses throughout the book, both the problem of decadence and its possible solutions or consequences are enormously complex and multifaceted.
The solution to decadence by which Douthat sets most store, however, is founded on two great hopes: God and science. The final section of the book envisages a human civilisation that is both technologically reinvigorated, perhaps even fit to venture to the stars, and also spiritually renewed, turning back to God to discover the transcendent purpose and lofty view of the human spirit that decadence has undermined.
Is this realistic? It’s hard to say, and indeed it’s hard to say whether Douthat believes so himself. One of the weaknesses of this part of the book, as with several earlier sections, is that Douthat retains a little too much ironical detachment. One can almost see the raised eyebrow and the wry smile, an impression not helped by a closing line whose glibness feels like a bit of a cop-out: “So down on your knees — and start working on that warp drive”. I for one would have liked a more consistently engaged analysis that explicitly approached decadence and its discontents from Douthat’s traditional Catholic perspective.
These are quibbles, however. This is an endlessly provocative and fascinating book, both in the conclusions to which it comes and in the evidence it adduces. I can see this starting a thousand dinner party arguments, and for good reason: it’s hard to think of a more important question than whether our civilisation can survive on its current trajectory.
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SubscribeOne result of this idiotic mentality running through contemporary liberalism, “the olden days were bad,” is that we have discarded wholesale the work and insights of millennia of thinkers. As if now we suddenly know better than all who came before us, an arrogant assumption if ever there was one. So had Douthat taken the time and considerable attention required to read Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, he’d have seen how a similar pattern plays out repeatedly with civilizations.
In Toynbee’s thesis of history, what he calls “the dominant minority” (perhaps better known today as the One Percent) are responsible for the great scientific and cultural innovations of a civilization in its early stages. This inspires mimesis in the general population or proletariat, i.e. willing”even admiring”cooperation.
Over time, however, these elites are unable to maintain innovative responses to new challenges facing their civilization. They typically resort to one of two pre-doomed strategies: 1) nostalgia for the golden period of the civilization, and seeking to recreate it, which is impossible since nothing stays exactly the same; or, 2) futurism, which Toynbee says tends to go along with authoritarianism, since most people fear change and thus must be compelled to go along, just as is happening now with 5G, “The Great Reset,” etc.
It’s at this point that elites resort to the last port of call: force. While often terrifying, this use of force is a sure signal that the civilization in question is on its very last legs. Elites may see themselves as the brains of civilization but without the cooperation of the body, they’re impotent.
Nice reply, one that perhaps, offers more insight than the original article.
I have noticed this creeping decay for some time, but I did not know if it was simply the result of getting older and set in my ways, or if I was witnessing real cultural change. I did not know how to verbalize the changes that seemed so obvious to me without sounding like an old ‘boomer’.
Thank you for this well-written article.
Douthat could have focused on historical parallels found in extinct civilizations of Persian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman empires to assess whether the four key factors of decadence were present as they apparently are today in the West. The rise and fall, and clash of empires seem inevitable.