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The dangers of decadence What starts as silliness can eventually turn into something far more sinister

Are we just lying to ourselves? (Photo by Foc Kan/WireImage)


February 15, 2021   5 mins

Five years ago, I finally bailed from the Decadence Party. After rejecting a “rock and roll” lifestyle in my youth — I had seen how the strings were pulled as a teenage NME hack — I eventually made up for it by doubling down on the sex and drugs. But after caning it for three decades, I decided that I’d had enough. Predictably for a mid-50s matron, Christianity and volunteer work had a lot to do with it. I cleaned up overnight — and I can honestly say I don’t miss it a bit.

What do you think of when you read the word “decadent”? Liza Minnelli showing her stocking tops while fascism looms in the shadows? Gatsby laying out his shirts to reclaim Daisy’s love? Julia Flyte’s gift from her rich lover, a tortoise whose shell bore her initials in diamonds? Or was it best embodied by notorious porn purveyor Larry Flynt, who died this week?

Merriam-Webster defines it both as “appealing to self-indulgence — a rich and decadent dessert” and “marked by decay or decline  — an increasingly decadent society.” In other words, it is considered either good or bad depending on your point of view. Not many words take in both the fall of the Roman Empire and a chocolate ganache.

Its meaning has, of course, changed over the years. Certainly things seem to have moved on since the late 19th century, when writers and artists favouring outré subjects became known as the Decadent Movement. As always there was a sizeable gulf between the French and the English; they had the deadly serious Joris-Karl Huysmans, we had the savage amusements of Oscar Wilde.

A magazine, Le Decadent, was founded in 1886 to bring order to their principles, but even then your average self-obsessed, opium-eating onanist wasn’t exactly a team player. A lot of it was little more than a Perve’s Charter. But the Decadents shrewdly saw that hedonism could be dignified with a backbeat of tragedy, and portrayed their excesses as a sane reaction to a mad world. As Baudelaire put it: “Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters… Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.” With virtue? Yeah, right.

With the twentieth century, the alibis for acting out ramped up as we entered the Age Of Excuses. The barbarism of the First World War was widely accepted as the trigger for the Roaring Twenties, and by the 1950s psychology had found a deep-seated reason for every last bit of bad behaviour.

Then rock and roll came — and the genie was truly out of the bottle. Girls had always hung around entertainers, but never like this. Not so much starry-eyed fans as scalp-hungry maenads, the groupies of the 1960s and 70s cut a swathe through the equally wanton rock stars of the age.

Many of them found their El Dorado in David Bowie, a rock star who seemed to exude decadence with each breath. Could that explain why he was allowed to have sex with underage girls and watch his popularity soar, while other men in his position would have been pilloried?

Perhaps it was simply because he didn’t seem to be enjoying it that much. His decadent behaviour was soundtracked by the splendid output of his cocaine-zombie soul-in-torment period; if he’d acted that way during his “Laughing Gnome” days, he’d have been bang to rights. But played smartly, the decadent card is enough to make people feel sorry for the most egregious of rogues. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” William Blake wrote. “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

But what about those times when it doesn’t lead to a “palace of wisdom”? Today’s decadents seem far more likely to end up in a shack on a cliff edge. “It’s just so lonely at the top,” squeals every showbiz biography ever written, from Charlie Chaplin to the Chuckle Brothers. And judging from the publicity for his Stories I Only Tell My Friends, the actor Rob Lowe seems unlikely to be striking out in a new direction. Lowe had it all: fame, success, teenage girls and even Princess Stephanie of Monaco. But that’s all fine — he just wasn’t happy.

No doubt Marilyn Manson — currently the centre of a huge storm concerning his sexual behaviour — will attempt to go down this more-in-sorry-than-in-salaciousness route if he ever follows up his 1998 autobiography The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell. Perhaps he’ll try to persuade us that he only behaved unpleasantly towards women because he was sad, rather than bad. (Though, while obviously feeling sorry for his partners, one does wonder what they expected from entering into a relationship with a self-confessed Satanist. Foot-rubs and rom-coms?)

The whole saga reminds me of the English dandy and decadent Sebastian Horsley, with whom a prostitute friend of mine fell in love, having been wooed by his assurances that the relationship between hooker and client was the purest possible. He called himself an artist and the prostitutes his muses — but as he produced very little art, it appears the only thing these muses inspired him to do was to go with more prostitutes. When my friend found out that she was one of many, she was (amusingly) outraged.

But Manson and Horsley both surely illustrate something sobering about decadence: that as you get older, you really need to get over it. A jaded palate appears to make the Decadent “up the ante”, and thus turn from something merely silly into something potentially sinister. Surely, for example, we can all agree that sexually bullying the handicapped is never a good look? Yet Horsley ended up in a foreign brothel having sex with a prostitute who literally had no limbs, while Manson once boasted of urinating on a deaf fan. (Having heard his music, it’s a wonder they all weren’t.)

Still, if you know when to get off, there’s nothing wrong with youthful day-trips to Decadence. It’s one of those things, like love bites and Maoism, which you can indulge in when young and pretty, but look rather sad trying to sustain into middle age. Worst of all, it can make you profoundly boring. Its 19th-century adherents went on to embrace everything from Catholicism to anarchy. I started volunteering in a charity shop.

Is that really so surprising, though? Not when you consider that the same waywardness which leads lost souls to decadence will eventually lead them out again — unless pleasure has destroyed them before they get the chance to break free. Because while pleasure, whether induced by pornography or cocaine, appears at first to open up a new world, hold it a beat too long and it ends up shrinking that new realm until you become not a Decadent but a lab rat, scurrying about in your own personal sewer searching for the next lever to pull.

When this happens, people begin to ceaselessly lie to themselves about their behaviour in order to continue it. And perhaps there’s a psychological reason for this: being wicked is always going to seem a lot more attractive than being weak. In every branch of the arts, for example, wicked people are glamourised, whereas the weak are portrayed as deserving nothing but contempt. This often leads to self-deception, as the Decadent insists that the source of their chosen indulgence — be it drugs or porn — is magically free of the misery and broken lives which litter its production.

By any standards, one of the most decadent people who ever lived was the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, a cross-dressing, sex-mad tyrant who ruled between the ages of 14 and 18. The Praetorian Guard, however, were not impressed and he ended up headless and floating in the Tiber. And we all know what happened to the Roman Empire; brought down, in part, by a religion rooted in humility and self-denial — the very opposite of decadence. One can only imagine what will suddenly spring up to wash away the dirt of today’s Augean Stables. But whatever it is, no doubt we’ll pose for selfies while society burns.


Julie Burchill is a journalist, playwright and author of Welcome to the Woke Trials, available now. Her latest play, Awful People, co-written with Daniel Raven, comes to Brighton Pier in September 2023.

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David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago

But be drunken.” With virtue? Yeah, right.

isn’t one of the characteristics of modern youth (at least, the posh SJW wing) that it is indeed drunk with virtue.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

of which it can never get enough.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago

“Still, if you know when to get off, there’s nothing wrong with youthful day-trips to Decadence. It’s one of those things, like love bites and Maoism, which you can indulge in when young and pretty, but look rather sad trying to sustain into middle age. Worst of all, it can make you profoundly boring. Its 19th-century adherents went on to embrace everything from Catholicism to anarchy.”
Yes, quite. Decadence is still a wonderfully freeing thing as long as you have a homebase or firm principles to return to after the party. Human souls need some kind of compass to be complete. I guess losing that for too long will make you sad and bereft.
But – if you turn that dress inside out – too much holding onto rigid principles is also an express ticket to boring-old-fartness. Everyone needs a naughty sortie every now and then 😉

David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago

Salvation through menopause?

Alison Houston
Alison Houston
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

I was going to make the same remark, the article reminds me of John Betjeman’s ‘Song of a Night Club Proprietress” Only Julie’s decadence was much more extreme. This setting by Madeline Dring is good:

https://youtu.be/XGbGmHwUeUs

Richard Brown
Richard Brown
3 years ago
Reply to  Alison Houston

Julie’s remark about David Bowie reminds me of a question I often ask myself – why has Jagger got a knighthood and Rolf Harris is in the Clink?

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

You can add a lot of 60s icons to that list. A lot my have to do with buyer’s remorse. If the icon is still cool then where’s the shame

Richard Brown
Richard Brown
3 years ago

Cool – now there’s an interesting legal term….

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

What does legal have to do with it?

alan fry
alan fry
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

did jagger abuse children ?

Richard Brown
Richard Brown
3 years ago
Reply to  alan fry

Sex with under-age girls. Not abuse?

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

Also, the Led Zeppelin guys.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Lale

Funny that you should say that. I watched a documentary on the band some years ago. An ex girlfriend said something to the effect that …..and then the underage girls came along and the boys could not get enough of them. I have no idea whether there was any truth in the statement but it was made

Michael Whittock
Michael Whittock
3 years ago

Decadence is invariably a sign and symptom of the terminal decline of empires, nations and cultures. The only cure is spiritual revival, cultural renewal and moral reform. To paraphrase the article a lot of authentic Christianity and a bit of volunteer work would be a good start.

Saul D
Saul D
3 years ago

There is something of roaring 20s and Weimar Republik in current times. Extraordinarily rich media stars and hedge fund moguls partying via private jets to private islands, surrounded by pretty hangers-on, and glitzed up luxury brands and Instagram, while telling the rest of the world to consume less and stay home; awash with money and walk-in ice-cream freezers and Nxivm-like cults. All while censoring and de-platforming critics, and telling the plebian classes, who are burning through savings and trapped without work, that there is no other way.
The Capitol is on its way to becoming the Capitol of the Hunger Games. Sealed in to protect it from the population of the Precincts. Impeachment as its sport, with over-dramatised melodrama acting as infotainment for the paper-drudges and non-working masses. Who will be the targets in 2022?

Cynthia Neville
Cynthia Neville
3 years ago
Reply to  Saul D

Right on

John Warren
John Warren
3 years ago

Intriguing article. “…what will suddenly spring up to wash away the dirt of today’s Augean Stables”? I don’t see anything washing it away in my life time (I’m 47). But I hope that it is eventually washed away by the very same faith that you say brought down the Roman Empire. Don’t underestimate the growth of evangelicals, even in the West. But even if that doesn’t happen contraception, abortion and a general dislike of the restrictions and duties of parenthood could massively reduce the number of Westerners who are raised in a way to be open to it in generations to come.

David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago
Reply to  John Warren

Now you’re really scaring me!
would you be equally happy if the “cleaning” job was done by radical islamists?

John Warren
John Warren
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

Well I’m a Christian, so, no.

Colin Reeves
Colin Reeves
3 years ago
Reply to  John Warren

In the estimation of many historians, the Methodist revival (aka Great Awakening) of the 18th century was why Britain had no revolution (a la Francaise). So many Christians are praying for a new revival. There is another possibility, however. Perhaps we are approaching the end of the age, the return of Jesus Christ and the final judgment. God alone knows.

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

I think you’ll find that Islam and Christianity bear almost no resemblance, if you can be bothered to look into both properly.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Lale

Except that they are both monotheistic, and even believe in the same God.

Additionally both carry a huge amount of sexually neurotic baggage, probably based on their desert origins ie: too much sand, and not much water, and rather hot.

Fred Atkinstalk
Fred Atkinstalk
3 years ago
Reply to  George Lake

Imagining that they believe in the same god is a primary school level error

Walter Brigham
Walter Brigham
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

Without going back centuries, in what way are Christians’ actions comparable to radical Islamists?

Todd Son
Todd Son
3 months ago
Reply to  Walter Brigham

The “Christians” commit mass murder and torture, over and over. The radical Islamist merely dream of doing such mass murders

Eleanor Barlow
Eleanor Barlow
3 years ago
Reply to  John Warren

‘ I hope that it is eventually washed away by the very same faith that you say brought down the Roman Empire. Don’t underestimate the growth of evangelicals,’

I’m glad I’m too old to be washed away by the religious nutters – whatever their denomination.I’ll be pushing up daisies long before then. Apres moi le deluge.

stephen f.
stephen f.
3 years ago
Reply to  Eleanor Barlow

The vast majority of the religious are not “nutters”.

Starry Gordon
Starry Gordon
3 years ago
Reply to  stephen f.

That depends greatly on your point of view and your personal experiences. Most religions are based not on evidence and reason, but the need to find or imagine the heart of a heartless world, as Uncle Karl said. In any case, Rome lasted an impressive 2200 years, counting from the foundation of the city to the fall of Byzantium, and was not due to decadence of the popular sort but the fact that it had become politically obsolete. The most decadent eras of its civilization were probably also its time of maximum power. In spite of Mr. Gibbon, Christianity neither cleaned up nor doomed Rome, and at least in America, Evangelicals seem to be a corruptible and crazy as everyone else.

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
3 years ago
Reply to  Starry Gordon

Ah, the easy insult against Christians. Very 2021. No need to provide details!

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago
Reply to  Starry Gordon

Fall of Constantinople, formerly known as Byzantium, please.

However you are correct about decadence, probably at its zenith in what we now call the first century before Christ. The age of Lucretius among many other devotees.
“Occ est vivere!”

Todd Son
Todd Son
3 months ago
Reply to  Starry Gordon

Evangelicals are definitely as corrupt as islamists!

ewan.sinclair
ewan.sinclair
3 years ago

That’s all very droll, but doesn’t really get to the essence of decadence. A solipsistic personal morality is just the symptom of what is a societal malaise. Decadence is when a society stops producing and starts consuming itself, when it decides to live on its capital to the impoverishment of the majority. As Joseph Taitner would put; when the cost of complexity outstrips the gain of specialisation. The private codes of morality that come with this condition are the cultural expression of a civilisation that knows it can’t justify itself.

robert scheetz
robert scheetz
3 years ago
Reply to  ewan.sinclair

Yes. Like so many before, she spoiled an important thesis trying to be cute.
Dionysia, Jerry Lee Lewis to our “Rap Artists”, however annoying and vulgar, is adolescent not decadent; and, flaneurs, merely narcissists. The imagists, Baudelaire, Mallarme, & Rambo, signified a true culture of despair, the all-shattering death of God, …the unrelenting deconstruction of all cultural value and diminution of Man to an insignificant speck floating momently in a vastness of Nihil. As Trump would say -“Whaddaya got to lose?”

Andrew Lale
Andrew Lale
3 years ago
Reply to  ewan.sinclair

That all sounds very impressive. Not sure it means very much though. Why can’t our civilisation ‘justify itself’, exactly?

David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago

Well she may be older, wiser, and less objectionable, but Julie still writes like she’s having fun doing so.
there’s a serious question in there though. Why do we forgive Bowie but not Saville? Talent? Should a huge stash of brilliant poetry by Saville be discovered, will his sins be forgiven?
or if we find that Bowie and Saville took part in a threesome with an underage girl (yuk, I know) will Bowie be forgiven but not Saville? Why?

alan fry
alan fry
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

Saville raped and abused children in hospital did bowie do that ?

Mark Bailey
Mark Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  alan fry

Literally no evidence has been offered for that. Allegations, yes. but not evidence.
Saville was a deeply unpleasant man, but there is something almost as unattractive in the state taking it upon itself to loot his estate on the basis not of criminal convictions, but a lot of allegations, large numbers of which were either preposterous or impossible.

Kathy Prendergast
Kathy Prendergast
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark Bailey

I agree that we need to stop reflexively assuming everyone is guilty until proven innocent when it comes to accusations of sexual abuse, no matter how unsavory and unlikeable we find the men accused. What bugs me is we do know, for a fact, that a member of the Rolling Stones had a sexual relationship with a girl that started when she was 13. But he hasn’t been disgraced, while celebs like Saville and Woody Allen have. Is it just because the victim in this case never thought of it as sexual abuse, but as a consensual relationship? But I thought that’s supposed to be irrelevant, when we’re talking about a child?

Todd Son
Todd Son
3 months ago

Different societies have differing views. Are the children? Or young adults? What is the age of consent? Why are they children when they have sex, but adults when they piss people off with crimes?

Society is inconsistent, irrational and unfair.
A cold scheming evil manipulative 19 year old can be compared to a sensitive and good and kind 31 year old. Anyone can say one is evil , one is good. But make it a 17 year old and a 29 year old and suddenly he 29 year old is called a sex offender, predator, and imprisoned and abused by everyone. The 17 year old is a “victim”. Then the 17 year old commits murders. Then suddenly the teenager is an adult who needs to be imprisoned for life with no consideration for their youth or immaturity or the fact they will change overtime .

Society is irrational and unfair

David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago
Reply to  alan fry

Not in hospital so far as I’m aware.

robert scheetz
robert scheetz
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

The theme is not middle-class morality, LGBTQP liberation, or PC. And neither is it adolescent rebellion. Children, even superannuated, are simply incapable of decadence.

David Otness
David Otness
3 years ago
Reply to  robert scheetz

“Lord of the Flies”

Clive Mitchell
Clive Mitchell
3 years ago

“ Still, if you know when to get off, there’s nothing wrong with youthful day-trips to Decadence.”

I suppose it depends who pays the price. If it’s simply a case of a severe hangover after “a bit of a night”, it’s probably not a bad thing. But what about the underage girls that Bowie took an interest in? I wonder what price some of them will have paid.

greg waggett
greg waggett
3 years ago

Agree very much with the broad point summed up in the last two sentences and the earlier comment, ‘The Age of Excuses.’ the way society conducts itself isn’t sustainable. It’s in plain sight.

Nicholas Taylor
Nicholas Taylor
3 years ago

One thing truly decadent people are not (I don’t know about Hunter Biden) is determined to force a political or moral view on others. One could hardly call Hitler or Mao decadent, or Stalin in his seminary or Pol Pot in his monastery. The danger of decadence is that it opens the door to such people. Yet it cannot be a simple choice. The world is a mesh of structures. If decadence entails taking much from them and giving little back then the resources have to be present to begin with. Lines of least resistance are seldom sustainable and hit bottom soonest, so it is not surprising that at least some of those once entranced by a papier-mache paradise clamber back up to find something more secure, even if no more firmly rooted in reality.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago

How does one indulge in Maoism, even on one of those day trips? That’s quite a leap from wanton s e x or being drunk.

andydavies
andydavies
3 years ago

Isn’t it just growing old we no longer have the energy, appetite, constitution or levels of hormones to sustain decadence. We grow older and we grow up and realise there are more interesting ways to sustain and enhance life.

Daisy D
Daisy D
3 years ago

Only in a country drunken w/decadence disguised as virtue could we get a – quite literally decaying – person like Biden elected President.

Cynthia Neville
Cynthia Neville
3 years ago
Reply to  Daisy D

I agree. The dunces are truly in a confederacy.

mark taha
mark taha
3 years ago

I wish I’d been decadent- I’m now 62 and hoping to be The Oldest Swinger in Town! I have no time for moralists, especially PC ones – my ideal was Errol Flynn. He did what he bloody well wanted to do!

Dorothy Slater
Dorothy Slater
3 years ago
Reply to  mark taha

yeah – but he died at 50 doing what he bloody well wanted to do – no one younger 60 even remembers who he was but I assume he had a lot of fun before fading into obscurity and would no doubt make the same choices given the chance.

steve eaton
steve eaton
3 years ago
Reply to  Dorothy Slater

Flynn is no more obscure decades after his death than say, you and I are while we still living, and I’ll bet that he had more fun than the both of us put together. Seriously how can you try to tie Flynn’s Decadent lifestyle to the fact that he is relatively obscure to the youth of today. Pretty much any cinema star of his time is obscure to youth of today.

David Otness
David Otness
3 years ago
Reply to  steve eaton

His autobio “My Wicked, Wicked Ways” tells a lot more about his ‘larger than life’ life than most are probably aware of sans reading it.

Last Jacobin
Last Jacobin
3 years ago

Isn’t this more of a Sunday Mail magazine column?

Karen Lindquist
Karen Lindquist
3 years ago

Not many words take in both the fall of the Roman Empire and a chocolate ganache.”
Fun read. Thank you. And I wholeheartedly agree. Been there, done that, and now my only unreasonable and out of control indulgence is gardening for food and helping others do the same.


mike otter
mike otter
3 years ago

According to a lot of the pundits i read the youth are turning away from earthly pleasures in general and decadence in particular. Certainly seems true of my kids and their friends who are way more grown up that we were in our teens and 20s especially as far as intoxication is concerned.

Brian Dorsley
Brian Dorsley
3 years ago
Reply to  mike otter

But more anxious and care-worn too. Many adults believe that with the correct kind of education system many of the world’s ills can be fixed. In that capacity, we offload all our problems on to the young and except them to fix everything when they grow up.

Chris Wheatley
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago

Is decadence a fashion?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

Oddly enough I have just this minute read, in an essay by Roger Scruton on Skryabin and Szymanovski, some of Scruton’s thoughts on decadence as they relate to the source of the music under discussion. I will not quote at length, and it is this sentence that seems most apposite here:

‘What is decadent cannot be truly felt; it exists as dream and illusion, as self-intoxication, but not as a warm response’.

David McKee
David McKee
3 years ago

I’ve always thought that decadence was such a waste of time. With my own little indulgence (weed), I am knocked out for hours. Oh, it’s very pleasant, which is why I do it. Still, the time factor is why I restrict it to special occasions, when I think I’ve earned a little time off. High days and holy days, you might say.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago

“By any standards, one of the most decadent people who ever lived was the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, a cross-dressing, sex-mad tyrant who ruled between the ages of 14 and 18”.

I’m afraid not, there were plenty of others, centuries before, for example Caligula and Nero. The idea that decadence did for the Roman Empire is frankly, tosh.
It a prurient Christian myth that originates with their sexually neurotic,Semitic origins in the wasteland of the Judean desert.

The great Bath Houses, (Thermae), had echoed for centuries with such cries as “ bring me another boy, this one has split” and such like, without any serious impairment of the fabled Pax Romana.

Civil War, fiscal collapse, increased bureaucracy, Christianity, pressure from Teutonic thugs to the North, and Sassanian barbarians to the East, and later Arabs to the south, these were the real culprits, who finally overthrew the greatest Empire the World has ever seen, or probably ever will see.

‘Sic Gloria Transit Mundi’.

Last edited 3 years ago by George Lake
Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
3 years ago
Reply to  George Lake

Well and their political opponents calumniating them in hit-job biographies purporting to be ‘fair and balanced’.
Really human nature and society have changed far less than people want to imagine beneath the public-facing attitudes.
Po-faced moralism was always a minority sport, although people felt much more need to hide it (and thus from the historical record) and it is true it had more cultural purchase in the past. The collapse of that owed more to the general economic flattening that the second industrial revolution bought about and the economic independence and agency of swathes of the formerly impotent working classes who, as Orwell noted on his essay on Ghandi, the vast majority never really took to asceticism or moralising and thus no longer wanted to be told what to do by an overweening elite, which of course has come back to assert its powers over the masses since the third industrialisation re-centralised the wealth in the population again. And read Dostoyevsky’s impressions of Victorian London for a taste of the reality of the time.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
rick stubbs
rick stubbs
3 years ago

“they had the deadly serious Joris-Karl Huysmans”. Yes, his progress from decadent french novelist in Le Rebours to his chillingly narrated scared straight engagement with French satanism (Las Bas) is worth a look. What is more decadent than satanism? Huysmans slowly changes direction in En route and becomes a medieval mystic in La Cathédrale. The latter was repurposed as an english travel guide for Chartres.

John Kozakiewicz
John Kozakiewicz
3 years ago

That cynical little phrase, “Yeah, right,” speaks volumes, Ms. Burchill! “Of course, it goes without saying that I am worldly and street-smart and could never be naïve enough to be drunk on virtue.”

David Ford
David Ford
3 years ago

You won’t find much more historically decadent than the Christian faith and that hasn’t changed. Evangelical Christianity in the modern age is littered with moral hypocrisy. Do what I say rather than what I do. Nope. If you’re looking for a saviour from decadence then something like radical Islam would be the answer. Like the Fremen in Dune. Of course that would usher in a new Dark Age. Perhaps Julie should be careful what she wishes for.

Richard Brown
Richard Brown
3 years ago
Reply to  David Ford

Place your faith in woke, then. No hypocrisy there at all.

Starry Gordon
Starry Gordon
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

Enlightenment has its rewards. For some, it’s the enlightenment itself; for others, doing well by doing good. Supply quotation marks as necessary.

Feld Grau
Feld Grau
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

Outstanding comment!

Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Brown

And where exactly did he claim he was pro-woke?
Not all opinions exist in some kind of manichean struggle. There are a great many atheists and anti-religious rationalists who see the moral panics of the last few years as actually having far more to do with the logical endpoint Christian culture assumptions than an anti-religious movement.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Jonathan Barker
Jonathan Barker
3 years ago

Meanwhile the decadence described and pointed to in this essay is very much alive in the person of Donald Trump who reeks of such decadence.
Even more so if you take into account the fact that prominent and influential so called conservative Christians pretended that the Donald was “God’s” chosen vehicle to re-Christianize America – whatever that could possible mean or signify!

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 years ago

As far as one can know, he did nothing to convert anyone. I don’t think he thought being a Christian mattered.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

Trump does not drink and has probably never taken recreational drugs. As far as we can tell he is not remotely religious. Yes, his golden staircases and toilets or whatever could be described as ‘decadent’ but in truth it’s probably just bad taste. If you’re looking for decadence, check out Hunter Biden.

David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

I think it was just a case of – insert DT here.
yes – more vulgar than decadent. And certainly not an advocate of decadence – quite the reverse.

Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

Decadence is just vulgarity with taste.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

If you wish an education in bad taste try walking around Quislington when this Chinese Plague is past.
For sheer pretentiousness, is has no equal.

David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago
Reply to  George Lake

Quislington – brilliant, I’ll use that.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

I pinched it off Fraser Bailey Esq.
Rightfully, his is the honour.

Todd Son
Todd Son
3 months ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Greed and Vainglorious trumpery as a lifestyle must surely count as decadent!?! No? Mammonite values are decadent!!! No? Being drunk with power and fantasies of power is also decadent! No!?

David Morley
David Morley
3 years ago

Donald Trump who reeks of such decadence.

and yet those who would forgive Bowie would not forgive DT, who discovered, and said openly, what Bowie discovered and exploited. That if you are a star you can grab em ….. and in Bowie’s case, much more.

stephen f.
stephen f.
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

-and too they embrace the “right-thinking” pols like Kennedy, Dodd, Biden, Clinton-all proven to have gone far beyond talking about it. Perhaps we should discuss the decadence of the partisan twisting of facts, ethics and judgement to fit a political goal.

Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
3 years ago
Reply to  David Morley

Because Bowie never presented himself for political leadership. That’s not to morally excuse him, only it doesn’t seem bizarre that people hold those who want to hold the terrible power of the state over people’s head to a higher standard of moral virtue.

stephen f.
stephen f.
3 years ago

Some day, in the future, I look forward to another vaccine, or possibly herd immunity-for TDS.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 years ago

your TDS is showing, along with your bigotry toward religious folks.

Starry Gordon
Starry Gordon
3 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

In attaching themselves to the likes of Donald Trump, many of them seem to be bigoted against themselves.

stephen f.
stephen f.
3 years ago
Reply to  Starry Gordon

Agreeing with a man’s (actually, many people’s) politics does not signify an “attachment”. Many saw the alternative of the deeply corrupt Clinton family, and then the increasingly obviously corrupt Biden family, as a continuation of the feather bedding and self-serving that is fast corroding the republic.

rick stubbs
rick stubbs
3 years ago

It means that God works in ways unintelligible to he/she/it/ze/etc and perhaps you..