The author's analysis of our current predicament in American (and Western) society.

The author defines decadence and explores how American society throughout my lifetime embodies decadence: beyond the Internet, not a lot of significant technological progress, especially in comparison with the previous century and a half; reduced fertility; sclerosis in government and civic institutions; and so on. He discusses how decadence may not be the end of the world and imagines various ways in which the decadence might lead to something else: further progression or regression, totalitarianism or a re-invigoration of society.

The author's conservative, Catholic posture is manifest throughout. It would be hard to argue with the proposition that we now are experiencing a time of decadence, especially the way decadence is thus defined.

What is more questionable, despite the author's protestations, is if it is really as bad a thing as he makes it out to be, or, for that matter, a time of "invigoration" is as great or ideal as he seems to assume it would be.

It would have been good for the author to have grappled with Judt et al regarding the traumas of the first half of the 20th century, or, for that matter, to have grappled at all with how much war and poverty was experienced to drive that "progress." The "invigorated" days saw a lot of violence and conflict which catalyzed a lot of technological and cultural change.

Perhaps we are living in a less than ideal decadent phase like the Romans after the first century CE, and maybe it has a similar end with exhaustion, barbarians, and plague. Or perhaps the American and Western imperial project met its spectacularly apocalyptic and paradoxical end, having conquered the world and exhausted itself in violence, now being reconsidered and challenged throughout the world. Perhaps also society is attempting to absorb the variety of changes which have taken place over the past 100 and more years. One could make a decent historical case how almost all of the changes seen in the 20th century were presaged by trends in the 19th century, with the major difference being the utter humiliation of the positivism which animated that century.

I say all of this because it seems the author is often too clever by half and there's a lot more going on and a lot more possibility than a "invigorated" or "decadent" binary. ( )

Conservative political analyst Ross Douthat makes some compelling points of the cyclic rise and subsequent stasis, sterility and decay of civilizations .

The generation that grew up on the promise of colonizing the planets to automation living up to its potential of uplifting entire swathes of people ; ended up with gimmicky apps , gadgets with planned obsolescence while being feed to pervasive algorithms of tech behemoths highly tuned to circumvent human biases , lost in a sea of meaningless memes , conspiracy theories ; trapped in partisanship , sinking ever so gradually into mediocrity.

While the 60s & 70s epitomized the pinnacle of achievement with the moon landing , the feminist movement to name a few ushered a new wave of progressive agenda which slowly and steadily eroded in subsequent decades ; An ageing population soon to be living in isolation with below replacement levels , stagnation , raising inequality and political gridlock in comprehensive policy making .

Enjoyed the book , most of it at least ; although it lost its way towards the end especially in “catastrophe” some of the scenarios seemed quite outlandish ; good read though .
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For any interested and for those who can handle criticism of American society, culture, policy, history, hypocrisy, stupidity, laziness, weakness, ignorance and criticism of Americans in general (and I am one), I wrote a blog article that i would have taken from a book review and then expanded it. It's pretty brutal because it calls us out and shows us for what we are -- and a lot of Joe Six Pack "Patriots" would be incensed. at the truth. If they were literate enough and patient enough to actually read uncomfortable facts of our history that are kept buried -- such as how Hawaii became a US state, as one of a ton of examples -- so if you don't think you can or want to deal with something like that, I'd ask you to avoid it because it will just send your blood pressure sky high.For others, regardless of your citizenship, who are interested in actual facts, truths, realities about American involvement in both World Wars, for example, and the subsequent "ugly Americans" beating their chests, saying we're bad asses and demanding the world do as we say, for moral reasons -- at the point of a gun ... well, you might be interested in this article. It has a couple of disturbing photos, is about 4,000 words and I posted it in February 2022. It can be found at https://ivebeendead.blogspot.com/2022/02/lets-go-way-beyond-douthats-decadent.ht..., People are welcome to dislike (or like it), find it educational, engaging, perhaps hate me, disbelieve things, but instead of bashing the messenger, I urge and challenge critics of this piece to research US geopolitical history (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Pol Pot, Woodrow Wilson and the Soviet Union, the USS Liberty, etc). If you doubt various things, I have the actual, literal NSA files on much, including the Gulf of Tonkin joke, the Bay of Pigs, as well as the infamous CIA Manual for Psychological Operations in Guerilla Warfare which deals specifically with the illegal war fought in Nicaragua that led to the Iran-Contra debacle. If you doubt, that document is freely available to anyone, anywhere -- just do an online search. However, one thing to note -- which would fit in with some other things I wrote about in this article -- is that if you find the actual document rather than the booklet that was published, you'll see that the pages state "Sanitized Copy Approved for Release," and that should give some pause for wonder. Because most people don't know there were multiple versions, though some might deduce that from that written line on the pages. Going further, very few people know there were a number of versions, each one eliminating a few things at a time, but more and more words and instructions that might put the government in a bad light, Either replaced by vanilla crap or completely eliminated. Do your research and find out the two major topics in the original manual that got yanked pretty quickly for fear they would get out. Which it did. Exposing the hypocrisy so rampant throughout our history as we lob accusations at adversarial states while claiming the moral high ground. I'm not anti-American. If anything, I grew up a patriot and members of my family have fought, bled and given their all on foreign soil for the sake of this country. I'm just anti-bullshit and anti-hypocrisy and it ticks me off at how quick we are to judge, accuse, criticize, threaten other states and entities when we ourselves have typically been guilty of the exact same things, and perhaps worse. It's just that you don't learn such things growing up in school, not in the history books, not mentioned elsewhere. But when you learn certain facts, certain realities, the ideals you've held your entire life get shaken pretty hard so you either search out more truths or hide your head in the sand cause you don't want to know. Fact. Sorry to be the bearer of news and information some may find unpopular or offensive, but I'm not the one who did, does, and covers up hundreds of years of the worst kinds of sins while playing angel, missionary and policeman to and for the world. I just read, research, analyze and watch from the sidelines cause there's little else one can do, Anyhoo, I didn't intend to write this, nor this amount or this much detail, so if I suddenly disappear - jk. Seek and learn facts, even if it's painful to do so. ( )

Has the feel of classical philosophy to it, just a man with his reason, trying to understand the world. Lacks in scholarship and bores you with analysis of cinema films. The thesis is very persuasive but that's more a function of good writing than any solid argumentative backing.

One extra complaint: if you're going to try an predict the future and offer a wide range of possibilities to cover all scenarios at least indicate what you personally think is most likely, to fail to do so is weak. ( )

I purchased this book at my local Barnes & Noble a week before the near total shutdown of the workplace for two weeks in order to "bend the curve" of the rate of infections from Covid-19. I finally read the book as the partial shutdown enters its sixth month. In the interval we have experienced not only the impact of the global pandemic but the ongoing pandemic of "mostly peaceful" insurrections in many of our major cities featuring not only attacks upon the police departments but a concerted effort to remove from the public square all statues and monuments that celebrate America's history at least prior to the last fifty years.

With this backdrop I took up Ross Douthat's "The Decadent Society, which was published this year but before the crises that have made 2020 such a dispiriting time.

By decadence Douthat does not mean the frequently employed sense of the word to imply a self-indulgent hedonism. Rather he takes his cue from Jacques Barzun, who in his "From Dawn to Decadence" published in the year 2000, offers the following description.

"All that is meant by Decadence is 'falling off'. It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted; the stages of development have bee run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces."

Douthat, building on Barzun, expands the definition of decadence to feature "...economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development". The first four chapters of the book are assertions of evidence of Stagnation, Sterility, Sclerosis, and Repetition, Douthat's Four Horsemen of what may or not turn out to be our apocalypse. It is Douthat's thesis that barring some cataclysmic event such as the meteor that does unto us what was done unto the dinosaurs millions of year ago, or an accidental triggering of a nuclear war that entails our complete self-destruction, or a pandemic (Oops!) that we ought to be able to muddle along fairly comfortably for maybe hundreds of years before the barbarians finally finish us off.

If for Hegel the end of History arrived with Napoleon's victory at Jena (or maybe the publication of Hegel's Phenomenology), and for Fukuyama History comes to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire, for Douthat the climax of our civilization is symbolized by the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the subsequent end of the Space Age" although that end is certainly a matter more of speculation than fact.

Douthat's argument for stagnation is based on an analysis of economic data in the years between the Clinton and Trump presidencies that show that in terms of household incomes the average family had earned less income in sixteen of the eighteen years prior to 2017. Moreover, the average household wealth figure of $97,000 in 2017 was slightly below the late 1990 levels. It is arguable about how meaningful a 20 year snapshot is, but when you consider that this period encompasses the end of the dotcom/telecom driven bubble created by the launch of the World Wide Web in the early 90's, the 9/11 disaster followed by the still ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market and the ensuing great recession, maybe these numbers don't look quite as mediocre as they might at first glance.

A more interesting argument is the suggestion that since the middle of the 20th century the significance of the scientific and technological progress does not bear comparison with the impact on daily life of the inventions of the first half of the 20th century, the space age and the Internet era notwithstanding. What is inarguable is that every "advanced for its time society" has at some point ceased to advance. What happened to the civilizations of imperial China and the Ottomans will eventually happen to the West. The question is have we reached that point in the curve.

The case for Sterility is a little harder to dispute. It is a matter of fact and concern that the developed nations are in a reproductive cycle that is resulting in a population decline that may not be reversible unless offset by immigration, whether welcome or not, from Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America. As Mark Steyn is fond of pointing out the future belongs to those who show up. The fertility rate in America in 2018 was an average of 1.7 children per woman, an all time low. The average fertility rate needed for a society to replace itself is 2.1.

In 2016 the fertility rate for Australia was 1.77, for Canada and China 1.6, for Japan 1.41, South Korea 1.25 and Singapore 0.82. These are going out business indicators.

The case for Sclerosis is largely based on politics in the 21st century which feature increased polarization between political parties and the constituents they represent, the frustration of getting anything significant accomplished legislatively and the consequent outsourcing of the legislative function in the United States to the judiciary and the executive branch via the unelected bureaucracy or the expanded use of executive orders.

Across the pond the travails of the European Union, most obviously the case of Brexit, but also the troubles facing the southern and eastern European membership caused by a common currency dependent on Germany's interests and world view has opened up opportunities for a revived nationalism is many member countries. Douthat compares the EU at one point to a "Hotel California" - where, as Brexit showed, you can vote yourself out at any time as long as you don't actually try to leave.

Finally, Douthat takes up the theme of Repetition and makes the case that we are experiencing the Eternal Return to 1975 in our culture. He compares the culture shock experienced by Marty McFly who returns to 1955 from 1985 and argues that had "Back to the Future" been made in 2015, the differences between 2015 and 1985 would seem relatively trivial. The past as represented by 1985 America would not seem like another country when compared with the past represented by 1955.

Popular culture in our time seems to be a never-ending repetition and recycling of the recent past, see for example, Star Wars and Star Trek, the DC Comics and Marvel Comics themed movies. In politics and in popular culture we've been experiencing deja vu all over again and again.

So, what are our prospects? Odds are that we will continue to muddle along for some time, maybe hundreds of years before it all comes to an end courtesy of a a meteor, global warming, or History returns when the barbarians finally get here. I couldn't help but think at various points of the book that Douthat's point of view was some melange of "What, me worry?", "It just doesn't matter", "Don't worry, be happy", or as Stanley Baldwin's 1930's campaign slogan put it, "You've never had it so good."

That said, if this was Douthat's understanding then there would have been no point to the book. It could be we are headed for a dystopian solution in the spirit of Brave New World's "A gram is better than a damn.". It is unlikely that Catholic integralism, Communism, neo-liberalism, socialism, etc. are destined to bring us out of this malaise. Perhaps a collective response to the challenge of the climate change crisis, perhaps a revived quest to explore our solar system and beyond or a Christian revival sprung from non-Western influences will generate a new era of growth, creativity and technological advances such that our winter of discontent becomes an ancient memory.

Douthat's meditation on these matters is interesting, well-argued and moderate in criticism and prescription. It merits your attention. ( )