The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Avid Reader Press, 2020

A Catholic conservative wrote a book titled The Decadent Society – we'll give you a moment to collect yourself.

Based on that alone, there’s a temptation to approach the book braced, or perhaps with extra reserve and skepticism. But Ross Douthat has always been excellent at taking account for the skeptical and even hostile reader. This is obvious from this book's beginning, when specifying what he means by decadence, pulling heavily from Jacque Barzun, he writes:

[decadence] describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected. And, crucially, the stagnation and decay are often a direct consequence of previous development. The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own significant success.

The intention of this framing is explicitly to avoid “excessive determinism” while maintaining a standard for judgement. Focusing on economics, institutions, and repetition, Douthat asserts, frees us from arguing up from personifications or embodiments of decadence, such as luxury, Donald Trump, or aesthetic preferences. Although Douthat comments on such details (Trump is “both an embodiment of our society’s distinctive vices and a would-be rebel against our torpor and repetition and disappointment”), he is not hinging this book on your attitudes toward them. That goes a long way in endearing the reader to his argument.

The application of this approach amounts to a balanced nudging of the reader toward his position. For example, part one of his book is about “The Four Horsemen” of decadence. The first is stagnation, and to make this point he couples a cross section of contemporary economists and their insights, from Thomas Piketty to Tyler Cowen, with an array of economic and demographic data couched in his own analysis.

This is carried on through the other three horsemen: He frames sterility with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and P.D. James’ Children of Men. Midway through illustrating sclerosis, the reader might think they finally have some of the book clenched, but Douthat carefully continues, with a persuasive explanation, noting that “The important thing to stress here, though, is that. . .we don’t have to actually choose between these varying explanations for political sclerosis; we can accept versions of them all.” And repetition, the final horseman, reads likewise. The result is that even if you don’t accept all of the narratives, or don’t find one of the themes entirely convincing, by the end of the section you are left with the sense he’s probably right.

The book goes on to consider sustained decadence and the death of decadence, maintaining the same propitious balance and consideration of part one – rather than clinging to a single predetermined story, he discusses (and discuss rather than argue is the word) what catastrophe, renaissance, and a Christian providence might look like.

Some of the most interesting parts of Douthat’s book are his commentaries on those details you don’t need to accept to buy the main argument: on cultural concerns, figures, books, and movies. His keen take, slightly updated, of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is memorable. His contention that “Jordan Peterson’s popular tracts against the dangers of postmodernism are fresh and shocking only if you don’t remember the 1980s,” with a nod to William F. Buckley and Allan Bloom, doesn’t read as out of date, rather as a long memory. There are strange passages too:

If you want to feel like Western society is convulsing, there’s an app for that, a convincing simulation waiting. But in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.

Everything considered, Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society is an excellent book that is convincing and interesting. It leaves room for disagreement as well as arguments that explain those specific narratives and phenomena by different means. It begins with the disappointed imaginations and outcomes after the excitement of “late July in the year 1969, when a trio of human beings were catapulted up from the earth’s surface, where their fragile, sinful species had spent all its long millennia of conscious history, to stand and walk and leap upon the moon.” But the book is not about disappointment. It is very much written by someone standing in 2020, assessing where we are and where we might go.

—David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.