Waiting for the Barbarians
The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat (2020)
This review was originally published on Apposition on April 21, 2021. It always stuck in the back of my mind as something I wrote that was of especially poor quality. Recently I was reminded of something in Douthat’s book and went back to re-read my old review. I think it has a few weak points, but there is enough in it to be worth sharing again. Here I present a new, edited version.
When Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history, he meant that liberal democracy had won the war of ideas. Having proven to be more resilient, adaptable, humane, and efficient than its competitors, it might grow or adapt, flux or shrink, but the terms on which it was constituted would not change. The west was now living in the final epoch of human society. All that remained was its perfection.
But mere success—having outlasted your enemies—does not make a society lively or hopeful. In The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat makes the case that the liberal democratic west has become decadent. To understand what this means, he turns to Jacques Barzun:
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 been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
Based on this description, Douthat diagnoses the liberal democratic west (by which he mostly means America) with four symptoms of decadence: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition.
Stagnation
Economic stagnation is a slowing of growth and an end to the dynamism of economic activity. Under threat of stagflation, western countries began to enact monetarist policies from the 1970s onwards. This may have saved their economies, but it hollowed out their working classes, with many manufacturing jobs going overseas to the developing countries. The zenith of this was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Under these new conditions, liberal democracies have become “captured economies”. Only established wealth and vested interests have enough power to nudge the economy. Small and new businesses—having less to lose and being more likely to take valuable risks—are smothered out of existence. Swathes of the decadent economy become devoted to mere rent-seeking; those who are winners at this accrue every form of passive wealth and institutional advantage, forming a new political-economic elite.
Unlike old aristocracies, in which elites were born into their position, the elites of the decadent society justify their domination through the same principle that allowed them to rise up to it in the first place: meritocracy. Because they have (theoretically) earned what they have on the basis of their own competence, they are intellectually permitted to privatise the common good. Douthat’s point here echoes what Christopher Lasch writes in The Revolt of the Elites:
An aristocracy of talent - superficially an attractive ideal, which appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on hereditary privilege - turns out to be a contradiction in terms: The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues. Their snobbery lacks any acknowledgement of reciprocal obligations between the favored few and the multitude. Although they are full of “compassion” for the poor, they cannot be said to subscribe to a theory of noblesse oblige, which would imply a willingness to make a direct and personal contribution to the public good. Obligation, like everything else, has been depersonalized; exercised through the agency of the state, the burden of supporting it falls not on the professional and managerial class but, disproportionately, on the lower-middle and working classes.”1
As well as economic stagnation, we have technological stagnation. Douthat is far less interesting here, for it is not entirely clear what it means to say that technology has been stagnant. He claims that no recent technologies have been life-changing (though he has to concede the internet as one major exception). His argument basically proceeds on a rather shallow thought experiment. Would you rather (a) keep 2002 electronic technology, but not use anything invented since 2002, or (b) use everything in the past decade, but give up older, more basic amenities like running water and indoor toilets? Most people would choose (a), yet all that really proves is that the technology of the last 20 years is built on that of the previous 100.
Sterility
To sustain itself, a society must replace its dying members. Birth-rates in the west are collapsing. There are many reasons why, including changing social and religious attitudes, changes in how we are socialised, and widespread contraception and abortion. About the only exception is the Orthodox Jewish community of Israel.
With improved medicine, nutrition, and healthcare, people now live longer and are much less likely to die. The elderly make up a greater proportion of the population. Yet as homo oecnomicus, they are less productive than the young, which means a decline in GDP growth. Japan epitomises this, with an economy that has been pretty much flat since the 90s.
Sterility has second-order effects on society. Because the young are still forming their minds, they are more likely to adopt and act on new ideas. The elderly, on the other hand, see the world in more fixed terms. They have accrued more wealth and status, and are less willing to risk these things.
As a society ages, it loses it dynamism and vibrancy. This sense of fading power is captured wonderfully in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, where the ageing king reflects on the battles and adventures of his youth, and longs to return:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Another second-order effect, observed by Thomas Piketty, is that wealth is more likely to accrue in a smaller family with fewer branches than in a bigger family with more branches. Since we have smaller families, the problem of wealth (and power) concentrating in the hands of a smaller number of people is exacerbated.
The decadent society has avoided outright demographic collapse through a mixture of quantitative easing, low investment rates, and mass immigration. Whether it can keep this up remains to be seen. Meritocracy helps once again, as the west is able to poach the best minds of the developing world. Mass immigration and meritocracy together can keep a decadent society alive, even if it is dead on its feet. Douthat calls this “sustainable decadence”.
This approach doesn’t seem all that sustainable to me, though. The “developing” countries will slowly become “developed” countries, at which point they won’t be so easy to exploit for natural resources, cheap labour, and fresh ideas. They may begin to demand fair compensation. The recent announcement by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana, that his country wants to stop being so dependent on cocoa exports to Switzerland and start their own cocoa-processing industry, seems like an early example of this.
Maybe the decadent west will respond by imposing new political and economic terms to strong-arm the developing nations. That may ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, materials, labour, and people, but in such conditions, violence might start to look like a good solution for the exploited. Either way, mass immigration and meritocracy are band-aids to sterility, not solutions.
Sclerosis
Sclerosis is a biological term. It means the hardening of a tissue or cell wall by thickening of lignification. Douthat uses it to describe the break-down of effective governance, such as the convulsive way in which the American political system currently functions, with executive over-reach and judicial activism becoming the only ways to by-pass a paralysed legislature. He points to Obamacare as a good example of this. As one of the few substantive reforms attempted since the Reagan era, Obamacare took an extremely messy fight in all branches and levels of government to get over the line, arriving only in a stripped-back, mutilated form.
Many of the countries of Latin America base their political systems on that of the United States. Many of those countries are also unstable. Perhaps we might glimpse something of the future United States by looking to their examples? Douthat makes a very interesting point here. I wish he had expanded upon it. One could easily imagine the American President becoming more and more a sort of caudillo, an elected strong-man.
So let’s take New Zealand as a counter-example. Despite being in the orbit of liberal capitalist decadence, it doesn’t suffer from these political paralyses and stalemates. It has a unicameral parliament, coalition governments, a very diverse population with many migrants, and an extremely quick process for passing legislation (too quick, some would argue).
Is New Zealand sclerotic? We have our own issues no government seems able to solve, like housing and mental health. But who is to say these are problems that can even be legislated away? New Zealand is also a small, isolated, relatively unimportant country, with a relatively simple and flat political structure. Still, it’s a case of decadence without sclerosis, and that might mean what Douthat is highlighting is really a manifestation of something peculiar to the United States.
Repetition
“The vital culture,” writes Douthat, “critiques its own tradition; the decadent culture just repeats the critique more loudly or crudely or tediously.” (112). Decadent art simply recycles the same plots, themes, tensions, and motifs. Films cash in on remakes and nostalgia. The same songs are heard decades later. Books—if they are even read—are only exalted for their social or political importance, or for their mere entertainment. The literature of a decadent society does not aim to widen the mind or embolden the heart. The decadent society is deeply cynical about the possibility of these things.
Repetition has its place in good art, where it is simply called working within a tradition. Before the mechanical reproduction of art, every oral and folk tradition around the world was based on mutation through repetition: bardolatory, pūrākau, skaldic poetry, the vedas, the music of the griots. And for a very long time in the west, every educated person’s library would have centred on canonical works like the Bible, Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Dante, etc. Familiarity of these works was presumed for any educated person.
High literature is almost always distinguished by its ability to converse with its own tradition while attaining new sorts of technical or aesthetic excellence. The biggest obstacle to this kind of art is the restlessness of the decadent society. Few people grant themselves the opportunity to still the mind’s background noise to the level at which art might happen. If we want to find the true pulse of decadence in art, we are better off searching TikToks and memes than books or paintings. There is so much more Douthat could have said here. I would start by questioning if repetition is the problem afflicting or art, or whether it is simply a mediocrity rooted in impatience.
Repetition also extends to the sphere of discourse. The culture war seems to come and go in cycles. Our current Kali Yuga is about unconscious bias, cancel culture, wokeness, freedom of expression, hate speech, and white supremacy. But as Douthat notes, these debates are not new, with arguments about them stretching back to the university protests of the 1960s.
There is an historical narrative which justifies the decadent society’s path to the present day: after defeating the manifestations of evil—embodied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—history ended, and liberal capitalism was suddenly here to stay. But those dark forces never went away. They were always lurking within the underbelly of society, or at its margins, whether in the revolutionary fronts of the 1960s (the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Baader-Meinhof group, the Black Panthers) or the current nativist and white supremacist resurgence (terrorist cells like Combat 18, QAnon, Boogaloos, Identitarians).
Yet none of these groups ever leaves a permanent dent in the decadent society. Nativist parties, on obtaining power, either mellow out or collapse. Tensions may erupt into spasmodic, stochastic violence, but it just as quickly levels out and we are back to the same arguments, with the same antagonists playing themselves out in new settings. The vanguard of every movement is a near-caricature of itself, a recycled jumble of everything that came before it. Jean Baudrillard puts it thus:
What is stupendous is that nothing one thought superseded by history has really disappeared. All the archaic, anachronistic forms are there ready to reemerge, intact and timeless, like the viruses deep in the body. History has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable.
These political expressions are not existential threats to our decadent society so much as a form of edgy roleplaying. This is best seen in the storming of the White House, more disturbing for what it represented than what actually happened. Its most striking image was not the hoisting of a flag atop the rubble of a crumbling republic, but the innumerable contradictions that met in QAnon shaman Jake Angeli: part patriot, part medicine-man, a nativist crossed with the new-age, conspiracy theorist and counter revolutionary, in whom tradition synthesises with heresy. He is everything and nothing at the same time. Do we really believe his sort will end liberal democracy?
Is There No Alternative?
Decadence conjures up images of sordid cities waiting to be swept away by barbarian hordes. But a decadent society need not collapse. The peculiar form it takes may allow it to stay alive in a kind of zombie state. We have already talked about meritocracy, which drains talent away from potential rivals. To this Douthat adds the inundation of sensual pleasure and the “pink police state”.
We are “comfortably numb”, he writes. No issue in life need ever raise itself to the tenor of an existential conflict, so long as we ply ourselves with enough distractions: let food, heaters, movies, medicines, and drugs regulate and absorb our manias. Let Tinder, porn, and prostitutes replace the love we will never find. These may not make us happy, but at least they give our sexual desires an outlet that never leaves us desperate enough to want to destroy everything.
If life truly becomes unbearable, it may be placed in the hands of the state, now re-imagined as a sort of benevolent therapist. The fundamental distinction of the old, social-contractualist view of government was that of private/public. The new dichotomies are health/disease and safety/danger. The state’s primary role is to guarantee safety and health to everyone by the mitigation of dangers and risks, including the suspension of basic liberties to curb the spread of infectious diseases.
The pink police state is not outright totalitarian because it has a serious commitment to a particular conception of freedom, by which is meant the absence of rules or impositions on individuals and the unbounded possibility of consumer choice. Your potentiality is more important than the actual formation of your character. You may become whoever you want, and should be allowed to make the consumer choices necessary to express that in your own way.
This form of freedom is upheld in a grass-roots, democratic way via cancel culture. Twitter cops prowl for misdeeds, like the Red Guards of Maoist China. Their methods are protest, blacklisting, exclusion, ostracision, and media amplification. Though an individual may have little power, a mob has enough moral authority to wag the tail of the dog; companies would rather bend the knee than risk sending the wrong message. Occasionally though, a scapegoat is needed, and someone is thrown onto their sword to save face. All of this forms a kind of digital panopticon that plays out on new technologies and applications, enabled by our constant voluntary use of smartphones. In this way, the decadent society smothers and redirects any violent energy within it.
Will the decadent society actually end? Douthat does not think it will be defeated by any of its opponents. While Islam presents a coherent alternative, it lacks any serious foothold in the west, and spends most of its energy in inter-denominational conflicts. Illiberal democracies such as Russia and Hungary are not real threats, for they justify themselves in liberal capitalist terms, effectively putting them in the orbit of decadence. And as Douthat notes, it is not the concept of illiberal democracy itself that makes us wary of those countries; Singapore and Japan are two examples of effective one-party states that are friendly to the west.
And China? It seems to present a coherent alternative. It also has a kind of vitality, linked to its sheer size. But it has its own problems, including a massive flight of wealth, intelligence, talent, and capital to the west. To an extent, China’s recent successes are just a case of playing catch-up from a horrible starting position. Once the “easy pickings” of healthcare, infrastructure, and corruption are solved, Douthat believes they will also fall into decadence. It may already be happening.
Africa is a wildcard. It is a staggeringly diverse continent, poor and struggling in many ways, but relatively young, religious, fecund, and growing. If it lifts itself out of poverty the way China has done, it may end up in the driving seat of history. And if the African diaspora can bring new, home-grown ideas to the decadent west, they may change it beyond recognition. Otherwise, a new centre of power could emerge from the continent, one that offers a genuine alternative to liberal democracy. None of this is for certain, but it cannot be ruled out.
Maybe the decadent society will end because of its own greed. An ecological collapse may throw us back into a dark-age. Or we may be transported to the end times through the Rapture, or extra-terrestrial visitors. These outrageous scenarios are semi-playful, but they suggest a decadence at work in Douthat’s thinking: each apocalypse is predicated on the idea that liberal capitalism really is the final form of human society. Any alternative could only mean the end of days. As the saying goes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Christopher Lasch. The Revolt of the Elites (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1995). pp. 44-5.