I reviewed Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society for the Washington Post. Excerpt:
We are, argues Douthat, living through a period of profound exhaustion in the cultural, political and economic life of the modern West. We’re inventing less, having fewer kids, recycling old culture instead of creating new stuff, getting stuck in mostly dead political vernaculars and narcotizing ourselves with drugs, porn, tweets and superhero movies. And we’re not an exception. Douthat’s bet is that the rising nations of the east and south are likely to follow. We’re running out of steam, everywhere and along multiple axes. Following the late social critic Jacques Barzun, Douthat calls this state of civilizational low energy “decadence.”
“Decadence,” he writes, “refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. It 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.”
We have fancy phones but no flying cars, fancy phones but no colony on Mars, and Siri and Alexa (i.e. fancy phones) but no HAL 9000 or Lieutenant Commander Data. We play at socialism and fascism on Twitter, but the great ideologies of the modern era, including liberalism, are spent, and nothing new seems to be coalescing to take their place. God is dead. Rock-and-roll is dead. The novel is dead. A reanimated Frank Sinatra is touring with hologram Tupac. A reality TV star is our president.