The Final New Frontiersman
Book Review: The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020, 258 pp.)
Opening lines are like pick-up lines: They often seem brilliant at the moment, but one generally spends a lifetime regretting them. Ross Douthat opens his latest book, The Decadent Society, with these words: “The peak of human accomplishment ….” What is he referring to? Charles Murray’s 2003 book, which is entitled Human Accomplishment and which makes a scholarly effort to rank man’s achievements, names fourteen high points in civilization’s rise: the invention of logic, of the scientific method, of mathematical proof, of artistic realism, of drama, of polyphony, of the novel, and seven more.
But Douthat is not thinking about things like that. “The peak of human accomplishment … occurred in late July in the year 1969.” The Moon landing, you see. I watched it on television, as a young man who had spent his childhood reading science fiction, and I would not have thought it possible for any author to make me feel he was exaggerating the greatness of that step. But Douthat has done it. Ayn Rand also rhapsodized about the event, but with her usual precision: “No event in contemporary history was as thrilling.” Thrilling, yes. The peak of human accomplishment? Not even close.
Where Ayn Rand contrasted Apollo 11 and Woodstock, Douthat integrates them, in effect, as part of “the last great burst of creativity in Western history.”
Douthat (pronounced DOW-thut, apparently) is the 40-year-old Catholic and semi-conservative columnist at the New York Times, and also—of equal importance, as this book demonstrates—a movie critic for National Review. (Yes, he was born 10 years after the Moon landing.) He thinks journalistically and cinematically, and therefore tends to accentuate the recent and the aesthetically flashy. The Sixties and the Moon landing—the New Frontier and the Final Frontier—are understood throughout his book as the civilizational high-tide from which America has turned. Where Ayn Rand contrasted Apollo 11 and Woodstock, Douthat integrates them, in effect, as part of “the last great burst of creativity in Western history.”
Well, Douthat is the only reason I still have a subscription to the NYT. So, let me try to give his book its due, despite its truncated perspective.
The Argument
Douthat begins by adapting the description of decadence in Jacques Barzun’s splendid cultural history, published in 2000, From Dawn to Decadence. Douthat’s final formulation is the following: “Decadence, deployed usefully, refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.”
In Douthat’s telling, dynamic societies—embodying economic growth, institutional vitality, and cultural innovation—are always pushing against boundaries, frontiers.
In Douthat’s telling, dynamic societies—embodying economic growth, institutional vitality, and cultural innovation—are always pushing against boundaries, frontiers. After the closing of America’s geographic frontier, space exploration seemed to be our next Manifest Destiny. But following the Moon landing, the New Frontier’s magnificent first push into the Final Frontier, we Americans drew back. That drawing back, for Douthat, is the perfect symbol of our era’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” The reality has been economic, demographic, institutional, and intellectual sluggishness—four measures of our “decadence,” which he proceeds to detail.
First up is economics, where decadence takes the form of “stagnation.”
First up is economics, where decadence takes the form of “stagnation.” Douthat’s principal economic indicator is that the median U.S. family income, in constant dollars, was about $60,000 in 2017–roughly the same as it was in 2007 (before the Great Recession) and roughly what it was in 1999 (before the Internet Bubble burst). His deep explanation, adapted from Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation (2011), is that the First and Second Industrial Revolutions developed the transformative inventions implied by eighteenth and nineteenth century science, and we have not been able to move much beyond that. Yes, we have had the twentieth century’s Information Age, Douthat concedes, but its products have not stirred in our culture the same sense of “technological majesty” (Perry Miller’s 1965 term) that was brought about by the railroad, the automobile, the airplane, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and television. Douthat quotes Peter Thiel: “We were promised flying cars. We got 140 characters.”
Next up is demographic decline, and here the obvious statistic is 2.1, the number of children per couple needed to keep a population steady. Below that figure, a population shrinks. In America, the number in 2018 was 1.7. In the EU, it averaged 1.6. In Japan, 1.4. Yet the number of children that contemporary Western men and women say they want averages 2.7. Douthat offers a startling suggestion: People want children but not sex—not the sex on offer in birth-controlled Western culture, at any rate. Since the Sexual Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, “men and women seem to be having more and more trouble successfully and permanently pairing off.… In low fertility Japan, a recent study … found that 45 percent of women ages sixteen to twenty-four and a quarter of men ‘were not interested in or despised sexual contact.’”
Third in Douthat’s indictment is the failure of our political institutions. In the good old days of John McCormack and Gerry Ford, budgets were passed by Congress and signed by the President. Now, we need continuing resolutions just to keep the National Gallery from shutting down. Unconstitutional executive orders provide solutions for immediate problems, and district court judges run the government through nationwide injunctions. Douthat borrows from Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins who called the result “a kludgeocracy.” By that he means a system in which every solution is “an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward compatible with the rest of the system.”
The fourth charge in Douthat’s “decadent” indictment is cultural stagnation, and it is clearly his favorite topic. It is also the topic on which I am least qualified to comment, because I do not attend movies or watch TV series. But looking from the outside, Douthat certainly seems correct in noticing the endless repetition of a few science fiction and superhero genres in the movies. When it comes to novels, my step-grandchildren seem to read endless spinoffs of Tolkien and Heinlein and Rowland. Douthat finds some excitement in the most popular television series, but the best of these (he argues) achieve their impact only because they portray our decadence.
Following his four-point indictment, Douthat considers three futures. First, one of the West’s challengers will overcome us and our neoliberalism: China, jihadism, or populist autocracy. Douthat dismisses these. The second possible future is that Western decadence will simply continue for the indefinite future. Our managerial elites and technocratic masters will operate a “pink police state,” a Brave New World for postmodern people, adapting to society as a whole what they have achieved on the campuses of our universities and tech giants. That will keep most of us relatively prosperous, content, and obedient. The third possible future is that something internal or radically external will overturn our state of decadence. Douthat considers two types of these revolutionary futures: the catastrophic, and the hopeful. In the first category are debt-induced financial collapse, climate change, and a population explosion in Africa that swamps Europe, our civilizational homeland. In the second category, are a spiritual revival (also Africa-based), fusion energy, robotics, and transhumanism. Douthat then concludes with a chapter that can only be called dreamy: Perhaps space aliens will arrive; perhaps the Second Coming will take place. Those would offer New Frontiers indeed.
Concluding Comment
Rarely have I so looked forward to a book only to find that I had almost no interest in what the author had to say. In 2017, an Orthodox and semi-conservative columnist at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, wrote a book called The Benedict Option. In many ways, he is on the same page as Douthat. Each author thanked the other in his acknowledgments. But Dreher’s Chapter 2, “The Roots of the Crisis,” described a civilizational decline that began with the rise of Nominalism and its extinction of metaphysical thinking during in the fourteenth century and that has, for the moment at least, culminated (quite logically) with the Sexual Revolution of the twentieth century, and its dissolution of the categories “male” and “female.” Agree or not, that is the sort of historical contour that comes to my mind when I hear the term “decadent society.” That is the sort of historical contour that I had hoped to hear Douthat discuss. He did not.
Philosophers (such as Robert Nozick) speculated about weird science fiction scenarios that might bring about a disjunction between self-realization and happiness.
Has Douthat anything to tell us? One thing above all, I think: his speculation that technological advances may allow our decadence to continue along the lines laid out by Brave New World. How? Virtual reality is the most discussed means, but the birth-control pill offers the model. Take the central functions of human life (e.g., reproduction), keep the pleasures they bring, but detach them from their biological role. The ethical egoism of Aristotelian Objectivism holds that activity realizing our given human nature (either male or female) will produce a sense of well-bring, and therefore that self-realization is what we ought to pursue, enabling us to reap our reward by experiencing the resulting happiness. Objectivism dismissed hedonism (the pursuit of happiness as a direct goal rather than an indirect goal) on the grounds that it was epistemologically impossible. We cannot know, Objectivism said, what will produce happiness except by knowing that self-realization tends to produce it. Philosophers (such as Robert Nozick) speculated about weird science fiction scenarios that might bring about a disjunction between self-realization and happiness. What Douthat suggests, when projecting the possibility of continued decadence, is that the technology of the Information Age is going to offer us that option: the ability to experience happiness without the necessity of self-realization. “Shape without form, shade without colour.” A world of Hollow Men: that is worth worrying about.
About the Author: Roger Donway
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