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While Douthat looks to the heavens, what we really need is a passionate commitment to the world we find ourselves on.
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
By Ross Douthat
Avid Reader Press
The conceit of Ross Douthat’s newest book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, is that the political and cultural atmosphere of the United States in 2020 is best summed up by Tony Soprano’s lament: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end.” Douthat’s book argues that while America was once defined by innovation, progress, and a sense of destiny, for a while now, the United States, and Western civilization as a whole, has instead been confronted by the three S’s—stagnation (economic), sterility (sexual), and sclerosis (governmental gridlock)—and that the combination of these three forces has brought us to an eerie repetitive twilight where new things are no longer possible.
All of this is what Douthat means when he calls our society “decadent.” We were once a people with an animating myth that inspired Americans to grow the economy, ward off the threat of communism, and explore either the open West or the darkness of space. Since the end of the Cold War and the end of space exploration, we have been bereft of those myths; and with technological success coming mostly in the areas of entertainment and communication, we have become a disappointed, anomic society. We have done everything we set out to do, landed a man on the moon, and now we have nothing left to do but enjoy whatever pleasure we get from marijuana and the latest Marvel movie. This is the bleak picture Douthat paints. Less George Orwell’s boot stamping on the face of humanity forever than Aldous Huxley’s future where a spiritually emaciated mankind content themselves with Soma.
In a way, Douthat’s narrational voice is not totally divorced from the decadence he describes.
Douthat has, for a while now, been a bewitching figure for the American left. The grounds for Douthat’s claim on a recent podcast that he is “the left’s favorite conservative” materialize quickly for the reader of his latest book. Douthat, citing left-wing thinkers like David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, draws an analogy between the fraudulence of Fyre Fest and Theranos and the venture capitalist–backed Uber. Uber, Douthat argues, has no horizon of profitability, yet maintains a valuation in the tens of billions. Worse, following Piketty, Douthat describes an economy secularly moving toward the dominance of a rentier class at the expense of growing inequality as the opportunities for profitability are narrowed by deep structural forces. Economic growth, once seemingly infinite, may actually be constrained by environmental and technological factors beyond human control. In short, Douthat’s arguments about a stagnant economy are broadly consistent with a left-wing tradition that since Marx has believed that capital will one day provoke a crisis by exhausting the possibilities of growth.
And Douthat understands that economic problems are not merely economic in the reductive sense. He is right that ours is a society in the midst of a widespread cultural malaise, visible everywhere, from rising rates of deaths of despair and the seemingly endless spate of mass shootings, to the proliferation of conspiracy theories and a growing gap between the number of children people claim to want and the number they have. Left-wingers and Douthat could even agree that cultural stagnation in the form of the Marvelification of the movie industry, where broad swaths of the movies released every year are franchised and written and cut to look and sound alike, is driven by rising levels of market concentration in the entertainment sphere. (Disney accounted for nearly 40 percent of the U.S. box office in 2019.)
Douthat’s claim that culture today is made up of “pastiches of the original pastiche” is basically the point made by the Marxist academic Fredric Jameson when he dubbed postmodernism the cultural logic of late capitalism.
But something important is obscured by naming this interlocking nexus of problems decadence. “Decadent” evokes a tottering empire on its knees: Roman cornucopias, Gatsbyian black-tie parties, intellectuals in Weimar debating the finer points of the nature of Kultur as the Nazis stage a putsch. It relegates the material causes of problems to a level of secondary, symptomatic importance. The fundamental driver of decadence is framed as a problem of elite culture. This in turn injects a basic contradiction into Douthat’s argument. On the one hand, in the places where Douthat believes more could be happening, the American state is portrayed as sclerotic and would-be inventions as disappointing trifles. On the other hand, elsewhere too much is happening, as young progressive radicals pose energetic demands that the state do more to protect trans rights or recognize America’s long history of imperialist wrongs. Douthat portrays this energy as nascently totalitarian. Douthat wants it both ways, in other words: He both wants to see the demands by campus protesters for broader Title IX protections as incipient pink totalitarianism—and in that sense, all too energetic—and for us to believe that we live in a society sedate to the problems Douthat believes are truly significant.
Jandos Rothstein
What Aldous Huxley called ‘Soma,’ contenting a spiritually emaciated mankind, is now manifested in marijuana and the latest Marvel movie, Douthat writes.
Decadence for Douthat is not even a crisis, if by crisis we understand something like a dangerous yet decisive turning point. What we have, Douthat contends, is “sustainable decadence.” Citing W.H. Auden, Douthat claims that the horror of the fall of the Roman Empire is not so much its final moment of fall—which historians struggle to pin to a single moment anyway—but that it endured for so long without renewing itself, without the fact of its decline coming to a moment of crisis and decision. Douthat concludes this because he is bearish about the odds for opponents of the liberal order, on the right or left, to really change anything.
Douthat’s affect throughout his book is phlegmatic. Socialists and fascists alike for him exist mostly online. The stakes of his book are our spiritual lives, but Douthat does not think of himself as ringing an alarm bell, yelling that a fire has gone up and must be doused now. Instead, he positions himself as calmly describing a situation, which while not immediately dire, poses a distinct threat of spiritually emaciating us. In a way, Douthat’s narrational voice is not totally divorced from the decadence he describes. His prose displays his own hypothesis—the decadence of the disengaged passive intellectual. He counsels moderation; the solutions he offers—from the hope for some unpredictable religious or technological revelation to a renewed managerial technocracy—are all either beyond his or his reader’s power to bring about or a strategy based on a sort of melancholic resignation to the reality of the situation. The final lines of the book, which expresses the mixed-up nature of religion and technology that has been a theme for Douthat throughout, read almost ironically: “So down on your knees—and start working on that warp drive.”
Douthat’s concern is not new. At least since the Western frontier closed about 1890, critics have fretted that without its settler-colonial manifest destiny, the United States would enter cultural or economic decline. Douthat is worried that the inhabitants of the West—and this is the nebulous, never fully defined object of concern—do not know how to live in a world without an infinite frontier for work to move into. This was Max Weber’s worry too: that the Puritans would wake up one morning and realize that the capitalist world they had made left them “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” But thinking seriously about the interactions between capitalism and anomie exceeds Douthat’s decadence frame.
From the 1930s to the 1970s, the American state built a welfare system and negotiated compromises between capital and labor on the basis of the ideal of the single-white-male-breadwinner household. But political decisions and economic shocks have combined to shred the social-political context in which that ideal thrived; and legitimate concerns about the maleness and the whiteness of the worker at its heart suggest the ideal was never all that ideal to begin with. All of this indicates not so much the need for a religious revival or space exploration, both of which guide Douthat’s readers’ eyes to the heavens, but rather a grim acknowledgment of the environment and horizon already around us, a recommitment to care for the finite world we actually already inhabit. We need to reconsider what sort of ideal we imagine, if we want a singular ideal or a world where a plurality of different sorts of human lives can flourish, and then we need to think about how to build the economic and political institutions that will sustain that flourishing. What we need is less a melancholic yearning for a new and infinite frontier and more a passionate commitment to the world we find ourselves on.
