Will we find that this triggering event purged the rot from our system, or will something much darker be left behind?
Rod Dreher: When most of us hear the word “decadence,” we think of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the late Roman Empire, or Weimar Germany. But that’s not what you’re talking about. Would you clarify what you mean by decadence?What Douthat calls decadence we identify as one facet of collapse.
Ross Douthat: I’m following a definition proposed 20 years ago by the late cultural historian Jacques Barzun, who argued that we should understand “decadence” as referring to periods when wealthy and dynamic societies enter into stalemate, stagnation, and decay—when they lose a clear sense of both purpose and future possibility. Which doesn’t exclude scenarios like rapid moral decline or fascist or communist takeover: a decadent society is vulnerable to both. But under decadence you’re often more likely to get a kind of moral or cultural mediocrity than either radical villainy or sainthood. And our own decadence seems to fit that pattern: in certain ways we look more stable and less flagrantly debased than in the 1970s, when crime rates and abortion rates and divorce rates and drug abuse were much higher, and our vices have a more private, virtual, numbing style.
Likewise, a decadent society can collapse under the right circumstances, and our sclerotic institutions are certainly vulnerable to certain stresses—like the coronavirus! But decadence can also last a long time: Weimar fell to Hitler quickly, but the “late” Roman empire (or the Ottoman or Chinese empires later) lasted for centuries in a condition of decay. So I don’t think you can assume that our decadence is going to turn to crisis and collapse immediately; it might be a lot more sustainable than people think.
Ross Douthat: I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t feel the decline of Christianity or the collapse of the stable family viscerally; as a Catholic columnist for a secular newspaper and someone with divorced parents and divorced grandparents, I feel them as viscerally as anyone. But the worst collapse of the family happened between 1960 and 1990, with the divorce revolution and Roe v. Wade, and since then there’s been a certain stabilization: low divorce rates, less teen pregnancy, lower abortion rates, and even the rise of out-of-wedlock birth rates has lately leveled off. Which has left us with a different set of problems: the retreat from marriage and romance and sexual complementarianism rather than too many affairs and abortions or too much teenage promiscuity, the growth of P.D. Jamesian sterility rather than sexual chaos, the numbing effects of porn-induced impotence rather Hefnerian excess. These are problems of decadence, rather than indicators of looming social collapse.
As I thought, Douthat completely misses the impact of feminism and cultural Marxism on marriage and family formation. Probably his own place on the SSH plays a role in his blindness. It's no wonder that he serves as a token conservative for the NYT. He's no threat to cultural Marxism or the ideology being promoted by the elites.
Age makes people more cautious and risk-averse; it also makes them much less inclined to take to the streets in mass protest or mass violence. I point out in the book, for instance, that the most enthusiastic participants in our virtual civil war, the Resistance types and the MAGA rallygoers, are often middle-aged suburban and retirees—not exactly the groups you’d expect to start brawling with one another in the streets. Meanwhile campuses and cities, the places where our 1960s tumults happened, are surprisingly calm and quiet in the Trump era.I think Douthat is a bit sheltered. Urban-dwellers may be soft and this may be true of the majority of rural red America. But how many hard men does he know?
Finally, we have the internet as a kind of safe playspace for revolutionaries—a zone where you can rebel against decadence by cosplaying 1917 or 1968, so that the impulses that lead to revolution in prior eras might end up channeled into virtual extremism instead. Occasionally online radicalism does leak into the real world, in terrible ways—as incel or white supremacist violence, or the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to murder Republican politicians. But those figures seem to me more like outliers than forerunners; so long as the internet keeps getting more immersive, I think we’re more likely to respond to institutional and cultural decay by play-acting the Russian Revolution rather than actually enacting it.
There are many who prefer to pose than to do the real work of change. But violence doesn't need to be organized or sustained to have a impact. I think this and the rest of the predictions that follow in his essay are more wishful thinking on Douthat's part than good predictions of the future.
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