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Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Our Decadent Society

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 line of advance.  The loss it faces is that of Possibility.

-          Jacques Barzun

Ross Douthat’s Decadent Society, a discussion with Peter Robinson.  This discussion is around Douthat’s recent book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.

I will only spend a moment on how I understand the thrust of Douthat’s view.  Ever since the moon landing, it has been all downhill.  No direction, no real advancement.  Yes, an uptick during the Reagan years in terms of the economy and the (soon thereafter) fall of the Soviet Union.  But this was just a blip.

Suffice it to say, the decadent society was birthed much earlier.  If the suicide of the West was to be found in the Great War, when did the decadence begin?  I will agree with Solzhenitsyn here: the roots are in the Renaissance, with the political fulfillment in the Enlightenment: the individual with nothing above him.

To the discussion.  Douthat comments on the “punctuated periods of deceleration and stagnation with occasional returns with the kind of growth we had in the post-war period” that began in the 1970s.  But no meaningful discussion of how or why.

I will give my “why.”  The end of the (not free market) gold exchange plan from Bretton Woods.  After this, nothing stood in the way of the central bank-induced wealth transfers from the middle class to the wealthy.

The two discuss innovation – it hasn’t stopped but it has been concentrated in narrow sectors – call it personal technological devices (along with many production and distribution efficiencies).  These have largely now been demonstrated and played out.  It is technology that allows us to stay in shells instead of seeing the planet – automobiles, trains, airplanes, even rocket ships.

Following this, a discussion on fertility – with births below sustaining rates.  Other than Israel, there is not a rich country in the world that is giving birth at a rate high enough to sustain its population.  We understand: with wealth, better health care, women’s empowerment, etc., the need and / or desire for more children is reduced.  But this doesn’t fully explain it, per Douthat.  No further explanation is offered.

I will speculate that it is the loss of future, the loss of meaning.  But I am just speculating – and obviously doing so based on my biases.  But this still leaves Israel.  What’s going on there?  Douthat suggests that what they will tell you is “Having kids is more likely if you live inside history.”  The host says that when he asked an Israeli woman a similar question, she replied “my country is still a cause.”

Which corresponds, in many ways with my speculation above – maybe my biases have grounding in human nature.  Having a history implies caring for a future, and holding to such a worldview contributes to meaning.  Having a cause means you have purpose and meaning.  With no future and no meaning, why have children.  Live your best life now –no strings.

How does this decadence end?  It might not.  It might roll on as either keeping us comfortably numb or with some form of kindly despotism.  Comfortably numb tranquilizes us – our virtual realities, whether on the screen or in real life: we scream at each other on twitter, but we don’t do anything.  Further, the world of drugs, where we have moved from heroin to opioids.  Instead of bread and circuses as the numbing agents, it’s pot and virtual reality.

They don’t discuss what is meant by kindly despotism, but in my view, we are seeing it now.  Universal basic income with nothing to do.  Automation is now sufficient to keep the masses satisfied in stuff.  The last few months of lockdown offers a small example of the possibilities.

Or, they discuss, it could all end in catastrophe.  What does this mean?  No real comment is offered.  Douthat doesn’t see this (the corona lockdowns) as the end.  (I think this discussion happened before the riots.  I wonder what Douthat says today.)

How might it end well?  Renaissance.  Douthat sees that we had two mini-renaissances in the recent past: the neo-liberal successes of the Reagan-Thatcher economy and the victory in the Cold War, and earlier, the invention of the transistor, on which all of our technological growth was built.  But neither sustained.

Robinson takes hope in something written by George Kennan in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War.  Basically, Kennan wrote thank God for the Soviets: “...a certain gratitude to a Providence,” in case you don’t believe me.  Because of the Soviets, the American people pulled together.  Robinson sees this in the context of China today.  “Can a new Cold War rally the American society?” Robinson asks.  Did I mention that Robinson is with the Hoover Institute?  Talk about bastardizing a former president’s name (at this page you will find perhaps twenty posts I have written on his book, Freedom Betrayed, if you want to understand my meaning).

Douthat is hesitant about this new Cold War strategy.  China quickly dealt with the virus (ruthlessly, yes, but quickly).  Now China is flexing its muscles in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and in the US, twitter is deciding how to deal with Trump’s tweets.  Douthat suggests that the US is not as well prepared to meet the threat from China today as it was to meet the Soviet threat sixty or seventy years ago.

I think this is quite true.  In fact, I think we are pretty close to saying that the US as leader of the globalization project might be dead.  And I am not sure that there is anything on the horizon that will replace it.

Robinson asks Douthat (a practicing Catholic): where is the obvious answer?  A religious revival?  Douthat barely touches on this in this book, but he reminds Robinson that he said such things in his last book.  Robinson cites something from the last chapter, and I offer it here in its entirety:

I would be a poor Christian if I did not conclude by noting that no civilization – not ours, not any – has thrived without a confidence that there was more to the human story than just the material world as we understand it.  If we have lost that confidence in our own age, then perhaps it is because we have reached the end of our own capacities and we need something else, something extra, that really can come only from outside our present frame of reference.

Culture, tradition.  Something transcendent.  Not an ideology – not liberalism, communism, socialism, libertarianism.  None of these.  Douthat suggests that a religious revival – here or anywhere else in the world – will be an inevitable (therefore, necessary) part of any Renaissance. 

Conclusion

Douthat reads the final passage from the book:

To be clear, I am not predicting the end of the world or the arrival of the millennium here.  I am just saying that if this were the age where some major divine intervention happened, whether long prophesied or completely unforeseen, there would be, in hindsight, a case that we should have seen it coming.

Oh yes.  Ask Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, or C. S. Lewis. Among others. 

And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that decadence ends with people looking heavenward, toward God, toward the stars, or both.  So, down on your knees and start working on that warp drive.

Or don’t.  Here is another option.

We are living in a meaning crisis.  Those who are alert enough to themselves and their surroundings are turning to religion – to Christianity, and usually to its most traditional forms.

As Douthat suggests, it shouldn’t surprise anyone.

20 comments:

  1. "Other than Israel, there is not a rich country in the world that is giving birth at a rate high enough to sustain its population."

    And the biggest contributor into this high girth rate is ultra-orthodox sector. Which is in many aspects pre-modern!!

    Pre-Jewish_Enlightenment. Pre-Haskalah.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah

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  2. Religious revival would be great. Haven't seen it yet.

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    1. Well, not a healthy one. We see one during the protest / riots: chanting, swaying arms, washing feet. To a false god, of course.

      If God decides we are Sodom, let's pray that Abraham argues with Him again. Five or ten people deserve to be spared....

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    2. Yes, I wasn't thinking of that. The pseudo-materialist-Leftist religion is the new mass belief in the West.

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    3. RMB, the "pseudo-materialist-Leftist religion" appears to me to be very materialist indeed and devoted to free stuff from the government by way of "redistribution" of other people's money.

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  3. "We are living in a meaning crisis. Those who are alert enough to themselves and their surroundings are turning to religion – to Christianity, and usually to its most traditional forms."

    No, those are not the alert ones. The alert ones are turning to property rights and recognizing that the problem is parasites preaching obedience to authority and self-sacrifice.

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    1. John, property doesn't provide sufficient meaning. If it did, the West would be suffering a far less meaning crisis than is occurring in most third-world nations, despite having both stronger property rights and more property.

      Instead, the opposite is true.

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  4. Bionic, this is, in brief, the core issue upon which you and I disagree, I think. I don't propose a lengthy debate here, but just want to underline this point. Property is not for providing 'sufficient meaning'. It is the necessary precondition for the human spirit to be free and with freedom, necessarily comes responsibility and thus meaning.

    Per your reply, relative wealth is irrelevant. The west does not respect the fundamental moral principle of property and never has (rhetoric aside) except marginally for short periods in some locations. That lack is at the root of every political / cultural problem you might mention.

    That would be my debate position: that it is property rights, not religion which is missing in the West and that explains (and describes) the growing chaos.

    Property is at the root of morality, not faith and not altruism.

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    1. "...it is property rights, not religion which is missing in the West..."

      Compared to what? When? Please let's not discuss anarcho-capitalist purity; it has never existed. Let's discuss relative positions of wealth and relative respect for property protection - both in different regions around the world today and in the West today compared to history.

      The wealthiest society in the history of the world is melting down; the society with as strong a property-rights regime in the history of the world is melting down: Suicide rates, opioid epidemics, depression, divorce, abortion, incarceration rates, broken families, minds captured by trivialities – the list is endless.

      We don't see this in third world countries today; we see it in the wealthiest and most property-respecting societies in history.

      Politics (hence property rights) is downstream from culture (hence religion and tradition). Politics (hence property rights) does not form a culture; it is the result of a prevailing culture.

      There is a reason that property rights were developed and formed in Christian cultures. Property rights didn’t develop anywhere else this way, and Christian culture was not a result of property rights.

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  5. "...the society with as strong a property-rights regime in the history of the world is melting down..."

    It is melting down because the respect for property has disappeared. You list social/psychological problems while not listing extortion, counterfeiting, monopoly, and slavery and mass murder. Property rights are gone while religion remains and you claim all those problems are the result of not enough religion and that we have a strong property rights regime. Hardly. The IRS, the Federal Reserve, and IP law refute that premise.

    As for the third world, they are the third world because they have never respected property. I agree with you that compared to them, the west did - at one time - have a far greater respect for property, but the west is now being invaded not so much by third world individuals, as by third world ideas.

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    1. John, every region of the world throughout history has had and has extortion and the like. They have not had the property rights (or the wealth) that the West has even today.

      One of us is very confused about history. There is no need to continue debating which one of us it is.

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    2. While you two argue over what is happening, and who's right or wrong about the history, The Melting Pot is in fact melting down. And the reason it is melting is because no-one is noticing that the fuel feeding the fire is that lethal mixture of cultures.
      Mixing cultures is exactly like trying to mix oil and water. It never has worked, (Israel in Cannan), and it never will work.
      Why don't you try mixing Christ with Antichrist and see what you get. Of course one would have to know who is who wouldn't one.

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    3. roc, I have seen you comment here before. Yet, somehow you have mixed the entire conversation on culture and liberty that has been happening at this blog for, oh, five years at least?

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    4. The problem with most of you is that you're fighting the wrong fight and you're all going to lose.
      Most whom I've read here seem to be very serious and sincere about what they know and think they know. So sad that they cannot "see" and "hear", but then as Saint Paul said; "God will send...a STRONG DELUSION...". Not just a delusion, a STRONG delusion.

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    5. roc, stop being coy. Spell it out, man. What is the right fight? What are we all missing?

      If it is so important and you actually cared about victory, you shouldn't keep it a secret.

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    6. Ok. I'll Try my best.
      "Doth the worke fay to him that wrought it: Vvhy haft thou made me thus?" Rom.9:20 Rheims translation of the Vulgate.
      I have no answer as to why God would choose to draw me to Him other than that it's His will to do so. I am very glad that He did, and at the same time very aware of the situation that if puts me in regarding the rest of the world. But what I have been shown is extremely exciting and heartening. Especially now in this world.
      One of the things that it creates is the never ending desire to find others who "see" and "hear" what I do. At this point in time I have not found many, and even those who do "see" things that I do, don't always agree 100%.
      As I mentioned above about being drawn. I didn't choose to be drawn. I did go on a search for answers to questions. But I do believe that it was only because something inspired me to do that.
      I have seen and heard the calls to "come" by the Gahrams, Falwells, Swagarts etc. etc. Trying to entice others into their folds. With book in hand they call and beckon and tell the lie that all one has to do is tell Christ to come into the heart and save them and He will do it. And in that same book Christ tells everyone that no-one can come to him unless the father first draws him. I won't even try to think of all the ways in which one can be drawn. I only know how it happened to me and it was a long involved process before I actually reached that point where I began to "see" and then Understand what I was seeing and hearing.
      But the most important thing I came to learn was that the only fight that matters is the Spiritual fight. If I lose that fight, I am truly lost. I may win the whole world and all that's in it but I will still lose in the end.
      Before I began to learn the Truth I needed to know, I had been fighting the IRS and had found the key to winning that fight.I was so excited that I just knew that everyone would want to know what I had found. Talk about motivated. But it's ironic that by fighting that fight I was led to someone who when they heard my argument told me "You are fighting the wrong fight and you're going to lose." Talk about taking the wind out of the sails. But when he began to explain things I had to admit that he was right and so I walked away from that fight. That was some 40 years ago. I was already 40 at that time so you could say I spent the first half of my life fighting the wrong fight and the next half trying to win the right one.
      The right fight is the war against the spirit of Antichrist. If we lose that one there is no going back. All the materials, freedoms so-called, benefits, rights etc.etc. are worth nothing in the fight against Satan. Those things are just distractions that take our minds off of what's important. Yes we need certain physical things to keep us alive and able to fight, but God has provided those things via His magnificent creation. He has also provided the Truth necessary for salvation but it isn't gotten without a price. I've said it before on your sight about how God says through His Word that to find the knowledge of God one must seek it as treasure and dig it up. The key is that one will only find it IF one does the work necessary.
      Spending all of one's time and effort fighting all the distractions and temptations of this world is just a waste of the unknown amount of time we each have for the real thing. I've been 40 years on this search and am still digging up the treasure of Truth.
      I don't know how you will receive what I have said so far and it may be that you don't care to hear any more, so I'll leave it at this. I would be happy to share everything I have been shown with you if you really want to know it but please believe me, there is so much and it won't happen in just a few short messages such as this.

      roger

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    7. "The right fight is the war against the spirit of Antichrist. If we lose that one there is no going back. All the materials, freedoms so-called, benefits, rights etc.etc. are worth nothing in the fight against Satan."

      Roger, it is the same fight. God's kingdom isn't limited to some cloud in the sky.

      The anti-Christ is alive and well. How is he manifest? How are you fighting against him? How is your fight made manifest in this world, the place God has chosen to put you?

      Ephesians 6: 12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

      "We" wrestle against this - the rulers of darkness of this world, right here, right now. How are these principalities and powers manifest? Is this anti-Christ working through nobody? Or is he working through somebody? Who? How do you know? How do we wrestle against these?

      Come on, Roger. It’s the same fight. It is what I have come to discover after ten years of writing.

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    8. When you say something like this: "God's kingdom isn't limited to some cloud in the sky.", it makes me wonder what you consider God's Kingdom to be. I don't recall saying anything about some cloud in the sky.
      "Put you on the armour of God, that you may stand against the deceites of the Devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and bloud: but against Princes and Potestats, against the rectors of the world of this darkness, against the spirituals of wickednes in the celestials."
      When asked "...what hast thou done? Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world." Jn 18:36.
      You say, and I don't disagree, "We wrestle against this - the rulers of darkness of this world, right here, right now." Then you ask, "Is this anti-Christ working through nobody? Or is he working through somebody?" Yes, he is working through someone. Then I think you are asking me,"Who? How do you know?"
      The answer to that question is clearly given in Jn 8:44. "You are of your father the Devil, and the desires of your father you will doe. he was a mankiller from the beginning, and he stoode not in the veritie because veritie is not in him. when he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his owne, because he is a lyer, and the father thereof."
      Here then, is the "Conflict of the Ages" revealed to those who have ears to hear. Two fathers in direct opposition to each other. The father of Truth and the father of Lies. Both have children, or servants if you will, that do their works.
      Then you ask, "How do we wrestle against these?"
      How about, "By standing up and fighting for Truth and Rightousness in the society in which we live."
      But you had better be ready to be hated when you begin to speak the Truth.
      "...and truth shal be throwen prostrate on the ground, and he shal doe, and shal prosper." Dan.8:12.
      St. Paul pointed out those who "love not the truth." What kind of mind does not love the truth? I don't believe that you have that kind of mind. I don't either. But there are those who do, and do not love the truth and are actually haters of God. Truth is so basic to life itself. If you hate truth you must also hate life. I'm off the track here. Sorry.

      roger

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    9. "By standing up and fighting for Truth and Righteousness in the society in which we live."

      Like I said, Roger. It is the same fight. I don't understand your beef.

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  6. You need to try focusing on the progress of taxation, counterfeiting and monopoly in the west. They are not just abstractions, either on or off. They used to be minor - now they are major. That is history about which there is no confusion.

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