Book Review
"The Decadent Society," by Ross Douthat.
4/5 stars
"Going to church/mosque/ shul and having babies is a great cure for decadence."
*******
Of the book

-245 pages of prose over 11 chapters; 22 pps/chapter
-Index but no bibliography nor citations
-5 to 6 hours worth of reading and reviewing time.

The writing is good, but the lack of citations / bibliography makes it feel like an extremely long newspaper article (that and the polemic obsession with Donald Trump).

I might also recommend that for a more thorough (and referenced!) discussion of political decay:

1. "Political Order and Decay,"  by Francis Fukuyama.

2. For an even deeper discussion of *why* things fall apart, Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Civilizations," whereby civilizations aggregate into ever more complex units for gains in efficiency until they reach diminishing returns and then collapse back into smaller units.

If exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, then some type of degringolade seems perfectly reasonable--and maybe all this angst is a bit misplaced?

*****
I have read lately several books about the transgender hysteria, and I am aware that these are not issues in their own right, but only symptoms of a society in the process of decline.

But, I thought it prudent to read a book that had some discussion of what it means exactly to be "decadent."

The answer is that: It can mean a lot of different things. (Popularly: "having low morals and a great love of pleasure, money, fame, etc.")

Douthat seeks a middle ground that is neither excessively judgmental nor excessively deterministic, and he comes up with: "economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development."

Fair enough.

Many of his observations are recapitulation for people who are already decently well read: economic stagnation, low birth rates, sclerotic governments (and repetitive, non-flourishing pop culture).

In a sense, the author's fluent prose to describe the current situation is helpful only in the same way that makeup helps a corpse: If we know that all Western civilizations are undergoing/will yet undergo these same "Four Horsemen," it's about as interesting to characterize each one as it is to do the same thing to a petri dish going through the typical lag/ log / stationary / decay phases.

What more can you add? And why is studying petri dish number 1 any different to studying petri dish number 1 million?

It seems that his answer to Rome's "bread and circuses" is, in modern times "pornography, fentanyl, video games and YouTube." 

As much as I had wanted to think of this as at least somewhat serious philosophical text, the fact that the author also seems to have a serious ax to grind against Donald Trump and his presidency really makes it seem less that than an editorial columns written by somebody who works for the New York Times. (And it seems that this author would be sensitive to the fact that avalanches are not caused by any particular snowflake, but by any particular snowflake PLUS an initial state. The fact that Donald Trump was Donald Trump is only a coincidence.)

Ultimately, the book is very speculative / inconclusive.

The decadence could ultimately be apocalyptic.

Or not.

Its reversal could come about in this way.

Or that one.

*******

What are some things that we DO learn from this book?

1. The future belongs to people who actually have babies, and that is how the author comes to the improbable conclusion of an African future. (The average African woman has 4.5 children. The average Asian/ European one has between 0.81 and 1.84 children.) The former is significantly more religious than the latter, whether Muslim or Christian.

Religious communities are not a bad idea. I'm reading that 55.2% of men father zero children, and only 4.4% father four or more. The average Orthodox Jewish man probably has 5.5 children. Ditto for the average Mormon.

2. Online life should be strictly limited. There's no reason for your sons to go out and find women (and have babies with them) if they spend too much time cracking one off to something on Pornhub, or playing video games with virtual friends instead of real ones.

3. Revolutions seem a lot less likely to happen when everybody is an armchair warrior and they can get it out of their system online, rather than putting boots on the ground. Things like the Occupy Wall Street and the CHAZ in Seattle eventually fizzled out because they just weren't real. (Douthat thinks that these black clad antifa protesters are play acting, because they don't even have the doxastic commitment to show their face.)

4. The Roman Empire stayed in a state of stagnation for ≈4 centuries before it actually collapsed. If it happened once, it can happen again, and in that case the fate of the West might not necessarily be so apocalyptic.

5. Aging societies become conservative societies, because people that have too much to lose from change don't want to see it coming.

6. Some interesting thoughts on a police state arising through the "safetyism" that is popular these days in the West (this has been talked about before by Jonathan Haidt in "Coddling of the American Mind"), where infringements upon personal freedoms are reinterpreted as a "safety" issue.  (Newport cannot sell menthol cigarettes because it discriminates against black people!)

7. If you don't want to become part of the Panopticon that comes with social media, it is easier to minimize your technological footprints. (90% of Orthodox Jewish homes do not have televisions, probably 50% don't have internet connections,  and probably 50 to 60% do not have smartphones.)

Second order thoughts: 

1. The author gives several examples of other writers that were prescient in their predictions. But, if somebody writes long enough and makes enough statements then some of them will be true.

The author here has a lot of fantastic (this is not in the positive sense of the word) ideas that really are just speculation.

2. The book is significantly vitiated by the lengthy discussion of repetition (Douthat is a movie critic, and he just had to shoehorn it in somewhere in a book about decline). 

Too many movies are repetition/inspired by recent films. Or the too many songs are remakes of old songs. 

I just don't know; in literature there are only four plots (person v. person / person v. self/person v. society / person v. supernatural force), and you could say that all books are rewrites of these four. 

But that does not necessarily mean that literature is stagnant. When musical artists find a formula that works, they stick with it. It's not so hard to imagine that a record label would do the same thing.

There's also the fact that the volume of television/ music downloads are OVERWHELMING, and it's probably harder than it's ever been to develop a new musical genre and get people to even find it in the ocean of material that's out there.

a. The making of albums and television shows are categorically different in "these" days to "those." When there are only three or four television channels, a studio will wait until they have something important to show in order to make a new TV show. Or, when it costs a lot of money to produce an album and higher personnel, then people will wait until they have something to sing to put one out. (Have you noticed how albums from the '70s are good all the way through? Can you imagine a label these days financing a song as complicated and expensive as "Bohemian Rhapsody"?)

b. Might it be too risky to try to make something that's too different if you want to get an audience somewhere? Better to stick with something safe. (Just under a thousand channels on cable TV.) 

And this is a running theme all throughout the entertainment industry, that the internet has made things so free and so low value that production values have declined in tandem.

3. (p.196) Some things that the author entertains are frankly stupid, and were actually disproven by subsequent events. ("Western fiscal and monetary policy, far from pushing us toward disaster, it's part of the system that might sustain our decadence indefinitely.")

I have to forgive him, because this was during the week that everybody thought that Modern Monetary Theory was a "thing."

But, in reality, the bond market has been humbling profligate governments for MANY centuries. Interest rates will be low right until they aren't (the FED funds Target rate went to 5.5% in just one year after being low for decades).

4. Almost the entirety of his Eurafrica thesis hinges on environmental apocalypse. There are some plausibility issues, because environmental apocalypse theories come and go, but the inability of Africans to manage a state (or even a city, for that matter: Baltimore, Detroit, or St.Louis-- among dozens of others) is something that has been stable for a very long time.

5. Even the Chinese surveillance state can only do so much. If you have 30 million bachelors in a country who cannot find a woman, using surveillance and internet bars to sweep that under the rug would be nothing short of miraculous.

Verdict: Recommended at the price of $5 plus shipping


Good quotes: 

(p.194): "The lesson of 1492... Is that any civilizational order, decadent or otherwise, is sustainable only until the right Black swan development arrives, at which point it might be doomed in a way that no simple extrapolation, no sociological analysis could have possibly predicted."

(p.193, Will Durant): "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it is destroyed itself from within."

(p.132): "Even the summer of 2020 did not establish a pattern that looks anything like the year of 1969, when there were more than 3,000 bombings across the continental United States."

(p.4, GK Chesterton): "There was nothing left that could conquer Rome, but there was also nothing left that could improve it."

(p.233): ".... Arguably the strongest non-communist worldview in china, with the potential to take over the Middle Kingdom much as Christianity wants took over the Roman empire: slowly, and then all at once."