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- By calling us “decadent,” Douthat doesn’t mean that we’re succumbing to imminent decline and collapse. Following esteemed cultural critic Jacques Barzun, Douthat instead defines decadence as a time when art and life seem exhausted, when institutions creak, the sensations of “repetition and frustration” are endemic, “boredom and fatigue are great historical forces,” and “people accept futility and the absurd as normal.”
- Decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. It describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected. And crucially, the stagnation and decay are often a direct consequence of previous development: the decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own significant success. [The Decadent Society]
- Instead of encouraging real-world authoritarian tendencies or fueling an extremism that could spark an actual civil war among polarized political factions, Douthat suggests that the internet may be having the opposite effect. Virtual reality, he claims, “encourages people to playact extremism, to re-enact the 1930s or 1968, … to approach radical politics the way they approach a first-person shooter game — as a kind of sport, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.”
- If you want to feel like the West is convulsing, there’s an app for that, a convincing simulation waiting. But in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb. [The Decadent Society]