Interview with Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society
Ross Douthat is a writer for the op-ed section of The New York Times.
The following interview revolves around Douthat’s much anticipated book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.
Moore: I’ve read your two previous books, To Change the Church and Bad Religion. It seems that you take up your pen to write regularly on decline and drift. To what degree, if any, does this present book extend and build on the concerns of the previous two books?
Douthat: As the titles suggest, those were both books about religion, about American and Catholic Christianity, and about the ongoing theological civil wars that have hobbled institutional religion in the Western world since the 1960s. So you could say they were about decadence, in a certain way – about a period of theological stalemate and institutional decay. And The Decadent Society, then, widens the lens to capture secular society as well, and tries to figure out why exactly the future hasn’t ended up being as dynamic and hopeful and creative as many people in the 1960s expected them to be.
Moore: The word “decadent” conjures up all kinds of images depending on your frame of reference. What exactly do you mean by decadent?
Douthat: Not exactly what most people might expect: This isn’t a book about moral decline, or at least it isn’t only about that. Rather, I’m using decadence to describe a situation that rich societies enter into once they stop advancing, stop having new frontiers to explore, stop having pride in their own past and confidence in their future. A decadent society is characterized by stagnation, drift and repetition at a high level of development – by political stalemates that nobody can figure out how to break, by disappointing economic growth and slowing technological progress, by declining birthrates and old age, and by cultural repetition as people return to the same fashions, movie franchises and ideological arguments. For us, that means an eternal return to 1975 or so, an endless recycling of Baby Boomer arguments and stories and ideas.
Moore: You take pains to show that the past thirty years don’t have the impressive breakthroughs in technology as the thirty years before those. How can that be with I-Phones, the Internet, and self-driving cars?
Douthat: You mean the self-driving cars that can’t drive in rain or snow and seem likely to be “just years away” for years to come? But that riposte aside, the internet is clearly a tremendous breakthrough, and the great exception to the story of stagnation, and the least decadent area of our economy. However, that concession comes with two caveats: First, our internet-era innovations are narrower than in past eras of American history, concentrated in technologies of communication and simulation and less substantial in areas like energy and transportation and even medicine (where we’ve made grinding progress but few penicillin-level breakthroughs). Second, the nature of that innovation, the way it encourages people to retreat into virtual worlds or disappear into their screens, has the effect of accentuating decadence in other areas – directing political impulses away from real-world organizing and into “likes” and “faves,” drawing young people away from marriage and romance and even sex itself with the lure of virtual alternatives, creating a kind of learned helplessness about the non-online world
So yes, the internet is the exception – but one that sometimes seems to confirm the rule.
Moore: You argue, persuasively in my estimation, that there is stagnation not only in the technological sector, but in culture, media, even politics. For the last in that trifecta, aren’t Bernie and Trump novel disruptions?
Douthat: Absolutely: They represent, in different ways, rebellions against decadence — attempts to break out of the existing stalemate, forge a realignment, and push American politics onto a very different track. And it’s not a coincidence that they’re led by old men, because they’re both reaching back to the America of their youth, to the pre-decadent society if you will, with their promise to make the country great again or put it back on the path to the socialist utopia.
But as we’ve seen from Trump’s presidency, with its mix of incompetence, chaos and conventional G.O.P. policymaking, just because you want to rebel against decadence doesn’t mean you’ll win. The underlying gridlock has a way of reasserting itself, and I suspect it would do so in a Sanders presidency as well. So even though you can usefully think of Joe Biden as representing a politics of sustainable decadence, and Sanders as representing a more radical alternative, the systemic elements of decadence mean that it terms of actual policymaking their presidencies might not be that different from one another.
Source: Christianity Today
All Content & Images are provided by the acknowledged source