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Ross Gregory Douthat

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success Hardcover – February 25, 2020

by Ross Douthat (Author)

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From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control

Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends. The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational languor that could endure for longer than we think.

Ranging from our grounded space shuttles to our Silicon Valley villains, from our blandly recycled film and television—a new Star Wars saga, another Star Trek series, the fifth Terminator sequel—to the escapism we’re furiously chasing through drug use and virtual reality, Ross Douthat argues that many of today’s discontents and derangements reflect a sense of futility and disappointment—a feeling that the future was not what was promised, that the frontiers have all been closed, and that the paths forward lead only to the grave.

In this environment we fear catastrophe, but in a certain way we also pine for it—because the alternative is to accept that we are permanently decadent: aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer confident in the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we wait for some saving innovation or revelations, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens.

Correcting both optimists who insist that we’re just growing richer and happier with every passing year and pessimists who expect collapse any moment, Douthat provides an enlightening diagnosis of the modern condition—how we got here, how long our age of frustration might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Clever and stimulating . . . Informative and well balanced . . . [An] intriguing theological-political idea.” —Mark Lilla, The New York Times Book Review

“Well-timed . . . This is a young man’s book. Douthat can see our sclerotic institutions clearly because his vision is not distorted by out-of-date memories from a more functional era. . . . Charming and persuasive." —Peter Thiel for First Things

“A scintillating diagnosis of social dysfunctions . . . His analysis is full of shrewd insights couched in elegant, biting prose. . . . The result is a trenchant and stimulating take on latter-day discontents.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Ross Douthat is the rare pundit who has managed to keep his head through the ideological turbulence of recent times — and his new book grows out of his characteristic equanimity and good sense.” —Damon Linker, The Week

“Douthat’s best book yet, a work of deep cultural analysis, elegantly written and offering provocative thoughts on almost every page. It’s hard to think of a current book that is as insightful about the way we live now as is this one.” —Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

“It is a testament to [Douthat's] singular skill and wisdom, then, that he has written so thoughtful and compelling a book that bemoans the end of progress. The Decadent Society is Douthat at his best—clever, considered, counterintuitive, and shot through with insight about modern America.” —The Washington Free Beacon

"A convincing argument." —The National Review

Praise for To Change the Church:

"High-minded cultural criticism, concise, rhetorically agile, lit up by Douthat's love for the Roman Catholic Church . . . An adroit, perceptive, gripping account . . . It's strong stuff, conversationally lively and expressive." —The New York Times Book Review

"Erudite and thought-provoking . . . Weaves a gripping account of Vatican politics into a broader history of Catholic intellectual life to explain the civil war within the church . . . Douthat manages in a slim volume what most doorstop-size, more academic church histories fail to achieve: He brings alive the Catholic 'thread that runs backward through time and culture, linking the experiences of believers across two thousand years.' He helps us see that Christians have wrestled repeatedly with the same questions over the past two millennia." —The Washington Post

“Absorbing.” —Booklist

About the Author

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times op-ed page. He is the author of To Change the Church, Bad Religion, and Privilege, and coauthor of Grand New Party. Before joining the New York Times, he was a senior editor for the Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review, and he cohosts the New York Times’s weekly op-ed podcast, The Argument. He lives in New Haven with his wife and three children.

Product details

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster (February 25, 2020)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1476785244
ISBN-13: 978-1476785240
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 41 customer ratings
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #82 in United States National Government
- #41 in History of Christianity (Books)
- #101 in Political Commentary & Opinion

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Malaise with a side of mayonnaise

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2020

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Folks, I would like to give my one-star rating some proper justification, but I'm battling a case of Covid-19-Lite right now and I just can't summon the energy. This mini-rant will have to do.

If you've bought this book, you're probably already aware that our civilization is rapidly turning into a cultural cesspool, so you deserve something more substantial than this book to chew on. The book can’t be faulted for its depth of insight, because it HAS no insight. It's just a simple, loosely-connected catalog of our cultural shortcomings that seems gleaned from casual Internet searches, with no deep understanding whatsoever of how we got into this mess. Given the richness of the subject, and the efforts of the great sociological pioneers who preceded him, Ross should be a little ashamed for turning out this mayonnaise-and-white-bread college essay.

In short, it appears that the shallowness of this book is yet another symptom of the decadence in our society. Our popular young writers can't even IDENTIFY the problem, much less subject it to tough analysis.

Gratitude to Amazon for its generous return policy. Now if I could get Ross to pay me for the time that I squandered reading his book, I might call it even.

86 people found this helpful

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Ross is bored.

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2020

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So what is decadence? It is not simply gorging ourselves on gout-inducing sweetmeats as we jerk on Princess Leia's chain and contemplate our mountainous accumulation of fat. It is the sense that we have come to the end of something important, that music, art, architecture, thought, imagination were once great and are now repetitive, stagnant and mediocre. It is the sense that nothing important is happening and that we are so hungry for authentic drama that we are at the point of risking catastrophe in order to obtain it.

RD's new book is a long reflection on this phenomenon, on its etiology and on the possible ways in which we might be released from it. Some of the book is strong cultural history. For example, the birth rate in the west is precipitously low. This may be a symptom of our anomie but it is also traceable to a number of obvious factors—the so-called sexual revolution, the women's movement, the broad availability of pornography, the cost of housing and other elements of family formation, the omnipresence of video games and so on. A world in which individuals do not marry, or marry later, or have fewer or no children leads to loneliness, both for the individual in early adulthood and in late middle age, when the absence of siblings and other familial relatives takes its toll. This is very important and the development of sex robots is not a hopeful sign.

Other parts of the book are more imaginative/speculative. For example, just how important was the space program and its diminution in recent years? How important is it that we go to Mars? Why? There are certainly societies to which we might point as warnings (the nature and extent of pornography in Japan) and others (well, one) to which we might point for hope—Israel, where there is a solid birth rate, great science and religious fervor.

The final segment of the book looks at ways in which we might become freed of our decadence. These are wild and woolly: a link between Catholic Africa and Christian China that helps leads to a new great awakening; increased space travel; a special revelation from God, with an intervention in human history . . . .

The book is never dull, but it is often frustrating. Covering virtually all of human history, particularly since the enlightenment, and ranging across all of human experience, we enjoy watching a nimble and informed intellect at work, but the subject is so vast that we see the special pleading implicit in the selection of specific cases. The discussion of economics and recent presidential administrations, e.g., is constantly open to question because of, as Bob Seger would say, what was left in and what was left out. RD is a NYTimes 'conservative', which is to say he is at the center and strays center-right from time to time but feels comfortable straying center-left as well. Think of the sometimes genius, sometimes whackiness of David Brooks in this regard.

In some ways this is essentially a think piece, not a book that argues a thesis. It doesn't say, "This is where we are and, hence, this is what we must do." It is rather one that says, "This is where we are and I feel the need for change. This could happen . . . that could happen . . . this might occur . . . this could change . . . . " I might encapsulate it as being an extended response to Fukuyama's notion of the end of history. RD does not want history to end because it would simply be a kind of giving up, a wasting of the human intellect and human capacity . . . and it would be boring. The fact that so many options are presented (including an extension of an Islam that would be more faithful to the middle-age modernism-accommodating Islam rather than its more reactionary, fundamentalist, contemporary incarnations) is a somewhat odd 'program' coming from a practicing Christian. It suggests the lukewarmness to which he is, at other points, opposed and infers that any break from our current boredom would be preferable to that 'decadence'.

It would take another book or two or three to offer alternatives, but the incremental growth rooted in tradition but also traditional values that we associate, e.g., with Edmund Burke, is an obvious choice. Many of our current problems can be traced to precipitous changes whose dire side effects were not anticipated. How can we roll some of those back? How can we ameliorate our current condition without profoundly disrupting it (again and again)? This is what I would have expected from a center-right Christian thinker.

34 people found this helpful

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Pseudo D

if lust and hate is the candy...

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2020

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Mardi Gras! Fat Tuesday! Carnaval! What a great day for Ross Douthat to release his thoughts on Decadence
in our society. It went great with the box of Lindt chocolates we were trying to finish before Lent, and as
we know, life is kind of like a box of chocolates. Douthat rose to prominence with his book about how elite
colleges have some problems, rehashing stuff in 2005 that was said much better by Bill Buckley in 1952 and
Allan Bloom in 1987 (jk). In recent years he has emerged as one of the finest Catholic commentators in the
Pope Francis era, with a popular seminary prof seconding my instinct in that regard. Damon Linker recently
dubbed him our best pundit. He writes as a conservative (mostly) for the elite liberal New York Times, and
is ripped apart by hundreds of comments every week, but keeps at it. His post at the prestigious Times gives
him a notoriety on Catholic matters across the Atlantic. And The Decadent Society is about America, but
also about the West in general and ultimately the world, with an emphasis on China, Africa, the financial crisis and great recession, and climate change.

The Decadent Society is VERY broad in scope despite its modest length, and covers more or less everything
in late modern life. So it obviously involves a lot of politics and religion, but I'm kind of tired of those topics.
There's a meditation on science and technology, beginning with the Apollo moon landing in 1969. So late
modernity is defined as the last 50 years. What young people easily forget is that everything since 1945 is
postwar, in the wake of the Great War (1914-18) and World War II (1939-45). This began with the Trentes
Glorieuses, the prosperity and dynamism from 1945 to 1975. Toward the end of that time, the stagnation
into late modernity began around 1969 after the moon landing. Decadence is this stagnation, it's not about
the moral corruption of kids getting hammered and hooking up and blowing donuts in the parking lot. In fact
those things happen less, because they're zonked out on weed and opiates, playing Fortnite and looking
at porn on their iPhones. Douthat begins and ends with space travel, ending with the possibility of UFOs
and such. Last summer, Anderson Cooper was all mad about President Donald Trump; it's been known to
happen to the media in general and CNN in particular. He played videos of loftier presidential rhetoric,
closing with Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster, they "slipped the surly bonds of earth, to touch
the face of God". I thought, that's kind of futuristic, but it's actually 33 years ago, and we don't do that kind
of stuff anymore. There was another tragedy in 2003, and then around 2007 the program was retired.

Where I find Douthat helpful is in regard to pop culture. Before Andrew Breitbart became a household
name, Chronicles under the editing of Tom Fleming showed that politics is downstream from culture.
Around 2000, Brian Griffin of the Family Guy sang a song to an old lady who had missed the years from
1970 to 2000 called "You've Got A Lot To See". 20 years later, a lot of the same cartoons are still around,
and have we missed anything? Was there even a difference between the 2000s and the 2010s? The 2000s
were called the Beyonces, but the 2010s could also be the Beyonces. Douthat can rant about the Star
Wars remakes, he has a lot more insight into that stuff but I share the basic feeling about it. Everything
these days is about feminism, even Ghostbusters. Although Melissa McCarthy was quite good in The Heat
with Sandra Bullock. Because she makes everything awesome! Even in the lowbrow area of raunchy comedies,
I shared Douthat's view that The Hangover was the last one of note. Is there anything the caliber of Mike
Judge's Office Space? I doubt it. And when Lady Gaga came along, I did think, this must have been what it
was like in the early days of Madonna. Say what you will, but Gaga is a classically trained musician. When I
heard the opening measures of Bad Romance, I was like, wow she's got some pipes. There wasn't much
on sports, but his Twitter occasionally addresses them.

As I said, this book covers everything, so there's a lot on politics. What I found most interesting was the
comparison of politics to pro wrestling (not stated explicitly) and the notion of kayfabe. Of course, wrestling
is real. Cactus Jack had a funny interview where he pretended to admit that his bumps (dangerous falls)
were fake. The trolls of the alt-right and woke SJW land are playing a part, but the extremists are the
marks, the ones who don't get the act.

A key argument is that decadence is not the immediate doom of civilization, although it could be if there's
a perfect storm of factors. Decadence is actually sustainable. Rome eventually fell, but there were several
centuries of decadence first. And as Chesterton showed in the Everlasting Man, Rome was the furthest
that human nature could achieve, and brought in the grace of Christ in the Incarnation.

Douthat has reflections on low birth rates, pornography, addiction, video games, etc. The internet and
Silicon Valley is an apparent exception to the lack of innovation, but even there there is more stagnation
than one might suspect. With due respect to Andrew Yang, the robot apocalypse isn't necessarily around
the corner, but it is a factor. With regard to literature, what stuck out to me was the references to Joan
Didion. Like Garry Wills, she was a National Review person once, if I remember right.

Where are the footnotes? There's some good research here. I guess it's a privilege of being out of college!
Mine is writing these essays.

29 people found this helpful

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Shlomo Rabinowitz

A bit wordy

Reviewed in Canada on April 22, 2020

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I had different expectations. Douthat is an excellent editorialist, but this book failed to pull together in the end.

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