Time makes these problems worse

Wednesday, February 12th, 2020

Peter Thiel reviews Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success:

Douthat outlines four aspects of decadence: stagnation (technological and economic mediocrity), sterility (declining birth rates), sclerosis (institutional failure), and repetition (cultural exhaustion).

Stagnation is the most evident. Look up from your phone, and compare our time to 1969. “Over the last two generations,” Douthat writes, “the only truly radical change has taken place in the devices we use for communication and entertainment, so that a single one of the nineteenth century’s great inventions [running water] still looms larger in our every­day existence than most of what we think of as technological breakthroughs nowadays.”

Sterility is not immediately obvious outside of a few places like San Francisco. In public debates, low birth rates are treated as a matter of personal preference. If they mean anything more, it is as a drag on future economic performance—hence an argument for immigration. Douthat goes beyond economistic abstractions to point out that missing kids weaken a society’s connection to the future. He thus explains a key current in “populist” skepticism of the elite consensus: “[Immigration] replaces some of the missing workers but exacerbates intergenerational alienation and native-immigrant friction because it heightens precisely the anxieties about inheritance and loss that below-replacement fertility is heightening already.” Douthat does not ignore racism, but he focuses on the dynamics that explain our unique moment instead of inveighing against an age-old evil.

“Sclerosis” refers to our diseased institutions, especially the inability of our government to get anything done. Assessing the record of rule by experts, Douthat again emphasizes historical contingency rather than doctrinaire ideology:

Time makes these problems worse, as popular programs become part of an informal social contract that makes them nearly impossible to reform; as the administrative state gets barnacled by interest groups that can buy off and bludgeon would-be reformers; and as the proliferation of regulations handcuffs administrators and deprives them of the room to respond to changing times.
In other words, the New Deal could only happen once, and whatever competence prevailed at its experimental dawn no longer exists.

“Repetition” names the condition of our culture, endlessly remaking remakes of remakes. Whereas the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties all had distinctive by-the-decade styles in design, clothing, music, and art, from the nineties to now feels like one big remix.

Comments

  1. Graham says:

    Can’t quite make up my mind about the pros and cons of Douthat’s thesis. I’ve been reading him on and off since The American Scene over a decade ago, his position in the debates has moved around, and I can’t quite decide if I like where he’s coming from.

    City Journal had a nice review: https://www.city-journal.org/the-decadent-society-ross-douthat

    On a related note, Spotted Toad doesn’t blog as much as he used to, but the day I read this I also stumbled over his comments on the movie, The Joker.

    https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2019/10/12/the-generation-x-origin-story/

    He doesn’t really make the generational case his title implies, for me, but it echoes these themes.

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