The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic by Ross Douthat.

3/5 rating. 244 pages.

Book #28 of 2021. Read April 5, 2021.

Ross’s thesis is that our society has become “decadent” in the sense of sclerotic, bloated, and dis-engaged.

As Thoreau speaks about lives of quiet desperation, our society has lost the spark of invention and of discovery. While I don’t agree with a lot of his worries, I believe that this critique is hard to argue with. I go back to the fact that Henry Ford would easily recognize a car of today even though Ford’s inception was over 100 years ago. The internet is great, but where did those utopian ideals of democratizing information and bringing the world together go? Instead it’s full of trolls, memes, and everyone screaming about useless problems.

In this case – and a few of his other ideas – the book was thought-provoking and let me synthesize my thoughts about some topics I had not really thought on before. Unfortunately, there were also some big disagreements I had with his opinions and use of language.

Ross is certainly pro-growth which I think is a maxim we need to get away from as pumping out ever-more, useless junk to give to people who already have too much of it is not a great way to measure how a country is doing overall (GDP). His pro-growth stance does not only apply to economics as he views our dropping birthrates as a travesty and possible civilization-ending problem. I have a complete inability to understand how lower birthrates are anything but a positive (as long as this is not spurred by negative outside forces and is optional).

My other problem is with his language around birth rates. As a journalist for the “New York Times” I expected more precise language from Ross. He continually uses the terms “sterile” or “sterility” to describe choices to not have babies. While there may be instances in our chemically-filled world of increasing sterility, labeling lower birthrates as such is just fear mongering and a flippant use of language to conflate a choice with the physical inability to have babies.

This was worth a read for the conversation and ideas, but unless you’re planning on contemplating those, it’s not a must-read.

Quotes:

“Instead, we are aging, comfortable and such, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, burrowing into cocoons from which no chrysalis is likely to emerge, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens.”

“Like most broad trends, the economic decadence of the developed world is overdetermined, and almost every serious attempt at explanation will contain some element of truth.”

“In the United States, literacy rates for white students peaked in the 1970s and have slipped since.”

“In the real world, the world of legislation and policy making, Trump-era politics were the same politics of gridlock and stalemate as before, with lots of lying and more corruption and occasional forays into cruelty from the man at the top but nothing resembling the ascent of real authoritarians in the real 1930s.”

“Lies and propaganda are normal features of revolutionary movements, but there is usually true belief woven in as well; Joseph Goebbels propagandized like Satan, but he believed absolutely in his Fuehrer and his cause. But Alex Jones just believes in selling supplements, Donald Trump just believes in selling Donald Trump, and a remarkable amount of online extremism is a mix of irony memes and pranks and playacting, with anonymous trolls competing with very public grifters to exploit an aging society’s anxieties and an adrift youthful population’s appetite for stimulation.”

“If you want to feel like Western society is sliding into the abyss of civil war, there’s an app for that, a YouTube clip of rioting to watch, a convincing simulation waiting. But in the real world, it’s possible that Western society as a whole is still 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 crucial task for twenty-first-century humanity, in this view, would be making the most of a prosperous stagnation: learning to temper our expectations and live within limits; making sure existing resources are distributed more justly; improving institutional functioning at the margins; using education to lift people, especially young men, out of the prison-and-virtual-reality nexus and into the sunlit up-lands of the creative class; treating the chronic conditions of old age more humanely; and doing everything we can to help poorer countries transition successfully into our current position.”

“A time traveler from the past, say, who spent an hour on our porn sites or our social media networks or an evening watching cable news or a day in an opioid clinic might report back that the future is simply dystopian, full stop.”

“Or, of course, the meteor. Were the dinosaurs decadent? Alas, their books have not survived.”

“Meanwhile, the fear that we’re printing and spending our way to disaster is confined to a dwindling band of deficit hawks and goldbugs and professional prophets of catastrophe – the sort of people who have successfully predicted thirteen of the last three recessions.”

#thedecadentsociety #rossdouthat #newyorktimes

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