Decadence: our passive, receptive, pleasure-seeking, self-indulgence

As Colorado again makes news, this time for free flowing marijuana, instead of school or theater shootings, I followed one of Gerard's links to this piece On Decadence by Charles Hill.

“Decline” we Americans and Westerners mope about daily; “fall” most of us still hope to postpone. Decadence, it would seem, is the mean between the two.

An explosion of dynamic individualism propels civilization forward toward a better future; but that same dynamic proves incapable of virtuous control, causing greed, violence and deepening self-indulgence to spiral society downward toward chaos.

The Puritans were consciousness personified, assiduous diary-keepers who were ever watchful for the slightest signs of grace or degeneracy.

George Washington's Farewell Address, commonly interpreted as a warning to avoid foreign entanglements, was more concerned with maintaining the character of the nation amid the temptations of freedom. As the world’s first-ever free people, the individual virtue vital to successful popular government could only be upheld, Washington believed, by respect for religion.

Social science is the new scholasticism, an intellectual paradigm in which participants are published, prized, tenured and made prominent for their contribution to one great required idea: to prove “scientifically” that human beings have nothing resembling what formerly was called “free will.” An avalanche of “studies” now unsurprisingly asserts that we hold prejudices seated in a level of our minds so deep as to be inaccessible to our conscious awareness.

The advent of “screen culture”—cellphones, iPads, as well as old-fashioned TV and film—now ubiquitous among the young in their formative years of education, has shrunk consciousness down in a different way. Students increasingly seem conditioned by the fact that much of their waking life is populated by mechanically mediated images in which they can see other beings on screens but those others cannot see them. As a result the viewer can become oblivious to others, having no need to interact or maintain a minimum of civil conduct with them. To think back on Herodotus again, this is the Gyges question: What do you do when no one is looking? The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it.The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it. This phenomenon adds a new dimension to the age-old definition of decadence.
So in the early 21st century it is the electronic domination of society by screen culture, as well as the orthodoxies of social science, that is shriveling consciousness.

These devices produce an ever shorter “attention span” that tolerates only fragments of information. As Stanley Cavell of the Harvard philosophy department has noted, “chronic interruption means the perpetual incompleteness of human expression.”

The habits of the incomplete have adversely affected the book as a unit of knowledge, for the book’s unique characteristic is to present an “extended argument.” By now, several generations of students have been conditioned to read books by way of fragmentation, which subverts any real book’s purpose. The consequences include the demise of bookstores, a form of textocide brought about not only by online price-cutting but also by the denigration of extended argument itself. This does grave damage to intellectual serendipity, for the richest value of a bookstore—as well as a large, open-shelf library—is to reveal via softly structured browsing what you were not looking for, or had no idea even existed. Now we are corralled by Google’s “big-data” efficiency into finding only that which we already know is there to be found. To Edmund Burke’s disgust at a time of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” we might now add “researchers.”

Are we increasingly becoming

passive, receptive, pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent and, yes, decadent?

With this observation we enter the Age of Entertainment, Plato’s nightmare, made worse by a ubiquitous screen culture that makes entertainment always available and that turns everything—news, sports, health, war—into one or another form of entertainment.

Entertainment’s contribution to decadence was exhibited in the mid-1990s through the medium of advertising, which has now become commercial, political, a product of the cultural elite and designed to entertain all at the same time.

In this way entertainment displaces all the major arts and humanities, blocking substantive communication and democratic discourse and replacing them with dictated, corrosively sardonic, simulated moments.

So in place of the classically tripartite elements of the soul—reason, desire and spirit, according to the parable of Leontias in Plato’s Republic, or in earlier America, self-reliance, Christian-Roman virtues and patriotism—a new triad emerges: claims on government, vulgar behavior and a yearning for relief from world leadership.

This vast societal transformation might be called “The Great Virtue Shift.” Almost every act regarded in the mid-20th century as a vice was, by the opening of the 21st century, considered a virtue.Almost every act regarded in the mid-20th century as a vice was, by the opening of the 21st century, considered a virtue. As gambling, obscenity, pornography, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, abortion and sneering disaffection became The New Virtue, government at all levels began to move in on the action, starting with casinos and currently involving, in several states and the District of Columbia, an officially approved and bureaucratically managed narcotics trade.

All this works to satisfy the cultural elite’s desire to feel morally superior about itself regarding collective moral issues of large magnitude even as they, as individuals, engage in outsized self-indulgent personal behavior. This is Reinhold Niebuhr’s “moral man and immoral society” turned on its head, where hedonism takes cover beneath a superficial global moralism.

The virtue shift has been paralleled by a governmental shift. As gifted politicians have sensed the changing psychology and national character of the country, they have learned to constantly scan the political horizon to identify each special interest group, make the necessary promises and then move to satisfy each group’s claim on government largesse, or its demand for deeper government intervention to enforce adherence to each group’s behavioral choices. Throughout most of American history people were preoccupied with how to prevent government from becoming corrupt. In our time, governments have discovered how to corrupt the people. It then follows that the more corrupted the people become, the more numerous the laws must be, thus further aggrandizing government’s indispensability.

It comes down, finally, to the individual and to George Washington’s recognition that a free society must be made up of virtuous, self-disciplined citizens. Americans have grappled with this idea since the days of the early Republic. Americans possess liberty as do no others and so have sought to understand its uses and responsibilities as well as the myriad of ways, direct or insidious, through which it can be taken away. Freedom is for a people; liberty is for the individual.

Learning what liberty is and what it requires of us is the only bulwark, ultimately, against American decadence. Pay no heed to the determinists: The choice is ours to make.