BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS44 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020New Hope kind of pastiche—of two
different conservative arguments.
The first finds its most forceful
champion in Patrick Deneen, whose 2018
Why Liberalism Failedemphasized the
ways in which our notionally free society
really isn’t—how a kind of soft despotism
can emerge from the uncoordinated
interactions of private agents, few of
whom are willing to risk their wealth or
comfort or status to challenge the
existing system. Douthat’s treatment of
the panopticon, and his Huxleyesque
concerns about virtual opiates, are a
variation on this theme.
The second argument comes from
George Will, whose 2019 The Conserva -
tive Sensibilitywas essentially one long
subtweet of Deneen: a brief for free
markets and limited government, for
classical liberalism, for the Founding, for
the revolution that created it—and above
all for the churn, the unpredictability, the
dynamism that this tradition always
promised, its commitment to individualfreedom the ultimate bulwark against
slowdown and sclerosis. To be sure,
Douthat is less bullish than Will on
small-government conservatism (he has
jokingly expressed sympathy for “a
multiracial, multilingual Catholic
aristocracy ruling from Quebec to
Chile”). But in defining “decadent” as the
opposite of “dynamic,” he is implicitly
granting Will’s political vocabulary. And
in insisting that decadence “needs critics,”
that “stagnation and repetition... crowd
out essential human goods,” he is
implicitly agreeing with Will about the
value of flux—and implicitly disagree -
ingwith Deneen about the value of
rootedness, the normative lodestar of Why
Liberalism Failed. It’s important, sure,
and in some ways our era could use more
of it. But also detectable in Douthat’s
prose is a note of nostalgia—not just for
the tight-knit culture of days past, but
for the pesky Boomers who blew it all
up, in “the last great burst of creativity in
Western history.” Yes, they were
“destructive and solipsistic,” yes, they
dissolved the traditions on which theircreativity drew, but hell, Douthat seems to
concede, at least they did something other
than masturbate.
At the same time, it’s unclear how
small-l liberalism alone could deliver us
from decadence. Even if one rejects the
idea that decadence is a logical conse -
quence of liberalism (and Douthat does
reject it, effectively, by stressing the way
technology has induced inertia), liberalism
offers no obvious guarantee against
decadence, and in certain cases may
even exacerbate it. Freer markets do not
automatically translate into higher
growth, checks and balances create
gridlock, and a public philosophy of
individualism hasn’t stopped the West
from slouching toward conformism—if
anything, it has abraded the social bonds
that uphold diversity.
This may be why Douthat is loath to
offer prescriptions in his final chapters,
choosing instead to sketch some plausible
(and not so plausible) paths out of
decadence—paths, not policies. It’s tellingthat many of these involve catastrophe—a
climate apocalypse or debt crisis, maybe a
migration-fueled civil war—while the
rest involve external shocks that are hard
to predict or engineer: a Euro-African
renaissance of Christianity, an unforeseen
technical breakthrough, a new political
dispensation, or some combination of all
three. In each case, individual agents
can do only so much, and what they do
could very easily backfire, hastening the
dystopia rather than forestalling it.
Which would in turn explain why,
when all is said and done, Douthat isn’t
holding out for a deus ex machinaso
much as a deus ex deo—something
providential, “something extra, that really
can come only from outside our present
frame of reference.” “I’m not predicting
the end of the world or the arrival of the
millennium here,” he assures readers on
the final page. “I’m just saying that if this
were the age in which some major divine
intervention happened,... there would
be, in hindsight, a case that we should
have seen it coming.”
Time will tell.counter culture from which these
properties arose was so successful that it
became the culture, full stop, thereby
destroying the “forms and structures that
once gave rebellion purpose.”
Indeed, Star Wars is in many ways a
synecdoche for the West that Douthat
describes: a once-novel pastiche of
competing ideas and traditions undone by
its own success, stuck in an endless cycle
of banality, increasingly unsure of where
it wants to go or what it wants to be, and
yet still rich enough to ensure its own
recrudescence for the foreseeable future,
provided nobody gets too bored, no
execu tive too adventurous.
Also, in America as in Star Wars,
people aren’t having sex.
This last development, termed “the sex
recession” by The Atlantic’s Kate Julian,
is a symptom of what Douthat calls
“sustainable” decadence, in which an
ever-expanding suite of virtual vice—
Playstation and pornography, TikToks
and Twitter—numbs us to the frustration,the angst, that stasis often brings. Simu -
lated stimuli, the one area where we
haven’tstopped innovating, thus reinforce
stagnation in other realms of life, with
threats of “real turbulence and disruption”
blunted by tweeting, smut, and video
games. (The return of radicalism, Douthat
notes, such as it is, has been a mostly
online affair.)
Then, in addition to these Huxleyan
balms, technology has enabled new forms
of social control: vast distribution
networks for propaganda and disinfor -
mation and fake news, the soft censorship
of Silicon Valley, a panoptic social-credit
system run not by China but by Google,
and an archive of digital memory of
which the Soviets could only dream. This
regime intimidates critics without quite
oppressing them and is too decentralized
to be attacked (well, plausiblyattacked)
as totalitarian—suggesting, again, that
our decadence could continue for a while
yet, immune to the paroxysms and
anxieties it generates.
All of which means that The Decadent
Societyis itself a pastiche—the good,Detectable in Douthat’s prose is a note of nostalgia—not
just for the tight-knit culture of days past, but for the pesky
Boomers who blew it all up.
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