A quick search of past references shows I’ve written about things Ross Douthat has dealt with about 20 times over the last 6 years. Clearly he and COTTonLINE have been working the same territory, if not often coming up with similar responses. Comes today, an overview of a new Douthat book by the always interesting Charles Murray, done for the Claremont Review of Books.
The book title: The Decadent Society, How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Douthat sees not just the U.S. but all first world societies as becoming decadent, by which he means demonstrating four things: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition.
Prior decadent societies have been overrun by one or another group of barbarians, Douthat admits that as a possibility but thinks more likely another outcome. Murray notes:
[Aldous Huxley's] Brave New World also appears to have been more prophetic than George Orwell’s 1984. Douthat describes the kindly despotism that is likely to oversee decadent societies as “the pink police state”—a state that merely nudges if possible, shoving only when necessary. The pink police state will protect civil liberties of pleasure and consumption and the freedom to be “safe.” The unprotected civil liberties will be freedoms of speech, religion, and privacy.
W.H. Auden was still more damning: “What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” but that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.” To Ross Douthat, that sounds grimly like the predicament in which our decadent society finds itself. “[T]he only thing more frightening than the possibility of annihilation is the possibility that our society could coast on forever as it is—like a Rome without an Attila to sack its palaces, or a Nineveh without Yahweh to pass judgment on its crimes.”
Like Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, I’m hopeful tech billionaires with ambitions in space exploration - most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - will provide the “new frontiers” for our society that Magellan and Columbus provided for a somewhat stagnant Europe (NASA has largely given up).
