Decadence as a Way of Life

Thomas Couture, "The Romans of the Decadence" (1847).
 Image from Musée d'Orsay, via Wikimedia Commons

Thinking about decadence this weekend, though not for the reasons some of you might suspect. The subject has always held something of a fascination for me. It seems that too many people think decadence has something to do with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, or possibly with Joel Gray and Liza Minnelli camping it up for Bob Fosse.

Whereas others (I'm looking at you, Ross Douthat) seem not to have much idea at all of what decadence is, just that we are it at the moment.


What set me off on this subject (this time at least) was a review in the New Statesman about a new(ish) book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper. I don't necessarily agree with the book's contention (at least as spelled out in the review; I have the book on hold from the library but it'll probably be a month or two before I see a copy) but it did give me cause to look up reviews of Douthat's The Decadent Society and to pull from my shelves a short book (almost more of a long essay, really) that says more about decadence in its first 50 pages than Douthat appears to in his entire book.

The book I refer to is Decadent Societies, by a long-dead intellectual named Robert Adams*; Lorna and I bought it when it was published in 1983 and I have re-read this book every couple of years for three decades now. (Any writer interested in grand fantasy is going to be interested in the causes of the collapses of Rome, ancien regime France, and Romanov Russia, I think.)

I freely confess here that I haven't read Douthat's book; not sure I'm going to either. What I have read is the long essay he published in the NYT to plug the book, plus a number of interviews he gave while promoting it. And perhaps I'm missing something, but nowhere in my reading have I encountered from Douthat any definition of what decadence is. He seems to be implying that it's a form of economic and cultural stagnation, but that can't be right. A society can be what we think of as stagnant and still last for decades or even centuries (the East Roman empire lasted something like 1,200 years and was culturally and economically stagnant for large parts of that time).

Adams's definition of societal decadence is simple and stark: a society is decadent when it no longer persuades enough of its members that they have any stake in that society's continuation; when an existential crisis arrives, there's pretty much nobody left to defend the society.

What did for Rome wasn't the sexual misbehaviour of the elite, nor was it the economic inefficiencies inherent in slavery and the introduction of serfdom to the agriculture of the Italian peninsula. I'm not even sure I agree with Harper's contention that it was epidemics that brought down Rome. When the Roman state forbade its citizens from joining the army and taking a role in their own defence; when it taxed its farmers into insolvency (and then tried to dump the tax burdens of the insolvent on their neighbours); when it sold into slavery the children of the German tribesmen it had invited into the empire to serve as soldiers in place of citizens—then Rome was decadent, and when the Goths attacked it fell.

Same holds true, Adams says, for France under the late Bourbons. The financial burdens of the state were dumped (largely by the noble class) onto the shoulders of the peasant farmers, who were at the same time given no say whatever in how the state was run. The peasants, in many parts of the country, actually seem to have had some love for their kings, even Louis XVI. They did not, however, have any love for their aristocratic overlords. So when a group of extremely unhappy urbanites attacked, claiming the state could not be improved without it first being destroyed, the peasants largely refused to help defend the monarchy—and went out of their way to destroy the nobles.

I hadn't actually intended to spend this much time castigating Ross Douthat, if only because everything I've read about his argument suggests it's a complete non-starter. But the question of whether our present condition is one of decadence might just have some relevance. And now that I've found myself thinking about it, I suppose I'll have to write up another post on the subject.

On the bright side, this is one of the longer pieces of writing I've managed since February. So there's that to be cheerful about.

*No, not the Robert Adams who wrote the "Horseclans" novels (does anyone still read those?). And not the Robert M. Adams who is the US philosopher. No, this was Robert Martin Adams, a professor of English at UCLA and frequent writer and translator on various literary subjects. This Adams has very little presence on the web, but I know this much: he was born in 1915 and died in 1996, and so he would have been 65 when he wrote Decadent Societies... roughly the age I'm at now.