Decadent Societies, Part 2

Romans of the Decadence by Thomas
Couture, via Wikimedia Commons

About 40 years ago, Robert M. Adams wrote Decadent Societies, a short book (or long essay) that attempted to answer two questions: 1) What did the best-known “decadent” societies of the West have in common? 2) Was the United States of the time decadent by those criteria?

Adams suggests “…’decadence’ may be used as shorthand for the condition of society incapable of transcending difficulties that, years before, it would have shrugged off as routine.” Among the symptoms he lists are:

·       military weakness;

·       food insecurity (dependence on outside sources beyond the society’s control);

·       technological stagnation;

·       a “grossly oppressive” tax system;

·       losses in major wars;

·       inability to prevent massive losses through epidemic disease;

·       acceptance of rising inequality;

·       a complete lack of concern over the increasing proportion of the population with little to no reason to continue to support the society’s existence.*

The societies he analyzed were: Rome; Byzantium (the East Roman Empire); Bourbon France (the Ancien Regime); late-Romanov Russia; and the British Empire. The latter was an interesting addition, and I suspect Adams discussed it mostly because it was a mid-twentieth century decadence, to him at least, and so came close in time to the contemporary US.

His conclusion was that No, the US was not really a decadent society at that time. He did, however, identify some conditions that alarmed him, and which—if they continued to progress on the lines he detected—might soon lead the US into decadence. I thought it might be interesting to look back at those conditions, and then perhaps to try to examine the US of 2020 through Mr. Adams’s eyes.

First, the 1980s. The thing that stands out most to me is Adams’s concern with organized crime. One of Reagan’s early cabinet secretaries was evidently somewhat mobbed-up, and Adams thought this might portend a taking-over of government by… the Mafia. Today, that seems somewhat quaint. Organized crime is still a problem—not just in the US but pretty much everywhere—but it does not seem to me to represent an existential threat, in the sense that revolutionaries threatened France in the 1780s or Russia in 1905-17. So there’s one sign of incipient decadence he got wrong.

One threat Adams identified that could still be considered an issue is gun violence: “The gross, inescapable example [of the unleashing of violent technologies] is the epidemic of handguns in America; if a society cannot control this particularly fearful example of technology run rampant, or even recognize the need to control it, there is little hope of its doing anything else.” Well, on the one hand he was certainly right about the threat; on the other hand, forty years later things were just as bad but not evidently much worse. So perhaps we’ll call this prediction a draw.

Adams was concerned about technological stagnation, represented to him by the inability of Detroit’s Big Three automakers to compete with their Japanese counterparts. Amusingly, he suggested one possible way of dealing with the issue would be to encourage US manufacturers to offer their employees the sort of lifetime employment then on offer in Japan. (Adams also considered it a sign of incipient decadence that Japanese and German automakers were opening plants in the US; he compared these plants with the maquiladora factories the US had set up in Mexico.) He noted the beginnings of the IT revolution without, it seems to me, fully comprehending its potential. At the same time he expressed a great deal of concern about the declines in coal, railroads, and steel-making. He seemed to think the US somehow might not be able to cope with a world in which coal wasn’t being mined and the railroads did not run. I think it’s safe to say that the US economy didn’t suffer much more from the decline of domestic coal and steel production than it did from the decline a hundred years earlier of the family farm. A change in economic structures doesn’t necessarily equate to collapse or even decay. So there’s another symptom incorrectly apprehended.

Related to his economic concern, Adams issued a warning about the inability in the US to understand the rate of infrastructure decay, or to do anything about it. In 1980 he was worried about the state of roads and bridges and other mechanisms of transport and communication. His biggest complaint here was about a failure not only to plan for infrastructure maintenance but even to track the process of decay. While Adams never came out in favour of centralized planning he certainly regretted the refusal of the US federal government to even keep proper statistics. Here’s another prediction that we’ll have to call a draw: he was right about the threat this posed, but while the problem hasn’t been fixed it hasn’t yet become an existential threat either.

Adams (correctly) dismisses the whole question of personal sexual behaviour as having anything to do with decadence. Where he does see a potential threat it is in what he referred to as liberal “niceness” in the face of violence and property crime. Like many a neo-conservative coming along a decade or so later, Adams was worried the reluctance of liberal America to get tough with criminals might represent, on a national scale, appeasement of a Chamberlain-to-Hitler flavour. Adams did not see—nobody did—the demographic changes that would lead to a diminution of criminal violence, even if property crime hasn’t quite shrunk as rapidly. So there’s another threat that didn’t quite come to pass.

At the end of his book, then, Adams admits that “To the question, Is America a decadent society? there are at least three answers, and two of them are Yes.” But he qualifies those Yeses, and in fact if you look at things dispassionately—which I have tried to do—the No answer is the one that won out. If only because the US is still intact forty years after he wrote.

Will this continue to be the case in another forty years?

*An example here is what happened in late-Roman Gaul and Spain, where the entire burden of taxation was dropped on the shoulders of the owners of farms—who were forbidden by law to stop farming. When the state no longer provided any protection for these farmers (who were as close as the late Roman Empire came to having a middle class), there was no reason whatever for them to obey laws that only punished them while not protecting them. A lot of these people abandoned farming and became brigands or rebels. Very similar things happened in late-eighteenth century France, which actually was developing a true middle class. The Revolution, remember, was largely led by lawyers and dissident clergy.