Decadence — For the Time Being
A Review of “The Decadent Society” by Ross Douthat
Woody Allen’s 2011 Midnight in Paris is a movie about the decadence trap: a sense that the present is just a falling-off from some past time we should envy. For its protagonist, Gil Pender, that’s the “Lost Generation” American modernists writing in Paris in the 1920s: there was life, history, art. Through some fantastical time-traveling, he gets to share their experience — and discovers that they, in turn, envied earlier times.
Decadence, in this telling, is just a form of wishful thinking. As the film’s Paul Bates concludes:
Nostalgia is denial — denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is golden age thinking — the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.
The sense of decadence? “That’s what the present is. It’s a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.”
The danger of this kind of thinking about decadence is very real. Even Jacques Barzun falls into it in his otherwise intricate and compelling From Dawn to Decadence (2000), a career-concluding history of modern Western civilization. The account falters when it casts the late…
