Decadence (Part 2)
Now is a time desperately in need of unabashedly ambitious answers to the titanic questions that bedevil us. We must get beyond the incredibly stale declinist argument of the moment, definitively arguing that western decline is not in question or indeed ought to be the question. The key and up-for-grabs debate should be over whether western decline is absolute or relative.
If decline is merely relative, we need have few fears about it. The British were in relative decline the minute the Battle of Waterloo ended in June 1815 until the string was finally played out in 1945 following the Second World War. Yet during much of this time London remained the dominant world power, with Britain setting the pace politically, economically, and culturally. All that was happening is that other powers were relatively gaining on it, a fact that Britain accepted and mastered to its advantage for over 100 years. So let’s weep few tears for an America (and a West) in relative decline; we should be so lucky.
The great danger is that our inability to see that the strange bipolar/multipolar world we live in has definitively changed the global game makes it far more likely the West will continue to behave as though nothing revolutionary has happened in this post-Lehman era. From this tragically erroneous belief, it is just a short step to advocating that America continue to domestically spend money like a drunken sailor, running up yearly trillion-dollar deficits, all the while attempting to order the world as if it retained the power it briefly possessed following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Continuing the policy of ruinous spending both at home and abroad will inevitably lead to other Afghanistans along the way, a war wherein to supply one American trooper now costs an incredible $1 million per man per year. Fighting wars of choice, pursuing such a unipolar policy in the bipolar/multipolar world, is a course that will lead to the rather quick absolute decline of the West, and the disastrous extinguishing of what remains of western power. Put simply, mindsets need to change, and in the blink of an historical eye.
The horse has left the stable over whether the West is in decline or not; we must entirely shift focus and instead map out whether western decline will be relative or absolute, doing all that we can to advocate measured policies that will nudge history in the direction of the former.
Secondly, we must move the creative ball down the field by ignoring the ridiculous (but all too popular) argument over whether things are worse off in Europe or in America. This question reminds me of nothing so much as looking at Ernest Hemingway’s diary during the Roaring Twenties. While he was out tripping the light fantastic in Paris, Hemingway often kept a meticulous count of how many drinks his friend and rival, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was consuming at the parties they were jointly attending. While on the surface evincing concern that Fitzgerald’s drinking was out of control (as it most certainly was), the author of The Sun Also Rises failed to mention the oceans of liquor that he himself—at only a slightly slower rate—was consuming. In other words, the US/Europe argument is only designed to make the questioner feel better about his respective condition, and serves as a psychological defense to avoid looking in the mirror.
Instead, for a fuller, much more profound analysis, I have uniquely come to see the two great pillars of the west (with Japan a third western casualty of a sort) as having the same disease, if slightly differing primary symptoms. This allows for an entirely original view of what is actually going on. For America it is political polarization that has led to an effective halt in genuine policymaking, and its people’s increasing intellectual mediocrity that has distanced them from the democratic process itself, that are the most pronounced signs of decadence.
For the Europeans it is the moral inability to see the link between economic growth and the benefits provided by the state—which far from being an inalienable, God-given right, flow directly from that success—that is the intellectual bridge too far at present. Also bedeviling Europe is the vast democratic deficit that has grown over decades between its elites and its people, a chasm that makes truth-telling almost an impossibility.
America truly stands on the precipice of being unable to indulge in reasoned political discussion anymore. There is simply no practical benefit for US politicians in doing so, as the whole country--be they liberals or conservatives--increasingly retreats to the immorally lazy position of only reading or listening to sources that bolster their prejudices (MSNBC or Fox, pick your poison), only connecting with people who share their immediate views, and worse yet, denigrating those who do not as somehow not quite American, not quite acceptable as fellow citizens. Such an overly-cosseted intellectual flabbiness will lead only to Jeffersonian calamity, and the demise of the American Republic.
While it is easy (and correct) to blame the political pygmies on both sides of the Atlantic presently leading us, as Churchill rightly observed, you get what you deserve in a democracy. And here politics is merely following the cultural bandwagon. American redistricting—amounting to nothing less than gerrymandering, the picaresque term used to describe congressional districts being drawn in Dali-esque shapes to nurture and perpetuate an increasing ideological conformity over the past several decades--has merely echoed what has been going on in the wider culture.
The political result has been as obvious as it has been devastating. There is precious little room for the moderates who used to make the deals that kept the country going in such a system, when almost all political challenges come from within one’s own party. The Congress is increasingly voting in strict parliamentary terms, despite the country not being founded on parliamentary principles; voter discipline within both parties is at 100-year highs.
At the state level, America has evolved into a series of 45 states with basically one-party predilections. The 2012 presidential election saw only five swing states decidedly narrowly, defined as by 5% or less; all the rest were pretty much in the bag before voting ever started. In 2012 just one in 15 House members was elected by a district which voted for the other party’s presidential candidate, the lowest level of ticket splitting in more than 60 years. This new polarization—where the crucial element of politics takes place within parties rather than between parties—leads both the Democrats and the GOP to adopt unchanging positions, whether grounded in objective reality or not, that are never tested by electoral competition. Instead, they measure the ideological purity of its members. While this quasi-Bolshevik stance may make for party discipline, it also does much to explain the bankruptcy of thinking that is presently the chief characteristic of dysfunctional Washington.
The end result is that politically the parties have fled the center, where deals between the two historically get done. The Tea Party phenomenon—and its pushing the Republicans to the right—has been much commented on. Less discussed—but equally important—has been the Democrats lurch to the left, both under President Obama (who is no Clintonesque centrist) and at the Congressional level. Despite leading the Democrats in Congress to the political equivalent of Little Big Horn in 2010, then Speaker Nancy Pelosi was easily re-elected leader of her party in the chamber. Why did the Democrats choose to reward such incompetence?
The simple answer is that the Democrats that survived the shellacking (to use the President’s description of the 2010 vote) all came from the two coasts, where the districts were safely drawn in ultra-Blue (liberal) states; it was their former moderate colleagues in the rest of the country who were wiped out. In other words, those left standing were more liberal, and came from safer districts than those who had been culled. The survivors loved Nancy Pelosi, even if much of the country did not.
Such an outcome, with moderates in both parties being effectively squeezed out, has left two disciplined, ideological parties—one increasingly liberal, the other increasingly conservative—to do battle with precious little incentive to work together. For a Republican lawmaker to admit the obvious, that taxes will have to rise on the Middle Class to tame the debt monster, would be seen as heresy, and likely lead to a Tea Party challenge the next primary season.
For Democrats to stop mimicking French Socialists and accept that runaway entitlements are primarily driving America’s unsustainable debt and must be reformed, would be apostasy, and lead to a similar challenge from an affronted left that does not let facts get in the way of its theories. In both cases, all these semi-hidden political incentives point toward the headline direction everyone is presently moaning about…political sclerosis.
But Washington isn’t doing this to the American people; truth be told, culturally in 45 of 50 states the American people (despite what they say) like the present state of affairs, to the extent of continuing to vote for it. And as Darwin realised, once self-selection starts it is a very difficult process to stop. People with cosmopolitan, leftish views like living in New York City and San Francisco where they know such views are favourably looked upon, just as those who cherish traditional American values like to live in places like Texas and Nebraska.
There is nothing much intrinsically wrong with this and certainly nothing unnatural. But while this has always been true, intellectual flabbiness—the basic yearning not to be challenged by other views but to instead cocoon oneself in news sources and neighbours who sustain one’s own prejudices—has taken this natural process an unnatural step further. A majority of the country finds itself surrounded by people of very like views, who just cannot understand how the other side can be so incredibly stupid.
What’s lost in all this is the precious ability to keep the American system functioning, predicated as it is on checks and balances that call beyond anything else for compromise. The great American Civil War historian Shelby Foote knew his people well when he noted that despite the myth of rugged American individualism, it was rather the country’s time-tested ability to compromise when the chips were down that was its greatest blessing, only marred by the horrendous bloodletting of 1861-65.
America has had one Republic, the French five. Uniquely, there was almost no revolutionary violence following victory at Yorktown, even when the Jeffersonians swept the Federalists from power in the election of 1800. The secret behind this two century record of political success has been the ability to compromise, to see in one’s adversaries a patriot, even if a misguided one. That is the precious asset being lost, one that largely derives from a cultural laziness that has permeated American life. It is certainly a form of decadence.
The European symptoms are slightly different, even if the overall disease is the same. The overly generous safety net must be cut back in line with the new economic realities. Retirement must come much later (contrary to the fantasies of the French), benefits must be means-tested, inflation-indexed and scaled back, government-funded health care must be topped-up with individual insurance, and pensions largely privatised. There will be a general need for both tax increases and spending cuts, optimally at a ratio of 3:1 in favor of cuts, if the continent is not to drown in debt.
All this is straightforwardly obvious. My consulting firm deals with European leaders in both the debtor camp (Italy, Spain, Greece) as well as the creditor camp (Germany, The Netherlands). Privately, a majority of both would easily agree to what I have just proposed. But in the honest and telling wail of Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and Head of the Euro-Group of Finance Ministers, ‘We all know what needs to be done, we just don’t know how to be re-elected after we’ve done it.’
European governments can demonstrably no longer fulfil the many promises they have made to their various constituencies; the promises must be scaled back if the lifestyle so many on the continent cherish is to be preserved at all. It is a glaring sign of how far gone Europe truly is that it is blatantly obvious in policy terms as to how to solve its present crisis, but such suggestions dare not be attempted, or indeed even mentioned. This is advanced-stage decadence.
The inability of European society to have a clear look at what is going on to them and around them forces the vast majority of politicians to dissemble. Austerity becomes something other people must do; taxing the top one percent will magically alleviate the need for government spending cuts for the rest. But life is not a Robin Hood adventure.
In Europe what is truly going on is the end of economic life as it has been known.However skillfully reforms are ultimately enacted, Europeans simply can no longer afford the serene, cosseted, not overly strenuous and very attractive way of life they have grown used to; government in European countries has grown simply unaffordable. But almost no one wants to hear this, much less do anything about it, as to do so would require a very painful, immediate retrenchment for millions. That is human and understandable, but it is also fatal. For it means at present democratic politics in Europe is being conducted based on lies.
And lying—beyond the immorality of it--is a very poor basis for making sustainable policy, at least in any open society. As such, what started as a debt and banking crisis has morphed into Europe’s greatest political crisis since the Second World War. European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as constructed is itself the problem, with around a 20 percent currency misalignment blotting economic ties between the north and the south of the continent.
Worst of all, for all the three bailouts of Greece, and the bailouts of Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, the bleeding has not been stopped, despite all the recent happy talk on both sides of the Atlantic that Europe has saved itself. These countrywide failures (only Ireland in the short term will be able to fund itself on the open market) have been propped up by the bailouts, but it is merely a case of plates being thrown in the air, nothing has been rectified. Likewise, at the equally unsustainable micro-economic level, reality has continued to be ignored, but only by keeping unsustainable borrowing going. Europe itself is on a drip feed, but the patient is certainly not getting well, as the debt numbers explode.
Germany is the primary example of dissembling being the present hallmark of policy due to the wilful ignorance of its society. Contrary to all that Chancellor Merkel has said up until now, German taxpayers will be on the hook for a good portion of the bailout money that Germany has been forced to give to its ailing fellow euro-zone members. The idea that the rest of Europe could go through what amounts to Depression while Germany somehow stays above the fray certainly appeals to the country’s desperate desire to avoid all this; it isn’t for a moment a realistic possibility. Merkel has chosen not to let her people in on the tragic truth articulated so well in Lampedusa’s masterpiece, The Leopard, ‘For things to stay the same, everything must change.’
No policy requiring the coming sacrifices—for whatever Germany decides to ultimately do there will have to be sacrifices—that is not buttressed by public support stands any chance of success. Lying as a way to avoid the democratic deficit over the European crisis is not clever; rather it is just a primary example of decadence.
Our third original insight is in many respects our most bold and most important. We do something unheard of; we actually answer the absolutely critical question as to the historical headline of our time: Why has the 500-year era of western dominance at last come to an end? Rather than timidly describing the times—which is what the overwhelming majority of current affairs assessments would do at this point—we will actually analyze what is going on, clearly laying out that the process of decadence in all its many guises is the primary villain of the piece.
While there are clear political, economic, social, cultural, psychological, and above all moral reasons for decline, they can all be best understood as components of one overarching idea, that of decadence. This long essay amounts to the modern biography of an idea that is the primary reason for nothing less than the end of one historical era, and the beginning of another.
Our fourth and final intellectual innovation is to come to the conclusion that we must also get beyond the macro view of all this; it is necessary, but to really crack the nut of Decadence and western decline it is at the micro-level that answers must be found, for the problem is above all one of personal ethics and psychology. To get somewhere we must eschew the comforting and usual stance of merely assessing grand historical forces and look at the personal, where many of the most telling examples of decadence can be found, as in our previous examples outlined here.
At root, Western decadence is about low-level social and psychological pathologies that have raged largely unnoticed and uncommented upon for decades—and have certainly never been connected to larger macro forces--which now threaten to become fires that rage totally out of control, engulfing western civilization itself. Without grasping the moral and psychological nub of the decadence phenomenon, its understanding is impossible.
So, to get anywhere, we must go beyond the standard declinist argument, looking at western pathologies as a whole, answering the headline question as to why the west’s 500 preeminence is ending, and focusing on the micro as well as macro level to reach fundamentally new conclusions. Fortunately, there is one peerless source that provides the inspiration, intellectual mapping and content structure for our decidedly ambitious undertaking.
Between 1776-1788 Edward Gibbon embarked on another decidedly ambitious project, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In well over 1,000 pages, Gibbon masterfully made this colossal subject accessible through wonderful, entertaining writing and his Enlightenment-driven ability to master many sub-fields (from anthropology through political science) at once, to reach holistic answers. But despite the unprecedented scope of the work, the narrative content was held together (as ours is) by only a few basic but profound analytical insights that give unique form and balance to what by rights ought to have been an unholy mess.
It is striking that one of these themes was the micro notion that the overall decline of the greatest empire the world has ever known was the result of the very personal failings of its citizens. Gibbon was prescient in realizing that societies are almost always destroyed from within, and that decadence becomes the means of societal suicide.
Time and time again, Gibbon characterized Roman decline as above all a problem characterised by personal passivity, a lack of creative energy and originality (it is amusing to wonder at what he would make of the Kardashian). For Gibbon, above all decadence meant that a society had lost its ability to solve its problems, and over time abdicated responsibility for them, a peerless pocket definition of what is currently taking place in both Europe and America. It was at this very personal psychological and moral level that Gibbon sensed things had begun to go awry for the Romans; we would argue that the same thing has been happening in our own time, but none have been able to see it.
I wish to follow in his grand footsteps, seeing decadence as the ideational key to unlocking the riddle as to nothing less than the current cause of western decline.