The Decadence Paradox

At the heart of the concept of “decadence” is a paradox. By its standard definition, decadence means “moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.” But very often, cultural developments that are widely accepted as decadent end up being examples of society thriving and peaking rather than falling apart.

For example, rock music was long considered evidence of moral and cultural decline because it was sexually depraved, violent, and vulgar. Today, it would be virtually impossible to find anyone in America who isn’t proud of the cultural impact of rock music. Other examples include women working outside the home, birth control, interracial marriage, public education, religious freedom, gay rights, the radio, the telephone, rap music, etc. All of these were foretold as society corruptors or killers. No doubt every one of these caused some amount of harm to some aspect of our culture. But let’s be absolutely clear: A gay rap song mocking organized religion and celebrating interracial relationships as it’s played on a smartphone radio app is a sign of a society that’s thriving beyond measure.

Cultural develops don’t happen randomly or in a vacuum. For example, the advent of women working outside the home didn’t get dropped by chance into any given time and place in history. It began in mid-1800s with the industrial revolution. It blossomed into the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s following the adoption of the washing machine and contraception. The culture was experimenting, shifting, and expanding on multiple fronts, with the end result of being ready to embrace a new understanding gender roles.

The same logic applies to the major societal advancement of gay rights. Western culture had been cautiously adopting less puritanical views around sex and family for decades. When the gay rights movement won the day, society had shifted and advanced in order to accommodate it. Same-sex parents had been studied since the 1980s. When the US Supreme Court made gay marriage legal across the US in 2015, we’d had 30 years of research into this specific question and others like it.

This isn’t to say that every “decadent” thing ends up being a plus for society. It may turn out that giving kids smartphones with 24/7 access to pornography and AI girlfriends was nothing but a total disaster. And there are plenty of social experiments being run under the banner of leftist progressivism that may equally turn out to be net-negative.

But we’ll find out if these experiments are failed ones long before society itself falls. Experiments that—for whatever reason—aren’t workable, either fizzle out or get snuffed out. If the broader culture doesn’t kill them, if voters don’t kill them, if podcast bros on a holy crusade don’t kill them, then lawsuits will.

There’s a great Jane Fonda film from 1969 called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The film takes place during the Great Depression when dance marathons were common. To win a cash prize, all you had to do was be the last couple still dancing. Sounds harmless, right? But in the aftermath of various scandals and even deaths, these events were deemed too dangerous and were banned.

In a similar respect, our society now bans deadly amusement parks, freak shows, bareknuckle prizefighting, and public blood sports like cockfighting. In the modern day, we’re scrambling to get cellphones out of schools, to stop children from accessing porn sites, to stop open-air drug markets from operating on city streets, etc. All of these things may go the way of the dance marathons. If they don’t? Then they probably weren’t that significant of a threat to society after all.

Meanwhile, be careful with which vices you label “decadent.” Rather than being signs that Rome is about to fall, they may be sideshows to the general march of cultural advancement, or they might even turn out to be the next rock and roll. That’s the paradox of decadence.