What Is Modern Decadence?

This is The Decadence Project, a newsletter about exploring modern decadence, futurism, and the absurd.

When people mention the Decadence movement, they’re usually referring to a time in the late 1800s when writers and artists turned sharply away from naturalism. The novel Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans kicked off the movement, inspiring Oscar Wilde, Paul Valéry, and many others. In the novel, the protagonist aspires to reach a higher plane of experience by wallowing solely in manufactured sensations. For taste, fine wine and cheese. For smell, perfume. For social experience, literature that defies strict naturalism. His favorite type of art? Fake flowers.

Modern decadence is a little different. There’s still plenty of excessive indulgence in the artificial, and people definitely haven’t lost interest in the general pursuit of luxury and pleasure. But there is something new: escaping natural reality through digital spaces. The modern equivalent of the protagonist from Against Nature is someone like Jak Wilmot, who, in 2019, spent a full week in virtual reality.

Most people aren’t terribly eager to spend weeks at a time wearing a VR headset, but anyone who spends a fair amount of time online is—in my view—part of the modern decadence movement.

Meanwhile, modern life itself has become inescapably decadent, in the sense that everything we interact with in our culture has become far, far removed from nature. Jean Baudrillard explains this best:

“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.”

Why is this interesting? So far, this is all a pretty basic observation. But looking at the modern world as another decadent movement is interesting because—like the first movement of the 1800s—it’s sure to open up new ways of seeing the world. In particular, it will reveal a lot about the nature of consciousness and the human condition. Also, the new worlds opened up by technology will give us a fresh batch of larger-than-life personalities—modern Oscar Wildes dabbling in unexpected mediums.

For a more in-depth read on modern decadence, check out my 2019 article in Areo Magazine: Virtual Reality Will Spark a Twenty-First Century Decadent Movement.