The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat

Author:Ross Douthat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Baudrillard’s America

In March 2017 Foreign Policy asked Keith Mines, a State Department expert on developing-world civil strife, to assess the risk of a second civil war here in the United States. He gave America a 60 percent chance of falling into such a conflict in the next ten to fifteen years; the other academics he assembled for the exercise came up with a slightly lower consensus of 35 percent. After Charlottesville, the New Yorker highlighted Mines’s work and interviewed him: “We keep saying, ‘It can’t happen here,’ ” he told the reporter Robin Wright, “but then, holy smokes, it can.”

But supposing it did, who, exactly, would be fighting it? Real war simply isn’t that attractive to people who have tasted the virtual alternatives, and some of our most polarized factions are distinguished by their extremely comfortable late-modern lives. The fiercest anti-Trump resisters are well-educated suburban liberal moms; the staunchest MAGA folk are seventysomething retirees in The Villages. Who among them is supposed to take up arms? Will the gamers and irony bros of the far right web-storm the bastions of liberal academia en masse, to be met by grapeshot from the social justice warriors? Will senior citizens inflamed by e-mail chains and Sean Hannity broadcasts roll into Berkeley in search of a rumble with Antifa and the New Black Panther Party?

Even as the former Yugoslavia descended into civil war in the 1990s, it was difficult for the warring factions to find soldiers to fight the actual battles, to a point where the Serbian nationalists ended up relying on soccer hooligans and convicts. That was a society that still remembered World War II and was riven by still-more-ancient hatreds. Our own hatreds burn hot in their own way, but not obviously in that way—the old way, the way that once persuaded young men that dulce et decorum est to die for a country or a cause, the way that gave Europe its 1930s and the pre–Civil War United States its anti- and pro-slavery forces killing one another in Bleeding Kansas.

In the age of online frenzy, there is an understandable fear that some kind of cultural-political cascade will carry our society downward into a similar kind of civil strife. But it may be that the nature of our decadence, our civilizational old age, makes that scenario unlikely, and that our problem is a different one: that our battles are sound and fury signifying relatively little; that even as it makes them more ferocious, the virtual realm also makes them more performative and empty; and that online rage is just a safety valve, a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant, and yet ultimately far more stable than it looks on Twitter.

Recall that Barzun wrote that decadence could be a “very active time” and “peculiarly restless” despite its tendency toward fatigue and repetition. That combination—restlessness and even frenzied activity that ultimately just recycles and repeats—was also predicted by Jean Baudrillard, famous for his pre-Internet emphasis on simulated reality as the default experience of late modernity.

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