In his new book The Decadent Society, Ross Douthat argues that the crisis facing the West today is really one of decadence—when a wealthy and mature civilization runs into economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion. Tracing the phenomenon across multiple dimensions, Douthat argues that decadence can endure for longer than its critics might imagine, but also outlines several scenarios—some bleak, some hopeful—for how we might enter a genuinely new era.

Ross Douthat is an opinion columnist for The New York Times, and he joins Richard Aldous on the podcast this week to discuss his new book. Be sure to follow @DouthatNYT and @aminterest on Twitter, and subscribe to the podcast on the app of your choice.

The conversation is also available as an lightly edited transcript below.

Richard Aldous for TAI: Hello, and welcome. You’re listening to The American Interest podcast, with me, Richard Aldous. My guest this week is Ross Douthat, columnist at The New York Times and author of the new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Ross, welcome back to the show.

RD: Thank you so much for having me back.

RA: Congratulations on the new book. So, how are we victims of our own success?

RD: In the sense that we are a technologically advanced, extremely wealthy civilization that is running into problems that you run into when you hit the frontiers of wealth and technological proficiency, and start to stagnate a bit and start repeating yourself a bit. So the book starts, I hope appropriately, with the moon landing in 1969, and basically makes the argument that whether it was a coincidence or not, that particular peak of human accomplishment happened at about the same time that all across the developed world, growth rates were about to start slowing down; people were about to start having fewer children, making societies steadily older and less entrepreneurial and creative; and government in the Western world, and particularly in the United States, was about to enter a long period that obviously continues to the present day of increasing sclerosis, in which it becomes harder and harder to pass legislation, implement sweeping reforms, and so forth.

And finally, that was the moment when the Baby Boomers essentially were seizing cultural power, and the least statistically precise argument that I make in the book—the most, by definition, in the eye of the beholder—is that in culture and especially pop culture, we have become, effectively, the prisoners of the Baby Boom generation, and haven’t figured out a way to get beyond endless remakes and reboots and recyclings of entertainment properties that became popular when they were young.

RA: Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things about the book. As you say, you start with Sputnik and the Apollo moon landing, and this period that you’re talking about really seems to end with the Challenger explosion in 1986. Very often, we’d think of decadence as being something like, “Oh, that chocolate cake was very decadent,” which is one of the examples that you give in the book as the wrong use of the word. But it seems to me that you mean risk aversion as much as anything else.

RD: Yes, and I want to say that anyone who wants to use the term decadent to refer to chocolate cakes or weekends in Vegas has my permission. I’m obviously offering a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of the term. But I’m not alone in it; I’m basically stealing it and adapting it from the great cultural critic Jacques Barzun, who wrote a book called From Dawn to Decadence that came out about 20 years ago.

His idea, which is now, I suppose, my idea, is that decadent eras are not necessarily characterized by total moral depravity, and orgies, and wild excess, and in fact, sometimes wild excess is a sign of dynamism and vitality, and decadent periods are characterized much more by frustration, institutions that don’t seem to work anymore, a loss of purpose, a loss of confidence in the future, and so on and so forth. So in the realm of sensory pleasures, the wild bacchanalian orgy is less decadent under my definition than the twenty-something man sitting alone at his computer, looking at 17,000 varieties of pornography—which is much more, I think, the story of our own era.

If you go back to the 70s, you have this period of chaos and collapse, in many ways, in the Western world—certainly, a sort of dramatic social transformation, but with it, a sense that society was falling apart. You had crime rates off the charts, you had rising rates of rape and sexual violence. It was sort of a peak for things like the controversies in France recently that have reminded everyone that in the 1970s, a lot of French intellectuals thought that they should argue that sex with minors needed to be rehabilitated or legalized. That was the 70s, and I think you can reasonably argue that the 70s were more immoral by some measures than our own era, but they were also more interesting and dynamic, and less comfortably numb, than where we’ve ended up today.

RA: Yeah. And on this sense of terrible coldness, at the beginning you quote Auden on imperial Rome: “What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash, but that it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.” The implication is that that’s modern America.

RD: Yes. I think Auden is slightly exaggerating for effect there, and obviously, there were pockets of creativity, hope, and warmth even in late Imperial Rome. And speaking as a Christian, the story of late imperial Rome from a Christian perspective is in fact one of dynamism, creativity, and growth. So the hopeful side of my analysis is that first, even under decadence, it’s possible to have forms of flourishing and creativity, even if the larger society feels sterile and repetitive, and second, that it’s possible to at least hope that you can escape from decadence, that you can have a sort of revolution from within that gets you out of this rut, without having to pass through the barbarian invasions, or the coronavirus wipeout phase of civilization.

RA: You said something that runs throughout the book, that there is a paradox in all of this, because on the one hand, you have the kind of decadent society that you’ve outlined—Barzun with economic stagnation, institutional decay, cultural and intellectual exhaustion. And yet, there’s also this profound sense that we’ve moved into a new age, from industrialization to this new digital age, that has seen innovation of a kind, in our lifetime, that we perhaps never thought we would ever see.

RD: Yes, and this is in a way an important caveat, although I think it actually links into the broader story I’m telling. There has been, I think, generally economic and technological stagnation in the Western world, relative to a lot of the expectations of the period from the 1940s through the 1960s. If you look at the expectations of that era, it wasn’t just that people were confidently planning missions to Jupiter, and moon colonies, and terraforming Mars, it was also things like energy. People expected that we would all have pocket nuclear reactors powering our homes and garages, and so on. So a lot of things like that have obviously not come to pass, but the great exception is the internet, and technologies of communication and simulation. We don’t have the starships from Star Trek, but we have the communicators, and we don’t exactly have the computer, but in fact we have computers that are pretty much as powerful that we carry around in our pocket.

So in that sense, there has been real innovation, it’s just been concentrated in a particular sector, a particular set of industries, as opposed to being spread the way it was in the Industrial Revolution across a lot of different sectors of the economy and society. So that change is real. Silicon Valley is the exception, but its exceptionalism, first, is proved every time people in Silicon Valley try to revolutionize something other than simulation and communication. So you have a lot of money poured into dot-com companies that are trying to do something outside the dot-com sphere, whether it’s Elizabeth Holmes trying to revolutionize blood testing with Theranos, or WeWork trying to revolutionize office space in the built environment, and you have an awful lot of cases where that money seems to end up either in outright frauds, or in companies that just aren’t actually as profitable or transformative as they think they are. So that’s one limit on it.

But then the other point that I make in the book is that this one area of technology, in certain ways, feeds stagnation in others spheres, because it encourages people to inhabit, and play-act in, virtual worlds, rather than doing work in the real world. Politics is one obvious example, where there’s tre